I think a more apt Borges story is 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'— where a clandestine guild creates artifacts from a fictional world with the intent to deceive. The artifacts and the world they allude to carry such appeal to the masses, that they essentially trump the rest of society as a source of truth and annihilate all culture that came before.
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" as I understand it is more ambiguous about exactly why Tlön is becoming real in the narrator's world. Although there is a description in the afterword of such a guild having fabricated Tlön and some artifacts from there, the story up to that point seemed to take Tlön's metaphysics (in which the idea of a reality outside of our perceptions is considered absurd and impossible) pretty seriously, and the end of the story presents the situation as though the narrator's world is actually starting to work according to these principles. That could conceivably be for merely social-perception reasons, although according to Tlön's philosophy there couldn't be any such thing as "merely social-perception reasons" because social perception obviously wholly creates the real and only reality.
One could imagine that the guild called up something it then couldn't put down, but necessarily because people will or prefer it so, but somehow because the world, at least in the story, fundamentally could work this way.
The Wikipedia article discusses how confusing it is to understand the exact position of the story with respect to narrative truth, when the entire story is playing with the idea of what is real and what makes it real, as well as explicitly talking about the idea of fiction coming to life:
“The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order — dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism — was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?”
To me, this suggests rather clearly something similar to the OP’s interpretation. His drawing on of this story as allegory for our future occurs to me also as apt, and what I imagine as what Borges would have envisioned.
I also don’t quite follow your assertion that “social perception obviously wholly creates the real and only reality”, as social perception clearly varies by each persons’ distinct society - and anyhow even if considered on the level of the entire society, such a vast, sprawling perception could hardly be considered a singular “only” reality.
I had always thought that the parts where reality was working according to Tlon rules was evidence that the author was being co-opted. Occasionally this happens in real life when political powers get involved in picking and choosing the outcomes of intellectual disputes - everyone's answers come out to corroborate a fiction, and the real guiding hand is never referred to.
The most widely known example is Lysenkoism. No supporter of that theory ever said they were fabricating data to please the apparatus. An example closer to the one in the story was academic support of Nazi "anthropology."
> a clandestine guild creates artifacts from a fictional world with the intent to deceive
In coolly-detached economics terms, we could call it a large-scale business in assymetric information.[1]
But the abuse of assymetric information can lead to market collapse. And to judge from the state of modern society, the information collapse has returned people into Plato's allegorical cave of ignorance and fear. [2]
The intellectual catastrophe is the same, but the difference in the modern world is a) the enormity of what we have lost, and b) that people's caves are more comfortable and they watch the shadows dance on a wall of high-resolution pixels.
First time I read TUOT, I was thoroughly confused. Both the article and this mention, has inspired me to pick up Borges again for the following few weeks of pre/post christmas reading!
To add to the recommended readings, I shall also mention "On Exactitude in Science"; I use this as an example of project plans where PMS try to be too detailed, and hence become useless.
>As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-generation texts – complete with made-up information called “hallucinations,” as well as outright errors, such as suggestions to put glue on your pizza – will further pollute the web.
I've come to suspect that the belief that AI's are hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality by these things.
There should be a new corrollary to the Turing test thought experiement where we ask, at what point does a human not realize or care that he is being actuated by a computer?[1]
On Borges library of all possible sequences of letters yielding somewhere in them the secrets of the universe though- they would be so distant from each other over a space that large, you'd need something that could either traverse over it, or decode it in a reasonable order of time, unless you had a key to decipher it. one made of transformers apparently.
the belief that AI's are * hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality by these things
i am confused by this sentence. are AIs not hallucinating? is that a fictional claim? am i misunderstanding or is there a "not" missing at the *?
> at what point does a human not realize or care that he is being actuated by a computer?
I don't know about caring, but I think that the point of the Turing test is to determine at which point a human can't tell whether it's another human. Also, I've read that it's not a particularly good test, because even pre-LLM you could craft an irritating, misspelling, troll of a chat bot and people would think it was a real teenage edgelord.
I think the chinese room thought experiment is another stronger exploration of whether or not computers are conscious (and, I believe, is no longer sufficient). I think people into AI should at least be familiar with its implications (or lack thereof) about human cognition.
It is clear to me that humans “hallucinate” all the time, and I don’t see why this should disqualify AI. One prominent human hallucinated that a hurricane was going to go in a particular direction and kindly updated a map, provided by scientists, with a sharpie.
The Library of Babel books weren't an infinite amount, they could fill up to 400 pages or so if I remember correctly. Still, it would have been a pretty big amount of books, far more than the amount of atoms of this universe.
