c: o/re Movie Nights – Talk: Ideal Locale – her and the envelope function of idealist predication by Ben Woodard

Spike Jonze’s her  (2013) is a near-future science fiction film about the difficulties of romantic relationships particularly in an age of ever-increasing technological mediation. Stemming from this, the film also explores the entangled nature of consciousness and artificial intelligence, the role of emotions and memories, and notions of self.

Alongside the film’s more obvious critical function, this talk examines her as fictional text which tests the limits of predication, of the grasping capacity of language, to encompass interior content of minds whether emotional, rational, natural, or artificial. This in turn requires analyzing a half-forgotten tract of philosophical logic namely, that logic is not about the mathematical or logical-like operations of ‘rational’ thinking but rather an idealist tradition of logic that treats predication as judgments about reality that does not assume a clear link between natural objects and discerning human minds.

The epistolary aspect of her  demonstrates how the letter, and the temporal delay inherent in all predication which written language highlights, emphasizes how the expressions of thought are always suffused with feeling, and that feeling is not to be viewed as a impediment to logic but rather its impetus. To this end this talk will read her through the work of FWJ von Schelling (especially via Iain Hamilton Grant) and FH Bradley. The idealist conceptualization of logic  shared between these thinkers shows how judgments issued by minds are to be valued not by their correlation to real objects but by their ability to construct shared worlds.

This talk is part of our c:o/re Movie nights.

The talk will take place at the Theaterstraße 75 at 15h.

After the talk, in cooperation with the Filmstudio RWTH Aachen, we will screen the film Her by Spike Jonze.  The screeining of the film will take place at the Aula 1 im Hauptgebäude der RWTH Aachen (Temeplgraben 55, 52062). All details and tickets can be found here.

By “Lifelikeness” (Lebensechtheit in German) we mean the representation and/or imitation of living beings of living beings in science and technology in fields such as robotics, synthetic biology or AI and neuromorphic computing. We ask how their increasing complexity mimics not only a fixed notion of life, but also the understanding of “life” as such.

Further information on the lecture series can be found here.