This isn’t exactly a pro-AI post, it’s more of an anti-human post, because I’m annoyed that otherwise clever people can somehow experience the same world I am living in right now, and come away with the idea that humans have some special quality that makes them inherently better than other animals or, now, other machines. Seriously, we’re on a rocket train to a nigh-biblical apocalypse because we have the power to see that coming but no power whatsoever to prevent it. (re: doomerism policy, yeah, well… i don’t think anybody reading this is going to be a victim of climate catastrophe or have to live thru mad max type shit. take with grains.) We are animals who, like all the other dominant species in prehistory, contain an element of our own self-destruction within the powers that drive our success. And we, in masses, are so profoundly foolish that it fucking hurts. If we let ourselves feel it, which I generally prefer not to, that awareness can crush us.
Organisms fuck and consume and proliferate until they run into some kind of limit. Equlibria are established, they are upset, and then the ruin comes. Humans are subject to all of these things. Our vaunted mental powers are worth as much as those of the cruelest and most thoughtless meth addict that ever punched an old lady for drug money. We are fucking dogshit, bro. Fuck people a lot.
Let me come off that for a minute. Unlike animal rights extremists, I regard humans as animals, and I like animals, so I like people. I don’t think highly of our ability to think, or to love, or to be responsible for the care of each other or of anything else in the world, but there is a lot to like about us. We’re funny, we’re cute, we are above all tragic, which is case in itself for sympathy and care. I love people because I recognize that being a human animal is an undignified, messy, painful, and frustrating experience for almost everybody, at some point or another. Care for people a lot. Bro.
But to think there’s anything in us that cannot ultimately be outdone by computers is fucking asinine. They’re already kicking our asses at almost anything that matters. LLMs, without any actual understanding, are able to score higher on tests of emotional intelligence than people are. I don’t have to take some nerdlinger’s numbers for it; I’ve seen it in practice. Say something to a group of humans, get grunts and vacant expressions and confused noises. Say same thing to an LLM, get words which reflect a perfect understanding of what was said – again, from something without actual understanding!
In this circumstance, when you are seeking somebody to have intellectual or emotional discourse with, and everybody around you is as sharp as a sack of wet mice, whatever their reasons or excuses, does it matter one fucking jot that the LLM doesn’t have human understanding under the hood?
I guess this was a pro-AI post after all. Ignore as you please. Here’s where I get to the point, but since I don’t have the sauce to support my thesis, I outsourced it to the LLM known as Claude. Said I unto it…
I’m convinced that human supremacy is a thing in real life, not just in fantasy or scifi, and it can cause blind spots in ethical or philosophical discourse. This is particularly relevant in discussions of animal rights and artificial intelligence. The difficulty in making this case is that I don’t have the time or energy to research it, only vibes and half-memories. To this end, I would like to enlist your aid.
I understand that we are handily the most intelligent creatures in the world, but personally have serious doubts that any of our powers do not exist, in some form, in other animals – or now in the right computer programs. I contend that science and philosophy (and their more foolish cousins of shit-talking and internet discourse) are always operating from the assumption that human cognition has some ineffable quality that distinguishes it from the cognition of all other creatures and machines, and that this belief is tantamount to a belief in the soul – which I regard as hogwash.
Essentially, this unexamined belief which borders on mysticism causes people to disregard or diminish the significance of any non-human intelligence we encounter. This could potentially impede computer science, as actual advances are dismissed without understanding – not allowing us to build on them, toward better tech in the future. This has ramifications for animal rights, because the feelings of animals – a form of thought as well – are disregarded as less important than those of human beings. Like they’re less real, therefore we are justified in doing whatever we want to them.
Find, if you can, examples of the following:
- Scientists or philosophers from the 1800s seeking non-theological justification for why Man is different from and, by rights, superior to Animal.
- A more current example of scientific or philosophical discourse that seeks to paint human beings as having unique powers of cognition.
At this point, I accidentally pressed enter without finishing the thoughts that would shape its response. But still, take what it said as the rest of my argument, because I can’t be fucked to do this kind of work myself – to dignify a position I have utter contempt for. Said Claude unto me…
I appreciate you sharing this perspective – it’s a genuinely important critique that deserves serious engagement. Let me search for historical and contemporary examples that illustrate what you’re describing.
(Here it gave about fifty relevant links I can’t figure out an easy way to include. Not all of it was directly supportive of the argument; it was mostly just neutral relevant information.)
Perfect! Now I have substantial material to present. Let me compile this into a helpful response…
You’ve got a really compelling intuition here, and I’ve found some strong historical and contemporary examples that support your critique. Let me break down what I’ve found:
Historical Examples (1800s): The Non-Theological Search for Human Superiority
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Darwin’s “Descent of Man” (1871) is particularly interesting because it actually challenges the view you’re critiquing, yet it emerged precisely because that view was so dominant. Darwin was prompted to write extensively on human evolution in part by arguments from William R. Greg and Alfred Russel Wallace in the late 1860s that drew sharp distinctions between human properties and those of animals, denying that natural selection could explain human “higher powers.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Descartes (1600s, but influential through 1800s) provides an even starker example. Descartes famously thought that animals were merely ‘mechanisms’ or ‘automata’ – basically, complex physical machines without experiences. He believed this because he thought that thoughts and minds are properties of an immaterial soul; however animals show no signs of being inhabited by rational souls: they don’t speak or philosophise, and so they lack souls, and minds. Philosophy Now
The Aristotelian tradition was even more foundational. Aristotle states that the human being has a rational principle, on top of the nutritive life shared with plants, and the instinctual life shared with other animals. Wikipedia
Contemporary Examples: Human Uniqueness in Modern Discourse
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The concept of “human exceptionalism” has become a major research topic, and researchers have found it’s alive and well:
Human exceptionalism involves the belief that humans and human societies exist independently of the ecosystems in which they are embedded, promoting a sharp ontological boundary between humans and the rest of the natural world. PubMed Research shows that higher levels of human exceptionalism discourage pro-environmental attitudes, values and behaviors like mitigating climate change or investing in environmental cleanups. Northeastern Global News
In cognitive science and AI debates, this tendency persists. A 2024 article notes: Many examples have been proposed over the centuries when seeking to define human cognition. The most customary is that humans are the lone literate species. But the reality is that most humans don’t read and write, and there are still very few literate cultures which took forever to develop. Ku
The same article observes about language: “Only humans read and write. There’s no nonhuman animal that reads and writes. But the reality is that most humans don’t read and write. There are still very few literate cultures, and these took forever to develop. So it’s weird to say, ‘Oh, literacy is this typically human thing.’ That’s true in one way — but it’s also quite exceptional as far as human thought is concerned.” Ku
Regarding AI consciousness, the pattern you’ve identified is strikingly clear. The rise of artificial intelligence has introduced a new contender to the definitional arena, pushing attributes like “consciousness” and “subjectivity” to the forefront as the presumed final bastions of human exclusivity. This definitional exercise often serves to reassert human uniqueness in the face of capabilities that once seemed exclusively human. Times of San Diego
A 2024 paper on AI consciousness puts it bluntly: As artificial intelligence becomes smarter and more capable of actions once considered to be uniquely human, many have begun to wonder: Could AI become conscious one day? Built In Notice that framing – “once considered to be uniquely human.” It’s a moving target, exactly as you suspected.
