How does philosophy understand the era of big data

How does philosophy understand the era of big data

In recent years, the problem of data has entered the philosophical field of vision. We can grasp the essential characteristics of the data explored by philosophers from the following aspects.

Data and big data

Technological progress, mainly due to the wide application of computers, networks and various sensors, as well as the rapid progress of mass storage technology and computing power such as cloud technology, distributed computing and storage, has replaced the concept of big data. The rapid growth of data volume can be roughly described as: the data volume generated in the last two years is equivalent to the sum of the data volume generated by all previous generations of mankind.

Big data refers to the huge amount of data involved, which cannot be intercepted, managed, processed and sorted out in a reasonable time. The characteristics of big data are nothing more than huge, fast and changeable. So big data is still data in essence.

Among the above characteristics of big data, its diversity deserves special attention. It is manifested in the diversity of generated data formats, such as words, pictures, videos, etc. It depends on the technology and equipment for generating data, but it reflects the era of data production and the ability and conditions of data processing, and also reflects the colorful nature and society being described. In addition, with the development of technology and the rapid growth of data volume, new data formats will emerge one after another, with more changeable and diversified characteristics.

Big data is not only a technical concept, but also a business concept. Its appearance has its specific background, that is, the consideration of IT business and the rendering of new technologies. Big data covers all the ways for human beings to obtain data, prompting the arrival of a new era of philosophical research. The voice of this era has already sounded. At that time, it was just called data. In our discussion, we mainly consider the relationship between data and philosophy.

Data and cognition

Understanding here refers to people's understanding, which is people's understanding of the outside world.

The emergence and attention of big data confirms the fact that data covers human perception of the outside world. Senses and their experience have retreated behind the display screen and behind various technical equipment, which "translate" natural and external images into images, sounds and even touch, smell and taste acceptable to human senses. This is both an inevitable and unexpected situation of technological development. If philosophy tried to find an intuitive image of the world outside the data generated by the technical system, then in the era of big data, this direct perception of human beings lost its traditional advantage, even if it was not completely replaced. In short, philosophy needs to seek knowledge of the world from data, otherwise it will lose the source of knowledge.

This seems to be an amazing change, but it is not. On the issues that affect human understanding, the changes brought by big data are only in quantity and scope, not in the fundamental sense. In fact, looking back at history, we find that our perception of the outside world has always relied on some technical devices, that is to say, people's understanding is actually obtained through data.

The earliest technical device may be a ruler, which is used to measure the length, such as fields; The early description of technical equipment, perhaps a knot, is used to describe an important event. In China, from the stone tools made by the ancestors in Nihewan, Hebei Province, to the words carved on tortoise shells in Yinxu, Anyang, all can be regarded as some kind of "materials", which express some cognition of human beings to the outside world. In the face of all these early data-bearing technical equipment, people have gained some of the earliest abstract understanding of the external world. The ancients invented counting, balance, missing engraving, elephant meter, protractor and so on. Are used to generate data to understand the outside world. People also invented pen, paper and block printing, which were also used to record and generate data. Relying on all this, data has become the basis of people's understanding, the source of thinking and the tool of expression.

Since modern times, western science and technology have sprung up, and telescopes, microscopes, sextants, spectrometers, mass spectrometers, accelerators and radio telescopes have appeared one after another, becoming powerful tools for human beings to understand the outside world. The data generated by these technical equipment has become the new support of modern thought. In contemporary times, with the emergence of powerful data processing capabilities of electronic computers, various instruments and equipment that extend and broaden human sensory perception emerge one after another, and finally completely or nearly completely replace human direct perception of the external world, and become the source of human knowledge by presenting data to human beings. This is the era of big data.

The key point is that the world we know is expressed by data, some of which are understood and explained, and more of which are just data, which are not explained or even paid attention to. It is like a natural place, waiting for people to find it, explain it and use it.

Data and ontology

According to the above understanding, it seems that we can understand the ups and downs of philosophy and science in explaining objective natural problems by observing the formation and production of data.

