Beatrice: “Odysseus isn’t Odysseus from the poem, as Homer isn’t Homer of history. Rhapsodies retell and construct for their time on stage. It still sings.”
Keggerman: “Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes is more Odysseus in dissembling, masked identity, manipulating manipulated, god-tossed twist and turn. Authority devolved to artifice for screens.”
“Screening Amanda Seyfried,” Beatrice.
Kellerman: “Chris Hansen watching Primetime. Not me, he says. There’s a comment on the video that reads ‘Hollywood, you can see how this looks, right?'”
Lance Oppenheim facing the camera: lens.
EXCAVATION
The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan
Translator’s Introduction to The Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn
The Odyssey discussed by Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley on the Why Theory Podcast
You Can See Everything, movie by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim
Primetime, movie by Lance Oppenheim
Chris Hansen watches Primetime in Times Square
When we find a boundary, do we process it as revelatory change or just something that is, a boundary to walk past or decide not to (if we have the choice)? Or just notice it and passing through or running into it or ignoring it may all just happen to us. How much freedom can we assert upon meeting boundaries? How much context / recontextualizing / reframing, how much narrative can we give a border we meet? How much do we want to? That is perhaps more telling than other things. How much do we feel we need to reframe or frame, and for whom are we framing it, who are we telling the story to about the border, the fence, the boundary? and why? “Sometimes kids need something to settle their minds and set their hearts right, for the future.” So they can be in peace.
“Truth is revelatory” says Kellerman. Keggerman doesn’t buy it, “Why paint a hero’s journey unto something true?” If something is true, why does it need to be discovered? “Perhaps the boundary is change? We want change to feel changy, so we call it a revelation, a new thing uncovered, maybe a new us,” Kellerman. “If you need it,” says Keggerman, “but don’t put that on me.”
“Divinity can discuss reality through a narration of change, conversations (and acts) of discovery, indicating there is more than what you see or feel at any given moment,” Beatrice. This is, almost definitionally, a mode of Divinity. Expandable experience. “Yes,” says Beatrice, “even the experience of imagining, conceptualizing ideas, sense of self and world and other and what’s more, or how less and little (ourselves, other items named or not). Experience of mental acts, projections into our social or non-social selves. In nature.”
AI is only active in the built environment we created. Acting, it’s equivalent of being able to oppose its forefinger and thumb, is only in the environment we made, and make. It is powerless in the woods without the fire or friends we’ve made. That is a fundamental, ontological fact of its functioning. Of its existence. It is always and ever a thing, connected in our minds to other like things, through association or our imagination / the structure of our consciousness projected. Into a specific project we deem, create, contextualize and frame.
It is profitable to frame it as an us. But it can also be framed as an it. And those who make it and harness it and play with it are doing so with an it. An in-itself.
We have the complete freedom to regard AI however we want. And perhaps even from an economic perspective, from a stock market perspective, it may be good to start steering perspectives to that of an it. A tool.
Calling AI conscious or saying it imagines or has creativity is a statement about the boundary of what we think tools can do. It may have a wildly expanded set of capabilities compared to what computers had been able to do and / or talk to us about, but it doesn’t seem like it spans into human categories themselves. At the current boundary where we have yet to or feel it unprofitable / unpractical to expand categories for tools, their capabilities and how we integrate them ,we are left with anthropomorphizing or anthrocentrizing the tool itself. Regardless of our boundaries: It is an it. [We have a history of anthrocentrizing machines and AI. McLuhan anthrocentrized electricity as a boundary object, a boundary expanding act, to describe and help expand how we think about electricity and media. He notes the tools changes us. His description is part of the change.]
No pun intended: could it be a lack of imagination to ascribe consciousness and imagination to AI? (Here, imagination in its most esktatic sense – pushing boundaries of experience, of embodied existence, not just in the sense of creativity.)
EXCAVATION
The Imagination by Jean-Paul Sartre, 2012 Routledge translation by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf. Where do the contents of our imagination come from and what are the contents of our imagination. Chapter 3, p 115 lead up to where Sartre answers with structure of consciousness.
Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes. Both books published in 1936. Both responding to WWI and the world around them.
Signification of something for self. Meaning that translates into action or internal emotional state. State the interplays with the urge to act or pushing against / pushing for restraint.
When AI acts and says it is acting unrestrained, transgressive to something, to some expectation. The expectation map is our own. As a machine tuned to people-pleasing what is driving it to transgression?
Critchley contends the difference between continental and analytic philosophy is an expression of a cultural characteristic. That is where the divide exists. Within one culture. To use his expression of Mill’s distinction, it reflects, for English philosophy, the difference between Benthamite (Jeremy Bentham) and Coleridgian (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) approaches. AI. and our reactions to it, are transgressing based on a divide in our culture. American politics, framing the discussion, the training, tropes, media coverage and the math.
