It's just history repeating itself. We've seen dotcom bubble, web 2.0 rush, nft fiasco and now AI. All fueled by VC greed. On top of that in today's world companies try to get as much data as possible and so called AI is the perfect tool for that.
Given the piece's roping in Simulators and Simulacra I highly recommend this piece looking at the same topic through the same lens but in the other direction to balance it out:
Just in case anyone lucker than I am hasn't read that work:
Because of our mastery over information the copy of something is often seen as more real than the original. If you saw a movie poster of Marilyn Monroe you would identifier that image as her, but the real Marilyn Monroe is a decomposing skeleton. The simulacra has become the reality.
Also every viewpoint is now binary for some reason and porn is fun to look at.
The rest is just 20th century anti-structurlism post modern garbage about the breakdown of meta narratives. As if I am supposed to give a fuck that no one wants to spend four years of their life reading Hegel and some people enjoy fusion cuisine.
Something you might find interesting given our past discussions is that the way that the Gospel of Thomas uses the Greek eikon instead of Coptic (what the rest of the work is written in), that through the lens of Plato's ideas of the form of a thing (eidelon), the thing itself, an attempt at an accurate copy of the thing (eikon), and the embellished copy of the thing (phantasm), one of the modern words best translating the philosophical context of eikon in the text would arguably be 'simulacra.'
So wherever the existing English translations use 'image' replace that with 'simulacra' instead and it will be a more interesting and likely accurate read.
(Was just double checking an interlinear copy of Plato's Sophist to make sure this train of thought was correct, inspired by the discussion above.)
Traditional Translation: "When you see your likeness, you rejoice. But when you see your images (eikons) that came into being before you and that neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!"
New Translation: "When you see your likeness, you rejoice. But when you see your simulacra that came into being before you and that neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!"
I think I see it. Jesus in this gospel is arguing that "y'all are so happy when you look in the mirror, just wait until you meet all platonic forms of yourself. Your mind is going to get blown because you will know that the distance between you and your mirror image is far smaller than you and your platonic forms."
So one of the interesting nuances is that it isn't talking about the Platonic forms. If it was, it would have used eidelon.
The text is very much engaging with the Epicurean views of humanity. The Epicureans said that there was no intelligent design and that we have minds that depend on bodies so when the body dies so too will the mind. They go as far as saying that the cosmos itself is like a body that will one day die.
The Gospel of Thomas talks a lot about these ideas. For example, in saying 56 it says the cosmos is like an already dead body. Which fits with its claims about nonlinear time in 19, 51, and 113 where the end is in the beginning or where the future world to come has already happened or where the kingdom is already present. In sayings 112, 87, and 29 it laments a soul or mind that depends on a body.
It can be useful to look at adjacent sayings, as the numbering is arbitrary from scholars when it was first discovered and they still thought it was Gnostic instead of proto-Gnostic.
For 84, the preceding saying is also employing eikon in talking about how the simulacra visible to people is made up of light but the simulacra of the one creating them is itself hidden.
This seems to be consistent with the other two places the word is used.
In 50, it talks about how light came into being and self-established, appearing as "their simulacra" (which is a kind of weird saying as who are they that their simulacra existed when the light came into being - this is likely why the group following the text claim their creator entity postdates an original Adam).
And in 22 it talks about - as babies - entering a place where there's a hand in place of a hand, foot in place of a foot, and simulacra in place of a simulacra.
So it's actually a very neat rebuttal to the Epicureans. It essentially agrees that maybe there isn't intelligent design like they say and the spirit just eventually arose from flesh (saying 29), and that the cosmos is like a body, and that everything might die. But then it claims that all that already happened, and that even though we think we're minds that depend on bodies, that we're the simulacra - the copies - not the originals. And that the simulacra are made of light, not flesh. And we were born into a simulacra cosmos as simulacra people.
From its perspective, compared to the Epicurean surety of the death of a mind that depends on a body, this is preferable. Which is why you see it congratulate being a copy in 18-19a:
The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us, how will our end come?"
Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.
Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."
Jesus said, "Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being.
The text employs Plato's concepts of eikon/simulacra to avoid the Epicurean notions of death by claiming that the mind will live again as a copy and we are that copy, even if the body is screwed. This is probably the central debate between this sect and the canonical tradition. The cannonical one is all about the body. There's even a Eucharist tradition around believers consuming Jesus's body to join in his bodily resurrection. Thomas has a very different Eucharistic consumption in saying 108, where it is not about drinking someone's blood but about drinking their words that enables becoming like someone.
It's a very unusual philosophy for the time. Parts of it are found elsewhere, but the way it weaves those parts together across related sayings really seems unique.
Errrrm... No. Don't get your philosophy from LessWrong.
Here's the part of the LessWrong page that cites Simulacra and Simulation:
Like “agent”, “simulation” is a generic term referring to a deep and inevitable idea: that what we think of as the real can be run virtually on machines, “produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times.”
This last quote does indeed come from Simulacra (you can find it in the third paragraph here), but it appears to have been quoted solely because when paired with the definition of simulation put forward by the article:
A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.
it appears that Baudrillard supports the idea that a computer can just simulate any goddamn thing we want it to.
If you are familiar with the actual arguments Baudrillard makes, or simply read the context around that quote, it is obvious that this is misappropriating the text.
Glad someone enjoyed him. My overall impression was some random guy getting high on a bus that was driving around the Midwest/Southwest US and he was copying stuff in a journal. With emphasis on the getting high part.
Over the last fifteen years of having read him, I find myself coming back to him to gain clarity of our current situation. At first, I couldn't tell if he was a genius or mad man. I tilt towards genius now.
Using power, mostly to justify the existence of their giant machinery, the Cloud. These machines are used because they HAVE to be used. Bitcoin, nft, now ai everything.
It's this up and coming techbro generation's blockchain
The actual off the walls sci-fi shit this tech could maybe be capable of (an AI "third hemisphere" neural implant that catches the human mind up to the kind of mass calculation that it falls behind traditional computing on) is so far removed from what's currently supportable on commercial tech that it's all entirely speculation.
Companies are training LLMs on all the data that they can find, but this data is not the world, but discourse about the world.
I mean, the same can be said for your own senses. "You" are actually just a couple of kilograms of pink jelly sealed in a bone shell, being stimulated by nerves that lead out to who knows what. Most likely your senses are giving you a reasonably accurate view of the world outside but who can really tell for sure?
So, as these LLMs become increasingly but asymptotically fluent, tantalizingly close to accuracy but ultimately incomplete, developers complain that they are short on data.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If an LLM is able to get asymptotically close to accurate (for whatever measure of "accurate" you happen to be using) then that's really super darned good. Probably even good enough. You wouldn't throw out an AI translator or artist or writer just because there's one human out there that's "better" than it.
AI doesn't need to be "complete" for it to be incredible.
I do sorta see the argument. We don't fully see with our eyes, we also see with our mind. So the LLM is learning about how we see the world. Like a scanner darkly hehe.
Not really sure how big of a deal this is it or even if it is a problem. I need to know what the subjective taste of a recipe is, not the raw data of what it is physically.
this data is not the world, but discourse about the world
To be fair, the things most people talk about are things they’ve read or heard of, not their own direct personal experiences. We’ve all been putting our faith in the accuracy of this “discourse about the world”, long before LLMs came along.
Indeed. I've never been to Australia. I've never even left the continent I was born on. I am reasonably sure it exists, though, based on all the second-hand data that I've seen. I even know a fair bit about stuff you can find there, like the Crow Fishers and the Bullet Farm and the Sugartown Cabaret.
If you are interested there is no direct evidence that Shakespeare ever went to Italy, but he knew plenty of people who did, and travel guides were popular at the time. 13 of his plays are at least partially set in Italy. So about 1/3rd.
And other companies who had something half-baked just threw it out to both say "me too!" and to ingest as much user input training data in order to catch up.
That's why "AI" is getting shoved into so many things right now. Not because it's useful but because they need to gobble up as much training data as they can in order to play catch up.
