Occasional Musings

An interesting article from nautil.us about the our quest for truth machines and AI in general and they keep not meeting the mark and where they breakdown. Perhaps the missing key ingredient is – reason.

spoiler excerpt from the article: “…. In fact, the LLMs of today are missing something even Llull and Leibniz believed was essential to their machines: reason. While language models can use logic to some extent, they make many of the same reasoning mistakes humans do, being trained, as they are, on our data. But unlike humans, language models can’t self-correct to come to a better answer—in fact, reflection seems to make their performance worse, as researchers at Google DeepMind discovered.

In the end, truth machines haven’t progressed much from Llull’s Ars Magna. The 13th-century zealot hoped to automate truth to dispel people’s uncertainty—instead we’ve automated the uncertainty. Perhaps the elusive truth about the universe does lie in the baroque, feverish ramblings of Llull’s Ars Magna, if only somebody could decipher it. Just don’t ask ChatGPT. “

More of this here: [The Link]

A recurring question that keeps popping up again and again. Came across this interesting article, which covers and few

• Art is useless
• Art is truth
• Art is (social) justice
• Art is good for us
• Art is for bildung, self development
• Art is for consituting the tribe, especially in modernity
• Art is for connecting us as individuals outside borders of the group
• Art is for cultural capital
• Art is for equipping us for modern life
• Art is for civilizing us
• Art is for artists
• Art is for increasing life
• Art is a fountain of spirit

Art can be many things at once…

More of this here: [The Link]

Interesting article about what are the ends/goals of any our work, especially about activities around building knowledge.

“… revealed four key ways in which to understand ‘ends’, which emerged collectively: end as telos, end as terminus, end as termination and end as apocalypse. “

“… four groupings – unification, access, utopia/dystopia and conceptualisation – synthesise many of the ways that knowledge workers respond when asked to consider their discipline’s ends, from seeking a point of convergence for knowledge to articulating the central project of their field. “

More of this in article here: [The Link]

Also interesting to checkout their book: The ends of knowledge; outcomes and endpoints across the arts & sciences

Many interesting items are becoming (have become) non-physical (books, art, music streaming…) and meaning of ownership has changed significantly. Often I wonder what I should do with all the books I have in my shelf and all the old music CDs I still own (haven’t got around to relinquishing them). Just came across an interesting article that talks more about this phenomena and specifically about keeping some certain cultural archives safe and what it means w.r.t the laws.

An interesting snippet towards the end of the article: ”
The good news is that so many people have now joined the preservation fight, either deliberately or accidentally: The more distributed the effort, the less brittle and more resilient it will be. Like those music-swapping networks of the ’90s, this web of preservationists is neither entirely online nor entirely offline. That’s good too: If physical copies let you hang onto something when a stream is altered or removed, digital copies let you almost costlessly save and transmit items that otherwise would be scarce. I don’t know the best way to keep our collective cultural archive alive, but I’m pretty sure it will involve an intricate interplay between the physical and the digital, not just one or the other.“

More of this here: [The Link]

Many articles and books have been written about: doing things slowly, being idle, importance of being bored (to be creative) and other virtues of spending quality time. Came across another interesting article around this theme. Talks about the question “What is time for? How would we spend our time if we weren’t busy?”

Few snippets from the article

“The leisure that is necessary for human beings is not just a break from real life, a place where we rest and restore ourselves in order to go back to work. What we are after is a state that looks like the culmination of a life.”

“Leisure requires cultivation – cultivation of habits and of communities that help to form habits. The pursuit of leisure requires this effort because we resist it. “

“Leisure turns out to be an interior discipline. It is not enough to simply choose a central life activity that is intrinsically leisurely. One must recognize the good of leisure and seek it out. “

Read more about the examples of contemplative leisure and how we sometimes fear pursuing being in such states: [The link]

The desire for certainty is often foolish and sometimes dangerous. Scepticism undermines it, both in oneself and in others.. An interesting article from aeon.

An interesting passage: “…The sceptical way of life, on Sextus’ presentation, follows a certain rhythm. You feel puzzlement about something. You search for knowledge about it. You arrive at two equally weighty considerations about what is happening. You let go trying to find an answer. And once you recognise that you might not find a solution, it brings some mental tranquility.”

More of this here: [The Link]
Also of interest:

• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sextus-empiricus/
• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-ancient/