Hegel’s definition of absolute knowledge in the form of Logic emerges as the following: Logic is the ability to grasp things in thought.

“Grasp” then, is quite a good word. When we deduce, understand a thought or a concept, we grab it, pick it up, seize it, hold it, turn it into something that has moved from the impenetrable to the “grasped”. This is what logic does, it clears away the mess of inaccuracy, or unformalised deadwood.

Grasping is the self-realisation of the self, of thought in itself, which constitutes the absolute. The self-determination of “grasping-ness”. The grasping of logic isn’t the grasping of something real outside of thought, rather the immanent self grasping of logic is of one movement as one ideal process. Contrary to misunderstanding, Idealism is not the opposite of realism, but the action of thought knowing that the real contains the idea. That the idea is real and grasps itself in it’s becoming. A realism that allows the idea to be real.

But what of the logic in machines, by which we mean, the formalised algorithmic execution of rules and of logic? Is the logic that constitutes the self-determining action of logic, the same for thought as it is for computer processing? Can machines grasp things in-themselves as much as the grasping of logic itself by the self-realising thought of the absolute? Or do we grasp machines that cannot grasp themselves, by virtue of thought grasping them first; that we have beaten the machine’s grasp?

But if it is to be the former, what kind of absolute emerges from such an admission? There is no room for a spectrum of ‘grasping’ in an absolutization of thought. The grasping of things in logic does not deal with ambiguities.

Do we grasp the logic of machines, or rather grasp the machines of logic?