asitisnow.bsky.social
Meditation, philosophy, lucid dreaming
You are prior to the idea 'I am'. Camp yourself there, prior to the words 'I am'. —Nisargadatta
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None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
― Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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We may not be Buddhas, but we all have (and are held by) buddha-nature (or Christ consciousness, dharmakaya, suchness, whatever one calls it). Very reassuring (and a great motivator for practice).
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"I see no reason to do things that *might* make it worse."
🙏
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"So at best the climate argument is inconclusive."
Conclusive evidence is always elusive, and those who stress that an argument or evidence is "inconclusive" appeal to that intuition in hopes that this will settle things. I don't think it does (on multiple fronts):
www.newyorker.com/books/under-...
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The bottom line is that Big Tech is slashing its net-zero targets b/c of the expansion of LLMs and similar AI technologies, which is extremely concerning, not to mention AI's disruption of labour markets and its impact on sense-making and cognition.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
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I don't think a Substack entry provides a reliable source. I'm sure that there are many back-of-the-envelope calculations that one can use to paint an "everything is just fine" picture. I'm old enough to remember elegant calculations that predicted a nuclear disaster as a 1-in-a-1000 years event....
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Does this take into account the energy used to extract the minerals and metals used to build and maintain the tech infrastructure? With Google abandoning its clean energy pledges, and Three Mile Island being slated to reopen to power Microsoft's data centres, these "highest" estimates seem off.
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These processes (and wealth distribution) did indeed start before LLMs and that they're not obvious is part of why they're so corrosive. They're part of a broader pattern (including AI development on other fronts that is even more concerning).
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It's pretty obvious at this stage that LLMs are causing harm to our shared natural and cognitive environments and are tools for massive wealth redistribution (to the top). They're weapons of mass distraction and labour devaluation devices and not worth it if one cares about fundamental well-being.
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Yes, technology has set us on a slippery slope not only where everything we have to do (for work or in daily life) incurs incalculable downstream costs but where the formerly shared epistemic ground constantly shifts b/c technology also generates mountains of data that only it itself "understands."
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If people using LLMs directly experienced the rise in carbon dioxide and heat in their immediate living space each time they query the system, they would quickly abandon it (or stop b/c of physical exhaustion). Absent such feedback, it seems many people prefer to plead ignorance.
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Yes. Always evaluate the words and deeds and not the person, which is inherently deceptive ("persona" is the Latin word for "mask").
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"You could also talk to your neighbors, friends, and family to get them to stop voting against their best interests"
That "talk" rarely works. Assuming to know another person's "best interests" is presumptuous and is rightly perceived as such. Coming to terms with that is where the work is.
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The head scratcher is why we as a culture decided to just focus on one aspect of being in (or as) the world (i.e., physical wakefulness) while discounting all the others (including dreaming, deep sleep, meditative absorption, and dying). It's a really impoverished view of life.
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An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by *unwarranted optimism* mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere.
― Iain McGilchrist (in The Master and His Emissary)
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Wishing you and your loved ones much courage and strength and time for reflection on the joys (and sorrows) you have shared together.🙏
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Yes, we hiked on the Rock Creek Trail this weekend, and several sections had visible/olfactory problems with water quality. Wouldn't want to dip a toe in it.
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This quote is from a critique of the brain being a predictive-processing machine (a kind of "hallucination engine") made widely popular in this (otherwise insightful) talk:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7...
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Many thanks for sharing! Yes, this quote reflects (typically unheeded) wisdom that probably reaches much further back than Twain (and even Socrates).