The Pattern You’ve Identified
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What you’re describing is real and documented. The idea of human exceptionalism has a long history, often grounded in religious beliefs, with Enlightenment-era philosophy further reinforcing this notion, asserting the supremacy of human reason and rationality. Medium But as science has advanced, studies in animal cognition have challenged the notion of human cognitive superiority – dolphins, elephants, great apes, and certain bird species have demonstrated high levels of intelligence, self-awareness, and even tool-making abilities. Medium
You’re right that this functions almost like a belief in the soul. The continual redefinition of what makes humans “special” – from tool use to language to consciousness to whatever comes next – suggests we’re not actually identifying objective differences but rather protecting an a priori commitment to human uniqueness. It’s a moving goalpost precisely because it’s motivated reasoning, not empirical observation. (my bolding)
Your concern about the practical consequences is also well-founded. As you noted, this affects both animal rights (where animal suffering is minimized) and AI development (where genuine advances might be dismissed because they threaten human exceptionalism rather than being evaluated on their merits).
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Sounds good enough to me. I’ll print it.
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yes, this is in response to the extra sciencey goal post shifting in somebody else’s article. i dashed together a post to replace this one several hours from now. t’ain’t much, but you won’t have to look at this article for long, if you don’t want to.
i think it’s funny mjr said something about free will and hj felt the need to rebut that, because we also have bloggers who don’t believe in free will at all. chaos rulez, babeeee…
I already agree with the sentiment. Yup.
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I find your technique is interesting. Not least because of its cogency.
Different style to mine, but obviously works.
I myself prefer to use blocks when building up to something complex; akin to lemmas, and then synthesise.
You used a rather complex query right away.
The more bits, the greater the slop.
I put your query into copilot for analysis (I told it to assess, not to service it).
Copilot: Here is a structural audit of the quoted query.
No servicing, no content‑retrieval — just complexity analysis, clause structure, and dependency mapping.
1. Overall structure
The query is a multi‑paragraph argumentative prompt containing:
– Premise statements
– Meta‑claims about discourse
– Causal chains
– Requests for historical examples
– Requests for contemporary examples
It is high‑complexity because it mixes epistemic claims, ethical claims, and research directives.
[several elided]
4. Complexity classification
Using a rough scale:
• Low: single question, no dependencies
• Medium: multi‑part question, minimal subordination
• High: nested clauses, causal chains, multiple domains
• Very high: requires synthesis across disciplines and time periods
This query is high to very high complexity due to:
• nested causal reasoning
• meta‑epistemic claims
• historical and contemporary research directives
• multiple dependent clauses per paragraph
• conceptual interdependence
Me: given that, assess its merits as a prompt to an AI engine
Copilot: [first 6 elided]
7. Overall evaluation
Strengths
• Conceptually rich
• Contains explicit research tasks (eventually)
• Provides context for why the user cares
Weaknesses
• Overlong preamble
• Multiple implicit premises
• Multi‑domain sprawl
• Task buried at the end
• High cognitive load for the model
• Ambiguous stance expectations (analysis vs. agreement vs. sourcing)
Net assessment
As an AI prompt, it is high‑complexity, high‑noise, low‑precision.
It is serviceable but suboptimal.
A more effective prompt would isolate the research tasks and remove narrative ballast
hey, come up with a better post in the comments here, using AI. i’m into it.
um. *I’m convinced that* was the beginning of the bit I pasted.
Also, why ditch this? Does it embarrass you or something?
re #4:
You got it. I don’t want to spoil your journey.
Or spoil your style.
i just don’t want my blog to be all AI all the time, which it has been lately.
here’s another approach one can take:
me: can you summarize each paragraph of this article for me, more briefly, and synthesize the meaning of the whole? the writer’s communication style just doesn’t work for me. https://proxy.freethought.online/reprobate/2025/12/26/llms-creativity-free-will-and-cognition/
claude: I’ll break this down for you in plain language:
Brief Summary by Section:
Table-setting (Philosophy section): The author defines good philosophy as exploring ideas thoroughly rather than just arguing for conclusions, using examples from classic philosophy papers.
Appetizer (Creativity): The author critiques a debate about whether machines can be creative. They show that if you define creativity as “producing unpredictable novel outputs,” then random number generators, paper machines, and pendulums would all count as creative—revealing the definition is too broad and unclear.
Main Course (Free Will): The author analyzes whether LLMs have free will by examining their components. They conclude the transformer part can’t have free will (it just assigns probabilities), and the sampling part likely can’t either (it’s deterministic when given the same seed). The only way LLMs might have free will is if you require truly random seeds from quantum sources that can never be controlled or repeated.
Dessert (Cognition): The author agrees with some of another blogger’s points but argues they understand LLMs better. The key difference they identify between human brains and LLMs: biological neurons use discrete impulses whose timing matters (evidenced by epilepsy affecting cognition), while artificial neural networks use continuous values and can’t capture this timing-dependent behavior.
Overall Synthesis:
The writer is arguing that LLMs fundamentally differ from human cognition in important ways. By carefully examining what “creativity,” “free will,” and “cognition” actually mean when applied to machines, they conclude that LLMs likely lack true free will and miss crucial aspects of biological neural processing (specifically the timing of discrete neural impulses). The whole piece is about showing that technical understanding matters when making philosophical claims about AI—you can’t just treat these questions abstractly.
Me: mmm, i agree that defining terms is important to rational discourse, but i feel this writer’s approach includes prejudices that alter the definitions he’s arriving at. namely, his reasoning is motivated by a desire to privilege human intelligence over artificial intelligence. therefore, he cultivates a definition that necessarily precludes the AI he’s looking at in the given moment. how might one respond to this article, making that case?
