#unalterable — Public Fediverse posts

Rob Horning writes:

It seems to me that #language #models, maybe by definition, are automated versions of #structuralism, in that they construct a synchronic, weighted matrix of language’s possibilities that is forcibly detached from history — a model of la langue that can generate an infinite number of paroles. And some structuralists, like some “#AI” advocates today, were eager to marginalize human #consciousness as a unique constitutive force — thus you find Claude Lévi-Strauss declaring in La Pensée sauvage that “the final goal of the human sciences is not to constitute man but to dissolve him.”

Structuralism seems to want to reveal this “hidden art in the depths of the human soul” and “divine from nature” how and why certain things and concepts are associated.
Lévi-Strauss claims that:

👉 the universe signified long before people began to know what it signified; no doubt that goes without saying. But, from the foregoing analysis, it also emerges that from the beginning, the universe signified the totality of what humankind can expect to know about it. What people call the progress of the human mind and, in any case, the progress of scientific knowledge, could only have been and can only ever be constituted out of processes of correcting and recutting of patterns, regrouping, defining relationships of belonging and discovering new resources, inside a totality which is closed and complementary to itself. 👈

Viewing the universe as a closed totality suggests that #time itself is meaningless, an unfolding of a pre-existing and #unalterable pattern that humans try to fathom but can’t change.

It seems as though this vision animates the claims and the fears of the companies working to impose language models on us as the apotheosis of general intelligence.

https://open.substack.com/pub/robhorning/p/neo-structuralism?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web