According to Arkady Plotnitsky, images of thought realize themselves in scientific processes. His essay “The Image of Thought and the Sciences of the Brain” describes their influence on the disciplines of neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology (Plotnitsky 2010).

Locating truth as exterior to the subject, data science and Platonic thought both treat the vagaries of human interpretation as a barrier to their object. Per McQuillan’s argument, data science reinforces the Platonic vision which unites truth with totality, objectivity, and goodness, and discounts the value of the subjective and particular.

The digital mandate to representation seals off all terra incognita.

Because the digital image of thought idealizes representation, it heeds no limit to that which may be reconstructed in digital and mental formats.

Its effect on thinking may be likened to the infinite scroll, a web design technique which automates the renewal of content as one navigates across a website or application. The infinite scroll presents figures at an instantaneous pace that preempts the mental production of difference in itself. The thinker always remains within the remit of its offerings, which is to say that they cannot help but acknowledge its endless procession of prefabricated forms. The image’s relative infinity is taken as absolute, as no lines of flight are available to carry the thinker away. Computers “think” or yield information in this manner, as their outputs are indelibly linked (however contingently) with inputs.

For my part, I can’t imagine why anyone with real power over AI wouldn’t slam on the brakes so that we can try to integrate these extraordinary technologies at something approaching a normal mammal pace

With Altman, as with so many in this biz, the computational bias of computer engineering has bloomed into a totalizing psychology. As the CEO put it in a famous tweet, referring to Emily M. Bender’s critique mentioned above: “I am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.” In other words, our brains are just running algorithms, making statistical guesses, and generating predictive processes that compose our reality almost entirely from the inside

The prophetic power of art

Art, artifice, and thought

Adumbrations of AI

The challenge of generative AI

Questions?

Chomsky NYTimes piece,

excerpt from the 25th hour

What is a machine

If there is an origin trauma in Giger’s work, I suggest it is really the trauma of origins in the ancient Gnostic sense: of spirits who find themselves born, painfully, even hopelessly, into the world of matter, with all of matter’s pains, frustrations, and limitations.

While the “fall of spirit into matter” seems like a purely theological or mythic narrative, it has an uncanny reflection in what has become the accepted, fully materialistic account of the origins of complex life forms on Earth. The theory, first proposed by the Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowsky in 1926 and then supported by the discoveries of biologist Lynn Margulis (below) in the early 1970s, is now entrenched in biology textbooks: Over two billion years ago, changes in Earth’s environment such as an increasingly oxygen-rich atmosphere led bacteria to adapt in new ways, including by merging and coopting each other, sharing their genes and unique bacterial talents. Through a process called endosymbiosis, independent creatures engulfed each other and “grew together”—most often, perhaps, pointlessly and painfully, but every now and then forming mutually beneficial and stable unions that shaped subsequent life. This was the origin of the first complex, nucleated cells or eukaryotes.

Margulis’s story about our merging bacterial ancestors is inspiring and cool … as long as you hold it at a 2-billion-year arm’s reach. Can you imagine the horror of being forced to live out your life immobilized inside another organism?

I am inclined to take Lacan’s jouissance as essentially the same thing—as spirit or consciousness, the thing that separates us from inert matter.

Giger’s world shows us this dark threat of cyborg endosymbiosis: not to be simply augmented by machines (or even simply replaced by them) but to be parasitized and engulfed by them in a kind of numbed ecstasy that somehow masks the violence being done.

Donna Haraway suggested that even to hope for such a choice could be a mirage, because we have always been cyborgs: Language, culture, tools, all act on and in the body so thoroughly we could never unplug from them.

For Bacon and Newton, sheath'd in dismal steel, their terrors hang Like iron scourges over Albion: reasonings like vast serpents  Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations.