Kellerman: Every system that doesn’t have a demon in it in the end becomes a demon. Witness AI and the data centers.
Keggerman: Demons are shibboleths for political, social and personal gain. Not the other, but a pessimism onto the unknown.
Beatrice: Craft demons and angels. And petals and stems. Paint the world, incision into consciousness spreading. In sighted emotion, unlanguaged pre-knowing | post knowing. The present: in point. (And line and circle and shape and color and shade. Especially in shade.)
EXCAVATION
In the Dust of This Planet, chapter 1, Eugene Thacker ( audiobook)
Trust, Hernan Diaz
Doubt is the foundation of intelligence. Increasing precision, probability of being right, pleasing humans doesn’t get there. Expanding range of possibility doesn’t get there. Doubt is qualitatively a different domain, a different foundation in the Phenomenological sense, than statistics.
Logic and theorem could introduce the fear of survival. But that too is different than doubt. Especially evolving doubt. Doubt that adapts over time, lifetime. That is a surface experience, thought, language, action, simply hanging around, all bounce off. Planning too. Again, not risk management or mitigation. Doubt. Pointed at self and other wise. Doubt.
EXCAVATION
Descartes, many others
“Sound always direct us toward its content, its signification for us; in visual presentation, to the contrary, we can much more easily ‘abstract’ from the content and we are much more oriented toward the location in space where the object is situated.” Thus for visual people, where music must be words, melody leading to the next signification. The content of hearing determines the next sound, the next meaning. Abstraction emotional flight alone, steered by composer, composition, form. Thus trained she feared lifting her pen from the paper. She was taught to draw dreams in one continuous line. Melodic action predictive in a sense. The location information, informed, informative. Stuttering she lifted it, the noise it made halting. Morse. Perjorative but new | ly invigorating, while trapped. It allowed her to smell : dream.
The soul plays on the perceptual, untrap it. Ekstasis. She thought Dyonisian? More, and different. The perceptual impinging, and the body impinging, on the soul’s capabilities. But dream? Dream can extend : the soul. Religious dreams the most, the some. Or for some, constrain. It’s dream. It is dream that extends. Whether awake or otherwise, drawing in. Breathing, broken or line. The artist performs | embodies, plasticitly (whatever the time allows, requires, inspires or agency forms, on its own -if such avenue of will is allowed | described, describable, necessary : it’s not, not for this) the artist, in all senses | on all, senses, awakens and asleeps and adream or lifts the pen off the page. Words flowing where places all over.
CITATION
Kurt Goldstein 1931 as quoted in Merleau-Ponty, p.116.
EXCAVATION
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), translated by Donald A. Landes (2012)
Disclosure Day believes it can impact history. The Odyssey is commentary. There is magic in Disclosure Day. Transmogrification, transfiguration in The Odyssey. One is American. The other British. Odysseus is Oppenheimer. Is there a single, Great Man in Disclosure Day, an architect, a Hero’s journey of realization around whom the events coalesce | besides the storyteller? The magic maker? For the audience. The future in The Odyssey is a long view of repetition. Disclosure Day is novelty. A bright view. Whole new span of unknown, encounter.
We don’t have to be the sea people.
1.
Stability is generative. Spawning rationalism. Spawning the body as object, observed. Observe the ease of corruption. Instability the underlying reality. Rationalism unfought for collapses. Fighting anathema to rationalism. Conviction overturn it. The body reality.
There is no direction. Opportunity.
2.
Reach for ekstasis in patient and settled times. In the opposite of despair, desperation. The opposite of fear. Psalm.
3.
Jealousy soothes, covers over the nick of waiting, watching. Incites forcing cornered mind to grab what’s available. In devious.
Retelling the burning of Moscow. It was me.
Common knowledge a body of fact. Bloating.
EXCAVATION
Merleau-Ponty, Intro sections IV, part 1 section I
Napoleon by Ridley Scott (Director’s Cut)
Critchley, Mysticism
Phillips, Strategic Decision-Making: An Integrated Approach to Uncertainty (forthcoming 2027)
The Contented Being first showed up on this blog in 2016 (as Contented Organism) discussing an entity that would have no need to communicate. With years of experience it seems the Contented Being would have no need for jealousy or to push people aside, down. The person that wants to take and limit others is not contented.
Ms. Pennington opened Charlotte Simmons’ eyes to more, to difference. So she sought more, difference. (Tom Wolfe)
Intellectualism seeks universals, dichotomies. (Merleau-Ponty)
The jealous want an environment where people compete on jealousy. Conviction against the competition feels like giving up, rationalized weakness. In that environment. Conviction that there’s more than whatever someone is jealous about | feels valuable. Feels like something transcendent, real. Transmutable to others to make the world happier. Opens surfaces to see others’ happiness. What others value. What’s valuable in others, in themselves. Not as instruments or threats or angles at play.
When we are not content, we communicate something different. We see and want clones. Mirrors.
Contented we create space.
Can we be motivated to produce, to compete, to innovate out of love for others? Fight for who we love (rather than fight for want). Invading armies | repelling armies. Leaving places for the betterment of what we love. ||asking others to leave||
EXCAVATION
I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe
Phenomenology of Perception (the Introduction, section III) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“The power to destroy something is the absolute control of it.” Dune by Frank Herbert
A king or local leader imbued the first written words with collective meaning. Or probably a mother, or father. Previous feeling and knowledge, bonds and norms in those symbols. It was certainly governments with slogans. Corporations with kleenex. Social media with memes (after mimetics). Citing AI output would we call to everything digital and the analog in the digital? Sense making attribution for an aggregate collector, pouring patterns through individual prompts where the output varies. By so much. By so many.
REFERENT
Ted Chiang. The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
We have trouble contemplating the size of the universe. Something as personal as surgery takes place among strangers, on the recommendation of strangers, in a building that fills rooms twenty four hours a day, with strangers. Each doing their tasks, each caring for people. Each person their own world.
Expectations for what comes next. Vague. The shower is frightening.
The rate of information accumulation is less than the rate of expansion of possible states. Entropy. If our lived self is subject to the same dynamics, every future state includes greater possibility. The challenge becomes communicability.
Or the end of the lived self accelerates information accumulation to pass some supersonic boundary. Future possible states collapse. Or we punch through them to something comprehensive.
Or the lived self is not subject to the same dynamics and we can have futures of fewer possibilities. This feels like it’s true for some.
Or the lived self ending is the end of information. And entropy becomes irrelevant. Communication impossible. Collapse to object.
Kellerman: explore an interplay between lived self ending, future states and for whom the lived self would become object.
Fable 5, like Opus 4.7 and 4.8 before, is disappointing. Or rather, you can’t swap it into existing projects that have been using a different model already for, say, months, without feeling like something’s not working. It’s like changing the scaffolding of a project mid-project. Often results in something being torn down. Or like changing a programming language in production software mid-stream (pre-AI). Hard to justify.
At first it felt like swapping in a new model could be more akin to upgrading OS. But it’s not. The model chosen and used in a project locks in an interaction pattern. Changes in models, and even version iterations, seems to disrupt that pattern. That means for the models to gain adoption the work involving AI has to increase. Is there more greenfield work still to be had? Or will the LLM producers be on a path of price increases only? Another path would be waiting for the ecosystem to more fully expand, bringing more novel applications, killer apps, to the market. On the positive, it means the ROI on older models that already had many workstreams starting to be built with them, should grow. But it feels like the hyperscalers are looking for hockey sticks and not dividends.
APPLICATION
The lock-in described here is a form of option foreclosure, but not a clean one. Choosing a model and building work around it narrows the option set incrementally, through accumulated interaction patterns rather than a single commitment. This has implications for how organizations think about AI adoption and speaks to the kind of department or infrastructure thinking that needs to be involved in governing, pattern setting, for AI adoption. By the time an organization evaluates whether to switch models, the switching cost may already be structural. The greenfield question then becomes central to AI economics. If existing work compounds around its original model, growth requires new work, not upgrades. That is a constraint the hyperscalers may not yet have priced into their growth narratives.
