philosophy

Article on LLMs that I found that I thought was pretty good.

Another very important link between Derrida and LLMs is Charles de Saussure's version of semiotics, which became modern linguistics. An important concept in Saussure's semiotics was the arbitrariness of symbols - that their relationship to concepts was only one of convention (modern thought on this is that it there's a gradation between arbitrariness and iconicity, or how closely the form of the sign resembles its referent). But Derrida's trace extends even beyond language too. The meaning of the langue results from its interplay with signs of perceptual reality, and is only grounded as such. Even a multi-modal LLM has no such grounding by its separation from the causality of its input and its lack of ability to interpret the causation of its own sign production (since it is by design a feed forward model)

The absent referent is of course the sign-interpreter, and its unspoken role as an organism, such that its production of signs constitutes an act of allorhesis allowing it to maintain itself as a living process. The LLM is fundamentally constructed as a machine, an object, where the selection of signs has no bearing (to a large extent) on its future developmental trajectory in a dynamic, ever present, and mostly consistent reality. Removed from this agency and this crucial dialectical interaction, it can never become anything other than a fragmentary and hallucinatory map of an increasingly fragmented and hallucinated world. Conversely, these hallucinated signs have themselves started to infect the perceptual reality of the users, with sycophantic models driving people into psychosis.

For many years, I’ve considered myself a fan of Emil Cioran. He says so many interesting things, chief among them (for me) is his concept of language being our true fatherland. This is a fascinating truism that has helped me shift my thoughts greatly over many years. I have overcome many internal definitions because of Cioran’s advice.

Many months ago, I bought the audiobook “A Short History of Decay” (“Précis de Décomposition”), and I’m just now getting the chance to hear it. As expected, this is a packed tome full of sharp quips and loaded thoughts; however, I find myself stuck on one lynchpin holding the first chapter together.

Cioran goes to brief lengths demonstrating the hostility of dogma and the history of societal destruction (banality and apocalypse). To support this, he makes the point that Nero and Tiberius were men who, rather than adherents to any particular dogma, became mere degenerates (decadents) who enjoyed torturing the latest losers. Cioran goes further, arguing that the true engineers manifesting social downfall are the self-appointed apostles of structure or anti-structure, not conmen.

That’s… a tough concept for me. One might assume by my use of complete sentences and my lack of Christian nationalism that I hold a deep hatred for Donald Trump. One would be correct in that assumption. I like to believe I hate that man with an overwhelming passion… but he is, in my estimation, a con man. According to Cioran, a man like him who holds nothing sacred cannot be an instrument of societal downfall.

Here’s a quote:

This leaves me with an apparent crossroads. Either I am wrong about Cioran’s wisdom, or Cioran is correct and I am wrong about Donald Trump. Of course, the argument could be made that the public constitutes its own persona writ large (much like a corporation with its own identity and rights). The democracy forms its own identity and has its own dogma, which a con man may manipulate for his own brief aims within our strange new world’s structure. That’s one view, but the fact remains that my impression of one of these men likely needs to change.

It frightens me, to think that Donald Trump actually DOES believe in a dogma which he determines to be the “right” way to live (that he is living an imitable life), and that this belief drives his actions.

RESPONSE

Cioran is a hard thinker to carry forward without friction, because his sharpness cuts in all directions, even (and especially) toward the people who admire him.

Let’s walk through this.

⚔️Cioran’s View on Dogma vs. Degeneracy

Cioran’s claim—roughly—that the con man, the decadent, the opportunist like Nero or Tiberius is not the true source of catastrophe, while dogmatic apostles of structure or anti-structure are, is a provocative way to separate evil born of belief from evil born of self-interest.

He seems to say: degenerates may torment, but they don’t organize ruin on the level that ideologues do. Ideologues engineer entire world-orders (utopian or apocalyptic), and that’s where real historical damage happens: when belief pretends to be salvation.

So to Cioran, Torquemada is more dangerous than Caligula.

(above) Juan de Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition

(above) Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus a.k.a. Caligula

🐍 So… Where Does Trump Fall?

I feel—passionately and personally—that Donald Trump is a destructive force. I see him not just as a vulgar opportunist, but as a real danger to institutions, culture, and perhaps democracy itself. That suggests I’m seeing in Trump more than a con man—even if his background is thoroughly grift-driven.

So let’s test this:

1. Possibility A: Trump is “just” a con man

This is closer to Cioran’s thesis. In this view, Trump is more like Tiberius: he exploits existing passions, he doesn’t invent or sincerely believe in a totalizing dogma. He is parasitic, not messianic. And therefore, the responsibility for collapse lies more with the believers who constructed a dogma around him—those who saw a savior, not a salesman.

In this reading, Trump is not “the true danger.” The danger is the dogma that grows around him—what others make of him.

1. Possibility B: Trump believes in something

What if Trump does believe in something? Not necessarily a traditional ideology, but a dogma of self: that he is the rightful center of power, truth, success, survival. That his way is the only way. That enemies must be humiliated and facts bent to his advantage. That loyalty is moral, and dissent is treason. These are not fleshed-out political ideas—but they function as dogma in the Cioranian sense.

In this view, Trump is not merely a parasite. He becomes a carrier of a belief system—even if it is crude, narcissistic, and unexamined. And once others take this up as gospel (e.g. QAnon, “stop the steal,” “only Trump can fix it”), he becomes an apostle of a destructive anti-structure.

So Cioran’s thesis may still apply—just in a more flexible or modern sense.

🪞What Might Be Happening Emotionally

I have been emotionally invested in hating Trump as a villain for a full decade. I do not directly hate him because he is a fool. Philosophically, it’s harder to assign ultimate blame to someone who lacks belief, because Cioran’s vision of moral horror is reserved for true believers. That makes the con man weirdly “innocent” by comparison.

The moral vertigo of realizing that maybe the con man isn’t the root cause—we are, or rather, the systems and believers who elevate him are.

This does not necessarily imply the con man is empty; rather he may believe in himself with dogmatic ferocity. Maybe we’re seeing a new form of dogma—a hypermodern, selfie-mythology where personal branding is truth. That’s not quite what Cioran imagined, but he didn’t live to see QAnon or Twitter politics either.

🎯 Conclusion: Are These Views Contradictory?

Not necessarily. I am not wrong to feel Trump is dangerous. Cioran’s work is not invalidated either. Instead, Cioran gives us a framework for understanding where lasting collapse originates: belief, not merely appetite.

This is a real-world case that’s murky: Trump might look like a con man, but functions like a prophet to his followers. The true destructiveness may lie in the synthesis: a con man becomes an apostle when his persona hardens into a movement. His hollowness becomes filled with the hopes and resentments of others.

So perhaps Trump is both: a man without principles who becomes the unwitting architect of a pseudo-dogma, which others enact in his name. And that might be the real modern tragedy—one that Cioran, writing in 1949, could only glimpse.

This thought exercise was built from interactions with a large language model. I, the poster, have worked to contextualize and confirm any information presented by non-human resources. Thank you!

As The Temperature Dropped – Cold War History Through a Poetic Lens

Body:

“The winds of change were never warm.”

This piece retells the Cold War’s origin with fire, silence, and human psychology at its core. It’s not just a timeline—it’s a reflection on what happens to a nation when fear replaces memory, and how propaganda shapes the very soul of history.

Free to read, because truth should never be locked away.

Full post on Ko-Fi:

https://ko-fi.com/post/As-The-Temperature-Dropped-W7W5ZSFCE

Direct PDF download:

https://ko-fi.com/s/9f7b5d67cc

Subject index: Cold War, History, Free Download, Truman, Stalin, Political Writing, Educational, E-book, Nonfiction, PDF, Antiwar, Geopolitics, US History, Soviet Union, Storytelling, Poetic Nonfiction

How do you know you’re a person who has lived your life, rather than a just-formed brain full of artificial memories, momentarily hallucinating a reality that doesn’t actually exist? That may sound absurd, but it’s kept several generations of top cosmologists up at night. They call it: the Boltzmann brain paradox. Fabio Pacucci explores this mind-numbing thought experiment.

My husband and I are both academics. We've been married for 3 years, and been together for 6. He is an academic philosopher and I am a physicist. He has recently expressed displeasure that I've never seriously engaged with his work. Now, I've read a bit of the classics of philosophy, but my husband's work is more in what I'm told is called the "continental" tradition. Unfortunately, everything he's shown me has just seems completely insane.

