filipcodes

@ArgonGruber @lionel_trolling wow, thanks, what a great description! i agree, i find it beautiful.

@filipcodes @lionel_trolling i learn my own thoughts by hearing myself think. i figure, so many neural firings are cascading around in my brain. then, i sorta detect those firings. i realize i'm thinking about war or work. i hear myself thinking as tho i'm external to my brain. human diversity is wild!

The idea that Freud invented guilt and introspection Jesus Christ...if anything, you could oversimplify Freud and say he thought you should feel a little less guilty and introspect less

@ArgonGruber @lionel_trolling fascinating. i need to make a concerted effort to access any of it. my default is abstract ideas, visions, metaphorical connections between patters, incessant internal monologue that covers everything else like a blanket. what jung would call introverted intuition.

@filipcodes @lionel_trolling that is so peculiar to me. to me, it feels so natural & right to say that the only way i ever learn anything about myself is thru so many variations of hearing my own stomach grumble.

@ArgonGruber @lionel_trolling yup, that's introverted sensing, exactly. people who have this faculty well developed are often connoisseurs of food, often enjoy travel etc. very foreign to me though, this is my least developed faculty :)

@filipcodes @lionel_trolling in other threads recently, i've discussed some examples. if i hear my stomach grumble b4 lunch, i can extrospectively learn that i'm hungry. if i feel my heart flutter when i see a pretty woman, i can extrospectively learn that i'm in love.

@ArgonGruber @lionel_trolling i think his distinction was more between introspection and action as an attitudinal disposition - I think he expressed his idea poorly, so it could be a misunderstanding on some level, but I don't care to defend him.

@filipcodes @lionel_trolling introspection is the current hot topic, right? since Andreessen sorta made a fool of himself about. he said that introspection doesn't exist - we never look inwards into ourselves. on his view, i think, we only ever look outwards out of ourselves.

@ArgonGruber @lionel_trolling jung offers a more detailed vocabulary here. distinguishes between sensing, intuition, feelings and thinking - and each of these can be extroverted and introverted disposition. so you could have introverted sensing, which is feeling of one's body and its affects, for example.

@filipcodes @lionel_trolling i'd have to look into that. i'm unfamiliar with jung. i actually think the basic AI overview definition of extrospection is pretty alright.

@ArgonGruber @lionel_trolling right, but on that ground the very distinction becomes meaningless in a way.

@filipcodes @lionel_trolling philosopher Berkeley, famous for his thesis of empirical idealism, i'd count as denying extrospection exists. in his view, only ideas are real. we never look outwardss from ourselves into external reality.

@ArgonGruber @lionel_trolling so just more like extroverted sensing in jung?

@filipcodes @lionel_trolling insofar as introspection is looking inwards into oneself, extrospection is looking outwards into external reality

@ArgonGruber @lionel_trolling if we distinguish between introspection and just thinking, then extrospection as something like Husserl's phenomenology?

@lionel_trolling Do you think extrospection is real? Just out of curiosity. Zillions of people have been dunking. I’m just curiously asking ppl about their thoughts on the relationships between introspection & extrospection. May I ask if you believe extrospection is real?

@viemccoy i think we actually agree a lot. thanks, that helped me structure my thinking better in terms of what's a bit of an unfamiliar conceptual territory for me. good article!

@filipcodes That the scope of empiricism is limited is my whole point! open.substack.com/pub/viemccoy/p…

I think cognition research is far more tractable than consciousness research. I actually think consciousness, as we've ill-defined it, lives somewhere near the type-error-tragedy I discuss in Semiotic Triage - attempting to study it with scientific tools might actually be barking up the wrong tree. This is obviously not true for cognition, however, and the mechanisms of thinking, solving problems, and creating knowledge. This is distinct from consciousness which seems to almost plainly be the scientific attempt to integrate a phenomenological soul into an empirical world-model. I am open to this being possible, but I am largely skeptical. (People have attempted to redefine consciousness to mean basically-cognition, but it hasn't stuck)

right, but that kind of limits what phenomena you're able to explain. the perspective becomes really coarse grained given various practical questions people ask. like, say, problem of "ai ethics" becomes not only unanswerable - but disappears as a problem. so technically yes, but maybe discourse can be valuable while not being tractable?

@filipcodes It bypasses the problem entirely. That's kind of the whole point! It's almost necessarily non-dual

@noveltokens not crazy at all. if you're in the habit of pulling on loose strings, you get to that "perspective" [?] sooner or later. the loopy loop part probably means we shouldn't overindex on thinking too much in the first place

having a perspective is the root of psychosis might sound crazy to you but i know it’s true

@GrantHBrennerMD that's really good - the insight about proprioception in particular

"Whether these machines are conscious is unlikely—and, for our purposes, beside the point. The relational dimension operates anyway, borrowing from our reservoir of consciousness, which we extend by fantasy as we wish. Tools become part of us as we extend proprioception to include them—as with a rake, or knowing where your car’s bumper is (Maravita & Iriki, 2004). With AI, relatability recruits additional attachment systems. The response is, in part, involuntary." @PsychToday psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experi… #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #humanity #culture #loneliness #relationships

@GrantHBrennerMD sadness as internal evidence of change that's underway?

Sadness makes you stronger. Strength through sadness. Obviously, sometimes erroneous, often overlooked.

@thrialectics i see no meaningful preparation. change on the scale of "writing" happening with the speed of the internet rather than over centuries. there's going to be some bumps.

How are we preparing for the mass psychological impact of ontological disorientation at scale? Right now we're protected by adoption curves, I think. Are dynamical systems experts smarter than me already on this, I hope?

@PAHoyeck if one is serious about philosophy, better not to write a book at all. philosophy = book writing is an unexamined bias for (almost) all philosophers. and the word originated as an entirely different sort of practice.

A philosophy anecdote I like is that Gilbert Ryle used to tell his students at Oxford not to pursue a PhD. He'd tell them it was “better to write a short good book later than a bad long book earlier.”

hamlet resolves the question into "which is nobler?" rather than "why am I the kind of person who frames everything in terms of nobility?" subtle but important difference.

is "to be, or not to be?" introspection? serious question. methinks not.

@mitsuhiko i don't get that take. with good enough architecture, you can always delete a leaf implementation that's hopefully behind an interface and replace it with another. from a rust project I'm working on - about 70k lines of code deleted already, codebase gets better over time... 🤷

The biggest issue for me with agents is that they are hard to resist. But then you can build yourself some shit into the codebase that you get to regret in record time. And no, I don't think you can vibe yourself back to sanity with better models.

@jonnoxrevanche books have been performing that same service for ages. say, hemmingway's "buddy buddy" tone that makes the reader feel like they have a privileged insight. that's what popular magazines do too. your criticism of ai merely shows where you derive your sense of superiority from.

What chatgpt has revealed is that a surprising large number of people want to be “seen” as intelligent, profound or insightful. Many more people than you’d assume. But they profoundly resent intellectual work or reading or study or, say, literally anything you do to get smarter