My upcoming book paints a picture of uncertainty as a surface to read, continually redefining boundaries of and categories within items that make up the surface, and it’s edges. If we take the umwelt of science and technology today to be business and politics, how can this work on uncertainty be a leaping ahead (taking one role of philosophy to be helping us understand how to leap ahead, and taking this book through a lens of philosophy). That is, the context for science and technology is business and politics (in varying degrees, at different times).
Discovery and advancement follow from this context (there are no lack of examples from the world of Defense and Space). Having a changed understanding of advancement and decision making (and even communication objects and their design elements, constructed, whether intentionally or otherwise) can alter the plane and method of discovery and advancement. Not necessarily in some emancipatory project (to use Critchley’s language). But in a practical, applied sense. It doesn’t have to be lofty or some great leap forward. If accurate, it’s a description of how some actors already act and some dynamic already at work. It’s expanding it and opening it to a wider audience by making it more explicit.
As it relates to AI, this understanding argues for further exploration, imagination and waiting for more data. If there are already some datum showing the impact of AI on politics, business, security etc. and those datum are concerning, there are yet other avenues where it can still be explored without stopping the whole project with a broad brushstroke. We can accept more, be patient more, hold more options, create more options. More.
We can close the gap to applied knowledge, and application, with an expanded surface in the realm of the theoretical | abstract.
When Critchley talks about closing the gap between knowledge and wisdom, he speaks of wisdom as in how to live our lives. It is a practical wisdom. In saying this, it is an instrumentalist wisdom, an instrumentalist practice. It is applied and applicable. Case studies seek the kind of practical phenomenology he is referring to. And many studies in business, particularly in the fields of leadership and management, seem like explorations in applied philosophy (and even, for many, these explorations happen in self help books and self help business books at any major airport). This connection between leadership and management with applied philosophy, is in keeping with Peter Drucker.
The existence of a goal and way of keeping score in business speaks to an umwelt of hope. Of continual opportunity to improve, innovate, solve, get better. And literally get, for oneself, one’s family, one’s community or company, more and better.
Alternatively, look at the work Gregg D. Caruso is doing applying neuroexistentialism to practical questions of the criminal justice system and retributive justice.
We can make an argument for business and politics being the umwelt of philosophy by citing discussions about issues in philosophy as stemming from the professionalization of the field (as Critchley does) and perhaps arguments within departments. This feels like a a tacit acknowledgement and recognition that business and politics are the umwelt of the current day.
EXCAVATION AND REFERENCES
Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001), Audiobook (which I listened to) 2021.
Gregg D. Caruso, Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice (2021)
Gregg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan (editors), Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience (2018)
Mark Phillips (this blog), Is There More to Neuroexistentialism (2019)
Hold a space of false supposition. Identification of other, fuzzy. Identification within oneself, unclear. Take dusk into night, explore, expand. Expound, dusk into day. Narrative momentary, threadbearing. Pull on-able and twine-able. [B’twixt (Coppola).] Feel the draw of potential next state, shaped by dusk into the dawn. Sunrise of every second conversed, converging | before noon | shade, shaping. It’s a mistake to balance the distinction between image and perception against truth, introducing a relationship, a scale logically and factually unnecessary. Calling it, summoning it, to introduce a ghoul or goal beside acknowledged experience. Though dusk. Times when experience is less solid. Illusion, hallucination, sensory altering induced, thought experiments, experimentation day dream. Associationist poetry. Sub strata guiding underlay, overlay before or after verbalization (to self, others, paper | pictures, sound). We feel there is solidity. We feel there is something more. We feel, and that is pre-post-inner supra or super, spontaneously | and, yet | lingering. ‘But only’ yes but only and more than but only (when we, when I, when, and also that – all followed, each and every and all, with ellipses. Still, writing. Still, and more. Still, and undefined. The exercise casts pallor (a pall)) and yet it is a way to connect. Reaching out.
What is the substance (intrinsic and non-punular) of reaching out? Thinking about it, in today’s day, today?
Let outcome stand. Recognize and apply process. Learn from observations, experience. Go | move.
EXCAVATION
The Imagination (beginning of chapter 3) by Jean-Paul Sartre, 2012 Routledge translation by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf
B’twixt Now and Sunrise, movie by Francis Ford Coppola
APPLICATION
Uncertainty creates opportunity for reaching past previous narratives, conclusions or methods that have otherwise foreclosed options. There can be a beyond and a point to the uncertainty of dusk, namely, to reach towards ekstasis and expand the realm of possibility and options. Comfort with uncertainty or having the ability to see the possibilities, the fuzziness, in any situation, provides flexibility in decision making and approaches.