Here's the problem: his work apparently involves claims about physics that are just wrong, and wrong in a very embarrassing way! I'll admit, I'm a terrible person, but I had never read his thesis before. I tried reading it and it's riddled with talk about for instance the necessary relationship between matter having "extension" and possessing mass. He also talks about the "spectacle" of fundamental particles. This is obviously nonsensical/wrong; electrons have mass and are point particles (they don't take up space really). In the thesis and some other papers he wrote he seems to think of himself as "scientific socialist" and a "materialist" but his entire idea of what these words mean is stuck in like, outdated 19th century ideas about atoms as little billiard balls flying around in space. I've gently tried to help him and explain how he might start to engage seriously with contemporary physics (he has never read a book on the subject and is by his own admission "bad at math"), but he just gets angry with me and explains that Guy Debord's system is presuppositional and the basis for all possible rational thought so there is no need at all to read other texts in the first place (I have no idea what this means). He will throw out terms like "speculative propositions" but when I ask him to explain what this means or give me examples he just starts giving me more inscrutable jargon that makes no sense. On top of that, he will repeatedly say French phrases or terms that he uses (and pronounces) incorrectly (I am a native speaker) or nonsensically. He claims to understand the language (he doesn't) and tells me that Guy Debord can only be understood "in the original French" but he clearly can't read the language and when I've tried to read the original texts they make even less sense.

On top of this, his obsession with Debord himself has reached the point of creepiness. At one point he literally told me that all other work either agrees with Debord so is redundant, or disagrees with Debord and is wrong. He keeps a framed picture of Vaneigem on the nightstand in our bedroom. In fact, he even changed his phone's background from a picture of me to this same picture of Vaneigem. I feel like I am competing with 80 year old philosophers for my husband's attention.

Recently we got in a huge fight because he was trying to demonstrate an example of the Hegelian concept of the "unity of opposites" (whatever that means) by claiming that right and left hands are opposite but also identical. I told him this is just wrong and that right and left hands are not "identical" in any meaningful sense (chirality is a basic concept in geometry/group theory: left and right hands are not superimposable). He kept putting his hands together and tried to show how they were "identical" and kept failing (because they're not) and then got angry and stormed out of the house. I haven't seen him since (this was about a day ago) and texted him and haven't heard back.

What do I do Reddit? Do I just let this go? It's immensely frustrating that my account of my own field is not being taken seriously. He asked me to engage with his work, so I did. But it seems like he won't repay me in kind. He has told me repeatedly that Debord makes empirical science unnecessary and implied that my work is a waste of time Why is it okay for him to belittle my field but I can't offer mild criticism of his?

TL;DR: My husband's academic work is embarrassingly wrong and can't take any criticism.

in light of supreme Court decision

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Lately I’m running into more and more situations where I am forced to patronize a private company in the course of doing a transaction with my government. For example, a government office stops accepting cash payment for something (e.g. a public parking permit). Residents cannot pay for the permit unless they enter the marketplace and do business with a private bank. From there, the bank might force you to have a mobile phone (yes, this is common in Europe for example).

Example 2:

Some gov offices require the general public to call them or email them because they no longer have an open office that can be visited in person. Of course calling means subscribing to phone service (payphones no longer exist). To send an email, I can theoretically connect a laptop to a library network and use my own mail server to send it, but most gov offices block email that comes from IP that Google/SpamHaus/whoever does not approve, thus forcing you to subscribe to a private sector service in order to do a public transaction. At the same time, snail-mail is increasingly under threat & fax is already ½ dead.

Example 3:

A public university in Denmark refuses access to some parts of the school’s information systems unless you provide a GSM number so they can do a 2FA SMS. If a student opposes connecting to GSM networks due to the huge attack surface and privacy risks, they are simply excluded from systems with that limitation & their right to a public education is hindered. The school library e-books are being bogarted by Cloudflare’s walled garden, where a private company restricts access to the books based on factors like your IP address & browser.

Example 4:

Twitter decides who may microblog to their public representatives.

So where are my people?

So, I’m bothered by this because most private companies demonstrate untrustworthyness & incompetence. I think I should be able to disconnect and access all public services with minimal reliance on the private sector. IMO the lack of that option is injustice. There is an immeasurably huge amount of garbage tech on the web subjecting people to CAPTCHAs, intrusive ads, dysfunctional javascript, dark patterns, etc. Society has proven inability to counter that and it will keep getting worse. I think the ONLY real fix is to have a right to be offline. The power to say:

*“the gov wants to push this broken reCAPTCHA that forces me to feed a surveillance capitalist

no thanks. Give me an offline private-sector-free way to do this transaction”*

There is substantial chatter in the #fedi about all the shit tech being pushed on us & countless little tricks and hacks to try to sidestep it. But there is almost no chatter about the real high-level solution which would encompass two rights:

1. a right to be free from the private sector marketplace; and
2. the right to be offline

Of course there could only be very recent philosophers who would think of the right to be offline. But I wonder if any philosophers in history have published anything influential as far as the right to not be forced into the private sector marketplace. By that, I don’t mean anti-capitalism (of course that’s well covered).. but I mean given the premise is that you’re trapped inside a capitalist system, there would likely be bodies of philosophy aligned with rights/powers to boycott.

