Categories
Philosophy

Separating Thought from Language in AI Language Models?

Separation perhaps, but we would be committing a major disservice to knowledge if we were not to acknowledge that both language and thought must derive in some way from deeper principles of self-organisational complexity in (and as) information, energy and logical or material communications systems in nature and physics. Language may be separable from thought […]

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Philosophy

The Microbial Archipelago of You

When viewed as the sum total combinatorial complexity of so very many information and energy-processing artefacts, entities and systems, it becomes apparent that the unity and individuated singularity of Self that we carry around in our brains as culturally reflexive semiotic cocoons of personal identity might be something quite significantly other than what we tend […]

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Philosophy

Human Intelligence

Human intelligence is really some kind of game that language plays against itself through us.

Categories
Philosophy

Buddhist Psychology and Artificial General Intelligence

I find that Buddhist psychology in some of its regional dialects (historically, through Tibet into China and Japan) approximates to a profound observation on the ultimate insubstantiality of this contingent, transient concept of Self that inhabits and invariably haunts us all. In regards to AGI, I think a significant barrier is that the subjective experience […]

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Philosophy

Technological Uncertainty

Has anyone noticed that the smaller these computational and communications artefacts become, the more rapidly this whole planetary technological juggernaut accelerates? There’s something of an uncertainty principle here – the more precisely we can measure, define and inhabit the various technological transmission media, the less certain we become about the velocity (and direction or destination) […]

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Philosophy

Aristotle and Alexander, Albert and the Atom

I’ve never been entirely certain that educating a person who as a probable consequence then goes on to conquer the known world (of their time) is necessarily a good thing. Of course, we can never be certain what someone will do with the technical knowledge or practical wisdom we might be fortunate enough in all […]

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Philosophy

The Rapid Rise of Language Models

Large Language Models are gaining such popularity because the technology at the center of this paradigm is that which has a natural orientation towards the reproduction of itself and its own sociotechnical genealogies. Our commercial, political, strategic and colloquial as cultural communications systems are similarly aligned to the generative technologies because as complex adaptive systems […]

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Philosophy

Cosmological Evanescence

Context: How will the Universe end? Cosmological evanescence as measured against the eternal darkness and endlessly meaningless expanses of infinite duration without life, experience or purpose. I expect the podcast might both begin and end with the generative complexity and radiating dissipative properties of thermodynamic entropy but I wonder how such vast existential facts can […]

Categories
Complexity

The Community of Me

Context: Mobile Genes From the Mother Shape the Baby’s Microbiome It’s interesting – we can rarely predict precisely what complex systemic relationships will occur, we can only be certain that they will occur. Our own continuity as individual (human) organisms is a function of the extent to which this emergence is a reliable fact. That […]

Categories
AI

Using AI in Mental Health

Context: AI must be developed responsibly to improve mental health outcomes It is a delicate and potentially dangerous matter when self-validating commercial incentives and their accelerated technical metamorphoses have taken the center of surveilling, assessing and aspirationally recalibrating human experience in this way. I quite often wonder about the compound, composite ironies of a world […]

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Philosophy

Conceptual Creativity and Large Language Models

The waffling, meandering text more closely associated with stream of consciousness and creative thinking has been slowly bludgeoned into a relatively colourless glue-like soup for corporate, scientific and institutional communication. I mention this because these text-weaving AI tools are now quite rapidly taking the center of generative gravity in regards to the production of such […]

Categories
Complexity

Self-Organising Criticality in Brains, Battles and Universes

The notion (articulated in the video) that the homeostatic process by which quasicriticality is maintained in the brain may have an essentially cybernetic explanation. In Jeff Hawkins’ “A Thousand Brains” he references neurophysiologist Vernon Mountcastle’s belief in the existence of an underlying (as unifying) organisational principle in the brain. I wouldn’t be at all surprised […]