It would be interesting working in ML with texts of a certain quality, for example literary and philosophical works. It would be even better, only dreaming: If we could make the machine understand and practice dialectical thinking. Being is the contrary of nothing, but it is also the same … But this, well, first we have to get the texts into the right format. Hegel wrote in German, but most of the scholars who read his books, somebody does! will read them in translation, mostly in English, maybe in Chinese. We know translating philosophical texts is an arduous task . We know many of these transpositions in other languages are misleading. As they should mirror both the ideas and the language, often they give neither. But judging is not my task here. When we talk about Hegel or dialectical thinking as an existing thing, we are talking about something not a priori definable by “original texts” or “author’s intentions”. Rather, we have to refer to w...
Hegel meets the Machine
We know how: Machines scratch every single existing website, collecting words, word embeddings and word positions. But we also know: Sixty or ninety nine percent of the material collected in giant databases is rubbish. Badly chosen words in wrong places, expressing things not true, stupid ideas. Could we not start with reasonable material? No journalistic stuff, no restaurant reviews, but texts from philosophers? Literary writings? .