Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel host a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call "reality."
The World Doesn’t Exist: William Gibson, William Blake, and Navigating an Algorithmic Hall of Mirrors | ODDCRITIC
Scrolling the TL revealed distorted realities, shaped by algorithms and biases.
Re-Engineering Wimsatt for Limited Beings
Science is the best way to produce facts about reality. The best, at least, that limited human beings have devised so far. Yet, not even scientists quite seem to understand how scientific knowledge is generated. This is not only a philosophical but also a practical problem, as our misunderstandings affect the quality of our research and limit the directions it can take. In light of this, it may be good if we reflected a bit more on how we do science — to become better researchers through philosophy. Here, I provide an accessible introduction to a philosophical approach that achieves precisely this: William Wimsatt’s multi-perspectival realism. It disabuses us of widespread but misleading myths and idealizations about science, such as the idea that everything in the world can be reduced to a fundamental level, or that we can approach a “view from nowhere” — complete and objectively detached knowledge of the world. Wismatt proposes an alternative view based on his thorough studies of actual research practice. It cuts deeply into the layered yet messy structure of reality, and the improvised but potent tools we have available, as limited and evolved beings, to explore it. Wimsatt reframes science as an irregular yet adaptive process rather than a cumulative repository of unalterable facts. His philosophy provides a workable and grounded middle way between radical skepticism and naïve belief in the objective truth of science. It explains how knowledge is conceptually constructed by humans, but still connects us to reality in a trustworthy way. We need such a new view of science, not only to improve our research practices and outcomes but, more generally, to gain a more realistic understanding of ourselves, the world, and our place and role within it.
The cinematograph, the "noematograph," and the future of AI art
From the cinematograph to the "noematograph," the Hugh-winning author explores how technology has, and may still, breed new artistic forms.
Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form
Until now, digital arts have largely been understood to belong in traditional genres or forms of art: we are said to have electronic literature, net.art, or electronic, techno music. Sometimes interesting discussions have arisen concerning the very ontology of digital art, and questions such as whether net.art should be seen within the tradition of the visual arts or as a form of literature connecting it to the different traditions and questions regulating these arts.[1] While it is not my intent to disconnect digital art from traditional art, or to argue for the irrelevance of the traditional forms of art, I will in the following establish the interface as an aesthetic and critical framework for digital art.
The Origins Of <br>‘Planetary Realism’ And <br>‘Whole Earth’ Thinking | NOEMA
There is no escaping an interconnected world.
Episode 5: Metaphors for AI, with Shannon Vallor
This week, Adam talks with Shannon Vallor, a philosopher of AI, about the metaphors we use to talk about AI and ourselves. They also dunk on libertarians and San Francisco billboards, and consider what kind of hope we can have for the future of technology.Messages: • Support the show at patreon.com/DreamingAgainstTheMachine • Follow us on Bluesky and Instagram • Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts! • Check out other great podcasts from Multitude like Wow if TrueAbout the show:Dreaming Against the Machine is a podcast about envisioning a realistic and hopeful future. Each week, the show’s host, journalist and astrophysicist Dr. Adam Becker, will have an earnest (and entertaining!) conversation with a guest about possible futures, seen through the lenses of history, science, and culture. In a world where tech oligarchs and their power fantasies are driving visions of the future, Dreaming Against the Machine aims to take back the terms of the public conversation about what our world can and should be.
Art or tool?
The Internet spaces I tend to inhabit have more polarisation than at many other recent times, and little explication of the worldviews that lead to different premises for discussion, that in turn...
People Who Can't Visualize Anything Are Challenging a 300-Year-Old Theory of Thought
Mental imagery might not be as central to complex human thought as we believed, philosophers say.
Thoughts and Feelings around Claude Design · Sam Henri Gold
I tried Claude Design yesterday and I have a theory for how this whole thing shakes out.
Revisiting creative behaviour as an epistemic process: lessons from 12 computational artists and designers | Proceedings of the 35th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference
As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.
We speak often of AI as if it were a future event. But it is already here in the fabric of our being. What Karl Ove Knausgaard captures with devastating clarity in his recent essay ‘The Reenchanted… | Kenneth Mikkelsen | 19 comments
We speak often of AI as if it were a future event. But it is already here in the fabric of our being. What Karl Ove Knausgaard captures with devastating clarity in his recent essay ‘The Reenchanted World’ is the departure of the real. “We live in a virtual world, as if the world had been lifted out of itself, into the air, like a giant roof suspended above the ground,” he writes. It is an existential condition. Across philosophy, from Heidegger to Baudrillard, from Don DeLillo to Debord, a singular thread weaves: the world, once our shelter from the self, has become self-referential. Where once we encountered beings in our Zuhandensein—ready-to-hand, intimate, meaningful—we now face a procession of Vorhandensein: inert, objectified, mediated. Simulation replaces encounter. Perception is swallowed by spectacle. And the digital era, in Knausgaard’s terms, “distances culture from the body”. “It is not just the body that disappears—it is the awareness that we are dying,” he writes. What we face is not merely technological change, but what I would call existential dissonance: the erosion of resonance between our inner world, our social world, and the material world. It is the tension that arises when the way one lives, acts, and relates is misaligned with one’s deeper sense of meaning, reality, and value. It manifests itself as a disturbance in being — an unease that is not merely emotional, but rooted in a felt gap between one’s existence as it is and as it could or should be. It is the voice of the self calling from within the noise of the world. This is why Knausgaard’s essay matters for anyone working in, with, or around AI. Because the question isn’t: What can these systems do? It is: What do they undo? “We can explain everything. But we understand nothing,” he writes. Manipulated constructions of truth, in such a time, becomes a currency. As shown in recent events—from Francesca Gino’s research fraud at Harvard to Bezos’ all-female crew venture into space, and Trump’s detention camp —truth is no longer that which corresponds with reality, but that which performs and sells. As Baudrillard warned, the simulation no longer hides the real—it becomes it. And yet, something remains. Knausgaard writes not to despair, but to stay. In the body. In death. In silence. In the concrete. If you seek to understand what is happening—not just in AI, but in the very metaphysics of modern life—I suggest we begin not with data, but with dissonance. With the feeling that something vital is slipping from view, and that “being in the world” now requires resistance. “We are surrounded by mystery. And yet we act as if everything were known,” he writes. AI will never understand this. But we must. Knausgaard’s full essay from Harper’s Magazine can be read via link in comments. | 19 comments on LinkedIn
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Philosophy in Practice
It is a curious thing when an artist, thinker, or writer gains influence outside the audience he intends or is comfortable with. When a thinker associated with the right becomes popular on the left, or a novelist associated with the progressive left becomes popular among conservative readers, there can be a sort of strain felt between the audience in fact and the “true” audience, or between those who feel themselves to be the authentic recipients of a work’s message and meaning and those who, to the true believers, come across as opportunistic in their enjoyment of works in tension with their own views. The same is true when a writer working within an academic discipline gets picked up by those outside it: Those working within that discipline may find the co-opting of these thinkers misplaced at best or malicious at worst.
What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory
Why do we need art? What Art Does is an invitation to e…
What does it really mean to have a moment of insight? | Psyche Notes to Self
From art to science to love, the moment of insight happens when we see a likeness between different things
