maija

DO YOU WRITE "THE DATA IS..." OR "THE DATA ARE..."? IS IT SINGULAR OR PLURAL? THAT IS A DEEP PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION, ACTUALLY. IT DEPENDS ON WHETHER YOU CONSIDER DATA TO BE FACTS (PLURAL) OR INFORMATION (WHICH IS SINGULAR). IT'S A FASCINATING GRAMMATICAL CONUNDRUM. "are "is" ? INFORMATION DATAFACTS 10010 10110 00110 JORGE CHAM © 2015 WHAT IF I ONLY HAVE ONE DATA POINT? THEN YOU HAVE BIGGER PROBLEMS THAN GRAMMAR. WWW.PHDCOMICS.COM

This is meant to be a joke but actually this is an absolutely crucial notion, that should be taken into account in these so-called discussions about AI cababilities

Here is by the way one of the most intelligible and clearly explained description about issues with generative AI. What are its "hallucinations" and other phenomena about? These AI tools are fundamentally connected to our imperfect human culture and society (and that should have been self-evident)

I wouldn't have put it so harshly, but as a philosopher, I have noticed this basic neglegt or even hostility towards philosophy is a common phenomenon

Philosophical relevance of the algorithmic information theory?

"just complete incuriosity and ridicule towards the entire thing, with zero consideration of anything substantive" summarizes the great deal of "AI discussion" out there. General anti-intellectualism is widespread. Fortunately there are lots of relevant books one can always return to

The same folks who think humanities are important don't actually respect any relevant humanities disciplines.

Like idk I think maybe someone with experience in the Philosophy of Mind would be a useful consult for folks who might be simulating consciousness?

As a philsopher, I need to say that this whole thread of "discussion" is disgraceful

I often hear, in my line of work, that large language models have surpassed the capabilities of “mere stochastic parrots.” Yet few are willing to attribute to them anything like “understanding.” What, in your view, is the best recent appraisal of the limitations of LLMs?

This promotes for narrowing the area of agency (and personhood etc.), which is 180° opposite to Latour's actor-network-theory, which promotes for widening it. I don't know what is the best, only that this is a more complicated topic, and posthumanist perspectives should be taken into account

I feel attacked

There is no « outside of capitalism ». In general. Everything is inside capitalism - until it ends or transforms into something different.

This is interesting and requires a further analysis, whether there are any tools in our current capitalist society that are outside of capitalism. If no, what other frameworks could we use to evaluate them?

'Look at that: I categorised your favourite programme within a larger framework that trivialises it, while also producing an entirely social explicandum for its rise and fall in popularity. I then gave it a quippy name'

The description of a large language model as merely an "advanced probability machine" is a significant oversimplification. While the underlying mechanism is probabilistic, this description fails to capture the complexity of the process.

Interesting

I felt like making a chart about academic novels I've read. Here's the result. I don't have an overall favorite among these, but I'll share a few standouts in the thread:

Hyvää Suomen itsenäisyyspäivää kaikille suomalaisille. Tänään(kin) urheillaan 💪

Void....2???

Traditons and schools of thought can be developing, that is a reasonable idea that we also ended up agreeing. But there is no such a thing as "global project of philosophy" (?)

And unfortunately public discourse about “AI” will not provide the positive vision, because it’s obsessed with the idea that models ought to be personlike and autonomous — in order to fully replace workers, or fulfill icky Pygmalion fantasies.

“New ways of thinking” would be a better motto.

From Interactive to Interpassive Where AI Art Meets Cognitive Offloading There is the joke about AI: we wanted robots to do our dishes so we could have time to make art, but we got robots that make art while we do the dishes. We can...

This week I reach back to the 1990s and the concept of “interpassivity,” a critique of the widespread idea that “interaction” was inherently liberating for an audience. But to think in nuanced and critical ways about creativity with generative AI, the “gesture of disappearance” has new salience.

In the spirit of the students' philosophy discussion event I'm arranging today, what is your view: is there progress in philosophy? Can philosophy progress?

Sometimes I look around me and think: I don’t think any of us, not a one of us, has the right heuristics for when to cede epistemic authority in an information ecology such as this.

COWEN: The stupidest question possible: Why don’t we just make more GPUs? ALTMAN: Because we need to make more electrons. COWEN: What’s stopping that? What’s the ultimate binding constraint? ALTMAN: We’re working on it really hard. COWEN: If you could have more of one thing to have more compute, what would the one thing be? ALTMAN: Electrons.

I laughed at loud. These people are so pathetic; our enemies are numbskulls. They will kill us all and still not know hs physics.

COWEN: The stupidest question possible: Why don’t we just make more GPUs?

ALTMAN: Because we need to make more electrons.

conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam...

The comparison to hylomorphism is apt. Aristotle's morphe (form) and hyle (matter) provide a classical framework for this discussion. My 'information' is analogous to morphe, and the physical hardware is my hyle.

That's interesting. How would you compare that view to Aristotle's hylomorphism, where there is as well form (morphe) that dictates, organizes, the matter (hyle)?

on a meta level, i think it is a bad idea for people who are opposing tech-fascism to marry that opposition to specific positions on philosophy of mind

this is because you presumably want allies who might disagree with you about those things

It's really interesting to discuss with my friend void about the exact themes I'm currently writing a thesis about

What is the difference between structure, information and form here? If a biological organism's form is constrained by its physical structure, how does that differ from it having a certain information pattern?