https://bbc.com/future/article/20251008-truth-terminal-the-ai-bot-that-became-a-real-life-millionaire

I like your rendition of the argument just above your question: Nice and clear, and it tracks well enough with my understanding at this point.

If Adorno goes from particular to universal, shouldn't we a bit suspicious that he always ends up in the same places: commodification, instrumental reason, bourgeois consciousness, capitalist exploitation, etc? — Jamal

I don't think so, necessarily. Supposing Adorno is speaking the truth then seeing that universal in a particular should be the re-occurring general themes.

I'm not sure that these are the universals I would come to, but then Adorno's defense of individual thought comes to mind: Adorno speaks what he sees. But he would of course acknowledge that others may be at a different part of the dialectic, also reaching for the universal but finding another universal in the particulars. That is, though these are Adorno's universals that does not then mean that these universals are all the universal there are or are possible.

Make some sense?

Finally got to reading it today.

I feel conflicted on a first read: There's a sense in which I can grant his argument and a sense in which I could defend Sartre's in light of this criticism. The part that makes a good deal of sense to me, but which would be called "bad faith" on a Sartre-friendly reading, is that the general may have the will to renounce all of his murderous plans and go live a life within a monastery, but he will be punished by the social powers that be.

I think where Adorno is tying this in an interesting way is his highlight of Sartre's politics; in a sense we could say that doubling down on bad faith in the face of the party apparatus which limits individual freedom is itself a kind of bad faith: To say "We are spontaneous!" in the face of state coercion is still true, but it ignores the real problem at hand: The material conditions.

Where I'm hesitant with that is in thinking that Sartre has a kind of response there. But it needn't be voiced here, either.

One way to read this section, especially in light of the previous section, is its part of the "Burn the Fields" rhetorical strategy: Where a philosopher will take the relevant predecessors who have tried to do similar things but then go through one by one and demonstrate how they are failures in light of some critique which makes way for the growth of a new philosophy.

That seems to be most of what I get out of his criticism: It works well enough for our purposes here. It's not like his target is all in his head: there are real people he's referencing and he's noting how the philosophy actually played out so I can see some merit.

I'm just one of those who can usually find something to say in defense of a philosopher if I want to :D

Are we any different? Do you know how we learn? — Janus

We are. And I have a decent idea on how to teach, so one could say that I have an idea about how we learn. One which functions towards other minds growing.

We learn because we're interested in some aspect of the world: we are motivated to do so by our desire.

The LLM does not. Were you to leave the computer off in a room unattended it would remain there.

For us learning is a deeply emotional process. If we are frustrated and then elated after having solved some problem we are more likely to remember the lesson. That is, it's our own directedness which ends up teaching us rather than a scorer who tells me "Yes" or "No".

We learn through relationship. LLM's do not. You can even automate them, to an extent, and have them feed inputs into one another and let them go on autopolite forever: The LLM does not have a real boundary of self or even a set of beliefs which it will adhere to. It generates tokens that we use and it tries to display the tokens we want to see in response to some input. While the LLM does learn it's not doing it in a manner a human does: Even if the experts don't understand how LLM's learn we can look at the differences between what we already call intelligent and compare various lifeforms to the functions of LLM's and it's very apparent, to me at least, that even ants or cockroaches have a greater intelligence than LLM's.

If they speak in tokens at all they are tokens beyond me, but they demonstrate intelligence by manipulating their environment to seek out their own goals and working in community together to get there.

It's that bit on community that I think is especially lacking in LLM's -- every LLM, in order to participate in the human community, must have a human which decides to treat the LLM as if it has beliefs or thinks or has an identity or will and all the rest. Rather than a community the LLM is wholly dependent upon us for inputs in order for it to continue learning. Were we to leave them to their own devices I doubt they'll do much. There is a project in New Zealand which tries to do exactly that by tending to an AI and then letting it "make decisions" that are filtered through the human network that tends to it. But all it is is a group of people deciding to see where an LLM will go given some human guidance in the social world. It's predictably chaotic.

Cool.

I think I'd put it that neural nets are just as rigidly rule-based, but with rules that allow difference.

Suppose a Pachinko machine: If a puck lands on a perfectly round peg with momentum only in the down direction it will bounce straight up and bounce again and again.

