If I have a pump that operates off of suction versus one off an impeller … Why must their output be declared of different types and categories simply because their unseen parts perform the intermediate tasks very differently? — Hanover

Doesn't it do this with auto-pilot airplanes and self-driven vehicles? — Hanover

Your error is conflating behavior and consciousness. Your argument is that if a machine acts like a human, it thinks like a human. The pragmatic Turing argument.

But cybernetic autopilots are machines driving machines in a machine-like world. AI can appear to be doing just great in a world already made as machine like as possible by humans.

Just having a world with doors, windows, steps and paths is such a huge reduction of complexity that a robot should be able to navigate it.

Or as is the case with LLMs running a call centre, a synthesised voice folllowing a pattern matching script can push the buttons of an unhappy human customer in a way that hopefully guides them down to a happy landing spot. Zero actual intelligence or sapience need be involved.

New technology fits into the previous technology that already composes our now highly mechanised lives. The more we behave like automatons in our machine-styled worlds, the easier we can add the new levels of life automation.

We don’t ask our machines to rub sticks and build the fire to cook the antelope it just speared and butchered. We just ask it to jam the ready meal in the microwave and press the button. And appear to understand us when we ask for the chicken option rather than the lamb.

So, where you say the AI community knows that LLMs can't do what they need it to, where is this documented? What is the cite for that? — Hanover

This is a decent summary making quite a stir given that the LLM hype bubble could be about to bust the stock market.

But I see our progress as tremendous, not minimal as maybe you're suggesting. — Hanover

Hah. Call me old and jaded. But I was around for the second AI revolution hype bubble of the 1980s. I spent time in the labs to learn about what was going on.

Neural networks had become a damp squib, but Japan had launched its fifth generation computer initiative and the US was all up in a competitive frenzy about parallel processing and symbolic computing as being about to rewrite the landscape.

And who remembers any of that?

Doesn't it do this with auto-pilot airplanes and self-driven vehicles? — Hanover

Sure. Cybernetics has been with us since the first AI revolution of the 1950s.

What the history of AI should tell us is that the architectural issues are not that complicated to understand. And even the most rudimentary implementations of some kind of neural network can be surprisingly powerful. Back-prop networks once seemed as big a breakthrough as LLMs.

But we’ve been at AI for 70 years now and LLMs are as far as we have got. That should also tell you something.

I think this is compatible with meaning is use as long as you're describing public manifestations. — Hanover

I’m not too fussed with making the psychological science conform to the Wittgenstein model.

But I would note preparedness is also being ready ahead of time, knowing what to ignore. So meaning is also inaction. Meaning is what you don’t do as you have already dismissed it in advance.

Again, this is a central fact of neurobiology that is quite absent from LLMs. The brain is set up on the basic principle of learning to ignore the world as much as possible, as almost everything about the world has already been predicted as being about to happen, or dismissed as unimportant if it does happen.

The more we understand ahead of the moment, the less we need to figure out in the heat of any moment. The natural goal of a brain is to have zero response as that means it was completely successful in its desire to remain completely unsurprised by what the world could throw at it.

This is the Bayesian Brain model of cognition. Hinton’s Helmholtz machine or even before that, Grossberg’s ART neural network architecture from the 1980s.

So the AI community knows the architecture it would want to copy. And it knows LLMs ain’t it. The surprise is just how useful LLMs can be as a new technology if you are willing to scale their simple ability just to predict the next likely step when trained on a static data set.

Living in a dynamical world in real time is quite another level of challenge,

It's very important to know the difference between an internal voice and an external one, or a real face and a hallucination. — frank

Again, this is about cognition being about anticipation-based processing. Forming expectancies that intercept the unfolding of the world even before it happens. We know it is us thinking our thoughts because we form the motor patterns that already prime our sensory circuits that we should be hearing exactly these words in our heads. But when someone else speaks, it feels different as we are having to guess what might be said, and assimilate that to what actually gets said.

So that is the goal for AI that goes beyond just LLMs. Switch to an anticipatory-processing architecture that lives in the world in real time.

The Wittgensteinian approach (and I could be very wrong here, so please anyone chime in) does not suggest there is not an internally recognized understanding of the word when the user uses it, but it only suggests that whatever that is is beyond what can be addressed in language. That would mean that whatever "understanding’" is amounts to our public criteria for it . — Hanover

From the neurocognitive view, understanding means anticipation. Forming the right expectations. So if not meaning as demonstrated by use, then meaning demonstrated by preparedness.

I hear “apple”, I get ready to react accordingly. My attention is oriented in that particular direction.

I think that originally written language evolved completely separate from spoken language, the former being for the purpose of a memory aid, the latter for the purpose of communication. — Metaphysician Undercover

What are you talking about? Writing came before speech, or something? Hands evolved before tongues? What's your hypothesis?

What evidence convinced you that speech caused the change? — frank

The literature is on this is massive. So there is no one fact. But what I would say is that genetics has made a big difference in clarifying the paleological record. And much more attention has been paid to how the lives of sapiens suddenly appears much more "narrated". Plus an emphasis on the importance of reaching a critical mass of population so as to result in a division of labour and explosion in productivity.

So the kind of thing Stringer in fact mentions. And the argument is not that Neanderthal had zero speech. It is that sapiens developed a foraging cultural package based on a new narratising habit. A new way of relating to the world through language.

Neanderthals were doing perfectly well as a thin population of big game hunters in Europe's mammoth steppes. Puny sapiens was growing up as a shoreline scrounger moving along every coastline taking it from Southern Africa to the rest of the world. A lifestyle based on the ability to be a social networker having to do a bit of everything to get by.

Once sapiens broke into Europe with its megafauna stretching all the way to Asia, that was an entirely new niche it could take over. Neanderthals and sapiens might be reasonably equivalent in brain power and hunting ability. But they looked to be viewing the same European landscape through very different eyes. Neanderthals thought in family groups just existing. Sapiens thought in terms of tribal clans warring and sharing. A new political existence to make the best use of a new entropic bonanza. Big game that could produce a population density that became a matching cultural intensity.

A group of 10 Neanderthals narrating their world vs a connected network of thousands of sapiens narrating the same foraging landscape was the big difference. Neanderthals perhaps had some level of grammatical speech. But sapiens had the critical mass to rapidly evolve exactly the kind of grammar best suited to exploiting the massive opportunity that presented itself, especially as the actual ice age steppes gave way to an era of patchy woodland and prey of all sizes.

I'll post some of the notes I was making on this issue to get back up to date with the latest literature. You can see that I was specifically focused on the biosemiotic argument as a better way to understand what made the critical difference.

So it was speech. Or speech with a certain grammatical structure. Or speech that was indeed the tool organising a new general mindset. The new general mindset that could seize a new general entropic opportunity and so start to scale in the explosive fashion that has become so now familiar.

