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dmreedy.com
I'm writing a science fiction book that takes place mostly around Jupiter, and would love to hear more about this; if you found anything particularly interesting or unexpected or striking (especially visually), and whether it might transfer at all to e.g., Ganymede/Europa/Callisto.
Consider for a moment a world in which not every mind is as self-possessed and self-assured as yours.
Consider further a world in which there are many minds for whom sensitivity to being wrong is such a high priority, as you seem to want it to be, that they may try and avoid formulating stances or taking positions at all. Lest they be wrong.
Sometimes it can be helpful to have someone explain to you how you have to have some confidence in your own capacity for intuition, your own ability make decisions, in order to make anything happen.
I certainly won't argue that there are probably a lot of ineffective practitioners out there, but to me that speaks to the difficulty of the task, of tuning between insecurity and confidence and arrogance. It doesn't suggest to me the task, or the institution that is still in its earliest years of trying to formally study it, is fundamentally flawed.
There is in fact a whole, and very famous, book about it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
It is as much a real object of specific concern as it is shorthand for "oppressive wage slavery in poor conditions" in the general sense.
While I agree with your conclusion, for what it's worth I'm not sure journalism "decided" anything. The economic system it is embedded in did.
I say that because it's not like the pattern is unique to journalism.
I'm not sure if this is what you're thinking of, but there's a story like that behind Dogfish Head's "Midas Touch"
http://www.biomolecular-archaeology.com/?page_id=143
https://www.dogfish.com/brewery/beer/midas-touch
Though more reconstruction of ingredients from residue than linguistic reconstruction I guess.
In addition to bbor's comment, the idea you're scraping up against is the much-discussed P-Zombie[0]
I like to think of it as an encouragement to meditate a bit more on, for example, why this "solution" (let the free market handle it) isn't currently already solving everything. Not argument by authority, just a reminder that perhaps you are not the first person to have thought about this problem.
And an admonishment against the hubris of just casually dropping deeply loaded positions like "Europe has more important things to worry about" than Africa or Ukraine. Hell even casual the separation of Ukraine as something outside of Europe.
If you took it as a personal attack, then perhaps it is just because a hit dog will holler.
Marketability (large mammal vs tiny insect excites the populace more, leading to funding)?
Conservationists often leverage the concept of "Charismatic Megafauna"[0] to serve as splashy poster children for broader, more practical efforts.
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I'm not saying I want it, I'm saying it is an ingredient to the function and survival of a society, especially as the number of members of a society grows and diversifies.
If one person / group wishes to force it's view on the other then we have a problem
I would put it even more simply:
My view is that this valuable resource is mine. Your view is that this resource is yours.
How do we reconcile this?
edit: just in the interest of not seeming antagonistic, I'll elaborate further.
I assert that resolving conflicts like this requires either direct violence, or deference to some external framework. That external framework often defines terms like "just" and "right" and "good" and "true". These terms are kind of "meaning flywheels" since they don't have direct correlation to physical things. You spin them up by giving them continuous impulses of examples and then they carry the abstracted sense of meaning in themselves, becoming almost qualia-like. You don't know all the examples anymore you just know more or less what is "just".
This process is an act of mystification; you separate the meaning from the direct examples, and push it into a layer of linguistic abstraction.
Any measurement against those ideas then becomes a engagement with the mystic. You simply know "what is just". Any perception that these things can be rationally defined or deduced is simply the hangover from the older, mystical systems that impelled the original flywheels of meaning.
That's all good and peaceful until two peoples' intuitions collide.
What is the process for reconciliation?
These "nonsense questions" are usually derived from an effort to find a common denominator of things which a society may agree on, beyond its component individuals.
I would assert that it should serve as a memento mori against too much confidence in your priors. And a reminder of the value of Russellian "Hypothetical Sympathy", an encouragement to examine your priors, and see whether you disagree with something because of a glitch in its proof, or a lack of understanding (or a rejection) of the assumptions that it began with.
Yeah, I'm not sure whether they passed it or just never got to it. To be fair I guess, it's not exactly what I would call a productive philosophy, if your goal is "productivity" (by some material definition) and not the act of philosophy in and of itself.
I feel like they looked in the mirror, saw only themselves, and decided what was needed was a better mirror, because there must be something else there.
