Category: philosophy

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In reply to Stop and think by Paolo Valdemarin

This made me stop and think. My company contains a well above average number of actual philosophers, 50% of our team. Some with PhDs. Usually combined with practical technical knowledge. Not sure if it gives us a better handle at the future though. Yet, ‘holding questions’ is something I have returned to a lot in the past months. One of my recent little LLM experiments focuses on it (it’s called WittgenstAIn III), and it routes a question through several philosophical schools of thought as lenses, to hold a question not just longer but also differently.

I started asking myself: how good of a philosopher is this guy? If I were shut in a room thinking about the future, is he somebody I want with me? That’s the test now. Anyone can execute. Fewer people can sit with a hard question long enough to find a better one.

Paolo Valdemarin

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In 1967 French literary critic Roland Barthes declared the death of the author (in English, no less). An author’s intentions and biography are not the means to explain definitively what the meaning of a text (of fiction) is. It’s the reader that determines meaning.

Barthes reduces the author to merely a scriptor, a scribe, who doesn’t exist other than for their role of penning the text. It positions the work fully separate of its maker.

I don’t disagree with the notion that readers glean meaning in layers from a text, far beyond what an author might have intended. But thinking about the author’s intent, in light of their biography or not, is one of those layers for readers to interpret. It doesn’t make the author the sole decider on meaning, but the author’s perspective can be used to create meaning by any reader. Separating the author from their work entirely is cutting yourself of from one source of potential meaning. Even when reduced to the role of scribe, such meaning will leak forth: the monks of old who tagged the transcripts they made and turned those into Indexes that are a common way of interpreting on which topics a text touches or puts emphasis. So despite Barthes pronouncement, I never accepted the brain death of the author, yet also didn’t much care specifically about their existence for me to find meaning in texts either.

With the advent of texts made by generative AI I think bringing the author and their intentions in scope of creating meaning is necessary however. It is a necessity as proof of human creation. Being able to perceive the author behind a text, the entanglement of its creation with their live, is the now very much needed Reverse Turing test. With algorithmic text generation there is indeed only a scriptor, one incapable of conveying meaning themselves.
To determine the human origin of a text, the author’s own meaning, intention and existence must shine through in a text, or be its context made explicit. Because our default assumption must be that it was generated.

The author is being resurrected. Because we now have fully automated scriptors. Long live the author!

After bringing the 5yo to bed, she usually calls me back after a few minutes to ask a question. I’m always curious to hear what she’ll ask. Sometimes these are practical questions: why did that person do this, how does that work? Sometimes the questions are more philosophical, like ‘does the universe really never end?’

Tonight the question was ‘why do so many artists make self portraits?’
An excellent question I said, let’s discuss it tomorrow.


Posters of the Self Portrets exhibition we saw in the Louisiana museum in 2012.

Bookmarked Literaturhinweis: Pierre Bourdieu – Die feinen Unterschiede (by Jörg Kantel)

Danke für den Hinweis! Hat dazu geführt das ich eine Stunde über Bourdieu und seine Texte gelesen habe, und mir ein paar Notizen dazu gekritzelt habe. Im Internetarchiv gibt es mehrere seiner Bücher auch zum ausleihen.

»Die feinen Unterschiede – Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft« habe ich leider auch noch nicht gelesen. Das wird sich aber bald ändern (Bestellung ist raus), denn es klingt sehr interessant.

Jörg Kantel

Bookmarked Dust Rising: Machine learning and the ontology of the real (by David Weinberger)

I am looking forward to reading this. Will need to put aside some time to be able to really focus, given the author, and the amount of time taken to write it.

…an article I worked on for a couple of years. It’s only 2,200 words, but they were hard words to find because the ideas were, and are, hard for me. … The article argues, roughly, that the sorts of generalizations that machine learning models embody are very different from the sort of generalizations the West has taken as the truths that matter.

David Weinberger

Bookmarked Permacomputing and Permacomputing Update 2021 (by Ville-Matias Heikkilä)

This seems worth a read, applying permaculture ideas to our use of the web and computing in general. At first glance I associate it with Heinz Wittenbrink‘s blogging about what the climate emergency must mean for his professional field of content strategy, and it reminds me of the ecological farmer at Reboot7 in 2005 who talked to us about applying his lessons learned to web and application development.

What makes permacultural philosophy particularly appealing (to me) is that it does not advocate “going back in time” despite advocating a dramatic decrease in use of artificial energy. Instead, it trusts in human ingenunity in finding clever hacks for turning problems into solutions, competition into co-operation, waste into resources. Very much the same kind of creative thinking I appreciate in computer hacking.

Ville-Matias Heikkilä in Permacomputing