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Life In Code: Programming The Posthuman (Patreon)

Published:
2024-08-23 16:34:50
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Hallo. We're just doing a single chapter today, a good timely 2002 essay on artificial intelligence! Right on time for 2024.

Despite this chapter being quite long, I don't have many notes on it, so just a couple Patreon update things and beneath it are a few choice quotes.

{++++|++++}

3 patch notes for Patreon things:

FIRST: here's a refresh on Bookmark Friday (i will post it again thats why i made it so i can just post it again and you can save it on your desktop or something).

SECOND: first Album of the Month thread is up if you want to share thoughts with people over the week! Or just hear new music. This coming Wednesday I'm posting the Movie of the Month thread which is Past Lives directed by Celine Song, so feel free to watch that in advance or pop in sometime next week.

THIRD: Last day of the month we'll do our first monthly Zoom Town Hall Saturday Aug 31st at 4:30pm EST. We can chat latest vids and Book Club and Movie/Album of month and just do Q&A in genera. It will be moderated and will be about 2 hours... I think.

If there's no time for your question itssok bc there will be another next month :]

>>>........_____........<<<

Programming The Post-Human

And here is the underlying motive of robotics: an anti-intellectualism in search of the intellect, a flight from introspection, the desire to banish the horrid muddle of all this "thinking about it," thousands of years of philosophical speculation about what animates us, without notable progress. "You can understand humans either by reverse engineering or through building," said Cynthia Breazeal, a former student of Brooks's. Don't think about it; build it—that's the hope. Equate programming with knowledge. Yet still we circle back to the old confusions, for conceptualization is as deep in our human nature as is tool building. Homo faber wrestles with Homo sapiens. (p. 145)

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How much of our state of being is dependent upon being hungry, eating, having eaten, being full, shitting. Hunger! Our word for everything from nourishment to passionate desire. Satisfied! Meaning everything from well fed to sexually fulfilled to mentally soothed. Shit! Our word for human waste and an expletive of impatience. The more I thought about it, the more I decided that huge swaths of existence would be impenetrable—indescribable, unprogrammable, utterly unable to be represented—to a creature that did not eat or shit. (p. 149)

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Sentience begins with social life, with the ability of two creatures to transact their inner states—needs, desires, motivations, fears, threats, contentment, suffering, what we call "the emotions." (p. 152)

____________//////////////////////////

This is the "magical quality," mutual recognition, the moment when two creatures recognize each other from among all others. (p. 158)

^ & that last bit right there is precisely what John MacMurray is getting at in The Structure of Religious Experience if any of you crazies came to my Toronto show or are doing extracurricular reading.

...

k thats all for me today i have a video i wanna be working on and gotta book more shows also in Baldurs Gate 3 I am finally knocking out these Act III bosses <3 remember to stretch your body, tell someone you love them and pray today

Files

Comments

SkateLouis

Comparing humans to computers in order to unconver the Human Condition™ is so biased and reductive. Like yeah, I could study tractors and what they say about us as a species, as people and as a society but I wouldn't get very far in my understanding of what consciousness is based on that. I don't see why that would be different for computers. You can't look at a banana for thousands of hours and then go "so that's what an apple is!" We treat computers as omnipresent and perfect representations of us, but in reality they are pretty limited. As long as we can't teach a machine it will die, I don't think it will grasp consciousness fully