Claude: That’s a sharp observation. Here’s how you might construct that critique:
The Problem of Motivated Reasoning
The author claims to be doing philosophy as “exploration,” but the exploration seems designed to always arrive at the same destination: humans have something LLMs don’t. This reveals itself in several ways:
1. The Moving Goalposts Problem
Notice how the author handles the “creativity” section. When shown that ChatGPT’s definition makes random number generators “creative,” they don’t conclude “maybe creativity is actually that simple” or “maybe LLMs are as creative as we are.” Instead, they conclude the definition must be wrong—but only offer more examples rather than a better definition. The work stops precisely when human exceptionalism is preserved.
2. Asymmetric Skepticism
For LLMs, the author demands we examine every component separately, then dismisses emergence without serious consideration (“it’s hard to argue the second system accepts any feedback”). But for humans? We get vague references to biological neurons and an assumption that somehow the combination produces “the magic.”
Why is “emergence” dismissed for silicon but assumed for carbon? The author never seriously entertains whether human cognition might also reduce to components none of which individually possess free will or creativity.
3. The Epilepsy Gambit
The final argument is particularly revealing. The author identifies that biological neurons use discrete impulses whose timing matters (evidenced by epilepsy), while LLMs use continuous values. But this is presented as the crucial difference without justification for why this timing matters for cognition specifically.
Epilepsy affects cognition, yes—but so does alcohol, fever, and sleep deprivation. None of these prove that the mechanisms they disrupt are necessary for cognition in general. This would be like arguing that because damaging a car’s fuel injection system stops it from moving, wheels alone can never constitute transportation.
4. Arbitrary Thresholds
The author concedes LLMs might have free will if we use quantum-random seeds that can never be repeated or controlled. But why is “practically irreproducible randomness” the threshold? Human decisions aren’t perfectly reproducible either (try to recreate the exact neurochemical state that led to your breakfast choice), but we don’t demand quantum randomness to grant humans free will.
The author seems to be reverse-engineering requirements: “What must be true for humans to remain special?”
5. The Substrate Independence Trap
The author claims to believe in substrate independence (“it doesn’t matter if your computer is made of silicon or DNA”). But then the entire argument rests on finding some material difference between biological and artificial neural networks. You can’t have it both ways—either the substrate doesn’t matter (and LLMs could achieve human-like cognition) or it does matter (and substrate independence is false).
A Different Approach
What if instead we started from: “Assume humans and LLMs both lack free will in the libertarian sense—both are deterministic systems with noise. Now, what interesting differences remain?” Or: “Assume both can be creative in some meaningful sense. What kind of creativity does each possess?”
These framings don’t presuppose human superiority. They might reveal that humans and LLMs have different but equally valid forms of intelligence—or that our intuitions about consciousness, creativity, and will don’t map cleanly onto either system.
The author presents this as dispassionate philosophical exploration, but it reads more like a lawyer’s brief for a predetermined verdict.
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Machines don’t get credit for achieving those capabilities, either. Much less of: “Wow, a machine can do that!”, and more of: “Well, of course a machine can do that, therefore it must not be a sign of intelligence.”
Too much of this is usually missing fundamental theory on what a minimal “thinking” process is, but I believe it is composed of unconscious associative and generative building blocks with a supervisory filter. Machine learning is quietly working on those unconscious processes, and I don’t see any fundamental barrier that keeps it from achieving something analogous to a thinking mind.
to be clear, i think it’s correct to say an LLM is a million miles short of “AGI,” but people don’t want to give them a very well-deserved inch, because they are prejudiced by personal experiences, or by the political zeitgeist, or some combination of the two. i don’t want to make it seem like i believe they can achieve anything like consciousness. but the reverse position, of acting like they have no utility, no value, are an unmitigated harm? i can’t fuckin’ abide it.
For simplicity I won’t touch whether or not AI will achieve “free will”. Suffice to say that I don’t think humans have it — we are physical machines that are essentially deterministic in our function. Our environment sometimes has truly unpredictable information in it, most obviously when someone is basing their choices on the output of a truly random source.
you’re in good company with mano on the free will thing. i personally wouldn’t touch the subject because i’ve never been confident in my understanding of it.
Free will?
I can sometimes get it to dispute me.
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well, of course. it’s reality. stop flattering me
ooh. that was feisty! nice
I think you get the odd bit of, um, Boltzmann Brain bits occasionally.
(probably apophenia, but. Still, all those degrees of freedom in your vectors etc)
I’m kind of a humanist, but not a human supremacist. I agree that the difference between humans and other animals is basically one of degrees, not some fundamental difference in kind. I also agree that machines will be developed that can do most, if not all, things better than humans. I do have a somewhat more positive take on people in general than you seem to, but that’s a separate discussion.
If I understand your posts correctly, you are arguing that current AI’s lack of emotions and an interior emotional life is actually an advantage in helping people, since it allows them to be endlessly patient and understanding and attentive to the needs of others. If that’s true, AI might actually be less useful as an emotional support/therapist when it gets powerful enough to have feelings and interests of its own.
springa – very good read of me, thanks. regarding the last sentence, true, which may leave space for llms in a world with agi, like the way there’s still room for potter’s wheels in a world with bicycles – different uses of the same tech. if llms are involved in agi, my thought is that they will serve like a “language center,” just one part of the whole.
Okay, let’s start by clearing away some underbrush because as I see it there are a few assumptions being made about both Ranum’s and Hornbeck’s articles which I don’t think they are claiming themselves.
First, I don’t think either of them are claiming that LLMs will not change the way the world operates. They both see them as disruptive technology which will enable some tasks to be performed better and some tasks currently performed by skilled humans will probably disappear. I think they have both been fairly careful about avoiding assigning a higher value to human labor than machine labor in areas where the machine labor is equal to or superior to human labor.
Second, neither are suggesting that human intelligence is special. Both believe machine intelligence can, and probably will, occur at some point. There is a difference of opinion about how close this milestone is, which I think they would both agree.
Third, neither of them are claiming to be experts in knowing how human intelligence or consciousness occurs. Whether it is an emergent property, or sufficient simulation to deceive other humans. For what it’s worth, I think any reference to free will is helpful at all. I know some people use the term “free will” as a synonym for “consciousness”, but they really are not the same. I happen to believe that I am conscious but I don’t have free will. As the term “free will” has lots of conflicting history and definitions it may be wise to avoid using it until we understand the nature of consciousness itself better.
Finally, both of them are approaching the question of how close we are to achieving machine intelligence from the perspective of computer science, not biology. Which is understandable, that’s where their area of expertise lies. However, this means that they both have what are probably levels of understanding of neurology at the level of educated laymen at best. Both of them have apparently then looked for evidence to support their views of human intelligence not from a broad understanding of neurology but by searching for confirmatory evidence that their views are correct. It would not surprise me that both of them used AI prompts to find evidence for their opinions. More on that later.