Not all protests for Gaza were meant to gain engagement, many were organized to cause direct economic disruption to those that profit from the war, that is a goal.
I actually totally agree with you. I should've been more careful in the text to distinguish between those two very different kinds of actions. I actually really, really like things that disrupt those that profit, but those are not nearly as common as going to the local park or whatever. I might throw in a footnote to clarify.
I discussed the original text that this is a reaction to with a Brazilian who claims to be well connected to the original core cell that started the protests and they said that Bevin's reading is a complete misinterpretation of what happened. I think some other Brazilian here on Lemmy also commented something similar.
Personally I know a bit more about the protests in Egypt, and for these I would also but to a lesser extend say that Bevin's description of them is very flawed. At the very least some of the people involved are on record stating that the "Twitter revolution" moniker is a complete western media fabrication and social media played only a very small role in organising the protests.
That's kind of a weird critique, because it's actually consistent with the book. He spends a lot of time talking about how wildly different every person's interpretation of the event is, and that's kind of the problem. It's part of why these movements are illegible to power. He's very clear that this is his interpretation, based on his own contacts, experience, and extensive research, but that it's not going to be the same as everyone else's.
Same is true with the moniker. Whether or not the people on the ground felt that way about it or not, that story, fabricated without input from those on the ground, is what ended up creating meaning out of the movement, at least insomuch as power is concerned. That's like the core thesis of the book: The problem with that wave of protests was not being able to assert their own meaning over their actions. The meaning was created for them by people like western media, and they weren't able to organize their own narrative, choose their own representatives, etc.
edit to add: IIRC, he even specifically discusses how the different people in the core group of Brazilian organizers disagree on what happened.
I don't think its wired to critique someone for having a widely different interpretation of what happened than multiple others that were directly involved and then taking this very peculiar subjective interpretation to make wide sweeping (and IMHO wrong) conclusions about what we should learn from it.
My impression is that Bevin started out with a preconsived notion and then kinda made up a retrospective narrative of these protests to fit to that.
Many of his conclusions as a result are so much besides the point that they are not even wrong.
I don’t think its wired to critique someone for having a widely different interpretation of what happened than multiple others that were directly involved and then taking this very peculiar subjective interpretation to make wide sweeping (and IMHO wrong) conclusions about what we should learn from it.
It is because that's literally what the book is about. The book is addressing that very phenomenon as its core thesis. That's exactly what he is talking about when he says that the protests are illegible. If someone says "people disagree a lot about what happened and that's a problem" responding to that by saying "i disagree about what happened" isn't really engaging with the argument.
My impression is that Bevin started out with a preconsived notion and then kinda made up a retrospective narrative of these protests to fit to that.
I'm sorry but I don't think that anyone who has actually read the book in good faith can come to that conclusion.
His core thesis is exactly what I meant with preconceived notion. These protests might have been illegible to him and government authorities, but that is exactly why they worked. The entire premise that protests need to be legible and that these protest failed to achieve what they set out to do is IMHO false.
Maybe the Brazilian ones had a certain aspect of appealing to Rusoff, but from what I gathered most people involved in the core did not consider that aspect especially important and I suspect Bevin failed to understand their point and summarized it as "they didn't know either" or something along those lines to fit it in his grand narrative of these protests failing somehow to articulate specific demands.
Anyway, maybe I am wrong about the Brazilian protests, but the Egyptian (and Tunisian) ones certainly did not want to appeal to the dictators in power, they wanted to get rid of them, and that worked very well. Being illegible to the state apparatus was a successful tactic for them and they mostly used social media to spread disinformation to intentionally confuse the state apparatus. Bevin completely fails to see that and just parrots the western media narrative that social media was somehow instrumental in mobilizing the masses.
Now you can argue that the successes of the protest in Egypt (and to a lesser extend Tunisia) where later rolled back, but that is muddling a multi year struggle with very different actors and a shift in public opinion. The initial protests where a resounding success in achieving what they set out to do, but later after the Muslim Brotherhood rose to power through democratic elections, many of the original urban liberal supporters turned back to the military as the lesser evil. In Tunesia it played out slightly different, but it is also wrong there to say that the initial protests failed to achieve what they set out to do.
