dentesguardados

It is possible to question consciousness, or even practice it; our deepest aim may be to enjoy it.

A escuridão era libidinosa. Os trens gostavam de trilhos.

Spinoza challenged the older philosopher’s segregation of mental substance from material substance, arguing instead that mind and matter were not two separable substances but simply two different attributes, or aspects, of one and the same substance, which he called Deus, sive Natura, “God, or Nature.” This unitary substance could appear either as matter, on the one hand, or as mind, on the other, depending upon the vantage we viewed it from. Just as, according to Spinoza, the vast and originating power that his contemporaries called “God” was nothing other than the creative dynamism and intelligence of Nature itself, so the human mind was simply the specific sensitivity and sentience of that part of nature we recognize as a human body. Every material body or thing, for Spinoza, had its mental aspect—all things were ensouled. The human body was the outward, material aspect of the human mind, as the mind was nothing other than the internal, felt experience of the body. “The mind and the body are one and the same thing …” (...) Still, in one important respect Spinoza remains ahead of even those researchers who today claim his heretical insights as their own. Most of those who now assert the centrality of the body in any understanding of the mind—those who argue that it is really the body as a whole, and not an isolated brain, that is the true locus of awareness—still remain trapped within the confines of an unnecessary presumption. It’s a presumption that lingers as our deepest inheritance from the Cartesian tradition: the assumption that awareness, or mind, is a special possession of our species, a property that isolates humankind from the rest of material nature. (...) Very few of those participant in the current “turn toward the body” seem to notice the wider, more subversive implications of their work. While they assert that the entirety of the body is integral to the mind, surely (they assume) it is only the human body that has this privilege, and not the body of an elk, or an aspen grove, or the dense flesh of the ground itself. Surely the gushing body of a river, or the ebb and flow of the breeze, has no real part in intelligence! It is here that their timidity contrasts with the far-seeing audacity of Spinoza. He alone saw that the human mind could never be reconciled with the human body unless intelligence was recognized as an attribute of nature in its entirety. To Spinoza, every sensible phenomenon had its own mental aspect; every tangible body within the material world was also an idea within the vast, encompassing intelligence that was known inwardly (to some) as God and outwardly (to all) as nature.

This is the mythology of automation: the belief that removing the human from the loop is always an efficiency gain. That judgment is a cost to be eliminated. That capability is a fixed input rather than a compounding asset. That the purpose of AI is to perform tasks currently performed by people, only faster and cheaper. This mythology does not announce itself as mythology. It arrives dressed in the respectable garments of return-on-investment calculations, headcount reduction targets and productivity dashboards. Increasingly, it arrives dressed as augmentation itself. All of the major AI companies now use the word “augmentation” to describe their respective LLMs’ services while building infrastructure that moves in the opposite direction.  Every significant platform release of the past two years — agent frameworks, coding agents, computer use, research agents — follows the same trajectory: Make the AI do more, make the human do less. None of them instruments the arrangement between human and AI. None of them measures whether human capability is growing or atrophying. The vocabulary of augmentation has been captured. The practice it names has not. The mythology asks: What can we automate? It never asks: What are we destroying?

qual tradução que vc não fez mas gostaria de ter feito? levando em conta apenas livros inéditos no brasil

Por trás das formulações desses cenários futuros estão determinadas ideias do que é um instrumento de pesquisa, uma escrita calcada na subjetividade humana, um estilo de um autor. Essas ideias só podem parecer autoevidentes para quem entende que a criação artística pode estar submetida completamente aos critérios de validação de eficiência, metrificação e produtividade que regem a sociedade contemporânea. A literatura, como toda forma de arte, é o domínio da liberdade plena de expressão, mas há limiares que, uma vez ultrapassados, a descaracterizam. Um texto publicitário nunca será arte, pois sua mensagem é sempre a mesma: consuma isso. O risco proporcionado pelas ferramentas de IA à literatura é do mesmo tipo. Não se trata tanto de indagar se o autor segue sendo um autor e se ele está de fato criando algo ao recorrer ao apoio da geração de texto de um modelo de linguagem estatístico — a resposta nos dois casos é sim —, mas de afirmar que a qualidade de comunicação que se estabelece entre criador(es) e leitores na escrita mediada pela IA é diferente daquela que caracteriza a escrita literária.

Moderation. They consider it the resolution of contradiction. It cannot be anything other than the affirmation of contradiction and the heroic decision to stay with it and to survive it.