The case for AI thinking

...My worry is not that these models are similar to us. It's that we are similar to these models." If simple training techniques can enable a program to behave like a human, maybe humans aren't as special as we thought. Could it also mean that A.I. will surpass us not only in knowledge but also in judgment, ingenuity, cunning—and, as a result, power? To my surprise, Hasson told me that he is "worried these days that we might succeed in understanding how the brain works. Pursuing this question may have been a colossal mistake for humanity." He likened A.I. researchers to nuclear scientists in the nineteenthirties: "This is the most interesting time in the life of these people. And, at the same time, they know that what they are working on has grave implications for humanity. But they cannot stop because of the curiosity to learn."

One of my favorite books by Hofstadter is a nerdy volume called "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought." When I was in college, it electrified me. The premise was that a question such as "What is thinking?" was not merely philosophical but, rather, had a real answer. In 1995, when the book was published, Hofstadter and his research group could only gesture at what the answer might be. Thinking back on the book, I wondered whether Hofstadter would feel excited that A.I. researchers may have attained what he had yearned for: a mechanical account of the rudiments of thinking. When we spoke, however, he sounded profoundly disappointed—and frightened. Current A.I. research "confirms a lot of my ideas, but it also takes away from the beauty of what humanity is," he told me. "When I was younger, much younger, I wanted to know what underlay creativity, the mechanisms of creativity. That was a holy grail for me. But now I want it to remain a mystery." Perhaps the secrets of thinking are simpler than anyone expected—the kind of thing that a high schooler, or even a machine, could understand. ■

New Yorker, Nov '25

On walking

"That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/12/18/in-praise-of-walking-thomas-a-clark/

Dodgers on Jimmy Kimmel

The @Dodgers break down the craziest moments of Game 7 in the World Series!

https://www.threads.com/@jimmykimmellive/post/DQqYv2YETl1?xmt=AQF0mwHmXhgx49HscYsuUzBQ9bcmATwx91AhKZ3DWEd4DvaQhbWPD0jch4edNhnJpMZjrHoB&slof=1

Ken Burns on America's continuing revolution

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/these-united-states-ken-burns-on-americas-continuing-revolution/

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Gotta have❤️

Dodgers in seven. Take heart from Bart, Jays fans, and look forward to spring.

"Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, & it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops." - Bart Giamatti.

Humphrey-Carter-Gandhi, 7 deadly sins

Good news

Hopes & dreams

Masks

https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-172074098?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

"All great things must first wear monstrous and terrifying masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity." Nietzsche

"All they lacked was a past"

...British philosopher, Galen Strawson, who claimed to have no sense of himself as a continuously evolving being—a creature whose self consisted of a coherent story about accumulating memories and distinctive traits. Strawson was, for that reason, uninterested in his past. He acknowledged that his life had shaped him, but he believed that whether or not he consciously remembered it didn't matter to who he was now, any more than it mattered whether a musician playing a piece could call to mind a memory of each time he'd practiced: what mattered was how well he played. What was important, Strawson felt, was his life in the present. He liked to quote the third Earl of Shaftesbury, a British philosopher of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, who had felt the same way:

The metaphysicians … affirm that if memory be taken away, the self is lost. [But] what matter for memory? What have I to do with that part? If, whilst I am, I am but as I should be, what do I care more?

Nick wasn't sure he agreed with Strawson, and he certainly didn't feel, as Strawson did, that his memory of his own life was unimportant, but he found the argument somewhat comforting. He still longed to relive important moments in his life, but it was easier to think about this experience as just one of many he hadn't had, like paragliding, or visiting Peru, than as a void at the core of his self. Many people believed that their selves were made up largely of memories, and that the loss of those memories would be a self-ending catastrophe. But he knew now that there were also thousands of people like him, who had work and marriages and ideas and thwarted desires and good days and bad days and the rest of it. All they lacked was a past. ■

Just nov3 '25