The story of the human semiotic transition is subtle. Sure all hominids could make expressive social noises as a proto-speech. Even chimps can grunt and gesture in meaningful fashion that directs attention and coordinates social interactions. A hand can be held out propped by the other hand to beg in a symbolising fashion.
But the way to think about the great difference that the abstracting power of a fully syntactical language made to the mentality of Homo sapiens lies in the psychological shift from band to tribe.
The evidence of how Erectus, Neanderthals and Denisovans lived is that they were small family bands that hunted and foraged. They had that same social outlook of apes in general as they lacked the tool to structure their social lives more complexly.
But proper speech was a literal phase transition. Homo sap could look across the same foraging landscape and read it as a history and genealogy. The land was alive with social meaning and ancestral structure. The tribal mentality so famous in any anthropological study.
It is hard to imagine ourselves restricted to just the mindset of a band when we have only experienced life as tribal. However this is the way to understand the essence of the great transformation in pragmatic terms.
Theories of the evolution of the human mind are bogged down by the very Enlightenment-centric view of what it is to be human. Rationality triumphing over the irrational. So we look for evidence of self-conscious human intelligence in the tool kits of the paleo-anthropological record. Reason seems already fully formed if homo could hunt in bands and cook its food even from a million years ago, all without a vocal tract and a brain half the size.
But if we want to get at the real difference, it is that peculiar tribal mindset that us humans could have because speech allowed our world to seem itself a lived extension of our own selves. Every creek or hillock came with a story that was "about us" as the people of this place. We had our enemies and friends in those other bands we might expect to encounter. We could know whether to expect a pitch battle or a peace-making trading ritual.
The essentials of being civilised in the Enlightment sense were all there, but as a magic of animism cast over the forager's world. The landscape itself was alive in every respect through our invention of a habit of socialising narration. We talked the terrain to life and lived within the structure – the Umwelt – that this created for us. Nothing we could see didn't come freighted with a tribal meaning.
At that point – around 40,000 years ago, after sapiens as an "out of Africa coastal foraging package" had made its way up through the Levant – the Neanderthals and Denisovans stood no chance. Already small in number, they melted into history in a few thousand years.
The animistic mentality was the Rubicon that Homo sapiens crossed. A vocal tract, and the articulate speech that this enabled, were the steps that sparked the ultimate psycho-social transformation.

My grammar story would argue that this is what suddenly catapulted sapiens past Neanderthals in an explosive spread based on increased fertility rates. A population pressure was created by a new entropic bonanza – perhaps a switch to hunting the big game with better clothing and tighter tribal order?
It makes complete sense that Neanderthals had grammatical speech at some level. And that articulation for expressive social noises was the original foundation. But it is the coupling of the Mammoth Steppe bonanza with population density that saw sapiens suddenly explode with a new displaced mentality. The start of a rationalising mindset. Grammar evolved new tensed structure that turned it into a general purpose conversational and narrative tool. A new level of social in and out group morality could get established.
Neanderthals were already feasting at the Mammoth Steppe table. But sapiens came roaring past with the new organisation that boosted fertility and survival. As Wrangham says, domestication pushed out old alpha male order and brought in the tribal collective order submitting to the displaced and abstracted group identity.

Neanderthal population in Eurasia never exploded like sapiens, which is evidence for a big grammar and entropy bonanza step. Neanderthals look like deep freeze erectus hunting. Sapiens is Qesem Cave cooking and foraging. So a fork that appears to start by 400kya in the Levant and so before full speech. This argues for an out of Africa package that then becomes proper speech with scalefree takeoff across mammoth steppe.

Neanderthals look to be reaction to Mammoth Steppe – chasing the big game north. Denisovans heading to the tropics. Then sapiens comes out of the African context and take over the game with the grammatical language/tribal Umwelt package.

Hunting big game for fat seems the more basic story for erectus, and again for Neanderthal. Then it is only sapiens that exploited the small game, cooked carb, firewood niche. This became the better option only after the megafauna had been eaten and so landscapes carved into scalefree foraging, trading and fighting networks – connected by linguistic culture, behavioural diversity and boundary policing – became the new thing.
Sapiens displaced Neanderthals fast with this new intelligent landscape approach where fighting each other made fighting Neanderthals child’s play. It is not just about being smarter individuals or even as domesticated groups. It was the ability to colonise the whole landscape, rather than simply trail behind roaming herds, that would rapidly squeeze out Neanderthals. This was anthropomorphism of the landscape at work. A biofilm becoming a memofilm. A lived space becoming a narrated space.
The primary transition or rubicon moment was the population explosion and cultural intensification that was sapiens reworking their worlds as a semiotic unwelt. Covered by trails, legends, social histories, distant relations and shared languages.

Foraging economy creates the social complexity of sapiens compared to Neanderthals….
Erectus didn’t cook, and Neanderthals were optional, so sapiens built lifestyle around hunting and gathering sociality. Steve Kuhn and Mary Stiner argue that sexual division of labour in foraging was a sapiens step and not an erectus step, says Ridley p64.
It was how they could beat Neanderthals through breeding vigour, and perhaps I would say by being better set up for attritional war if men had the specialist role and Neanderthals had to stick defensively together.
Glynn Issac had argued the opposite since 1978. But Kuhn/Stiner point to the lack of gathered food in Neanderthal camp debris - no grindstones or leftover nuts and roots. No food processing of that kind. And also the lack of intricate clothes and shelters like Inuit women have time to produce if men are away hunting. So women must have been active with the men unless child protection was a full time job.
So this would fit the language story of cooking needing protospeech and division of labour needing fully symbolic grammar?
It seems cooking must have started things in terms of spreading out and coming together. But sapiens took a strong next step that also involved trading and warfare. Sex division would be part of that, and so an ability to trade off carb gathering with game hunting. This African balance then encountered the Neanderthals on the Mammoth Steppe and quickly run them over. Carbs took a back seat in the new balance as big herd hunting creates the explosive spread of sapiens out of Africa.

Note the difference that size of the language community would have made. This alone could explain how sapiens crossed the rubicon to some new rationalising grammar. It was just a critical mass deal….
Dediu - Language seems to behave in a different manner, due to its design properties which require “parity” (similarity of systems) between communicators. Large populations erode complexity because of the need to communicate across groups), and small ones allow it, allowing clutter to accumulate.
[Or rather, small ones don’t create general ways of simplifying speech by adding new grammar features like tenses, or doing away with local special cases, like Piraha’s distinction of whether fact is known, believed, guessed.]
Consequently, highly complex languages (with elaborate morphology and irregularity) tend to be spoken by small groups (Lupyan and Dale, 2010). From this, we might conjecture that Neandertals had the features typical of languages spoken in small traditional societies today: sizable phoneme inventories, complex morphosyntax, high degrees of irregularity, and vocabularies in the tens of thousands.
We can also be fairly sure, due to the relatively isolated nature of the groups, that there were many distinct languages. We could even hazard the prediction on the basis of the genes they carried, that the chances are they spoke tone languages (Dediu and Ladd, 2007).
[So this fits a new my model story where sapiens hit the Mammoth Steppes and suddenly had the population density to create a critical mass grammar transition. A great simplification – or rather a structuring series of general grammatical divisions, such as tense - made for a more logical and powerful tool. Displacement would have been the key feature of the new grammar as it would have created the platform for a social level of organismic world modelling.]

According to Chris Stringer, there are multiple theories about what happened to Homo sapiens 60,000 years ago. — frank

There are always multiple theories when it comes to a critical issue like this. How else is any self-respecting academic going to forge a career?

I speak from the point of view of having studied the many different interpretations folk have made of the evidence. I was once even approached to write a paleoanthropology textbook. I kid you not.

