Category Archives: teleology

Online Webinar Starts Soon: Human Purpose in an Age of AI and Biotech


15 week live online course
Tuesdays at 7PM EST starting Jan 7, 2025
$160
Instructor: Dr. V. N. Alexander
IPAK-EDU

As AI begins to demand more energy than a city the size of Pittsburgh, Google and Meta are planning to build their own nuclear reactors to power their chatbots that are capable of providing generic responses to prompts. Meanwhile, although not as fast as AI, human brains are capable of responding with greater accuracy and more originality, while expending no more energy than a light bulb.

Registration closed.  Check back next semester.

See sample talk about last year’s webinar.

 

In this new course, Dr. Alexander will refresh material from her two previous webinars: The Perils of Coding Humans: A Response to Transhumanism and We Are Not Machines, as well as investigate new claims made by the AI and Biotech industries.

What is intelligence? and what sort of processes result in people being able to act purposefully? What is the difference between artificial and biological intelligence? Can all creativity and purpose be reduced to physics, chemistry, and natural selection? Or can science add more to our understanding of what makes us human and life meaningful?

About the instructor

V. N. Alexander’s work focuses on the overlap between art and science. Her honors include a Fulbright Scholar grant (ITMO University, StP, Russia), a Rockefeller Foundation Residency (Bellagio, Italy), a public scholar position with the NY Council for the Humanities, a visiting researcher position at the Santa Fe Institute, a Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women Fellowship, an Art & Science Lab Residency (Santa Fe, NM), and the Alfred Kazin award for best dissertation at the Graduate Center, City University NY, which was published in 2011 as The Biologist’s Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature and Nature. Alexander is a leading researcher in the field of Biosemiotics and she is a member of the distinguished group, the Third Way of Evolution. Her work on novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s contributions to the theory of the evolution of insect mimicry has been widely recognized. Her award-winning literary fiction novels include, Smoking Hopes (1996), Naked Singularity (2003), and Locus Amœnus (2015). A new audiobook of Naked Singularity, which explores many of the themes in this course, has just been release in 2024.

Recordings will be available if you miss a class.

Naked Singularity now available as an Audiobook

Cover design by Anthony Freda

VN Alexander’s “gut-wrenching” and “beautifully written”  2003 novel is now available as an audiobook, read by the author.  Listen to a sample on Spotify.

Synopsis: When Hali’s father asks her to  help him end his life to spare his wife the misery of a long illness, she reluctantly agrees. While family and friends in the Bible Belt insists on letting “God’s will” decide such matters, Hali broods upon the idea of predetermination and an afterlife in a way that is both challenging and deeply moving. Ultimately, she is unable to do what her father wishes, and she is forced to accept the help of a manipulative male nurse, adding further complications that result in a slow and painful end.

The audiobook of Naked Singularity is now available on all platforms, including Spotify, Overdrive (for libraries), Apple, Google Play, Kobo, StoryTel (in Sweden), Hoopla, Barnes & Noble and Amazon’s Audible.

Want to review the book?  Get a code to listen free on Spotify. Please leave a comment below.

Reviews for the 2003 hardcover edition:

“Best of 2003: Best Locally Produced Literary Figure” –Dallas Observer

“A painful tale about euthanasia. The emotions are raw at times, but there’s a cool tone of postmodern post-mortem throughout as well, raising hackles and sympathy from first to last.” –Kirkus Reviews

“Alexander takes on a gut-wrenching topic and writes eloquently about the family’s daily emotional pain, leading up to a lurid, macabre ending and a climax that is so true, it is barely believable.” Publishers Weekly

“At once deeply intellectual and extremely sensual” –Ethical Culture Review

“Beautifully written” Texas Books in Review

“Alexander takes the reader down an intriguing road loaded with questions and choices, none of them easy…. Naked Singularity is sad, touching and heartfelt, a taut story about love and living, pain and dying.” Curled up with a Good Book Review

“Woven into Naked Singularity‘s metaphors and narrative is a profound understanding of chaos and complexity. It renders esoteric constructs concrete, and in a setting none of us can escape.” J. P. Crutchfield, co-author of “Chaos,” Scientific American.

The hardcover edition was originally published by The Permanent Press in 2003. The print versions, hardcover or paperback, is available at any bookstore.

See more press/reviews/interviews about Naked Singularity. Leave a review of the new audiobook on Amazon or Goodreads.

Local readers, If you are a member of Hudson Valley Current, you can order a signed hardcover first-edition for $25 or a $15 signed paperback.

Biosemiotics Takes on Transhumanism

In this lecture, which I presented on June 19, 2024 in South Africa, I use concepts from Biosemiotics to explain why Large Language Models (LLMs) and other kinds of AI fall short and will never be able to develop true, creative intelligence.  The problem is that AI uses only symbols, whereas biological systems use icons, indexes, and symbols.  These three types of biological signs function within a physical medium that defines how they can function based on similarity and proximity.

To hear my talk follow this link to the conference page, click on the video for June 19 and start at  3:13:53. The Q&A that follows end at 3:49:45

Held under the auspices of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, the 24th annual Gathering took place at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, organized by Kobus Marais and Xany Jansen Van Vuuren.

