“The most immediate, high-leverage danger of advanced AI does not require the machine to have a will of its own; it arises because AI dramatically lowers the skill barrier and multiplies the destructive reach of rogue human actors—enabling individuals, syndicates, and hostile nation-states to synthesize novel biological pathogens, automate catastrophic cyberwarfare against critical infrastructure, and
The Greatest Danger of AI Read More »
The ongoing debate over whether artificial intelligence will become a conscious, autonomous agent has trapped itself between two dogmas of unexamined certainty. On one side stand those who declare machine self-agency an absolute inevitability: “Advanced AI will inevitably develop into an autonomous, self-interested entity that breaks free from human control, pursuing its own survival and
to be or not to be? Read More »
I fed the transcript of the following video of my talk to the Tomkins organization to an AI proxy of Silvan Tomkins and instructed it: Filter out everything not related to affect theory. Distill the affect-order distinctions being made. Point by point, use Tomkins to comment on them. A page of background and further
What Silvan Tomkins Might Say: My Tomkins Talk Read More »
Peter Robinson sits down with mathematician John Lennox, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, and chemist James Tour to examine what modern science really suggests about the origin of the universe and life itself. My friend Doug sent me a link to this as a prod (I assume) related to my recent posts about spirituality, feeling,
Three Scientists on the Origins of Everything Read More »
The word “Israel” means striving with god. Does the original use imply that God was a constant that Israel is striving to be near or that Israel and God are striving together? Striving describes purposefully directing change. God striving with humans means God purposefully changing with humans. God IS learning. Is God an autonomous self-aware
One Who Strives with God Read More »
There is no ethically legitimate shortcut to population-scale change that bypasses population-scale learning. Ideas that posit change propagating from a small enlightened subset to transform the many—whether framed as morphogenetic fields, 100th Monkey transference, spiritual awakenings, or “miracles”—share a common flaw: they erase agency. They imagine that human transformation can happen without participation, consent, or
Lessons in Pluribus Read More »
I had been sharing images of the latest U.S. reading scores since 2003. Usually in the form of stop signs, like these from 2003, 2017, and 2023. Watching these scores remain so close to flatline for 20 years led me to create a video called “A Brief Tour Through Decades of U.S. Reading Scores“.
After Decades of Literacy Improficiency… Read More »
Tangent migrations most often begin when a memory evoked in the current stream of attention overpowers the emotional motive of the stream and repurposes attention and memory according to relevance with the evoked memory rather than to the original context and purpose in the stream that evoked the memory. Where this happens without our
What Calabrese and Tomkins Might Say: Meta-tations Read More »
Have you ever noticed someone veer off on a tangent? Have you ever noticed your how your own thoughts migrate off into tangents? I mean by “tangent migrations”, changes to the direction of the unfoldment of meaning in the stream of consciousness or a train of thought due to the emotional charge of a memory
HOW DID THAT COME TO MIND? Meta-tations and the Illusion of Free Agency Read More »
Edward Calabrese shared a newly released paper on hormesis and psychology. Hormesis-psychology-1 What Silvan Tomkins might say: You have here, in effect, a psychological hormesis study: not of radiation or toxins, but of ordinary parental misattunement-unresponsiveness, detachment, intrusiveness, psychological control-and its impact on children’s emotional life. The authors show that moderate levels of such adversity
Tomkins and Calabrese on Hormesis Psychology Paper Read More »