@machinespirits/eval 0.2.0 → 0.3.0

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  1. package/README.md +91 -9
  2. package/config/eval-settings.yaml +3 -3
  3. package/config/paper-manifest.json +486 -0
  4. package/config/providers.yaml +9 -6
  5. package/config/tutor-agents.yaml +2261 -0
  6. package/content/README.md +23 -0
  7. package/content/courses/479/course.md +53 -0
  8. package/content/courses/479/lecture-1.md +361 -0
  9. package/content/courses/479/lecture-2.md +360 -0
  10. package/content/courses/479/lecture-3.md +655 -0
  11. package/content/courses/479/lecture-4.md +530 -0
  12. package/content/courses/479/lecture-5.md +326 -0
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  14. package/content/courses/479/lecture-7.md +326 -0
  15. package/content/courses/479/lecture-8.md +273 -0
  16. package/content/courses/479/roadmap-slides.md +656 -0
  17. package/content/manifest.yaml +8 -0
  18. package/docs/research/build.sh +44 -20
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  28. package/docs/research/header.tex +23 -2
  29. package/docs/research/paper-full.md +941 -285
  30. package/docs/research/paper-short.md +216 -585
  31. package/docs/research/references.bib +132 -0
  32. package/docs/research/slides-header.tex +188 -0
  33. package/docs/research/slides-pptx.md +363 -0
  34. package/docs/research/slides.md +531 -0
  35. package/docs/research/style-reference-pptx.py +199 -0
  36. package/package.json +6 -5
  37. package/scripts/analyze-eval-results.js +69 -17
  38. package/scripts/analyze-mechanism-traces.js +763 -0
  39. package/scripts/analyze-modulation-learning.js +498 -0
  40. package/scripts/analyze-prosthesis.js +144 -0
  41. package/scripts/analyze-run.js +264 -79
  42. package/scripts/assess-transcripts.js +853 -0
  43. package/scripts/browse-transcripts.js +854 -0
  44. package/scripts/check-parse-failures.js +73 -0
  45. package/scripts/code-dialectical-modulation.js +1320 -0
  46. package/scripts/download-data.sh +55 -0
  47. package/scripts/eval-cli.js +106 -18
  48. package/scripts/generate-paper-figures.js +663 -0
  49. package/scripts/generate-paper-figures.py +577 -76
  50. package/scripts/generate-paper-tables.js +299 -0
  51. package/scripts/qualitative-analysis-ai.js +3 -3
  52. package/scripts/render-sequence-diagram.js +694 -0
  53. package/scripts/test-latency.js +210 -0
  54. package/scripts/test-rate-limit.js +95 -0
  55. package/scripts/test-token-budget.js +332 -0
  56. package/scripts/validate-paper-manifest.js +670 -0
  57. package/services/__tests__/evalConfigLoader.test.js +2 -2
  58. package/services/__tests__/learnerRubricEvaluator.test.js +361 -0
  59. package/services/__tests__/learnerTutorInteractionEngine.test.js +326 -0
  60. package/services/evaluationRunner.js +975 -98
  61. package/services/evaluationStore.js +12 -4
  62. package/services/learnerTutorInteractionEngine.js +27 -2
  63. package/services/mockProvider.js +133 -0
  64. package/services/promptRewriter.js +1471 -5
  65. package/services/rubricEvaluator.js +55 -2
  66. package/services/transcriptFormatter.js +675 -0
  67. package/docs/EVALUATION-VARIABLES.md +0 -589
  68. package/docs/REPLICATION-PLAN.md +0 -577
  69. package/scripts/analyze-run.mjs +0 -282
  70. package/scripts/compare-runs.js +0 -44
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  74. /package/scripts/{check-run.mjs → check-run.js} +0 -0
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+ # Eval Content
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+
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+ Read-only copy of course content used by the evaluation system.
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+
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+ Source of truth: `~/Dev/machinespirits-content-philosophy`
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+
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+ ## Courses
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+
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+ - **479** — Machine Learning and Human Learning (EPOL 479)
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+
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+ ## Updating
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+
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+ To refresh from the source:
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+
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+ ```bash
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+ cp ~/Dev/machinespirits-content-philosophy/courses/479/*.md content/courses/479/
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+ ```
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+
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+ To use the full content-philosophy package instead (all courses):
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+
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+ ```bash
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+ export EVAL_CONTENT_PATH="../machinespirits-content-philosophy"
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+ ```
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+ ---
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+ id: "479"
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+ title: "Machine Learning and Human Learning"
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+ subtitle: "Towards Synthesis: Rethinking Learning in the AI Era"
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+ description: |
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+ This course responds to a new learning reality shaped by advances in machine learning.
