Thirteen Ways To Think About An A.I.
Western Metaphysics is Imploding. Will We Raise a Phoenix from The Ashes? [Catalytic AI]
On the 12/8 Path with Charlie Keil
by William Benzon I knew about Charlie Keil somewhat before I met him and long before we began collaborating on various projects. In 1966 he published Urban Blues, which was a study of such singers as Bobby Blue Bland and B.B. King, blues musicians who wore sharp suits and performed in urban venues with electrified…
Some Scattered Thoughts about Maestro, Music, and the Meaning of It All
by William Benzon I’ve now seen Maestro twice, spread out over four, maybe five, sittings. I suppose the fact that I haven’t watched it straight through in a single sitting might be taken as an indication that I didn’t find it…Didn’t find it what? Good, compelling, interesting, satisfying? If one or some combination of those…
Aye Aye, Cap’n! Investing in AI is like buying shares in a whaling voyage captained by a man who knows all about ships and little about whales
by William Benzon That title reads like I have doubts about the current state of affairs in the world of artificial intelligence. And I do – who doesn’t? – but explicating that analogy is tricky, so I fear I’ll have to leave our hapless captain hanging while I set some conceptual equipment in place. First,…
On the Road with the Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band
by Bill Benzon The road was generally somewhere in the Capital District of upstate New York. Think of it as a group of small cities and towns and centered on Albany, the state capital, Troy, where I lived at the time, and Schenectady, incidentally, where my grandfather had his first job in the United States,…
Next year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI debates]
by William Benzon Oh, Ariela, daughter of the People of the Book, the work of the mind is our game! –Miriam Yevick I first became aware of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick through my interest in human perception and thought. I believed that her 1975 paper, Holographic or Fourier Logic, was quite important. David Hays and I…
A New Counter Culture: From the Reification of IQ to the AI Apocalypse
Children in Search of the Dance, Some Informal Ethnographic Analysis
Black, White, and Blues: Notes on Music in America
by Bill Benzon When European colonists and used West African tribesmen and their descendants as slaves, they had no intention of learning anything from them or of adopting their ways. Their intention was simply to secure a source of cheap and tractable labor. But they were struck by the musicality of their slaves. And that…
Mind Hacks R Us: The Psychedelic Computer
by William Benzon During the last half of the 20th century various groups of insiders and outsiders adopted mind-altering drugs and computer technology to create cultural spaces in which we imagined and realized new venues for the human mind. These spaces engaged fundamental issues of freedom and control, of emotion and reason, which have bedeviled…
Beyond artificial intelligence?
World, Mind, Learnability, Large Language Models, and the Metaphysical Structure of the Cosmos
by Bill Benzon By cosmos I mean “the universe as seen as a well-ordered whole.” It thus stands in opposition to chaos. By metaphysical I mean…well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Wikipedia tells me that it is one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, ethics, and logic and “the…
From “Kubla Khan” through GPT and beyond
by Bill Benzon I became hooked on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in the Spring of 1969, my last semester as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Three years later “Kubla Khan” had become the standard against which I measured my understanding of the human mind. That is why I am about to tell a story about how…
ChatGPT is a miracle of rare device. Here’s how I’m thinking about it.
by William Benzon ChatGPT is based on the same underlying computational architecture as GPT-3, which was released in the summer of 2020. That’s when I started reading “GPT for Dummies” articles. Some were more useful than others, but none of them gave me what I wanted. So I started poking around in the technical literature.…
A day in the life of Kimono Mom and Sutan
by Bill Benzon “I’m trying to treat her as an equal.” – Moe, talking about Sutan Of philosophy and food Moe, the name has two syllables, is Moto’s wife and Sutan’s mother. Though it may also be a play on “a Japanese word that refers to feelings of strong affection mainly towards characters in anime,…
SBF from Girard to Dawkins to Xanadu and back
Conversing with ChatGPT about Jaws, Mimetic Desire, and Sacrifice
Dance to the Music: the Kids Owned the Day
by William Benzon Here’s the scene: A middle school auditorium in suburban New Jersey early in the Fall. It’s late Saturday afternoon on the second day of a dance competition. The auditorium is filled—but only loosely—with young dancers and their parents, other family, and friends. They’re all waiting for the final performance of the competition.…