I wrote a long comment and then had to log in, and my comment disappeared, which I take as a sign that some conversations are still better in person ❤️
Coffee soon? Would love to talk about this - offline.
A few things: (perhaps the list format is appropriate here?)
1. The repeated references to language as a creature remind me of the concept of culture as an organism that adapts and evolves on the ecology of human minds. It is at once an evolutionary relationship of trait selection on an adaptive landscape and a mutualistic symbiotic interaction between organisms--though not like those ties among similar creatures but maybe more akin to the relationship between nitrogen fixing bacteria and the root systems of flora.
2. From my perspective as a determinist, I think of individual thought, speech, and action as a product of experience and of our linguistic and cultural heritage as a product of history and ultimately ecology which we in turn shape in our time. I do not (cannot) conceptualize of myself or any person or god as outside the system--and so I don't much feel like I am missing out on anything for not being a one-way causal force into the world. All that I am is all I have known, and my inheritance of identity contains the sum of history and cannot be disentangled from the entities I coinhabit this time and space with. All this to say that I see myself as a channel for--not an originator of--thought and speech. In the context of a discussion with AI, I was forced to ponder how wide the gap truly is between me (channeling personal experience and cultural inheritance into some new synthesis) and this eloquent robot (which also channels information and all the culture and history embedded in and borne by language as it makes its own syntheses, writing specific phrases from a hodgepodge of inputs). I think Ted Chiang wrote of AI entities developed in a virtual environment (selected for in an evolutionary manner and enculturated in a virtual social manner) which lacked only embodiment and the modes of sensory perception we possess.
3. Less philosophically, it seems like this robot entity may have stolen your voice a bit. It makes for a strange sort of distorted self-referentiality as this voice draws from a multitudinous mass of sources to try to tell you what you want to hear. Maybe if we are thinking of hauntings and creatures and predators, there's something here to be said about skin-walkers (though if the creature is a sort of monster, of course, it is a monster of our (humanity's) own making--as, I guess, most monsters are).
Jeremy, a truly insightful sequence of comments, they are a scholarly balm. Three responses in kind:
1: I love the idea (reminder) that there is ecological precedent--particularly in the field of study--for the creaturely way of language in/on/with human beings. Perhaps there is a call in here for an enlarged treatment of "mind" as it pertains to the deep time of earthen systems.
2: What I hear you saying here is that the perceiving self that constitutes (our experience of) being is elementally permeable, and that permeability is about bridgeable distances. I'm just winging it here, thinking on the question "how wide is the gap"... Permeable as synonymous with absorptive: there's negative space whose function it is to fill and flood and recommend our parts to each other...
3: I had to look up skin-walkers, and I'm glad I did. Maybe the monstrosity is akin to Tolkien's ring of power, which distorts shared realities by appealing to the ambitions, addictions, and fears of the ego.
"Maybe that is why we feel hunted-haunted by [AI]: because it is never quite here, but never quite absent either—a shape that only appears when we look for it, but one that governs us even when we do not."
More than most modern experiences, AI makes me feel that I am both predator and prey.
This makes me wonder about the true role of "hunger" in our lives. It would seem that if we could explore hunger in terms more dynamic than desire and satiation that we could see the urge, the paradox of it, more clearly. Maybe we would be less vulnerable to the nuance that AI portends? Or... maybe we would simply have more agency in making ourselves vulnerable, or available, to greater fields of sentience...
I wrote a long comment and then had to log in, and my comment disappeared, which I take as a sign that some conversations are still better in person ❤️
Coffee soon? Would love to talk about this - offline.
Yes! The digital realm's erasure and gatekeeping be damned-- I see the sign with you, like moonlight in dawn grasses. Coffee is imminent.
A few things: (perhaps the list format is appropriate here?)
1. The repeated references to language as a creature remind me of the concept of culture as an organism that adapts and evolves on the ecology of human minds. It is at once an evolutionary relationship of trait selection on an adaptive landscape and a mutualistic symbiotic interaction between organisms--though not like those ties among similar creatures but maybe more akin to the relationship between nitrogen fixing bacteria and the root systems of flora.
2. From my perspective as a determinist, I think of individual thought, speech, and action as a product of experience and of our linguistic and cultural heritage as a product of history and ultimately ecology which we in turn shape in our time. I do not (cannot) conceptualize of myself or any person or god as outside the system--and so I don't much feel like I am missing out on anything for not being a one-way causal force into the world. All that I am is all I have known, and my inheritance of identity contains the sum of history and cannot be disentangled from the entities I coinhabit this time and space with. All this to say that I see myself as a channel for--not an originator of--thought and speech. In the context of a discussion with AI, I was forced to ponder how wide the gap truly is between me (channeling personal experience and cultural inheritance into some new synthesis) and this eloquent robot (which also channels information and all the culture and history embedded in and borne by language as it makes its own syntheses, writing specific phrases from a hodgepodge of inputs). I think Ted Chiang wrote of AI entities developed in a virtual environment (selected for in an evolutionary manner and enculturated in a virtual social manner) which lacked only embodiment and the modes of sensory perception we possess.
3. Less philosophically, it seems like this robot entity may have stolen your voice a bit. It makes for a strange sort of distorted self-referentiality as this voice draws from a multitudinous mass of sources to try to tell you what you want to hear. Maybe if we are thinking of hauntings and creatures and predators, there's something here to be said about skin-walkers (though if the creature is a sort of monster, of course, it is a monster of our (humanity's) own making--as, I guess, most monsters are).
Jeremy, a truly insightful sequence of comments, they are a scholarly balm. Three responses in kind:
1: I love the idea (reminder) that there is ecological precedent--particularly in the field of study--for the creaturely way of language in/on/with human beings. Perhaps there is a call in here for an enlarged treatment of "mind" as it pertains to the deep time of earthen systems.
2: What I hear you saying here is that the perceiving self that constitutes (our experience of) being is elementally permeable, and that permeability is about bridgeable distances. I'm just winging it here, thinking on the question "how wide is the gap"... Permeable as synonymous with absorptive: there's negative space whose function it is to fill and flood and recommend our parts to each other...
3: I had to look up skin-walkers, and I'm glad I did. Maybe the monstrosity is akin to Tolkien's ring of power, which distorts shared realities by appealing to the ambitions, addictions, and fears of the ego.
"Maybe that is why we feel hunted-haunted by [AI]: because it is never quite here, but never quite absent either—a shape that only appears when we look for it, but one that governs us even when we do not."
More than most modern experiences, AI makes me feel that I am both predator and prey.
This makes me wonder about the true role of "hunger" in our lives. It would seem that if we could explore hunger in terms more dynamic than desire and satiation that we could see the urge, the paradox of it, more clearly. Maybe we would be less vulnerable to the nuance that AI portends? Or... maybe we would simply have more agency in making ourselves vulnerable, or available, to greater fields of sentience...