If you find this subject interesting, the different ways the sort of post-enlightenment intellectual diaspora has begun to try and chase fundamental "meaning" again (after realizing perhaps they could not arrive at it by deduction), and the deeper nature of "religion" beyond the thing your parents used to drag you to on Saturday/Sunday, the author of this piece, Burton, also has a book called Strange Rites.
I've always enjoyed the lighthearted analysis of the Nietzchean "God is Dead" moment as asking:
"Yes, God is Dead. Congratulations; that was the easy part. Now what?".
He had is own answer of course, but, as the characters in this piece have discovered, it's not necessarily an effective one.
edit: ah they mention the book in the postscript of course.
"Man – despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and his many accomplishments – owes his existence to a 6-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."
I'd hesitate to be flippant about the complexities and difficulties in the generation of food, and the market forces that it drives. And I'd certainly hesitate to claim that anyone has "better things to do".
I am reminded of the Mitchell and Webb "Evil Vicars" sketch.
"So, you've thought about eternity for an afternoon, and think you've come to some interesting conclusions?"
Because it reads as relatively naive and a pretty old horse in the debate of sentience
I'm all for villainizing the figureheads of the current generation of this movement. The politics of this sea-change are fascinating and worthy of discussion.
But out-of-hand dismissal of what has been accomplished smacks more to me of lack of awareness of the history of the study of the brain, cognition, language, and computers, than it does of a sound debate position.
I don't think anyone reasonable believes LLMs are right now skynet, nor that they will be tomorrow.
What I feel has changed, and what drives a lot of the fear and anxiety you see, is a sudden perception of possibility, of accessibility.
A lot of us (read: people) are implicit dualists, even if we say otherwise. It seems to be a sticky bias in the human mind (see: the vanishing problem of AI). Indeed, you can see a whole lot of dualism in this thread!
And even if you don't believe that LLMs themselves are "intelligent" (by whatever metric you define that to be...), you can still experience an exposing and unseating of some of the foundations of that dualism.
LLMs may not be a destination, but their unprecedented capabilities open up the potential for a road to something much more humanlike in ways that perhaps did not feel possible before, or at least not possible any time soon.
They are powerful enough to change the priors of one's internal understanding of what can be done and how quickly. Which is an uncomfortable process for those of us experiencing it.
You're right, of course, but that also makes your out-of-hand dismissals based on your own philosophical premises equally invalid.
Until a model of human sentience and awareness is established (note: one of the oldest problems out there alongside the movements of the stars. This is an ancient debate, still open-ended, and nothing anyone is saying in these threads is new), philosophy is all we have and ideas are debated on their merits within that space.
I am glad to see a continuation in the literature of this fascinating and important domain: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/papers/sigbovik2011tom7whatword...
Look I see where you're coming from of course, living in the same culture you do.
But it's always important to remember that people believe their religions. And not just the clergy. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.
They didn't imprison him for astronomy theory. Astronomy was largely not separable from theology. Both Galileo and his judges believed this.
This feels like a pretty modern view of the role of religion in society. For the majority of history I think it would barely be fair to consider a religion's de jure or ab initio "intent" from its de facto actions. Since it is the line to God (in the theistic traditions at least), it is always the most accurate source of its own intents, especially pre-Luther (and really, pre mass literacy).
I guess what I mean to say is I'm not sure any of those you listed had strong philosophical or textual convictions against the counterpoints you provide. And even if they did at given points, that's not enough to judge the overall shape into some particular direction of "corruption"
If anything, I assert that religion is as much reflective of the society it serves, as it is causal. It is one of the primary engines of "True Things" for people, but it also needs to react to new "True Things" from other sources, and integrates them, to provide a more powerful explanatory framework. With some consideration for its own foundational priors and axioms, but even those become malleable given enough social pressure.
So in that light how can we be surprised that modern American incarnations of "Christianity" embrace capitalism as the yardstick for Goodness?
Agreed! I'm testing a hypothesis here through the dialectic, not asserting one!
There are definitely visionaries and prophets and doom-seers in each society; when I talk about societal consensus I'm talking about averages.
Though I'd hesitate to agree that vision === imagination of successors. To my mind, there's a difference between improving the extant, and having a new one. Maybe you can get to the latter by way of the former over time, and that way you get into "Gentle Seduction"[0] territory. But that also kind of amounts to a lack of imagination, and a rejection of endings.
Where is Ursula Le Guin?
Where indeed! Though I haven't given enough of the newer generations of sci fi authors a chance myself, to be fair.
