flâneur

Josias Aurel

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on the atlas — 3

highlights — 15

  • Through risky play, children practice dealing with strong ambiguous emotions (thrill and excitement could also be interpreted as fear and terror) and situations that abound with uncertainty. It can also show them that they are resilient and capable of coping when things go wrong.
    Why Children Need Risk, Fear, and Excitement in Play
  • Some deaf children, left to socialize without the aid of sign language, can develop whole new systems of communication complete with complex grammar
    Are Large Language Models Conscious?
  • language actually represented a kind of cognitive impairment — a limitation imposed by our fall from grace, a reflection of our God-given mortality.
    Are Large Language Models Conscious?
  • Benjamin Whorf posited that cultural differences in vocabulary and grammar fundamentally dictate the bounds of our thought about the world. Language may not only be the thing that endows AI with consciousness — it may also be the thing that imprisons it. What happens when an intelligence becomes too great for the language it has been forced to use?
    Are Large Language Models Conscious?
  • As these models evolve, it increasingly appears like they are arriving at consciousness in reverse — beginning with its exterior signs, in languages and problem-solving, and moving inward to the kind of hidden thinking and feeling that is at the root of human conscious minds.
    Are Large Language Models Conscious?
  • Suddenly, it appeared to researchers that ChatGPT 4.0 could track the false beliefs of others, like where they might assume an object is located when someone has moved it without their knowledge. It seems like a simple test, but in psychological research, it is the key to what is known as “theory of mind” — a fundamental ability of humans to impute unobservable mental states to others.
    Are Large Language Models Conscious?
  • They appeared to develop the capacity to produce abstract images from mental synthesis and reason about objects in an imagined space. At the same time, their linguistic understanding evolved. They could comprehend figurative language and infer new information about abstract concepts.
    Are Large Language Models Conscious?
  • Put another way, it may be possible to think, in some fashion, without generating a conscious self — performing simple mathematical calculations, for example. But thinking about something — a tart green apple, Louis XVI of France — involves some mental synthesis of an object outside the self. In effect, it creates a thinking self, one necessarily capable of being aware of what is happening to it.
    Are Large Language Models Conscious?
  • Either language imperfectly reflects a much richer interior world of the mind, which is capable of operating without it, or it enables the thought that occurs in the mind and, in the process, delimits and confines it.
    Are Large Language Models Conscious?
  • lone genius myth. Pablo Picasso: “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” James Baldwin: “Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.” In practice, however, what they are referring to as solitude is not being physically isolated but rather more of a state of mind. They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the types of questions worth asking — they’ve developed their taste a…
    Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile
  • “The great human error is to reason in place of finding out” — Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
    Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile
  • noting that most education systems fixate students to an agenda where they are always searching for a singular right answer to the problem rather than taking the time to really feel and explore.
    Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile
  • we gain insights not by going in search of them, but instead by being receptive to the true nature of the thing itself.
    Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile
  • If we outsource our opinions all the time, we no longer exercise our own taste and lose the capacity to derive our own value systems. Like a muscle, it decays without frequent use and we default to liking and valuing what everyone around us already likes or does. As with anything mediating, the act of relying on the taste of society as a proxy for our own effectively serves as a band-pass filter, dampening the range of what our exploratory taste might consider.
    Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile
  • We have built up an instinctive habit of looking things up and seeing how other people have done it before trying it for ourselves. But the downside is that this habit primes our brains to value our work in the context of the taste of others rather than of our own. We have outsourced our value systems for what is good and bad (how we may judge aesthetic value) to other people.
    Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile