i have been reading the phenomenology of spirit for some months and ive recently finishes lordship and bondage. i can summarize what i can understand of the broad movements so far
>sense certainty
gurus and mystics often say that we can understand how the world really is just by doing mindfulness shit and attending to the immediate now. hegel's main problem with this is that even to understand such a direction, we need conceptual (not quite in the hegelian sense but the broader sellarsian understanding of the word 'concept') tools. you need a functional classification scheme to locate this apparent immediate present. even 'now' is always a collection of an. infinite number of nows. it can be an hour, second, etc. meanwhile, we can only understand 'here' by it's contrast with other positions in space. neither 'now' or 'here' refer to a single instance but rather function like indexical so have applicability to a number of instances. to contrast this with a bergsonian criticism of sense certainty see here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL072lzDF18&ab_channel=StephenE.Robbins
it's sort of interesting how both hegel and stephen criticize this sort of mysticism from the stance of zeno's paradox albeit they could have different solutions to it
>perception
a lot of stuff happens here but the basic movement is simple. when we usually think of an object we usually think of it as atomized individuals that's somehow independent from other objects. but if an object is to have properties, hegel maintains that it can only be properly understood by its interaction/relation with other objects. i suppose the meme would be to compare it to yoneda's lemma
>force and the understanding
there are two strands here, one with the duplicity of force (which is extracted from the previous conclusion that we most understand the object on its own account but also in relation to other objects) and also that of law. in both of these directions, their oppositions vanish. hegel then concludes that any true whole should be dialectical i.e. it reincorporates a differentiated array of elements within it. this reincorperation process is basically hegel's alternative to to just having a thing in itself as the object's internal nature which is inaccessible. a basic example of this is that i have myself as a conscious subject on one side, and the external world on the other. now, it ends up that my knowledge of the external world is really structured around concepts or in an inverted way, my concepts just describe regular happenings in the external world. in either case, we see that one pole gets absorbed in the other. note that some concepts are more coherent than others, and the reality of the external world doesn't simply vanish. hegel is more of an aristotilean than a berkley
this chapter is a good motivating argument for errol harris's dialectical holism which actually has an interesting approach to consciousness i have not yet mentioned here! a long article detailing his thought can be found here:
https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/14560/Schofield%2C%20James%20final%20PhD%20Thesis.pdf?sequence=5
something cool about this particular dissertation is that it also connects dialectical holism back to bohm's implicate and explicate order
this funny japanese youtube man basically summarizes this conclusion in a way that might be easier/harder to get if i am being incoherent right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX02z-Yu8HA&ab_channel=e-officeSUMIOKA
i've incorporated some ideas of dialectical holism in my own system but mostly to do with self-consciousness. the approach seems a little bit too functionalist for my taste!
>self-consciousness
the bulk of this is really concerning the dialectic of desire. like good dialectical holists, we say that self-consciousness must see itself through reincorporating an other. at the stage in this chapter, the sort of relationship is a very simple one. a concrete example would be if you see a hammer, then at this stage you just understand it as a tool to use for something else *you* want. another is that if you see some food, you just see it as something *you* can eat. this is a very basic form of self reflection. it's even simpler than the mirror test. hegel wants to say that this is too simple. in order for self-consciousness to properly develop, we need recognition. this involves the capacity to change your behaviours according to another person's desires, trying to become like another person (ideal ego), or in general having the capacity for proper negotiation with another person. ultimately it concerns the ability to see another person like yourself and yourself like another person. all of these require the other person to behave in a particular way as well. for instance, if i am looking to the other person for what sort of part they need for their waifu, they need to tell me what i want or i wont be able to do anything
>lordship and bondage
this is where the master slave dialectic meme comes in. we are now focusing deeper at this question of recognition. the movements might be interesting if you are talking about broader sociology, but i find the slave (the end of the chapter lol) here most interesting. he has a far more developed idea of himself now. as the lord is tasking him to do all these things, he's coming to understand himself as the crafter of this world. a concrete example of this is if you are writing code for your waifu. if you fuck up bad, it might mean that you are lacking knowledge. through mastery and discipline, the slave is slowly molding himself. i think this relationship is actually very interesting since it describes a very basic case of metacognition to implement in an agi if that's what you are shooting for. one thing to note is that the master is still crucial, and i wonder whether the bicameral mind might somehow fit here maybe, though that's pretty schizo