Unmaking Sense

We talk a little bit about Charles Taylor’s book “sources of the self” and in particular the way he insists in the second chapter that we cannot have any sense of self unless we are in a community of selves and in particular that we have a sense of self because we are a member of and participate in a web of interlocution.

Pursuing being large, a multitude.

We consider initially the merits of being insatiably curious. Then as an example we move on and consider my own current obsessions with quantum computing, AI and other things as examples of the benefits that can accrue when we simply allow our brains, which are far smarter than our conscious minds, to have their head. We illustrate this by a select example from quantum computing which allows us, unlike classical computing, to do many things at once, and we consider what the existential message of that might be in terms of doing, being, thinking, saying, living many lives at once.

We saw a few episodes ago that the operation of a quantum oracle is very difficult to understand because nobody seems to be able to answer a simple question about it, namely why once we have the oracle and it has found a solution we then need Grover on top. In this episode we will explore what I think is very close to being a definitive answer.

Why it doesn’t really matter whether authors have intentions if their output is valuable to others. We all know more than we can tell, and our words always mean more than we can ever know.

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.