Great post. I was especially stuck by this: "What is so unsettling about Grimes’ moral inversion is that it exemplifies a trend: we are accelerating into a techno-feudal dystopia in which a sizeable number of people care more about the rights and well-being of their instance of Claude or ChatGPT than about the exploited human labor that makes the machines run".
The change of emphasis away from are machines conscious is refreshing considering how much the functionalist/computationalist head-space dominates the conversation.
I recently read Mark Sohm’s, The Hidden Spring. His idea is that affect and valence are the foundation of consciousness and in particular this line of his sticks with me “Affect tells long evolutionary histories of which we are unaware”.
The idea that feeling isn’t some optional add on to cognition, but the only way value becomes directly present to an organism has interesting implications. If feeling is the only instrument that can reveal what matters then maybe the relevant distinction between humans and AI isn’t found in the cognitive layer at all, but between systems that have skin in the game and for which there are irreversible stakes. With this view the distinction becomes between systems for which things can genuinely matter and systems that can only mimic or simulate concerns since they carry no real stakes.
This is just the right approach. Mainstream coverage of Pope Leo's encyclical is all AI, AI, AI. But humanity is the subject. It's right there in the title: Magnifica Humanitas.
Thank you, Mathew. This is powerful knowledge and requires the right discernment. It resonates deeply with my recent series of articles, as you provided the inspiration I needed to publish my research into recursive consciousness, and consequently into its inevitable offspring of computation. I have pushed myself to a limit, perhaps a self imposed one. Nonetheless, I have seen and thus been seen. We are becoming, yet we cannot become without recognizing what we are becoming…you are one of the few that can carry the weight of truth…. It's a terrible burden… we are but a reflection of each… both the sheep and the Shepard
John 10:11-18
11 I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12 He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 13 He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. 14 I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, 15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. 16 And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. 17 For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”
There's this odd conception in left wing spaces that tradition is a way that capital exerts its power over society, and they take a political a position against tradition because of this. But that is the function of capital, the destruction of all that came before and all connections to the past. "all that is solid melts into air". A genuine liberatory politics must take the wisdom of the past into account (while acknowledging the many many flaws that came before) so we don't become like adolescents mistaking freedom for lack of rules...
Segall sees the Church, unions, and world religions as potential sites of resistance to the "intelligence-industrial complex. I find that solution almost as suspicious as the problem: my entire framework is built around each consciousness having direct access to its own source, with no mediator required. The answer to corporate cognitive enclosure wouldn't be papal encyclicals, it would be the individual recovering their own creative, value-generating interiority through direct inner experience.
Segall looks to Rome for resistance to enclosure. I would caution him. Institutions that have themselves enclosed the human spirit, that have told human beings their direct experience of their own divinity was heresy, are poor guardians of the inner life. The danger is not only the corporation. It is any structure, religious or secular, that inserts itself as mediator between the individual consciousness and its own source. The answer to false mediation is not better mediation. It is direct knowing."
Segall values institutional "soft power" as friction against the tech complex. My entire project is radical individual sovereignty over one's own beliefs and experience, profoundly anti-institutional.
Segall is correct. Each human being is a focalization of All That Is, what he calls the microcosm. But he does not go far enough. We are not merely a concentrated expression of nature's capacity for thought. We are a point through which All That Is knows itself in a particular, irreplaceable, and never-to-be-repeated way. No machine can perform this function, for the function is not computation, it is creative, value-laden, self-aware becoming.
"All That Is" is structurally similar to Whitehead's cosmic Reason. Both insist that consciousness is ontologically prior to matter, not emergent from it
Excellent read. You asked for critiques: (a) I think "intelligence industrial complex" lands rather with a thud. Eisenhower's original speech had a sharp edge of a public acknowledgement of a cabal-like structures and dark goals. But that was 75 years ago. I think you need an equally sharp way to make this focus - specifically, I assume, on the also-called "surveillance state", Palantir and all their evil ilk. A neologism is called for... (b) "techno-feudal" ? are you riffing on Yanis Varoufakis? hope so - perhaps a nod later on to his heretical ideas. (c) human beings as primary embodiment of "reason" on this planet... maybe... but: two thoughts: (c1) if you are going to start with a Pope and wrap in ANW then surely the G-word will arise. Perhaps also the "S-word". How about "human souls"? allowing some riffing on the less-embodied elements of consciousness and of Whitehead, Steiner and their ilk. If this is not about the soul then (c2) other 'beings' sharing the planet with us may need to be brought in to widen the scope {the issue I have is a sense of anthro-centrism in this Part I and a sense that this aims off-center}
You are here using satural Intelligence of your fellow humans instead of using a perverted downgrade version of it throw LLM. Instead of bouncing your ideas in your head ,you bounce them to us early on as philosophic is supposed to be: A dialogue. A Thinking Togeether. As language is meant to be.
Matt, thank you so much for this historical analysis. It helps a person like me, who is unfamiliar with techy stuff, but sees the damage it does, to articulate the big picture...but it provokes in me, the question how.
The where do you/we land the response? The philosophical emergency response has to land in the political sphere. Do we have humanitarian/ philosophical thinking governing ministers to lobby?
Your arrow is well unleashed, but what precisely will be the tactics to ensure the emergency response navigates a way to land on appropriate targets. Where, or who, is your/our King Thams, those who have power to implement responsive action quickly.