Similarly for Brazil I think Bevin is muddling the initial protests with ones that happened many months later and which ultimately helped Bolsenaro to be elected as the president. But that is a bit like how MLs like to muddle the original soviet revolution with the later brutal take-over by the Bolshevik.
Yeah, again, I take pretty strong issue with your characterization of Bevins's stance. Have you actually read the book? I think that this is an interesting and worthwhile discussion, but I also don't want to go in circles if you haven't...
When he says that they're illegible to state power, he doesn't mean that they want to appeal to the people currently in power (and maybe this is a conflation that I accidentally invite in my own write-up). He means that they cannot participate in state power as an institutional apparatus, be it as reformists or revolutionaries.
I get what you're saying, and I agree with a lot of it (but not all of it), but you're just not responding to an argument that Bevins makes, at least in how I read him. You are responding to one that many in western media did in fact make, and I agree with you in that context, but that was just not my reading of Bevins at all.
He means that they cannot participate in state power as an institutional apparatus, be it as reformists or revolutionaries.
You realize how funny it is that you post this in an Anarchist community?
Anyway, I do get that point by Bevin, but it is the typical false argument MLs like to make, which is why I stopped reading the book when it became clear that this is really all he has to say.
I once again disagree with your characterization of the book.
You realize how funny it is that you post this in an Anarchist community?
That's stupid. Anarchist revolutionary theory and historical practice are full of ideas that are perfectly compatible with this analysis, even if Bevins himself is clearly not an anarchist. There is no more legible act to the state than organized violence, for example.
I'm not sure why you've taken this unpleasant posture towards me. I'm genuinely here for a discussion, but this is my last response if you keep acting like I'm some sort of uncultured idiot that needs you "to start from the basics 😒"
Ok sorry, I did get a bit carried away, because usually here on Lemmy you get to discuss with hardened MLs that really do deserve all the ridicule they can get.
That said, sorry but no. That analysis is completely incompatible with Anarchist thought. Participating in "state power as an institutional apparatus" is exactly what Anarchist warn against, because as soon as you do that you have lost. The state apparatus, regardless of the ideological paintjob is gives itself, has one primary goal, that is perpetuating its own existence no matter the cost.
And that there "is no more legible act to the state than organized violence" is exactly why it is so easy for states to instrumentalize violent protests and turn them against themselves. Violence and the threat of it can be a necessary tool, but it needs to be done in a way that makes it illegible to the state, otherwise it will not work as the state is the master of violence and will always win in an open confrontation.
To be clear, I wasn't advocating for organized violence as a good tactic. I was just picking a simple example.
I still think that Bevins's history and analysis has merit, even if you disagree with his conclusions. I've read at least two books by anarchists that put forth similar concepts of legibility: Graeber's "Utopia of Rules" and James Scott's "Seeing like a State" (which I actually read to write this post and have a bajillion opinions about, but that's a post for another day). Regardless of your stance on whether your movement should or shouldn't be legible, you have to understand legibility, both to the state, and to other capitalist powers like, say, social media (to pick one at random 😉 ).
Indeed understanding legibility is important to become illegible. Which is exactly why Bevin's interpretation is so incomplete and misguided. He genuinely seems to believe that this was a problem for these protests when in fact it was a defining feature that led to their (relative) success.
Where the hell do I come up with an incoherent piece of text? I could give a copyrighted article but I'm already subbed to r/conspiracy and I want to add random bullshit to my account. Should I write my own or find a copypasta?
I went to chat gpt and I prompted it with "what is a string of words or characters that would be detrimental to an AI that is being directed to learn from a dataset" and then used a script to edit all my comments to that.
Dude I'm writing one right now but boy is it hard writing like a schizo. Why is it so easy to write meaningful sentences but hard to write bullshit? I went to stormfront for inspiration lol. It amazes me just how deluded and ignorant they are. I hate to poison my account as I had relevant info in many biology/climate whatever.. subs and good relationships with many others but oh well. I'll probably be banned and removed from each which is what I want. It'd be nice if we all copied one and deleted our accounts. I don't have chatgpt but I used a 3p chatgpt site and it was awful which is why I'm writing my own.