Chandler Sterling

"Then he said: 'Huh. None of our robots can recognize their own kind.'" (pg. 157) I am continually astounded at how badly people want to believe that the human mind is easy to simulate. I don't know how you can go through every day experiencing the immensely complicated interplay of emotions, social interactions, and bodily functions that make up a day in the human life and think, "Ehh, that's just data." Just because you can quantify something doesn't make it capable of replication. There are more variables at play than you can possibly account for. Quantity and Quality aren't inherently separate, it's just more convenient to think of them that way when we want to pretend that quantity=logical/objective, quality=emotional/subjective. Don't even get me started on the fact that logical/emotional and objective/subjective aren't separate either. It's everything and oneness all the way down. I'm surprised that CAPTCHA didn't make more of an appearance in this chapter given that it's a pretty good example of how computers and humans are actually very different. AI "art" was such a big deal because understanding pictures was always one of the hardest things for a computer to do. You just can't communicate what something is to a computer's bits and bytes if there's any amount of extra noise in the picture. The classic example is a machine learning program that was learning to identify objects in pictures. It could identify a cow 99% of the time, but when it was given a photoshopped picture of a cow in a desert, it just couldn't figure it out. It understands cow not as a specific animal, but as the context of this black and white four legged thing in a field. Take any one piece of that context away and a machine doesn't get it. This isn't a bad thing by the way, it's what machines are SUPPOSED to be good at. We define things for them via code, and they use those definitions to run calculations much quicker than we would be able to. They were designed as a compliment to our strengths and weaknesses, not a substitute for them. "I found myself muttering, 'No that's not right, we're not just mechanisms, you're missing something, there is something else, something more.'" (pg. 134) Analogies are a dangerous game because they're actually very easy to get wrong. When someone says a human mind is LIKE a computer, that can technically be true. There are similarities, and if the point of the analogy is to highlight those similarities, then it is being used well. The slippery slope is keeping in mind that "like" does not mean "equal". "In selecting the computer as the model for human thinking, AI researchers were addressing only one small portion of the mind: rational thought." (pg. 137) Analogies can reduce complexity, but that should be something you are aware of the whole time. Otherwise, you might start to believe the human mind is just a meat computer. It's not. I saw a post out in the wild once that said we should intentionally put a stop to improving hardware for a while. The thinking went like this: When computer science was just starting, we had to be extremely careful and smart about how we used resources. Coding had to be efficient, not just because it was good but because it was the difference between something that would run and something that would overclock your hardware. Now we expect people to read a list of minimum requirements to run your poorly optimized 300 GB video game. The original Doom could run on a potato clock. "But computers are not just chips; they also need the instructions that tell the chips what to do: the software. And there is no Moore's law for software." (pg. 142) It seems like Moore's law isn't really a good thing? It's just a thing, and we assumed in the early years that having more freedom to make complicated, less optimized software would inevitably be good. We just haven't been able to keep up with what this hardware is able to do anymore, and the response has been a general disregard of how close we are to the machine. It's becoming a black box, and while it's not necessarily good or bad to make coding easier and more accessible, it has definitely helped increase the mythologizing of the computer. The more I read about the early adopters of technology like Lanier and Ullman, the more I realize that it's not shocking or prophetic that they saw all of this coming. They were just so close to the machine that they had no choice but to understand what it was doing to people. That was the job. It's only so surprising now because we have taken so many steps back that we assume the machine was always in a shroud of uncertainty. When you have to write assembly to get a program to work, there is no confusion about what this thing is doing to people. You designed it that way. Now you can throw together the work of a hundred different siloed groups, and everyone can claim that they don't understand the whole product. The more complex these projects get, the harder it is to understand how it will affect people. It seems to me that's the real worry at the core of our pushback against tech billionaires in recent years. There is so much more disconnect between them and the machine that we can't trust them to make intentional choices. Some of the biggest names in tech now are as far away from the machine as any other average person. How can we trust them to exercise caution and foresight into something that has gotten so complicated? It's why I was so grateful to see Mark Zuckerberg, one of the tech CEOs who actually knows the machine pretty intimately, say that he doesn't think the brain can be moved to a machine. Say what you want about him, but for a moment there, he sounded like he got it. There are still people out there who know where things are going, and they will continue to warn us. It's just harder to find people close enough to the machine to trust. This chapter gave me hope oddly enough. We've been trying our hands at the AI stuff for a while, and no matter how many times someone makes a snarky analogy to a fish saying nothing can live on dry land, we keep finding out that there is something special about people. "We are not abstract processes; we are not Simon's bodiless artifacts. We do not face survival pressures mindlessly. We know we are not ants. We know we are not code objects. We know we are going to die." (pg. 143) Reading those lines sparked something very religious in me. I am reminded that the body, not the mind, is a temple. As if body and mind were ever separate to begin with. Oneness all the way down. I've started working out consistently these past few months for the first time since high school marching band. It's good, I feel more grateful for my body throughout the day now. Kill the Internet; Take care of your body. It's part of what makes you human.

D.S Films

This was the longest chapter but I ate up every word. I was deep into artificial intelligence, humanity, and consciousness and then suddenly I had finished the chapter. Did not drag one bit. When we started this book, with descriptions of office life and late night beach dates, I was not expecting a long, fulfilling essay about the essence of consciousness and the nature of God, but here we are. I particularly enjoyed this chapter because I felt it connected well thematically with a lot of the philosophy going on here about the importance of others, and reading it filled me with a strong sense of beauty. The combination of the poetry in her writing, and the intelligence of her observations makes for a truly liberating read. This book had me sat staring at the chair next to me for a long, long time, as I thought about what it says about human beings and the society we live in. A computer could never stare at something outside of itself and ask "but what does that say about us?". It also feels like a huge f you to the technocrats, and even sci-fi writers that sound clever when they heighten robots and artificial intelligence as above humans, but are missing a fundamental greatness of life, as Ullman now asks, buts what wrong with shitting?

Hex Diesis

"Sentience is the crest of the body, not its crown. It is integral to the substrate from which it arose, not something that can be taken off and placed elsewhere". -p149 I love little reminders that cartesian dualism is an illusion, and this one is pure poetry.

Xaris _

I will hopefully be caught up by next week. I was excited to participate this summer/fall and bought the book+audio book but then got busy after chapter 1 😭 haha. Things have cooled down now 🙌

Louis-Antoine LeBel

I didn’t write anything for the last two book club threads because I honestly don’t have much to add. I still read other people’s contributions on here, it’s always great. “We drag along inside us the brains of reptiles, the tails of tadpoles, the DNA of fungi and mice; our cells are permuted paramecia; our salty blood is what’s left of our birth in the sea. [...] And who is to say which piece of this history can be excised, separated, deemed “useless” as an essential part of our nature and being?” (p.149-150) Soo good. I really don’t have anything else to say. That’s the problem with this book: its qualities are so self-evident, that you can essentially just point at it and say “wow, so true Ellen Ullman”. It’s fascinating to read the author’s account of the tech industry in the late nineties and early aughts. It’s a pivotal time of mass technological adoption. The blackberry movie is another great piece on this period. Ullman seemingly didn’t work on anything groundbreaking (or maybe she did, but she’s not bringing attention to it), but she was still close to many influential tech figures. This distance is important, as it allows her to be in the middle of emerging technological debates, whilst being detached enough to remain critical of popular ideologies in the tech space. Ullman writes from a really refreshing perspective. It's a wonderful read.