If we want a really infinite library, a lot of named irrational numbers could work as that, and be as efficient for searching for something meaningful inside.
Arguably, it doesn't really make a difference, because every possible 800-page sequence exists as a pair of 400-page books from the original Library, and so on and so forth. The 800-page, 1200-page, 1600-page and every greater length Library is as well-defined, complete, and vacuous as the original 400-page version.
William Gibson pays a very nice tribute to Borges in an essay for $MAGAZINE that is in his "Distrust That Particular Flavor", which I wholly endorse, as I do every single last thing I've read or listened to of his or involving him.
Portraying the now in the guise of "the Future" is the art of it.
Strange that this appears to be nearly lost to history -- but this is rhymes with kibo's (James Parry) declaration of happynet[1].
For a long time I thought that the internet would be like the library described in "The Abortion: An Historical Romance" by Richard Brautigan[2], where anyone can put anything they've written into the library.
Somewhat tragic, I guess, that the world's been predicted by kibo not brautigan. So it goes[3].
Readit News
One could imagine that the guild called up something it then couldn't put down, but necessarily because people will or prefer it so, but somehow because the world, at least in the story, fundamentally could work this way.
The Wikipedia article discusses how confusing it is to understand the exact position of the story with respect to narrative truth, when the entire story is playing with the idea of what is real and what makes it real, as well as explicitly talking about the idea of fiction coming to life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...
To me, this suggests rather clearly something similar to the OP’s interpretation. His drawing on of this story as allegory for our future occurs to me also as apt, and what I imagine as what Borges would have envisioned.
I also don’t quite follow your assertion that “social perception obviously wholly creates the real and only reality”, as social perception clearly varies by each persons’ distinct society - and anyhow even if considered on the level of the entire society, such a vast, sprawling perception could hardly be considered a singular “only” reality.
The most widely known example is Lysenkoism. No supporter of that theory ever said they were fabricating data to please the apparatus. An example closer to the one in the story was academic support of Nazi "anthropology."
In coolly-detached economics terms, we could call it a large-scale business in assymetric information.[1]
But the abuse of assymetric information can lead to market collapse. And to judge from the state of modern society, the information collapse has returned people into Plato's allegorical cave of ignorance and fear. [2]
The intellectual catastrophe is the same, but the difference in the modern world is a) the enormity of what we have lost, and b) that people's caves are more comfortable and they watch the shadows dance on a wall of high-resolution pixels.
[1] _ https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asymmetricinformation.a...
[2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
To add to the recommended readings, I shall also mention "On Exactitude in Science"; I use this as an example of project plans where PMS try to be too detailed, and hence become useless.
[0]: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
I've come to suspect that the belief that AI's are hallucinating -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality by these things.
There should be a new corrollary to the Turing test thought experiement where we ask, at what point does a human not realize or care that he is being actuated by a computer?[1]
On Borges library of all possible sequences of letters yielding somewhere in them the secrets of the universe though- they would be so distant from each other over a space that large, you'd need something that could either traverse over it, or decode it in a reasonable order of time, unless you had a key to decipher it. one made of transformers apparently.
[1] 42.
i am confused by this sentence. are AIs not hallucinating? is that a fictional claim? am i misunderstanding or is there a "not" missing at the *?
If I may apply a regex:
s/polite/lucrative/g
I don't know about caring, but I think that the point of the Turing test is to determine at which point a human can't tell whether it's another human. Also, I've read that it's not a particularly good test, because even pre-LLM you could craft an irritating, misspelling, troll of a chat bot and people would think it was a real teenage edgelord.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Google's AI result, when I ask for the spot price of silver, returns the amount in British pounds, but with an American dollar sign in front of it.
That's not a lie, it's just an absolute misinterpretation.
If we want a really infinite library, a lot of named irrational numbers could work as that, and be as efficient for searching for something meaningful inside.
The most trivial example, you cant make an 800 page concatenation of two identical books because the 400 page library doesn't contain duplicates.
William Gibson pays a very nice tribute to Borges in an essay for $MAGAZINE that is in his "Distrust That Particular Flavor", which I wholly endorse, as I do every single last thing I've read or listened to of his or involving him.
Portraying the now in the guise of "the Future" is the art of it.
Deleted Comment
For a long time I thought that the internet would be like the library described in "The Abortion: An Historical Romance" by Richard Brautigan[2], where anyone can put anything they've written into the library.
Somewhat tragic, I guess, that the world's been predicted by kibo not brautigan. So it goes[3].
[1]http://www.kibo.com/kibopost/happynet_98.html [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abortion:_An_Historical_Ro... [3]yes, I know that's Vonnegut.