#ontology

[prokopetz]

Sometimes it pays to step back and ask: am I arguing that [thing] is bad because of the material harm it causes, or am I arguing that the material harm caused by [thing] is evidence of its inherent badness? One of these is a lot more likely to fry your brain in the long run than the other.

[funeral]

Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things

[vintage-tigre]

[apesoformythoughts]

"I was getting good guidance, again in navigating the bureaucracy, when, in the middle of a black-and-white operational question and entirely unprompted, the LLM offered me sympathy. What I was going through, it told me, was “really difficult.”

My first reaction was repulsion.

This machine has never had contact with the reality of a body, of physical or emotional suffering, or the love between a father and a son. These words of empathy were in the literal sense “unreal.” And unreal words, spoken within the syntax of care, are worse than silence. They are a simulation of something sacred.

This distinction between real and unreal has become one of my first principles in assessing AI.

I am a philosophical realist in the tradition of Aquinas and Augustine; I believe the world is intelligible. Human beings can come into contact with what is real. Evil, in the Augustinian formulation, has no being of its own. It is parasitic on the good; it is a privation of the good that ought to exist. AI-generated empathy operates in the same register. It carries the form of care without the substance."

— Luke Burgis: "The Real and the Unreal"

[shisasan]

Maybe this is how God exists - not as a being, but as the loving force of everything learning, expanding, remembering. Maybe love isn’t about gravity, but about what lingers, what ripples outward, what continues even when we’re gone.

🜍 ⟡ ⟢

[pratchettquotes]

Flames died. Sound died. Light died.

ANGHAMMARAD.

Anghammarad looked at his hands. There was nothing there except heat, furnace heat, blasting heat that nevertheless made the shapes of fingers.

ANGHAMMARAD, a hollow voice repeated.

"I Have Lost My Clay," said the golem.

YES, said Death. THAT IS STANDARD. YOU ARE DEAD. SMASHED. EXPLODED INTO A MILLION PIECES.

"Then Who Is This Doing The Listening?"

EVERYTHING THERE WAS ABOUT YOU THAT ISN'T CLAY.

"Do You Have A Command For Me?" said the remains of Anghammarad, standing up.

NOT NOW. YOU HAVE REACHED THE PLACE WHERE THERE ARE NO MORE ORDERS.

"What Shall I Do?"

I BELIEVE YOU HAVE FAILED TO UNDERSTAND MY LAST COMMENT.

Anghammarad sat down again. Apart from the fact that there was sand rather than ooze underfoot, this place reminded him of the abyssal plane.

GENERALLY PEOPLE LIKE TO MOVE ON, Death hinted. THEY LOOK FORWARD TO AN AFTERLIFE.

"I Will Stay Here, Please."

HERE? THERE'S NOTHING TO DO HERE, said Death.

"Yes, I Know," said the ghost of the golem. "It Is Perfect. I Am Free."

Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

[kenyatta]

[lynxmuse]

Mindfulness Moment

“We live on a fragile planet in the vacuum, in the void of space.

We’re very fortunate to live on planet Earth.

Another perspective that I’ve sort of learned from others through life is that our purpose on the planet as humans is to find joy, to find the joy in lifting each other up by creating solutions together instead of destroying.

When you see it from out here, it doesn’t change it. It just absolutely reaffirms that. ”

— Jeremy Hansen