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“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” — whoever wrote the gospel of John attributed word-like powers to God, on some level casting words and language as the fundament of all existence, a facet of the divine, identical to the divine.
From such a teaching arises the Kabbalistic heresy, a belief that magic powers inhere in sacred words, powers that become available to the initiate who learns the many secret names of God. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1077052140533809154
Words are not concepts; they are names for concepts. The concept itself is a physical configuration of matter in your head (as is the name.) The name we share, but the concept in my head and the concept in yours may be different.
When I say a word, I intend my concept, and when you hear my word, you evoke yours. If our concepts are not the same, then communication is merely sound and fury. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025737938682822656
Deleuze said that thinking is a violent confrontation with concepts. The act of thinking is an attempt to destroy a part of your interior self, and to replace it with something better.
It is easy for us to speak together of concrete things. When I tell you that if you walk any further, you are going to fall off a cliff, the literal meaning is unambiguous. We all have nearly the same experiences of walking, cliffs, and gravity.
As we move from the concrete to the abstract, our experiences and our mental pictures become more divergent.
Every word is a dead metaphor. In linguistics we learn that every abstract name once referred to some physical thing. The word “abstract” itself is built out of the Latin ab—“from” and trahere—“draw away”. Spatial distance signifies conceptual distance from the “real world.”
Consider the ways we relate to ideas: philosophies have foundations, ideologies have planks, ideas can move us, they can be structured, truths can be hollow, an idea can be solid, an idea can be an anchor, we can toss an idea out there, we can catch what someone said.
An idea can have a point, a mind or a wit can be can be sharp, an idea can have teeth or legs, you can take an idea and run with it, you can run or hide from the truth, which can also be right in front of your face.
The concept in my head is a model of the real world: Wittegenstein called it the picture, Korzybski called it the map. The picture of the world is not the world; the map is not the territory.
Moreover, the way in which the map corresponds to the territory is part of the map, the way that the picture connects to the world is part of the picture.
Kant was among the first to understand this distinction; he said we could never perceive “the thing in itself.” This means an agent (e.g. you) can only conceive of the world by building an internal representation of it, and that all cognition is action upon this representation.
Kant’s idea becomes obvious and undeniable in the era of ubiquitous computation, because as soon as we attempt to build a machine that can interface with the world, we realize that the machine must first contain an internal representation of the world, a map.
A self-driving car, a Boston robotics dog, and the mars rover all possess internal maps, which they populate by means of sensors. They continuously integrate sense data into their mental map, including data about their own bodies. In a sense, all of these machines are self-aware
And yet, we do not suspect they have a personal, interior life in the way that we do, or even in the way that a dog or a mouse does Perhaps they do have an interior life comparable to an ant or a jellyfish, it’s difficult to say https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1157307637660209153
It seems that in order to be “like us,” an engine of cognition must have perceptions and world representations, but this is not enough. A machine made in Man’s imagine must also experience emotions and “qualia” (singular: quale).
We don’t know what a quale is, so the best we can do is to call it, for example, the ineffable redness of the color red. The quale of red is “what it’s like” to see something red, and the quale of the smell of apple pie is “what it’s like” to smell apple pie.
“Rigor” is a word we use when the words that we say can be unambiguously resolved into the mental model they indicate, and the indicated model can be unambiguously resolved into concrete things in the actual world, the world of things “in themselves.”
In thinking, we strive for rigor, even in poetry, which is not the playful juxtaposition of deliberate ambiguity, but rather the raising of the ghost of the concrete thing that died in order for a word to become a metaphor.
It is not possible to speak rigorously of qualia, because although we perceive by means of them, we do not ever perceive them; we have no concrete experience of anything that connects them to anything else in our world. They are a blank spot on the map, here be dragons.
To produce a rigorous account of a phenomenon, we need a way to perceive it from the outside. When we possess outside perceptions, we relate them to our internal map by means of a metaphor, and we use the names of concepts we know to name those concepts that are strange.
Cognition is when an agent convolves new perceptions with its internal map (built from past perceptions) to predict the future. In our Information Age, we have built very intricate rocks that are capable of perception, cognition, and agency, defined as autonomous decision-making
These machines function by means of manipulated lighting, just as lightning courses through our own brains and nervous systems, and it certainly seems to be the case that lightning, whatever that is, is identical to élan vital, the animating force of life.
The similarities between the thinking machine and the thinking bag of meat (e.g. you) are simply too great to ignore. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1121900804711956480
The advent of personal computing has revealed to the average person that much of his mental faculty is mechanical, though he hems and haws at this realization, and seeks for voluptuous ways to deny it.
Emotion may inhere in the soul, but perceiving, knowing, and even acting are clearly earthbound faculties, residing wholly in the body. One can imagine the immortal soul, unfettered by the body, may also be free of the fetters of perception, knowledge, and action.
