This short film made with Seedance 2.0 is absolutely insane.The realism looks like a real movie — no one can…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. X. The rise of the LLMs
Portrait of Geoffrey Hinton by Stable Diffusion
The rise of the LLMs
This is the way things stood before some recent events that led Geoffrey Hinton to make a disturbing statement. Geoffrey Hinton is the mastermind behind Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or LLaMA3. In the press he goes often under the nickname of the “godfather of LLMs” and not without good reason. As proof, that in the two-volumed book that launched the connectionist approach of which LLMs are the current flagship, published in 1986…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. IX. Freud: The soul in the realm of suspicion
Illustration by DALL·E
Freud: The soul in the realm of suspicion
What Linnæus and Darwin had forced to reconsider was the notion of Man as having been created entirely separately from the “the beast of the earth according to its kind, cattle according to its kind, and everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind” (Genesis 1:24). Man’s special status in relation to the beast is explained by his endowment with a property of divine quality that no other creature shares with him: the soul. The soul…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. VIII. Darwin: Man in a sequence
Illustration by DALL·E
Darwin: Man in a sequence
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the thinker who added a historical perspective to the picture Linnaeus had painted: animal species that look like each other in their skeleton necessarily evolved from a common ancestor. Hence the caricature of viewpoint which was quickly adopted by conservative Christian opinion: ‘Man is descended from the ape’.
In their book entitled They Studied Man, Kardiner and Preble summarise this:
« It dawned on Darwin that these puzzling sets of facts could be explained…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. VII. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Being more generous when defining Man
Illustration by DALL·E
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Being more generous when defining Man
The question of the “us” extends however beyond the borders of the Homo sapiens species. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) in his Essay on the origin of Inequality held the view that we’ve been most ungenerous in our manner of assigning the status of human being. Discussing the reports of various travellers he had come to the following conclusion:
“We do not see in these passages [wherein travellers report their contacts with great apes] the reasons on…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. VI. Linnæus: Man taken down from his pedestal
Illustration by DALL·E
Linnæus: Man taken down from his pedestal
The biblical representation of Man as a creature special in the eyes of God suffered a first serious blow in 1735, when Carl Linnæus (1707-1778) classified the human species along animals, labelling it in accordance with his newly devised system of naming using Latin words, as Homo sapiens.
He had classified mammals in the same way he had done for all animals according to the shape of their skeleton, whether external or internal, placing in the same…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. V. The New Testament: Reciprocity
Illustration by DALL·E
The New Testament: Reciprocity
In the East, with totemism, which Durkheim and Mauss identified with China’s thought of archaic times there is no crucial divide between Man, the chosen creature in the eyes of God, and the other creatures placed at his disposal quite the contrary, humans as a whole are distributed in an all-encompassing division of the world into sections or sub-sections where some are identified with specific plants and animals and other features of the world such as the four directions of the…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. IV. The Old Testament: Creation
Illustration by DALL·E (+Animé)
The Old Testament: Creation
For almost two millennia the dominant view of humankind in the West was grounded in the biblical account: Adam and Eve being made in the likeness of God, while nature was defined by God as being put specifically at the service of humankind.
The Bible states: “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. III. East and West
Illustration by DALL·E of Marco Polo discovering China
East and West
In the conceptualisation of the advent of artificial intelligence on a par with human intelligence, there are major differences between the West and the East: between the civilisations and the range of cultures born, on the one hand, in the Fertile Crescent and, on the other, around the Pacific Rim.
The tradition in the East is to assume that the essence of the world is very close to what we spontaneously perceive of it. The philosopher Alexandre…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. II. Decentring and refocusing the definition of “us”
Illustration by DALL·E from the text
Decentring and refocusing the definition of ‘us’
Who do we think we should protect as a last resort, the members of a strictly defined ‘us’ with some and a vaguely defined ‘us’ among others, when things go wrong, as they unfortunately do time and time again on this troubled planet of ours, and there is no alternative but to fight with whatever strength we have left? This planet is ours, all of us: creatures great and small. This is the planet of everything…
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In the age of AI, the danger is not knowing less than machines, but understanding too slowly the structure of…
Ouch! The whole of cosmology was standing on its head, and now it’s back on its feet! And everything becomes…
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Well! It is comments such as yours that make the trip … worthy of the trouble! 😀
When I saw your work on P vs NP, I knew you were on to something profound. I couldn’t have…
Admittedly, I was a little thrown off by the direction this took. From my perspective, you (1) identified the major…
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