You joke, Johan, but you're heads and shoulders above most other contemporary philosophers our age.
I've been in Manhattan the past few months, walking the streets and going to restaurants, attending concerts and whatnot, and I hear and overhear conversations and they sound to me like some form of AI or spoken texts messages at best. The speech patterns themselves are becoming robotic. As for the thought patterns of these up and coming generations, who have never known life without a screen in their hands, I'm left with wild guesses. Is this really the end of empirical and theoretical knowledge, along with any historical perspective, or is it already well on its way? I can't say that I really worry about it, but sometimes I do marvel at it, breathlessly.
You mention novelists and I have attended a few literary events. One I guess you could consider rather high brow, with some ivy leaguers, where one guy read a chapter from his recently self-published debut novel. And it was excellent. Really raw, honest writing. But then he gave the synopsis and mentioned something about vampires or zombies coming into it and it was so disappointing. Because this guy has the potential.
As for AI in the universities, I'll take a radical stance here, I don't think it really matters. For all the hype and prize of Diversity, superficial diversity of course: race, gender, sexuality; any actual diversity, of thought, opinion, perspective, intellectual influences, experiences, that are not filtered through "the proper channels", is nil. The universality is already damn near complete. AI can simply be the icing on the cake.
When I think of most of the writing today, whether it's novels or poetry or essays or philosophy, it reads as though it was written in between guidelines. And the writer's backgrounds are almost universally the same: upper-middle to upper class, university educated, similar life experiences. And it's obvious to show. No more Genet's writing from their prison cells. Or Henry Miller or Bukowski trudging along in the grueling work-a-day world, reading and honing their craft in their spare time.
I still have hope here though. Every so often I'll find a name and read their works and want to sing both from the rooftops.
Thanks for the kind words. I don't think I am, and I'm fully aware I'm at best mediocre, and often lazy and cowardly, even though I sometimes can string an argument together. But the fact that you think I make the cut probably says more about the sorry state of our culture in general than anything else.
"The universality is already damn near complete. AI can simply be the icing on the cake.
When I think of most of the writing today, whether it's novels or poetry or essays or philosophy, it reads as though it was written in between guidelines ..."
Huh. I think you're right. Even though I'm sure the AI tech will synergize with this and kind of supercharge it, the foundations are very much in place already.
And yes. It's a script. "Authors" go to fucking schools to learn how to write novels, and they produce commercial products.
We desperately need an entirely new kind of university (as John and AR have been talking about for years). Funding is totally fucked up and undermines the whole enterprise in terms of a search for knowledge; dissemination and publication is a lethal joke, and it's current role and function in society breeds corruption and nepotism.
We need new grass-roots funding structures, we need new ways of dissemination and crediting that perhaps need to do away with the "paper" as medium, we need to do away with credentialism, we need to open up the methodology, and we need to separate science from capital and the state. Easier said than done lol
We are again talking about the same thing (my last blog post) -- this inability to think. Certainly institutional learning is anti thought. Even most podcasts I know are reports or author interviews. Very little thinking goes on. Formats have been shaped (from mostly economic forces I think, though not entirely at all) to discourage thinking. Most people, even relatively smart ones, can barely recognise thinking. Everything is a collation of data -- of facts, or pseudo facts, and often this is called materialism. There is an enormous hostility to culture overall. Dennis' piece on castaneda was excellent and got me thinking on those books for the first time in a long while. They are not at all stupid. That's what is unnerving in a sense. Back in the 70s in So Cal the rumours about casteneda were endless. It did sort of inch toward something cultish. But they resonated for a reason. -- I do think there are young thinkers out there, maybe even a lot of them, but as you note, their potential to grow is limited. Same for artists. And this becomes a question i return to again and again, the audience, the culture, the context. Who goes to serious theatre or music or reads difficult material? Not a lot. There is no relationship anymore between society and its thinkers or artists. One is out on the fringe, in the cold, and alone.
