I really enjoyed this! I agree with Joel Simon that so much of this early era of AI art isn’t really working within the medium of AI—it’s imitative and derivative, trying to copy what other deterministic art forms have achieved, instead of really embracing the strange generative unexpectedness of AI…
and so your suggestion that we can think of AI as a “fiction machine” (the tendency for AI to invent things then becomes a strength, not a flaw) is very compelling! looking forward to future installments of your newsletter 🕊️
this was a very difficult post for me to get through, because I found myself in awe after every paragraph (and off on a rabbit hole, taking copious notes). After the first paragraph I thought to myself, "wow, I love this, this feels like a genre of writing where people just collect the things they find very beautiful and meaningful and share it, and explain why it moves them, and i wish there was more of this"
and then I read that this is very much the intention and I feel like I'm in the right place!!!
> Writing about the nodal points forces me to understand better not just them, but also why I’m drawn to them. This newsletter, a space that I grow and share my nodal points and, hopefully, the fruits they bear
- I have never heard of are.na before today, but I am shocked because it sounds like something I have been yearning for. "A garden of ideas, tumblr meets wikipedia", and also it's been going for 12 years?? (I also love love love that there is no "one founder", it's always "one of many founders of are.na". Makes it feel like a resilient network.
Reminds me of an Alan Kay snippet I recently stumbled on, 27:00 to 29:00 (https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs?t=1630), about how the internet is the closest thing we've built to a biological system:
> "the internet has grown by 10 orders of magnitude without ever breaking, the internet has no center, it's replaced all of its atoms and all of its bits at least twice since it started"
I love this part so much:
> Indeed, “Morphotrophic” reads like a speculation of Levin’s research where cellular intelligence is acknowledged, albeit still yet to be fully understood
I used to dismiss fiction as a purely leisurely activity. Recently I've found great utility in it, when I pair it side by side with a non-fiction reading material. For me this accidentally started with "Three Body Problem" & Fall Of Civilizations, where I realized the fun fiction story was actually capturing something very real, about history, and the end of the world, that I couldn't see reading just the non-fiction because of a lot of preconceived notions about ancient civilizations.
(another example is "Children of Time" + "I Am a Strange Loop")
I now see fiction as something like, psuedocode? It is literally "false code" in that, you can't run it. But in a lot of cases, it is "more true" than the actual implementation (if I can't separate the algorithm from the details of the implementation)
Morphotrophic + Levin's work sounds like an amazing pairing together.
> LLMs weave living fictions that can be actualized.
> A few thoughts for experiments:
I love this so much. I keep thinking a lot about a genre where I as the author don't actually write words that are ever read by the reader, instead I just build this world, and lots of rules and dynamics and interpersonal relationships. And the reader discovers this, by trying things in this world, by asking questions. Like, I think this is what good writers already do: (1) you envision a world (2) you envision characters embedded in that world (3) you extract some facts in that world, that are all consistent with the underlying universe, such that the reader has that sense of depth about what is happening in the rest of the world.
But I think steps (2) and (3) can be done communally and collaboratively. Like, there IS a narrative, I as the reader am not creating the narrative, so much as excavating it (which I think is what I now do anyway in my head, when I'm really engaged with a novel, and it lingers with me long after)
This is amazing! I love reading about how higher consciousness and modern technology are coming together for us, something I have believed for decades. I really enjoyed it!
It's true that the world is a flea market. We are all built on the second-hand opinions of people we like. As we start creating, without heaviness in the process, we gradually discover who we are and gain our true "weight". Our persona doesn't have to abide by things we used to defend, just because they were said by someone we found inspiring.
I partially agree with "The ${self} Is A Computational Boundary". From my perspective it's a bit more about computational capacity. We glimpsed into the $capacity variable with the use of LLMs and it truly is scary. Just imagine something with the attention capacity to --force reprogram each cell in your body through directed frequency, because the power to do so is insignificant to "it". Streaming at each of our ~30 trillion cells a little bit differently, adaptively.
I always used to intuitively suspect that we, as individuals from the human form template, are actually a dual-core entity, and we never really learned to use our $second_core, which for me is the body with which we dream.
How could we ever compare with something that can scale to 30 trillion attention threads and beyond? We're fundamentally different, and our brain's 20 watts of power can't really compare to a nuclear power plant scale silicon-based brain. In pure algorithmic comparison though, we actually are very similar... And it pretty often leaves me in awe.
