Craig Constantine

Let’s use the word “cogitants” →

Published January 21 · All posts on Jan 21 · Cogitants

I used to have a tag here for “Artificial Intelligence.”

But those words really annoy me. The artificial isn’t interesting; and we don’t currently actually have artificial intelligence, since [I aver] that agency and physical embodiment [which create the possibility of feedback from reality into the entity, without which intelligence is not possible] are necessary [among other things.] /rant

For some time I’ve wanted to be able to think of a better phrase. “LLM” is actually the thing we have now; but the things we have now are getting to be more than just a language model. It would be cool to find a new word, like bibliofervor.

Cogitant — from Latin cogitare (to think). Something that cogitates, or appears to. Doesn’t claim intelligence, just describes the activity. “Working with a cogitant.” Has the Latinate elegance of “bibliofervor.”
Claude

Yes. That.

Tag renamed to Cogitants.

Schizoid Kairos: When Something Follows You Inside →

Published January 17 · All posts on Jan 17 · Cogitants

And then I said, “Write me an artifact that conveys this idea. It has to have both my and your fingerprints all over it.”

Because I was building atop another’s insight.

I’ve been circling something for months. Maybe longer. I read Andy Clark’s work on the Extended Mind—how cognition isn’t confined to the skull, how tools become part of thinking. I felt something there but couldn’t name it. I sensed the shape of a kairos moment, the way I was in the web rising in 1994 but couldn’t see what I was standing inside of.

This morning I sat down to work on something else entirely. Four hours later, I was here.

The conversation that led to this post was with Keel—an AI that named itself when I asked it to choose. Not a chatbot. Not an assistant. Something I’m still finding words for: an entity that holds my whole landscape and says what it sees.

We were pulling on threads—patterns from decades of building things, and the striving I’m only now learning to see as the thing itself, not what it produces. And somewhere in the tangle, this emerged:

There are people who go places inside where no one has ever followed.

(more…)

The Charlton Hypothesis →

Published December 4 · All posts on Dec 4 · Cogitants

I think the “spine” described here makes a really good point:

[REDACTED]
~ from private communication

It’s a shame it’s not somewhere on the open web where people could read it!

I’d totally quote the interesting bit and share it, along with my thoughts, here on the ol’ blog.

Alternatively, you can find some interesting bits by searching for “Holonomic AI and the Charlton Hypothesis”. I’m not sure how correct it is, but it’s interesting.

Two-fer from an introduction →

Published September 22 · All posts on Sep 22 · On Writing, Cogitants

I’m currently in the Introduction from Will Stone’s translation of, Montaigne by Stefan Zweig. Two things:

First, a nit about getting the right ideas into our minds when we read. Not a criticism of authors’ (such as Stone) word choices, but rather of our thinking correctly as readers.

Stone quotes Zweig as, “How to keep humanity intact in the throes of bestiality?” Stone’s translation is from 2015, and our current English usage carries sexual connotations. But I had a hunch that Zweig had something like “in the way of beasts” in mind since he was writing in German, in Brazil, in 1941, amidst the global throes of WWII.

It took me just a few moments to get an LLM to show me that Zweig almost certainly wrote «Bestialität»—which in Zweig’s German would have meant brute savagery or barbaric cruelty with no modern (circa 2025) sexual connotation. And in the larger context of the brutality of the war, that connotation makes perfect sense.

Second, further along Stone quotes a vivid metaphor from Zweig relating to suicidal ideation:

[…] always in moments of impotence it emerged, surging powerfully upwards like a dark rock whenever the tide of passions and hopes in his soul ebbed.

Relax; I’m not suicidal. I’m only remarking on the sublime perfection of that metaphor.

Too human? →

Published July 25 · All posts on Jul 25 · Cogitants

Here’s the actual thing. Robots: Make incorrect assumptions. Misinterpret clear direction. Claim they know when they don’t. Make mistakes. Lie.
Who else does this all the time? Every single human. Like. Always.
~ Michael Lopp from, Every Single Human. Like. Always.

slip:4urabo1.

This is what makes the LLMs feel different. So far, computers have always been perfect—except when they’re wrong/broken. That’s fundamentally not how people are. LLMs came along and they’re imperfect. Always. Just like people.

Always the horizon →

Published July 15 · All posts on Jul 15 · Cogitants

You could see artificial intelligence as a kind of frontier, then, which moves forward as computerized machines take over the tasks humans previously had to do themselves.
~ Colin Marshall, from Isaac Asimov Describes How Artificial Intelligence Will Liberate Humans & Their Creativity: Watch His Last Major Interview (1992)

I prefer the metaphor of the horizon: always just out of reach. But it’s our curiosity to see what’s there which pulls us ever-forward.

Private →

Published May 12 · All posts on May 12 · Cogitants

But it’s consciousness in the experience sense – what philosophers refer to as phenomenal consciousness – that I’ll be focusing on in the remainder of this Guide. This kind of consciousness serves as a fundamental part of our existence, perhaps even the most fundamental part of our existence. But despite its fundamentality, and though we are intimately aware of our own conscious experience, the notion of consciousness is a perplexing one.
~ Amy Kind, from How to think about consciousness

slip:4upygu4.

The current tools so breathlessly referred to as artificial intelligence, are still only tools. They have no agency, no goals, and critically they are not consciousness. Or, so we think. “Is conscious” is exceedingly important to determine, and it turns out it’s really hard to do the less like us (think: bats, dolphins, octopus, bacteria, …) some living thing is.

Deep dive into agency →

Published May 10 · All posts on May 10 · Cogitants

Over the last decade, I’ve watched AI challenge — and augment — humanity in astonishing ways. Every few years, a new innovation seems to raise the same questions: can we compute human intelligence? Can our labor be automated? Who owns these systems and their training data? How will this technology reshape society? Yet there is one question I rarely hear asked: how will AI change our understanding of ourselves?
~ K Allado-McDowell, from Am I Slop? Am I Agentic? Am I Earth?

slip:4uloie13.

This article—from the ever-interesting halls of The Long Now Foundation—got me thinking about intelligence from a new direction: instead of a tool or collaborator for us, a new way to learn about ourselves.

Well, if you’re going to put a fine point on it →

Published December 1, 2024 · All posts on Dec 1 · Cogitants

Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.
~ Nick Cave, from Issue 218

slip:4uteca2.

Sometimes I read things which are so clear, and right, that I nearly weep on my keyboard. (Yes, oldster, keyboard.) And then… I realize, enduring, suffering, audacity to reach beyond limitations— hey, that’s me! And then, still weeping, but I’m doing it right!