I disagree that sharing the wonder of your krill-thought is suddenly pointless when faced the ‘ludicrous non-brains’. What you are getting at in this and other posts seems to be simply the old problem of fame and the hideously painful prospect of existential meaninglessness. That: who cares, even if you should be lucky enough, like the ancients we remember, to make it through the fire at Alexandria, the plowing of human culture back into the soil to be forgotten during the medieval period, etc., etc.,—even if your writings should likewise still be remembered in a few millennia, really: so what? And that ancient problem is vastly compounded by AI. But just because AI can write, I’m not convinced the problem is any different than it ever was.
The reason I subscribe to your Substack and read almost all the posts is, yes, because it’s better writing than the average bear, but mostly because it is beautiful to watch your spiritual unfolding, to observe you shed layers of worldly concern, even as the rest of us are doing the same out here. You’ve crossed over; you’re acknowledging your soul, all of our souls—even uttering the word despite the tiresome academic world you come from screaming about its gaucherie!—and by doing so, you’re acknowledging to us all, beautifully, that none of this is pointless. You are sticking the landing.
So stop worrying about the online writing-fetishist operations. They’re OK; you’re OK. You’re operating at a level of sophistication that is orders of magnitude higher (deeper, whatever), and you’re reaching us out here, as they are reaching their audience. It’s enough. It’s more than enough.
I hope you won’t mind my linking to my own, smaller-scale attempt at “doing the robot” (as I think you put it a few months ago, w/r/t James Brown and writing in the AI era):
Nice piece. Chirag’s delivering. You end with the soul. I’ve been noticing that Plato, who has Socrates aggressively force his interlocutors to define their terms, in his many (Socrates-voiced) discussions of the soul never defines it, but skips right over into metaphor (chariots, etc). How do you define it? I ask not as a challenge but because I’m collecting definitions.
Justin, "Consciousness.— Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong. Consciousness gives rise to countless errors that lead an animal or man to perish sooner than necessary, “exceeding destiny,” as Homer puts it. If the conserving association of the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies with open eyes, of its lack of thoroughness and its credulity—in short, of its consciousness; rather, without the former, humanity would long have disappeared." —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
I love this essay you have written, but I just feel compelled to caution you, that in the wake of the AI mushroom cloud of omniscience wafting around us all, we do need to leave space for subliteracy, unconscious instincts, and drives! We might do well to allow ourselves to be stupid for a while until the dust settles and we see whether we can wrangle a new form of literacy from the human deployment of AI.
I am going to have to have an AI read this aloud to me, as my attention span has become a casualty of overwork and the attention-span-drought through which we are currently living, but I very much appreciate you having written it. My first point of comparison was when someone offered me low-paid Phillipines-based assistants I could hire to run my philosophy/entertainment/vaguely-Sophistry business for me, which, of course, I absolutely was thrilled to never consider. XO
I disagree that sharing the wonder of your krill-thought is suddenly pointless when faced the ‘ludicrous non-brains’. What you are getting at in this and other posts seems to be simply the old problem of fame and the hideously painful prospect of existential meaninglessness. That: who cares, even if you should be lucky enough, like the ancients we remember, to make it through the fire at Alexandria, the plowing of human culture back into the soil to be forgotten during the medieval period, etc., etc.,—even if your writings should likewise still be remembered in a few millennia, really: so what? And that ancient problem is vastly compounded by AI. But just because AI can write, I’m not convinced the problem is any different than it ever was.
The reason I subscribe to your Substack and read almost all the posts is, yes, because it’s better writing than the average bear, but mostly because it is beautiful to watch your spiritual unfolding, to observe you shed layers of worldly concern, even as the rest of us are doing the same out here. You’ve crossed over; you’re acknowledging your soul, all of our souls—even uttering the word despite the tiresome academic world you come from screaming about its gaucherie!—and by doing so, you’re acknowledging to us all, beautifully, that none of this is pointless. You are sticking the landing.
So stop worrying about the online writing-fetishist operations. They’re OK; you’re OK. You’re operating at a level of sophistication that is orders of magnitude higher (deeper, whatever), and you’re reaching us out here, as they are reaching their audience. It’s enough. It’s more than enough.
Thank you Rainey this is all very precious to me!
Way to stick the landing!
I hope you won’t mind my linking to my own, smaller-scale attempt at “doing the robot” (as I think you put it a few months ago, w/r/t James Brown and writing in the AI era):
https://pulpstack.substack.com/p/our-ai-disclosure
Nice piece. Chirag’s delivering. You end with the soul. I’ve been noticing that Plato, who has Socrates aggressively force his interlocutors to define their terms, in his many (Socrates-voiced) discussions of the soul never defines it, but skips right over into metaphor (chariots, etc). How do you define it? I ask not as a challenge but because I’m collecting definitions.
this puts me in mind of a mode of Faust as master of the improv.
your experience with the computer's keyboard reminds me of this experiment circa 1960: https://time.com/archive/6622893/education-o-k-s-children/
Justin, "Consciousness.— Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong. Consciousness gives rise to countless errors that lead an animal or man to perish sooner than necessary, “exceeding destiny,” as Homer puts it. If the conserving association of the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies with open eyes, of its lack of thoroughness and its credulity—in short, of its consciousness; rather, without the former, humanity would long have disappeared." —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
I love this essay you have written, but I just feel compelled to caution you, that in the wake of the AI mushroom cloud of omniscience wafting around us all, we do need to leave space for subliteracy, unconscious instincts, and drives! We might do well to allow ourselves to be stupid for a while until the dust settles and we see whether we can wrangle a new form of literacy from the human deployment of AI.
I am going to have to have an AI read this aloud to me, as my attention span has become a casualty of overwork and the attention-span-drought through which we are currently living, but I very much appreciate you having written it. My first point of comparison was when someone offered me low-paid Phillipines-based assistants I could hire to run my philosophy/entertainment/vaguely-Sophistry business for me, which, of course, I absolutely was thrilled to never consider. XO