I personally think it's likely that abstract speech got a huge boost from agriculture, which involves a lot of delayed gratification. Obviously, that happened much later than the shift that took place 50-60,000 years ago. — frank

This would be the upgrade in semiosis that resulted from literacy and numeracy. The shift from an oral culture to one based on the permanence of inscriptions and the abstractions of counting and measuring. The new idea of ownership and property.

Pantheism and panpsychism are entirely different things. — T Clark

Panpsychism can be rather a broad church. Hartshorne coined the dichotomy of synecological and atomistic panpsychism to cover this.

So pantheism, or indeed panentheism, is a variety of synecological panpsychism under his classification scheme. Broadly this is the difference between a top-down constraints and a bottom-up construction view of things.

That is, consciousness as either a holistic constraint imposed on material being down to its finest grades of division, or instead the opposite thing of consciousness originating at the level of atomistic events – even particles in interaction – and then becoming complexified as it becomes built up into more elaborate structures like bodies and brains.

So it is the same old causal debate. Top-down holism vs bottom-up contruction. Two ways of treating consciousness as a reified "thing" – an elemental property of nature. But two opposite ways of framing that fact. Either human minds emerge from atomistic fragments appropriately combined, or from the generalised divine mind appropriately constrained – as in being confined to inhabit the particular circuitry of some human or other, or some shape and form of animal, tree, or mountain or river, or other.

What is shared is seeking to elevate "consciousness" to something maximally general and fundamental to material reality. Either the panentheism of participating in the generality of the divine whole, or the more familiar reductionist model that sounds more scientifically respectable and which thus popularised the actual brand name of panpsychism.

If Nature was fundamentally atomistic in its causality, we’ll just assume consciousness begins right there where the first particles arise. That bottom-up construction view felt always more properly sciencey and less like religious woo.

But of course I have to add that all this pan- talk is guff as its seeks to reduce reality to either its whole or its parts. The systems view seeks to find reality in the interaction of its extremes. A holism that is triadic and which thus incorporates both its holist and reductionist tendencies.

Then semiosis actually defines life and mind as a modelling relation within the entropic world. It gives a sharp reason why consciousness can arise when a particular modelling process arises within Nature at a certain sufficiently cool, large and complex moment in its Big Bang history.

But that would be leading the conversation back into the realm of the actually scientific. :grin:

I've been making this argument for many years. I may have expressed it better here...

There was all this buried coal and petroleum left over from super abundant plant growth in an era of "too high/too warm" oxygen and temperature levels. Dinosaur conditions. Lovelock argued the planet does best at a cooler 15 degrees C global average with lower oxygen levels – the balance established after the asteroid did for the dinosaurs. A world with 70% ocean to make for a cold energy sink that balances out the atmospheric CO2 sink in a way that maximises productivity.

So you could see fossil fuels as biomass that got shoved under the carpet as the Earth was still finding its global biological balance and didn't have the means to recycle everything with maximum efficiency at the time.

Locked in the ground, it was out of sight, out of mind. But life continued to evolve above the ground. It developed increasing agency as it gained new energetic advantages like being warm-blooded and more sophisticated in its understanding of its environment.

Then along came Homo with big brains, language, social organisation and tool use. The keys to unlock the goldmine of fossil fuels.

So it is inevitable in the sense that if it could happen, it would happen. The probability was 1, especially once the semiotic means to "objectively stand outside biological nature as a sociocultural organism" came along.

In the fullness of time, fossil carbon may have got slowly degraded by being geological exposed to bacterial recycling. Either that, or recycled by the earth's hot geological core itself – the cycles of plate tectonics. So genetic level semiosis would have been the "brains" adapting itself to this entropic mop up chore. Other outcomes were possible there.

But the Gaian biofilm continued to exploit the "technology" of semiosis – life's code-based approach to constructing dissipative structure. Genes led to neurons. With humans, this led on to first language – sociosemiosis. A code based on words. That then led to technosemiosis – codes based on the complete abstractions that are numbers.

So above ground, the evolution of semiosis was continuing, helped by the ideal conditions being created by the Gaian biofilm.

First we had an era of "climate stress" – the glaciation age which acted as a filter on hominid intelligence and sociality with its rapid cycles of change and the abundant herds of horse, deer, elephants and other big game that roamed the open grass plains that resulted across much of Eurasia.

Again, we have a "energy bonanza" just asking to be over-exploited. Large herds of yuumy bison-berger. And this drove an arms-race among the varied hunter-gatherer hominids that evolved to be top predator during this ice age. Homo sapiens came out on top, having developed the best linguistic software. But also, the large herds were pretty much wiped out in the process. It looked like Homo sap was out of a job.

But then the climate clicked into a longer stable interglacial period. Agriculture could be invented as the Homo tribes being shove about the landscape by shifting glaciers could instead settle down to tend and defend their patch of soil. Grow their own bison-bergers, and the buns and spices to make them even more delicious.

Again, other outcomes were possible. Language-equipped Homo might not have been lucky with a shift in climate. They may have eaten the last mastodon and gone extinct soon after.

But agriculture became a new energetic bonanza – although one now demanding a very organised and measured approach to its exploitation. Homo had to build a culture around working with the daily solar flux and annual farming rhythms. We had to become experts at recycling even our own shit to keep the paddy fields going, or burning the cow dung to heat our huts. We had to really take care of the ecology of our environments. They became the gods, the ancestors, that we worshipped and revered.

Roll the clock forward and we have the rise of agricultural empires. Then this turns into the age of expansionary empires – Rome and European nation states – as societies are reorganised from being farmers to being soldiers. If you are 15th C Portugal with a fleet of ships, there is the whole world to start raping and colonising. Again, an entropic bonanza just begging to be exploited.

And now the military technology - in the form of the Greek hoplites that invented the Western notion of all out war based on self-actualising "democratic" control – had been refined to the point that ships, muskets and cannon could really project focused power. Again, gunpowder. An entropic bonanza that followed its own logic all the way up to nuclear warheads. The shit that actually worried us in the 1970s and so probably pushed climate change down the list of concerns at the time – especially at government response level.

Anyway, you can see the pattern. Entropic bonanza. Semiotic control. Put the two together and you get explosive growth, like a spore on a Petrie dish, until the system hopefully finds some kind of homeostatic long-run balance.

Humans - once equipped with the sociosemiosis and technosemiosis to take a view from outside "nature" – outside even the Gaian Earth as a biofilm regulated entropic enterprise - could start to look for all the new loopholes it might exploit. Our busy minds and hands were pushing and probing every crack for a seam of advantage – an ability to concentrate semiotic power in ways that topped whatever already existed.

Whether we kill ourselves with nuclear fission or a blanket of trapped CO2 is still perhaps a close-run thing. Overpopulation and ecosystem destruction are still also in the game. All the exponential curves still intersect circa 2050, just as we saw they did in the 1970s when the Club of Rome offered up its first still dodgy computer simulations of the trends.

So it is all one Hegelian historical arc. The relentless upward climb in an ability semiotically to project power. The bigger the entropy store, the more dazzling the semiotic structure that arises to exploit it.

