Tidewater Dreams

Note: This is written like one of those old “logical” philosophy arguments — inspired by Society of the Spectacle by Guy DeBord. Each statement is in support of the following argument:

Artificial Intelligence can never have knowledge.

The Human Body is a Container of Time

A vessel for the fourth dimension.

Human knowledge is both within and without the body.

Stored in books (or any box, digital or analog), knowledge lives, in a way, on its own island.

Inanimate until touched by human consciousness.

Information is not knowledge.

Your corporeal form is not “hard drive.” It is, in my case, “flabby dude.”

To conceive of knowledge as information is to reconstruct the human body as a hard drive, removing experience and dimensionality. (And flab.)

Also morality. Also aesthetic judgement.

Also experience, through the senses: for example, shaking the last crumbs from a Pringles tube and tossing them in your mouth. The chip shards sound metallic. The flavored dust dissolves on the tongue. You are young again and can eat anything.

The experience of finishing a tube of Pringles all by yourself is knowledge.

(See also Proust’s madeleines.)

Artificial Intelligence reconfigures information without reference to time or experience.

An A.I.’s reference is the information base it is fed (trained on). Its’ so-called knowledge is the reconfiguration of that information.

Is reconfiguration of information the same thing as human knowledge?

The Book with Anything Paper

Imagine holding a book whose words were not fixed to the page. When closed, the words are quantum (in flux). Or you might think of the words dancing around the pages according to their own whims. They dance like no one is watching.

Whenever you open the book and look at it, the book stops dancing and becomes fixed, solid, legible. The words are new. Never before constructed. But the words you see must be combinations of all the words contained in the book, in regular syntax. Nearly limitless possibilities but still limited.

Syntax is like DNA, chess, etc. etc. Starts small; becomes, basically, infinite.

Does this page have knowledge? What if you asked the book a question and it was able to reconfigure itself to provide an answer? Is this knowledge? Or reconfigured information?

Isabel Allende’s Tidewater Dreams both does and does not exist.

A.I. “hallucinations” are reconfigured information, without reference to the world, time, or experience.

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a summer reading list that was partly iterated by A.I. Some of the suggested books do not exist. They weren’t hallucinated. The fake books are A.I. providing information. A.I. will provide information regardless of the existence or correctness of that information.

To an A.I. all information exists without reference to the world. (The world (n): The place where human bodies experience time.)

Future A.I. trained on the many web pages now linking the Chilean-American writer with the unreal book, will “know” that the words “Isabel Allende” and “Tidewater Dreams” appear together frequently. Therefore, in a sense, at least to a large language model recombining words in ways in which they often appear, Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende does exist. Its’ existence is confirmed every time someone types “Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende.”

A.I. trained on A.I.-produced web content will grow exponentially less tethered to human reality.

This is not a hallucination. It is free floating information become a (boring) Dada poem.

(Example: refrigerator magnet poetry is Dadaist. Even better example: cutting out the words of an old newspaper, throwing them in the air, and collecting your new poem from the floor.)

This is ironic, because the whole Dada thing was against logic and reason. The A.I. has applied only logic and come to the same illogical place.

The knowledge of syntax is a kind of knowledge. Babies acquire it along with walking. But on its own, syntax is just so many colorless green ideas sleeping furiously.

These days, I feel like I am living in a Dada poem. A random assortment of empty words.

I feel like I am the protagonist of Isabel Allende’s Tidewater Dreams.

Human Knowledge has Taste

To provide a true summer reading list for human readers the Chicago Sun-Times would have to hire a well-read person with knowledge of literary trends and history. Not to mention a feeling for what “summer” means culturally and how a book might relate to that sense. (This would be filtered through the critic’s own experiences of summer.) This kind of knowledge could be used by a critic to develop taste and make choices using the state of the body (Hungry? Tired? Rushed? Happy? Drunk?) and their experiences. Knowledge is required to recommend human art for human minds.

Tastes or subjective choices regarding beauty, morality, and worth are aspects of knowledge separate from information.

My wife is beautiful.

This is a form of knowledge.

Artificial Intelligence can never have knowledge.

Desire Paths iterates itself via the wet-meat brain of Jonathan Gourlay every two weeks. Do you know someone who might be interested? Let them know. Heart, comment, subscribe and all of that. Then go out and live, man. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em! (And by “‘em” I mean “fresh caught lake trout.”)