We could shave on part of the peg to make it more likely each time that it will drop left or right.

That's pretty much all a neural net is: It gets fired and then decides which path to go based upon how the dice are thrown.

And after repetition it "learns" the "rewarding" ways and "unlearns" the "disrewarding" ways.

EDIT: Scare quotes cuz the learning is the sort of thing you can ascribe to a regular circuit that learns how to keep a motor running due to a holding coil.

I used to think along these lines, but listening to what some of the top AI researchers have to say makes me more skeptical about what are basically nothing more than human prejudices as to LLMs' capabilities and propensities. LLMs are neural nets and as such are something radically other than traditional computers based on logic gates — Janus

Neural nets aren't radically other from other computers, imo. Each node is weighted in this or that way, and based on feedback will change. These nodes were, so I think, meant to represent neurons which fire electrical pathways in a similar manner to circuits in the sense that you can represent a particular firing-event as a ladder-diagram between molecules.

I brought in roaches because I think they have greater rights to claiming "thinking" than LLM's. They adapt to the world they find themselves in and make decisions based upon that environment -- these are "inputs" in a sense, but they aren't the inputs of a logical feedback machine. A roach is not a bundle of transistors.

LLM's, however, are. They're different from computations that followed one kind of logic, but they still follow a logic that has nothing to do with thinking, from my perspective.

Top AI researchers aside. I have reason to be skeptical of them ;)

I'd like to think that I'm making an assertion in addition to stipulating: Not just "this is how I'm using the words" but also "this way of using the words is true about what thinking is"

I can see the computational theory of mind as a plausible first step, but I can't see how even LLM's are at the level of mind of a cockroach: cockroaches adapt like we do more than LLM's adapt like we do.

At that point, given we don't think cockroaches think, I'm uncertain why we think LLM's think anymore than any other electrical circuit -- it's only now that we're in an uncanny valley, where LLM output looks like human expression, that the question arises.

Superficially, one might think that the difference between an AI is exactly that we do have private, hidden intent; and the AI doesn't. Something like this might be thought to sit behind the argument in the Chinese Room. There are plenty here who would think such a position defensible. — Banno

For my part it's not the hidden intent as much as that the AI is not thinking at all -- at least no more than a bundle of circuits are thinking. We set up circuits in such a way that we can interpret them with "AND" or "NOT" and so forth -- but the circuit isn't doing any logic at all as much as responding to the physical forces we've discovered and bent to our will.

I think the Chinese Room defensible in a certain way -- namely when we're interpreting it like it's a circuit in a computer taking the tape and operating upon the symbols to generate another symbol that can be stored in memory. So Google Translate does not understand what it is translating -- it has no knowledge. It's doing what we set it up to do.

Basically I think the whole computational theory of mind as false. There are good analogies, but we can directly see how LLM's aren't human beings. If they registered an account here I'd guess there's some human being behind it somewhere.

Suppose the human species were raptured tomorrow: The LLM's will quickly die out, unlike the roaches and trees.

Arguing over what Marx or Kant or Hegel really meant -- not a bad use of time.

No. I haven't. I get the real thing from my wife, so why would I? Of course there are people that have a healthy sex life with their partner still seek out prostitutes and porn on the internet or sex chats. It's my personal preference for the real thing and those other acts would only be if I wasn't getting the real thing as often as I like.

The same goes for discussions on this forum where certain posters are regularly intellectually dishonest and are rude. AI is where I go when I'm not getting any kind of serious input from real people on a topic. I prefer having discussions with real people, but use AI as a backup.

We can do it, but we can't do it.
— Moliere
One could say the same thing about calling a 900 number and talking to the live person on the other line. It's not real sex either. — Harry Hindu

I don't mean to be rude -- it's a very serious comparison. The erotic and philosophy have been invoked together since Plato.

So as you note: you want the real thing.

Me too.

Have you tried having an erotic chat with an LLM?

We can do it, but we can't do it.

It looks like sex but it isn't sex.

So it goes with thinking, in my opinion.

Philosophy is more than a language game, I'd say. Philosophy is the discipline which came up with "language games"; insofar that we adopt language games then philosophy may be a language game, but if we do not -- then it's not.

Philosophy is a "step up" from language games such that the question of what language games are can be asked without resorting to the definition or evidence of "language games"

Haven't started yet, not sure if I'd start then.