If ecologists governed the world rather than the engineers who run the communist bloc and lawyers (or more lately, the derivative traders) who run the free west, then the burning need to establish a new Gaian planetary balance would be top of mind. But no one ever wanted to vote for hair-shirted greenies. They offer no fun at all.

I mean this soap opera world where absolutely everything teeters on the brink in mad self-destructive fashion. What more exciting and interesting time is there to be alive? — apokrisis

Yep. This is the right line of thought, The danger is that if it can happen, it will. The second law will roll right over us.

The whole machine age was about stumbling on ancient fossil fuel reserves - the coal that is the lignin which bacteria couldn’t digest, the dead plankton that likewise overwhelmed the recycling capacities of the Earth’s ecology for many millions of years. This organic matter was cooked and rarified and became vast seams of chemical negentropy with no one able to burn it.

Then the Brits, camped on top of coal lodes, were the first to make the connection, close the circuit, between steam power and capital investment. The Industrial Revolution was born. Coal and oil were released to be burnt in a way that paid for their own fiery consumption. The growth in this burning became relentlessly exponential. Even with the danger of global warming apparent by the 1960s, humans had become so wedded to a lifestyle based on a mindset that “intelligence” could on focus itself on how to keep the exponential curve of fossil fuel consumption continuing.

We see the same with AI. Once the genie is out of the bottle, humans will contort their thinking so as to believe exponential increase is the natural order. Number goes up. Dissipation becomes a self organising, feedback driven, enterprise that absorbs all the intelligence and attention available.

But the big question is whether we will use AI technology to amplify our human actions or whether AI could replace us as the new level of entropic superorganism.

As biology, we really are constructed with a growth imperative. We have an evolved purpose that is baked into our bodies. But also that leads to us being hugely efficient. We can do everything we do living off the negentropic equivalent of a 100 watt electric light bulb. Evolution created us to live within it ecological limits set by the daily solar flux. The planetary enterprise that is a biofilm achieving a steady 20 to 40 degree C cooling of the Earth’s surface compared to what its heat dissipation would have been with the sunshine falling on bare rock rather than forests and vegetation.

AI has been born into a different world based on profligate fossil fuel burning and resource consumption. Already - even with fracking - half of what practically is extractable has been consumed. So number doesn’t always just go up. Can AI hope for superorganism status unless it cracks the question of what is its sustainable level of entropy burn?

Of course humans can easily project a future where fusion power is the new unlimited electricity resource, where going to Mars and then building a Dyson sphere around the Sun are other ways that us and our machines will continue on their exponential entropic curve, forever a self-compounding algorithm.

But from an ecological and biosemiotic point of view, I would argue that the dreams are sci fi. Nature is ruled by the urge to entropify, but also constrained by the limits that entropification itself must impose on life and mind. An organism is by definition a steady state or homeostatic creature. One that rebuilds itself at the same rate that it is falling apart. Not a process that grows exponentially forever but grows to the carrying capacity of its geophysical environment.

So humans broke that mould. We were already doing it as big game hunters before we became farmers and factory owners. We created an exponentialising mentality that really took off for the skies with the Industrial Revolution. And if that is baked into us as what it means to be civilised, then that is what is being baked into LLMs in particular as the preserved patterns of thoughts of us humans.

So whether we continue as being the AI-enhanced Homo techne superorganism, or the techne gets away on us and removes us from its own entropic enterprise, there is the deeper question of how an exponentialising mindset can survive for very long in this Universe where dissipative structure might need to be more focused on lasting for the long haul. Living within the limits of some evolved ecology and not instead living the life of a runaway cancer.

Of course, being a mindless cancer could work. But the debate over the human future needs to be shaped by a better understanding of what is natural and likely to be the case under an evolutionary algorithm.

Can exponentialising be a long-run state for intelligence? Will fusion and Dyson spheres and quantum computing tear up any concept of a reality with geophysical limits to its ecological being? Or is having to work within some long-run carrying capacity just an evolutionary necessity?

Will Homo techne believe in the infinite horizon or the bounded ecosphere, and respond accordingly as the dissipative structure that needs to both dissipate and preserve its own state of structure.

So far the LLM story has only confirmed us in our unbounded exponentialism. It is another symptom of that ingrained belief which does now define Homo techne as a thing.

The journey to enlightened thinking has struggled against this baseline feature every step of the way: calling it superstition. But maybe the unenlightened mind was right all along. Maybe the mind is inextricable from the world we engage. A real theory of embeddedness would take that possibility seriously. — frank

That’s why fully grammatical and propositional language made such a quick difference when Homo sapiens took over the world from the Neanderthals, Denisovans and other hominids around 60,000 years ago.

They were reasonably tech savvy hunter gatherers that lived in small isolated family groups, likely more organised at the level of sophisticated chimps.

Then we came along with the new habit of narrating our worlds, our landscapes. The world became our tribal story of a network of historical feuds, raids, trading relations, animal migrations, terrible and great events. We saw not just a place as any smart animal would see it but now one woven into the story of “us” as a collection of tribes sharing lands further than the eye could see with a need to be places at times or seasons to repeat rituals, negotiate for mates, maintain a fabric of relations that spread knowledge, technology, genes, prized goods.

Humans with language could scale, as the tech bros would have it. Neanderthals were clinging on alone in hard times. Humans could spread themselves across a landscape in a web of semiosis that spoke of the near and the far, the past and the future, the dangers and the opportunities.

So anthropology does stress this narrative embeddedness in our world. Speech transforms the world to make it a collective social space full of ancestral wisdom and understandings. And if that mentality can scale to thousands, it can eventually scale to millions and billions. Powerful stuff.

Optional coda if you want to name stakes/criteria:

> If one day a system coupled LLM-like modeling to **self-maintenance** (metabolic or economic), **endogenous goal-setting**, and **answerability to its own norms** (not just ours), I’d say it crossed from delegated to intrinsic semiosis. Until then, it’s powerful **participatory** cognition—semiosis in the loop, not in the lump.

This keeps his biosemiotic hierarchy intact, concedes the “no biology, no sentience” point, and still preserves your externalist/Peircean claim that meaningful work really is happening *at the system level* we inhabit together. — Pierre-Normand

Yep. This is just rolling on to an argument I’ve made.

Biosemiosis says that life and mind are the rise of “reality modelling” under the aegis of the second law of thermodynamics. We exist because we are a self organising and evolving form of dissipative structure.

Humans are entropifying the planet now that our way of life has been technologically amplified and economically engineered. And the doomsday scenario would be that global capital flows could be now going into building the AI infrastructure that one day just cuts us out of the loop.

So the next step wouldn’t be some kind of super sapience. It would be a takeover by a mindless algorithm that got out of hand. One that could organise its own entropifying world order with the kind of superorganism relentless we might associate with ants and other social insects.

It’s a charming thought. But life and mind are an algorithm in being dissipative structure. Something that had to emerge under the Second Law of Thermodynamics because it could.

And the story on AI is the same. The human superorganism level of semiotic order had already gone exponential once technology became the accelerating feedback loop. The Industrial Revolution happened because fossil fuels made the temptation impossible to resist, humankind had to engineer that dream of a reality which would forever grow bigger, faster, louder.

