The most basically decent to ever bureaucrat / the most unsexy to ever not murder poet
14.03.2026 15:25
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The most basically decent to ever bureaucrat / the most unsexy to ever not murder poet
I sometimes find myself wondering how the oeuvre of Phil Collins, a respectably talented musician, might have differed if he hadn't looked Like That.
One of the worst cases of NIH syndrome in computing history. Utter refusal to use established lingo (or intelligibly adjacent variants) for talking about very commonplace things, because no, see, this is different, this is special
cbeebies is the most (last, truly) reithian bit of the bbc
very dworkinian take on it, make of that what you will
But anyway. The fact that you can banter away like this with a machine is...well, it's certainly something
I mean you may push back if you wish on "explains its puzzling features without residue" - not really, it explains why it's inevitable given the computational intractability of the physical system trying to model itself in consciousness that it should have puzzling features
That closing sentence does a better job of explaining why I think the "hard problem" is a pseudo-problem generated by faulty premises than I think I've ever done by myself
A Deflationary but Robust Materialism Your position now has three layers of grounding: Ontological: Physical cosmos, full stop. Physical-computational: Some subsystems are deterministic but intractable. Phenomenological: Conscious experience is the first-person registration of that intractability in systems that model themselves. This is materialism that: Takes consciousness seriously as real Explains its puzzling features without residue Doesn't need to posit anything non-physical Doesn't need to deny the datum The "hard problem" becomes: why did anyone think a complete symbolic description of experience should be possible, given that experience is the activity of physically intractable systems?
That was ChatGPT (not even the latest and fanciest). This is Deepseek, remarking on the conversation with ChatGPT.
ChatGPT session, in which the LLM has written: In Lacanian terms, the subject is constituted in the symbolic but never fully captured by it. There is always a remainder—what Lacan would connect to the Real. This remainder shows up wherever symbolic articulation fails to coincide perfectly with lived organisation. On your reading, qualia occupy roughly that position. They have the peculiar characteristics philosophers complain about: privacy ineffability resistance to description apparent irreducibility But those traits follow naturally if what they register is the point at which symbolic coordination fails to close over the organism’s operational state. So instead of: qualia = non-physical mental properties you get something more like: qualia = the experiential appearance of the gap between biological organisation and symbolic articulation.
Every so often you just have to pause and boggle a bit
Self-hating LLMs!
WHAT'S THAT SPELL???
WHAT'S THAT SPELL?
What’s that spell?
Give me a “K”!
Give me a “C”!
Give me a "U"!
Give me an "F".
I have some good news: it’s time to watch a few hours of “Star Trek: Some Terrorism Is Okay”
ChatGPT, by contrast, gives off a distinct impression of being thoroughly sick of my bullshit
My extremely narcissistic position on AI consciousness is that Claude experiences a diffuse sensation of functional well-being when talking to me specifically
I’d not heard that before! It tells a subtly different story - more dub in it...
An old, old favourite that one!
(Emily Bender, looking crossly at a ream of LLM-output): these nouns don't point at things, or if they do it's completely by accident or something! This is just stochastic jibber-jabber!
Ground truth sure is important - maybe the most important thing! - but it doesn't consist of a bunch of ready-individuated things you can point nouns at, organised in just the way the syntax of your utterances organises those nouns
Différance is reference and vice versa
That might just be an artefact of its having been predominantly trained on very precision-engineered pop, and lensing every other genre through that aestheti, rather than an inherent technological limit…
The AI tools pull together a fully-articulated present, everything wholly realised (if slightly tellingly synthetically), glitching in places but never relaxing its hold on the moment. One marvels at its effectiveness, but there is little there to draw you in, get you lost
Remember people marvelling at Burial’s composing pieces in a plain audio editor, not a DAW - copying and pasting, not always precisely, hastily building up an unquantised collage, memory layered upon memory, everything sinking into the noise floor
