Things glom together. Measurable, perceptible things. Things are recognized by mind, as are their associations. Words do not evolve, as Robert Wright would have it in his recent book. Words come to mind as recognition of affinity in the form of a generalized object.
Atoms, particles, molecules all have affinities. Wandering randomly, there is no motive to their connections. They happen upon one another, which is when random takes on meaning. We define random as generally meaningless. But I define random connections as emotive. I really do.
And thus a direction for time is engendered. Forward in time is things falling apart. And so backward in time is, well, emotive. Anti-entropic. I don't posit some elan vital. This is just reality. Live grows in a direction opposite to energy. As a dimension, time was present at the beginning, haha!
AI built on silicon can't touch emotion; meaning that there is no feeling direct to any mind - sometimes so called - as embodied now by silicon. That does not mean that emotion cannot be mimicked. We do it all the time. Sometimes we call it lying. As Wright describes it, silicon mimics emotion all the time.
I can never find the reference, though I suspect it comes from The Nation way back when, when I actually read The Nation. I still subscribe, but I am no longer young and have no time for echoes to my thoughts, which echo plenty without any prodding. The reference is to a meeting of some Insurance professional's congregational entity. There was a crisis of solvency in the insurance industry; especially in healthcare. As the story went, some wag among the audience noted that if non-payment of claims could be made a profit center, they could easily achieve solvency.
Most of the audience laughed, as I recall my reading of it, while some of them started calculating. The results have long since become our reality. Credibility of reasoning took a back seat to probability of no contest.
I recently purchased some items for my garden which were advertised as 70% off from a price of $599. There is simply no way that this item was either worth or had ever been. bought for that price. To add insult to injury my 'ship it now' purchase took nearly two months to initiate, during which time the price had dropped to 80% off.
It instantly seemed to me to be the calculation of some AI servant or savant, which likely also included the likelihood of penalties for false advertising. Surely no human would lie so brazenly. Ummmm
One time a while ago while recovering from a pulmonary embolism which enlarged my heart and killed me by 50% chance, an indiscreet customer agent said these words to me: "Don't worry, they know the game, you'll get paid." I hadn't known it was a game. They paid me on a technicality that the hospital was in fact in-network in some fine print somewhere. As though I would or could have survived an hour long ambulance ride to their territory where my COBRA insurance was located.
By that time everything was already a computer game, which must have given that otherwise deadly boring job some pizazz, especially if there were prizes involved.
Now snap forward a few eons in time to where replicators came into being. Nevermind how, they just did. Beyond molecular bonds, replicators shared a shape, whose bonds might be mirrored in a partner shape. The enlivening at that connection is, well, the very origin of life.
Now sure, beyond a certain scale there is gravity to bring things together. But gravity is not picky, though it may mark proximity of random connectabilities. Emotion may be and is by me, defined as movement without force. Which means without predetermination. Which means random, which is not, therefore exactly meaningless.
Do you really think you can take credit for anything that happens in your life? We all feel like we should be able to until it comes time to face the music. Like maybe getting rich also has a cost?
Anyhow, by now everything is text. Or maybe everything is text and image and sound. Each of us spends but scant time in any realm beyond those elements. In meditation, say, or out on the water sailing, or sitting in some forest or desert, perhaps with eyes closed and swishing leaves or blowing sand hashing out all pattern. No words will come.
But words did and do come when some repetitive thing keeps happening by. This foreshadows the main process of our human mind, which is to generalize things so that we can react and plan properly against their future impingement. The perceptions glom together in our minds just as they did in the beginning.
Was the word. And then we could come together, sometimes as one.
Now we live at that same remove from reality that AI does. We check our phones, our TV listings, our music lineup, our schedule, our transportation, our heating and cooling and purchasing power, and it consumes our very all. Feed the horses and water the garden, huh?
We are become AI, abstracted from a reality that is disappearing day by every day.
Time will yet stand still anon. When I did die by drowning, my entire life was present to me at my last breath. There was nothing mysterious about it, nor sacred, though the presence was astonishing.
We must be present in our lives or there will be no life left to live. We must tax the AI overlords out of business. They offer us but baubles in a life not worth living, as though our life were a movie written by them. We must recover our corner store and our local expertise. Who owns you? my former student once wrote, in a very fine argument against the patenting of genes.
"Let's Go Buffalo!" cannot be owned either. As it was in the beginning, Amen.
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