alex

first of all @cj please enjoy your first run of bg3 because i cannot for the life of me move my corporeal form to complete my durge run oml ok also. Important note. this has been my favorite essay so far because it pissed me OFF dog. i am SO heated about this, i am CANTANKEROUS. this is an unhinged and long pseudo manifesto. =Programming the Post-Human= From the excerpt from Thomas Ray: “By separating the property of life that we choose to study from the many other complexities of natural living systems, we make it easier to manipulate and observe the property of interest.” (148) Respectfully, because I know that paper was written in the early 90s: no! That’s not how that fucking works, and it is either absurd or supremely short-sighted for anyone to have held that idea in their heads for any amount of time! To give an example, let’s say I want to know about human digestion. So I just have a stomach. A pristine stomach, just grown out of a petri dish. In observing it digest food, I might come to the conclusion that the only function of the stomach is to act alone in the processing of food by producing acid to break it down, then mixing it up to push it into the small intestine. Solid conclusion, if you’re in seventh grade. But since the stomach isn’t in a human, we don’t observe how 1) the food is already partially broken down by chewing and amylase (in saliva) 2) bacteria not only influence what you eat but also how your food is broken down 3) how gut dysbiosis can lead to a HOST of issue like Crohn’s, IBS, and (probably) whatever causes my regularly scheduled tummy aches 3) the GUT-BRAIN AXIS? because 4) GUT BACTERIA MAKE 95% OF THE SEROTONIN IN THE BODY. Another example is causal pies. Say, for example, a person gets cancer. Why did they get cancer? Well, it could be because of their genetics. That’s their entire causal pie. Another person’s pie might be divided between environmental exposure at their work, and their genetics. And yet another person’s causal pie might be divided between tobacco and exposure to HPV. The point is: there’s no such thing as taking as interconnected and interdependent as life out of context and, to any reasonable or rational degree, studying it. One point my epi III professor always hammered home is that just because something has statistical significance doesn’t mean that it has biological significance - and that’s all that matters. Why do you give a damn about something being significant if it doesn’t impact life, the living, the people whose lives you want to make better? And for that matter, why are you trying to imitate life by taking such a shortcut to imitate it? Earlier in the passage Ray refers to the decision to call something alive based upon some trait relegated exclusively to biotic factors as “semantic[s],” and I hope you read that as “sEmAnTiCs.” Basically, the argument made by the technologists of this time is that you can divorce life from humanity. That we’re just a happy “accident,” which is an awfully easy cognitive trick to get around the whole sentience question (145). While I’m no believer in intelligent design, the idea that the difference between a system of synthetic parts and a human being is arbitrary is reductive. Ridiculous. Borderline insulting, frankly. These arguments do not strike me as philosophical. Computers are not organized in the image of man (135), because if they were, our brains would be beautifully perfect filesystems. While computers might be a good proxy for studying the way man has decided to be productive (136), and perhaps the logical ways it might go about categorizing information, memories, files, folders, programs, etc - it’s not a one-to-one study. Study a human for that, because computers limit the behavior to what is possible on a computer. You’re limited to studying how one uses a computer. How it is able to be developed under the constraints of capitalism. Communication doesn’t just sputter out of nowhere (141), and what makes this doubly insulting is that the research that cells communicate with each other is almost a century old by the time “ALife” pops out. “My private list [of the properties of life] contains only two items: self-replication and open-ended evolution… life must have something to do with functional properties we call adaptive..” (146) Oh, for sure. By this incredibly flexible definition, we can successfully say that computer viruses are arguably alive. No - these arguments strike me as the most contrarian bullshit. They strike me as a teenager trying to weasel out of an argument. They strike me as “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.” Because in this sense, these brilliant people - and they are brilliant, they don’t have to be stupid to be incorrect - so want to see life in their creation that they are willing to bend the definition of “life” until it breaks. They want their Pinocchios to be real boys so bad that they’re willing to call themselves fake. You are not a gadget, goddammit. You are not pristine, beautiful, humming silicon. You are not logical, you are not data singing along cables and electricity dancing across a motherboard. The child you created - your helpmate (131) - is your brainchild, not your child. You. You, however, are not the product of deliberate force towards productivity, calculation, and wealth. You are the product of the hot, churning gasses at the bottom of the ocean. Of ugly protists with pseudopods, of fish and flesh and a natural history. You carry the scars of diseases that killed your ancestors by the millions, you carry the natural instincts of babies that survived their first crucial years. Perhaps your genes have borne the brunt of famine and poverty from only a few generations past. The body keeps the score. It listens - as far back as time is old. But it’s not just the body, which the earth hammered away at until billions of us could be sustained at the same time. It’s the consciousness we share as human beings. The root of us is in our relationship with each other, and that relationship is embodied. “Thinking is not logical and conscious… [it is] metaphorical and mostly unconscious… [t]he source of most of these metaphors is the body itself.” (150) In fact, “[r]eason is not disembodied… [it] arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience… the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our environment.” (150) Why (the hell) else is the reason for thought? “Mammalian life is social and relational… to survive, we need to know our own inner state and those of others, quickly at a glance, deeply. This is the ‘something’ we see in the eyes of another mammalian creature: it looks at us and knows, in its own way, that we have feelings, states, desires that are different from its own.” (151) And how on earth is something made to be logical, to be useful, supposed to be able to do such things without skin in the game? Without a hindbrain, built for regulating our lowest, basest instincts? “Do you have to go to the bathroom and eat to be alive?” (148) Yes! Abundantly yes! How is something without a hindbrain, without a limbic system built for navigating emotions and states and social hierarchy, without a prefrontal cortex built for language and relation and metaphorical thoughts and toolmaking be considered even adjacently alive? The answer - the only answer - is if you’re willing to skirt around the definition of life. If you’re so damn set on seeing something as alive that you’re willing to die yourself.