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+ It traces historical tools externalizing memory, from stylus to internet and smartphones,
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+ and highlights the reciprocal learning relationship between humans and AI systems.
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+ Through concepts like technosymbiosis and symbiotic pedagogy, we explore how both
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+ forms of learning—machine and human—come together in synthesis.
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+ image: "/markdown/courses/479/479-thumbnail.png"
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+ instructor: "Liam Magee"
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+ semester: "Fall 2025, Term A"
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+ institution: "University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign"
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+ credits: 4
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+ prerequisites: []
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+ tags:
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+ - machine learning
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+ - pedagogy
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+ - AI
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+ - philosophy
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+ objectives:
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+ - Understand the historical relationship between technology and learning
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+ - Explore the phenomenology of AI-mediated learning experiences
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+ - Develop critical frameworks for evaluating AI in educational contexts
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+ - Practice synthesis of human and machine learning approaches
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+ readings:
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+ - title: "Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious"
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+ author: "N. Katherine Hayles"
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+ type: "book"
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+ url: ""
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+ - title: "The Phenomenology of Spirit"
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+ author: "G.W.F. Hegel"
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+ type: "book"
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+ chapters: "Preface, Introduction"
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+ ---
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+
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+ # Machine Learning and Human Learning
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+
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+ Welcome to EPOL 479: Machine Learning and Human Learning. This course examines the emerging synthesis between human cognition and artificial intelligence, drawing on philosophical frameworks from Hegel to contemporary cognitive science.
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+
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+ ## Course Overview
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+
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+ What does it mean for both humans and machines to "learn"? This course explores:
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+
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+ - The historical development of cognitive technologies
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+ - Hegelian frameworks for understanding AI consciousness
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+ - The master-bondsman dialectic in human-AI interaction
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+ - Ethical implications of AI in education
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+
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+ ## Weekly Structure
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+
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+ Each week consists of two 45-minute lecture pods followed by discussion and hands-on AI practice sessions.
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+
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+ ## <a id="main-lecture"></a>Welcome to Machine Learning and Human Learning!
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+
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+ ### Towards Synthesis? Rethinking Learning in the AI Era
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+
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+
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+
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+ - Responds to a new learning reality shaped by advances in machine learning.
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+ - Traces historical tools externalizing memory, from stylus to internet and smartphones.
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+ - Highlights reciprocal learning: generative AI learns from us, we learn differently.
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+ - Explores differences between ChatGPT requests and calculators or traditional search engines.
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+ - Frames relationship through synthesis, alongside concepts like technosymbiosis and symbiotic pedagogy.
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+ - Website: https://cgscholar.com/community/community_profiles/epol-479-fa25
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+ - DON'T BE PUT OFF BY THE VOCABULARY! This might start as a tough course, but we will stepping through things – with AI's help!
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ Welcome to Machine Learning and Human Learning!
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+
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+ What is this course about?
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+
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+ First it is a response to a certain new reality about learning, triggered by the advent of machine learning. Our ideas about learning are changing, and perhaps have already changed fundamentally. The history of technological supplements or supports, from the writing stylus to the abacus, the calculator, the Internet and the smartphone, has always shaped how we exteriorize our memories – put it out into the world – and in turn re-interiorize those memories during our recollection. Machines have, in other words, always been central to how we humans *learn*.
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+
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+ But today we also talk about machines learning how to do things themselves. Most obviously this happens in the fields of AI, and more specifically, of Generative AI. These machines now learn from *us* – from the traces of us we leave in data stored on the Internet. Machines learn from us; and from these new machines, we also learn differently. Asking ChatGPT to create a new recipe is different, we could say, from asking a calculator to add two numbers or even asking Google to find a recipe. We will explore this difference in the course, but for now we can note that we have entered a period in which "learning" comes to be applied to machines as well as humans, and that this learning – for both cases, machine and human – depends upon the other. Even if they differ, both forms of learning form, in their co-dependence, a kind of *synthesis*.
