I'm suggesting that "ESP" corresponds with the Cusan vision of "intellectus," or direct access from the immediate source of experience. "Ratio," which can be duplicated in machines, involves the discursive operation of the objects within mental experience.
A funny thing about Turing's *Computing Machinery and Intelligence* is the discussion of ESP.
ESP seems like a pseudo-science now, but thinking machines were unthinkable in 1950. And the nice thing about this comparison is that they resemble Nicholas of Cusa's distinction of "ratio" and "intellectus."
"Ratio" is discursive comparison, judgment, choice, etc. The kind of thing that no one would argue computers are incapable of doing. "Intellectus" is direct apprehension, like the angels.
This is honestly one of the scenarios that scares the shit out of me. For all of the problems we see coming down the pike w.r.t. climate change, a major volcano would yield a lot of ecosystem collapse in novel/unexpected ways. All of this would force the existing political system to actively make choices about geoengineering that are very likely to be badly informed, poorly executed, and insufficiently tracked. Once we're geoengineering on the fly I suspect we'll lose the whole planet.
If there is one vice in Greek thought it is this: because they had the misfortune of being *first* in the culture of inquiry, they misinterpreted the silences in their own dialogues as a kind of resting point, akin to the rest of an Olympian athlete after the games. But in the history of thought, the scale of those silences have shrunk into caesurae or less. And now it becomes apparent that there is no resting point within the world of ideas, and that inquiry does not pierce-through to the end.
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
Humanist interested in the consequences of the machine on intellectual history.