Prof of Sociology, @warwickuni. Founder of Social Epistemology and Author of Humanity 2.0 and Post Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game
University of Warwick
Joined July 2011
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My new book is 'Media and the Power of Knowledge'. It is partly based on lectures I've given over the last 15 years. It updates McLuhan for the age of @X: futurespodcast.net/events/me…
Ironically, the chair of this select committee got himself in a bit of a pickle with sex and drugs: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_…
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Sometimes I think Stewart Lee's modus operandi is to turn Samuel Beckett into a comedy night fixture.
Gilbert Ryle famously distinguished two ways some verbs can be understood: (1) as a task; (2) as an achievement. My own example is 'to translate'. If we treated 'to believe' similarly, then we can legitimize 'to believe in God' in sense (1) without sense (2).
Steve Fuller retweeted
The most unsettling thing isn't that AI has learned to make art like us. It's that we've been making AI-like art for centuries. The Baroque is perhaps the most obvious example.
Is this kind of defence more reason to think that Mark Fisher was just an artefact of our recent past?
Dennett is right, of course. But perhaps Block had doubts because he reads 'blurry' as possibly standing for some neutral monist concept of 'vague', which William James seem to have?
While I don't buy everything that @garyseconomics says, he's right to be indignant about people questioning his 'credentials': msn.com/en-gb/news/other/ror…
When we say that certain ideas were necessary for others to follow, we sometimes mean that had the later ideas came first, those earlier ideas would never have happened. E.g., if Marx had his way, there wouldn't have been social contract theory. Make of that what you will.
Experience has been too often used as a proxy for significance. This is why 'the meaning of life' has fallen into disrepute as a serious philosophical topic.
AI-generated art is not a 'bit of fun' but a very powerful medium of communication. You despise it at your peril.
When John Brockman was promoting the 'Third Culture' featuring the likes of Gould, Dawkins, Pinker and Dennett thirty years ago, I bet he imagined there would be today's downstream versions doing their panto acts in theatre--I mean 'lecture'--halls across various nations.
Obvious, but the fact that he needs to say it shows that some large number of his followers are poseurs.
Poor Heidegger, he didn't figure out that the essence of the human is to be fugitive from its manifestations, but not from the essence itself, which resides in that fugitivity. (Pardon the Heidggerese!)
“Sealing off the holy obscures any illumination of the divine. This obscuring reinforces and conceals the deficit of God. The dim deficit makes all beings stand in the uncanny. ... The uncanny in beings as such brings to light the homelessness of the historical human being within beings as a whole. ... The half admitted, half denied homelessness of the human being with regard to its essence is supplanted by organizing the conquest of the earth as the conquest of one planet and its atmosphere among other planets. ... the homeless human being can be propelled into the flight from its own essence, in order to represent this flight as the return home into the true humanity of the Homo humanus... The poverty of beings with regard to the unconcealedness of being has reached its consummation.”
Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Nihilism
My take: As we accept that art can be produced in ways that are radically different from how humans produce art, we shall establish the objectivity of art.
When a piece generated by AI won a fine art competition in Colorado, the backlash was fierce.
Every major new technology, from photography to the computer, provoked the same debate about whether it could ever produce real art.
Philosopher Henry Shevlin argues that AI is no different, and that the question worth asking isn't whether AI can make art, but whether human creativity can push beyond it.
"A gifted human artist like Monet or Picasso can move beyond the constraints of the art world they inhabit and create a bridge to truly novel forms of representation. Could an image model ever do that?" asks Shevlin.
Tap the link to read the full article. iai.tv/articles/the-artist-i…
ALT A digital artwork depicting a human hand reaching out toward a robotic hand, reminiscent of Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam." The headline reads: "The artist is dead, AI killed them.
If Plato were talent-scouting for his Academy today, he'd be exploiting and incubating the various 'long tails' opened up by neurodivergence.
Way back in 1981, I decided to do my PhD at the University of Pittsburgh, rather Harvard and Princeton (both accepted me), because I didn't want to be saddled with debt. Frankly, if Cambridge could pay for Americans remaining after the Masters, I would have done my PhD there.