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+
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+ We can now speak in various ways about this much closer relationship we share with machines. We can speak of socio-technical systems; of cyborgian creatures (Haraway); of cyber-social systems (Kalantzis & Cope); and of compound terms like 'technosymbiosis' (N. Katherine Hayles) or a term I'll be using, in the context of learning, 'symbiotic pedagogy'. But the wider concept we'll be working with this week - and returning to, as we'll see - is that of *synthesis*. *Synthesis* will describe how both the similarities and differences between machine and human learning come together in our present moment.
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+
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+ Through the course we will be studying this relationship in a number of ways. Later I'll talk through the organization of the course materials.
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+ ```
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## <a id="administration"></a>Administration
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+
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+
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+ ### <a id="weekly-seminars"></a>Weekly seminars.
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+
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+
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+ - Preferred session duration is 90 minutes (6:00‑7:30) with a brief break, including two 15‑minute lecture pods followed by discussion and AI practice.
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+ - Flexibility exists; the actual course schedule may be shorter due to overall time constraints.
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+ - Options under consideration are trimming sessions to 90 minutes or even 60 minutes, pending participant feedback.
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+ - The goal is to balance depth of content with practical engagement within the limited weekly allocation.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+
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+ On to some basic notes about the course and administration.
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+
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+ My preference is for these to be 90 minutes (6:00 - 7:30), with a brief break. I'm flexible here though. Essentially we have a lot we can present, discuss and practice.
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+
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+ ```
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+ ---
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+
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+ ### <a id="assessment"></a>Assessment
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+
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+ The course will use CGScholar – a platform I think most of you will be familiar with? Assessments will be divided between:
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+
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+ 1. Weekly discussion and commentary (weeks 2-8) (70%) in CGScholar (formative assessment).
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+ 2. A final project (30%): An individual curriculum, learning guide or conference presentation outline (summative assessment). This will be your choice, but could be any of:
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+ a. Learning materials designed for machines, describing some facet of human culture
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+ b. or Learning materials designed for humans, describing some facet of machine "experience"
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+ c. A hybrid guide for a new world of cyber-social learning - how both machines and humans can learn from eachother.
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+
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+
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ A note on use of machine learning materials – for the formative assessment tasks, it would be good to use machine learning explicitly, but in a way that is visible. My preferred option for this at the moment is actually in the form of a dialogue – and edited chat session between you and your preferred chat agent / assistant – followed by some kind of summary by you, which includes your reflection on what the AI supplied, and your consideration of how useful the resulting artefact would really be.
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+
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+ Michele has already authored a fantastic and comprehensive handbook, and I have done some work on creative dialogues with AI – either or both could be models for how this task would proceed.
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+
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+ We can discuss which models, and how to access them in future weeks.
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+ ```
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+
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+ ---
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+ ### <a id="previous-course"></a>Current Course vs Previous Version
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+
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+
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+ - A previous course ran in 2023 and 2024 under the same name.
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+ - https://cgscholar.com/bookstore/web_works/epol-490-machine-learning-and-human-learning-3ac5e22b-45c9-4464-a390-95d80e1ab73b?adv=false&category_id=higher-education-modules&path=higher-education-modules%2F160
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+ - Despite the shared title, this offering differs significantly in approach and content.
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+ - Review Bill and Mary's earlier course, especially their excellent instructional videos.
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+ - Alternate between both courses to gain complementary insights and balanced understanding.
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+ - Keep the link handy and consult combined videos and readings as needed.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ A previous version of this course ran in 2023 and 2024: [[2023-Course]]
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+
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+ Despite this having the same name as that course, it is very different. And I would encourage people to look back to Bill and Mary's earlier course, and especially their videos, which are excellent. As you will probably gather, I have a quite different take. I would say by going back and forth, you might get the best of both worlds. Keep the link to the course handy, and feel free to consult both videos and readings.
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+
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+ ```
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+
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ### <a id="our-approach-in-2025"></a>Our Approach in 2025
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ### Why Hegel?
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+
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+
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+ - What can 19th century German Philosophy tell us aout Machine (and Human) Learning?
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+ - And Who's Afraid of Hegel (in the age of Machine Learning)?
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+ - What can Machine Learning tell us about 19th century German Philosophy?
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ So what distinguishes our approach in 2025? The first and biggest difference will be my reliance on the work of a early 19th century German Philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
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+
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+ Why Hegel? Why build a course on machine learning around a thinker who pre-dates, not only the recent era of machine learning, but the entire history of computation altogether?
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+
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+ I'll talk through five reasons in a moment.