Heh, yeah, we seem to be thematically synchronized even more than you’d expect from us just dealing with and trying to figure out the same subject material. I haven't yet gotten to your last post but I'll make sure to comment -- I think this inability to think (in some form or other) is absolutely crucial to this historical moment, and in a sense the fundamental problem of modern mass society as such.
And I think what you're saying here is spot on. The indirect impact of the technological structure and of the social organizations have conspired to undermine thinking as such -- not necessarily directly or intentionally, but that's the aggregate effect of everything from the prison and the school as institutions to the ironically named smartphone as a technology.
And we're talking about is not the absence of "cognitive processing" or however the techno-corporate lingo would describe it -- but the absence of complex, nuanced thinking, of the ability to reflect from a position of tranquility and to really discern with full intention and an embodied understanding that involves emotion, reason and ethical judgement.
And even clever people today seem to settle for a kind of superficial complexity, a pseudo-nuanced kind of simulacrum of real information which is perfectly exemplified by these superficial "options" that genAI output gives you (and which is increasingly the stylistic and epistemic basis of ALL STUDENTS' OUTPUT). Post a complex question as a prompt, and you get four hackneyed, half-thought "options" that all point towards the same predetermined result which is just the reproduction of the dominant ideologies.
It's like they think it's nuance, but what you actually get is 8 TV channels with the same kind of garbage
That's exactly what I and Dennis observed as well, that Castaneda resonated with people in spite of everything else, that there was something real there, some truth that at least seemed to be important
I want to add, aside from completely agreeing that this inability is historically crucial and essential -- is that I think it has occurred over time in phases. But crazy as it might sound, the most recent threshold, or phase, seems to have coincided with the advent of AI on major social media platforms. Just in my personal experience, it feels as if something happened just over the last couple years. I find nobody seems able to follow simple directions, mail is sent to the wrong address, the pharmacy orders the wrong medicine...these small easy to fix errors are now an everyday occurrence, and it feels as if this is a sort of prelude to a genuine cognitive tipping point.- Now even as I write this I know it sounds crazy. I get that. But its also a bit crazy to think these AI programs are NOT having an effect. And your point is correct regards the distinction between genuine deep organic thought -- and just the calculative efforts in a very narrowly prescribed area. That, obviously, people, or some, can still do. But philosophizing (if you will) feels forgotten. As I say i dont know that many can identify it even.
I could not agree with you more here, John. And when it comes to that collation of data, there is an almost complete unwillingness to entertain any thought that does not concur with said facts, pseudo-facts, etc. And if you start to question the how and why these "facts" were concluded, you become the fool in most eyes. It borders on religious beliefs.
I don't think AI is going to cause people to be brain dead.
I grew up in a time where calculators were thought to take away the ability to do math.
Teachers thought that the ability to manually do square roots was something super important that we would lose.
Same with books. Our high school and college course loads were heavy and many like me relied on summaries in order to get the gist of what the writers were saying. I hate to say it, but some of the authors that we idolize are the soap opera writers of their time.
AI summarization is a helpful tool in order to lay out the book just like we did in order to keep up with ridiculous course loads.
As for philosophers of this time challenging the current times, Iain McGilchrist's book The Matter with Things explains the issue of society where the left hemisphere has dominated, leading us to believe in nonsense.
I have hope in that now they promote space travel, genetic engineering, and problematic vaccines people are seeing how they can't even address the problems at home.
Without the "affluence" afforded to previous generations, the predator class has a harder time selling their vaporware pipe dreams.
That group must've gotten their name Demon & Eleven Children from an album by the band Blues Creation, who were a Japanese proto-metal group back in the 70s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDt4DCRMdec
That's a really nice piece of writing. I also like the way you differentiated between dishonesty (what we get in the media) and lies that have their roots in truth (when biography or philosophy meges with literature and psychology, I guess).
You joke, Johan, but you're heads and shoulders above most other contemporary philosophers our age.
I've been in Manhattan the past few months, walking the streets and going to restaurants, attending concerts and whatnot, and I hear and overhear conversations and they sound to me like some form of AI or spoken texts messages at best. The speech patterns themselves are becoming robotic. As for the thought patterns of these up and coming generations, who have never known life without a screen in their hands, I'm left with wild guesses. Is this really the end of empirical and theoretical knowledge, along with any historical perspective, or is it already well on its way? I can't say that I really worry about it, but sometimes I do marvel at it, breathlessly.
