philosophy

Posts tagged with philosophy

'Don''t Fix Us: Transgender in the Face of Impossibility'

You want, if possible – and there is no more insane "if possible" – to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible – that makes his destruction desirable. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

A kaleidoscopic whirlwind of pern

'Synthesis Libertarianism: A Manifesto' toc: "true"

  1. Introduction

There has been an invisible war for the heart and soul of the libertarian movement going on since the 1960s, and corruption is winning. The foundational values of libertarianism have been all but lost in the influx of alt-right and neo-reactionary people, and something must finally be done about it lest we lose those values completely.

Thin libertarianism was the naive dream of a tiny and struggling movement striving to grow at all costs, but what does it matter if the movement

A Fuzzy Bayesian Analysis of Deductive Argumentation

1 Now that I've finally gotten around to writing out some of the more fundamental components of my epistemology,1 I can at last proceed to writing one of the articles that I've been planning to do pretty much since I started writing on this blog months ago: a fuzzy Bayesian analysis of deductive philosophical argumentation. This was inspired in part by a “discussion of how arguments work on the part of Dr. Graham Oppy. In that interview, he

AI enables privacy laundering

yt:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPkRwUR7eoc

I think this video is really emblematic of a serious problem that we are going to have as a society in the future: privacy laundering by means of AI.

They say at the beginning of the video that they have a rule at corridor that they don't record people without their knowledge and consent. However, they have a goal they want to achieve that surveillance will make significantly easier, so they have a motivation to come up with a rationalization

Accelerationism Triptych 01: Future shock fever

There is something feverishly exciting about watching the deterritorialization swing of technocapitalism work. Careers disintigrate into hypermobile, infinitely reconfigurable, on-demand gigs; old markets are dissolved as new ones are assembled from their molecular media as the fundamental nature of production and demand is altered; technology is ceaslessly iterated in a blind genetic algorithm looking for the next thing; any attempts at societal control are left in the dust, and in the process

Accelerationism Triptych 02: Technology is an engine of possibility

In the first part of this thematic triptych, I discussed the affective aspect of accelerationism — the strange, almost sadomasochistic but also freeing allure of deterritorialization and the space it makes for change, the new, the outside, the different, new freedoms and new arrangements. In this essay, I want to discuss how the rejection and fear of this allure, both in itself and because of a belief that deterritorialization must always be combin

Are LLMs inherently unethical?

In my view, large language models are just tools.

Just like all tools they can have interesting uses –

LLM agents; summarization, even in medical settings; named entity extraction; sentiment analysis and moderation to relieve the burden from people being traumatized by moderating huge social networks; a form of therapy for those who can't access, afford, or trust traditional therapy;

Capitalism innovates?

Capitalism does not innovate, because innovation is risky, whereas rent-seeking and financialization are profitable and mostly guaranteed-safe. Even when it doesn't choose rent-seeking and financialization, capitalism will choose to pander to the obvious gaps in the market that are easy to satisfy, or take existing desires and use advertisement to give them concrete referents in the world of products. And in all these cases, it will aim for the common denominator desires to satisfy, the ones

ChatGPT is bullshit, my philosophical commentary

Mirror of the paper, with my key excerpt from it, here.

I think this paper is too dismissive of the usefulness and capabilities of language models on the basis of their analysis (as I'll cover below), and far too dismissive of the adaptations we can make to make them useful while dealing with their bullshitting nature — a technology need not be perfect, or perfectly reliable, to be useful — but nevertheless, this is an excellent model for unde

Do AI images and video mean "reality is broken?"

A lot of people seem to be angry, upset, or panicking about the advent of generative AI image and especially video models like Veo 3 and Sora 2, claiming that since these systems allow us to effortly create photorealistic videos and images completely out of whole cloth, our society is finally completely screwed: we have no way of getting information that we can know comes from actual reality. We can no longer trust anything.

