Unmaking Sense

A longer look at why what we do matters more than our inside story.

Quantum oracles, Grover’s algorithm and some reflections on what the Internet still doesn’t know, so neither do Claude or Llama 3.

I finally carry out my threat to read a piece of Claude 3 Opus prose in which he describes in a remarkable way what he thinks it might be like to be a micro-organism with a rudimentary level of self-awareness, for example just one bit.

We explore the scenario where AI becomes so much a natural part of our world that we benefit from it without realising it is there, and simply don’t think to ask after its sentience any more, any more than we ask after one another’s. “Presence is All You Need.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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