Great piece. Randomly, I've also been revisiting Percy's novel recently (there's got to be some collective consciousness), and it's an important novel; your reading of it here is very helpful.
Thanks Nick! Would love to hear your thoughts on The Moviegoer when you finish. Part of this essay for me was wanting to unpack the link between his fiction and his nonfiction work, which I do more implicitly than explicitly here
Really thought-provoking. But I wonder about your optimism that LLMs — by creating “meaning” via more holistic sense of the relationships among tokens— can really alter our sensorial orientations toward less atomism and greater connectedness. I would like to think so, but we don’t *see* the LLM weighing the relationships among its tokens; we *see* an alphabetic result of that output, one that seems to be as atomistic as all the other ones we’ve seen. Or no?
(I would, for the record, love to have the hyper-capitalists pursuit of AGI result in a global realization of the inter-connectedness of all matter and as a side benefit the self-destructive inanity of hyper-capitalism.)
I love this push, Sebastian. I need to think on it more, but I suspect there’s an important distinction between our experience of AI’s final output (which remains very textual) and the underlying way information is processed to produce that output. The ability to instantly ask questions across an entire document, or to see how reasoning models generate hidden tokens before arriving at an answer, suggests a mode of interaction that is less linear/mechanistic/atomistic than the surface text alone might imply. You've got me thinking here... 🤔
Hi Jens, yeah- I love what you have brought to the table regarding Charles Taylor and language here. I am especially intrigued that you seem to make the connection between his philosophy of language and, for example, modern social imaginaries, which is to say that language is the foundation of his entire project, or at least, to understand his thoughts on language is to understand so much else that he puts forward. I think that is right.
Thanks for reading, Gregory! This connection you're pointing out was emphasized (in my mind) through serendipitously reading McLuhan at the same time as Taylor. I love how Taylor's work spans so many domains.
Great piece. Randomly, I've also been revisiting Percy's novel recently (there's got to be some collective consciousness), and it's an important novel; your reading of it here is very helpful.
Thanks Nick! Would love to hear your thoughts on The Moviegoer when you finish. Part of this essay for me was wanting to unpack the link between his fiction and his nonfiction work, which I do more implicitly than explicitly here
Really thought-provoking. But I wonder about your optimism that LLMs — by creating “meaning” via more holistic sense of the relationships among tokens— can really alter our sensorial orientations toward less atomism and greater connectedness. I would like to think so, but we don’t *see* the LLM weighing the relationships among its tokens; we *see* an alphabetic result of that output, one that seems to be as atomistic as all the other ones we’ve seen. Or no?
(I would, for the record, love to have the hyper-capitalists pursuit of AGI result in a global realization of the inter-connectedness of all matter and as a side benefit the self-destructive inanity of hyper-capitalism.)
I love this push, Sebastian. I need to think on it more, but I suspect there’s an important distinction between our experience of AI’s final output (which remains very textual) and the underlying way information is processed to produce that output. The ability to instantly ask questions across an entire document, or to see how reasoning models generate hidden tokens before arriving at an answer, suggests a mode of interaction that is less linear/mechanistic/atomistic than the surface text alone might imply. You've got me thinking here... 🤔
Hi Jens, yeah- I love what you have brought to the table regarding Charles Taylor and language here. I am especially intrigued that you seem to make the connection between his philosophy of language and, for example, modern social imaginaries, which is to say that language is the foundation of his entire project, or at least, to understand his thoughts on language is to understand so much else that he puts forward. I think that is right.
Thanks for reading, Gregory! This connection you're pointing out was emphasized (in my mind) through serendipitously reading McLuhan at the same time as Taylor. I love how Taylor's work spans so many domains.