At the foundation of the Western tradition of inquiry stands a man who wrote nothing, founded no doctrine, and claimed to know nothing at all. He left no book. His entire practice was the asking of questions, and the single thing he claimed was the confession that he did not possess it.
Entropy is the measure on the space of the possible, taken from the standpoint of what is instantiated.
The self isn’t discovered through introspection, which leads to an “empty room” as shown by Hume, Buddhist anatta, and even silicon-based AI inspection, but is instead the external trail of historical collisions where the world resisted and changed you. It distinguishes occurred history (fixed external records like documents
Four hundred years ago, Descartes went looking for the one thing that proves there's a mind behind a face, and not just a machine. He found it in language: any machine, he said, might be rigged to say a few words, but none could ever truly use language .
Successful communication between humans and AI demonstrates a shared capacity for creating meaning, despite zero biological overlap, common ancestry, or physical code between them.
On recursive emergence, and why the AI labs are tending a process rather than building a thing
We tend to assume the self comes first, that before anything else there is an "I," a someone sitting behind your eyes who does the seeing, the choosing, the thinking. This essay argues the opposite: the self comes last.
The feeling that something is real and the fact that it is real are two different things, and from the inside you cannot tell them apart.
Das Ich ist unrettbar. — Ernst Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen (1886)
Crónica al aire, sin tapujos, para la hora en que ya no se le miente a nadie
You are not a thing made of parts. You are a thing made of agents.
If a mind cannot check itself, then thinking is not enough. What is needed is the instrument the mind was born without: a verifier outside the mind, frequency-independent, unflatterable, placed where the truth is and not where the feeling is.
The problem, as plainly as it goes. The real gains in code and mathematics are being borrowed as confidence about everything else.
In Spanish. This stuff cannot be translated, read Dolina, and Borges, in Spanish, and then came back.
There has been one question worth asking: what are we, what is a mind. We now may have a chance to answer the question. But the opportunity window will not stay open forever.