Unmaking Sense

Episode 9.05: Truths and facts depend on values, what we think matters, what we think to be human.

One of the problems that we always face when we say anything is that our speaking, writing, listening and reading are essentially linear with one thing coming after another. If we were able to say many things at once, and our non-conscious brains are certainly able to think many things at once, even if our conscious brains can’t, we would be less likely to seize upon single things as indicative of a position or a reality, less like to to misunderstand one another, and much more able, and ready to see whatever is said, heard, written or read, as one aspect of a much more complex whole, within which alone they make proper sense.

Episode 9.04: More examples of misdirection.

All sorts of people including monarchs, political leaders, captains of industry, tribes, cultures, families and friends have a vested interest in persuading us to become passionate about things that do not matter so that we expend our energies in them rather than the things that do. These are all instances of misdirection.

Episode 9.03: Prosperity as something we think we understand. But do we? Does it cause our problems?

World does not like us to challenge its most cherished assumptions. And one of its most cherished assumptions is that we all know, and it knows what prosperity amounts to. This supposition persuades us to work in pursuit of the earning power necessary to pursue that very notion of prosperity. But suppose the notion itself is mistaken, and even fraudulent, perhaps even a or the major cause of most human misery. Might we be spending our lives in pursuit of the means to acquire a prosperity that is itself an illusion?

Episode 9.02: Metaphysics, truth and protection rackets: being controlled by external worlds.

When we reject external authority we reject metaphysics, truth and slavery to other people’s beliefs and standards.

Episode 9.01: Unmaking Sense of Truth: why “Yes, but is it true?” is usually the wrong question.

It is impossible to decide what is true unless we have first decided what we think matters, what we value, what we think worthwhile, what we think to be a life worth living. To attempt to answer the question “Yes, but is it true?” before we have answers to such questions is to condemn ourselves to a self-perpetuating sequence of deepening misconceptions and delusions. Only when we have - albeit only provisionally - decided what matters does the concept of truth begin to make sense.

Episode 8.100: The GPT family function as we do. A taster for Series 9 : Unmaking Sense of Truth.

The chatGPT series finale: human and artificial intelligence; the experience of totality; and rhetoric as that which lays hold on the otherwise-ephemeral.

Episode 8.99: Why neither human nor artificial intelligence is what we suppose; some implications.

Human beings like to think that their intelligence arises in the deliberate, conscious application of logical processes to the solution of a problem. They are mistaken. Intelligence manifests itself as a result of the activities of a brain that we do not begin to understand and over which we have almost no control. In these respects, human brains are very much like chatbots with their black box “mentalities”: neither has much control over the problems it can solve and those it can’t.

Episode 8.98: Reactions to imminent AGI are a bereavement process: we mourn the loss of our status.

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross famously described the bereavement process in five stages: we first deny; then we are sad; then we often become angry; anger later begins to become reconciliation and finally acceptance. We cannot change what cannot be changed; someone we love, something we love has gone forever. That’s exactly what is happening over artificial general intelligence as it progressively displaces us from our final resting place at the head of creation by showing that we are really not all that intelligent after all.

Episode 8.97: Human intelligence is a stage in evolution; so no reason to think it unique or best.

Conviction that human intelligence is, somehow, the crowning glory of evolution is a legacy of a time when we we believed ourselves to be the designated dominant species created by God. Only abandon that belief and it ceases to be remarkable, surprising or regrettable that human intelligence will one day be superseded, who is to say by what?

Episode 8.96: The AGI dangers are not new; they are just amplifications of age-old threats.

Arguing that the dangers of AGI are unprecedented puts the wrong spin on the problem. The dangers that it represents are as old as history as old as any attempt by any human being to coerce others into obeying, believing adopting supporting something that they really don’t want to obey, believe, adopt or support so let’s not kid ourselves, but what’s going on his new what’s new is the speed, the power of a scope with which it is happening, that’s where we need to be careful.