Unmaking Sense

Episode 11.33: Paying attention to what is going on directly inside us right now.

It’s great to pay attention to the present and to what is going on in front of us, but what is going on inside us right now?

Episode 11.32: Radical self-trust as the key to knowing how to live the present; only I can be me.

Radical self trust is the key to making decisions about how to live the present because in the uncertain relationship between the present and the future radical self trust is the only basis upon which we can live the present in the way we uniquely ourselves can live the present, rather than as others might hypothetically suggest that we should or could or would be better advised to do. Finding needles in haystacks as an AI problem.

Episode 11.31: Living the Present as the only preparation for the future that amounts to anything.

Dewey’s great maxim and why trusting in our enjoyment of things, in what energises us, is the only way to decide how to spend the present time.

Episode 11.30: What interests us is what energises us, and so something we do willingly and with joy

Some clarification of the nature of enjoyment as a reflection of human interest, and some reflections on the criteria that we might use as a measure of the extent to which we enjoy things, and have an interest in them as measured by the energy that those activities or those relationships generate.

Episode 11.29: Interest-driven education is a self-justifying end in itself not a means to an end.

Because the means-ends relationship between learning, qualifying in something, working and earning a living has been ruptured by the advent of AI, we will need to refactor education to be an end in itself, and only interest-driven education can possibly satisfy that requirement.

Episode 11.28: Living the present changes everything: education must help us to find what we love.

Why interest-driven education is everything.

Episode 11.27: Why AI will force us to rethink what we think matters and our relationship with it.

AI will not just alter our world by taking our jobs: it will force a rethink of the basis of how we regard ourselves, our motives, our values, and what we think matters. A central feature of that re-evaluation will involve the relationship between “is” and “ought”, and it’s coming more quickly than we think.

Episode 11.26: The crises caused by belief in sources of truth and meaning that lie beyond the world

As a further preparation for our discussion of what matters we explore the legacies of religion and metaphysics that insist we defer to sources of truth and meaning that lie “beyond the world”.

Episode 11.25: MoE (Mixture of Experts) approaches to AI are already appearing. What they involve.

The AI wars are hotting up with much current disparagement of OpenAI, competition from Google Deepmind’s Gemini, and now a new version of the Mistral model based on MoE technology called “Mixtral” because it mixes experts. The pace of development is extraordinary and that before the AIs themselves get in on the act.

Episode 11.24: If our sense of what matters is illusory, solving a problem could make it worse.

“Unmaking Sense” means freeing ourselves from the illusory senses we make of the world in order to see more clearly what better sense we could make of it.