David Cahn’s Post

Sunday thought: "We were once the children and images of God, the crown of creation; now we are alone and abandoned in the cosmos. The empty place of God today is taken increasingly by the intelligent machine... We understand ourselves as algorithms, our brains as computers, and our minds as software; that is, we understand ourselves in the image of our machines. "Conversely, however, we increasingly elevate our machines to the status of subjects. We make them our counterpart, our partner, advisor, and therapist. And when we seek contact with real people, we connect to them through an omnipresent machine that presents them to us in the form of virtual realities, images, and signs, so that we can no longer tell what is answer or echo, true or fake, reality or appearance. "But that is not all: we also endow our machines with superhuman abilities, we already see ourselves as the proud creators of a new species. The paradoxical result of this is that we feel increasingly insufficient in the face of artificial intelligence, and we begin to feel ashamed of our existence as all too earthly beings of flesh and blood." From the essay 'Narcissistic Depressive Technoscience', by Thomas Fuchs. H/t Peter Spear.

A thoughtful reflection on AI and technology in general. Worth a read.

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How To Understand Things https://lnkd.in/eA5-YaGq

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20. BUILDING THE ULTIMATE ADDICTION PARADIGM: Navigating the War-within-Self "There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.”—Thomas Sowell With that pragmatic morsel of brilliance in mind, those who do not experience a permanent end to the War-within-Self that powers their Addiction can always learn to navigate it more effectively. The first time I heard the term "moral gyroscope" was in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting back in 1983, from Ted H. , who spoke about it as an internal course-corrector that automatically pulled his actions back in a balanced direction whenever he started to veer off course. Decision-making became increasingly easier, involved little weighing of possibilities, and even less second-guessing. From his example, I could begin to see how my values guided my decisions; my decisions arranged themselves into patterns; those patterns created the outcome of my life.   But one day I woke up and the person I had become was not the person that I expected to be: “I never chose to become an alcoholic!”—but I was only deceiving myself. Long before this naïve protest, my values hurled the momentum of my choices in a direction and a speed that was singularly mine, irrefutably alcoholic.   It mattered little that I could not envision the precipitous outcome of valuing the feeling of intoxication more than its consequences to myself or others. Such is the moral nature of a War-within-Self that goes public as an Addiction.   The mutable beast's nature is to survive: treat an Addiction and it will shapeshift into a different form. "Recovery from Addiction" is just another of its brilliant disguises, whether dressed up as abstinence or lipsticked as harm reduction.   A Moral Gyroscope takes me back to the event horizon where my choices first emerge, teaches me how my preferences become the values that alone give staying power to my decisions. Operating by the principle of The Conservation of Moral Momentum, it automatically adjusts to subtle changes in the War-within-Self, evolves to keep pace with the unseen evolution of the dormant addictive template. Integrated with a few other tools, it can neutralize addiction's greatest power: the ability to adapt to any direct effort to overcome it.   A Moral Gyroscope is not about judgments of right or wrong; it is about balancing the light and the dark within; about accepting that they are both along for the ride no matter how much that prospect terrifies us. * As an Exemplar of Freedom, the Moral Gyroscope will be an essential part of the constellation of principles & practices around which we Build a Better Addiction Paradigm—but it is only a part. © 2005, 2012, 2024 Michael V. Cossette #warwithinself

In a new Æther article, I argue that the emerging psychological literature on emotion regulation helps us understand why it is sometimes difficult to manipulate the adversary’s emotions in contemporary wars. Thank you so much Laura M. Thurston Goodroe, DLS for superb editorial work, and Dr Claire Yorke for wonderful feedback on the earlier versions of the article. https://lnkd.in/edBVGrv4