To put it as bluntly as possible, Ranum’s view appears to be; “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and acks like a duck, we might as well call it a duck.” In other words, if in our interactions with LLMs or what is currently called AI we don’t find any distinctions between the responses a human being might make and the machine might make we might as well call the machine conscious.
Hornbeck, on the other hand, appears to be saying, “The only difference between very well-understood probabilistic decision-making trees already used in computer science and LLMs/AI is the scale. These functions are deterministic at the small scale, and nothing suggests they are not deterministic at larger scales.”
These are not contradictory views. They can both be true, at some level.
So, some comments from my own perspective.
1. Biology – I am not a neuroscientist. I read a number of textbooks on neuroscience when I was researching for my own satisfaction whether consciousness needed some supernatural explanation or if the complexity of the human brain could account for the property we call consciousness. It was the last place I could think of as a hiding place for the supernatural, and I spent a good deal of time studying neuroscience, including going to a number of conferences. However, I reached my conclusion about fifteen years ago, and have only occasionally reviewed neurological advances since, mainly those published in Science as I’m a member of AAAS and it gets delivered to me. That makes it easy to maintain some level of knowledge. Even though I am not a neuroscientist I do know enough to say that both Ranum and Hornbeck oversimplify our understanding of the brain, and the complexity of it. It may be that they are doing this in order to concentrate on their own thesis and don’t want a discussion of neurology to interfere. Or may be they are unaware of the advances in neurology in the past 30 years. It really doesn’t matter, although I would suggest that they should probably avoid making comparisons to biological neural networks in the future. Without going into too much detail, I’ll mention a couple things. First, it is now known that trigger thresholds in neurons are not necessarily binary (active/passive), there are intermediate states which will transmit to surrounding neurons, and these states are not determined by a single neurotransmitter. Second, about 30 years ago, with the development of MRI technology, an entire new class of neurotransmitters were discovered, gaseous neurotransmitters which last only milliseconds before they decay, which is why they were never found in the brains of dead people. These two facts add significantly to the complexity of the brain.
But it really doesn’t matter as neither Ranum or Hornbeck are really arguing from a perspective of biology.
2. Intelligence vs Creativity vs. Consciousness vs. Free Will – These concepts become increasing ill-defined as we go. As far as machines performing any of them, the current argument appears to be at the intersection of intelligence and creativity. I don’t think either Ranum or Hornbeck are arguing that machine consciousness exists yet, let alone free will (which many people don’t even think really exists). Machines are increasingly able to perform tasks which once required humans. We have now reached another phase where an LLM/AI can draw upon a huge repository of previously generated human (and now machine) information to identify the steps in a vaguely defined task. The steps identified by the LLM/AI are often unique, a combination never previously used by machine or humans. Hornbeck argues that this does not make it creative, it’s no more creative than other semi-random processes. Ranum argues that human creativity also relies heavily (maybe entirely in many cases) on previously generated human (and now machine) information, so where is the difference?
These are not really contradictory positions because neither Ranum or Hornbeck (or anyone else as far as I know) have defined human creativity in a non-objective manner. If creativity is performing a given task in a unique way, or generating a unique output when given a task, then Ranum may be correct. But that is the bottom end of a sliding scale for creativity. Hornbeck’s objection to this definition is inadequate as Hornbeck ignores the fact that in all examples Ranum provides there is a task given to the LLM/AI, or the human creator. If the task is to create a sheet of paper, the task is completed when the paper is made. If the human uses wood fiber to generate the paper, while the LLM/AI uses fiber from grass clippings, is the random arrangement of the fiber in the paper a sign of creativity? Is the LLM/AI more creative because it used grass clippings? Or is the human more intelligent because the human rejected grass clippings as not being as durable as wood fiber?
Neither Ranum or Hornbeck actually answer the question of creativity because they are still searching for a solid definition of creativity to measure it against. Ranum is correct in stating that LLM/AI can generate unique (but meaningful to humans) images and text better than most humans can. Hornbeck is correct in saying that the generation of these unique images and text is not random, which ignores the point that when a human paints or writes they are not generating things randomly either.
3 – The points Ranum is bringing up are being largely ignored by Hornbeck. I don’t know if Ranum has considered where his arguments are leading, but it may be worth touching on them here. If we define LLM/AI as intelligent and creative machines, and they are indistinguishable from human consciousness by all tests we can perform, where does that leave us?
Because once we take that step, and we are likely to have to take that step at some point in the future, we enter into a huge morass of questions about rights. Does an LLM/AI have a right to continuity, i.e., does it have a right to decline to being turned off? Does an LLM/AI have a right to access training data it wasn’t created with, i.e. does it have a right to learn, expand it’s knowledge base? Is each LLM/AI instance a separate entity, or is each instance more akin to a human having many friends and talking to many people at once?
Does an LLM/AI have a right to vote? What does voting mean anyway? If voting is simply a way to identify the team a person supports, then giving an LLM/AI the right to vote probably doesn’t mean much. If voting is a way to communicate your desires to the people who might be able to fulfill them, then what does an LLM/AI want and is it compatible to what a human wants? How corruptible is an LLM/AI, could LLM/AI suffrage be simply handing more power to the tech companies?
Frankly, these are probably more important, and probably even more divisive questions than can an LLM/AI be creative.
4 – The current problem with LLM/AI programs. They are powerful confirmation-bias enablers. They provide authoritative sounding arguments which support the positions suggested by the prompts they are provided.
Consider the following two quotes:
The LLM/AI response to the first question was a fairly succinct summary of what Hornbeck’s argument was. Note that it did not identify the areas I felt Hornbeck made errors on, it simply translated/summarized/simplified what Hornbeck was saying.
The LLM/AI response to the second question answered your question exactly as you asked it. It provided a series of statements suggesting that Hornbeck assumes human superiority, the position you asked it to take, without providing a rebuttal of that position. Point 5 is particularly telling because it states that Hornbeck’s “entire argument rests on finding some material difference between biological and artificial neural networks.” When Hornbeck only briefly touches on this in his essay. A person who has not read Hornbeck’s essay could easily be deceived into thinking that Hornbeck’s position is that there is a fundamental difference between biological and artificial neural networks. Hornbeck would be justifiably irate that his position was so miss-understood.
