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On the current narrative hype

So this? It’s just a trick.

They simply create a tailored, ad-hoc proxy correlating with the perception.

Sort of like taking your pulse and body temperature and correlating the physiological aspects of an emotional response to e.g. a dataset of pieces of music, and then from a measurement of the former picking out the most likely candidates for what I’m actually hearing – presto. It can read my mind.

In other words, you simply tell the machine beforehand how you tend to react to certain stimuli, or how certain intentions tend to manifest within you physically, and it then just correlates that output to the dataset with which you’ve actively trained the algorithm. Definitely not rocket science.

And in terms of the framing, rather sleight of hand.

W.M. Briggs gives us a good takedown over here.

So any takers as to why we actually need metaphysics and epistemology in science?

Anyone got an inkling?

Here’s a good example.

“In the beginning was the word. Language is the operating system of human culture. From language emerges myth and law, gods and money, art and science, friendships and nations and computer code. A.I.’s new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization. By gaining mastery of language, A.I. is seizing the master key to civilization, from bank vaults to holy sepulchers.

What would it mean for humans to live in a world where a large percentage of stories, melodies, images, laws, policies and tools are shaped by nonhuman intelligence, which knows how to exploit with superhuman efficiency the weaknesses, biases and addictions of the human mind — while knowing how to form intimate relationships with human beings? In games like chess, no human can hope to beat a computer.

What happens when the same thing occurs in art, politics or religion?”

(Yuval Noah Harari, “You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills”, New York Times, March 2023)

This is mythmaking in process. This is a resurgence of the basic narratives of reductionist functionalism in synergy with a deeply fascist ideological framework and spectacular marketing. It’s the myth of the Nietzschean superman transposed upon the technological demigod of our own making. Even though there’s no longer any anchoring in an immutable nature, the Faustian will to power was always the more fundamental aspect of fascism’s conceptual groundwork, and contemporary society’s deeply pervasive relativism renders the isolated and purified action of spectacular technology an almost perfect epitome of the very same thing.

In truth, we are relativists par excellence, and the moment relativism linked up with Nietzsche, and with his ‘Will to Power’, was when Italian Fascism became, as it still is, the most magnificent creation of an individual and a national Will to Power.

(Benito Mussolini (Relativismo e Fascismo)