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Yeah I agree completely.
I have been thinking lately about that as a defining feature of science fiction, or I guess speculative fiction more broadly; thought experiments into other "us"es. What it's like to be something else. I don't mean to say that as if it's some novel position, just a particular facet that has been resonating.
The eschatology angle is a super interesting one I hadn't considered. If anything though, especially for the millenarian/apocalyptic flavors, it seems like almost the platonic ideal of being unable to imagine a successor; we are the end, and when we end, the world ends, preserving us forever.
And incidentally, there is still resistance there. "Don't immanentize the eschaton!"
For a longer-form treatment, Patrick Wyman's podcast, Tides of History, has been going through an extended series about prehistory, including the bronze age collapse. It's a lot, and mostly through a particular thinker's lens, but still worthy I think.
Riffing on this, I think an interesting and fundamental phenomenon of societies is exactly their frequent inability to imagine their successors, or even the possibility of a successor. Each seeing themselves as a logical peak of the progressive arrow history, especially post-enlightenment (cf. Fukuyama's (in)famous The End of History[0]).
It seems to boil down to the sort of societal consensus definition of "us" that serves as a foundation for the individual definitions of "me" that comprise a society. It's why societies seem to tend to see their peers and predecessors as lesser as well; they are all their own "us"es, in some ways inaccessible to our "us". They may say the same words, but mean different things. They have the same human equipment for reasoning and synthesis, but a different set of priors from which this calculus manipulates and concludes. They seem dumb because they don't come to the same obvious conclusions we do.
And it seems to motivate conservative behavior, by way of fear. At least we can grapple and argue with our contemporaries, and scorn our predecessors. We know what they think, or at least we think we know what they think, filtered through the lens of what we think. But as a societal consensus starts to shift, and we start seeing new priors appearing, things start to get uncomfortable. We see a glimpse of a future we don't understand; we used to be with "it" but "it" changed[1]. We don't know anymore what the next ones will think. What they will be like.
They will still be humans, but they will be a different us, completely inaccessible to our us.
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[0] I know his philosophy is more a bit more nuanced, but it's such a perfect and unfortunate phrasing, accepted so implicitly and literally.
[1] To quote Grampa Simpson
The big idea is that the first lesson of history, to the point of self-parody, is that, for a given it, it started earlier and it was more complicated.
The obvious, traditional vectors of change throughout history suffer the exact same recursive "but what caused that" loop as any other broad question about the nature of things. God made creation, but who made God? You can either choose an arbitrary place to stop (God is the prime mover) or you can keep recursing, trying to put the first order threads ("A war was waged") into their contexts ("Why wage a war? Wars are expensive and risky. What drove these forces into play?)
When you start to look at the motivating factors that drive the first-order events of textbook history, the scope inevitably becomes larger and fuzzier, as you're dealing with many more variables across many more moments of decision.
It can definitely start to feel very speculative, and it is speculative. But it also provides the framework for more testable hypotheses to be explored. At the very least, it should give pause to anyone who thinks anything is obvious.
All I can think of is a quote from the McSweeney's article elsewhere on the front page right now.
"we are proud to bring the written word into the future with revolutionary technology that delivers the one thing readers are most passionate about: efficiency."
For me at least, postmodern literature isn't just about conveying a message or an idea. It's about conveying a vibe, a state of mind. And that kind of pseudo-telepathy might even require the meandering and the density and the apparent overcomplication to deliver you enough context to align your neurons into something approximating where the author's were at.
I don't think the concern is that the subscription doesn't bring value. Just that it builds no equity. Once the renting agreement ends, you lose all the access you once had, not just access to future things to come.
(edit: I don't know if this is actually true of Final Cut Pro's model)
'With grave joy we, the cosmical explorers, who were already gathered up into the communal mind of our own galaxy, now found ourselves in intimate union with a score of other galactic minds, We, or rather I, now experienced the slow drift of the galaxies much as a man feels the swing of his own limbs. From my score of viewpoints I observed the great snow-storm of many millions of galaxies, streaming and circling, and ever withdrawing farther apart from one another with the relentless "expansion" of space. But though the vastness of space was increasing in relation to the size of galaxies and stars and worlds, to me, with my composite, scattered body, space seemed no bigger than a great vaulted hall.'
- Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
Not much inspires a sense of meaning in me these days like the sheer scope and scale and depth of creation.
Beautiful work.