No bells, just whistling in the dark...
The single biggest knowledge deficit in those convinced of AI experience, without a doubt, has to be neuropathology. Even a cursory look at disorders involving language and experience shows their functional independence, the fact that people can talk without experience, as well as experience without the capacity to talk. This means that language and experience […]
I think the most politically significant fact we’ve been working here the past years is the dependency of Enlightenment socialization on ‘adapt-to’ analogue technologies, and how digital technologies are more ‘adapt to us’ machines, automatically targeting our prehistorical psychology, undoing our training, transforming cognitive ecologies enough to bring the world’s once greatest democracy to its…
Now that they are finally realizing that flash intelligence algorithmically bound to its training data will likely require a Dyson Sphere to produce godlike intelligence, some researchers are either bailing on LLMs, or reimagining what LLMs could be. As a result, it feels like things I’ve fretted about forever are now popping up on a […]
Back in 1947, Edward Sapir famously called nonverbal communication “an elaborate secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all.” I don’t know about you, but it’s one of those lines that sends me back to the changeroom feeling like a wannabe. It’s so packed with meaning… and as it turns […]
Well, folks, this is it. Like it or not, Anthropic’s latest frontier model, Mythos, is the watershed moment, the point where the pivotal problem posed by AI stands revealed, as plain as day. This is the moment where either AI research goes nuclear weapon dark and consumer AI becomes illegal, or it’s where things really […]
[I think I wrote this 2017; I had a computer disaster around then and I don’t think it saw the light of day. The sources are dated in some cases, but the diagnosis, unfortunately, remains as pressing as it has ever been.] I hate people. Or so I used to tell myself in the thick […]
I think it’s fair to say it’s beginning in earnest now. A bit faster than I thought, and pretty damn close to as predicted. The plunging cost of reality is allowing the simulation of crisis events to cue sustained engagement, driving advertising revenue, fueling gushers of pollution. Herr Goering, the adorable clown, is now the […]
Once again, in midst of all the ad hominem nonsense coming from the Trump-Newscorp-Combine, we find another theorist, this time neuroscientist (and creationist) Michael Egnor, embracing an ad hominem dismissal of eliminativism on the Mind Matters podcast, which has been partially transcribed and posted under the title, “Why Eliminative Materialism Cannot Be A Good Theory […]
What are the odds that I would finish writing a near-future viral thriller (The Lollipop Factory) just as 2019-nCoV was becoming entrenched in Wuhan? So, as it turned out, the first facts I wanted to know when I caught wind of the outbreak were things like the resource requirements for treatment, the average transmission rate […]
A hallmark of intentional phenomena is what might be called ‘discontinuity,’ the idea that the intentional somehow stands outside the contingent natural order, that it possesses some as-yet-occult ‘orthogonal efficacy.’ Here’s how some prominent intentionalists characterize it: “Scholars who study intentional phenomena generally tend to consider them as processes and relationships that can be…