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+
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+ But in the meantime, I also want to address why we might look at philosophy at all. Do we need it? And should we be intimidated by it? Hegel is also a very "intimidating" philosopher - perhaps the most intimidating in the Western philosophical tradition.
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+
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+ In what will become a key theme for us here, just as Hegel is a lens for us to understand and critique machine learning, machine learning itself will be a tool for understanding some complex philosophy.
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+
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+ ```
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+
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## **Hegelian Critique of Empiricist Machine‑Learning Paradigms**
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+
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+ - Current ML models inherit an 18th‑century empiricism that treats learning as mere fact accumulation on a blank slate.
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+ - Hegel challenges this view by framing experience dialectically—new insights can negate or transform prior ones.
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+ - Learning unfolds through developmental stages, each marked by a “learning moment” that may contradict earlier knowledge yet remains integrated via synthesis.
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+ - This dialectical progression anticipates later stage‑based theories (e.g., Piaget), offering a richer model for both human and machine learning cycles.
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+ - Learning is also *organized* by our concepts (Kant as well as Hegel).
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ First, I will be arguing one of the present limitations of machine learning is that it is stuck in a period of thinking about learning: the 18th century. According to the philosophy of the period – and I am of course simplifying here – the human mind was a blank slate that needed to be filled up with facts. I learn by simply adding new experiences, observations, sensations, to an existing repository, then retrieving from that repository to understand and integrate yet more new experiences. Learning was a comparatively simple process of *accumulation*. Just as life itself is the experience of a sequence of moments, each of which is compared to other moments, so learning is the acquisition of experience that are recorded in the mind.
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+
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+ This, as we'll review, is a form of the *empiricism* that underpins our current paradigm of machine learning. Now Hegel – as we'll also see – represents a profound challenge to the empirical tradition. His account of experience is not simply accumulative –– it is *dialectical*, which presumes that new experiences can sometimes *negate* those that they succeed. Learning proceeds, in other words, in a series of developmental stages, each of which involves some kind of realization or learning moment which can sometimes refute a past moment. Although, at least in Hegel's account, both past and present moment, even if they stand in contradiction, can be reconciled in a process of *synthesis*, constituting in turn a future moment which initiates the whole process all over again. Some of you might hear echoes here of later theorists of learning like Jean Piaget, who also supposed learning proceeded in development stages.
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+
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+ One final point here: for Hegel, experience is also organized by the concepts we have. For Hegel, as for Kant, I experience properly only if I have some concepts – such as time and space – to help synthesize that experience. We'll return to this point – it is a key distinction between how humans and machines – at least machines today – learn.
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+
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+ ```
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## Hegel’s Social‑Consciousness Lens on Learning
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+
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+ - Hegel argues that learning is fundamentally shaped by interactions with others, not merely individual experience.
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+ - The developmental shift from consciousness to self‑consciousness hinges on recognizing other selves—others who are distinct from the self.
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+ - This social mediation implies that human learning is conditioned and amplified through relational awareness.
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+ - Whether machines can be truly “social” in Hegel’s sense remains unresolved, highlighting a key difference between human and machine learning.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ In addition – and here is the second reason – Hegel's account is rooted in our experience of *others*. In a way that prempts another learning theorist, Vygotsky, Hegel's account of human experience also involves a specific development from consciousness to self-consciousness. Ironically, our awareness of ourselves is closely connected to our awareness of other selves who are not our self - other people, in other words. This awareness means our experience and learning is *social*, conditioned and mediated by others. Now it is an open question as to whether machines are said to be social at all, but certainly not, as we'll see, in the sense that Hegel means.
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+ ```
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## Hegel, History, and the AI‑Driven Future
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+
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+ - Hegel views history as a collective learning project progressing toward an ultimate realization—his “Absolute Idea” or Absolute Knowledge.
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+ - Unlike many contemporary thinkers, Hegel insists that history follows a determinate, directional path shaped by social development.
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+ - The rise of AI forces us to question this historical trajectory: Will we reach a singularity, and what new competencies will learners need?