You mention novelists and I have attended a few literary events. One I guess you could consider rather high brow, with some ivy leaguers, where one guy read a chapter from his recently self-published debut novel. And it was excellent. Really raw, honest writing. But then he gave the synopsis and mentioned something about vampires or zombies coming into it and it was so disappointing. Because this guy has the potential.
As for AI in the universities, I'll take a radical stance here, I don't think it really matters. For all the hype and prize of Diversity, superficial diversity of course: race, gender, sexuality; any actual diversity, of thought, opinion, perspective, intellectual influences, experiences, that are not filtered through "the proper channels", is nil. The universality is already damn near complete. AI can simply be the icing on the cake.
When I think of most of the writing today, whether it's novels or poetry or essays or philosophy, it reads as though it was written in between guidelines. And the writer's backgrounds are almost universally the same: upper-middle to upper class, university educated, similar life experiences. And it's obvious to show. No more Genet's writing from their prison cells. Or Henry Miller or Bukowski trudging along in the grueling work-a-day world, reading and honing their craft in their spare time.
I still have hope here though. Every so often I'll find a name and read their works and want to sing both from the rooftops.
Thanks for the kind words. I don't think I am, and I'm fully aware I'm at best mediocre, and often lazy and cowardly, even though I sometimes can string an argument together. But the fact that you think I make the cut probably says more about the sorry state of our culture in general than anything else.
"The universality is already damn near complete. AI can simply be the icing on the cake.
When I think of most of the writing today, whether it's novels or poetry or essays or philosophy, it reads as though it was written in between guidelines ..."
Huh. I think you're right. Even though I'm sure the AI tech will synergize with this and kind of supercharge it, the foundations are very much in place already.
And yes. It's a script. "Authors" go to fucking schools to learn how to write novels, and they produce commercial products.
We desperately need an entirely new kind of university (as John and AR have been talking about for years). Funding is totally fucked up and undermines the whole enterprise in terms of a search for knowledge; dissemination and publication is a lethal joke, and it's current role and function in society breeds corruption and nepotism.
We need new grass-roots funding structures, we need new ways of dissemination and crediting that perhaps need to do away with the "paper" as medium, we need to do away with credentialism, we need to open up the methodology, and we need to separate science from capital and the state. Easier said than done lol
We are again talking about the same thing (my last blog post) -- this inability to think. Certainly institutional learning is anti thought. Even most podcasts I know are reports or author interviews. Very little thinking goes on. Formats have been shaped (from mostly economic forces I think, though not entirely at all) to discourage thinking. Most people, even relatively smart ones, can barely recognise thinking. Everything is a collation of data -- of facts, or pseudo facts, and often this is called materialism. There is an enormous hostility to culture overall. Dennis' piece on castaneda was excellent and got me thinking on those books for the first time in a long while. They are not at all stupid. That's what is unnerving in a sense. Back in the 70s in So Cal the rumours about casteneda were endless. It did sort of inch toward something cultish. But they resonated for a reason. -- I do think there are young thinkers out there, maybe even a lot of them, but as you note, their potential to grow is limited. Same for artists. And this becomes a question i return to again and again, the audience, the culture, the context. Who goes to serious theatre or music or reads difficult material? Not a lot. There is no relationship anymore between society and its thinkers or artists. One is out on the fringe, in the cold, and alone.
Heh, yeah, we seem to be thematically synchronized even more than you’d expect from us just dealing with and trying to figure out the same subject material. I haven't yet gotten to your last post but I'll make sure to comment -- I think this inability to think (in some form or other) is absolutely crucial to this historical moment, and in a sense the fundamental problem of modern mass society as such.
And I think what you're saying here is spot on. The indirect impact of the technological structure and of the social organizations have conspired to undermine thinking as such -- not necessarily directly or intentionally, but that's the aggregate effect of everything from the prison and the school as institutions to the ironically named smartphone as a technology.
