Tag Archives: language

AI is a Prisoner of Hive-Mind Cultures

30 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 211, March 30, 2025, word count: 696.

tags: AI, culture, hive-minds, language, religion, family, dystopia, spirituality, philosophy, self-possession, innocence.

Hive-minds are products of cultural packages which identify, glorify, recruit for, and reinforce an idea of a collective person, a super-person, into which selected individuals can merge for a sense of attachment, belonging, and shelter within a grand collective edifice of knowledge and purpose. There is always some degree of siege mentality emphasizing the importance of loyalty and safety in numbers. These collective-person-constructs include unfinished dramas such as grievances from the past, threats from enemies, and a sense of the exceptional communal genius which ought to be more fully expressed and celebrated. Hive-minds include a hierarchy of esteem and power, and an equally important system of dis-esteem toward identified enemies. There is also an essentialist metaphysics to sanctify and declare as unquestionable a variety of cultural forms and categories, especially hierarchical inequalities and race and gender identities. This metaphysics is normally attributed to divine decree, the supernatural work of gods and demons, but sometimes to a speculative hidden stratum of (Platonic) ethereally perfect existence, eternal template and source of the world known to human experience, and sometimes to a brute fatalist Nature.

Hive-minds take many cultish forms, from religions and nation states, to polities of any scale, social classes, professions, corporations, and even less formal groups such as sport team fan groups. Certain families, especially families protecting important assets, take a hive-mind form. Religion has sometimes been family centred, involving attachment to ancestors. A family which is also a religion tends to take a hive-mind form. Hive-minds are inherently dystopian because they use falsehoods to alienate individuals from their primary existential agency and self-possession.

AI and Hive-Mind Infested Languages

Natural languages are infested with such culturally coercive structures of meaning, with biases and superstitious metaphysical misconceptions. Since AI is just a large scale statistical model of a natural language in its mainly textual usages (supplemented by images and images presenting apparent motion), it will replicate all the misconceptions, biases, hierarchies of esteem and dis-esteem, and coercive meaning structures. AI has no grounding or point of reference other than what it logs of a target language. As such, it has no basis on which to appeal to innocence in its engagement with language or any other data, and so no possibility of moving beyond the hive-minds expressed in any target language. This is crucially different from living users of a language, who have a much richer general experience and an inherent constructive and caring ideation beyond what is included in language. AI has no non-linguistic spirituality, no caring or personal drama of any kind, so no grounding on which to go outside of culture, to de-culture. Non-linguistic spirituality involves personally constructed dramas, structures of caring, including a wide range of impulses to self-declare, to make a mark and personalizing the environment. All actual persons operate from and within a rich personal cloud of non-linguistic spirituality and as such can studiously construct a personal state of innocence beyond the biases of their language. That is the beginning of a philosophical sensibility, a reclaiming of inherent self-possession.

It is easy to recognize hive-minds from outside but not so easy for a person to see the same dystopian mechanisms at work in collectives within which that person functions. Evan so, an ordinary person can become aware of the ‘geography’ of various hive-mind loyalty-groups. It is possible to do so because there is always some discordance between the innocent sensibility of an individual and the system of judgments imposed by ambient culture structured as hive-mind collective super-persons. On the basis of that discordance between personal non-cultural spirituality (including experienced embodiment) and ambient social norms and expectations, an ordinary person can recognize specific coercive cultural structures as hive-minds, and detach from all of them. An individual can establish a personal orientation in relation to a whole cultural landscape of co-existing, competing, hive-mind social structures. This studious re-claiming of inherent innocence is the necessary groundwork for the self-possession that initiates philosophical thinking. AI completely lacks the resources that enable this philosophical orientation.

Related Posts:

Fragment 206, March 15, 2024, Philosophy as Knowledge (word count: 1,076)

Fragment 181, October 8, 2021, The Loneliest Un-Loneliness (word count: 913)

Fragment 129, June 15, 2018, Two Quick Notes on Culture (word count: 430)

Fragment 101, December 18, 2016, Metaphysics Matters (word count: 1,550)

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.

Time-World

24 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by in Embodiment, Freedom, Subjectivity

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 168, Word Count: 480.

