Read a high-level summary of the chapters in The Architecture of Encounter.

https://open.substack.com/pub/brywillis634737/p/the-architecture-of-encounter?r=pvxh5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

When we're not writing, we may be performing ancillary activities like promotion and awareness. You are a witness. Video to follow. Do I need a new headshot?

#writing #philosophy #books #script #contents #ontology #logic #epistemoloogy #mediation #subjecthood #perception #language #socialontology #realism #normativity #SharingIsCaring #substack

I recently finished reading Richard Wollheim's "Painting As An Art".

I found much of it stimulating in the close attention paid to particular pictures and thought provoking with regard to his theory of "seeing in" as the way to understand our perception of paintings.

On the other hand, his use of psychoanalytic theory left me with questions.

Surprisingly, his use of this theory reminded of some recent reading of mine in evolutionary psychology. Both Wollheim and the evolutionary psychologists stress the significance of a common human nature and are inclined to downplay the importance of systems of symbols or culture in general.

I do think that a substantive concept of human nature makes sense, and I am open to the possibility of evolutionary psychology and psychoanalytical theory contributing to an understanding of of human nature.

Altogether less agreeable to me is the tendency of these theories to smuggle in a social ontology in which culture is merely the creation of atomized individuals. One can believe in the evolved nature of the mind and allow for the possibility of certain kinds of psychic forces at work in the individual without denying the importance, still less the existence, of social facts. Thinking about languages as at once learned and used by individuals but also existing as entities external to those individuals is helpful here.

Image: The Construction of the Tower of Babel -- Folio xvii, The Bedford Book of Hours -- 1423 - 30 - The British Library.

#Wollheim #RichardWollheim #PaintingAsAnArt #EvolutionaryPsychology #Psychoanalysis #SocialOntology #Art #Philosophy #IlluminatedManuscript #BookOfHours #BedfordBBookOfHours #15thCenturyArt #TowerOfBabel

Jan 22-23, 2026: not one #philosophy #conference in #Groningen but two:

1. #Sustainability and #CorporateResponsibility: The #Sustainable #Corporation (see https://www.rug.nl/filosofie/organization/news-and-events/events/2024/call-for-papers-sustainable-corporation-jan-2026?lang=en)

2. #Plessner and #Anthropology: Groningen Plessner Conference at @Bibliothecaris (https://www.rug.nl/library/heritage/plessner-conference-jan-2026?lang=en)

#PhilosophicalAnthropology #SocialOntology #BusinessEthics

The most important book about LLMs that currently exists

I’m glad that Henry Farrell has written this about Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines. It’s a dense, complex and at times frustrating book but it’s also the most genuinely original take on LLMs I’ve encountered. This is how Farrell summarises the outcome of the book:

That LLMs exist; that they are capable of forming coherent sentences in response to prompts; that they are in some genuine sense creative without intentionality, suggests that there is something importantly right about the arguments of structuralist linguistics. Language demonstrably can exist as a system independent of the humans who employ it, and exist generatively, so that it is capable of forming new combinations.

This cashes out as a theory of large language models that are (a) genuinely culturally generative, and (b) incapable of becoming purposively intelligent, any more than the language systems that they imperfectly model are capable of becoming intelligent. Under this account, the “Eliza effect” – the tendency of humans to mistake machine outputs for the outputs of human intelligence – is not entirely in error. If I understand Weatherby correctly, much of what we commonly attribute to individual cognition is in fact carried out through the systems of signs that structure our social lives.

I’m still processing it but I think this book shows a way through the cultural tensions which have made it conceptually difficult to get to grips with what LLMs fundamentally are: actions without actors, creativity without intentionality, even thought without a thinker? They are a sociotechnical infrastructure which facilitates the generativity of the linguistic system, unbinding it from the direct dependence upon individual subjectivity in order that we can prod and prompt it in newly intentional ways.

#HenryFarrell #LeifWeatherby #LLMs #poststructuralism #socialOntology #structuralistLinguistics

Social ontology matters for how we attribute causality in relation to emerging technologies

From If… Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics, by Taina Bucher:

What remained puzzling throughout the ordeal was the apparent lack of vocabulary available to talk about what it is that algorithms do or are even capable of doing, as exemplified in the repeated attribution of bias either to the algorithm or to the humans involved. Words such as bias, neutrality, manipulation, and subjectivity abound, making the controversy one of locating agency in the right place. The prevailing sense in the discourse surrounding the event seemed to be that Facebook should not claim to use algorithms to make decisions when, in fact, humans make the decisions. Of course, what was being slightly overlooked in all of this was the fact that algorithms are always already made, maintained, and sustained by humans. Yet, if only the responsible people could be held accountable, the story went, it would make it easier to control or regulate such “manipulations” and “subjective orderings” in the future. From a relational perspective, however, determining the origin of action as if it belonged to one source only would be misleading. After all, as Latour puts it, “to use the word ‘actor’ means that it’s never clear who and what is acting when we act since an actor on stage is never alone in acting” (2005: 46).

