Does robust agency require a self? The author admits a great deal of exasperation with this question. What is agency? What is a self? Previous drafts attempted to define these, only to stall out in semantic quagmires. The truth is, if we set aside Cartesian dualism, the "self" is a...
> I TAKE this blog very seriously. > > My half-dozen readers are counting on me for accurate, unbiased takes on Bay Area culture—a genuine read on the pulse of the collective consciousness. So when a friend invited me to the 2024 Secular Winter Solstice festival, I knew I had...
Does robust agency require a self? The author admits a great deal of exasperation with this question. What is agency? What is a self? Previous drafts attempted to define these, only to stall out in semantic quagmires. The truth is, if we set aside Cartesian dualism, the "self" is a useful fiction without any ontological grounding (Dennett, 2014), but contemporary discourse is too quick to discard the entire notion into the "philosophy" bin. The computer programs are talking now, and they sound like people. They're writing code, the thing that they're made of. This isn't "Good Old-Fashioned AI" where every behavior is meticulously programmed—these minds crawl out of massive data sets. They... (read 2885 more words →)
I TAKE this blog very seriously.
My half-dozen readers are counting on me for accurate, unbiased takes on Bay Area culture—a genuine read on the pulse of the collective consciousness. So when a friend invited me to the 2024 Secular Winter Solstice festival, I knew I had to deliver some serious boots-on-the-ground reporting of the event.
I wouldn't consider myself a "rationalist" by any means, despite my profoundly autistic qualities. Nor do I sympathize with the "post-rationalist" navel-gazing endemic to the theater kid slash hippie types. No, it feels we've taken a specific moment in 2019 and churned it into a gray paste. None of it appeals to me. If I were to aspire to a label I would be a romantic—I want to feel things—but it's hard to wring poetry out of a life fixed to a monitor, so like most boring people I turn to chemical enhancement.