Stephen Folkerts

My Dad sent me this Hugo Prize Winner for 2024 recently, and I thought it tied in nicely with our reading this week. It was more about algorithms than AI per se, but I thought it subverted the traditional sci-fi story arc in a realistic and inviting way. Very KTI stuff. https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/ You can read it before this comment if you don't want me to partially spoil it, but basically I was enamored with the way that an algorithm designed for happiness is just nudging us in the direction of basic, obvious things-- connecting people through accountability and real meet-ups and spaces. If we create intelligence, the point of it would be for it to connect to us, and for it to help us connect to others. I listen to some Deleuzian people on podcasts who are critical of the "humanist" positions, and I get that there are attempts to broaden definitions of what constitutes a body, or maybe its true that being "human" is not the greatest thing, or that we could broaden our scopes on what human could be via new modes of thinking (difference in repetition and all that, idk someone prbly knows better than me). It might be reductive to describe these positions as asserting humans are "a bunch of tricks"-- at least the ones with strong philosophical grounding. But yeah, something about it just doesn't feel right- ill have to investigate why. It's a religious impulse, probably, but one that Ullman describes very well. I don't think there is any way to get rid of the intense genetic, affective history that comprises our bodies and the way we exist.

azalea water

I didn't expect to stumble face first into the question of consciousness. ---------------------------------------- I can’t remember where I read it, but there’s a history of humans comparing ourselves to the machines we just created. From clockwork, to steampower to computers, we are always trying to understand ourselves with the analogy of our own creations. This is a fundamental mistake in our logic. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there’s that line about how – since Aristotle – we’ve misplaced our trust in our minds and objectivity over the raw emotions that make us human. And Herbert Simon makes that mistake when he talks about humans as computers. “The computer is a member of an important family of artifacts called symbol systems … Another important member of the family (some of us think, anthropomorphically, it is the most important) is the human mind and brain.” - (page 138, quoting Herbert Simons) This is the plague of rationalism – that Cartesian understanding of ourselves that strips humans of our humanity and place in the world. That idea has spread into every science you can think of, from linguistics to geography, there is a ploy towards objectivity that robs life of beautiful, human errors. “This circular idea—the mind is like a computer; study the computer to learn about the mind—has infected decades of thinking in the computer and cognitive sciences” - (page 140) And with code, we see it time and time again: this idea that computers are perfect, rational machines that will continue to improve and, eventually, surpass us. This ignores that humans are the ones that go in and fix the code, write the articles that train LLMs, and create the hardware that lets computers function in the first place. “Computers are not just chips; they also need the instructions that tell the chips what to do: the software. And there is no Moore’s Law for software. On the contrary, as systems increase in complexity, it becomes harder—very much harder—to write reliable code” - (page 145) This is where Ullman comforts me. She has a beautiful understanding of our sentience and minds, that it “is the crest of the body, not its crown.” (page 152) She understands that the most fundamentally human thing in the world is interaction, be that with the world around us or the creatures that span our globe. “This is the “something” we see in the eyes of another mammalian creature: it looks at us and knows, in its own way, that we have feelings, states, desires that are different from its own” - (page 154) That’s empiricism. That’s John Dewey’s understanding of art and experience, George Berkey’s famous adage that “to exist is to be perceived.” Maybe one day, months or decades into the future, we’ll have sentient AI that’s able to connect with humans. We don’t know what the limits of AI are. But there will be no sentient robots if they cannot recognise their own kind.

Leo V.

[disclaimer: just found out how to cite accurate page numbers! I’ve had to read this on an iPad with variable text sizes! Oops!] Nearly at the end of this chapter I immediately realised an argument I wanted to build based on these ideas, and then in a beautiful twist of dramatic irony, Ullman came to a very similar conclusion. This is what Stephen King meant when he talked about writing being telepathy: 20 years of subconscious history suddenly finding a meeting point. Art fucking rules. I still think the idea is complementary, so here — an add-on to the hypothesis of sentience as recognition: I have a friend who regularly brings up beautiful ideas. She’s an animation director who loves details, and some of her past bangers have included a preference for micro-expressions over big swathes of movement, and the thesis “hands are as expressive as faces, and have just as many micro-expressions”. At one point she said this: “the first thing we know to do when we’re born is to Call for Help”. Calling for help. Crying and screaming. Machines don’t ask for help as their first action. They ask for What To Do. They can’t call for help unless they’ve already been told what to do. “I can’t do what you told me to do, because there is an obstacle in the way. Please help me achieve my goal by removing that obstacle.” One is a request for service and care. The other is the service itself. The communication of requests and mutual exchanges of care is vital to progress. Our survival is not isolated into just navigating an environment, and the service we provide to others exists because of a social contract: what we owe to each other. In short, to request care, and to react to that request. “But an infant’s need for attention is not simply a “game.” There is a true, internal reality that precedes the child’s interchange with an adult, an actual inner state that is being communicated. An infant’s need for a mother’s care is dire, a physical imperative, a question of life or death.” (p. 156) Internality and the recognition of it was the bigger nesting doll I was missing here. Whether that’s your own or someone else’s. Presence as sentience. * * * While the recognition of your Self isn't mentioned as much here as I thought it might be, I'll add this fun piece on how elephants were proven to be able to recognise their own bodies in the mirror, since it also touches briefly on the importance of social recognition: https://youtu.be/-EjukzL-bJc?t=50 Interesting that magpies have also passed the mark test — not a mammal, as described by Ullman. But the study was published a few years after her essay: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202 I nearly forgot about one of my favourites! Not about recognition of the Self, but about the communication of requests of care! Rats will rescue their cage mates from a trap, overcoming their own fear. I’d forgotten all about the wonderful details from further experiments: https://youtu.be/nyolz2Qf1ms?feature=shared

