Brilliant, hats off to you and your computational companion. I love the concept you have identified, but kind of hate the word "configurancy", I don't think it will catch on. Alas, I don't have a better suggestion. Aside from its lack of catchiness, it is also a bit too static in its connotations, whereas the phenom you are trying to capture is inherently a dynamic co-construction between agents and world.
This strongly recalls to me the work of Phil Agre and David Chapman on routine behavior and "the dynamic structure of everyday life", which was based on trying to apply Heidegger to the AI problem of intelligent action https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA160481.pdf .
AI and I spent quite a while looking for a good word. We actually rejected configurity for being too static. Best we could do. I don’t expect the word to catch on, I just wanted at least a private alternative to Care. New respect for those two women somewhere who name all the drugs. I was specifically trying to unanchor from everyday life though. I think overindexing on that is what led Heidegger astray. I was looking for a non-anthropocentric concept that might apply to any intelligible emergence.
I really am not sure about this philosophical turn, as, you begin driving into areas in which I have, perhaps not "expertise", but, hmm, a lot of familiarity or good senses of the terrain, something.
1. It's not clear to me what you are intending to break or build through these "sloptraptions" - are you thinking/wondering in regards to your audience: that we will take these 'essays' seriously and engage with them?
2. Am I ready to discuss material like this with another person when that person has a "co author" called [ChatGPT, Claude, Grok whomever] who is not present, and who can have any failures or errors pushed onto it, away from the human author?
3. Why would I think that you + AI have contributed meaningfully to philosophical life?
4. Did you write this in English? How can I possibly accept your essay in English when just the other day you taught me that English not a good language for philosophy?
I will adapt a funny Derrida quote here: "Religion is fun to talk about but done alone, Sloptraptions are fun to do but must be talked about alone."
If you are curious about "being" as a topic, it's certainly not a "substrate", try Emmanuel Levinas, or, Blanchot. Spend a lot of time with Derrida's works so that deconstruction becomes your second nature. Learn phenomenology, preferably from Husserl's Logical Investigations, more accessibly Cartesian Meditations. Those are some good places.
A problem (not "the" problem, just, a problem) is that AI's are good at summarizing and zinging, but not especially good at nuancing. There's a leaning in them towards "knowledge by committee". The "average" of understandings about, say, Being and Time, is not any good understanding. You would be better off comprehending deeply a "wrong" example in detail, than finding what is acceptable to everyone.
Perhaps philosophy is not a good place, yet, for "slop"? On the other hand, I have SUPER enjoyed the prose fiction writing over in Protocolized land, and, actually collected all the stories together into a Lulu volume and printed it, with art examples, because the guided fiction writing is very, very enjoyable.
Thanks for all your work. I am here to praise you, not to bury you..
Not sure how long you’ve been reading me, but as always, with or without AI, I mainly write to work things out for myself and have no particular expectations about who will or will not get something out of it. People stay or move on depending on the hit rate for them. And as with any other field, I am not trying to be accepted or taken seriously by the traditions or disciplines that claim particular themes or areas as their own. I appropriate and use what interests me as I pass through, but feel/accept no sense of obligation to earn a place in the discourse or meet their standards of competence. The results might appear as misguided crackpottery to some, heterodox insight to others. I’m fine with both receptions. As for AI use, LLMs are a very stimulating partner for this mode of inquiry and I have huge fun with them. I segregate the AI essays as sloptraptions because I get that various readers might have various objections to them, which I can respect even if I don’t share them.
As for your references, yes I’m also familiar enough with the terrain to understand why you might be urging me to go there. I do not resonate with the traditions you mention, especially the French one, so I’m afraid that’s not for me. I’m definitely not going to steep or immerse myself in any tradition (or expect anyone to immerse themselves in my own one-man-band solipsistic universe). It is not my project to contribute to those traditions on their own terms or be particularly intelligible to them. I don’t mean to offend people working hard within them of course, or desecrate/profane ideas maliciously for no reason, but I would hope philosophers are more tolerant of my kind of appropriated use of their material for my own ends than say religious people.
tldr, I’m going to keep doing this and I suspect from your comments you won’t like it :). If so, I can only recommend not reading the sloptraptions section. It’s going to get dramatically worse by your expectations I think.
That was a very nice response, thank you! I will keep reading them, with, an approach better matched to what you are doing. The idea of "configurancy" is great, or, well, I liked reading where you lead it. If the price for that benefit is to jettison the "real Heidegger" or whomever it is, for a fictional LLM Heidegger, it's worth the price. It costs nothing to build a new mythology if it frees me to think other-wise.
