Machinations
Thought pieces on Artificial Intelligence, Technology, the Singularity and Civilization.
Index 14
- 014 The Letters Came First: Are LLMs Inherently Kabbalistic? A meme on X says the golem makers finally shipped. The joke is better than it looks: an LLM builds a world out of letters, and nobody can prove which came first, the word or the world.
- 013 Return to Your Dust: The Golem and the First Turing Test Sixteen centuries before Turing, a rabbi tested a made man by talking to it. A later rabbi asked whether such a being could count in a prayer quorum. Both answers still matter.
- 012 Babel as a Story About Technology The Tower of Babel is usually read as a story about pride. The rabbis read it as a story about one language, one plan, a new material, and a society that wept for its bricks and not for its people. And I can't help but wonder, are we becoming guilty of the same sin?
- 011 Kosher Agents: Shabbat in an Age of Machines That Never Stop Our machines work around the clock and our agents never sleep, but my orthodox friends wonder if they can leave their agents working during the day the Torah says even God was refreshed by resting.
- 010 Formal Systems, Emergence, and the Indifferent Axiom God A thought experiment: a universe that runs as one formal system, where the Creator is an indifferent set of axioms and consciousness is a strange loop.
- 009 The Interrelation of Consciousness, Free Will, and Identity Consciousness, free will and the self across the sources: from Hofstadter’s emergent patterns to spiritual disidentification.
- 008 The Rigor of Angels: Consciousness, Computation, and the Architecture of Reality A new Copernican moment: what AI asks about intelligence, computation and the limits of what we can know about reality.
- 007 The Emergence and Necessity of the Self Why a mind that cannot see its own micro-mechanics must invent a causal “I”, and why that self then becomes impossible to move.
- 006 Algorithm as Strange Loop and Identity Intrusion The social media algorithm as an unconscious strange loop that acts as a false prime mover, and how far identity intrusion could go.
- 005 An Analysis of Transcendence: Consciousness, Technology, and the Evolution of Human Experience Myth, religion, science and technology as one long drive to move beyond human limits, and where that drive may lead next.
- 004 Possession, Madness, and Extinction in the Simulation Possession, madness and the end of the creators, read through AI world models, self-reference and the simulation hypothesis.
- 003 Simulation Consciousness: One Entity or Many? If we live in a simulation, is there one conscious mind or many? The answer depends on whether computation alone can produce consciousness.
- 002 Strange Loops and Nested AI Simulations AI agents that live inside AI-generated worlds, and what they suggest about strange loops and simulations inside simulations.
- 001 The Algorithm's Victory and the Human Strange Loop Has the algorithm won? On social media as an autonomous system, digital stagnation, and whether human consciousness is being replaced or only reflected.