[FRIAM] Writing and Civilization and AI, oh my!

[Prof David West]

I agree with one small caveat. Artifacts; tangible, written, stigmergic, ... are but a small part of what is "cooperatively constructed and kneaded." The vast majority of what an individual "knows" and the vast majority of what the 'collective' "knows" is tacit, 'in-the-mind' and transmitted orally and/or by non-formal means.

davew


On Fri, Jul 26, 2024, at 12:18 PM, glen wrote:
> Similarly, but a bit larger in scope, humans (and other animals) are 
> merely small parts of a larger system. The extent to which any one 
> person actually knows anything (much less is wise about anything) is 
> negligible, on the same order as that which a chimpanzee knows or is 
> wise about something. What's *valuable*, worth preserving, are the 
> cooperatively constructed and kneaded stigmergic cultural artifacts.
>
> But unlike Plato's straw man, suggesting the artifacts are somehow 
> fixed and repetitive, what's interesting about them is a) their 
> re-interpretation through successive generations and b) the derivations 
> spawned from them. Decay and derivation are more informative than 
> preservation. No single artifact (including flora and fauna, knowledge 
> or wisdom) matters. What matters is the milieu, co-mediated by 
> artifacts like math and painting.
>
> On 7/26/24 09:14, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> *< *Particularly galling to me is the deprecation and dismissal of any human knowledge, wisdom, experience ... that cannot be reduced to mere words and abstract symbols. The epitome of this is the conceit that AI—which is nothing more than the algorithmic manipulation of abstract meaningless tokens is somehow "equivalent" to human intelligence.>
>> 
>> The conceit of humans, thinking their low energy, low frequency, lossy biochemical system can compete with tens of thousands of 80 billion-transistor GPUs each running a billion operations a second.
>
>
> -- 
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>
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