A substantial eight-part exploration of many themes that might engage cosmos folks by @ThouArtThat on his substack: footnotes2plato.substack.com…

Physicists may have found the origin of gravity. And that would finally explain why gravity is different from the other forces of nature.

The Side View was a media project I ran from 2018–2023. Through it, I published online and print articles, ran a podcast, and hosted a few online and in-person events here in the Bay Area. In the end, I worked with ~50 different writers on ~60 essays, all dealing with the question of perception cultivation from the perspective of philosophers, contemplatives, architects, designers, athletes, cognitive scientists, artists, and more. The site has been degrading for some time, to the point of being almost unusable. Now, however, I’m happy to report that I’ve done extensive repair work on the site, bringing it up-to-date with a fresh coat of paint and some subtle design upgrades for safe keeping. If you’re not familiar with the site, but you follow and appreciate my work, I think you’ll really get something out of this archive. The essays stand the test of time and really brought something new into the online philosophy space, and did so at a high level. I’ll write something more formal soon, but for now, I encourage you to visit the new site and check out some of the pieces.

Sunday Funday with @ThouArtThat. Good listening while I do some housework. youtu.be/6HhTmdUz204?is=qjAC…

A very personal testimony by @ThouArtThat who was exceptionally in Chiang Mai: Between the Cross and the Bodhi Tree: My Intra-Religious Journey youtu.be/kV-UQJgYKx4?si=vo9L… via @YouTube

Matthew David Segall, author of the amazing blog, @ThouArtThat has written a series of reflections on AI, its effect on human consciousness, and the potential for machine consciousness. It's available in a full pdf version for his subscribers but anyone else can read the articles in his blog. STRONGLY RECOMMENDED, along with Alien Minds of David Brin. This is from the preface: footnotes2plato.substack.com… "The whole world is currently living through a transformation in the medium of thought and communication that may come to dwarf the arrival of alphabetic writing in the ancient Mediterranean or the printing press in early modern Europe. Large language models are not merely new tools for circulating ideas. One way or another they are helping to usher in an entirely new shape of human consciousness. Despite the violently tedious quality of their insufficiently prompted prose, I affirm the potential intellectual and logistical utility of large language models and other machine learning systems. They already have pragmatic value as scientific and philosophical research instruments. But I am polemically dismissive of the fantasy of machine consciousness."

"Why there is no need to be too happy about a conscious world" - subtitle to recent substack by @VardamanFish on "pan-pathism". Ref pathos w. nods to mono no aware. Thoughtful reply from @thouartthat here x.com/ThouArtThat/status/206….

A man photographed the Sun every day for three years from the same spot and at the same time. He then combined all the images to reveal the Sun’s movement across the sky throughout the year.

@ThouArtThat this was great. Such cool hosts and questions. A little less academic. More relaxed. ❤️ the boat metaphor. I recently thought of it as swimming in a river the size of the universe. You can feel like your doing stuff, but the river is SO big. youtu.be/vm7nioOMwyM?si=1TNM…

A new series by @ThouArtThat , written in Chiang Mai: * “Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence” footnotes2plato.substack.com… Introduction Automated computation should be understood not as an independently intelligent rival to humanity but as a technological externalization of human intelligence. The danger lies in mistaking the simulation of Reason for Reason itself and allowing this mistake to diminish human judgment, responsibility, and cosmological self-understanding. Part I: The Pope Interrupts the Talking Machine Pope Leo XIV’s intervention into debates about artificial intelligence provides an occasion to question whether nation-states and transnational corporations should be allowed to define the nature and significance of the systems they are building. The section contrasts human personhood with machine simulation and calls for moral and philosophical resistance to the emerging intelligence-industrial complex. Part II: Philosophy as Emergency Response The history of philosophy is interpreted as a series of responses to transformations in media technology. Plato confronted alphabetic writing, Descartes the printing press, and contemporary philosophy must respond to technologies that appear to mechanize the production of thought itself. Part III: Resisting Cognitive Enclosure The extraction of humanity’s accumulated cultural and linguistic inheritance into privately owned models is compared to the enclosure of common lands that accompanied the rise of capitalism. The section examines attempts to convert collective intelligence into a privately owned and metered utility and defends the living activity of thought as finally inalienable. Part IV: Hegel’s Loom and the Difference Reason Makes Hegel’s distinction between mechanical Understanding and speculative Reason clarifies the limits of large language models. Like looms, these systems can weave extraordinarily intricate patterns from inherited materials, but they do not undergo the self-transformative movement characteristic of living thought. The task is not to smash the loom but to sublate it. Part V: Whitehead’s Function of Reason and Humanity’s Cosmic Calling Whitehead’s process philosophy situates Reason within the evolutionary adventure of cosmogenesis. The human being appears as microcosm: not the exclusive possessor of mind, but a concentrated expression of nature’s capacity for novel valuation, conscious freedom, and moral responsibility. Machine computation represents practical intelligence severed from speculative wisdom. Part VI: Ruyer and the Origin of Information Raymond Ruyer’s critique of cybernetics distinguishes the transmission and recombination of information from its meaningful origination. Machines can conserve, process, and rearrange patterns, but novelty of arrangement is not equivalent to the creation or comprehension of meaning. Part VII: The Science of Machine Consciousness Contemporary empirical attempts to determine whether large language models are conscious are critically examined. The section argues that experimental measures cannot resolve a question already distorted by computational functionalism and the modern bifurcation of nature into objective mechanism and subjective experience. Conclusion The chapter returns to the practical and existential question of how automated computation might enhance rather than diminish human consciousness. It proposes neither technophobic rejection nor technological surrender, but the preservation of embodied human beings as the living centers of interpretation, judgment, valuation, and responsibility.

Guattari explicitly discussing AI in 1992.

A list of the countries in Central and South America that the USA has coup’d and/or committed acts of terror against

I’m gearing up for a conversation next week with @ThouArtThat and @ebarenholtz . Do any of you have burning questions for either of them?

Rest in Peace, Edgar.

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas