Archives for February 2024

"...technology places a frame around everything; it artificially limits what sort of world of meaning we can access. It guarantees inaccessibility. The information we have isn’t the information we want; the information we want isn’t the information we need; and the information we need is impossible to get." Duncan Reyburn (The question concerning AI, Eucatastrophologist, Substack) "If, for example, an AI passes a theory of mind test in such a way as to suggest that the AI can understand people’s mental states, it is more likely that the test is not testing what the test designers think it is testing than that the AI has a theory of mind. An implicit agreement with the technological frame … [Read more...]

"Plato’s Phaedrus implies that Socrates had theoretical objections to writing philosophy, since writing is always less truthful than the direct medium of speech. Socrates probably never gave official public lectures or founded a philosophical ‘school’. He seems to have imagined philosophy as something close to conversation." Emily Wilson (The Death of Socrates) “A tide of unnecessary publications is rising through our universities and libraries, it is threatening to drown real intellectual life and nobody knows how to stop it.” Noel Malcolm (Sinking in a Sea of Words, The Independent, 1998) "The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one … [Read more...]