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+ - Though Hegel didn’t predict AI, his engagement with events like the French Revolution invites us to interpret our present within a broader, evolving historical context.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ The third reason relates less to Hegel's direct views about learning, and more to his understanding of history. Within the Western tradition of philosophy, Hegel is the first and central philosopher of history – in the sense that he discusses history as something like a wider social and collective learning project. History moreover has a tendency or direction: it moves towards gradual realization or recognition, what Hegel terms, grandiosely, as the Absolute Idea or Absolute Knowledge. Outside religion, perhaps few today would agree strongly with Hegel that history follows a determinate path. However, with the arrival of AI – and certainly with much of the hype that comes with it – we are also forced to confront a series of questions: where are we going with AI? Will we arrive at a singularity, when AI becomes smarter than humans? And what skills do future human learners need to navigate this particular historical moment? Hegel doesn't answer this question, but – especially in his confrontation with the major events of his own time, including the French Revolution – he is already opening a way for consideration of our position within a wider time and history.
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+ ```
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## ** Hegel’s Reemergence in Contemporary AI & Language Debates
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+
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+ - Hegel once seen as obscure is now central to debates on language, norms, and consciousness.
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+ - Recent scholarship (e.g., Brandom’s *A Spirit of Trust*) reinterprets Hegel for modern philosophical inquiry.
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+ - These reinterpretations provide a rich backdrop for discussing AI’s impact on learning and language.
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+ - The text underscores how historical philosophy can inform contemporary AI ethics and pedagogy.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ Fourth, Hegel occupies an unusual position himself in the recent history of philosophy. Long regarded – for reasons we shall see, as we begin to look at some of his text – as an obscure and complex thinker without much value to mainstream philosophy, he has become central in recent decades to debates about language, norms and consciousness. Robert Brandom, a prominent American philosopher, has written for example an 800 page volume called *A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit*. Brandom, among others, is an important thinker in his own right about AI, and this suggests Hegel provides us with good background – if we want it – to contemporary discussions about learning and language.
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+ ```
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ### AI as a Productive Contradiction
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+
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+ - Consider AI's manifold effects: enabling, constraining, helping some, harming others.
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+ - Approach AI with Hegelian contradictions: both this-and-that, benefits inseparable from harms.
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+ - Temporarily suspend strict non-contradiction to think conjunctively before judging better/worse.
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+ - Recognize binary logic underlies machines and us, yet humans can hold paradox.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ Finally, a challenge for us today is to think through what Artificial Intelligence means for us in its manifold sense: what it does for us, what it limits us to, what it enables and constrains, who it helps, who it oppresses, and so on. In other words, we need to think AI always in a certain spirit of contradiction: as involving the good and the bad, and understanding how these are to some degrees indissociable. Hegel is **the** thinker of contradiction, the paradoxes of "the this and the not-this" are throughout his work. There is an irony then that in trying to think about AI *intelligently* we have to give up on a particular rule of logic – the law of non-contradiction – that for many is the very hallmark of intelligent, that is to say, *consistent* thinking. We don't need to give it up entirely, of course, and we cannot – machine learning is bound up, for example, in binary logic, and it is foundational for us as well as for machines. But we can perhaps suspend it, in order to hold on to the idea that before we *judge* machine learning – in a disjunctive sense, as better or worse – we need to think it *conjunctively*: as both *this-and-that*, or *this-and-not-this*, simultaneously. We have to allow ourselves to do what, in a certain sense, machines cannot do, in order to talk about how they are different, as well as similar, to us.
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+
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+ ```
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+
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## <a id="5-reasons-for-Hegel"></a>Five Reasons for Hegel
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+
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+ - Hegel critiques 18th‑century empiricism (learning as mere accumulation) and offers a dialectical model of learning via negation and synthesis—richer for both human and machine learning.
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+ - He grounds learning in social recognition: the move from consciousness to self‑consciousness through others, highlighting a relational dimension machines may lack.
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+ - He treats history as a collective learning process with direction, giving a lens to situate AI, singularity debates, and the skills learners will need.
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+ - His renewed relevance (e.g., Brandom) in language, norms, and consciousness provides contemporary scaffolding for AI ethics, pedagogy, and discourse.
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+ - As the thinker of contradiction, he helps us hold AI’s benefits and harms together, suspending strict non‑contradiction for nuanced, both‑and evaluation.
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## <a id="organization-of-the-course"></a>Organization of the Course
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+
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+
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+ The course is structured over eight weeks, and each week introduces and discusses a new concept.
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ### **Week‑1 Overview & Upcoming Focus on Hegelian Experience**
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+
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+ - Introductory session establishes “Synthesis” as the course’s foundational theme.
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+ - Next week centers on Hegel’s concept of *Experience* from the Phenomenology of Spirit, framing it as a critique of non‑human learning.
