Epistemology

That is, they understand the purpose of chatbots and generative models to be the ability to force other people to see a particular version of reality. It is a tool of power that masquerades as a tool of knowledge.

That we can write the prompt or query is not an emblem of our freedom but of our surrender. We give up on what we think the words mean and let the machine process them in alien and opaque ways.

How could gaining knowledge amount to anything other than discovering what was already there? How could the truth of a statement or a theory be anything but its correspondence to facts that were fixed before we started investigating them?

Some philosophers have argued that, despite widespread intuitions to the contrary, knowledge is not merely a mat... See more

Here’s the deal with theta: it’s a different kind of knowing than beta. Beta is a crisp, oh-I-just-cogitated-this-thought. But experience in theta is knowing. Theta hits you in a total, murky, deep-but-diffuse way.

Your everyday beta knowing feels like, hey here’s a knowledge I found, let us rotate and consider this sparkling, clearly-defined concept. Theta’s not like that. Theta knowing extends with no clear edge, even implicating you, whether you want it or not you’re part of the knowledge like some inseparable field and wave.

If I were going to study psychic shit, my money would be on theta providing access to a buffet of non-local information. Like weird, action-at-a-distance, outside of conventional time and space info. This is a different kind of knowledge, and you can’t approach it like regular, daylight, yes-no questions, because it’s not structured that way.