Leaving aside the possibility of technological solutions — such as

Emacs and the UNIX philosophy, part 2

See also: UNIX, Lisp Machines, Emacs, and the Four User Freedoms.

Each of the main tenets of the UNIX philosophy has essentially a kernel of truth to it:

However, it misunderstands how best to achieve e

Empires of AI by Karen Hao thoughts

Some thoughts on the book as I go through it. This is a book I really have to grapple with, as someone who loves advanced, cutting-edge technology and wants an accelerationist vision of fully automated luxury market anarchism, not an anti-civ, primitivist, or degrowther's vision of returning to the land — or picking over urban remains — with a "few nice perks left over," or the common leftist position of desiring to go back to just before some latest technology has been invented, not seeing

Footnotes

Freeing the noosphere

Author's note: the historical references found herein are meant to be general and impressionistic. I am intentionally simplifying and linearizing this narrative to make a point about how the representation media for ideas effects the nature of the noosphere-economy, not to make any historical point. I have linked to relevant respectable sources for each historical thing so that you can go learn the real history in all its proper complexity if you are interested.

The

GNOME Is Not 'Mobile-First'

And like I said on my podcast, people think I only use KDE, but sometimes, I get so overwhemed with KDE that I need to fire up my GNOME virtual machine just to get a little bit of peace. Because it just… works. … GNOME just works. The moment you start installing extensions, you are introducing some instability into a stable OS, although there are some exceptions. … but GNOME is the macOS of Linux: if you use it the way it was intended to be used, it is going to be super stable. …

Da

How to do a revolution

And tonight, when I dream it will be That the junkies spent all the drug money on Community gardens and collective housing

And the punk kids who moved in the ghetto Have started meeting their neighbors besides the angry ones With the yards That their friends and their dogs have been puking and shitting on

And the anarchists have started Filling potholes, collecting garbage To prove we don't need governments to do these things And I'll wake up, burning Time's Square as we sing "Throw your hand

How to use a large language model ethically

  1. Prefer local models
    1. So you're not supporting the centralization, surveillance, and landlordization of the economy any further
    2. So you're not taking part in necessitationg the creation of more data centers which – while they don't use a total amount of water and energy that's out of line with many other things in our technological society – concentrate water and energy demands in communities in a way they can't prepare for and which hurts them
    3. So you're harder to subtly m

Is GNOME Actually Evil?

GNOME is the de facto or de jure default desktop environment on many of the biggest Linux distributions, and it has a substantial marketshare among Linux users. Yet, GNOME seems to be positively reviled by a vocal minority of the Linux community.

Why the hell is that?

Is it just because GNOM

Large language models will never be able to reason reliably… but that doesn't make them not useful

The fundamental structure of large language models is not just different from the structure of the human brain, but different in a way that fundamentally leans them away from truth and reasoning capabilities. The differences include:

  1. Trained on a reward function that only optimizes for generation of superficially human-seeming (by probability) token sequences, not token sequences which correspond to true or useful ideas or accurate reasoning or anything of the sort. Human beings, on the oth

Linguistic Pragmatism and the Incoherence of Transphobia

1 To all the "superstraight" and transphobic people out there: your categories are fucked. Your language is incomprehensible, and your philosophy of languages is confused. Here's why.

2 As a naturalist, nominalist, and linguistic pragmatist, my position on how words are used is pretty simple: A lot of things in our world share certain common features. There are a lot of different ways that we could taxonomize those common features, in the same way that there are a lot of different words that y

More on LLMs and the occult

I recently watched a the It Could Happen Here podcast episode "Occulture, William S. Burroughs, and Generative AI." The discussion of occulture itself, William S. Burroughs, the mentions of the CCRU and early Nick Land, hyperstition, and other things like that were decently comprehended (better than I can say for most of that group's understanding of subcultures) and somewhat interesting. Might even

My opinion on large language models

There has been a lot of controversy around large language models lately.

Fundamental limitations

In my opinion, they have fundamental flaws that mean that you can't use them for many of the things people are claiming you can use them for, such as obtaining factual information, programming, or writing things for you. This becomes clear if if you look at how large language models actually work:

My own license for the Noosphere

Given my unique beliefs about the "noosphere" — the world of human intellectual and creative expressions and ideas, separate from their material instantiation — and my absolute opposition to its territorialization, including intellectual property, including even using IP to enforce any "freedoms" beyond purely the destruction of IP by means of IP itself (the core idea of share-alike/copyleft), but also my belief that licenses function as a sort o

My thoughts on religion and society

Introduction

Notes on Gender Acceleration

Xenofeminism is what g/acc wishes it was. Technocapital is not inherently feminizing, it is artificing, and that process is available to any gender expression that can be commodified. G/acc, despite its futuristic, anti-humanist trappings, is ultimately a work of ressentiment: it self-servingly elevates the group the author happens to be in over everyone else out of a desire t

On Gary Marcus

I have Gary Marcus in my blogroll. I agree with his idea that neuro-symbolic architectures are the way forward for robust AI.

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Side note: Although unlike him:

  1. I do not think that causation is fundame

On my ethical and metaethical theory

Introduction

Let me put my cards on the table up front: I will be assuming pragmatist epistemology, and will not deal in depth with competing ethical and metaethical philosophy, especially not the cutting-edge stuff, because I'm a regular human being, not a PhD in philosophy, and I have limits. As such this is more a general sketch of what I believe and why I believe it than an in depth point by point proof of it and rebuttal of all possible responses and points.

Generally, my position is t

Personanet and infonet, and the Semantic Web

I recently came across an article on someone's personal blog that spoke eloquently and plainitively about the reason they write online, and how a world of personal AI agents collecting and synthesizing information on-demand for users conflicts with the very reasons they write online in the first place:

There's a fair bit of talk about “Google Zero” at the moment: the day when website traffic referred from Google finally hits zero. If

Posthumanism and The Death Drive

The point is to recognize that to genuinely love life, one must have “signed a contract with death.” The love of life — to the extent that it is something other than naiveté, delusion, or cynical manipulation — will (ambiguously) emerge from, nourish, and incorporate necrophilia. A “love of life” that seeks to exclude or refuse death is not, in fact, a love of life at all, but the worship of an idealistic myth whose inevitable effect will be a devaluing of life in its real and tragic fullness.

Radical elitist egalitarianism

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer’s ideas or personality. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, is decried as a hater of the weak because he believed in the Uebermensch. It does not occur to the shallow interpreters of that giant mind that this vision of the Uebermensch also called for a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves.

It is the same narrow attitude which sees in

TODO Analytic philosophy argument for philosophical egoism

TODO In defense of parsimony

TODO Perspectivist epistemology is not epistemic relativism

TODO The concept of plagarism is a category error when applied to machines

TODO The problem with utilitarianism

TODO Weberian disenchantment is a spook

The "dogshit economics" of AI according to Cory Doctorow

This is a response to this post. I'll respond to the post point by point, because I think that in his rush to discount something he finds personally distasteful, Doctorow gets his economics and arguments very wrong.

First, Doctorow argues that the current excitement around AI is a massive economic bubble, larger than previous bubbles like the dot-com boom or the Worldcom fraud. A significant portion of the stock mark

The Dao of Emacs, and my mixed feelings on Doom Emacs

One of the most powerful aspects of Emacs is that it can truly become anything you want it to be. This is definitely a good thing, as I've spent a lot of time explaining above: malleable tools give you freedom, autonomy, control over your own computing life. You can shape them to best help your workflow, your thought process, your preferences, your needs (even physical ones). They grow with you, around you, rewarding you for the time you spend with them. They have better longevity, because they

The Problem With Presuppositionalism

*This is an essay I wrote awhile ago as a Google Doc, which I'm reposting to this blog because it seems relevant. I haven't looked at it or edited it in awhile, so it's not the most polished or up-to-date version of my philosophy or responses to these things, but I generally stand by it.*

[A presupposition is] a belief that takes precedence over another and therefore serves as a criterion for another. An ultimate presupposition is a belief over which no other takes precedence. For a Christian,

The intellectual property views of traditional artists in the age of NFTs and Generative "AI"

I recently came to a really interesting realization.