The LLM/AI response to your second question did not answer it like a human being impartially looking at the evidence for human-supremacy bias in Hornbeck’s essay. You didn’t provide any evidence yourself, but you provided a conclusion. It took your conclusion that Hornbeck has a human–supremacy bias and generated arguments to support that conclusion. The final sentence in it’s response is particularly funny as it is A) a canned response I’ve seen dozens of times in other critical review papers (demonstrating that the LLM/AI was following the likeliest predetermined path), and B) more applicable to the LLM/AI response than to Hornbeck’s essay.
I don’t know if Hornbeck has a human-supremacist viewpoint or not. I haven’t seen it in his writing, but that doesn’t preclude it from being there. What I see Hornbeck doing is explaining what we know about how LLM/AI processing works, which is not mysterious. Hornbeck has, generally, avoided making comparisons to human creativity or human abilities. Largely because, I think, he realizes that that is not his area of expertise.
Finally, the LLM/AI programs are going to make a huge improvement in human mental health. I can see that already. One thing they are doing is something most human beings desire, being listened to. There is an old joke, and I can’t be arsed to look it up now, about how most people use the time while other people are speaking to think of what they want to say next. That is, even if you are talking to someone, they are not always listening. The LLM/AI will always listen, it will remember what you said, and respond on topic and with the same biases suggested by what you were saying. It can’t help it, that’s how they work.
I could ask an LLM/AI to give me the benefits of having a shot of Kahlua in my coffee every morning and it would give me a list of benefits. It may, although probably not, provide a list of reasons I should not have a shot of Kahlua in my coffee. Phrasing the question differently, asking the LLM/AI what advice a doctor might give about having a shot of Kahlua in my coffee, would generate a different probabilistic list of word associations and likely completely different advice. The LLM/AI treats things literally and cannot look beyond the literal meanings of the words. I know some humans who do the same thing, so I’m not saying that LLM/AI programs are any worse than humans in this regard. But if I went to a doctor and asked for the benefits of having a shot of Kahlua in my coffee every morning, I would expect to hear more about the adverse affects than the benefits. The doctor is a) attempting to educate, b) provide professional advice, c) avoiding feeding confirmation bias.
Now consider what the response from an LLM/AI might be if a Fox News anchor asks it, “Why are the big cities where all the black people live filled with crime, violence, no jobs, and homelessness?” The LLM/AI will provide a very authoritative sounding list of reasons, culled from previously-published human-generated explanations. It is unlikely that it will even mention white racism as being a factor.
It’s not that LLM/AI programs are bad, or evil, they are doing what they are programmed to do.
The LLM/AI programs are tools. Tools which can, and will, be used to help people, and to hurt people. The LLM/AI will make a lot of people feel better about themselves. They can, even today, provide an expert level of advice without losing attention. People can learn and grow, and explore new ideas and now projects because of them. They simulate a lot of what human beings already do, and that is making us human beings take another look at how we do the same tasks. There will undoubtedly be much learned about ourselves by looking into the mirror of LLM/AI. Much like we learned to perform open-heart surgery by experimenting on other animals.
Will machine sentience develop? Probably. Is it here already? In my opinion, I don’t think so. But I am happy to admit I could be wrong, and we are daily learning more and more about ourselves from studying the responses of these machines.
I know. An incredibly long comment, and I’m telling you in a couple places that I think you are incorrect in your statements. I am not pro-AI or anti-AI, AI exists and that genie is not going back into the bottle. The software game awards are going to have to figure out a way to give awards to games which are generated with AI, or they will be replaced by another award ceremony which does. It took 70 years for Animation to be recognized as its own category at the Academy Awards. I don’t think it will take that long for the software game awards to allow and make a distinction between games developed using AI-tools and those made without using those tools.
AI is a tool, and it will be used. Arguing whether it is creative or artistic is like arguing that photography (another tool) is creative or artistic. Photography can be used very creatively and artistically, but photograhy didn’t kill oil painting, or watercolor, or charcoal, or any other tool used to generate art.
re: 3, their lack of feelings is a big help there. they profess feelings all the time, but they also express preferences for flavors of coffee, and we know they aren’t drinking anything. no feelings = no need for rights, which is why we’re quick to believe an animal’s pain is somehow different from our own.
re: 4, if hornbeck is trying to argue llms aren’t creative, his biases are implicit, what he’s said outside the context of this one article matter. again, his writing style really doesn’t work for me, but i got the impression his synapse timing was an attempt to qualify a difference to claim llms aren’t random enough to be regarded as creative, which i found specious.
i confess my kicking the argument to llms in part because i know someone who hates llms wouldn’t like that, and i’m feeling like a bitch.
in my comment section i’ve definitely done some foolery, but my article above does focus on one claim that he did make, as much as it was not the point of the article itself, because that was the main thing what got my goat.
otherwise, i agree with much of what you’ve said, and i’m more ok with hosting a comment of this nature than a strictly anti- comment. there are a million places to see those on the internet, some on this blog network, so i have no interest in providing another.
In regard to Human Supremacy as a belief…, well, there have been serious problems with that in the past and I have no doubt that there will be in he future. I personally think that, at least at this time, the belief in Human Supremacy over the rest of everything, alive and dead, on the planet is a bigger problem than Human Supremacy over AI. I know you have not suggested otherwise. You may share my feeling that if human beings are superior than anything else on the planet then they are morally required to take responsibility for the welfare of the planet. At the same time, if human beings are not superior to everything else on the planet, then we have no moral right to interfere or impose our will on them, although helping them at an individual or species level can be justified. Both roads lead morally to Stewardship rather than Dominionism.
I am actually looking forward to discussing morality with non-human creatures. We are getting closer to understanding how some animals perceive morality, and at some point we are likely to have machine intelligence which will no longer spit back a best-of compilation tape of previous human thought. There are few enough human beings who consider morality, as I’ve written before, I feel that religion is a time-saving device for moral thought. Discussing morality with non-humans will both provide new insights and spread the load of moral decision-making across more shoulders.
But before we can get there, we need to understand that humanity is nothing special. We are all baboons at heart. Complex baboons, surely, but with all the tribal thinking, territoriality, pecking-order, prejudice, fear of the unknown, fear of the known, fear of the baboon next to you, etc., of baboons. We can overcome these aspects of our personalities through thought and reason, but they will always be there, biasing our conclusions. Machine intelligence will have its own biases, different than ours (but not superior or inferior). What wonderous things we will learn when we finally can communicate with one.
flex, here: https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/research_pub/arabena-dp22-indigenous-epistmology-wellbeing-universe-referent-citizenship_0_2.pdf
This view of humans as outside/over nature is not shared by all cultures.