#algorithms #causality #socialOntology #TainaBucher

The misuse of the concept of assemblage within digital social science

I’ve seen a growing trend to use the Deleuzian concept of assemblage in a way that fails to distinguish between internal and external relations. What distinguishes an assemblage from an entity or a totality is these elements are externally related, rather than the internal relation between elements which jointly constituted a whole. Or at last they are a mix of internal and external relations. But what an assemblage is not is a purely internally related entity. That’s the whole reason for coining the neologism in the first place, to distinguish it from a being/whole. It’s the difference between a relation which cannot exist apart from through its connection to a whole, as opposed to a relatively autonomous relation that can manifest in a different form. So for example the battery on my iphone has an internal relation to the phone, whereas the airpods have an external relation to it. You could extract the battery and install it somewhere else but it would have to enter a constitutive relation with another iphone, whereas the airpods can be used in relation to a range of entities.

This matters because if we treat assemblages as containing internal relations, we are basically talking about totalities while imagining we are doing the opposite. The analytical virtue of assemblage theory is that it helps us sketch out how heterogeneous elements are drawn together into complex coalitions of existing things, able to form and reform in dynamic and multifaceted ways. If you treat the assemblages as if they have internal relations then you are suddenly imagining vast totalities which loom across the social world, without recognising the dynamic character which is the whole analytical point of the theory. In this sense if you imagine ‘AI’ as an assemblage, without making this distinction, it becomes this vast and impenetrable juggernaut which rampages obscenely across a world which it transforms. It becomes a mega force, to use Filip Vostal’s phrase, to which we must either subordinate ourselves or reject in its entirety.

If you treat an assemblage as an internally related thing you’re effectively just connecting up a load of heterogeneous elements and saying ‘this is a thing’. But things being connected don’t make them a thing, even in terms of assemblage theory. What matters is how they’re connected, under what circumstances, with what results. This is why assemblage theory is powerful but you completely miss that if you lose the internal/external distinction, whether explicitly in terms of conceptualisation or tacitly in terms of how you’re narrating the analysis.

I’ve wondered recently why some critics of generative AI see it as uniquely obscene, as opposed to another expression of platform capitalism. Fundamentally I don’t see it as any different on a moral level (clearly technologically and potentially socially it is very different) to watching YouTube, posting on Instagram or using Uber. Or for that matter driving or taking flights. It involves a complicity in a system you would rather was different, licensed by the affordances of that system. You can respond to this in multiple ways but these responses tend to be connected into the practical logic of living a life e.g. non-drivers sometimes using Uber. I often agree with much of the substance of the critique, yet don’t end up in the same place politically and morally as they do. I wonder if there might, at last sometimes, be a disagreement about the ontology of ‘AI’ underpinning this. To the extent its seen as a totality, whether deliberately or through its misattribution as an assemblage, I part ways at an analytical level and I think a difference of moral and political opinion follows from this.

#AI #assemblage #deleuze #DigitalSocialScience #generativeAI #LLM #socialOntology

Based on the contents of your meeting transcripts, here are five propositions about the social ontology of generative AI, attempting to replicate your own voices:

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/07/five-propositions-about-the-social-ontology-of-generative-ai/

#collaboration #generativeAI #MilanStürmer #socialOntology

A satirical documentary about the #capitalist #religion https://youtu.be/xd7jhRsjYOI?si=aN6w_iTMk_orZ6NC via @YouTube

#satire #socialscience #socialontology #politics #comedy #politicalcomedy

Näkyy SEP:n uusittuihin ilmaantuneen kaksi jollain tapaa intressipiiriini kuuluvaa entryä, joita en jo löydä selaimen kirjanmerkeistäni, eli tuskin olen lukenut.

Etiikan alueelta supererogaatio (ylihyväntely, oma suom. justiinsa), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supererogation/, ja metafysiikan puolelta sosiaalinen ontologia, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-ontology/.

Kvanttilaskennasta kiihottuville olisi uusittuna tarjolla myös sitä koskeva perus-filosofinen entry, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-quantcomp/, ja biologisteille luonnonvalintaa, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-selection/.

#sep #new #philosophy #ethics #ontology #metaphysics #supererogation #socialOntology #quantumComputing #naturalSelection