Need to read this fascinating article slowly but one quick observation: the ritual practices of Islam seem to be very much bound up with the cycles of the sun (daily prayer) and the moon (Eid, Ramadan). A kind of alignment with the cosmos (as Hakim Murad intimates in a lecture of Nature).
Jun 7, 2023·edited Jun 8, 2023Liked by Justin Smith-Ruiu
Like Khalid, I will need to spend some proper time with this one. It's interesting you mention Tarkovsky... I've written on Czech filmmakers (especially animators) under the rule of the KSČ and a fear of being estranged from the cyclical rhythms of time is one of the most common themes amongst quite disparate filmmakers. I adore Jiří Barta's gaspingly lyrical stop-motion short 'Balada o zeleném drevu' (1983) especially for this:
"[I]n an Orthodox wedding…[the] newlyweds are ceremonially crowned, as if they had become, for this brief special moment, emperor and empress of the realm." Similar idea in Judaism: "hachatan domeh l’melech” ("the bridegroom is like a king"). https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_DeRabbi_Eliezer.16.16?lang=bi
Time is a (meta)relation between types of relations, ostensibly measuring the 'rate' of change of one type in terms of the occurrences of another, but in fact we are measuring every type of relation in terms of All other discernible relations which form the temporal texture of being in the same world (the sense of a world). Eternity, the totality of events, is not a relation in this world but an impossible ideal; it can never be wholly itself, as shown by Russell's paradox, therefore it is nothing but a metaphor for the unapproachable limit of meaning. When we say we "experience time" we imply that time occurs 'in time', therefore time is at least two-dimensional (as intuited by Ricoeur and Hegel). This is evidently correct, since we can also observe how our own past evolves in time, its meaning-content changes, proving that the past is not fixed, not ever finished.
Nothing escapes the laws of sense, not even imagination, not even our delusions, and that is precisely what unites 'us', makes Humanity (rational, intentional consciousness) a universal kind of relation, relating as the same time.
(Kant's categorical imperative culminated not in individual sovereignty as law-givers but in One universal law to which each individual is subject to: rational consciousness itself, bound by the rules of sense. HIs argument was that acting on the premise of individual sovereignty leads us all to the same objective point of reference, the same limit.)
The hill town of Orvieto in Italy has a clock tower from around 1347 that was built by the Bishop with the express purpose of keeping track of work on the cathedral there, and it was considered a very novel thing at the time. The description on the website is great:
"The peculiarity of that timekeeping system was also due to another reason: the automatisms did not move angels, roosters or other characters distant from the specific context like previous medieval clocks had done, but a character that fitted in perfectly well with the rest, a worker, possibly very similar to those employed at the worksite;"
I took a film class in France one semester where the prof had us watch Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev" in class at least three times. Maybe more if you count repeated viewing of specific scenes. This is a three hour movie, I believe (class was also 3 hours). I didn't really like it at first, but after seeing it so many times I began to like it, and then I went and watched some of his other films (now I'm a fan). We did the same thing with "Satyricon" by Fellini. These were the only two films we covered in one semester. The next year I was back in the States and took a film class where we never watched a full movie in class, never really discussed any movies in depth, besides talking about the movie as representation of some -ism, and we probably covered 10-15 movies. Don't remember any of 'em. Not sure where I'm going with this comment but "Andrei Rublev" is certainly a movie about pre-modernity and ritual, and that film class with its repeated viewings seemed to me to be cyclical, whereas the other one was decidedly (post)modern in all the worst ways.
One question: in pg 45 of "The internet is not what you think it is", you write "As already mentioned above, G W Leibniz got the underlying problem of artificial intelligence right: when we outsource our thinking to machines, we are not bringing new subjectivities into existence, new conscious beings like ourselves (...)".
This has become quite a hot issue in public debate for the last year or so.
I tried to go back to the "already mentioned above" to see what exactly Leibniz wrote about "the underlying problem" of "outsorcing thinking to machines" and possibly creating "new conscious beings".
Whether they are "like ourselves" or "not like ourselves" is not very important for practical purposes; they are almost certainly not "like ourselves" in a metaphysical sense, but if they are powerful enough, they could evade human control, as a non-conscious locomotive can if systems do not work as expected, with potentially catastrophic outcomes.