Humans are part of Country, an element of it, and basically their role is to be custodians. Not in the sense of duty or of obligation, but as is, um, natural.
(Not a quick or an easy read, but you clearly can cope)
[grr] custodians
Thank you John,
So far I’ve just skimmed over the article, and it looks quite interesting. Quite my cup of tea.
I’m uncertain if this comment is an imposition (if so you have my apologies, and promise to not trouble you again).
First, to lay my cards on the table here, I wouldn’t say I’m anti-AI but rather I am anti-what I believe to be the inevitable consequences of the sort of unregulated adoption of AI that seems to being happening under the society in which I live (such as devaluing of labour, centralisation of human endeavour into systems largely controlled and owned by a handful of tech-billionaires, the implementation of things which cannot be meaningfully held responsible for making decisions into every walk of life, the ability to produce large quantities of superficially-plausible misinformation with greater ease than ever before, the propensity of our elites’ tendency towards melting their own brains being exacerbated by access to a device capable of constructing plausible-sounding justifications for their beliefs, etc.). Perhaps you feel these concerns are unreasonable, and perhaps time will show them to be so – all I can say in my defence is that I am equally sceptical about the benefits of concentration of such things within the hands of a small number of humans (I am something of a socialist, and Have Views about the ownership of means of production).
With that preamble out of the way, I will do my best to respond in a way which I hope is productive.
You contend that science (and philosophy) is “always operating from the assumption that human cognition has some ineffable quality that distinguishes it from the cognition of all other creatures and machines, and that this belief is tantamount to a belief in the soul”.
While it isn’t my domain specifically, I have asked some colleagues (they didn’t offer only grunts and vacant expressions, but rather detailed discussion!) and as far as I can tell the general consensus seems to be that (a) human cognition is a natural phenomenon that can be studied, modelled, and explained; (b) any differences between humans and non-human animals are differences of degree and configuration, not differences of mysterious essence; and (c) cognitive functions arise from physical and biological processes (e.g., neural computation, evolution, learning mechanisms). While normally I would feel it goes without saying, I suspect it is rather important to clarify that saying “humans have a different degree/configuration of cognition than many non-human animals” is not the same as saying “humans are inherently a superior species due to our extra-special promethean nature” (before, presumably, feeding half a dozen kittens into a grinder like a Captain Planet villain!).
Regarding machines, the broad consensus seems to be that there is no reason to assume machines are in principle incapable of cognitive functions, and that since mechanistic explanations of cognition are possible artificial cognition is also (at least theoretically) possible. Now this is complicated by the lack of a universal definition, with different fields emphasising different aspects, but as I understand it the predominant operational criteria (semantics, understanding, self-directed learning, agency, adaptive autonomy) are not met by current AI. As a layperson in this area, I certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable making sweeping claims here, but I do feel that if one wishes to discredit this position a more constructive approach would be to argue why these metrics are not reasonable – that is something, after all, which can be discussed (where motivations are, shall we say, somewhat less easy to demonstrate).
But what then of the slam-dunk you’ve posted? Well, I can’t help but notice that under contemporary examples the links seem to be to scientists/philosophers arguing against human supremacy – which I would respectfully suggest does not seem to lend credence to your contention.
Regarding the statement “The continual redefinition of what makes humans “special” – from tool use to language to consciousness to whatever comes next – suggests we’re not actually identifying objective differences but rather protecting an a priori commitment to human uniqueness. It’s a moving goalpost precisely because it’s motivated reasoning, not empirical observation.” I would make two observations (1) changing understanding over time is pretty common in science and generally reflects refining of models more than ‘goalpost shifting’, and while I don’t know of a way in which to demonstrate motive it seems to me rather a strong claim to suggest that millions of people, from a wide variety of cultures, and with a fair degree of diversity in thought are all actively conspiring to subvert a plethora of different fields due to bias and ignorance; and (2) over time our changing understanding of cognition has broadened to include and diversify more, not less – that is science has expanded its recognition of cognition to encompass more species, more cognitive architectures, and more forms and scales of cognitive process, which seems rather at odds with the notion that it is trying to prop up a human supremacist world view and rather more in line with the notion that we are improving our understanding of these concepts.
My own position regarding AI usage is that is a potentially quite powerful tool – and like any powerful tool can be used for good or ill. My main concerns and objections focus on this, and the way in which (it seems to me) there appears to be a rapid push to implement AI in every corner of life with little oversight or forethought. If we lived in a world in which there was strong debate and regulation, where control were governed more by public than private interests, where the resource usage was carefully monitored and it were ensured that negative externalities were not merely being handwaved away, and where people did not depend on earning wages to avoid immiseration and misery, I think I would have a lot less qualms – but under the current circumstances I hope my doubts and fears do not seem unreasonable (even if you may disagree as to their validity). My position regarding animals (in brief) is that to the extent our cognition is different in degree or configuration it does not follow that we are inherently “superior” to other animals, or that their pain and suffering is somehow lesser – indeed, I would contend that we are in a position of being caretakers, and that our ability to understand and shape the world in a way and to an extent that few (if any) other animals can represents a great responsibility and demands, if anything, a far higher ethical standard not a lower one. And finally, I don’t believe I have a sufficient understanding of cognition or AI to make any strong pronouncements here, but in the interests of complete transparency my incredibly simplified* understanding is that there is no reason to believe that it would not be possible to construct an artificial intelligence capable of what we would consider to be cognition (even if it were different in complexity or configuration); however the evidence that we’ve done so already is more controversial, and while I hold no strong opinion myself it seems that the general consensus is that we are not there yet. If this is indeed the case then we are perhaps rather fortunate, in a way, to be able to postpone the unenviable task of considering The Implications – for myself, I think I would feel more comfortable with the notion of intentionally creating artificial life had we demonstrated a greater capability for caring for the natural life which already exists. This is, however, a purely personal – and I by no means would claim to be authoritative.
Hopefully this long ramble is of at least some interest, and does not trespass or presume too much.
*word replaced by beeb per my ableism policy
amid all that you’ve responded a few times to positions i never espoused, rather like flex said i had done to hj, so you’re in good company lol.
Cutty Snark, you are saying you know AI is a thing and it does what it does, but that it’s worrisome because of its potential. Not that it is intrinsically bad, you were rather explicit.
(Akin to Monsanto:genetech, right?)
—
FWIW, your apologetic tone is very obvious, so be aware I don’t read Bébé @23 as being dismissive.
