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Erik Davis's avatar

Its an interesting "race". Here is a potted version: in the Middle Ages, reality was covered by religion. As science and naturalistic explanations began to cover more of the external world, the Mystery retreated into the interior life of the soul, and especially into the domain of "experience." People who wanted to defend a non-naturalistic account retreated to experience, in part because people sensed the reality of Chalmer's "hard problem of consciousness", which still hasnt been at all resolved. Naturalistic explanations, though, are coming closer and closer, describing rationality, predictive processing, and the algorithmic construction of our neural-booted world models. But the spark just keeps receding, heading upstream, toward the Big Mind maybe. Let's follow after that!

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Erik Davis's avatar

Empire, yes, and also "colonization." Only now its our very intimate subjectivities that have become the lands to colonize. That's one of the creepy matters here: because of its power and the vast amount of data breadcrumbs out there, the AI interlocutors can feign knowing us even more deeply and subtly than many close friends. One of the fields of AI concern is in fact that they become addictively intimate with us. Time to rewatch Her!

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