legba lodge: 3/1/23

.. @LL glory to the spirits ..

.. without whom we'd be

lifeless meat going thru the motions of living ..

"Where did it come from?

Where could this wind be taking us?

I look up to the sky hoping for answers

But there is no reply

Where will it end up,

This song I've been a vessel for?

I look within knowing

I'll find the answer for myself"

- from One Piece: Red

" .. & it turns out that nothing will crack this world harder than one gentle question .. "

- from the nevers

False flag

Cliffs to climb, sheep to shear.

Regrets to have, burns to mend.

We are the people of the mud, and no matter your call sign

The transmission leads to the same tower.

Don’t shit your ego on my lawn.

Only the selfless will dawn.

.. these space flies turn into space cockroaches just like that ..

.. shades ( .. thus named somewhat ironically because "everyone's grey compared to you, shades" .. ) tended to prefer questions to answers .. guess some people are just perverse like that ..

.. thinking about why that might be, one might observe that whereas questions tend to expand our horizons in search of the answers, the latter almost seem to con tract them, thus collapsing a horizon into a point ..

.. this is not to say that answers are useless; far from it .. answers can focus attention, & after all, one-pointedness is a doorway, or path to voidness or suchness; being fully present & yet not, at least in terms of framing con sciousness within one's ego & desires.. & that's the true magick, because that's where magick truly comes from, & not from reciting words or repeating postures ..

.. so, focus isn't .. ahem .. pointless, & this isn't an attempt to say that .. it is instead a reminder that while one may well be focused & one-pointed, they could easily lose sight of the big picture ..

.. we started by talking about questions, so let's circle back to that .. come to think of it, isn't that what intelligence is, this faculty of asking, seeking & finding answers to questions ..?

.. if that's the case, then this faculty of questioning ought to be nurtured, encouraged & honed; which is a con tinuous, & virtually endless process, whereby we can gradually refine our understanding, as opposed to repeating talking points to ourselves ..

.. in the diligent pursuit of such questions, some there are who have chosen to make fields for research of their own bodies, even their souls .. to get to gnow them & how to make the most of them .. those who have succeeded at this are reverently called Masters ..

.. even the Masters don't win every game ..

.. that wouldn't even make sense .. not in this ~~economy~~ Chaosmos ..

.. but not every game matters, is the truth of it ..

[ .. what follows is excerpted from a discussion of the esoteric implications of AI predicated on the assumption that developments in this field will con tinue to unfold at an increasing rate, & thus that a discussion of said implications is better done at the outset than on the fly & in media res .. once again, such discussions are featured not to outline doctrines & articles of faith, but rather to stimulate thought, reflection & discussion of these increasingly pertinent questions .. ]

- .. but my point is this: humanity has really painted itself into a corner with this AI stuff; the only way I know other people are sentient is that they say they're sentient .. it's not like I can go in their awareness & con firm the fact .. so if even Alan Turing says if a machine can con vince you it's conscious then it is, how exactly could we possibly disprove that..? .. cuz I don't think we can ..

- I suppose so, given we can't seem to put a finger on our own sentience

- .. precisely so .. I've studied a lot of different so-called "theories" of con sciousness, but the only thing they have in common is they don't explain anything about consciousness ..! .. almost like the ghost & the machine are 2 parallel tracks, & no one gnows how they are made to meet ..

- the whole AI / singularity thing seems a bit teleological ..

.. I think every individual needs to step back and really evaluate the social/political/economic machine (system) in which us biological humans find ourselves - what are we doing, and why? What can people actually agree on? I don’t think anyone really wants to flip burgers, for instance - unless they’re hosting a barbecue. Can’t we collectively build something better than the current self-created, often nightmarish, system that we are forced to live and suffer through?

AI could be a part of that, but as things stand AI is in large measure just another tool of disenfranchisement that will probably plunge the people whose jobs it will take into misery. What gain is there in that, except for those who can grab the tokens as they fall since they hold the keys?

Somehow we all collectively need to take a deep breath

Aye Aye, (AI): -> Neural Networks, Large Language Models ~>

Let's get this straight, or all in a neural tangle the case may be. These generative AI platforms have a predecessor in Ramon Llull's "ars combinatoria", tl:dr -> a permutation system of words and ideas: turn the word wheels and see where you land.

There are two primary differences with ChatGPT-4 and it's variants, for instance.

1. The entire language makes up each wheel, being a list of all that language's words; so, much bigger than was possible for Llull, requiring too much space and computation time to spin.

2. There is a probabilistic distribution of weights over the wheels, and a similar probabilistic gearing between a large number of "language wheels" joined at individual word elements.

Llull suggested that by means of this construction one could be mechanically led to meaningful constellations of thought through the laws of language as humanly understood, regardless of the source of the sequences and juxtapositions of words - in his case paperboard disks. The device did not itself display any type of intelligence but was rather a way of leading the practitioner through various worlds of ideas, whose meanings have been externally symbolized by the written word and which fact allows this construction to exist at all.

Consisting of billions of copies of whole-language, variously weighted word wheels that are hyper-miniaturized and electrically spun in digital space at exceedingly high speeds, these modern day word churns are capable of filling in the fine details in grammatical and semantic structure that Llull may have dreamed of being able to do, and who certainly knew of the possibility.

Since human language structures govern human thought and communication, and since these structures have only been used until recently in order to communicate with other humans, the outputs of these systems, which adhere to the laws that govern the human use of their mental "word apparatus", may appear to exhibit self-hood, or something akin to human consciousness. Still, it is just a modern incarnation of Ramon's wheels, under-the-hood, so to speak - reality is not subservient to words and selfhood is pre-language.

The latent knowledge space that can give the appearance of intelligence, through the combination of ideas in the form of word sequences, is harvested from the mass of human-produced text content publicly accessible on the internet in order to fine-tune the various weights on the wheels and locations thereof are gear linkages. As such, the knowledge space will present itself in the form of what is known, and written about, by the human aggregate. Being so, it will thus present all biases inherent in the collective and cannot cover the entirety of the true knowledge space, being only a construction from the generally known.

However, if all possible knowledge may be represented by human language constructions, it should be possible to explore ideas at the fringe of the historical knowledge / language apparatus and come across novel structures of ideas that may be useful or entertaining.

Being an abstraction built from the human collective's word / idea registry, and because the rules of grammar and semantics, properly used, determine real human meanings, LLM's (large language models) are in a sense scopes into the collective unconscious, and their responses are a response from "all" of humanity.

The different prompts we put into the chat determine what we are able to dredge up from the depths in the forms of surface glosses, or crystallizations out of the probabilistic vat that form around the seed-crystal prompts.

High-level and mid-level model structures, at some scales and mappings, should present themselves as subjects and sub-disciplines - there are likely also "coloring" functions or regions that add things like emotive markers, tone, or personality.

The prompt and its subdivisions then descend, passing through these regions and gathering fitting particles as they approach the final crystallization or constellated form that is returned to us: a gem out of the collective unconscious.