PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

Socialist are to blame for the Forest Fires. Antifa caused Algae to take over the reflecting pool. Conservatives believe that nature has allied with their enemies to undermine their authority and Western vicilization. We discuss many instances of the opposition of culture/nature in recent news, political theory, and most importantly Twitter discourse.

Video essay referenced: https://youtu.be/ZFOSdqhpuaI?si=86JJOjAuxQl7lrhv
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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