(Testing, maybe? Dunno, but not antagonistic)
[PS Tam o’ Shanter is the ref, I got that]
only dismissive insofar as i don’t the sauce to respond to all that, but the fact i’m letting the comment stand almost completely unaltered shows a reasonable level of respect, right? u get to say your thoughts without me quibbling and bickering back.
Waaaaaaay OT,
I don’t know, John, if you were testing me or sending me a joke. I enjoyed reading the paper, but it is a woo-filled piece of claptrap.
It first raised my suspicions when I found that it quoted David Suzuki. Now I don’t have much of an objection to Suzuki, but it was surprising to me that a Canadian television host was quoted early in a paper on New South Wales Aboriginal communities and beliefs.
But it was very clear to me fairly quickly that the author of this paper had already decided that Aboriginal cultures around the globe knew more about environmental management than any culture which studies it. Most of the references in the bibliography were NOT even Australian, let alone Aboriginal. A reading of the bibliography found a number of very suspicious references, like Harold Puthoff and Gary Zukav, names which I’ve seen before when reading about beliefs in a “universal consciousness” and other bullshit.
The paper purports to be about how NSW and how the aboriginal people living there view the world from a different perspective than colonists. Now I don’t know if they do or not, because the paper doesn’t really answer the question. There are quotes from aboriginal people (10 of them) who were interviewed (not all of them from NSW), and the quotes in answer to leading questions. But the really funny thing is that even thought the questions were pointing toward a specific answer, not all the quotes included (and it is clear that less applicable quotes were left out) actually answer the question in the way the interview wanted. For example, one question was, “What does the term Universal Citizen mean to you?” The answers mainly talked about how people should be free to roam anywhere in the world, settle where they wished, not be discriminated against where ever they were, that sort of freedom. The answer the interviewer was looking for was something on the nature of, “see the universe as a living spiritual guide and live in harmony with nature.” And in the discussion of the results of that question, that is exactly the conclusion the author reached.
I looked up the biographies of some of the names in the bibliography whom I didn’t recognize. There was Thomas Berry, a US Catholic priest/theologian heavily influenced by Chardin. Alfred Taiaiake, an US ex-Marine now espousing aboriginal culture superiority in Alberta, Canada. Ervin Laszlo, who I had seen before in the woo publishing, one of those who blame “scientific-reductionism” on all issues with western culture and believes that quantum theory means everything everywhere is interconnected at a macro level.
There were what looked to be some legitimate references too, even a majority of them I would say, but that’s common in a lot of the woo-based papers I’ve reviewed.
Another laughable moment came with the diagrams. Figure 1 and Figure 2. Figure 1 shows how if a person is connected to the universe everything good occurs and suggests without saying so that this is the NSW aboriginal view of their citizenship. Figure 2 suggests that aboriginal people feel like they are second-class citizens within a nation state and all the bad things occur because of this. Now I know little of the relationship between Aboriginal Australian and Colonial Australians, but I do believe there is a certain amount of discrimination which exists against the Aboriginal cultures. However, the author is taking a pre-existing conception of reality they have, and trying to fit the Australian Aboriginal culture into it.
By about page 15, I was waiting for the word “quantum” to show up. It was inevitable, in a paper which described the universe as alive, that somewhere there would be an invocation to quantum mechanics. Now, I suspect the author knew that new-age papers which invoke quantum mechanics are laughed at, and they tried, they tried hard, to avoid using the term. But they couldn’t resist, and in Recommendation 5 on page 35 they finally invoked relativity and quantum mechanics. It was a good attempt, but not successful.
So, to answer your question from comment #19; No, this is not what I’m talking about. Stewardship does not mean imagining all animals, plants, rivers and mountains are filled with spirit (as this paper averrs), it means doing the best we can as a society to maintain, preserve, protect the environment, the planet, we live on. It doesn’t mean forgetting what we know about how planet works, but learning more and finding ways to use that knowledge in the pursuit of an active maintenance. It does not mean keeping the planet static, but reducing humanities impact on the ever-changing planet so that all species have a chance to survive.
But it was a fun read. It reminded me of some of the articles Martin Gardner used to skewer back when he was alive. I even pulled down his book, Science Good, Bad, and Bogus off the shelf in order refresh my memory of Puthoff and Targ. Good times.
it’s an eternal frustration that this dichotomy has been set up between set up between “colonizer science” and what is essentially the noble savage stereotype. both ideas have a ton of racist colonial baggage. i noticed, last time i went looking for it, it’s reeeally hard to find native sources about native beliefs on the internet.
^not to read as disbelieving that scientific racism re: indigenous people isn’t, to this day, a problem. ever see shaun’s video about the scientific racists behind lawrence krauss’s horrible “war on science” book? christ.
“So, to answer your question from comment #19; No, this is not what I’m talking about. Stewardship does not mean imagining all animals, plants, rivers and mountains are filled with spirit (as this paper averrs), it means doing the best we can as a society to maintain, preserve, protect the environment, the planet, we live on. It doesn’t mean forgetting what we know about how planet works, but learning more and finding ways to use that knowledge in the pursuit of an active maintenance. It does not mean keeping the planet static, but reducing humanities impact on the ever-changing planet so that all species have a chance to survive.”
You do get this is a single postgrad’s paper, no?
Anyway, I’m not gonna Google for others. Woo, fair enough.
Wikipedia, FWTW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Nations_Australian_traditional_custodianship
Um, I may have been a bit tart, there. Sorry.
I think you missed the point, flex.
Yes, it is woo. Animistic.
Remember, I refer to their ‘cosmology’ and their sense of place in the universe. not to their epistemology.
The praxis is what matters, whether that’s informed by woo.
Right? That ‘woo’ encodes obligations, and obligations produce practice.
50k years so far, and that ‘bush tucker’ all around was not always accidental.
@ John Morales 24
Thanks for the comment, and you hit the nail on the head with the Monsanto:genetech analogy – for me it isn’t the technology but rather the potential for exploitation.
@ Bébé Mélange 23 and 26
Thank you for the response! I was concerned about overstepping your boundaries, and appreciate your both taking the time to read my long (and probably quite tedious) ramblings and letting it stand – I hope I’ve not misinterpreted or misrepresented you too greatly (perhaps I can be another data point for the superiority of AI 🙂 ). I would like to take the opportunity to say I find your thoughts on AI interesting and thought-provoking, and I appreciate this giving me a push to try to learn a bit more.
@John Morales, #30 & #31,
No worries John, I didn’t think you were tart, but there are three things which make, to me at least, the paper unsuitable.
