01 / September 8

A grin without a cat

“Information does not exist, it is a useless notion in biology… It is a useful notion for design for understanding systems that are very well specified, you may describe relations in these terms but living systems do not operate in those terms.”
— Humberto Maturana

Topics

A cybernetic system; the para-real and the propaganda model; TESCREAL, Libidinal Materialism, and AGI; Part-Artilects, Cosmism to AGI; Attention is all you need — self-attention and transformers; the Attention Economy; O.G. Selfridge, Paradise Lost, and Pandaemonium Architecture; von Neumann, cellular automata, and self-replicating machines; Conway’s Game of Life; cybernetics and Marcel Duchamp’s The Creative Act

Readings

Claudia Jacques

Human-Computer Interaction Design and the Cybersemiotic Experience

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Scott Benzel

Notes on À bruit secret: on Duchamp, Cybernetics, and Organized Crime

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Additional Reading

O.G. Selfridge, Pandemonium: A Paradigm For LearningIllia Polosukhin, et al., Attention is all you needTimnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence

Lab

Generative/toy AI: Golly, Koan to Wotja, et al; latent diffusion models and transformers