Hinges

What this film is

A fiction with a real idea underneath. Martin, Jim, Diane and Tessa are invented, and so is the call. The idea comes from Ludwig Wittgenstein's last notes, published as On Certainty. It is my reading, simplified.

Three ideas from Wittgenstein

• A search needs something that is not searched. Someone who reopens a drawer to see if the thing is there now has not learned to search.
• Hinges. Our questions and doubts turn on certainties that stay put, like the hinges of a door. A hinge is not a belief held firmly. It is what we judge the evidence with.
• The house carries the hinge. One might almost say the foundation walls are carried by the whole house. That is why a hinge does not move when you push it.

Why it matters with AI

"If I see and hear you, it is you" has held for as long as we have had eyes and ears. Phone calls, video meetings, payments approved by a familiar voice rest on it. AI does not argue with it. It loosens it. You do not pull the hinge out. You move one wall: call back on a number you already have, agree a family word, confirm a payment on a second channel.

A question that sorts

What would change your mind? If you already know the test, it is an assumption. If some fact would do it, a belief. If any fact against it would make you doubt the fact first, a hinge. If the answer is "nothing", though a proof is easy to imagine, it is a belief dressed up as a hinge.

About the application

The hinge "if I see and hear you, it is you", the sorting question and "move one wall" are my application, not Wittgenstein's. The film paraphrases him; it does not quote him.

Sources

• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewißheit / On Certainty, notes 1949–1951, published 1969: §§ 248, 315, 341, 343.
• Deepfake video call, finance worker in Hong Kong, about $25 million: CNN, May 2024.
• On hinges and deep disagreement: Duncan Pritchard, "Wittgensteinian Hinge Epistemology and Deep Disagreement", Topoi, 2021.