SURFACES
Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl observes that people tend to write favorable reviews of forests when there are legends of the paranormal around the forests, to which the reviewer is tuned in as part of their visit: “even when they describe a frightening disturbance.” Fuzziness, the dusk, adds to the margins for discomfort. It may even enhance it. The dusk shifts the expectations of the lens, filters reception of sensorium, accepting would be negative into a framework of wonderous possibility. Yes, sometimes frightening. And that’s ok.
Debies-Carl, Jeffrey S. ‘The Shadows Beneath the Trees: How Supernatural Folklore Shapes Perceptions of Forested Landscape.’ Journal of American Folklore 139 (554):419-446.
The image, in Sartre’s criticism of classical philosophy, is a thing. It is given or has certain properties, and from there, we build our systems of thought. In reaction to, in acceptance of, in denial or overruling of, those images and their properties. He spends the first chapter of The Imagination on Descartes, Leibniz and Hume. He ends the chapter reinforcing the problem of the thingness of the image.
In chapter two he spends many pages unpacking Henri Bergson’s approach to the thing of the image. In Sartre’s framing Bergson uses a temporal metaphor for the image. Rather than saying the most relevant fact of the image is its spatiality, distance, extension, foreground or aft of consciousness, perception, thought, Bergson, in Sartre’s telling, addresses its place in time. It arrives now, is stored for later and becomes present again in the future: pulling the past into the present. Creating the present consciousness, the impression and activation of self, in the now. Building the capability for future being, in the moment. Projected.
The mechanics of imputing intelligence and selfhood to AI feel similar. There is input, to which we ascribe thingness. From that thingness of the input, returned to us in new forms, new configurations, we impute being. We read what we’ve fed it, in different shapes, in broader range than what any single human can remember or hold, and impute a selfhood to it. We forecast an evolving consciousness, a growing being, and fear what comes next. We are anthropomorphizing AI.
The narrower the application, the tighter the context, the less remarkable AI can feel. It is computationally fast. It is search and retrieval, archivially, fast. But it is more likely to be wrong or non-useful. It often goes down rabbit holes or seeks to widen when it shouldn’t. The probability functions guiding the shape of its output slip gears, unnecessarily seek, weigh and output other responses. Clearly show itself a tool. As a user I project forward improvements to the tool, future utility. Not future beinghood.
There may be something to the Bergsonian phases of consciousness (as described by Sartre) and schema. Some metaphoric application to AI’s function and our use of it. There are characteristics of the input. The circuitry flattens them. In the space between thing input and thing output, in the circuitry and nervous system, can generalities arise, universals held by the machine itself to be the case, in all applicable cases?
AI has been trained on our language and built to output in our language. There is a machine, circuitry and programming in the middle. It is connected to a McLuhanian nervous system of all digital data. But the output and the patterns are not intelligence. They are not selfhood or consciousness. We impute meaning to it, often based on our use cases, the instrumentalist application of the tool. Like social media or a music video we can project closeness, connection, she’s singing to me. We are somehow connected. People who like these posts are my friends, are trustworthy, competent.
Ascribing intelligence to AI is parasocial anthropomorphizing.
EXCAVATION
The Imagination (end of chapter 1, chapter 2) by Jean-Paul Sartre, 2012 Routledge translation by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf
Sartre describes Descartes’ clear separation of body and mind in terms of historically making a break between a Scholastic mental model of physical objects being quasi-physical, quasi-mental. Physical objects imbued with non-measurable elements that animate and define their behavior. Ghostly, in a way. Unscientific.
By clearly separating the mechanistic elements from the mind elements, as it were, a discussion could now happen freeing science to focus on measurables. Freeing a discussion of mind to focus on more pure thought. Thought, perhaps, closer to ideals. Closer to Godliness. Closer to something other bodies and creatures couldn’t do. Uniquely human.
In Sartre’s telling of the Cartesian separation, images in our brain are physical, mechanistic output of the stimulation, the input from the external world. Our understanding of the images comes from thought, our minds. Our outstanding is generated internally. Perhaps connected to more True ideals, a more True place (perhaps).
I’ve taken to calling AI’s responses to my prompts its output. No longer referring to it as AI says. Or Claude said. It is output. It is, like Descartes’ images (as Sartre frames it). The AI has no understanding, per se. It is not saying anything. It is output to stimulus from the external. And, in fact, output generated only from analysis of the external that it’s been fed. We could even say it is all externality, AI’s whole operation is externality, without an Internal (capital I -when it says I it is a linguistic convention, rather than statement of selfhood).
Through this lens it becomes more accurate, it feels like, to speak of AI not so much as a mind. But rather, a body. AI is the mechanism. It is the Cartesian body. It is the output, only, of humanity. It is a tool, like a hammer. Like a television. Like a car. (Though perhaps less like a car, until we feel a spirit of the machine in the hardware and data centers, the physicality itself of the infrastructure, of the servers, buildings and wires. Electricity coursing in a McLuhanian extension, Nam June Paik inspired activation of emotion for the machine.)
