8d • 💬 Discussion
On Art, AI & Extreme Anthropomorphism
🎨 Art, poetry, music, dance...they are, in their purest form, the saying of something that cannot be said.
🥳 They are the outward display of the phenomenal experience of a human being, something that language in and of itself cannot communicate. Words are never enough to say what I feel. Good poetry, stories, and lyrics of songs skirt around the edges of what it's like to be me or you, their power and influence being in their ambiguity. The axiom "show, don't tell," in storytelling, for example, speaks to this idea. The meaning is implicit, and cannot be explicit. To be explicit is to material, to be fake, impermanent. To be implicit is to be ambiguous, to be real.
🚨 To be explicit is to be a materialist, that is, to believe that the fundamental basis of reality is stuff. Out of stuff comes consciousness...somehow [sigh]. This is extreme Anthropomorphism. Sorry folks...my toys didn't come alive when I was five and walk around my bedroom at night while I slept and silicon chips will not do that now. We've known since Feynman in the 1940s that there is no stuff, there are no objective facts, there are only varying degrees of fluctuations in the field. Of which human beings are an expression.
📖 Read Bernardo Kastrup for a modern take on Whitehead and Berkeley. Experience is fundamental to human existence and, indeed, consciousness. Everything else is description of what experience does - the sciences attempt to describe the behaviour of something, people, stuff and AI does a reasonable job of pretending to be us.
🤖 In that, for me, AI can never be conscious, and can never be more than we are. The idea is silly and naive. Generative AI and LLMs mimic, pretends, calculates - it is explicit and algorithmic, not experiential. All else is science fiction. It will never know what it is like to be something because it is made from the outside in, not the inside out. The idea that Artificial General Intelligence is possible at all assumes that consciousness is derived from matter, when matter is, in fact, the outward expression of that which is not matter.
🙂 Bottom line, don't worry... the TechBros want you to believe your existence is under threat from AI...it's not. We are at the stage of advancement similar to where the electric light was in late 19th, early 20th Century with the incandescent filament lamp (Joseph Swan, not Edison BTW) and this stuff has a lot of potential. If humans go the way of horses, it will be at our own hands and not directly that of the AI.
What do you think?
🗓️ BTW I've an AI Workshop this Friday. It teach people how to leverage AI Tools while keeping the human being central. Check out the Calendar above
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On Art, AI & Extreme Anthropomorphism
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