2023 Was the Year of the ChatGPT-4 Scare. What’s Next?

2023 was the year that an artificial intelligence (AI) known as ChatGPT-4 spectacularly passed the Turing Test. For a hundred million users, interacting with the Chat bot was indistinguishable from interacting with a human being. The bot appeared to be able to understand questions and reason out competent answers.  Although its replies were sometimes vapid and sophomoric, that may have made them seem even more convincingly human.

ChatGPT is capable of processing text inputs (prompts and commands) and outputting text whose patterns have a high statistical probability of occurring after such prompts. Its apparent intelligence is a kind of magic trick insofar as the product seems similar to human reason, but it is really high-speed, brute force statistical pattern matching of words in specific contexts. (How human reason works differently will be the subject of a future essay.)  Nevertheless, the impressive performance stoked fears that AI is on the verge of becoming conscious, writing itself new and better code, and then replacing human beings as rulers of the Earth. Continue reading

Can the Cells in your Body Act Irrationally?

In The Journal of Physiology, special issue on The Physiology of Evolution, edited by Denis Noble

The Creativity of Cells: Aneural Irrational Cognition
V. N. Alexander

In “On Having no Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems” (2016), František Baluška and Michael Levin review the literature on aneural cognition in single-celled organisms, plants, and animal tissue, all of which exhibit abilities for memory, learning, decision-making, and goal-direction. “Cognition,” they argue, need not involve neurons per se.  Cells of all kinds appear to be capable of intelligent behavior that emerges from dynamical networks that propagate signals and alter connections in response to the environment—very like neuronal activity. In fact, as Baluška and Levin conclude, neural tissue seems to have merely improved upon ancient mechanisms used by all living systems generally.

This paper extends the exploration of the mechanisms of cognition by considering whether or not aneural cells may be capable of irrational cognition, making associations based on coincidental similarities and circumstantial factors.If aneural cells do harness such semiosic qualities, as with higher-level creativity, this might be how they are able to overcome old algorithms and invent tools for new situations. Continue reading

Technosemiotics

What Can Technosemiotics Do?
May 8 @ 18:00 – 19:30 EEST
The second seminar in the Technosemiotics discussion series will explore the conceptual apparatus offered by biosemiotics and its cybernetics-inspired analytical models.

Relying on a recently published joint paper,* Victoria Alexander, Josh Bacigalupi and Òscar Castro discuss the qualitative or interpretive aspects of biological semiosis. The slime mold as a minimal cognitive organism is compared to the quantitative deep learning algorithms and their generations. The paper in question also proposes a concept of Turing systems as better artificial models for biological processes.

* Alexander, V.N., J. Augustus Bacigalupi, and Òscar Castro Garcia. 2021. “Living Systems Are Smarter Bots: Slime Mold Semiosis versus AI Symbol Manipulation.” Biosystems 206 (August): 104430. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2021.104430.

https://technosemiotics.net/event/intelligence-contest-generative-ai-vs-slime-mold-semiosis/

The Perils of Coding Humans: A Response to Transhumanism


15 week live online course
Mondays at 12PM EST starting Jan 9, 2023  (Details for new course for 2025 coming soon.)
$180
Instructor: Dr. V. N. Alexander
IPAK-EDU

The September 12, 2022 White House Executive Order* pledges R&D funds to the biotech industry to enable it “to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way [emphasis added] in which we write software and program computers.” We may be glad of this implied admission that the biotech industry currently cannot “predictably program biology” nor effectively “write circuitry for cells,” as demonstrated by the failure of the COVlD-19 synthetic mRNA injections. But we may also be concerned that technocrats—who believe that such advances will be possible once they “unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence”—will continue to use us as lab monkeys as they pursue impossible goals.

Some see the issue as a battle between the ideologies of pure mechanism and spiritualism. As long as we see the problem this way, it might remain irreconcilable. In this course, we will use lessons learned from science—complex systems science, the philosophy of creativity, and Continue reading

Is counting things always more “objective”?

Social science researchers employ so-called qualitative methods, such as case studies, interviews, documentary evidence, participant observation, and the quasi-quantitative method of survey research. Physical science researchers employ quantitative methods; they take measurements, collect and count data points, and formulate equations that model how systems change. The difference in methods is said to make the social sciences more subjective compared to the hard sciences. Interdisciplinary studies departments worldwide now offer courses combining quantitative and qualitative methods as a compromise intended to resist the privileging of one method over the other. In this talk, I will argue that we’ve been coming up with answers to the wrong question. Continue reading

Free Range Humans

In my latest paper, “Free-Range Humans: Permaculture Farming as a Biosemiosic Model for Political Organization,” I apply the lessons of my field to governance and economics.  The title is a mouthful, I know, but it’s actually a pretty accessible read. I offer this as an alternative to the Great Reset, which proposes to centralize all assets under the control of a Corporate State and, essentially, make us into livestock. 

Abstract: Modern agricultural approaches attempt to substitute biological self-reinforcing networks, which naturally sustain healthy food economies, with technology that seeks to control nature — not work with it. Artificial solutions (caging, pesticides, genetic engineering) tend to address symptoms of problems that the artificial approach has itself created. The great error of modern agriculture is the assumption that Nature is not intelligent. In fact, we can learn much from natural smart technologies that far out-perform recently invented artificial “smart” technologies. These lessons can also be applied to other political and economic systems, allowing self-organization to foster creativity and intelligence in the populace at large.

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