Sunday, July 18, 2021
The scariest part....
A satanic demon named JOHN TILLSON writes a perfectly scary screech in Aeon.
Fortunately JOHN TILLSON is also grotesquely STUPID and has no fucking idea why his horrible idea won't work and can't work.
First the stupid part:
Consider the following case of what I call ‘knowledge insertion’ from The Matrix (1999). In the movie, the protagonist Neo discovers that the world as he knows it is a computer simulation designed to help enslave humanity. To free humanity, it (apparently) helps to know kung fu. While Neo doesn’t know any, he doesn’t need long to learn it. Via a computer cable plugged into the back of his skull, the martial art is downloaded into his mind, instantaneously making him an expert. If you could, would you follow Neo’s example and ‘insert knowledge’ – or indeed any other valuable dispositions, such as character traits? After all, it’s not just knowledge that Neo has ‘inserted’, but the kung fu ability that the kung fu knowledge has enabled. In fact, there are many desirable states that can’t necessarily be reduced to ‘knowledge’ – such as being courageous, intelligent, creative, funny and athletic – but might be facilitated by it.A skill is not a "state", whatever the fuck that means. A skill is a complex set of microprogrammed and FLEXIBLE responses to a physical process. Training involves a long and intentional interaction with the weapon or the hammer or the frying pan. Real trainers put the student through a controlled 'play' of the real process, deliberately creating the oddities or accidents that typically occur during the process, without the deadly consequences of real mistakes. JOHN TILLSON goes on to examine how learning really happens, and relentlessly smashes every part of the process without ever saying why the real thing can't work. The real thing is bad because JOHN TILLSON SAYS SO, and that's all. Michelet as usual:
Here lies Sprenger's real merit, which is beyond dispute. He is a fool, but an intrepid fool; boldly and unflinchingly he lays down the least acceptable doctrines. Another man would have tried to elude, attenuate, soften objections, —but this is not his way. Beginning on the first page, he sets down openly and displays one by one the natural, self-evident reasons there are for disbelieving the satanic miracles. This done, he adds coldly, "Merely so many heretic mistakes." And never pausing to refute the reasons given, he copies out the texts on the other side, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Bible, legends, canonists, and commentators. First he shows you what common sense has to say, then pulverises it by weight of authority.Now the scary part, showing JOHN TILLSON'S real purpose, which is of course the same as Sprenger and Kremer:
Even if we dodge the threat of replacement by downloading a modest suite of knowledge at a suitably gentle pace, we might still worry that knowledge insertion would make us become someone we wouldn’t want to be. This isn’t always a problem. Suppose Neo was racist and wanted to stay racist. I’d say that losing his racism as an unexpected and unwanted side-effect of uploading kung fu would be objectively serendipitous. Any antecedent hostility to becoming non-racist wouldn’t constitute a problem: it should be a welcome becoming.A welcome becoming. Straight out of Comrade O'Brien. Most of the commenters are just fussing about grammar points or definitions. One gets the difference between real experience and injected "states". None of them are bothered by the scary part. And that's the scariest part.
Labels: #WholeOfSociety, Experiential education
¶ 11:07 PM