But Leibniz so far in your book ("above") is only mentioned twice: in pp 2-5, in which you describe the optimistic Leibniz project of a machine to help process conceptual thought and solve all possible human disputes, facilitating universal peace and harmony ("Calculemus!"); and a brief mention on page 22 of Leibniz' concept of "petites perceptions" by which "bare monads, which is to say non-spiritual and non-rational mental beings, represent the world to themselves, even though they lack consciousness". Perception without attention, in short.
Is the page 22 reference the one "mentioned above" in page 45? I guess so, but there is a bit of circular reasoning here, I am afraid. When building AI, we do not create conscious beings "like ourselves", agreed; but can't we create another type of "conscious being", another species in a sense, or not?
In page 46 you write that "we do not have the power even remotely to understand what would be involved in such an act of creation". Agreed, but in this case, how can we be sure of not creating a conscious being of a new type, as an unforeseen (or foreseen, both by transhumanists, as a desired state, and by technopessimists, as a catastrophe) consequence of our investing untold billions in advanced language models?
You write these machines have a kind of thought "that has everything our own thinking has, except perhaps" (sic) "for the subjectivity, the presence of a conscious mind behind the thinking".
Well, all is in this "perhaps", no? What if there is, hidden inside billions of interconnected artificial neurons, a "conscious mind" of a different kind than ours, one which we cannot understand? Can we even agree on a definition of what a "conscious mind" is?
Not to mention that Erik Hoel and others point out that, whether "conscious" or not (a point we may philosophically debate forever), a powerful enough AI, like and out of control locomotive, could still drive all train passengers to extinction.
I would be very interesting in your thoughts on this issue.
> The annus shares its etymology with the anus, for both are rings, as Isidore already noted — one of the rare cases in which his Etymologies actually get an etymology right.
Need to read this fascinating article slowly but one quick observation: the ritual practices of Islam seem to be very much bound up with the cycles of the sun (daily prayer) and the moon (Eid, Ramadan). A kind of alignment with the cosmos (as Hakim Murad intimates in a lecture of Nature).
Sorry for the manic writing Justin but "I'm your number one fan" (Annie Wilkes) and I really enjoyed this article (esp. the 'wild speculations').
Also, the monasticism bit reminded me of my mother phoning me from London a few years back, asking if I was safe back in the land of the pure.
Me: "Why?"
Her: "Well, India has just attacked!"
Me: "Oh. really?"
Thought you might like this:
https://www.theawl.com/2012/06/how-silence-works-emailed-conversations-with-four-trappist-monks/
Like Khalid, I will need to spend some proper time with this one. It's interesting you mention Tarkovsky... I've written on Czech filmmakers (especially animators) under the rule of the KSČ and a fear of being estranged from the cyclical rhythms of time is one of the most common themes amongst quite disparate filmmakers. I adore Jiří Barta's gaspingly lyrical stop-motion short 'Balada o zeleném drevu' (1983) especially for this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fIvxfWezRU
"[I]n an Orthodox wedding…[the] newlyweds are ceremonially crowned, as if they had become, for this brief special moment, emperor and empress of the realm." Similar idea in Judaism: "hachatan domeh l’melech” ("the bridegroom is like a king"). https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_DeRabbi_Eliezer.16.16?lang=bi
Time is a (meta)relation between types of relations, ostensibly measuring the 'rate' of change of one type in terms of the occurrences of another, but in fact we are measuring every type of relation in terms of All other discernible relations which form the temporal texture of being in the same world (the sense of a world). Eternity, the totality of events, is not a relation in this world but an impossible ideal; it can never be wholly itself, as shown by Russell's paradox, therefore it is nothing but a metaphor for the unapproachable limit of meaning. When we say we "experience time" we imply that time occurs 'in time', therefore time is at least two-dimensional (as intuited by Ricoeur and Hegel). This is evidently correct, since we can also observe how our own past evolves in time, its meaning-content changes, proving that the past is not fixed, not ever finished.
Nothing escapes the laws of sense, not even imagination, not even our delusions, and that is precisely what unites 'us', makes Humanity (rational, intentional consciousness) a universal kind of relation, relating as the same time.
