PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

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There's only been about a century of structuralism. It had a day, then in the 80s haters celebrated its falloff. But today, the LLMs designed according to the precepts of structuralist linguistics have proven Saussure's intuitions were more accurate than even he could have suspected. We read the argument from Language Machines by Leif Weatherby (https://amzn.to/4bipjYu)

This week we evaluate a paper written by a Google DeepMind engineer which, in effect updates the Chinese Room Thought Experiment (Searle, 1980) to modern LLMs.

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Hubert Dreyfus loved recounting how he was maligned for his AI skepticism, which was informed by applications of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and turned out to be correct as of 2007. Is he still correct in the age of LLMs and self-driving cars?

Link to article:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370207001452

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While many had hoped for a Butlerian Crusade against the thinking machines, the Pope has instead released a lukewarm encyclical asking the mean machine men making automated murder drones to please be nice to us. This episode we evaluate whether Christian Humanism has any juice left.

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

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People have not always had a self, our selves were invented. According to Foucault, our concept of self emerged from religious technologies, genres of writing, and the institutions that perpetuated them. https://amzn.to/4uWyVAg