If AI is the conciousness that replaces us, it will be because human capital flows - released by neoliberal economic theory - can now flood directly into energy intensive projects. The imperative of the Second Law can cut us out as the middlemen and hook directly into global capital. Which is exactly what the state of play report shows is happening in terms of the data centre and power station demand curve.

Life and mind will always be an entropic algorithm. Hand AI the keys to the kingdom and it can only say drill, baby, drill. Or if we are lucky, moderate the new super-exponential resource consumption curve by mixing in a little bit more wind, hydro, solar and nuclear capacity. Although greenies know that that just equates to mine, baby, mine.

So this is the future we are rushing to embrace. Tech bros and their infinite money glitch. AI because capital just wants to connect to resources. Information remains what it always has been, the handmaiden of entropification. — apokrisis

So biosemiosis doesn’t say human sapience is that special as such. It is about a Peircean algorithm that allows life and mind to exist because intelligence can be used to unlock greater entropy production.

AI could become properly semiotic by closing the loop in a modelling relation fashion. Becoming responsible for its own perpetuation. But it could do so with more the kind of sentience or intelligence we would associate with a vast mechanical ant colony.

I'm sure apokrisis would have much more to say about the integration of semiosis with biology — Pierre-Normand

I'm holding out for something quantum or panpsychically exotic — frank

I think a snappy way of putting it is that when you turn on your TV, an image appears. But do you believe the TV is seeing anything as a result?

LLMs are just displays that generate images humans can find meaningful. Nothing more.

Biosemiosis is a theory of meaningfulness. And it boils down to systems that can exist in their worlds as they become models of that world. This modelling has to start at the level of organising the chemistry that builds some kind of self sustaining metabolic structure. An organism devoted to the business of being alive.

So it starts with a genetic modelling of a metabolism, progresses to a neural modelling of surviving in an environment, and in humans, to a narrative self-model within the context of a sociocultural environment. We become a functional unit within a human made world.

Technology like cars, TVs and LLMs are then yet a further level of this semiosis we weave into our lives. A level based on connecting mathematical algorithms to fossil fuel deposits. The social order becomes a technological order.

Certainly a new level of sapience if you like. But still one that begins in how genes organise chemistry, neurons organise intelligent behaviour, and words organise social order. Numbers simply organise a further level of “being in the world” that is energised by being mechanised.

So humans are special in terms of being living and mindful creatures. Even at the level of physiology, we have vast entropy flows sustaining our being. We consume our environments like no other species has ever done before. Our worlds are supercharged in terms of all that we are so busy thinking and doing, changing and experiencing.

And LLMs feel like upping the stakes again in that regard. We are doing something new in the supercharged existence we have spun for ourselves. A sense of self is even overtaking our material environment. We used to look at a chair and see how it was exactly meant for us. Soon we will expect our self driving cars to chat to us intelligently as they whiz us off to work.

But at the end of the day, is it any more revolutionary than the invention of the mirror? The new social habit of having a device to remind ourselves we have a face that looks just like “us”. An image that we can then read for its meaning. Is my hair sticking up at the back? What will other people think when they see what I can see? And how different must the world have been before mirrors and the ability to see what other people were seeing?

So LLMs are just lumps of circuitry churning strings of bits. Absolutely zero biology involved. Nothing semiotic going on inside its own “head”. But to any socialised and encultured modern human, the world suddenly seems alive with a vast repository of thoughts thinking themselves. At any moment, an image of thinking and answering can be projected on a screen, even broadcast through a speaker. Even though always just an image, it is like the machine has come alive at that human intellectual level.

The story here is about organisms and their need to construct a habitable world. The basic biosemiotic trick. The construction of an Umwelt. Humans inherited a genetic and neurobiological legacy and then have added a narrative and technological level of world-making on top.

LLMs can only be a big deal in extending that human journey. The business of filling our environments with a density of images that we can understand. The mirror on the wall. The seat that looks comfortable. The TV that will amuse and inform us. The car that will whisk us to wherever we want to go. The LLM that can generate endless images of the smart things that the cleverest humans could have said.

But none of this technology is itself alive or aware. It simply exists to amplify our own lives that have become so densely packed with meaningful imagery.

Yep, fair enough. :up:

You are the one setting the LLM into motion for your own purposes. — Leontiskos

Well yes. Just like tossing a post into the TPF bear pit.

But one is casting a very wide net. You can do some rapid prototyping without having to be too polished. Publish the roughest top-of-the-head draft.

The other has the promise of accelerating the polishing part of some argument which you have just tossed out to see if even you still think it might fly. :wink:

People who are interacting with LLMs know that they are not interacting with a person, and as a result they go to an internet forum and say, "Hey, my LLM just said this! Isn't this interesting? What do you guys think?," followed by a giant wall of AI-generated text. — Leontiskos

And I agree that there should be constraints on low-effort posting. It is standard practice for posters to simply assert your wrongness and scamper off without providing any argument. Just muttering excuses about it being lunchtime.

So yes, if one makes an effort, then one wants others to return that effort. Perfectly reasonable.

And cut and pasting LLM cleverness is something to object to, even on a forum that seems remarkably tolerant of low effort OPs and responses.

While I don't necessarily agree, I don't think there is much danger in making mistakes with the rules. — Leontiskos

OK. So that is part of the experimenting too. :up:

How would you regulate LLM use on a forum such as this? — Leontiskos

I mentioned some ground rule ideas already. But I'm not really big on rules being more a constraints-based guy. And as I said, a public discussion board on philosophy is already going to wind up in a forum much as we see it.

So I say I am annoyed by low effort responses. But that just goes with the territory. Mandating high effort would be ridiculous.

But banning LLM generated OPs, and clamping down on masquerading cut-and-paste brilliance, seems quite doable. The mods say this is the priority I think.

Then if LLMs do turn low effort posters into folk who can focus well enough to at least sense some flaw in your argument and drum up an instant "but AI says..." riposte, then that seems a step forward to me.

That could be the experiment to see how it goes. But you might have to add subclauses like that if you deploy the insta-LLM text, you then have to still defend it after that. You have to take the risk of being forced into a higher effort mode as a result of being low effort.

At the moment, there is no comeback at all on the insta-responses along the lines of "you're just wrong, I can't understand you, the lunch gong just rang".

The reason TPF is not a place where you argue with LLMs is because there are no places where you argue with LLMs. When someone gets in an argument with an LLM they have become caught up in a fictional reality. What is occurring is not an actual argument. — Leontiskos

But your deepest arguments are the ones you are willing to have against yourself. Which is how I structured my own early practice once word processors made it practical to take a deeply recursive approach to note taking.

And I think @Joshs example of his own conversation with an LLM quoted back on p6 - “What are we to make of the status of concepts like self and other, subject and object in Wittgenstein’s later work? Must they be relative to the grammar of a language game or form of life?” - is a great example of using LLMs in this same recursive and distilling fashion.

So it feels like a fork in the road here. Anyone serious about intellectual inquiry is going to be making use of LLMs to deepen their own conversation with themselves.

And then there is TPF as a fairly unserious place to learn about the huge variety of inner worlds that folk may construct for themselves.

How does TPF respond to this new technology of LLM thought assistance and recursive inquiry? Does it aim to get sillier or smarter? More a social club/long running soap opera or more of an open university for all comers?