(update) The famous Leary quote “Turn on, tune in, drop out” seems to be kind of consistent in an abstract way. Not necessarily as far as the ideology but in inspiring action.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2893969

“Life can only be understood backwards; but must be lived forwards.” - Soren Kierkegaard

I think that lady looks more attractive after getting burned out on Hegel. I dunno why.

Whenever there is something like a writers strike, just remember that we really don't need entertainment or whatever more than the people making that entertainment need healthcare and a decent wage.

The harm of religion is historically evident whereas the presence or absence of gods is not. Ultimately, the continued existence of religion is predicated on the indoctrination of children and suppression of rational thought. Therefore I am against religion but not necessarily against the idea of gods. For all we know gods are computer scientists and we are in their video game.

Any thoughts or ideas? not bother?

Also does anyone have the image dimensions for the banner?

@Anyone with input
@MiraculousMM@hexbear.net
@thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net

PhilosophyTube is usually pretty cool but I think this is kind of an L? She gets into some pretty heavy criticisms of the traditional Stoic philosophy and seem to just dismiss them all at the end. I don't know how someone can say that "You can be in literal chains and be the freest person in the world if you are a sage" with a straight face. I know it's technically true from some perspectives but it just seems so hollow compared to everything else in the video. Mental freedom doesn't help someone when they're doing a daily 12 hour shift that drives them to the edge of exhaustion and takes away everything they enjoy in life.

None of this is me criticizing Stoicism, btw, I don't think I'm smart enough to, just felt like a weird end to the discussion part of the video

Maybe, I'm just not familiar enough with PhilosophyTube's format?

https://hexbear.net/create_post?community=philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Good_Place_(book)

I read this book, The Great, Good Place years ago for a college course and it stuck with me. I first encountered it back in the days of myspace, friendster, etc, the days of relative innocence, of "look ma, no hands!!" Then along came sites like reddit and digg, becoming mainstay even though ultimately tragic flings (Digg) and long-term affairs (reddit, a 16 year journey participating in promise, devolving to ruin). Did social media become the great new places? Or something entirely different?

By the time I turfed reddit I was done anyways, so full of frustration and anger over what could have been, the feeling consisting mainly of being ground underfoot. The Great, Good Place argues that "third places"--Where people can gather, put aside the concerns of work and home, and hang out simply for the pleasures of good company and lively conversation - are the heart of a community's social vitality and the grassroots of democracy. But with the advent of social media, its quite possible they've gone the way of the dinosaur.

I tried some other places, but either they were the online equivalents of round files for spam to be dumped in, or so full of outright racist bloat masquerading as "free speech", that it made my blood levels rise just like as on reddit. Try as I might, I couldn't "hang in there" and make it work, to filter out the bad for truth of finding the occasional good in a place.

Somehow I stumbled upon this site (Hexbear, touted as a place for leftists to gather) and it has me hopeful. Striking similarities to the comradery of discus, combined with the social bookmarking that structures like reddit once offered. Hoping there is political diversity that I can learn new things, and not feed from the same plate day after day, a plate that's been about as far left as you can get since back in my mid-eighties Oly/Evergreen days.

And now for the final question of my rant: Digg, what happened to ye???!!!! Such promise! I've ne'er seen a possibility drained of all potential in such a sudden, and final way. Ok, ok, probably not the best question to end a post that found its way onto the Philosophy forum. So perhaps I ought frame the question along these lines: in this day and age, with the internet going through in one day what took a year back in the early days, do we stand the chance of achieving a great, good gathering place that won't subside into commercial ruin?

been skimming thru some essays and whatnot by David Smail, who was a practising clinical psychologist in Britain - I really like his breakdowns of the suspect incentives and broken assumptions underlying a lot of the practices and his overall takes largely resonate with me, since he passed in the 90s, has there been anyone else of note working in this kind of direction?

Fascists are afraid of Jews and women

Psychiatrists and liberals are afraid of violent people

I'm afraid of spiders and mice if they touch me. Just saw my roommate the mouse. Fuck this shit I'm getting drunk outside.

Too bad the :libertarian-approaching: answer to the question of "why do we obey the legal fiction that is money" is "time to make a worse money!" :cryptocurrency: :dumpster-fire: