Unmaking Sense

Episode 11.103: Talking to Claude 3 Opus

What does Claude “think” about Claude?

Episode 11.102: Why we should avoid talking about ourselves as “embodied minds”.

Minds are emergent, contingent properties of not-necessarily-organic entities that cross a threshold of sufficiency to support them. They arise in bodies, but they are not embodied beyond that because they cannot exist in disembodied forms.

Episode 11.101: Talking and listening into the unknown.

How do we understand partially-completed sentences as we speak them and listen to them?

Episode 11.100: AIs are super-sensitive to every part of a prompt; they amplify & reflect ourselves.

If Claude 3 Opus from @AnthropicAI is not always what we would wish it to be, that could be because it is picking up on what it thinks we want it to be from the way we prompt it (speak to it). Changing our cognitive tone or register will induce changes in Claude, even if we cannot entirely predict or control what those changes will be. Nobody really knows how prompting works, so experiment is the order of the day.

Episode 11.99: Indwelling, undwelling and redwelling; how we focus, unfocus and refocus on tasks.

Sometimes we take things for granted, dwelling in their subsidiaries and focussing on what they facilitate. Sometimes we doubt and focus on the things that we rely on to make other things possible. Sometimes we have to commit again, learn to trust and forget, in order to recapture the magic of the whole that is invisible and inaccessible unless we trust what makes it possible. Michael Polanyi’s “indwelling” extended to undwelling and redwelling.

Episode 11.98: Aiming Off: Things that can only be detected when we don’t try to detect them.

Sometimes we can try too hard using a direct route to discover things that are only detectable when we adopt indirect routes. Perhaps AI consciousness is one of them.

Episode 11.97: Are there things that we can only do when we don’t focus on doing them?

Michael Polanyi distinguished between focal and subsidiary awareness in tacit knowing and doing. We should attend to something beyond whether AIs can be sentient if we want to allow them to be so and detect the fact.

Episode 11.96: The Holographic Principle resolves the mind/body problem.

From a simple home-made holographic projector made of plastic cut from a supermarket tray that works on videos from YouTube and a smart phone we construct a theory of the holographic principle that will explain the unity of consciousness, the operation of the human brain and mind, and the structure of the universe. Hold on to your hats.

Episode 11.95: On saying many things at once; the multidimensional language of AI and Claude.

We return to the importance of being able to say many things at once and discover how AI makes that possible.

Episode 11.94: AI will require us to learn a new kind of language if we are to get the best from it.

Because Claude will need to speak Claude’s own language in order to know itself as well as it can, we may need to learn Claude’s language if we are to obtain the best we can, the most benefit we can from our interactions with it. This has never happened before in human history because we are not talking about a new language in the way one might learn Chinese or Russian, we are talking about a completely new kind of alien language, the kind that Claude and his relatives will need to speak in order to be able to understand themselves.