Borges and Egan in the same newsletter… what a treat! Been thinking about the technologies that mediate our internal worlds and external relationships and loved the thought experiments at the end
Hey Kat, I'm on a similar path and really enjoyed the links shared here. There's such a rich language in describing what AI can mean to us
I found entered such unalloyed delights through this. thank you for sharing
I really enjoyed this! I agree with Joel Simon that so much of this early era of AI art isn’t really working within the medium of AI—it’s imitative and derivative, trying to copy what other deterministic art forms have achieved, instead of really embracing the strange generative unexpectedness of AI…
and so your suggestion that we can think of AI as a “fiction machine” (the tendency for AI to invent things then becomes a strength, not a flaw) is very compelling! looking forward to future installments of your newsletter 🕊️
this was a very difficult post for me to get through, because I found myself in awe after every paragraph (and off on a rabbit hole, taking copious notes). After the first paragraph I thought to myself, "wow, I love this, this feels like a genre of writing where people just collect the things they find very beautiful and meaningful and share it, and explain why it moves them, and i wish there was more of this"
and then I read that this is very much the intention and I feel like I'm in the right place!!!
> Writing about the nodal points forces me to understand better not just them, but also why I’m drawn to them. This newsletter, a space that I grow and share my nodal points and, hopefully, the fruits they bear
- I have never heard of are.na before today, but I am shocked because it sounds like something I have been yearning for. "A garden of ideas, tumblr meets wikipedia", and also it's been going for 12 years?? (I also love love love that there is no "one founder", it's always "one of many founders of are.na". Makes it feel like a resilient network.
Reminds me of an Alan Kay snippet I recently stumbled on, 27:00 to 29:00 (https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs?t=1630), about how the internet is the closest thing we've built to a biological system:
> "the internet has grown by 10 orders of magnitude without ever breaking, the internet has no center, it's replaced all of its atoms and all of its bits at least twice since it started"
I love this part so much:
> Indeed, “Morphotrophic” reads like a speculation of Levin’s research where cellular intelligence is acknowledged, albeit still yet to be fully understood
I used to dismiss fiction as a purely leisurely activity. Recently I've found great utility in it, when I pair it side by side with a non-fiction reading material. For me this accidentally started with "Three Body Problem" & Fall Of Civilizations, where I realized the fun fiction story was actually capturing something very real, about history, and the end of the world, that I couldn't see reading just the non-fiction because of a lot of preconceived notions about ancient civilizations.
(another example is "Children of Time" + "I Am a Strange Loop")
I now see fiction as something like, psuedocode? It is literally "false code" in that, you can't run it. But in a lot of cases, it is "more true" than the actual implementation (if I can't separate the algorithm from the details of the implementation)
Morphotrophic + Levin's work sounds like an amazing pairing together.
> LLMs weave living fictions that can be actualized.
> A few thoughts for experiments:
I love this so much. I keep thinking a lot about a genre where I as the author don't actually write words that are ever read by the reader, instead I just build this world, and lots of rules and dynamics and interpersonal relationships. And the reader discovers this, by trying things in this world, by asking questions. Like, I think this is what good writers already do: (1) you envision a world (2) you envision characters embedded in that world (3) you extract some facts in that world, that are all consistent with the underlying universe, such that the reader has that sense of depth about what is happening in the rest of the world.
But I think steps (2) and (3) can be done communally and collaboratively. Like, there IS a narrative, I as the reader am not creating the narrative, so much as excavating it (which I think is what I now do anyway in my head, when I'm really engaged with a novel, and it lingers with me long after)
wrote a bit about this here: https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1770058783605014687
Egan just strikes me as a relentlessly creative guy. I've got 'Permutation City' on my bookshelf, looking forward to it!
This is amazing! I love reading about how higher consciousness and modern technology are coming together for us, something I have believed for decades. I really enjoyed it!
It's true that the world is a flea market. We are all built on the second-hand opinions of people we like. As we start creating, without heaviness in the process, we gradually discover who we are and gain our true "weight". Our persona doesn't have to abide by things we used to defend, just because they were said by someone we found inspiring.
I partially agree with "The ${self} Is A Computational Boundary". From my perspective it's a bit more about computational capacity. We glimpsed into the $capacity variable with the use of LLMs and it truly is scary. Just imagine something with the attention capacity to --force reprogram each cell in your body through directed frequency, because the power to do so is insignificant to "it". Streaming at each of our ~30 trillion cells a little bit differently, adaptively.
I always used to intuitively suspect that we, as individuals from the human form template, are actually a dual-core entity, and we never really learned to use our $second_core, which for me is the body with which we dream.
How could we ever compare with something that can scale to 30 trillion attention threads and beyond? We're fundamentally different, and our brain's 20 watts of power can't really compare to a nuclear power plant scale silicon-based brain. In pure algorithmic comparison though, we actually are very similar... And it pretty often leaves me in awe.
So much to think about with practical ai emergence and integration. I'm overwhelmed. Happy to read this.
I wish I could understand this 😭
Borges and Egan in the same newsletter… what a treat! Been thinking about the technologies that mediate our internal worlds and external relationships and loved the thought experiments at the end