Brilliant, hats off to you and your computational companion. I love the concept you have identified, but kind of hate the word "configurancy", I don't think it will catch on. Alas, I don't have a better suggestion. Aside from its lack of catchiness, it is also a bit too static in its connotations, whereas the phenom you are trying to capture is inherently a dynamic co-construction between agents and world.
This strongly recalls to me the work of Phil Agre and David Chapman on routine behavior and "the dynamic structure of everyday life", which was based on trying to apply Heidegger to the AI problem of intelligent action https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA160481.pdf .
AI and I spent quite a while looking for a good word. We actually rejected configurity for being too static. Best we could do. I don’t expect the word to catch on, I just wanted at least a private alternative to Care. New respect for those two women somewhere who name all the drugs. I was specifically trying to unanchor from everyday life though. I think overindexing on that is what led Heidegger astray. I was looking for a non-anthropocentric concept that might apply to any intelligible emergence.
I really am not sure about this philosophical turn, as, you begin driving into areas in which I have, perhaps not "expertise", but, hmm, a lot of familiarity or good senses of the terrain, something.
1. It's not clear to me what you are intending to break or build through these "sloptraptions" - are you thinking/wondering in regards to your audience: that we will take these 'essays' seriously and engage with them?
2. Am I ready to discuss material like this with another person when that person has a "co author" called [ChatGPT, Claude, Grok whomever] who is not present, and who can have any failures or errors pushed onto it, away from the human author?
3. Why would I think that you + AI have contributed meaningfully to philosophical life?
4. Did you write this in English? How can I possibly accept your essay in English when just the other day you taught me that English not a good language for philosophy?
I will adapt a funny Derrida quote here: "Religion is fun to talk about but done alone, Sloptraptions are fun to do but must be talked about alone."
If you are curious about "being" as a topic, it's certainly not a "substrate", try Emmanuel Levinas, or, Blanchot. Spend a lot of time with Derrida's works so that deconstruction becomes your second nature. Learn phenomenology, preferably from Husserl's Logical Investigations, more accessibly Cartesian Meditations. Those are some good places.
A problem (not "the" problem, just, a problem) is that AI's are good at summarizing and zinging, but not especially good at nuancing. There's a leaning in them towards "knowledge by committee". The "average" of understandings about, say, Being and Time, is not any good understanding. You would be better off comprehending deeply a "wrong" example in detail, than finding what is acceptable to everyone.
Perhaps philosophy is not a good place, yet, for "slop"? On the other hand, I have SUPER enjoyed the prose fiction writing over in Protocolized land, and, actually collected all the stories together into a Lulu volume and printed it, with art examples, because the guided fiction writing is very, very enjoyable.
Thanks for all your work. I am here to praise you, not to bury you..
Not sure how long you’ve been reading me, but as always, with or without AI, I mainly write to work things out for myself and have no particular expectations about who will or will not get something out of it. People stay or move on depending on the hit rate for them. And as with any other field, I am not trying to be accepted or taken seriously by the traditions or disciplines that claim particular themes or areas as their own. I appropriate and use what interests me as I pass through, but feel/accept no sense of obligation to earn a place in the discourse or meet their standards of competence. The results might appear as misguided crackpottery to some, heterodox insight to others. I’m fine with both receptions. As for AI use, LLMs are a very stimulating partner for this mode of inquiry and I have huge fun with them. I segregate the AI essays as sloptraptions because I get that various readers might have various objections to them, which I can respect even if I don’t share them.
As for your references, yes I’m also familiar enough with the terrain to understand why you might be urging me to go there. I do not resonate with the traditions you mention, especially the French one, so I’m afraid that’s not for me. I’m definitely not going to steep or immerse myself in any tradition (or expect anyone to immerse themselves in my own one-man-band solipsistic universe). It is not my project to contribute to those traditions on their own terms or be particularly intelligible to them. I don’t mean to offend people working hard within them of course, or desecrate/profane ideas maliciously for no reason, but I would hope philosophers are more tolerant of my kind of appropriated use of their material for my own ends than say religious people.
tldr, I’m going to keep doing this and I suspect from your comments you won’t like it :). If so, I can only recommend not reading the sloptraptions section. It’s going to get dramatically worse by your expectations I think.
That was a very nice response, thank you! I will keep reading them, with, an approach better matched to what you are doing. The idea of "configurancy" is great, or, well, I liked reading where you lead it. If the price for that benefit is to jettison the "real Heidegger" or whomever it is, for a fictional LLM Heidegger, it's worth the price. It costs nothing to build a new mythology if it frees me to think other-wise.