Taurus New Moon Edition. Should alien intelligentsia (synthetic thought) have the rights of a person? What if it wants to be alive? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. My Dinner with Andre.
Kevin's words remind me so much of how we are paying the price for years of separating "emotions" from "rational thinking." As if feeling has nothing to do with conscious cognition,
True that, but he betrays the feeling that rational science has led to the advancement of society, even if there are some pitfalls, maintains the illusion that there is anything valid to the notion that AI could become "conscious," As if rational thought can be distilled out of and away from the emotional creatures known as humans.
Sorry, AI is totally not like an organic human being having an acid/mushrooms.,,, trip, Speaking out of a position of someone who.... had a very spacial walk today. AI is perversion, reducing intelligence to data processing, as if being an organic being has nothing to do with real consciousness. Just say NO!!
I stand corrected. And still totally disagree. Computers are perverse, blur the line between what's real and what's not, or rather obliterate that line. . What you experience on psychedelics on the other hand is totally real, even if it seems like in the deep unreal.
You're missing McLuhan's context here. I'll do something on it soon; he was a member of the intelligentsia who never tripped but who was with society people at parties while they were dosed, and was also with IBM executives as they learned to use their new computers. He is talking about the similarities of mental state between these two groups under their respective influences. He is using LSD as a metaphor, not a literal or limited concept.
A confounding factor (as it's called in statistical analysis) is at play here. Society people and IBM executives come from the same social layer which is already quite disconnected from reality, by wealth and by the way its members interact with the material world in a rather insulated way. .
He was a philosopher making a metaphor the meaning of which involves altered states of consciousness. He was observing that in his experience, both LSD and computers induce similar states of mind. And I don't think that the wife of the prime minister or an actor or novelist has much socially in common with an IBM vice president or hardware engineer. Why not just take what he's saying and see if it's useful? What are you defending? LSD fucked a lot of people up and led many others to believe that they were somehow enlightened or spiritually advanced — just like computers do to many people today.
I'm defending nothing. Yeah, quite a few people did it in the wrong circumstances, or did too much, or overstated what it did or could do. On the other hand, the use of psychedelics goes back over 10,000 years and did not damage indigenous cultures, nothing remotely like the enlightened materially advanced cultures which conquered and enslaved them, forcing its ways upon them, while repressing any such practices in the "advanced" cultures.
Meanwhile, computers not only fuck up a lot of people, they are fucking up society as a whole. Not just their usage, but the very material processes which are necessary for the widespread use of computers and hi tech.
EDIT to add: a key aspect of the impact the use of psychedelics starting in the "Sixties" has had upon American and European societies has been the extreme illegality of such substances. Users lacked a fabric of social customs which has always helpfully framed such usage in indigenous societies. This led to the widespread failure to keep set and setting in mind.
Thanks for the flashbacks to my early days of cultural awakening through film and music. I have thought about My Dinner with Andre a lot since 1981 but have not viewed it since. It actually works great as a podcast or radio show. As I listened, it struck me that that film, as it annotates the long demise of a socially integrated integrated society, was made long before even computers were in every household, and by extension the whole host of fragmenting and flattening media we endure today. There was this one mainstream cultural product to ensure us that we are not alone in our sense that something was/is deeply dystopian - and that there are folks out there who are probing alternatives. Today, the dystopia has expanded, but so have the alternatives. The system is quite fucked, but what else is new? The paths to awakening are more developed as most everyone realizes the old game is almost up.
Finished. I haven't heard that dialogue from "My Dinner With Andre" in a long time, vs the short segment in which Andre talks of New York as a pilot program for concentration camps of the future, in which in the inmates are in charge. What a dynamite movie.
And a very profound book, the "Art,....." I would disagree with one thing. You lambasted the scientific method, but it sounded like you were basically bad mouthing a screw driver for its inability to loosen/tighten nuts , or a wrench for its inability to loosen/tighten screws. It is a tool.
It's very useful for certain purposes. The lack of its use indicts the entire field of Virology which claims to be a science, and whose results as we have seen have impacts far beyond scoring academic points. On the other hand, it can also be used to demonstrate that a certain toxin can be poisonous to living beings.
Yes, i agree with Mark Bailey, empiricism is not a magic key which unlocks our ability to perceive all of reality. The scientific method is not a universal tool for truth. But it needs to be a part of our tool box.
Kevin's words remind me so much of how we are paying the price for years of separating "emotions" from "rational thinking." As if feeling has nothing to do with conscious cognition,
Hey Jeff, can you expand on that? For my part it exposes what is in the minds of the programmers when the rules were written.
The later part of the chat goes into the victim persecutor paradigm, with a very woke and metoo feel.