So, okay. We all remember the huge cultural phenomenon that was NFTs, that appeared for like a couple months and then immediately disappeared again, right?

What were NFTs exactly?

I'll tell you: they were a way of building a ledger that links specific "creative works" (JPEGs, in the original case, but theoretically others as well – and yes, most NFTs weren't exactly creative) to specific owners, in a way that was difficult to manipula

The phenomenology agentic coding

The discursive trap of productivity metrics

AI coding agents are important not because they make one more productive, but because they fundamentally alter what it is like to program. That is what interests me and — I believe — should interest you, about this whole enterprise. The productivity discourse is, to a large degree, misguided noise, a discursive trap motivated by reactionary Luddism on the one hand and market hype on the other. While AI coding agents certainly make me, as a pr

Two fictional analogies for large language models

Large Library Model

When using a large language model to gain knowledge or perform tasks, they remind me of the Library of Babel: they're capable of outputting basically all grammatical assemblages of tokens, and their probability distribution contains (a fuzzily associative, highly compressed, copy of) essentially all of human knowledge and thought. Thus contained within it is the complete catalogue of useful, insightful, correct, and wise things a

UNIX, Lisp Machines, Emacs, and the Four User Freedoms

UNIX

What Is A Woman?

Since Matt Walsh's transphobic 'documentary' What Is A Woman? was released, I've been seeing a lot of people, even allies and members of the LGBT community, reiterating this question. What is a woman? Just what does that mean? Well, I've got a simple, compact answer:

A woman is someone who identifies with womanhood.

I wouldn't go beyond that for anyone in general conversation, certainly not with someone who asks that question as a challenge or in a "debate me bro" way, because actually e

What OpenAI should have been

OpenAI is fucking awful. We all know this. But I want to offer a vision of an alternative, better future — what could have been, had they not been a techno-cult of privileged power-hungry tech bros totally divorced from reality, but instead people genuinely dedicated to the project of making "AGI" that benefits all of humanity.

Imagine, if you will, a non-profit foundation,

Why I Am No Longer An Anarcho-Capitalist

  1. A Fundamental Confusion Of Values

My primary problem with anarcho-capitalists, as I mentioned in another essay ('Two Principles of Anarchism') is that they are fundamentally confused about values. The value at the heart of all libertarian movements is autonomy, often referred to as liberty: the desire to be a free individual, making one's own choices about one's life, labor, and associations, according to one's own plans. This is why people are attracted to any form of libertarianism or in

Why am I being so mean to indie artists? Am I a tech bro?

To be perfectly clear, the purpose of this post, and all my other posts on this page expressing frustration at popular views concerning information ownership and "intellectual property," is not to punch down at independent artists and progressive activists. I care a lot about them, because I'm one, and I know many others; I'm deeply sympathetic to their values and goals and their need for a livelihood.

The reason I write so much about this topic, directed as often if not moreso at independent

Why the "Left" always loses

See also: What the fuck does praxis even mean?

In my opinion, I think it's really kind of for three interlocking reasons.

The first is that The Left has increasingly become the politics of /ressentiment, with very few exceptions. This is not inherent to many of the projects of the Left, but it's inescapable in Leftist culture as a whole. "Leftism" is a system of morality and values constructed by the w

  1. I will admit, I fall short on this. I focus on trying to educate the people in my local community on tech-related things because that's my strong suit, but besides that I tend to be very reclusive, mostly because my disability means being in non-controlled, changing environments, especially if there's a lot of noise or visual complexity, and talking to people, is completely overwhelming and exhausting.↩︎