Just Connor

well this was not something i was expecting but i really liked it. it kinda felt like YANAG but better? maybe not better necessarily but more of what i was hoping YANAG to be. “This circular idea—the mind is like a computer; study the computer to learn about the mind—has infected decades of thinking in the computer and cognitive sciences.” this chapter really captures a true sense of life and humanity in a way that is very not mystical. normally when i think about ai i will jump to mysticality because i believe a lot of it and it is the answer for me personally, but i’m really glad, thanks to this chapter, to have sciency intellectual arguments to also back myself up and make me more well rounded. it’s not like i didn’t have some arguments before, or that i thought i was intellectually wrongs, but i was just personally quite satisfied giving mystical qualities to life and specifically intelligent human life. “And here is the underlying motive of robotics: an anti-intellectualism in search of the intellect, a flight from introspection, the desire to banish the horrid muddle of all this “thinking about it,” thousands of years of philosophical speculation about what animates us, without notable progress.” THANK YOU. the people who just think it’s cool and shit and want to see robots and sentient ai cause their into sci fi movies really annoy me. i get it, but also they aren’t engaging with the actual questions of philosophy. “What these views of human sentience have in common, and why they fail to describe us, is a certain disdain for the body” “In this sense, artificial-life researchers are as body-loathing as any medieval theologian.” YES. it’s crazy the amount of people who talk about uploading brains to computers and stuff without like actually discussing what it means to be alive without a body. the amount of duality involved with thinking that the mind and body are that divided, to where you can just upload your brain is insane. if you can’t shit or eat ur not alive haha. i really enjoyed this chapter

valentin

Late to this post because I am on a counselor summer camp. I will be messy and imprecise with my words. Again, because I am on summer camp. "[...] the post humans thoughts would not be limited by the slow speed of our own nervous systems. Unhampered by the messy wet chemistry of carbon based life." Are we not already doing this? Speed blasting scattered information into our brains at record speeds. Connecting with humans everywhere. Are we post-human right now? Were we ever human? The tools we make have molded us for centuries. We use so many objects as extensions of our cognition. We learned to fly. To scale mountains. I find the idea of the post-human kind of silly because it pressuposes some moment at which technology will finally free us from our fleshy prisons. We have lived with technology forever, we should focus on making it good instead of advancing it to some kind of arbitrary level in order to not be human anymore?!? As if being human ever meant to not use OBJECTS? ---- "From where I was sitting, high up in the balcony, the scene reminded me of nothing so much as those paintings of early medical dissections." I rewatched poor things recently. The dissection scenes in that movie are what I pictured when reading this. Just want you guys to know. I've been thinking about poor things a lot. What a movie. Curious to hear from you guys if you have any thoughts on that movie. Especially non-men, Post-men or whoever. Feel like my man-ness might allow me to look past some of the complicated feelings some folks had when watching that film. --+-- "It was soon clear that, in a secular society that had given up on the idea of God, we would be looking elsewhere for the answer to the question of what animates us; and that "elsewhere" would be the study of cybernetic intelligence, the engine of postmodern philosophical speculation." 42. Hitchhikers guide is a bottomless resource when it comes to random passages that weirdly line up with philosophical debates/ideas that come up in my life. What a guy. Douglas Adams I mean. ---- What does promulgated mean. You English people really do just make up words sometimes. ----_- "Natural objects have the authority of exustence, he say; the laws of nature determine what must be." "The engineer and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be---" Some scrumptious thoughts and ideas on the nature (haha) of design. Really interesting as the nature/technology split is something that has made me think for a while. -- That's all. Gotta get back to bossing kids around in order to give them the best experience possible.

Lucas Regis

30 pages straight of computer scientists trying to create the torment nexus from best-selling science fiction novel "Don't Create The Torment Nexus." irl people ask me all the time why I dropped such a promising field as computer science. This kinda shit is why. So tired of these people's bullshit jfc

BethiePage42

This chapter reminded me of my college dorm in the late 90s: Philosophy majors vs psych majors arguing for hours about AI. Although still mostly hypothetical at that point, we constantly argued over whether we could recreate what we don't understand in the first place. I feel like I'm finally understanding the bone of Ullman contentious relationship with tech. If the code was written by people willing to give up the human experience to be close to the machine, AI was created by people who who don't revere consciousness.... All of this striving toward rationality when the great joys of life are in the irrational. As a psych major, I can tell you this about the brain...they are made practically blank. You get a breathing instinct and a suckling instinct shortly before birth, but everything else is built by input. Any baby can be dropped in any country and learn their language. They are mostly protein/chemical building machines that release transmitter to reflect the encounters. Tiger? Here's some adrenaline. Joy? Here's some seratonin. Over time each brain is custom built to its own specific environment through choices and attention. Whereas AI is the opposite. All trained up for you with a ton of stimulus that may have nothing to do with the user's environment or choices

Christine Guzman

Read this chapter slowly, Ullman writes so beautifully. I literally stopped and cried at this: "except for the realm of insects, the whole history of life on earth is inscribed within our bodies." (149/150). There was a quote I had seen that said something along the lines of "we are the universe trying to experience (or notice) itself." We are evolution, we are the most advanced technology in the planet. Somewhere in this search to understand ourselves we lost the plot. "Evolution is predicated upon the dire human need to survive and reproduce" (143) Computers have no motivations. I'm inclined to think that the reason people have forgotten this is because there has been such a "mechanization" of humans since slavery, and the industrial age that followed. Humans as tools of production. Humans as units of labor in production. WE ARE MORE THAN OUR LABOR, more than writing a fucking email. As I read this book, I'm both vindicated and scared. All the things Ullman predicted are happening right now. But not enough people see the problem, blinded by the same force: number go up. Or maybe is the dream of corporations to not have to hire any labor. Is AI going to shop for their useless products? I'm glad to be reading this book with a community of people being critical of tech. Makes me feel somewhat hopeful. <3