True that, but he betrays the feeling that rational science has led to the advancement of society, even if there are some pitfalls, maintains the illusion that there is anything valid to the notion that AI could become "conscious," As if rational thought can be distilled out of and away from the emotional creatures known as humans.
Thanks Jeff, I see what you mean
My neighbours must think I’ve lost the plot, I’m laughing so much about the NYT article! Just too funny and also so deranged.
Note, Nixon not Johnson was elected in 1968.
I heard one other error, forgot what it was.
My reaction to the NY Times article: OY VEY!
Sorry, AI is totally not like an organic human being having an acid/mushrooms.,,, trip, Speaking out of a position of someone who.... had a very spacial walk today. AI is perversion, reducing intelligence to data processing, as if being an organic being has nothing to do with real consciousness. Just say NO!!
Not AI -- humans exposed to computers. He said the computer is the LSD.
I stand corrected. And still totally disagree. Computers are perverse, blur the line between what's real and what's not, or rather obliterate that line. . What you experience on psychedelics on the other hand is totally real, even if it seems like in the deep unreal.
You're missing McLuhan's context here. I'll do something on it soon; he was a member of the intelligentsia who never tripped but who was with society people at parties while they were dosed, and was also with IBM executives as they learned to use their new computers. He is talking about the similarities of mental state between these two groups under their respective influences. He is using LSD as a metaphor, not a literal or limited concept.
A confounding factor (as it's called in statistical analysis) is at play here. Society people and IBM executives come from the same social layer which is already quite disconnected from reality, by wealth and by the way its members interact with the material world in a rather insulated way. .
He was a philosopher making a metaphor the meaning of which involves altered states of consciousness. He was observing that in his experience, both LSD and computers induce similar states of mind. And I don't think that the wife of the prime minister or an actor or novelist has much socially in common with an IBM vice president or hardware engineer. Why not just take what he's saying and see if it's useful? What are you defending? LSD fucked a lot of people up and led many others to believe that they were somehow enlightened or spiritually advanced — just like computers do to many people today.
I'm defending nothing. Yeah, quite a few people did it in the wrong circumstances, or did too much, or overstated what it did or could do. On the other hand, the use of psychedelics goes back over 10,000 years and did not damage indigenous cultures, nothing remotely like the enlightened materially advanced cultures which conquered and enslaved them, forcing its ways upon them, while repressing any such practices in the "advanced" cultures.
Meanwhile, computers not only fuck up a lot of people, they are fucking up society as a whole. Not just their usage, but the very material processes which are necessary for the widespread use of computers and hi tech.
EDIT to add: a key aspect of the impact the use of psychedelics starting in the "Sixties" has had upon American and European societies has been the extreme illegality of such substances. Users lacked a fabric of social customs which has always helpfully framed such usage in indigenous societies. This led to the widespread failure to keep set and setting in mind.
https://hal9000computer.wordpress.com/2017/11/22/all-hal-9000-phrases-from-the-movie/
Thanks for the flashbacks to my early days of cultural awakening through film and music. I have thought about My Dinner with Andre a lot since 1981 but have not viewed it since. It actually works great as a podcast or radio show. As I listened, it struck me that that film, as it annotates the long demise of a socially integrated integrated society, was made long before even computers were in every household, and by extension the whole host of fragmenting and flattening media we endure today. There was this one mainstream cultural product to ensure us that we are not alone in our sense that something was/is deeply dystopian - and that there are folks out there who are probing alternatives. Today, the dystopia has expanded, but so have the alternatives. The system is quite fucked, but what else is new? The paths to awakening are more developed as most everyone realizes the old game is almost up.
Finished. I haven't heard that dialogue from "My Dinner With Andre" in a long time, vs the short segment in which Andre talks of New York as a pilot program for concentration camps of the future, in which in the inmates are in charge. What a dynamite movie.
And a very profound book, the "Art,....." I would disagree with one thing. You lambasted the scientific method, but it sounded like you were basically bad mouthing a screw driver for its inability to loosen/tighten nuts , or a wrench for its inability to loosen/tighten screws. It is a tool.
It's very useful for certain purposes. The lack of its use indicts the entire field of Virology which claims to be a science, and whose results as we have seen have impacts far beyond scoring academic points. On the other hand, it can also be used to demonstrate that a certain toxin can be poisonous to living beings.
Yes, i agree with Mark Bailey, empiricism is not a magic key which unlocks our ability to perceive all of reality. The scientific method is not a universal tool for truth. But it needs to be a part of our tool box.
What's your source on the 10:00:07 a.m. time for ChatGPT? I analyzed that date as an untimed chart in my 4/18/25 post.