Tezos

What Does It Mean To Have A Body? #50 (unspoken politics of language: a thread)

Creator

tz1PwqkrfqAgaJ2iSM3SqxwCBs61UoC2H8gA

Description

This long form generative AI project is the result of 124 days of work around the concept of body and how AI can interpret what a body is. As we interact with computers now, and leaving aside our concept of what sentient AI could be, this is already a conversation between a form of life that will be extinct and a form of information managing, perhaps consciousness some day, that has infrastructural characteristics to "never" die, and by never I mean just longer, we know that machines can eventually break down, whether from natural causes or other reasons and that this could happen before they get their message or tools to distant safe places. When this form of thought, what we now call AI, is finally alone, the question of how did it feel to have a body or what did it mean, can take many paths. From just scientific information about how a body works, it's very unlikely that for a being not inside a body this picture is complete. So possibly how we interpreted the human body, at its surface, and from within, through art history, could be a part of the input machines would need to try to understand what is it to have a body, to be in a body, or also, what is it or how does it feel to be trapped in a body. The workings of logic inside the body can resemble the way they function in dreams and art. Our bodily experiences are more akin to poetic acts than straightforward assessments of reality. This poetic quality of bodily experience may be why we often turn to art to make sense of our inner lives. Metaphors and analogies can capture the nuances of our bodily sensations and emotions in ways that scientific language cannot. Dualism has existed since forever. We can think of AI's mind as a child of the human mind, and we can think of feelings, spiritual life, consciousness, as a thinner foam on top of rational thought, the true intangible thing clearly different from the computable part of thought. AI is already highly capable of processing and analyzing the rational and computable aspects of human thought. But there's this chance that in order to that higher realm of unpredictable, ineffective, odd acts of thought, it may need to delve into the infrastructure of human life and how it feels to have a body in order to fully understand the more intangible aspects of human thought. What Does It Mean To Have A Body? Long-Form Generative AI Edition of 500 JavaScript + Stable Diffusion + Upscaler 2784x2784 PNG May 2, 2023