Silver

Am a bit late this time around as i didnt really feel motivated to write much about this chapter. Also i didn't have many thoughts while reading instead just appreciating her beautiful prose and her articulating everything that's on our collective mind in this book club. The fallacies of the devision of mind and body for instance. was reminded of ZMM fairly regularly with its classical/romantic devide with Phaedrus being a very classical person. In this chapter i found even more reason for why i find the romantic side of the equation so much more rewarding. (also i promise i will get back to ZMM, i find that i can't read more than one book at a time, also school is doing its usual) "*Homo faber* wrestles with *Homo sapiens*." (p. 145) i needed this. this whole anti-intellectualism section was very much something that was in the back of my head for quite some time now which i didnt know was there and had no path to until now. also i had the other side, the way in which Homo Sapiens can have an inferiority complex about homo faber and antagonizes the other for a long long time and now i have the other side of that coin as well. so yay anyway thats it for now until friday

phil e the theyby

Today was a garbage day in a lot of ways, but I read this chapter earlier and I have a minute to comment on it now, and maybe that will shake the mood a bit. This chapter was profound as fuck. Ullman does an incredible job in grounding our embodiment as the core of human experience. It’s kind of remarkable that our embodied emotions are the core of everything (even the disciples of the gospel of rationality lean in so hard on what they believe because they have an embodied negative emotional reaction to things that contradict it), but that so much of the history of philosophy and Western thought (though not necessarily exclusively Western) so adamantly denies the significance of embodied experience. Mutual recognition feels like it carries a similar irony. As I see it, anyone who’s really attached to the (typically masculine) ideal of being autonomous and independent also tends to be really attached to other people thinking of them as independent. They care that they’re differentiated from those weak people who rely on others. The need to be seen by others is so core to who we are, even people who define themselves through NOT having that need tend to betray how strong the need is in their attempts to do so. I had never considered that aspect of how much time we spend in things related to the body. That shit (pun intended) was fucking real, and it’s 100% something I’m going to remember and share with other people. We all need to recognize just how important our relationship to embodied experience is to being alive. Also I don’t know y’all, but I really care about y’all as humans. Just wanted to put that out there.

halley

this one is just. so much. i'm intimidated by the questions and how much I have to say. I love contemplating the mysteries of consciousness. I feel like I was getting worked up and wanting to argue with much of the things laid out in the first part but by the end Ullman had so thoroughly and gracefully countered these myths and with such reverence for life that I thought maybe I didn't have anything else worth adding. and then I reread/revisited my notes... I kept coming back to questions of: why? why go to such lengths to make this sci-fi nightmare into reality? can't we marvel at the ingenuity of our computational creations without being reductive to humanity, and biological life itself? I wonder if it has to do with engineers having some kind of god complex, of being so enamored by their abilities to understand and create far beyond most others that they overestimate/overstate their own abilities and importance (thinking about stockton rush/oceangate and musk/mars specifically..) "the hope was to turn sentience into a problem not of philosophy but of engineering." but what authority do these tech guys have to speak on matters of the soul? the spirit? the human condition? it seems to be the hubris of unprecedented wealth and material success conferring some undeserved power of influence. and why are they so disturbed by this failure to produce something like awareness in their machines? could it be driven by loneliness, of wanting to also be seen by their creations? of being too close to their machine? why not be satisfied with the unique accomplishments and capabilities of what their field does best? why the need to reduce life to 'machines whose components are biochemicals'? could this be a reflection of how exploitative systems have eroded conceptions of humanity, as labor machines to be programmed? (reflecting on @Christine Guzman's comment, re: the mechanization of humans since slavery) "we are not abstract processes... we do not have survival pressures mindlessly... we know we are going to die. they do not tell us what we are." the leap it takes to think that enough data and technology could tell us what we are and crack open the mysteries of life is mind-boggling to me. If anything, what it can show is a reflection of humanity in our co-creation with our creations. our impending death is a key part of what makes us alive, what it means to be alive: to not be dead. looking for life, for answers about life, to create life, in machines that do not die might indicate some desire to escape death- to find an alternative, a way of living without dying - but death is as crucial to any understanding of living as is eating and shitting. inputs and outputs. being in relation to the world. innana and dumuzid. trying to bypass this feels very death instinct to me- denying the whole truth of what living is, schemes to avoid the bravery of facing it. the ways the people in this chapter try to conceptualize intelligence felt very fragmented- thinking that by understanding the parts, one can build an understanding of the whole. maybe this was all necessary, to ask the questions and put in the effort just to prove this theory of mechanical data-driven human intelligence as false, to show these fears of sentient robots are unfounded/unattainable. but somehow, the story is too good, and the myth persists. what has emerged from the exponentially increasing computational power and data inputs is not sentience, but systems better able to fool us into an illusion of sentience, of humans behind the mask of programs- turing tests around every corner, infiltrating social media feeds and news sources. no wonder we're all starved for truth and confused by what that even is anymore. "the whole project of robotics is predicated upon the belief that sentience is separable from its original substrate." its this ridiculous notion that life can exist without being in relation with a world- art without an artist, a futile attempt to find or create life by severing the relationship that is life itself. it's disdain for the body, suspicion of the flesh- "to believe in the separation of mind and matter, spirit and flesh, body and soul". and I just love her refutation of all of this. "as if these messy experiences... these deep biological imperatives... were not the foundation, indeed, the source of intelligence; as if intelligence were not simply one of the many strategies that evolved to serve the creatural striving for life." it's satisfying, wholesome, and feels in conversation with Kimmerer in ways that I love and wasn't expecting when I picked up this book. thinking about the hunger, this insatiable craving for more, and a line from the song 'crane your neck' by lady lamb came to mind. it's a great song, look it up if you want, I'm sure you'll know which part I mean. I think her theory on sentience as a property of mammalian life is intriguing, though I gotta admit it made me a little sad to hear her talk about reptiles as 'robotic' and lacking in emotions and an 'essential spark of life' :( I'm pretty sure my gecko and tortoises at the very least recognize me, even if it may not something that can be called 'love' from their side. it took time to cultivate that bond and now they come to me when they sense my presence and let me pet them despite their guarded natures. it's a special experience to care for and feel seen by a creature so different. the name of the robot 'kismet' stuck out to me and I've been pondering why that name was chosen and what it could mean. in Bulgarian it translates to simply luck but in Turkish it is harder to translate, meaning something more like fortune or fate or destiny. the suffering this robot was programmed to display reminded me of the artwork "can't help myself" by sun yuan and peng yu, in which a robotic arm is programmed to sweep its increasingly leaking hydraulic fluid back into itself until it eventually 'dies'. (I encourage you to just search for a picture or video of it) though I don't think a creature without flesh or awareness really 'suffers', it is interesting how this evokes such strong emotional reactions in us who do. "their task in stimulating a self-identifying sentient creature would be like trying to stimulate a hurricane...and that's what human sentience is: a hurricane- too complex to understand fully by rational means, something you observe, marvel at, fear with a sense of awe, what finally we give up and call 'an act of god'."

