le siècle sera

I. The world’s shortest critique of Pavlovian reason: if the pointer address of dopamine response can slide backward from stimulus (beef) to cue (bell), then it makes sense to start looking at every particular experience as cue to a parallel, abstract, universal real counterpart. Emancipation is seeing the cues for themselves, their this-ness, removed from the great chains of salivation. II. By now, augmented LLMs (verbal reasoning, post-training witchcraft, agentic loops) have rightfully inherited the mantle of “artificial intelligence”. Large Language Models in their own right were originally parlor tricks; they produced strings of text on which we, the users, hallucinated meaning. The real bitter lesson that ensued was that the titanic scale of corpora offered a cheat out of Hubert Dreyfus’s Heideggerian critique of AI — effectively, LLMs gained a world, albeit one that’s only truly alive during post-training. What is alive to the user is, of course, the world of tools to be…