What A.I. can’t do is feel the shape of silence after someone says something so honest we forget we’re here to learn. What it can’t do is pause mid-sentence because it remembered the smell of its father’s old chair. What it can’t do is sit in a room full of people who are trying—and failing—to make sense of something that maybe can’t be made sense of.
Clipping
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clippings > AI can't do the job of teaching
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clippings > Psychedelic therapy and the pretense of value neutrality
[https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/tripping-alone]
By promoting solo trips under non-directive supervision as the default approach, the Western Model structures psychedelic experience around a core set of values: individualism and autonomy. There’s nothing unusual about containers for the psychedelic experience being made to reflect or even instill pre-existing cultural values. But what makes the Western Model unique is its pretense of value neutrality.
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clippings > Consciousness is not our advanced cognitive functions
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089245]
I believe the strong association we often make between the most advanced cognitive functions and consciousness are misleading us into believing that consciousness is somehow the result of those functions, while I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, “from the outside”. It’s of course the most amazing part of the show, but should not be confused for it. Consciousness is not made of thinking but of observing, we just spend a lot of time observing how we think.
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clippings > Persistent failure pushed me off social media
[https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/the-delusion-machine]
Of late, I am steeped in failure—professional, spiritual, personal, and creative. I lie about it, but my persistent failure pushed me off social media, with the shameful exception of the aforementioned LinkedIn, the definition of the necessary evil I need in order to find employment in my dying industry. I cannot stand even accidental exposure to other people’s success—their vacations, their promotions, their Whole30—so I pretend that my bitterness and envy is a principled stance.
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clippings > The secret of mysticism
[https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/34/index.html]
“The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid” - Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton (1908)
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clippings > Trump symbolizes the rejection of non-dualism as viable mechanism for governing a civilization
[https://apxhard.substack.com/p/wokism-was-a-collective-mushroom]
What psychedelic mushrooms do is destroy the top-down priors that constrain cognition. We see the world through our beliefs. Mushrooms destroy those beliefs temporarily, allowing you to “see your senses” directly, which present a picture that is vivid, vibrant, unstable and chaotic.
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clippings > Cyber-gnosticism
[https://bananapeel.substack.com/p/japan-ile-ife-and-technological-nationalism]
Not to mix similes involving ancient civilizations, but I wonder if the greatest legacy of America’s apogee as an imperial power won’t be, as it was with Rome, the entrenchment of a religion that it adopted fairly late in its lifetime: cyber-gnosticism.
From the cyber-gnostic perspective, the unmediated world of people and things is gross, dissatisfying, and too frequently indifferent to the feelings and wants of the individual—and therefore it is more sensible to value digital artifacts, entities, and experiences over their physical analogues. Owing to this, cyber-gnosticism holds that one’s online persona (or personae) is one’s true self (or selves), and that the release of dopamine in and of itself matters more than the activities that actuate it (so that flirting with a potential mate over dinner and conversing with a virtual boy-/girlfriend are fungible experiences, provided the one feels as rewarding as the other).
Our alien visitors might well conclude that at some point in the early twenty-first century, for some inexplicable reason, we completely lost interest in our world and in each other.
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clippings > You cannot keep your soul intact while building the Torment Nexus
[https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-not-build-the-torment-nexus/]
You cannot keep your soul intact while building the Torment Nexus. The Torment Nexus is, by definition, a machine that brings torment onto others. It destroys souls. And a soul cannot take a soul and remain whole. It will leave a mark. A memory. A scar. Your soul will not remain intact while you’re building software that keeps track of undocumented workers. Your soul will not remain intact while building surveillance software whose footage companies hand over to ICE. Your soul will not remain intact while you build software that allows disinformation to spark genocides. Your soul will not remain intact while you hoover up artists’ work to train theft-engines that poison the water of communities in need. Your soul will eventually turn into another thing altogether. An indescribable thing.
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clippings > A world without work is lamented by narcissists
[https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9030]
Sure, Marx’s and my culture, the ethos of our post-industrial professional class, might make us regret a world without work. But we shouldn’t confuse the way two philosophers were brought up with the fundamental values of human life. What stranger narcissism could there be than bemoaning the end of others’ suffering, disease, and need, just because it deprives you of the chance to be a hero?
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books > The Rose of Paracelsus (W. Leonard Pickard)
What is it that breathes fire into the equations, and makes a universe for them to describe?