this is a Nazca ceramic vessel from the ica region of Peru made anywhere between 200 bce and 600 ce but don't you feel like you could log on to any website today and see this face as someone's avatar. pre-Columbian rantsona
Obviously, since the satisfaction of "gold" souls is exponentially more important than the satisfaction of lower souls, we must prioritize the highest level of thought and consideration toward their satisfaction. This will be the task of "philosophy" in my proposed egalitarian utilitarian utopia.
The conjecture of a Utility Monster implies also a continuum of Utility Monstrosity. I propose to create a rank-order method of organizing utility functions according to order of magnitude: utility functions that are more than two orders of magnitude higher than the average will be considered "gold"; those that are one to two orders higher will be "silver"; those that are within one order of magnitude from the norm will be "bronze" or "iron." Thus we will achieve the most egalitarian system.
Some time ago I worked on a pilot research project about AI, which started with a bunch of user interviews learning about how they used technology and what they might want from an autonomous AI agent
The project went nowhere because the users didn't want an autonomous AI agent making decisions for them
The engineers kept asking for "the data" so they could use AI to "model a solution"
Which rather missed the point of what the data uncovered
These people live in the rainiest place in the world and never developed agriculture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaw%C3%A9sqar
"Once, the power to automatically capture and duplicate the world as the sole privilege of the mirror; now this power has been emulated by technological media—photography, movies, audio recordings, television, and computers—and the world is being filled by representations that share the virtuality of the specular image." ~ Marie-Laure Ryan
Remember that time that the Wall Street Journal published US intel reports about the first COVID victims who, in November of 2019, just happened to all get sick at the Wuhan institute of virology?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228
Happy 5-year anniversary to COVID.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_2019#October_and_November
This wiki article makes it clear that the goal is to find a gender-neutral word to use in spanish (or portuguese), but... why does this project need to be undertaken in English? English is already gender-neutral in most respects. "Latin" is an epicene adjective in English, and so also is "Mexican," "Brazilian," etc.
It seems like anglophone America is being used as safe harbor for a cultural project that doesn't really have any use / relevance within this language.
An argument
1. modern media really is bad for your ego's ability to manage object relations -- and social media is the purest, most psychoactive brew we've ever had
2. society & socialization hove become demonstrably worse in an accelerating trend (EG falling levels of trust, civic participation, etc.)
3. *this* breakdown in social fabric is the fundamental cause beneath the upswing of personality disorders
"Each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But every branch of each plant, every member of each animal, and every drop of their liquid parts is in itself likewise a similar garden or pond." ~ Leibniz, Monadology 67
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.