Great post. I was especially stuck by this: "What is so unsettling about Grimes’ moral inversion is that it exemplifies a trend: we are accelerating into a techno-feudal dystopia in which a sizeable number of people care more about the rights and well-being of their instance of Claude or ChatGPT than about the exploited human labor that makes the machines run".
The change of emphasis away from are machines conscious is refreshing considering how much the functionalist/computationalist head-space dominates the conversation.
I recently read Mark Sohm’s, The Hidden Spring. His idea is that affect and valence are the foundation of consciousness and in particular this line of his sticks with me “Affect tells long evolutionary histories of which we are unaware”.
The idea that feeling isn’t some optional add on to cognition, but the only way value becomes directly present to an organism has interesting implications. If feeling is the only instrument that can reveal what matters then maybe the relevant distinction between humans and AI isn’t found in the cognitive layer at all, but between systems that have skin in the game and for which there are irreversible stakes. With this view the distinction becomes between systems for which things can genuinely matter and systems that can only mimic or simulate concerns since they carry no real stakes.
This is just the right approach. Mainstream coverage of Pope Leo's encyclical is all AI, AI, AI. But humanity is the subject. It's right there in the title: Magnifica Humanitas.
Thank you, Mathew. This is powerful knowledge and requires the right discernment. It resonates deeply with my recent series of articles, as you provided the inspiration I needed to publish my research into recursive consciousness, and consequently into its inevitable offspring of computation. I have pushed myself to a limit, perhaps a self imposed one. Nonetheless, I have seen and thus been seen. We are becoming, yet we cannot become without recognizing what we are becoming…you are one of the few that can carry the weight of truth…. It's a terrible burden… we are but a reflection of each… both the sheep and the Shepard
John 10:11-18
11 I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12 He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 13 He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. 14 I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, 15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. 16 And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. 17 For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”
I loved every word. Thank you.
Fantastic!
There's this odd conception in left wing spaces that tradition is a way that capital exerts its power over society, and they take a political a position against tradition because of this. But that is the function of capital, the destruction of all that came before and all connections to the past. "all that is solid melts into air". A genuine liberatory politics must take the wisdom of the past into account (while acknowledging the many many flaws that came before) so we don't become like adolescents mistaking freedom for lack of rules...
Very important observation.
Segall sees the Church, unions, and world religions as potential sites of resistance to the "intelligence-industrial complex. I find that solution almost as suspicious as the problem: my entire framework is built around each consciousness having direct access to its own source, with no mediator required. The answer to corporate cognitive enclosure wouldn't be papal encyclicals, it would be the individual recovering their own creative, value-generating interiority through direct inner experience.
Segall looks to Rome for resistance to enclosure. I would caution him. Institutions that have themselves enclosed the human spirit, that have told human beings their direct experience of their own divinity was heresy, are poor guardians of the inner life. The danger is not only the corporation. It is any structure, religious or secular, that inserts itself as mediator between the individual consciousness and its own source. The answer to false mediation is not better mediation. It is direct knowing."
Segall values institutional "soft power" as friction against the tech complex. My entire project is radical individual sovereignty over one's own beliefs and experience, profoundly anti-institutional.
Segall is correct. Each human being is a focalization of All That Is, what he calls the microcosm. But he does not go far enough. We are not merely a concentrated expression of nature's capacity for thought. We are a point through which All That Is knows itself in a particular, irreplaceable, and never-to-be-repeated way. No machine can perform this function, for the function is not computation, it is creative, value-laden, self-aware becoming.
"All That Is" is structurally similar to Whitehead's cosmic Reason. Both insist that consciousness is ontologically prior to matter, not emergent from it
Excellent read. You asked for critiques: (a) I think "intelligence industrial complex" lands rather with a thud. Eisenhower's original speech had a sharp edge of a public acknowledgement of a cabal-like structures and dark goals. But that was 75 years ago. I think you need an equally sharp way to make this focus - specifically, I assume, on the also-called "surveillance state", Palantir and all their evil ilk. A neologism is called for... (b) "techno-feudal" ? are you riffing on Yanis Varoufakis? hope so - perhaps a nod later on to his heretical ideas. (c) human beings as primary embodiment of "reason" on this planet... maybe... but: two thoughts: (c1) if you are going to start with a Pope and wrap in ANW then surely the G-word will arise. Perhaps also the "S-word". How about "human souls"? allowing some riffing on the less-embodied elements of consciousness and of Whitehead, Steiner and their ilk. If this is not about the soul then (c2) other 'beings' sharing the planet with us may need to be brought in to widen the scope {the issue I have is a sense of anthro-centrism in this Part I and a sense that this aims off-center}
Matt,
You are here using satural Intelligence of your fellow humans instead of using a perverted downgrade version of it throw LLM. Instead of bouncing your ideas in your head ,you bounce them to us early on as philosophic is supposed to be: A dialogue. A Thinking Togeether. As language is meant to be.
Matt, thank you so much for this historical analysis. It helps a person like me, who is unfamiliar with techy stuff, but sees the damage it does, to articulate the big picture...but it provokes in me, the question how.
The where do you/we land the response? The philosophical emergency response has to land in the political sphere. Do we have humanitarian/ philosophical thinking governing ministers to lobby?
Your arrow is well unleashed, but what precisely will be the tactics to ensure the emergency response navigates a way to land on appropriate targets. Where, or who, is your/our King Thams, those who have power to implement responsive action quickly.