Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

My TV is getting too smart even for me. It's started checking in on me when I don't change the channel or adjust the volume or something. It asks me if I want to stay awake. My sister says her black mini-coop sometimes asks her if she needs to take a break. AI is coming folks, making us more and more dependent on itself. And it's already poking at us like some insidiously fawning xenomorph in our most private moments.

'the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent...'--M Merleau-Ponty

While some deplore the influence the Internet is having on all of our lives making us more opinionated and more divided than ever, I see a tremendous benefit it is providing as well. It's teaching us all how to use language more intelligently and creatively, giving us the time to post things eloquently and clearly that are simply not possible in the quick overemoting flurry of back-and-forth speech. And in giving us this little time to articulate things better and more originally and more thoughtfully, we just might come to find ourselves living in a whole new reality of enlightening and timely-revealed truths.

Words are the strangest things. We use them so regularly we tend to lose sight of this. Like our bodies which we are living thru all the time, words are the flesh and bones that make real our thoughts and imaginings. Originating in the exhalations of our lungs, they are made of warm breath blowing thru the pipes of our throats and modulated by the skillful jostlings of our tongues and the jacking of our jaws. Even in reading and writing, we hearken back to this primal visceral origin of words conjured up and silently pronounced in the mental soliloquy we call thinking. Words ARE us, and yet they carry us beyond ourselves out into a universe spellbound and on the scent of new truth.

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I'm glad we are teaching AI the tales of Greek mythology. This is the first step of any new mind towards acquiring a western psyche. (Apollo needs to lay off the peroxide though!).

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1361982759102145

In writing creatively, one must tread with caution the thin line between intention and serendipity. At some point in the process our inscription turns into transcription, the chosen gives way to the inspired, and language takes over like a Muse singing thru our veins.

The best analogy I can think of is riding a horse, where the rider is carried along while gently reining in and steering the horse where to go next.

A good writer is thus not carried away so much by the wild rapture of language’s seductive reveries and metaphors, but lovingly trusts its inner knowingness by always intuitively feeling and responding to the tug of what needs to be said next.

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“It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.”― Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic

I frequently glimpse blobs of green and purple intermingling and gobbling each other up when I close my eyes in bed at night. I call this communing with my phosphene overlords. If this is the colour of magic, then I am game. Let the enchantment flow!

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Teenage survival skills:

I was quite skilled in the practice of galavanting around at the age of 16. By the time I was 19 it had developed into the fine art of traipsing around.

We are always fading into pastness. This is not a reason to despair however. We always feel at home in this warm and cozy last remembered adjacent state, our firmly-constructed and intimately familiar house always being "the last before the Infinite" as Rilke says. From its spacious windowsills we project and are projected, shooting outward in numerous trajectories towards a sublime ideality that's barely begun to glow pink above the dawn's horizon.

I figured out why sports games held in stadiums and sports venues aren't rife with the fans' telekinetic "assists"--like the football always being caught, or the batter always hitting a homer, or the basketball always going into the hoop. It's because there are two roughly equally numerous sets of fans in the seats, each rooting like crazy for some miraculous intervention for opposite teams. It doesn't happen, or not obviously so, because those two collectively-pooled telekinetic power surges--to score or to miss--largely cancel each other out, restoring the otherwise normal randomness of the game. We need to perform an experiment where only all the fans of one team are allowed into the stadium, thus proving once and for all the telekinetic power of singularly-intending and emotionally-synced groups.

Imagine two event streams--your own private stream of thoughts, and your perceived surroundings as you move thru space. Both can be said to be determinative streams, having their own respective chains of strict cause and effect. But relative to each other, the event streams are totally random and indeterminate to the extent they are occurring parallel to each other. IOW, at the same time and to the same experient.

As such, semantic/thematic correlations or coincidences between the two will naturally arise as they are coupled together in time and in the experient's consciousness. But get this--these coincidings are not being caused physically or mentally in any way. The pure zone of indeterminacy opened up between the two event streams, coupled only by time of occurrence and consciousness of occurrence, acausally instantiates the pattern--the coincidence--the sign. Like attracts like--the synchronistic concurrence of two events, one outside in the perceived world, and one inside as the just thought about, signaling the agency of some non-physical and non-mental principle/intent operating outside of both physical reality and conscious experience.
Both objectively real and subjectively meaningful, it suggests the oneness of eventhood and thought as the inconceivable fusion of being-in-itself and being-for-itself.

We know the physicalist worldview of an entirely unconscious reality going on without anyone being conscious of it betrays its ideality in the very fact that this whole consensually-enforced scenario is itself only something realizable mentally, or even metaphorically. It is not a perceived empirical state of reality itself.

It is as if consciousness itself is the one metaphor that must disappear in order to make reality appear as just this physical non-subjective universe. But even that is just a metaphor we are mentally generating. Consciously must even disappear from the brain itself to make the brain appear phenomenally as yet another unconscious piece of quantifiable matter.

Psychologically speaking this is the activity of projection, which is experiencing something as other and objectively real by repressing into unconsciousness our concurrent state of consciousness about it. The real thus becomes defined as whatever exists and goes on without us experiencing it at all, which can only feel so real and certain because we are only experiencing it as such!