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Confusing & Polarized Times
We live in confusing times. Disappointed expectations, polarized societies, traditional ways of life and identity under threat, increasing exclusion of the marginalized, the world dividing into power blocs, even truth seeming to dissolve into incompatible factional interpretations contaminated by bias and misinformation. There has always been a gap between idealized aspirations and how we act…
Free Will & "Could Have Done Otherwise"
Under what circumstances & pursuing what purposes? What is meant by the claim that for agency to be meaningful, it must be so that the agent could have done otherwise (Dennett, Elbow Room, chap. 6)? If knowledge of all possible influencing factors is included in a description of what caused something, then to deny that this sum of factors suffices to determine the outcome would seem to deny the…
Determinism's Claim: Could Not Have Unfolded Otherwise
What does this claim imply about predicting future events from a hypothesized origin of events? Does the claim depend on there being a fixed total of matter and energy? on a fixed set of laws governing their causal interactions? (Thoughts triggered by Daniel Dennett’s Elbow Room, pp. 50-62) Simple Unipolar Determination Imagine a universe, a totality outside of which nothing exists, and about…
Encased in Perspectives
We live within perspectives from which we never fully escape. Escaping a familiar and comforting haven is hard work and much works against it. Our sense of personal identity and whatever status or worth we feel is ours are nested within it. Our social connections grow within it. Our livelihoods emerge within it, as do our competencies, our pleasures, our comforts, and our associations. Truth…
Movements & Elites
Inside every political movement is a new elite channeling power to themselves. Movements couldn’t ‘move’ otherwise. But this functional necessity forms, of necessity, a ruling class with a shared interest in staying in power. (When Marx denied that this would apply to his “vanguard party”, he made his biggest and most inexcusable blunder.) Rulers cannot do what they aim at otherwise. And in…
The Human Condition: Causes, Ends & Identity
(Planned for posting 12-26/27-2024.) The Human Condition: Observer & Agent Remodel your world according to your own designs Intelligent beings are living beings, so they are at once observers and agents. As passive observers they perceive the world as a system of discoverable causes in which they are enmeshed. As active agents they are perishable beings permanently at risk, with needs to…
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Why Wouldn't AI Hallucinate?
(Sparked by an observation by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker from The Economist’s 9-4-2024 Babbage podcast “AGI, part two“.) The Issue: Hallucinating Supposed Facts It is now widely known that the latest marvel of AI, Large Language Models (LLMs),can hallucinate falsehoods. When we say LLMs hallucinate, we mean they present false factual claims as true ones. Steven Pinker thinks that this…
Information, Knowledge and Choice
It all makes sense when you trace it from its beginnings
(Sparked by Max Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence and Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish ) Not so clever as all that Some of the earliest animals were radial, having no front or back, no distinct intake and exhaust. Fuel was ingested, converted to energy, and its residue ejected through a single opening. Think jellyfish or anemone, animals that wait for fuel to drift their way. Then came…
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The Time of Your Life
Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forward Soren Kierkegaard We are timebound, for all our possibilities expand and collapse in time. Time is the cadence of our lives. It flies and it crawls. Time fills us with hope as we glimpse its possibilities yet, when hopes die, time is their executioner. Time grants us our successes and leaves us to learn from our…
Where We Are Now
The Cruel Irony of Politics Win big, and your statues go up eveywhere No people can unquestioningly trust any elite. This follows whether that elite is an entrenched traditional elite or an insurgent revolutionary elite, whether the insurgency is military or electoral, whether the traditions are of recent or ancient origins. All that matters is the mechanics of power. For victories are…
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Dark Thoughts, interspersed with Humor
Interesting Politics revolves around interests — polarized ideology, and other forms of bullshit, to the contrary. Material for an insult comic “Your shit’s so transparent, your doctor’s worried!” Natural Selection; Historical Selection Culture is simply habit accumulated at the group level. That’s not to say that it’s arbitrary. Cultural habits are structured; they’re sifted by the group…
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Realism, MAD and MADder (Foreign Policy Matters Long-term)
Foreign Policy & the Uncertainty of Intentions The uncertainty of intentions between independent sovereign states — the dynamic that generates what contemporary realists call anarchy and Hobbes calls the state of nature — is simply this: no state can trust that another state will not resort to an available tactic, if that would give it a competitive edge. Balanced on a knife’s edge A glaring…
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Technology v. Morality
Operating soon on a body near you Technology is value-free, amoral in the strictest sense, for it is merely a man-made means to achieve whatever ends man adopts. This essential character of technology has been remarked upon from Plato to Heidegger. Discovered in1901 in a shipwreck off the isle of Antikythera, The Antikythera Mechanism, dated to roughly 205-60 BCE, is understood as the world’s…
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More Sayings #2 (Bismarck Knew)
Linear versus Networked Thinking & the Danger of Hallucinations
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Jokes: the Dreams that Drive Us
I had a laptop I brought into the high school magnet I taught in before retiring. When I had it open at my desk the back of the screen, facing the class, sported this sticker: My point was that the real world is not kind to dreams, but you need them, so have a Dream Plan B on hand. In fact, have two in reserve, replenishing them anytime a frontrunner crashes. I’m not advocating dream…
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