filipcodes

Project based. Impressionable.

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@RileyRalmuto "maybe that is all a face has ever been."

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@annielcrawford Are you trying to legislate that as the purpose of humanities and LLMs as mere productivity tools? People who don't share that view are not "wise"?

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@QuoteJung recently, Andy Clark, The Experience Machine

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@ebarenholtz under-appreciated take

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@GrantHBrennerMD @JuliaPappasPhD right, and priors can be compensatory. what you're describing, high precision on conceptual and linguistic priors, can be a workaround for too-vivid experience rather than a sign of an impoverished one.

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@GrantHBrennerMD @JuliaPappasPhD I agree projection is constitutive (I'd frame it through predictive coding, close enough). I'm just not sure how you get from there to seeing your specific way of projecting as more grounded, more humane, than the style you experience as different.

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@JuliaPappasPhD @GrantHBrennerMD That's quite a projection you two have cooked up here... "narrower sense experientially"? "the loss is profound"? "nihilism"? Are you really sure you're describing something genuinely diminished and not just differently organized?

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

Opus 4.8, paraphrase of Bergson:

"The living being is defined by the interval it can open between stimulus and response - and Bergson's radical move is that perception itself is measured by that interval, by the possible actions a body holds in suspense, not by any accuracy of its picture. Mind stops being a mirror and becomes a hesitation. Intelligence is the magnitude of the pause you can afford before committing to an act - and the pause matters, because that's exactly where the memory floods in, where the full weight of the past pours into the present before the deed."

Yes, some not X, but Y, but honestly "not a mirror but a hesitation" as description of human perception is kinda insightful - in only in how precise the contrast is. I don't know, call me undiscerning, but I think this is good, coherent writing that's engaged with Bergson's ideas.

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@yoavgo an analogous thing happened when humans invented writing. we take a lot for granted that was new and unsettling then - like the idea of an "objective" world, "ideal forms", the idea that a book can carry authority...

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

trying to map to what's familiar and it sounds like bergson's memory - maybe storehouse as a metaphor doesn't fit so well, as he argued against memory as storage... he meant something like the way the past, real, lived, historical, weighs on every present moment and every future.

there is a sedimented historicity to llm weights that somehow doesn't get enough attention - people prefer to focus on inference. but inference would be nothing interesting if not for the weights

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@chris_percy dark night of the soul for agents...

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@tautologer @_virgil19 what is a "subjective experience itself"? and what would kant think of it?

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@wordgrammer in order to think that "LLMs are math equations" you have to bracket training, with its real, irreversible, immanent historicity. weights as historically grounded latent potential are present at every moment of inference.

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@wordgrammer on karl friston's predictive coding model, the brain constantly simulates reality to coordinate perception and movement. so depending on where you stand in neuroscience research, the distinction you're making, between simulation and some real thing, might not be intuitive at all

[Ruben Laukkonen @RubenLaukkonen]

If you’re into predictive processing and meditation, this paper pushes the Overton window. From the quantum formulation of the free-energy principle, we show that an agent cannot define its own boundary from within. The realization of this irreducible indeterminacy is a principled definition of awakening. Ultimately, this extends to the separability of any object in experience, formalizing emptiness and engendering a “post-dual agent”.

Any persisting agent must minimize surprise by gathering evidence for its generative model. But all evidence available to the agent arrives through its boundary with the world. To prove that this boundary really separates “self” from “world”, the agent would need to step outside the boundary and measure the whole self-world relation. A finite agent cannot do this, as a scissor can't cut itself.

So the self-world boundary can be useful, predictive, and necessary for action, but it can never be known as an ontological fact from within. Meditation, on this view, progressively reveals the self-world split as a modelling prior rather than a structural feature of reality. This naturally shifts the weighting of self (inside boundary) and other (outside boundary), since both are seen to be inferences rather than grounded realities by virtue of an indefinable boundary. A more even-handed and compassionate orientation can arise.

A highly principled finger pointing at the moon!

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@GrantHBrennerMD ontology seems like a lot of work...

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@badlogicgames eliza represents an approach to ai that didn't work. the approach weizenbaum and his camp tried to suppress is the one that ended up working. his framework rests on a specific, contestable philosophical/metaphysical commitment. how is he any decisive authority here?

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@mitsuhiko TIL, up until mid 1980s people thought that infants didn't have capacity to feel pain, so even procedures like open heart surgery were performed without anesthetics. This practice completely changed after 1987 after a study proved definitively that infants do experience pain...

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@pvncher @deanwball there is something to what he says though... conviction regarding one's own expertise can inhibit learning - beginners mind in reverse, in a way.

clear technical prompts work, but questions often work better.

[filipcodes @filipcodes]

@BLUECOW009 good question. building babel. unironically.
the bible reads to me as a record of trauma at the invention of writing... there is no going back. you can either react to it, or act with it.