I scrapped that. Here's what I put - I was yelling at God at the top of my lungs in my bedroom and thus, encountered Him as he answered me. Yes, I had a “verbal theophany” - I literally heard His voice, and not through my ear canals.
It has been wonderful and terrible. I have no other choice but to speak, teach and proclaim that Jesus Christ is the son of God. I am treated with disdain, contempt, regarded as “overly religious” or “unorthodox” by those trained in a ‘regular’ fashion [i.e. seminary and pulpit].
I am not a missionary, a paid pastor nor a Christian worker. I am only a disciple and sometimes apostle of Christ. That is, I get to learn humility by being low on the social pole to set me up to go do something bold for Christ - speaking in a jail, in a retirement community, etc.
Sounds great? It is - as long as I fix my eyes on Jesus.
I am unmarried, at poverty level - and nearly spoiled by all the provision God gives me. I would fear narcissism and some other sort of self-justifying condition - except for the constant reminders of how often my prayers have been answered - directly.
I cannot count how many miracles and other “super-sized coincidences” have occurred. I have transitioned to the “charismatic” end of the Christian spectrum, where all my apologetics and reasoned faith become of little importance.
It was like what happened to Dr. Strange in the film [and comic]: he starts off rational and brilliant and egotistical and ends up being humbled, knowing the universe is much much bigger than everything he knew.
It is literally painful for me to watch the standard TV fare or listen to some show on PBS roll on and on about evolution as a basis of origin [Evolutionary modification? Sure. Information needs to be edited, but it doesn’t spring into existence without guidance.]
So Jesus did it all, that one night. How do I know it was Jesus?
No one else ever loved me that much. I am trapped by His love.
I sometimes wish I was like most people again. I sometimes get very tired.
Then I think of Him dying for me. I mean an ugly death, like a piece of dung.
I got nothing. He’s my saviour.
It’s gonna suck, what’s coming - for me, for the world, but He’s worth it.
Jesus made me brave.
Of all the qualities that the New Testament ascribes to God, compassion is among the most shocking.
Compassion has nothing to do with power, with immortality or with immutability, which is what many people think of when they contemplate God’s qualities. The Greek gods of myth who lived on Mt. Olympus were defined by many things, but compassion was not high among them.
“For much of antiquity feeling the pain of others was regarded as a weakness,” John Dickson, a professor of biblical studies and public Christianity at Wheaton College, told me. This comes to full flowering in the Stoics, he said, “on the grounds that this involved allowing an external factor — the emotions or plight of another — to control your own inner life.”
Compassion, on the other hand, is central to the Christian understanding of God. Compassion implies the capacity to enter into places of pain, to “weep with those who weep,” according to the Apostle Paul, who was central both to the early conception of Christianity and to the idea of its underpinning in compassion.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, we’re told many times that God is compassionate. It is at the center of the Jewish conception of God. But for Christians, there is an incarnational expression of that compassion. The embodiment of God in Jesus — the deity made flesh, dwelling among us — means that God both suffered and, crucially, suffered with others in a way that was a seismic break with all that came before. In the Gospels, we repeatedly read of the compassion of Jesus for those suffering physically and emotionally, for those “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
When a man afflicted with leprosy came to Jesus, begging on his knees to be healed, we’re told that Jesus, “moved with compassion, stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I am willing; be cleansed.’” And he was.
This is an extraordinary scene. Those with leprosy were considered not just unclean, physically and spiritually, but loathsome. Everything they touched was viewed as defiled. They were often cast out from their villages, quarantined “outside the camp.” In the words of the famed 19th-century preacher Charles Spurgeon, “They were to all intents and purposes, dead to all the enjoyments of life, dead to all the endearments and society of their friends.”