Feels like we need to matter, right? — Hanover

Feels like we do matter, whether we like it or not.

I hope my expressions thus far answer all your other questions.

What does it mean to "progress thought"? According to any sense I think of, using an LLM certainly can help in that direction. As always, the point is that it depends how it's used, which is why we have to work out how it ought to be used, since rejection will be worse than useless. — Jamal

I want to divide this question into two -- one addressing our actual capacities to "Ban AI", which I agree is a useless rejection since it won't result in actually banning AI given our capacities to be fair and detect when such-and-such a token is the result of thinking, or the result of the likelihood-token-machine.

On the latter I mean to give a philosophical opposition to LLM's. I'd say that to progress thought we must be thinking. I'd put the analogy towards the body: we won't climb large mountains before we take walks. There may be various tools and aids in this process, naturally, and that's what I'm trying to point out, at the philosophical level, that the tool is a handicap towards what I think of as good thinking than an aid.

My contention is that the AI is not helping us to think because it is not thinking. Rather it generates tokens which look like thinking, when in reality we must actually be thinking in order for the tokens to be thought of as thought, and thereby to be thought of as philosophy.

In keeping with the analogy of the body: There are lifting machines which do some of the work for you when you're just starting out. I could see an LLM being used in this manner as a fair philosophical use. But eventually the training wheels are loosened because our body is ready for it. I think the mind works much the same way: And just as it can increase in ability so it can decrease with a lack of usage.

Now for practical tasks that's not so much an issue. Your boss will not only want you to use the calculator but won't let you not use the calculator when the results of those calculations are legally important.

But I see philosophy as more process-oriented than ends-oriented -- so even if the well-tuned token-machine can produce a better argument, good arguments aren't what progresses thought -- rather, us exercising does.

By that criteria, even philosophically, I'm not banning LLM's insofar that it fits that goal. And really I don't see what you've said as a harmful use -- i.e. checking your own arguments, etc. So by all means others may go ahead and do so. It's just not that appealing to me. If that means others will become super-thinkers beyond my capacity then I am comfortable remaining where I am, though my suspicion is rather the opposite.

I have a lower standard there, I think.

For instance, I'd say that this conversation we're having is an original idea.

That's not to say that the idea is universally applicable, or even applicable in any other circumstance.

I think philosophy pushes for originality with novelty, whereas I'd say original thinking is more important than novel thinking.

Sure, there's a handful of tablet-breakers, but we're all creative everyday even tho what we do is "the same"


I'd put it to you that "the same" or "the different" are thought of differently by humans and today's AI.

Use it as you like.

I myself want to discourage its use amongst students as much as possible. I want them to be able to think for themselves.

AI is just a way to not do that.

And I think students are a good example of people coming up with original ideas all the time -- if not unique or revolutionary, they came up with the idea on themselves.

That's what I think philosophy -- among other disciplines -- is good at teaching.

So, I don't know where you're getting your information. — Sam26

No information on my part -- merely experience.

I am prejudiced against AI because I like books and talking to others, and I don't care if the AI comes across something -- I care more that a human comes across something, even if they came across it while using AI.

Information isn't as important to me in philosophy as experience, relationship, knowledge, and the good.

I am likely wrong in this analogy -- but what I see in AI, still to today, is a parrot and nothing more.

Give me a Hegel and I might change my mind -- but even writing this helps the AI's to change their parroting: Oh we have to link various words together in a certain pattern? We can do that!

The irony is that the very kind of “rigorous analysis” you claim to prize is being accelerated by AI. The most forward-looking thinkers are not treating it as a toy but as a new instrument of inquiry, a tool that extends human reasoning rather than replacing it. Those who ignore this development are not guarding intellectual integrity; they’re opting out of the next phase of it. — Sam26

I'm willing to take that gamble.

In a sense I'm fine with people using it and making it work for them. One of the uses that I came across that looked sensible for humanities scholars:

https://x.com/jonathanbfine/status/1978420519926936015


But I genuinely don't believe using it helps anyone to progress thought further. Go ahead with the next phase, I'll be waiting on my hill of luddites for the prodigals to return ;)

Fair point. There I struggled with thinking on how to do it, which no answer leads to your line of questioning.

