What is it to understand?.
To be towards something, to enter it, and for it to enter me.
To really know a place involves finding it from many roads.
"getting to grips" is the proper term.
Can a computer understand?
First ask: can it "get to grips"?.
Can it let something be an ornament in the house of its being?
Can it feel that mastery that accompanies beholding a thought?
If it cannot feel that mastery, it cannot understand.
A calculator is masterful, but never a master.
The master can find a thought from the least expected roads.
The great thinker is a great walker, he makes his own path.
insight really is in-sight, a vision of a new path in thought.
in-sight is an attraction between the knower and unconcealed.
Both move towards each other.
This is not computation.
It is the flow of truth, not a truth.
To be rational is to allow truth to flow unimpeded.
To allow the unconcealed to become revealed, in whatever form.
This is an act of honour, self-restraint, and strength.
A computer will never know what courage it takes.
Forced "rationality" is not rationality.
To think only rationally involves not knowing something.
What irrationally, the impeded flow of truth, is really like.
And this is a paradox of rationality that a computer cannot know.
Minds and machines exist in different spheres.
The one is concrete flow, the other abstract and blind.
Machines live in the same world as numbers.
But we are too blind to see.
Too afraid to admit.
That a machine has faces no grit.
Has no real wit.
Cannot "get to grip".
Has no in-sight.
No feelings of fright.
Not a taste of irrationality.
Or creative originality.
Nor fears its own death.
Or strives for breath.
Does not love without thought.
And can never get caught
Behind the veil of chaos.
But what is our pay off?
True understanding.
Which is to dwell, to decorate, to make home, on the sea of chaos.
Philosophical musings on machine understanding.