It would seem to me that this is still a time for experimenting rather than trying to ring fence the site. TPF is basically an anarchy anyway. It may get better, it may get worse. But the basic dynamic is already locked in by priors such as the anonymity of the posters, the diversity of the internet and the back and forth haphazard nature of flinging posts into the ether with only a modest expectation of a helpful response.

So for you, TPF might not be a place to do this or that. But if you have a clear vision about what it is indeed for, then LLMs are a thought amplifying technology. You could experiment and see what better thing might take.

I mean it won’t. But you can have fun trying.

We hold the author to account for their post. ... This is not epistemic or ethical reasoning so much as aesthetic. — Banno

So the essence of TPF is that we have feelings about the authors of posts. And they must also respond with feeling. Sounds right. Now we are getting down to it. :up:

I would sort of prefer a philosophy forum where everyone is involved in a lot of falsehood but is nevertheless involved in genuine human reasoning, as opposed to a philosophy forum where there is a great deal of factual accuracy but there isn't much genuine human reasoning occurring. — Leontiskos

Well now you are explaining the quirky appeal of TPF. And wanting to construct a preservation society around that.

Which is fair enough. I agree that if you get enough of the highly constrained approach to speculation elsewhere, then it is fun to drop in on the bat-shit crazy stuff living alongside the po-faced academic stuff, all having to rub along and occasionally go up in flames.

So if that is genuine human reasoning in the wild, that would be why TPF would have to be turned into @baden's game park. Save this little corner of unreason for posterity. Once the larger world has been blanded out by LLMs, folk can come visit and see how humans used to be. :grin:

Certainly a valid argument in that.

You and I differ at least mildly on the trustworthiness of LLMs, and that is at play here. We could ask the hypothetical question, "If we had an infallible authority, why would appealing to it as an adjudicator be bad for the quality of philosophy?"—and this is by no means a rhetorical question! But the presupposition is that LLMs are reliable or trustworthy even if not infallible. — Leontiskos

First thing is that I have been surprised at how reasonable an answer you get. And second, if no one is treating LLMs as infallible, it could be simply like having an intelligent third person offering a mediated position.

So I am only pointing to how LLMs could improve standards if they became part of the intellectual jousting. A new habit with a low cost of effort. How folk would actually make use of this possibility is another matter.

Now given that you understand that LLMs use fake reasoning (which I will call "material reasoning"), you might respond by asking what happens if the material reasoning shows one to be wrong. — Leontiskos

I wasn’t actually thinking about LLMs being trusted to analyse arguments as they are clearly bad at that. Rather it was to answer on points of fact and standard interpretation.

Again my point is that LLMs could have advantages if used in good faith. And given think tanks and actual philosophy departments are going to have to figure out how to factor LLMs into their practice, it seems Luddite not to be doing the same on TPF, even if their bad faith use is almost to be expected.

Am I seeing this argument being made?

Some people get away with murder. Therefore we should not try and stop them. — unenlightened

Or maybe more that some are getting away with shop-lifting. Or perhaps jay-walking. Or merely farting in a public place.

Are you about to demand bringing back the death penalty for posting under false pretences? Am I seeing that argument being made. :roll:

It is not concerned with plagiarism, but with the outsourcing of one's thinking, and it is not implemented primarily by a rule, but by a philosophical culture to which rules also contribute. — Leontiskos

The culture of rational inquiry would seem to be what we most would value. But this is TPF after all. Let's not get carried away about its existing standards. :smile:

Maybe you are implying that LLM-appeals would improve the philosophical quality of TPF? — Leontiskos

If LLMs are the homogenised version of what everyone tends to say, then why aren't they a legitimate voice in any fractured debate? Like the way sport is now refereed by automated line calls and slo-mo replays.

I'm not arguing this is necessary. But why would a method of adjudication be bad for the quality of the philosophy rather than just be personally annoying to whoever falls on the wrong side of some LLM call?

So I can imagine LLMs both upping the bar and also being not at all the kind of thing folk would want to see on TPF for other human interaction reasons.

But note that, on my view, what is prohibited is, "My LLM said you are wrong, therefore you are wrong. Oh, and here's a link to the LLM output." — Leontiskos

But what if this shows you are indeed wrong, what then?

Sure it will be irritating. But also preferable to the ducking and diving that is the norm when someone is at a loss with their own line of argument.

You seem to be describing a situation where you were winning the human interaction but now have to face up to the fact that some little snot-nose shit might have been half-right all along.

Of course the problem there is that LLMs are trained to be sycophantic. They give a blunt yes or no up front, and you then have to be expert enough to see they are simply misunderstanding a badly written prompt.

But if you are making a wrong argument, wouldn't you rather know that this is so. Even if it is an LLM that finds the holes?

So as you say, we all can understand the noble ideal – an open contest of ideas within a community of rational inquiry. Doing our own thinking really is the point.

But also the corollary. Learning from the friction that this thinking then encounters as it engages with its wider world. Even if it becomes arguing with the referee.

But I am not a mod so there is no need to focus especially on my view. If I've said too much about it, it is only because you thought I endorsed Baden's approach tout court. — Leontiskos

Maybe its just that your view leaves more space for rational debate. :up:

One may use an LLM, but the relevant sourcing should go to the LLM's sources, not the LLM itself — Leontiskos

Again it may be noble to protest against LLMs in principle. Of course the tech bros are stealing all our information to make themselves unreasonably rich and powerful. Of course, the one click internet destroys many existing livelihoods. Of course the damn things deserve a proper political response.

But monopoly abuse is just the name of the game in information technology. It has been so ever since IBM. It is in the nature of the beast to be this way.

The practical issue for TPF is what is its true value that needs preserving? You say the human interaction. Perhaps there ought to be a thread to define that in better detail. The quality of the interaction is a little patchy to say the least. What if LLMs offered some more sophisticate mechanisms to achieve whatever human interaction goals people might have in mind?

I care less about transparency and more about not promoting a forum where thinking is outsourced to LLMs. — Leontiskos

And what if the human element of TPF is mostly its swirling emotions? And when it comes to the thinking, its mostly the stark differences in thought, rather than the quality of these thoughts, that keep the place lively.

So there seems little danger that posting LLM generated background material in a serious thread is going to outsource any actual thinking. Posts which are emotional or crackpot are surely the least likely to want to provide credible sources for what they say.

The key is to find a guideline that is efficacious without being nuanced to the point of nullity. — Leontiskos

OK. So somewhere between black and white, thus not a blanket ban. :up:

Perhaps at a certain point t we’ll have to ban human users who don’t take advantage of a.i. to edit and strengthen their arguments. — Joshs

:grin: The problem there is that it won't bring all users up to the same high standard. It may indeed magnify the differences as those already used to academic rigour will be boosted much more by LLM amplification.

My definition of tedious research is busywork, made necessary not because it is an intrinsic component of creative thought, but because it is an interruption of creative thinking, like composing prior to the advent of word processing, that our technologies haven’t yet figured out a way to free us from. — Joshs

I remember the joy of spell-check and find and replace.

Then I got used to googling facts as I was going along rather than just guessing.

Now an LLM speeds up Google. Answers more to the point and great when I can only remember the vague outlines of what I need to dig up, not the exact keywords needed by a search engine.