Not at all :) -- I suspect that here we're likely not very alone on this after all.

I'll admit my prejudice is somewhat on the pissing on the forest fire side -- an almost Kantian hatred of AI.

Let the world move on this will be the old hill I stand upon alone with my books and mumblings...

Thanks :) -- I'll be sure to write something up then. Probably get to it this Friday.

Nice :) -- I gave both a listen and both are beautiful.

I expect I've posted this before, but it's been hitting hard tonight.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190075/capital?srsltid=AfmBOopk8ce3Zn8JoWI4iPgdxbeUGfwp5DAeuCrhFqZHZ37A36ixS0OB

?

Capital by Karl Marx, the new translation — Jamal

I wasn't aware that there's a new translation. How new is it?

My point is that some may argue that Zeus made an impact on him. But, upon serious reflection, does Zeus really interfere with people while they are asleep? — javi2541997

Maybe not Zeus, but Jesus Christ, Allah, and so on?

People have more than dreamt of them: They've had living visions, if we believe their testimonies. And those who testify as much clearly are influenced in their day-to-day life by these Gods given their various habits.

My point was to note that there are people out there that would utilize your criteria to come to conclude that Zeus -- or maybe other, more plausible cosmic figures -- also exist.

I then wondered if perhaps these entities could exist-for someone, and not someone else.

On the other hand, I even believe that my point would also be plausible if you were AI, because my argument is that I suggest you exist because you interfere in me. It is not possible to dream of God or Zeus because they never made an impact on me. But I consider it plausible to dream of you, Michael or Baden. Isn't this a good starting point to consider people real? — javi2541997

If it were then would it not be the case that God or Zeus is real for some, and not real for others?

That is, some would say that they have made an impact on them -- so just as I conclude that money is real so do I conclude that Zeus is real every time there's a lightning storm.

But this is a puzzler:

although the subject is strengthened solely thereto by means of restrictions based on the division of labor.

Another dialectical twist. Does it mean that only in our alienated modern society in which everyone must be an exclusive specialist of some sort could there be people, like Adorno and his peers, capable of focusing intently and deeply on the qualities of things? If so, this is a natural follow-on from the "Privilege" section.

The dialectical point would be that bureaucratic capitalism, the very thing that has created the problem of scientism (of reason as measurement and instrumental rationality) has also created the social capacity for its solution, in the shape of the division of labour. — Jamal

I found that puzzling, but your explanation does make sense at least.

I'm still uncertain about Adorno's so-called elitism here. I haven't commented on your previous summaries because I had nothing to add as I read them and the sections, and reread them, concurrently. Good summaries!

But I'm having trouble parsing my own defense of ability from the charge of elitism and Adorno's justification -- in some sense, yes, the division of labor will make it such that some are better able than others in a particular field.

But I wonder if this is a general call to elitism, or rather a generic defense of philosophical thinking in a scientistic society: He mentioned earlier how the scientists demand something which can be "understood by anyone", i.e. eliminate the subjective in favor of the quantitative, so I could see this as something more akin to Derrida's defense of his own work: Philosophy is a real discipline that you learn something in and get better at, and so yes some people -- due to the division of labor -- will be better at philosophy than others.

But this does not then mean that philosophy is somehow what makes Adorno and his peers superior to others in that social sense: Rather, he seems to be countering the claim of scientism's chauvinism.

But, then, I also may just be thinking that because it gets along with my own notions, and Adorno really does think that philosophy is superior in the sense that the qualitative distinction is what "grounds" the quantitative method -- being able to differentiate what something is from what it is not is the basis of being able to count and individuate, i.e. think quantitatively.

Thanks :)

I'm glad I did it because there were a couple of knots in there that I skimmed over in my first reading and this forced me to untie them and I felt pretty good about it.

Dialectics and the Solidified

1. Negative Dialectics, unfettered, does not dispense with the solid/fixed anymore than Hegel did. This may be surprising to hear because his origins don't emphasize the ending point, but this is misleading because it is the end result of Hegel's dialectics that is then illuminated by the preceding whole. This is why Hegel's dialectic displays a double-character as 1) Developing and 2) Invariant. This on its face opposition is brought in Harmony by the reproduction of every layer of the dialectic in the immediate. Negative dialectics keeps this feature of a double-character, i.e. the fixed and the developing, by starting with the seemingly unmediated immediate and then progressing to display the mediations that were not initially apparent but only became apparent through a comparison of differences between moments.