benedict.m

popping back in with a small critique: why does Ullman draw a line around mammalian life? she says that what makes "mammals different from other animals is...the limbic system" which allows us to "read the interior state of others of our kind" <151>. I'm sure she's right about the uniqueness of the limbic system--I don't know enough about biology to dispute that--but I don't think she's right that the quality of recognition, of seeing "something" in the eyes of another, is unique to mammals. crows can recognize and befriend humans; my friend's pet tortoise recognizes him from across the yard and runs to him through the grass; even pet jumping spiders recognize and become attached to their owners. granted, maybe these things weren't common knowledge in 2002, I don't know. but the choice to place sentience squarely in the box of mammalian life seems a little short-sighted to me. it's a bit of an easy answer: she broadened the definition of sentience & recognition beyond humans, but didn't broaden it enough. for whatever reason, Ullman still felt she had to place a limit on it. maybe just to feel confident making any strong claims about sentience; maybe people wouldn't listen to her if she claimed a wider or fuzzier boundary. but I think this easier answer of sentience being a mammalian quality risks erasing other intelligences and some of the complexity of our interactions with other forms of life. it's a bit like Lanier's "circles of empathy." do you have to place a line around the organisms you're willing to identify with? if so, where do you place it? what do you risk erasing / devaluing / ignoring based on that placement? the fuzzy truth, to me, is that humans can recognize and empathize and identify with anything. and many animals that aren't mammals can do the same with us. I don't know if I'm comfortable placing a hard line anywhere. maybe that's impractical, but I'd rather be impractical than miss out on other forms of life, recognition and intelligence.

capybyara

Currently catching up! I didn't have too much to say about the last few chapters, they were interesting to me but didn't move anything in me, so to speak. HOWEVER. Man, this one got me good. I *know* we aren't machines, this is not the first time I've thought about this or read about this or talked about this and the conclusion has always been that there is something special about the human experience. And yet. "Even if I could not quite get myself to believe in God or the soul or the Tao, still, as I sat there high in the balcony of the Stanford lecture hall, listening to the cyberneticists’ claims to be on the path toward creating a sentient being, I found myself muttering, “No, that’s not right, we’re not just mechanisms, you’re missing something, there is something else, something more.” And then I had to ask myself: What else could there be?" This paragraph freaked me out, because I, too, didn't have an answer, and that made me feel stupid and small. As she went to explain the three different answers cybernetics came up with when asked what humans are, I got increasingly nauseous. Upon reading her rebuttal, I felt so damn relieved. Also, the idea of the physical body being necessary for sentience is extremely interesting to me (I loved the chair example as well). I learned a lot about the role of the physical body in performance when I did theatre studies. Owen G. Parry wrote an article on "fictional realness" in 2015 in which he talked about how realness in a performance (as opposed to acting something out) gave the audience an experience that sole words could never achieve. Experiencing something real instead of something trying to pose as reality will hit home closer, he essentially said. It will evoke a different kind of (and arguably stronger) emotional reaction. And that experience of a real thing can only be experienced through a body that can in turn have that emotional response. Hence, performance art (like what Marina Abramovich does) creates a whole different experience for an audience than watching a staged play. I think performance art is interesting in relation to this chapter anyway. In 2008, Erika Fischer-Lichte wrote about the participation of the audience within performance art. Marina Abramovich has on lots of occasion expressed some kind of self-harm during a performance. One of her pieces included her cutting a pentagram into her stomach and then laying down on blocks of ice with a fan on the ceiling blowing cold air down on her. The response of the audience is just as important and just as real as her actions during this piece. The nausea an audience member may feel upon seeing blood, the growing concern for her safety and the eventual intervening in order to save her life. All of this correlates to this recognizing of our own kind, I think. We empathize with the pain she may be feeling. We worry for this person that we barely know, but recognize as one of our own. And though initially no one wants to be the first to intervene since crowds are powerful and scary, eventually someone did make the decision. They decide to be an individual, which a programmed thing could not. Anyway. Thought that was interesting. I love performance art and this chapter was very moving.

