AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
A term proposed by Phil Agre in his essay @Writing and Representation , meaning, the environment in which a mental homunculus operates. In the classical AI planning model, the homunculus is some kind of general problem solver or optimizer, that operates within an environment made up of representations.
Phil AgreÕšs Writing and Representation caused a related and similarly violent lurch in my thinking, because it made me realize that the metaphor of writing underlies the technology of computing in a fundamental way, all the way back to the Turing machine. And while from a computer-as-medium perspective that was interesting but not problematic, from an AI standpoint it seemed to fatally compromise the whole operation. The strengths of writing (definiteness, stability, abstractness) were a late achievement of human minds and thus obviously unsuitable to be the building blocks of human minds, which evolved under conditions of orality (and before that, from animal signalling and sociality).
A big influence on Meaningness and Phil Agre and thus indirectly on me. But I also have a pretty deep resistance; the man was a Nazi, and when the anti-rationalism starts to shade into fascism that's where I get off the train.
I came by my anti-philosophy stance at MIT, of course, where the standard line was that AI and cybernetics had rendered all past philosophical discourse obsolete and irrelevant. This was not quite the case (See Heideggerian AI , and Phil Agre on AI's contempt for philosophy The Soul Gained and Lost )
From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.
The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. ... People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.
The defenders of aristocracy represent aristocracy as a natural phenomenon, but in reality it is the most artificial thing on earth.
On the nature of writing and its relationship to thought, or how we think about thought, Orality and Literacy blew my mind, along with Phil Agre's Writing and Representaton. Highly recommend.
David Chapman (aka @meaningness) has been a major influence on my own thinking. His work at the MIT AI lab with Phil Agre made a deep impression on me when I was trying to figure out my own academic path. This included a critical take on the standard cognitive science view of the mind, which is pretty much Rationalism minus the more cultish and cartoonish aspects.
One of my main influence s. I learned a lot from Phil, who despite being a grad student in an engineering department seemed to have read widely in philosophy, sociology, and other exotic subjects. But the main lesson he taught was a stance-related thing; that one could do technical work while at the same time having a rigorously critical attitude about the work, the field, and society. Probably his essay Towards a Critical Technical Practice is the best explicit articulation of this, but it's a quality that comes through in much of his work.
Phil was also one of the first public internet intellectuals, pioneering the format of one-man newsletter with is Red Rock Eater New Service (now, some 20 years later, everyone is doing this via Substack, but Phil did this on his own with no recompense). Some of this stuff is dated but a lot holds up well, for instance this essay on Institutions and the Entrepreneurial Self.