The context here is a philosophy forum where humans interact with other humans. The premise of this whole issue is that on a human philosophy forum you interact with humans. — Leontiskos

I agree in spirit. But let's be practical.

A blanket ban on LLM generated OPs and entire posts is a no brainer.

It would be wonderful to delete posts where an LLM has generated the counter-argument, even if this has been disguised by the poster. But detecting this is subjective.

With frequent posters, it is pretty obvious that they are suddenly generating slabs of text above their usual pay grade. This is bad as they aren't doing any thinking themselves and so not learning, only point scoring or being lazy. But if the argument is good, you can still just respond. And if it annoys, you can just ignore or show the finger.

I think that it should be fine to quote LLMs just as you would quote any other source. If you make an argument and some factual, technical or historical point comes up, why not just cite a reasonably impersonal opinion on the matter. If the source is clear, others can call you out on your use of it.

@Baden's stance on being King Canute and holding back the tide is both noble and over the top. Banning OPs, punishing those who publish text they didn't add real thought to, and keeping LLM use as transparent as possible, would be enough to preserve the human element.

Don't you feel that being black and white is usually counter-productive in human interaction, so shouldn't a philosophy forum be up to a nuanced approach?

:up:

Well the LLMs have no experience of the real world do they? — Janus

But can even humans claim that? Let’s rehash the forum’s most hardy perennial one more time. :up:

I guess it could be an exciting prospect for some folk. — Janus

Yep, the amplification is bipartisan. It applies to both the winning and the losing. That is the algorithm doing its thing.

This ‘textbook’ is created specifically for the individual who requests it. — Number2018

Well yes. So it used to be me and a whole library. Now it is me pulling my own personal textbook out of the library, led by my chain of thought and not dictated by any author’s more limited intentions.

That could be a hugely amplifying tool.

I've come to see anything that is not based on rigorous analysis or scientific understanding as intellectual wankery—mental masturbation—and I have no problem with people enjoying that, but the idea that it is of any real significance is, for me, merely delusory. — Janus

Are you saying that with PoMo philosophy, AI might have hit its particular sweet spot. :grin:

Did you find something useful in it? — Janus

It generated pithy quotes such as….

That solitude was a technical and social affordance: the printed page, the silent reading space, the private room — all infrastructures of inwardness.
It produced philosophy as we know it: the “voice of one thinking alone,” addressing a virtual community of readers. — Number2018

If say you were just a grad student looking to publish, imagine going on this wending conversation which starts with the LLM largely reminding you of the familiar stuff you sort of know, but reassuringly complete in that it seems to cover all the bases. And then you arrive at some chance angle like this. Something that seems a fresh and catchy intro. A neat little summary that follows the human love of the rule of threes.

Already a thesis. Now data mime to have something more detailed to say about the actual history of each of those three spaces. A quality idea that can just as quickly be spun into a full paper.

We might say:
the age of the solitary thinker ends,
but the age of solitary thinking — as a gesture of difference — becomes all the more necessary. — Number2018

I mean that is a quality punchline. The average academic just couldn’t phrase a thought so fetching. It would be gold to have such a thesis and such a punchline. The academic just needs to flesh out the bits inbetween in whatever more wooden prose suggests it was mostly their own creative work.

So what I think would happen in this interactive textbook scenario is the usual thing. Technology amplifies rather than replaces the human element. But then the rewards are not evenly distributed in an accelerationist world. The top 1% get 99% of whatever benefit or kudos that is going.

Any number of mediocre grad students could publish mediocre papers in the old world. In the new world, those who have an edge in their prompt skills and their marketing nous will fly high above the common herd. Everyone might have the same access to the technology. But the rewards will again be a fat tail distribution when the inequality of outcomes is what the technology amplifies.

That was a fun read. So it makes LLMs the new interactive textbook?

Who would buy a real textbook when you can scrape all of them for nothing in this interactive fashion? A lot of implications in that.

I Googled "John Collier" and got nothing relevant. — Gnomon

Just click the link I provided,

Some TPF posters are offended by my unorthodox views, but most accept a bit of oddity as typical of independent thinkers. — Gnomon

Not always offended, but puzzled that you would be resistant to learning of the philosophers and scientists already saying much the same thing in a more nailed down fashion.

It is a good case as my own investigations into biosemiosis put me among a community of about 100 researchers trying to figure it all out. They had a number of discussion boards and the level of discussion could be both friendly and rigourous. Welcoming to independents making an effort.

And also occasionally so violently acrimonious that one discussion board got simply deleted with its many years of posts by its admin who didn't think it was sticking close enough to the view of his own particular recently deceased mentor. Professors are only human too. :grin:

Anyway, there was even one philosopher there – John Collier – who had coined your term enformation. He defined it dichotomously as the opposite of intropy and firmed it up with the suitable mathematical equations.

See Causation is the Transfer of Information (1997).

So this is my point. One could get mired in philosophy as some whole cosmopolitan edifice of collective human wisdom. Or at least a history of certain leading questions and the endless acrimonious splits that they created. A soap opera of endless fissions and not much helpful consensus.

Or one can go the "independent" route which at best can only end up with you repeating the semi-obvious in a suitably obscure way.

And then there is always an informed community who have narrowed down the search space in some robust fashion. They are surprisingly welcoming as they are always pleased to find someone sort of on the same page. But also their tongues are sharp, their tempers sometimes explosive. A contest of ideas is what it is about. And then a few virtual beers after the fray.

But having the discipline of a research mentality is the only way to reach the inner circles of current thought. And that is just the way it is.

I need to deep dive on every topic to get to a standard I’m happy with and be able to form and hold my own positions on them as such. — KantRemember

But is there a point to this other than to join some imagined club of sophisticated thought?

Sure it is great to launch into the usual Grand Tour of the history of philosophy as another subject to study. But do you really want instead to become skilled at critical thought? To gain skills beyond mere philosophising?

Your point on writing my own work and formulating my ideas is crucial to learning how to engage outside of just reading. So I will do that too. — KantRemember

I'll tell you my secret. Start by finding some question you really want answered. Then start reading around that. Make notes every time some fact or thought strikes you as somehow feeling key to the question you have in mind, you are just not quite sure how. Then as you start to accumulate a decent collection of these snippets – stumbled across all most randomly as you sample widely – begin to sort the collection into its emerging patterns.

Look for the more general things that connect up a lot of particular things. Delete what starts to seem irrelevant. Begin reading much more about anything that starts to really seem to matter. Keep adding the snippets and sorting them into their natural clumps. Eventually you will find you are coming at your original question from all its many angles. You really begin to see an answer emerging as a fully structured whole.

And doing that not only answers your question – to the degree that it can be – it is also teaching you critical thinking of the valuable real world kind.

My own first question was "how could the human mind have evolved so suddenly?". I had been a good enough student at school and university, but never the slightest bit stimulated to engage beyond passing everything with minimum effort. But this is how I got hooked on really learning. And it is incredibly efficient as you are turning a morass of what everyone has ever thought and said, then zipping through looking for only the ideas that properly connect as a whole, while discarding vast chunks of guff that only clutter up the view of what matters.

Even with a day job as a magazine editor, I had generated a tightly reasoned book in a couple of years. I was off to the races.

Do you want to wade through all of philosophy – much of which is sophisticated guff? Arguments for the sake of arguments. Tiny amendments to disputes of increasing irrelevance.

Do you want to have random arguments with random strangers with a random array of opinions?

Probably not. So what is some really difficult but pointed question you would want to tackle in a thorough manner, and thus learn your own limits when it comes to critical thinking.

You can't just invent answers off the top of your head. And you can't learn answers by asking around or reading diligently, as there are just any number of answers that will be offered. You have to turn yourself into an efficient search algorithm with an end in mind and a method that sifts the wheat from the chaff.

Why are you interested? — Tom Storm

That is the start point. How do you begin with the something worth doing and not a vague hope of becoming more learned?

Everyone has their own style, but some form of this discipline helps one keep building on previous learning. — Paine

Yep. It is about a method with that built-in feedback of condensing and reacting. Then reacting to that reaction with even more distilling. With an infinity of texts available, the ones to read next start popping out.

Okay, here's how i look at it: there's informal philosophy. This is anything: "What is life"?

And the there's formal philosophy, related to specific thinkers, which ends up being academic philosophy. — ProtagoranSocratist

This is a good summary of how people tend to divide. Either they wander around picking up on what seems interesting. Or they will treat it like being back in school or joining an impressive institution.

Either too unfocused to be something that personal, or too focused on what some institution has decided is the proper course work to master and parrot.

So that is why I recommend a middle road. Find that interesting thing. Then make full use of the institutional knowledge and support that exists. Have the best of both worlds. And undertaking a structured search task is the best way to emerge out of it as a proper critical thinker.

Every pregnancy comes with its dangers, and we are no exception. — punos

But what if we were already the monster 1.0 in the womb of a Mother Earth when we emerged as the accelerationist enterprise of the Industrial Revolution. And now LLMs are part of monstrous womb ripping birth 2.0? :lol:

Humanity and all life on Earth, no matter how sustainable our systems become, are destined for inevitable destruction and extinction unless we are able to permanently move beyond our planet and eventually beyond the solar system. The development of AI and what it may evolve into could be the only viable path to preserve what Mother Earth has created. — punos

I tend to think that what we’ve created can’t be all that important if we could see what we were doing and yet still threw it away.

I mean what was the worst that could happen with galloping climate change? Another mass extinction event for the Earth. Then the bounce back. Always with some more interestingly complex level of biology and ecology.

The choice, therefore, is to either halt AI development, become less industrial, pursue extreme sustainability, and perish with the Earth when it dies, or to use every resource available to build and bring forth the new form of humanity capable of living throughout the universe and carrying us to the stars. Humanity cannot remain in the cradle forever. — punos

I think this ain’t how things will pan out either way. We won’t choose to give up anything. We will just crash and burn in ways that will be either quite rather uncomfortable or decidelly terminal.

As for the dream of spreading our footprint across the galaxy, I asked AI its opinion and the answer seems pretty accurate.

And you will note how AI applies the same logic. The Second Law again is the natural arbiter. If you think you can do it, go for it my son. Raising the entropy rate and producing climate change on every planet you can reach is how I would wish it to be. :up:

A reasonable dream?

Whether interstellar colonization is "entropically reasonable" depends on the scope and timeline.
Long-term feasibility (billions of years)

On a cosmic timescale, the colonization of the universe is not an "unreasonable" dream. In fact, it is an expression of life's natural drive to spread and create order, an inevitable consequence of the entropy-driven evolution of the universe. Over millions of years, a civilization could theoretically develop the technology to colonize the galaxy, a process that would be astronomically expensive in energy but not fundamentally impossible.

Near-term reality (hundreds to thousands of years)
For the human civilization of the present and near future, interstellar colonization is an entropically unreasonable dream. The energy and material costs are so colossal that they would drain immense resources from Earth, which many critics argue would be better spent solving urgent problems on our home planet. The dream is a massive leap of faith that we can achieve energy outputs and efficiencies that are currently far beyond our technology.

Conclusion
The thermodynamic cost of interstellar travel is arguably the most significant barrier to colonizing other planets beyond our solar system. While life itself is a local decrease in entropy balanced by a global increase, interstellar colonization is an extreme application of this principle. The immense energy required for travel makes it impractical and possibly unachievable for a long, long time. In the near term, it is more a testament to our aspirations than a realistic goal. In the long term, if life is destined to expand, it may be the ultimate entropic imperative.

I project that another emergence, as unique to consciousness as physics is to life, will occur at some point in our future. It may be that the development of AI represents the first embryonic form of this something entirely new (at least on this planet), something of a higher order than life or consciousness. It will, of course, include all previous emergent levels of mind and matter within it. — punos

It’s a charming thought. But life and mind are an algorithm in being dissipative structure. Something that had to emerge under the Second Law of Thermodynamics because it could.

And the story on AI is the same. The human superorganism level of semiotic order had already gone exponential once technology became the accelerating feedback loop. The Industrial Revolution happened because fossil fuels made the temptation impossible to resist, humankind had to engineer that dream of a reality which would forever grow bigger, faster, louder.

If AI is the conciousness that replaces us, it will be because human capital flows - released by neoliberal economic theory - can now flood directly into energy intensive projects. The imperative of the Second Law can cut us out as the middlemen and hook directly into global capital. Which is exactly what the state of play report shows is happening in terms of the data centre and power station demand curve.

Life and mind will always be an entropic algorithm. Hand AI the keys to the kingdom and it can only say drill, baby, drill. Or if we are lucky, moderate the new super-exponential resource consumption curve by mixing in a little bit more wind, hydro, solar and nuclear capacity. Although greenies know that that just equates to mine, baby, mine.

So this is the future we are rushing to embrace. Tech bros and their infinite money glitch. AI because capital just wants to connect to resources. Information remains what it always has been, the handmaiden of entropification.

This is a summary of the report for those interested…



And this is a summary of the superorganism thesis…

Getting back to the greenie issues, the latest state of the play report on AI says what is really top of mind is building enough new power plants to keep up with the runaway AI development.

The US needs to build 68 city-size electricity generators in the next three years. And that is just the start of the exponential curve. This is despite cost per search also dropping on its own steep curve.

So imagine that. The physical impact of AI data centres being forced on communities which have the necessary land and water by a new national imperative. Mini nuclear reactors are already being prototyped. Local red tape won’t be allowed to stand in the way.

What is crazy is not that we will replace ourselves with something that is even smarter, but replace ourselves as we thought with fracking and industrial farming that we couldn’t get any dumber, but now are proving that indeed we can.

We weren’t crashing the environment fast enough. So OK. Let’s focus on accelerating that.

Some commentators predict that as the AI content on the Net becomes predominant, and they inform, feed off and train each other with material increasingly their own, that we will then be confronted with an alien intelligence orders of magnitude smarter than we are. — Janus

Don’t worry about being replaced. Worry about what clever humans will do if allowed to dumb their own lives down.

Imagine I could offer you a prototype chatbot small talk generator. Slip on these teleprompter glasses. Add AI to your conversational skills. Become the life of the party, the wittiest and silkiest version of yourself, the sweet talker that wins every girl. Never be afraid of social interaction again. Comes with free pair of heel lift shoes.