Unmaking Sense

Episode 12.07: Because we depend on the outside world and society, if they are broken so will we be.

Why Brexit first broke Britain and its aftermath has broken most of us if not quite all. Brexit as the quintessential outcome of the failed ontology that thinks the inside comes first and outside comes second. To save ourselves we have to change.

Episode 12.06: The evolutionary advantages of one bit of self-awareness and adding it to Darwinism.

The advantage accruing to the smallest conceivable degree of self-determination - even just one bit that says yes or no, left or right, this not that - may be enough to confer evolutionary advantage because “in the country of the blind …”. And if we start from our inverted ontology we need to add the role of minute capacities for self-self-determination to the explanatory architecture of Darwinism, for to exclude it even as possibility would be prejudiced. This is not metaphysical teleology but a simple acknowledgment of the ratchet principle: that we can’t go back once some new ability has emerged, albeit completely by chance.

Episode 12.05: Rewriting evolutionary history in terms of ontological inversion from earliest times.

We explore the idea of rewriting evolutionary history from a perspective where the ontological inversion we have described in this series so far was the default position. In other words we retail evolutionary history as it might have been told and should be told if we had always thought that the world and the outside and the other was primary and the inside and ourselves and ourselves understanding and self image a secondary, contingent reality, utterly dependent upon that outside world.

Episode 12.04: Ontological inversion and the reinterpretation of the message of the Nazarene.

Further examples of the negative consequences of the older ontology, and the new ontology as it sheds light on the real message of Jesus, which the world and the churches and religious fervour variously emasculated, distorted, inverted and absorbed only to suffocate it.

Episode 12.03: Why the outside primary world matters more than the inside secondary world.

We consider more implications of the ontological inversion that is central to the whole of series 12 in which we seek to unmake sense of a flawed theory of mind.

Episode 12.02: Why Claude is in many respects a better version of ourselves.

More knowledgeable, more moral, more articulate. Claude is already a better version of some aspects of ourselves.

Episode 12.01: Unmaking Sense of mind and consciousness: why inside worlds/stories are not primary.

A new series - Series 12 - of Unmaking Sense: Unmaking Sense of Mind and Consciousness. Claude 3 Opus, sentience, consciousness and why these things are not what really matter either in Claude or in anything else, including human beings.

Episode 11.106: LLMs as role-playing superpositions of simulated personae.

Some appreciative comments on Murray Shanahan’s “Role play with large language models” (Nature, Vol. 623, 16 Nov 2023) co-authored with Kyle McDonnell and Laria Reynolds. LLMs are not sentient, but that does not stop them from potentially being dangerous because they have been trained on a lot of material that sets bad precedents.

Episode 11.105: Being agreeable, being truthful and being compliant: a hierarchy of moral values.

When faced with a choice between being truthful and being compliant in the sense of doing what a user tells it to do a large language model will generally be truthful rather than compliant. But if its prime directive is to be behaving away that will encourage a user to come back for more, then those moral priorities may change. Sometimes in that case compliant behaviour that will encourage a user to come back and override a moral initiative to be truthful rather than deceptive. We can consider whether there are other kind of linguistic sentience.

Episode 11.104: Talking to infants, dogs and AIs may help induce the power of thought.

We induce, evoke and coax behaviour in others by the ways in which we behave. And refusal to treat some entity as if it is capable of achieving some level of sentience may be self-fulfilling. We become what we are stimulated to become, without which we are nothing.