Dear Alberto, I must say that I love your style òf writing! Deep, yet always with a delightful sense of humour. Where do you find the time to create these masterpieces?
Wonderful essay, Alberto. There’s a wide field open for experimentation and novelty between reactionary dismissiveness and cynical surrender — attitudes that, I suspect, often coexist in many of our contemporaries.
One way of confronting AI with itself is to use it to highlight the conventions embedded in the viral jargons that standardize our thoughts, and in the formats and genres they use as vectors to spread — our available archetypes, so to speak.
That’s the line I’m exploring in my “Bureaucratic and Corporate Fiction” project (only in Spanish for the moment).
As for setting yourself free from Borges, I’m afraid that if you keep writing about the cross section between literature and AI, you’re predestined to fail, no matter how many people you drag with you into the labyrinth. Maybe only once those of us inside outnumber those outside will the distinction become blurry and irrelevant :)
"Ryle concludes that Descartes and his followers confuse the mind as being in the same category as the body but distinct from it, while the truth is that the mind is not a separate thing at all, but a way of describing how the body (the brain) behaves. This revelation opens up a secret path: if the mind is not made from a singular fabric accessible only to God, but an imperceptible higher-order manifestation of the body, then nothing stops humans, lesser beings, from instantiating a mind into a different substrate, like silicon."
Switching from the Mind - Body to Brain (a physical part of the body) - Body (minus Brain) is still dualism. Most AI has a very simple linear input-output model to cognition which is essentially still Cartesian: sensory information flows in about the external world; the brain stores, organizes and plans (using representations of the external world); the brain instructs the body to act; behavior is output. I believe philosophers working in the tradition of Ryle and Wittgenstein would say this is a type of category error, a homunculus or mereological fallacy. Minds/brains don't think; people do. That being the case, you are correct, that we are still haunted by ghosts as the metaphysical ones have not been exorcised.
Thank you for reminding me why I got on Substack in the first place, and why I stick around.
Thank you Brenton, comments like yours is why I write here!
Dear Alberto, I must say that I love your style òf writing! Deep, yet always with a delightful sense of humour. Where do you find the time to create these masterpieces?
Dana van der Merwe
Thank you so much Dana! I find time in the fact that this is my full time job haha not much distraction when this is all I do!
Wonderful essay, Alberto. There’s a wide field open for experimentation and novelty between reactionary dismissiveness and cynical surrender — attitudes that, I suspect, often coexist in many of our contemporaries.
One way of confronting AI with itself is to use it to highlight the conventions embedded in the viral jargons that standardize our thoughts, and in the formats and genres they use as vectors to spread — our available archetypes, so to speak.
That’s the line I’m exploring in my “Bureaucratic and Corporate Fiction” project (only in Spanish for the moment).
As for setting yourself free from Borges, I’m afraid that if you keep writing about the cross section between literature and AI, you’re predestined to fail, no matter how many people you drag with you into the labyrinth. Maybe only once those of us inside outnumber those outside will the distinction become blurry and irrelevant :)
"Ryle concludes that Descartes and his followers confuse the mind as being in the same category as the body but distinct from it, while the truth is that the mind is not a separate thing at all, but a way of describing how the body (the brain) behaves. This revelation opens up a secret path: if the mind is not made from a singular fabric accessible only to God, but an imperceptible higher-order manifestation of the body, then nothing stops humans, lesser beings, from instantiating a mind into a different substrate, like silicon."
Switching from the Mind - Body to Brain (a physical part of the body) - Body (minus Brain) is still dualism. Most AI has a very simple linear input-output model to cognition which is essentially still Cartesian: sensory information flows in about the external world; the brain stores, organizes and plans (using representations of the external world); the brain instructs the body to act; behavior is output. I believe philosophers working in the tradition of Ryle and Wittgenstein would say this is a type of category error, a homunculus or mereological fallacy. Minds/brains don't think; people do. That being the case, you are correct, that we are still haunted by ghosts as the metaphysical ones have not been exorcised.