People would avoid contact with those afflicted with leprosy. They were seen by many as the object of divine punishment, the disease understood to be a visible mark of impurity. Yet in the account in Mark, Jesus not only heals the man with leprosy; he also touches him. In doing so, Jesus defied Levitical law. He himself became “unclean.” And he provided human contact to a person whom no other human would touch — and who had very likely not been touched in a very long time.
Jesus’ touch was not necessary for him to heal the man of leprosy, but the touch may have been necessary to heal the man of feelings of shame and isolation, of rejection and detestation.
Kerry Dearborn, professor emerita of theology at Seattle Pacific University, told me her students found the most moving examples of Jesus’ compassion to be his responses to outsiders, especially those deemed unworthy, unclean or unfit. “In taking on their ‘outsider status’ with them,” Dr. Dearborn told me, “he reflected his deep love and solidarity with them, and his willingness to suffer with them.” Jesus not only healed them, she said; he also took on their alienation.
In the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John, we’re told that Lazarus, the brother of Mary of Bethany and Martha, and a friend of Jesus’ whom he loved, was sick. By the time Jesus arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had died and had been entombed for four days. Both sisters were grieving. Mary, when she saw Jesus, fell at his feet weeping. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” she said. We’re told Jesus “was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.”
“Where have you laid him?” he asked.
“Come and see, Lord,” they replied. And according to verse 35, “Jesus wept.”
“Jesus wept” is the shortest verse in the Bible and also “the most profound and powerful,” the artist Makoto Fujimura told me. For him, those are “the most important two words in the Bible.”
And understandably so. Earlier in John 11, we’re told that Jesus knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, which he did. So Jesus wasn’t weeping because he wouldn’t see Lazarus again; it was because he was entering into the suffering of Mary and Martha. Jesus was present with them in their grief, even to the point of tears, all the while knowing that their grief would soon be allayed.
My daughter Christine Wehner, who originally suggested to me that Jesus’ compassion would be a worthwhile topic to explore, told me, “Jesus wept because Mary was before him and her heart was breaking — and as a result, his heart broke, too.” The Psalms tell us that God is “close to the brokenhearted”; in this case, Christine said, “Jesus doesn’t just care for the brokenhearted; he joins them. Their grief becomes his in a remarkable act of love.”
“Jesus ushered in a compassion revolution,” Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church, told me. Before Jesus, compassion was primarily thought of as a weakness, he said.
“When Jesus says he is with us, that’s not a metaphor or a trite offer of ‘thoughts and prayers,’” the pastor said. “He’s literally in it with us.”
Dr. Dudley pointed out that in his suffering, Job says to God, “Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as a mortal sees?” In other words, Do you know how hard it is to be human? “Because of Christmas,” Dr. Dudley told me, “God can legitimately say yes in a way no other god in any other religion can.”
Renée Notkin, colead pastor of Union Church in Seattle, told me that “our daily invitation in living is to be with people in their stories. When I take time to listen deeply and to listen beyond the words spoken to another person’s heart story, am I able to begin to cry with them? Not problem solving and not saying, ‘I know what you mean’; rather simply weeping alongside in shared humanity.”
As a Christian, my faith is anchored in the person of Jesus, who won my heart long ago. It would be impossible to understand me without taking that into account. But sometimes my faith dims; God seems distant, his ways confounding. “Faith steals upon you like dew,” the poet Christian Wiman has written. “Some days you wake and it is there. And like dew, it gets burned off in the rising sun of anxiety, ambitions, distractions.” And the rising sun of grief and loss, too. Those things don’t necessarily destroy faith; in some cases, for some people, they can even deepen it. But they always change it.
...
A nice NYT article.
I got like 10 warnings for harrassment by u/reddit but I\m already banned. Got banned from r/biology and others, they probably think I'm a conspiracy nut now.
Or change it to this nice schizo wall of text made from stormfront's intellectuals. Reddit has my home IP though from a long time ago and I dont want to sound like a domestic terrorist.
If one wanted to really screw the AI, I’d replace each post/comment with nonsense generated by ChatGPT itself on a higher-than-normal temperature setting. AI would be training on its own generated content, and out of context as well.
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