And we're talking about is not the absence of "cognitive processing" or however the techno-corporate lingo would describe it -- but the absence of complex, nuanced thinking, of the ability to reflect from a position of tranquility and to really discern with full intention and an embodied understanding that involves emotion, reason and ethical judgement.
And even clever people today seem to settle for a kind of superficial complexity, a pseudo-nuanced kind of simulacrum of real information which is perfectly exemplified by these superficial "options" that genAI output gives you (and which is increasingly the stylistic and epistemic basis of ALL STUDENTS' OUTPUT). Post a complex question as a prompt, and you get four hackneyed, half-thought "options" that all point towards the same predetermined result which is just the reproduction of the dominant ideologies.
It's like they think it's nuance, but what you actually get is 8 TV channels with the same kind of garbage
That's exactly what I and Dennis observed as well, that Castaneda resonated with people in spite of everything else, that there was something real there, some truth that at least seemed to be important
I want to add, aside from completely agreeing that this inability is historically crucial and essential -- is that I think it has occurred over time in phases. But crazy as it might sound, the most recent threshold, or phase, seems to have coincided with the advent of AI on major social media platforms. Just in my personal experience, it feels as if something happened just over the last couple years. I find nobody seems able to follow simple directions, mail is sent to the wrong address, the pharmacy orders the wrong medicine...these small easy to fix errors are now an everyday occurrence, and it feels as if this is a sort of prelude to a genuine cognitive tipping point.- Now even as I write this I know it sounds crazy. I get that. But its also a bit crazy to think these AI programs are NOT having an effect. And your point is correct regards the distinction between genuine deep organic thought -- and just the calculative efforts in a very narrowly prescribed area. That, obviously, people, or some, can still do. But philosophizing (if you will) feels forgotten. As I say i dont know that many can identify it even.
I could not agree with you more here, John. And when it comes to that collation of data, there is an almost complete unwillingness to entertain any thought that does not concur with said facts, pseudo-facts, etc. And if you start to question the how and why these "facts" were concluded, you become the fool in most eyes. It borders on religious beliefs.
I don't think AI is going to cause people to be brain dead.
I grew up in a time where calculators were thought to take away the ability to do math.
Teachers thought that the ability to manually do square roots was something super important that we would lose.
Same with books. Our high school and college course loads were heavy and many like me relied on summaries in order to get the gist of what the writers were saying. I hate to say it, but some of the authors that we idolize are the soap opera writers of their time.
AI summarization is a helpful tool in order to lay out the book just like we did in order to keep up with ridiculous course loads.
As for philosophers of this time challenging the current times, Iain McGilchrist's book The Matter with Things explains the issue of society where the left hemisphere has dominated, leading us to believe in nonsense.
https://iainmcgilchrist.substack.com/p/metaphors-can-make-you-blind
But what do we expect with a culture that promotes narrow minded dumb geniuses over true awareness?
https://robc137.substack.com/p/left-brain-vs-whole-brain-in-battlestar
I have hope in that now they promote space travel, genetic engineering, and problematic vaccines people are seeing how they can't even address the problems at home.
Without the "affluence" afforded to previous generations, the predator class has a harder time selling their vaporware pipe dreams.
That group must've gotten their name Demon & Eleven Children from an album by the band Blues Creation, who were a Japanese proto-metal group back in the 70s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDt4DCRMdec
Yes! I'm sure they did!
Beautifully written 👌
That's a really nice piece of writing. I also like the way you differentiated between dishonesty (what we get in the media) and lies that have their roots in truth (when biography or philosophy meges with literature and psychology, I guess).
So why did Dr Benny Spock's 1947 book on 'baby and child care' sell over
500,000 copies within the first six months of its release ?
1) World War 2 severed the inter-generational transmission knowledge belt ?
2) 'mericans thought it was porn ?
3) It sounded sciencey so everyone thought Baby would become A Scientist if raised Scientifically ?
4) Your guess is as good as anyone's guess ?
5) ?