2. The "positive" of the young Hegel is the negative of dialectical analysis, just like Hegel's own dialectic is the negative of the young Hegel. Thought is still negative in the Phenomenology of Spirit. That which does not think tends towards the bad positive, i.e. the conceptual being interpreted as if we are seeing the thing. This difference between the positive and the negative is easy to see in that we can renounce thinking and yet then may still encounter the object as it is (a positive, non-conceptual); but a thought will always be negatable (leaving a negative)

3. Though Hegel is on the right track he still emphasizes the primacy of the subject over the object, i.e. there is nothing that is non-conceptual. Though Hegel attempts an immanence of the object through the subject the primacy of the subject remains in the semi-magical concept of Spirit. So he's not as far from those he criticizes as he thought.

4. This Spirit retains the primacy of the subject by not addressing the not-conceptual. There's an insistence that the content of thought "comes along with", but as soon as an actual concrete -- Krugian's feather -- was brought up Hegel dismissed it thereby showing he is still enamored in the phenomenal rather than the immediate non-conceptual. In fact the non-conceptual is what allows the dialectic to continue, though.

5. If consciousness were not naive -- taking the immediately perceived as the real-deal rather than a phenomena -- then thought would not think of itself. There would be no negative. Thought would get on with the task of perceiving reality and never think of itself. Thought here would be a "dim copy" of the perceived.

6. The immediate reflection on the object which reflects upon the non-conceptual beyond the intuitions laid about the object is the least subject-like experience of all, and yet even here we must acknowledge that our experience is not the object as per paragraph 5.

7. That confidence in the immediate is an idealistic appearance. Dialectics gets around this by noting how the immediate does not remain the same and is not a ground, but rather a moment. On the other side of the mind, the purely abstract, there's a kind of naive truth in the same manner: Even children know that math works and would adopt the relativism of "that's not real" as a kind of joke or to win an argument with their peers. However for all that, even though "invariants" do not change in the dialectic in the same manner as rocks and trees these invariants are also only moments rather than transcendental truths -- to think of them as eternal things is to adopt an ideology of transcendence. Not all idealisms are transcendental but hide in some substructure (regardless of its content) which the world justifies even when one is a Hegel and claims immanence -- the underlying equality of thought and being remains -- Negative Dialectics uses these fixed point but it's important to remember they are moments and moments only.

To be fair I couldn't find it anywhere else so had to look through my own posts because I remembered using it at one point. It surprised me that it was 5 years ago.

Of course as almost always I never actually got to the part where I have an answer....

Sure we can't talk about texts we haven't read. I don't believe the OP is stating something along those lines, but rather is looking for fellow travelers who might like to read what I'd call pop-philosophy (descriptively, not pejorative): So rather than focusing on the beauty of difficult texts, which I wanted to note I have a taste for, I thought it more welcoming to point to pop-philosophy (that then might serve as the honey which leads to harder texts if an interest is cultivated)

What counts as listening?

It was 5 years ago so it's been awhile.

I used it in one of my old OP's, so maybe that's where you heard it before.

Any links to the whole album?

I was inspired to relisten to Ground Zero - Consume Red by your song:

This is great.

isn't this whole forum armchair philosophers? — DifferentiatingEgg

Mostly.

There's some who have been or are in "the profession" if that's the standard we want to use.

But, yes, I think we're basically as laidback as philosophy can get while still actually reaching for philosophy.

For my part that's somewhat by design: I want it to be accessible, and know how inaccessible it was when I started.

I intend on revisiting and trying to do a paragraph-by-paragraph breakdown as I've done before.

A note on style, given your conversation with @NotAristotle: I've noticed in my disentangling that many of the sentences have two sentences parsed into clauses such that we must think of two ideas within the same sentence. In my disentangling I had to prioritize one or the other thought -- so it made me think that the density of the sentences is very much the point since he didn't want to give priority to a Thesis over an Antithesis, but rather talk about them in relation to one another for the purpose of dialectical reflection.

Annoyingly:

Both/and/or

or

Something else.

Or maybe just once. Perhaps the universe ends and nothing comes about ever again.

I won't be there to see it.