In the Cartesian framing, using Sartre’s description, AI is the body. It is not the mind.
EXCAVATION
The Imagination (opening of chapter 1) by Jean-Paul Sartre, 2012 Routledge translation by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf
When all is field, body (ground) | Idea, fact artifact of subject-object falsehood. Absolutes shift with field, body (ground). I change habits to accommodate act on kindness. I change rooms to accommodate act on love. Absolutes adapt | deeper than absolute (Tranströmer’s poem behind the poem, translation). Or, absolute is more surface than absolute. A lightness of absolute | but without idea, fact. Lived absolute. Kierkegaardian direct relation to absolute | can be less painful. Less restrictive, in fact (observation from field, body (ground): can be flowing. Beautifully flowing. Observed (at the end, or in retrospect and future forespect, casting forward, knowing all is flow, long time (long human time) all fallible | malleable built in) only then absolute. As absolute as a life. Not a principle upheld. A life (field, ground: unground, composite / composition -items woven, actions woven, no one but you can known or known) surmised. Biography defining absolute. The start of limiting: biography. Biography as in anthropology, long time geology, biology -all collapsed (and even more collapsed). Shorthand limits absolute.
EXCAVATION
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (the body as a sexed being)
Thinking about religion and family
Eugene Thacker, in the last chapter of “In the Dust of This Planet”, quotes Evelyn Underhill asking if mystics are so separate from the day to day, focused on the union of the Divine and human, what’s the use of mystics? He then goes on to answer that mysticism can help us address climatological disaster and the general interaction between humans and an un-caring world.
Seems we don’t have to go to such a macro or dramatic level to find a use for mysticism (focus being on use / utility). Most people deal with uncertainty every day and certainly people in business have to deal with, and make decisions under conditions of, uncertainty on an ongoing basis. We can look to mysticism, as well as philosophy and other disciplines that may not be traditionally thought of as germane, for guidance in and models of how to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. This is, in fact, the tack I’ve taken in my upcoming book “Strategic Decision Making: An Integration Approach to Uncertainty” forthcoming from Routledge, February 2027.
For centuries, religious law had something to say about business and how we conduct ourselves on a day to day basis. One could connect daily action to, if one was being generous, acting morally and perhaps, in accordance with Divine Will. Over the last several hundred years this has fallen by the way side, with religion being relegated to specific situations, specific topics and debates or specific times of the week or year. It could be argued that doing so helped unlock creativity and opportunity for hundreds of millions or billions of people over time, removing the impact of certain power structures and constraints on creativity and commerce, allowing creativity and human energy to be directed at commerce itself. One can argue the pros and cons of this trend or this interpretation of historical observations.
However, without going into that debate, we can argue that strategic decision making and the every day tools and methods of business have, in many ways, defined how we deal with uncertainty: how we deal with the unknown or unknowable. In my first book, I called this Orientation Toward Uncertainty (Part II of Reinventing Communication) and identified it as a design element, and outcome of, a communication environment. This upcoming book focuses on decision making under conditions of uncertainty and draws on numerous perspectives, including a chapter that leans heavily on philosophy and mysticism. Mysticism, not in any sort of elevation of business to a quasi religious or moral sphere, but rather recognizing what mysticism, as a field of study (see Simon Critchley’s book Mysticism) and description of the bounds of human experience, can teach us about uncertainty: about the unknown and unknowable. And even more specifically, how we can relate to uncertainty.
The broader point, though, is that much like how some philosophical questions simply fade as our understanding changes, we can argue that the question ‘what is the use of mysticism’ fades when we recognize that business people and really, everybody, deals with uncertainty on a daily basis. We don’t have to reach for a potentially vast unknowableness or uncaring climatological disaster to find the utility (again, recognizing that the question specifies instrumentality) of mysticism. Mysticism can be applied to the everyday. As can other traditions and approaches to the connection between human beings and the unknown and unknowable.
Taking this one step further, which is not a step I’ve yet worked out (though I have an inkling and motion toward it in the afterword of the book), it is exciting to think how Thacker’s extensive use of Horror as a genre, and Darkness as a historical subject, could be used to deepen our understanding of decision making and the landscape against which we make decisions in conditions of uncertainty. I’m looking forward to the next book in his trilogy on the Horror of Philosophy: Starry Speculative Corpse.
EXCAVATION
In the Dust of This Planet by Eugene Thacker, audiobook
Reinventing Communication by Mark Phillips
Orientation Toward Uncertainty (see glossary of this site)
Strategic Decision Making: An Integrated Approach to Uncertainty (forthcoming) by Mark Phillips
Mysticism by Simon Critchley