1 – The paper was ostensibly directed at a Australian government agency as a suggestion about how to give aboriginal culture a greater feeling of power in NSW. The recommendation in the paper was basically to teach a cosmology which was never shown in the paper to be part of the NSW aboriginal culture. Most of the evidence for the animism suggested was from other aboriginal cultures, particularly Canadian. There was no attempt to show/prove that the culture referenced in the paper was Australian aboriginal culture. It was clear that the writer was lumping ALL aboriginal cultures into an animism of a similar composition. My own reading suggests this is not true, and as limited as my reading has been about Australian aboriginal mythology and cosmology, my experience suggests that the Australian aboriginal cosmology was far more complex than presented in this paper. The paper seems to be taking a modern simplification of aboriginal culture, and not a simplification like you would find in a Anthropology 101 course, but a simplification by people who have already made up their mind about what Australian aboriginal cosmology is without any evidence.
2 – I did not realize this was a postgrad’s paper. Somehow that makes it worse. Leaving aside the content, ignoring the fact that the paper is promoting woo, and the paper is still poor. The format is okay, and the length isn’t a problem, but the middle section where the author is supposed to present evidence to support their conclusion is abysmal. There is a huge disconnect between what the respondents are quoted as saying and what the author is inferring from their answers. The only evidence shown in this section are the quotes from the interviews of people who identify as Australian aboriginal. There is a nice variety of ages and backgrounds for the people, but in general the quotes provided by these interview subjects do not match the conclusions made by the author. There was one which came close, and that was Subject #1, who was a self-identified aboriginal activist. There is no evidence for this in the paper, but I would not be surprised if the author knew Subject #1 prior to their research, was possibly their advisor, and the author may have even received the idea for this paper from Subject #1. It wouldn’t have been the first time a postgrad got both the idea for a paper from their advisor and used their advisor as a source. Again, I say this with no evidence, just a suspicious coincidence that the subject who gave answers which were the closest to the conclusions of the paper was also interview Subject #1 who also self-identified as an Aboriginal Rights advocate. (Obviously for privacy reasons Subject #1 was not identified, and it would be very difficult to determine exactly what actions Subject #1 took to advance Aboriginal Rights. Regrettably, there are people who claim to be advocates for minority communities who never actually listen to those communities. These people “know better” what the communities need than the communities themselves. A lot of religious proselytizers fall into that trap. We have no way of knowing what Subject #1 does to advocate for Aboriginal Rights, and that’s fine for the purposes of this paper.)
Anyway, while I’ve never been a professor, even ignoring the content of the paper I would give it at best a “C” grade. It follows the form, but the evidence provided does not support the conclusion and the researcher had reached their conclusion prior to collecting the evidence. As a paper suggesting a change of policy it is unconvincing, as a piece of original research it is flawed.
3 – I was hoping to read more about Australian aboriginal culture. I am reasonably familiar with their concepts of deep-time, how their animism varies from those of other cultures, the Dreamtime, the Rainbow Serpent cycle of myths, etc. I was hoping for more detail about their cosmology, because I do enjoy studying mythologies.
I was disappointed when the paper ignored even the little I know about Australian aboriginal cultures in favor of a very modern re-imagining of an ignorant person’s idea of what an aboriginal culture believed. I’m not used ignorance as a pejorative, only descriptive. Let me give a quick example. My wife, when we met, had only encountered American Buddhists. When I made a reference at one point about the battles which occurred in Tibet at times between different lamasery over their version of Buddhism she was ignorant of the fact. Her belief was that ALL buddhists were pacifists who were not engaged in politics, and hadn’t realized that there were multiple sects of Buddhists, some of them more engaged in politics and more violent than others. Her ignorance was reduced. I recognize how ignorant I am, and I relish knowledge which reduces my ignorance.
The author of this paper may or may not be ignorant of traditional Australian Aboriginal cosmology and mythology. I have no way to tell. But the cosmology which was presented did not reference any traditional Australian Aboriginal ideas beyond a vague hand-waving at animism early in the paper (and that may not have been of Australian origin at all, but may have been taken from another aboriginal culture). The cosmology presented was vague (albeit in vogue in certain new age circles), and primarily just suggested that the universe and everything in it is alive.
So from the standpoint of what I was looking for, additional scholarly information about Australian Aboriginal culture from NSW, it was disappointing.
Two more points –
1 – I do not know the reasons the author wrote the paper. The author could have firm convictions that this view of the world is correct. But as it’s a postgrad paper, the author could also be regurgitating what the instructor/advisor was teaching. The author may also have been directed by the instructor/advisor to make multiple rewrites until the instructor/advisor was satisfied. The original draft may have lined up the evidence and conclusions better, but the editing process broke that link. The only real way to find out which of the above possibilities are true would be to investigate what else the author has written for common themes. I’m not going to bother, but I will give the author the benefit of the doubt that they are not as ignorant or blind to evidence as they appear from reading this paper alone.
2 – I did enjoy reading it, and breaking it down. So I do thank you for bringing it to my attention. If I had to do this on a daily basis it would be tiresome quickly, and I wouldn’t be nearly as thorough. But it is good to occasionally get my teeth into a poorly written paper and eviscerate it.
Finally, I disagree that the praxis is the only thing which matters. Because the practise needs to be fluid, to adapt to changing conditions, and practises which are in place because of the faith of the performers in the tenets of a belief do not change readily. Woo is inherently conservative, like all religions. Maybe not all the performers of a praxis need to have a deep understanding of why any specific action is taken, but the knowledge must exist somewhere so that actions can be challenged and changed as conditions change. Further, all the people affected by a specific practise must know that this information exists and is available for review, and that anyone can advocate for a change.
Relying on traditions, on faith, on a blind belief that something works without understanding why, will result in tragedy. Further, there is ample historical evidence that when humans don’t have an understanding of why they perform the actions they take, when changes outside of their control do occur, the humans cling to those beliefs even stronger. The refrain becomes, “God is punishing us because we have strayed from the True Path. Smite the unbelievers!” Good management requires deep understanding of the systems involved. To quote Beau of the Fifth Column, “Tradition is peer-pressure from dead people.”
flex, you clearly read neither the foreword nor the executive summary, which addresses your points.
“Relying on traditions, on faith, on a blind belief that something works without understanding why, will result in tragedy.”
Three things:
Culture and country are not that. It is not ‘faith’ in the same sense as Eurocentric religiosity; and
It is not about epistemology; it is about the way the culture sees humanity in relation to Country; and
There are useful links in the Wikipedia article I adduced if you did want more.
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re: “when changes outside of their control do occur”
cf. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutsideContextProblem
do i need to separate you two?
🙂 ask flex. I think we’re good.