(Kant's categorical imperative culminated not in individual sovereignty as law-givers but in One universal law to which each individual is subject to: rational consciousness itself, bound by the rules of sense. HIs argument was that acting on the premise of individual sovereignty leads us all to the same objective point of reference, the same limit.)
The hill town of Orvieto in Italy has a clock tower from around 1347 that was built by the Bishop with the express purpose of keeping track of work on the cathedral there, and it was considered a very novel thing at the time. The description on the website is great:
"The peculiarity of that timekeeping system was also due to another reason: the automatisms did not move angels, roosters or other characters distant from the specific context like previous medieval clocks had done, but a character that fitted in perfectly well with the rest, a worker, possibly very similar to those employed at the worksite;"
https://www.museomodo.it/en/the_maurizio_tower.html
I took a film class in France one semester where the prof had us watch Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev" in class at least three times. Maybe more if you count repeated viewing of specific scenes. This is a three hour movie, I believe (class was also 3 hours). I didn't really like it at first, but after seeing it so many times I began to like it, and then I went and watched some of his other films (now I'm a fan). We did the same thing with "Satyricon" by Fellini. These were the only two films we covered in one semester. The next year I was back in the States and took a film class where we never watched a full movie in class, never really discussed any movies in depth, besides talking about the movie as representation of some -ism, and we probably covered 10-15 movies. Don't remember any of 'em. Not sure where I'm going with this comment but "Andrei Rublev" is certainly a movie about pre-modernity and ritual, and that film class with its repeated viewings seemed to me to be cyclical, whereas the other one was decidedly (post)modern in all the worst ways.
Brilliant as usual
One question: in pg 45 of "The internet is not what you think it is", you write "As already mentioned above, G W Leibniz got the underlying problem of artificial intelligence right: when we outsource our thinking to machines, we are not bringing new subjectivities into existence, new conscious beings like ourselves (...)".
This has become quite a hot issue in public debate for the last year or so.
I tried to go back to the "already mentioned above" to see what exactly Leibniz wrote about "the underlying problem" of "outsorcing thinking to machines" and possibly creating "new conscious beings".
Whether they are "like ourselves" or "not like ourselves" is not very important for practical purposes; they are almost certainly not "like ourselves" in a metaphysical sense, but if they are powerful enough, they could evade human control, as a non-conscious locomotive can if systems do not work as expected, with potentially catastrophic outcomes.
But Leibniz so far in your book ("above") is only mentioned twice: in pp 2-5, in which you describe the optimistic Leibniz project of a machine to help process conceptual thought and solve all possible human disputes, facilitating universal peace and harmony ("Calculemus!"); and a brief mention on page 22 of Leibniz' concept of "petites perceptions" by which "bare monads, which is to say non-spiritual and non-rational mental beings, represent the world to themselves, even though they lack consciousness". Perception without attention, in short.
Is the page 22 reference the one "mentioned above" in page 45? I guess so, but there is a bit of circular reasoning here, I am afraid. When building AI, we do not create conscious beings "like ourselves", agreed; but can't we create another type of "conscious being", another species in a sense, or not?
In page 46 you write that "we do not have the power even remotely to understand what would be involved in such an act of creation". Agreed, but in this case, how can we be sure of not creating a conscious being of a new type, as an unforeseen (or foreseen, both by transhumanists, as a desired state, and by technopessimists, as a catastrophe) consequence of our investing untold billions in advanced language models?
You write these machines have a kind of thought "that has everything our own thinking has, except perhaps" (sic) "for the subjectivity, the presence of a conscious mind behind the thinking".
Well, all is in this "perhaps", no? What if there is, hidden inside billions of interconnected artificial neurons, a "conscious mind" of a different kind than ours, one which we cannot understand? Can we even agree on a definition of what a "conscious mind" is?
Not to mention that Erik Hoel and others point out that, whether "conscious" or not (a point we may philosophically debate forever), a powerful enough AI, like and out of control locomotive, could still drive all train passengers to extinction.
I would be very interesting in your thoughts on this issue.
> The annus shares its etymology with the anus, for both are rings, as Isidore already noted — one of the rare cases in which his Etymologies actually get an etymology right.
This may be incorrect; at least, https://archive.org/details/m-de-vaan-2008-etymological-dictionary-of-latin-and-the-other-italic-languages/page/44/mode/2up derives these two words from different Proto-Indo-European roots.