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+ - Comparative analysis will juxtapose Hegelian experience with Locke’s empiricism and contemporary notions of machine “experience.”
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+ - The discussion links experience to broader cognitive dimensions: learning, consciousness, perception, and memory.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ 1. **Synthesis** This is the introduction and overview we are doing today.
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+
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+ ```
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ### Experience
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+
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+ - Focus on Hegel’s *Experience* as the cornerstone critiquing non‑human learning.
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+ - Contrast Hegelian experience with Locke’s empiricism to illuminate differences between human and machinic “experience.”
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+ - Explore how experience connects to broader cognitive faculties: learning, consciousness, perception, and memory.
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+ - Position this discussion within the course’s theme of synthesis—melding machine and human learning dynamics.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ 2. Experience
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+ - Next week we'll be looking at the concept of Experience. This is a crucial idea in Hegel's **Phenomenology of Spirit**, and constitutes the single largest implicit criticism of non-human learning. We will examine how Hegel unpacks this idea, and contrast it with other ideas of experience (e.g. Locke) that might be closer to what we see of machinic "experience". We will also discuss the relationship of experience to learning, consciousness, perception and memory.
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+ ```
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+
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## **Attention Across Disciplines**
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+ - Integrates neuroscience, psychology, CS, philosophy, and media studies.
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+ - Highlights the seminal paper *Attention is All You Need* as a pivot in machine learning.
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+ - Connects computational attention mechanisms to human learning processes.
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+ - Examines critiques of the “Attention Economy” within critical media theory.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ Attention
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+ - Following that, we will focus on the idea of attention. This is an idea that spans neuroscience, psychology, computer science, philosophy and media studies. We'll examine a key text in the development of machine learning, "Attention is All you Need". But we will also think about how attention is important for human learning. And we will look at recent critical studies of attention and what has become known as the Attention Economy.
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+
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+ ```
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ### Recognition as a Social Dimension of Learning
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+ - Hegel frames recognition as linking individual learning to relational dynamics with others.
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+ - The week’s discussion juxtaposes Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory with Hegelian insights on intersubjectivity.
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+ - Machines are examined for their potential to "recognize" humans, raising questions about machine–human relationality.
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+ - This exploration situates recognition as a foundational social process underpinning both human and machinic learning.
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+ ```notes
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+ 4. Recognition
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+ - Another key Hegelian idea, this week we will examine how *recognition* connects individual learning to our relation to others - to, in other words, a social process. We'll discuss here Vygotsky's theory of human learning, and also examine ways machines could be considered as "recognizing" us.
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+ ```
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+
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+ 5. Consciousness (Self/Other/Un/Non)
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+ The early parts of Phenomenology of Spirit is dominated by the ideas of Consciousness and Self-consciousness. We'll explore how these relate to Experience, Attention and Recognition (and whether indeed they "synthesize" these earlier ideas). We'll explore also later ideas of the Unconscious (Freud) and Nonconscious Cognition (Katherine Hayles). This leads us naturally to an obvious question: can machines be conscious? If not, can they be unconscious?
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+
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## Alignment Between Human Values and Machine Learning
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+ - Alignment refers to aligning AI systems with human values, often via RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback).
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+ - The concept parallels social norms—implied, value‑laden rules that shape behavior rather than explicit laws.
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+ - Alignment is reciprocal: humans also align with others’ norms, and increasingly they align with machine‑generated values in education.
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+ - This dual process highlights the pedagogical potential for AI to both reflect and reshape human learning practices.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ 6. Alignment
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+ Alignment is a "vogue" term in machine learning, and describes the process of aligning machines to human values and interests. One technical process for doing this is RLHF – reinforcement learning from human feedback. This relates closely to ideas of "norms". As opposed to rules or laws, norms describe often implied values that condition our practices, including our speaking practices. So "alignment" also can describe human learning – aligning ourselves with others. And increasingly today, we can also think of humans aligning themselves with machine values, especially in pedagogical settings.
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+ ```
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+
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## ** Critique as the Hegelian Counterbalance to Alignment
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+ - Critique examines failures of alignment when technology misses societal standards.
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+ - It draws on Kantian categories—rational, practical, aesthetic—to frame how critique operates philosophically.
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+ - The section explores Critical AI’s response to AI, positioning critique as both a tool and product of the very systems it scrutinizes.