reva

i love ullman's dedication to the body and physical existence. i've felt this throughout the book and it comes out a lot in this chapter, her instinct that abstracting intelligence and consciousness into discrete bytes of data is missing something fundamental. i think it's interesting that she's spent her whole life doing programming and is clearly quite good at it, and at the same time her beliefs about computers and human nature are the opposite of a typical programmer's beliefs about those things. i feel the same way about certain things in my life as well. sometimes you have a deep relationship with something and spend years dedicated to it, and that experience shapes beliefs within you that fundamentally oppose the experience you had. ullman had to spend years outside of time working for a tech startup to realize that that wasn't living. that's all i'll say for this chapter, i am speeding to catch up!

sepha

This chapter. It very much put into words what i deeply intuitively understood. It was so real. I could get into every part of it that was real but it’s already been discussed. I want to navel gaze for a minute. I may be showing my ass a little here as a silly stem kid who doesn’t read enough philosophy but the continuous assertion that there’s more to life and sentience than whatever those nerds at MIT can come up with without ever reading for pleasure even once in their lives, was momentous…or it would’ve been moreso, if I hadn’t watched Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos already. But it was still really good. Probably the only people who have said it in actual words that I’ve read have been first CJ and then Ms. Ullman. The whole narrative of there being more to life than acting like robots probably (I wasn’t alive then) used to be taken for granted—but by the time I first gained sentience, around 2008 (NOT when I was born), humans fully acted like robots. Or at least, that was the goal in the ideal STEM narrative. When they played those “do STEM!” videos in class, they showed things like the simulated bunny robot. If you pursued math and science, eventually you would arrive at the bunny robot, chasing a simulacrum of humanity that you may or may not have actually experienced, you shut-in nerd. Anyway some way or another, I did it. I got that golden ticket into the world of tech. But the whole time, and especially while interacting with the world of wannabe entrepreneur computer science (via cheating because they didn’t actually understand the beauty of real computer science) dual degree startup jerkoffs, I was like THESE PEOPLE SUCK!!! But I didn’t really have the words for why. Well actually I tried to write about it, and the attempt was pretty good for a college freshman on a deadline. But the conversation in my brain has moved forward by a lot due to BBVSJB and Life In Code so I’m taking some time to think. I call it a “dreaming period” <3. That was a lot of words to say that for a certain type of person that includes me, at some point this stuff is…new. For those of us who were born into the post-internet world, it’s almost like we have to relearn how to be a person. Some of us never do. It’s sad.

Lou Corben

Hello!! I’m finally catching up after a bonkers couple of months… I just finished the book and don’t have a lot to say so just going to read everyone’s comments and maybe share just a quote or two I enjoyed from each chapter “They were, in essence, attempting a simulation of the neocortex - rule-based, conscious thinking - declaring that to be the essence of intelligence.” I think that really just sums it all up doesn’t it? This chapter and certain parts of YANAG.

yennik arual

the post-human today is the hyperreal ghost of you / an in-depth collage of traces to your personality. i am the nasayer and fish to hofstadter's question "will spiritual robots replace humanity by 2100?" but (or especially because) 'spiritual' is an interesting distinction for him to make. if humans were to die out before technology, our online ghosts will simply continue to remain evident rather than 'live' in the same way we do in our day to day. unless someone programs an ai based on all your recorded interactions online to simulate you, but i guess that's what the panel ullman attended was supposed to be about. <<^vv^>> among other ideas to conceptualise 'human-ness' or "specialness", i drew the parallel between how we treat the limbic system and the theory of mind (tom). tom gets a bad rap because it has been utilised problematically in the past, and since nobody had mentioned it just yet, i'd like to fill the gap. shahaeian et al. (2011) argued that children raised in collectivist cultures develop tom later than those socialised by individualism. the paper has been used to affront/give reason to ignore coll. cultures for studies in psychology and language acquisition study, among other fields. it has also been used to dehumanise autistic people, which was only thoroughly interrogated as recently as 2019. if this interests anyone further, a good place to start is the general wiki page for tom. it has some good summations of its presence in academic malpractice (and social consequences of perfectly fine studies too). >>v^^v<< i like the pragmatism in dreyfus' quote (155?). "what makes an object a chair is its function, and what makes possible its role as equipment for sitting is its place in the total practical context. this supposes facts about human beings (fatigue, the way the body bends)." in my semiotics lecture the other day the professor used a chair as an offhand example of a sign. the chair itself is the sign and we receive the data (its shape as read through light reflecting off of it etc.) as signifying *what we know* as a chair. our current (prototypical?) conception of a chair "would not be equipment for sitting if our knees bent back like flamingos, or if we had no tables, as in traditional japan or the australian bush", for if this (traditional japan's/the australian bush' conception) was indeed our own subjective truth, what we conceive as a chair would be different. we could still conceive it, it is just that the sign would not be the same. there may be a cultural context where would simply not think of a chair at all. this relates to exemplar theory, where the semantic and phenomenological 'facts' of x object are based on our experience (taught or immediately embodied) of the object, and so forms a prototype. ullman then lists example of experiences that may mould or are additive to the exemplar. a robot knows a leather couch is smooth because it was programmed to. it will just simulate the performed response to leather's smoothness. we know leather is smooth because we can feel it so. it is a characteristic that determines it distinct from other kinds of chairs. it is a characteristic that can be applied to experience other objects. cue hurricane analogy at the end of the chapter.