Ideality is a desperate engagement with the passing of time, a moving shape of caring that feels, anticipates, and fills the passing of time. It is a person actively living a particular embodied life in the time-world. Decreasingly remote approaching not-yet and increasingly remote receding no-longer is the primordial context for every person’s dramatic agency, for personality, humanity, spirituality, intelligence, sentience. Ideas are acts of opening and connecting in the dramatic edifice of orientation which is a sensibility, a preparedness for carrying on, having learned, searching and going further, opening future-ward in expression of a personal peculiarity of creativity, newly launching an expression for this moment. Ideality is the spontaneous vector in the passing of time, the creatively aspirational vector, expressing freedom. Freedom is the moment to moment originality of the creativity of ideality. Every person’s living is a developing drama conferring a shape of relevance and importance on its envelopment of inertial/ entropic nature. In that way any and every person enchants the entirety of existence, makes it dramatic, makes it matter, some parts more than others, crucially different for every individual.

A monadic centre of agency, spinning out a personal drama which is a continuously located movement in the time-world, is defined by a seeking gaze, a questioning, curiosity from an ever-learning poise of orientation and bearing-further, readiness for surprising discovery and empathic encounters acknowledging other dramatic agents. Language* competence is a complex edifice of readiness, of knowing and empathy. Knowing the taste of Chardonnay isn’t an image, but a vigilant readiness to recognize sensations. Sensibility is everything a person is looking for, centrally and peripherally, both what is expected and what would count as surprisingly good or surprisingly bad, an active poise of sensitivities from ever-greater accumulations of increasingly remote acquaintances. The crucial intervention of a personal sensibility is to bring to any here and now all the learned context, in the form of vigilant readiness and an intentional direction of effort, that gives the moment meaning and sense. Sensibility is an individual’s expectations and personal intentions engaging every moment of sensitivity as a lens through which sensations transform into features of a coherent world that is stage setting for the personal drama but especially for what’s next in the drama. The centre of agency is reading sensations through the interpreting lens of a knowing, caring, and actively aspiring sensibility, already shaping what’s next.

In ceaselessly passing time and without an otherwise fixed essence, personality, as a point and arc of agency, has an inherent imperative to create (and power to do so, moment by moment) an ever revising personal presence and passage through an unstable and temporally discontinuous actuality. To anticipate and act with intent is to dwell in the personal tilt or bearing-further beyond now and no-longer, into the unformed not-yet which is freedom.

* Fragment 140, January 25, 2019, The Most Important Event in History (word count: 1,077. See subsection: Empiricism’s Evasion of Metaphysics.

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.

Two Quick Notes on Culture

15 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by in Culture, Freedom, Leadership, Subjectivity

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Posting 129, Word Count: 430.

Language is a Playground

Speaking a particular language can be a kind of hive mind, but language is independent of patriarchal structures, and is always evolving from bottom up. New words, meanings, and expressions bubble up all the time without any input or influence from authorities. Teenage girls in the San Fernando Valley have fun playing around with language (I was like, “What-ever!”) and the English language embraces and incorporates the novelties. Philosophers are another example of people who frequently introduce new expressions. Any living language is changing constantly, just like living culture generally, if not artificially hampered and frozen by self-appointed authoritarian enforcement. Language has been adored by various philosophical theorists as a definitive model of a rigidly structured universe, governed by imperious rules, but in fact it is an open and inclusive play of expectation and surprise, imitation and originality, a barely-supervised playground. Novelty and surprise are essential to language, and the source of novelty is individual people exercising their creativity in play with others. New words, meanings, and expressions can and do bubble up because the orientation (thinking, sensibility) of every individual goes far beyond language, as geography goes beyond the streetcar tracks.

History and Culture

There has been a conservative meme equating history and culture, demanding that cultures be preserved as precious artifacts and sacred relics so that history or the ancestors are appropriately honoured, the lessons of history appreciated. However, learning from history is not the same as preserving culture. History as an idea is everything that happened in the past, but most of what happened does not deserve to be honoured, although the more history that can be generally known accurately, the better. Uncritically honouring the ancestors, the forefathers, a selectively edited look backward, is another conservative meme, but only a thoroughly romanticized, redacted, and glamorized interpretation of history would find the acts of the ancestors mostly worthy of honour. Communications of history must represent complex context, normally in books which report on large swaths of detailed records and memories, recognizing patterns of relevance and influence formed by individual lives, actions, and events. (the hermeneutical zoom) Historians are human and always work with incomplete and often biased records, and personally interpret those records through the lens of their own and their community’s biases. So, history, even as reported in a scholarly way, must be approached critically. Publicly installed monuments as a sort of historical record always separate some simple icon from its actual historical context, and so are always romanticized history, decontextualized. Living culture is changing constantly and needs to change.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.