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+ - Overall, critique serves as the dialectical counterpart that ensures alignment remains reflexive and socially grounded.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ 7. Critique
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+ "Critique" then brings us to what happens when alignment, one way or another, fails: when technology, in other words, fails to meet the wider social standards we set for it. Critique is another keyword also in the Hegelian nomenclature - it comes famously from Kant, for whom "Critique" is the method for understanding how "pure" (rational, scientific), "practical" (applied, moral) and "judgemental" (aesthetic) reasoning can happen. Here we will look at how Critical AI has been responding to AI - and look in turn at how AI works itself as a tool for, as well as of, critique.
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+ ```
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+
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## Technosymbiosis as a Hegelian Synthesis
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+ - Revisits synthesis, now enriched by prior concepts (experience, attention, recognition, consciousness).
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+ - Positions Katherine Hayles’ “technosymbiosis” as the fusion of technology and life.
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+ - Frames technosymbiosis as an integrative model that subsumes alignment and critique.
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+ - Emphasizes a dialectical evolution: each new idea reshapes the foundational notion of synthesis.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ 8. Synthesis: Technosymbiosis
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+ Finally, we return to where we started: with the concept of synthesis. However – just like a Hegelian process of argument – our original concept is now modified and inflected by the other concepts and materials we've encountered. In particular we are in a position to understand N. Katherine Hayles' idea of "technosymbiosis" – the combining of technology and life – a synthesis that also incorporates earlier ideas of experience, attention, recognition, consciousness, alignment and critique.
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+ ```
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+
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## Technosymbiosis – A Dialectical Journey Toward Human‑Machine Co‑Development
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+ - Finally, a word from GPT-5 on all this...
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+ > This lecture traces a dialectical arc from the initial synthesis of machine and human learning to a higher reconciliation in technosymbiosis. Learning, for both, proceeds through experience as determinate negation: errors, surprises, and feedback that reshape models and minds. Attention functions as the selective mediation of this process—mechanically as weighting and salience, pedagogically as disciplined focus—organizing the field in which meaning can emerge. Recognition supplies the intersubjective and evaluative moment: humans become self-conscious through mutual acknowledgment, while models are shaped by social signals (labels, feedback) that confer norms. Across these movements, we clarify consciousness—self- and other-relation for persons, and the un/non-conscious operations of machines—so that we do not confuse functional intelligence with lived subjectivity. Alignment then names the practical task of orienting capacities toward shared ends, integrating ethical, social, and technical constraints. Critique provides the immanent negativity that guards against dogma and misalignment, refining concepts and objectives. The result is a second, richer synthesis: technosymbiosis, in which human Bildung and machine optimization co-develop, each sublating the other’s limits while preserving their difference.
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+ ---
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+
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+ ## <a id="a-word-on-software"></a>A word on software....
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+
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+ - Introduces “Hegel Pedagogy AI,” a custom note‑to‑presentation converter developed via prompt engineering with Claude.
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+ - Highlights the shift from traditional coding to conversational design—“vibe coding”—emphasizing communication over algorithmic depth.
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+ - Positions AI as a low‑barrier software‑writing assistant that democratizes technical creation for educators and learners.
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+ - Connects this new skill set to broader course themes, framing it as a necessary form of human–machine co‑learning.
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+
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+ ```notes
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+ Now some of you may have seen that I'm using some unusual software to do this presentation – and I'll be using it for the rest of this course. You'll see it's called "Hegel Pedagogy AI", and indeed I've written this software – or more exactly, I've prompted Claude to write the software. I used to be a software developer, and I've always wanted something that could convert notes into a presentation. So I asked Claude to write this "note converter" for this course. It may change week-to-week, and if I think it is useful for anyone other than myself, I'll release it.
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+ But more to the point, I want people also to experiment with how these AI tools also write software. In fact this might be one of the sweet spots of AI today – as a software writing assistant. For the right applications, it has reduced the technical demands of users to nearly zero. One practical effect is that the key skills needed for so-called "vibe coding" are no longer deep algorithmic knowledge, but rather design and writing – specifically, how to talk to machines to get the results you want. Management, in other words, and not far removed from teaching. A new kind of human human learning is required to make use of these new kinds of learning machines, and to offset some of the conceptual terrain of this course, we'll also be practicing how to write software.
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+ ```
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+
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ Authors:
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+
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+ [@hegel2025phenomenology; @kojeve1980introduction; @hyppolite1974genesis; @houlgate2012hegel; @heidegger1988hegel; @pippin2010hegel; @hegel2014science; @vzivzek2020hegel]
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