At the beginning of modern science, it was not separated from traditional philosophy and was crowned as natural philosophy. Parallel to it, there are philosophical ontology and metaphysics. The latter two are trying to describe and explain the external nature with a certain concept, seeking the essence of things and legally existing in the field of philosophy. Galileo, Newton and others advocated using advanced observation and experimental means to observe and regulate nature, and using mathematics to describe natural processes. When all this becomes a trend, the ontology of philosophy gradually declines, and philosophy seems to give up the description and explanation of the objective world and give way to natural science.

The last philosopher who tried to explain nature with scientific data was Kant. He studied Newton's mechanics of motion and celestial bodies and put forward the theory of evolution of the universe. But on the basis of Kant, Laplace expressed the theory of nebulae and the theory of the evolution of stars and galaxies in infinite time and space with physical theory and mathematics. After Laplace, scientific description is naturally superior to traditional philosophy.

It is generally believed that in the era of classical science, the difference between philosophy and science in describing nature lies in whether data and mathematical methods are used. Today, we find that this is not the whole problem. In the classic era, until the rise of big data today, natural science did occupy a dominant position in the data obtained by using various technical equipment, while philosophy adhered to the traditional concept analysis and general reasoning methods, still referring to good philosophy. This is not so much that philosophy lags behind science, but rather that the ability of human beings to obtain data is still insufficient, leaving room for traditional philosophy to display.

The emergence of big data has surrounded all aspects of human cognitive world and the situation has changed. When the scientific community began to discuss and realize "computing everything", it also opened the door for philosophy to return to discussing ontology. The change here is that data has become the source of cognition and the material of thinking; Our interpretation of the world has become an interpretation of data, and there is nothing else. The emergence of big data makes us discover that the external world we know is presented through data. When we seek the essence and meaning of the world, we are actually wandering in the data; When we feel that we have discovered something and realized something, we actually consciously discovered the connection between some data.

Physical characteristics of data

The so-called physical temperament refers to thinking about the essence of things, exploring the essence of things from the principle level and revealing the basic laws of things. It remains to be seen whether the hot data and big data have the function of revealing the basic laws of things. But the data, as far as its phenomenon is concerned, seems to have shown a certain physical temperament. Investigating this characteristic is not only conducive to understanding the nature of data, but also conducive to deepening the understanding of physics.

Physics here mainly refers to quantum mechanics.

As we all know, quantum mechanics has achieved great success in theory and application, played a fundamental role in the research of field theory, particle physics and astrophysics, and has excellent performance in applied disciplines such as solid state physics, semiconductor physics and superconducting physics. The relationship between quantum mechanics and philosophy is closer than any other natural science field, among which epistemology is the most important.

Quantum mechanics finds that knowledge based on uncertainty relation is limited by basic physical principles, so the objective world can't be really observed in principle, and we can only know the world according to the physical measurement results. Measurement itself interferes with the objective world and cannot really recognize its true colors. So the only source for us to know the world is the result of measurement, which is called experience.

This cognitive principle of quantum mechanics has triggered a discussion for nearly a hundred years, and it has not subsided yet.

Niels bohr believes that we must accept the cognitive principles given by quantum mechanics and acknowledge and accept the arrangements made by nature. Quantum mechanics describes nature well. Einstein was unwilling to accept Bohr's "appeasement philosophy". He believes that it must be caused by the imperfection of quantum mechanics itself. People's understanding of nature should be endless, which cannot and should not be described by quantum mechanics.

When we review the epistemological and ontological significance of data and big data mentioned above, we will understand that the debate about quantum mechanics has always been a debate about the meaning of data. Obviously, Einstein is unwilling to accept the results and explanations given by data, while Bohr believes that the essence revealed by data is natural ontology, whether we like it or not.

Interestingly, people have been arguing about the measurement of quantum mechanics, but few people realize that the measurement result itself is data, and data has become a de facto source of knowledge. Without data, we know nothing about the world.

In this era of big data, when we realize that data is the source of our understanding of the world, the so-called world is actually made of data, we will also see the physical temperament of the data itself. As quantum mechanics emphasizes, the world is hidden behind the experience representation, and all we can talk about is the experience itself.

The above is what Bian Xiao shared with you about how philosophy understands the era of big data. For more information, you can pay attention to Global Ivy and share more dry goods.