From today’s walk…
Reading: The Matter with Things by 📚
… ‘the layman’s grounds for accepting the models propounded by the scientist are often no different from the young African villager’s ground for accepting the models propounded by one of his elders.’
From the past couple of days…
From this morning’s walk…
From yesterday, a picture of the pack…
More recently, though, I have lost my enthusiasm for human space exploration, largely because I cannot figure out where there is for flesh and blood to go. There is no destination reachable within a current human life span that is hospitable, as far as I know.
What Intelligent Life is Made Of, Part 2 Essays On Attention Paid
From today’s walk…
Reading: Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici 📚
The stakes on which witches and other practitioners of magic died, and the chambers in which their tortures were executed, were a laboratory in which social discipline was sedimented, and much knowledge about the body gained. Here those irrationalities were eliminated that stood in the way of the transformation of the individual and social body into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms.
Reading: Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici 📚
What died was the concept of the body as receptacle of magical powers that had prevailed in the medieval world. In reality, it was destroyed. For in the background of the new philosophy we find a vast initiative by the state, whereby what the philosophers classified as “irrational” was branded as crime.
@manton, Really like the redesign of the M.b app!
Some Block Island homes…
Apparently we’ve been to the brink and beyond before and it was the Democrats who took us there….
On October 22, 1985, Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III told congressional leaders that if Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling by the end of the month, the Reagan administration would pay the nation’s bills by taking back Treasury securities in which Social Security had invested.
So let’s be frank and honest. Alternative intelligence of superior stature to our own, should it come about, will be an entirely natural extension of, evolution of, intelligence on this planet and in the universe.
What Intelligent Life is Made Of, Part 2 Essays On Attention Paid
When I published a description of the 2009 talk these posts are based on, I used the phrase “alternative intelligence” instead of the far more common “artificial intelligence.” This is because I do not believe that the distinction between natural and artificial is useful when it comes to intelligent technologies.
What Intelligent Life is Made Of, Part 2 Essays On Attention Paid
If Monet lived on Block Island…
Scenes from this morning’s walk…
Ada Limon, Dead Stars … a really lovely poem!
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
Cardamom/saffron frozen soufflés setting up in the freezer…
My beautiful wife Holly in a Block Island state of mind…
From this morning’s walk…
Reading: The Matter with Things by Lane McGilchrist 📚
The more precise anything is, the less content it has: the more certain our knowledge the less we know.
Reading: The Matter with Things by 📚
Our dominant value—sometimes I fear our only value—has very clearly become that of power. This aligns us with a brain system, that of the left hemisphere, the raison d’être of which is to control and manipulate the world.
Only 2% in to a looong book. Already pretty sure it’s important.
Read: Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell 📚
Just finished. An enjoyable read that traces the origins of Humanist thought through the many historical characters who furthered it. Just enough philosophy for grasping the nature of Humanism. It end’s making the case for Humanism in the present day but it’s a bit of a whimper in my opinion. Faced with the decidedly non-humanist churning going on in the world against which it struggles to fight. Perhaps my greatest pleasure in reading it is having it confirmed that , yes, indeed, I am a humanist.
Part 1 of a 5 part series on AI…
Among their concerns were the possible criminal uses of artificial intelligence; the potential for significant job loss as intelligent machines assume increasing amounts of the human workload; the possibility of machines becoming capable of making life and death decisions on their own.
What Intelligent Life Is Made Of, Part 1 Essays On Attention Paid
There wasn’t anything exceptionally noticeable about the way she moved through doors, but when you’ve known someone all their lives, you become familiar with their nuances. You sense them in all manner of ways you are barely aware of.