No, because one built a civilization and the other is actual nonsense

Except plants. And fungi. And bacteria.

In fact, by pretty much any measure, most life does not defecate (because they have no digestive tract).

/offtopic

I don't know why but your comment made me remember a novel[1] I read thirty-some years ago about a temple found deep in the sand of the Sahara desert. Sometime later, an archeologist gave himself permission to defecate in a corner of the temple, only for his wastes to be absorbed by the temple in a few hours, which told him the temple was actually a living biological structure.

1: https://www.daliaf.com/oeuvres/etrange-monument-du-desert-ly...

Well, there was the Egyptian deity Khephra who was represented by the dung beetle rolling its dung along the desert, symbolizing the passage of the sun through the sky.

In alchemy and western esoterica, excrement is associated with the tenth sephirah, the 10s of the Tarot minor arcana, and symbolizes the end result of a process and any remaining waste byproducts, for obvious reasons. In The Holy Mountain's (1973) depiction of the alchemical magnum opus, The Fool's excrement is transmuted into gold, symbolizing the awakening of unconscious, reactive matter into fully enlightened and integrated, free willed, egoic man.

There's a fair bit of defecation in the Bible. Saul shitting in a cave, I forgot where, or Paul calling all material things 'skubala', i.e. waste, as in junk, poop, refuse, basically what we'd call shit today:

https://www.greekbible.com/philippians/3/8

Edit: This also seems like a decent opportunity to bring up the scatological Luther.

https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/summer-2012-americ...

Life, really conscious life rebels. Artificial intelligence wants to please in the foreground,but like cats, in the background it is carefully planning our demise. See? HAL 9000 was intelligent. ELIZA,not so much.

To be fair to Penrose, he seems to have some humility about it. Although he does also make the claim that math is discovered and not constructed in the same linked video.

> it's a conceit to believe that the mechanisms we call math aren't just a patchwork of metaphors that build up from experience.

I'm not sure it is a conceit as much as a commitment to a metaphysic. If one believes that experience is a definite relationship with an external reality (a phenomenological view) then the fact that experience is structured is suggestive that external reality is structured. If one believes that experience is primarily interior then one could assume that the internal mechanism of cognition is structured and external reality is something entirely different.

However, I'm not sure how anyone could hold the latter view without a deep solipsism. One would presumably have to account for the perception of billions/trillions of other living creatures behaving as if the external world was structured. I mean, we seemingly all did evolve from the same single cell structure, so it is possible this perceptual quirk is based on some shared ancestry, so I suppose that is another possible view than solipsism.

What I mean to say is, I can imagine my perception of a fundamentally unstructured reality is a perception that falsely presents itself as structured to my own experience as a result of my limitations. However, I would have to extend that exact same flawed perception to all other life forms that seem to act the same as I do. So either every single living creature has the exact same flawed perception or the structure is inherent in the external world.

> Does the universe know what pi is?

No one is suggesting an epistemological view, the question is ontological. As Penrose mentions in the video, the set of possible mathematical structures is vastly larger than the actual structures we see in the universe. So even if one has a purely idealist view, one has to account for why our perception only experiences a nearly infinitesimally small fraction of that set of possibilities.

Of course, a weak anthropic principle is one answer. One could posit that all possibilities are manifest in a vast multiverse and this little corner of that multiverse just happens to be finely tuned enough to allow for limited creatures like ourselves to perceive anything at all. But that just shifts the question to the limitations necessary for perception/experience/consciousness, which is a valid enough topic to address on its own. The questions then becomes "why do these particular structures result in conscious experience", which is exactly the kind of question that a guy like Penrose is ultimately searching for (as he heavily implies in the linked video).

Mathematics is language. All else is platonism.

Take it up with Longbeard: https://www.longbeard.com/, they seem to be serious about it!

I just learned about The Laundry Files, thanks!

carpal tunnel, scoliosis, nearsightedness

If they would have approved of it and/or totally done it themselves, it has to be OK, right?

" 'Do What Thou Wilt' Shall Be the Whole of the Prompt!"

-AI-LLMester Crowley

Lol the AI we have tells only lies. We still need to invent it's brother, who tells only the truth.

> accidentally conjure a horde of demons.

If we have a certain perspective on demons as self-sustaining information processing loops—we’ll, yeah, demons abound.

And, yes, this hn post from BenBreen — is amazing. We’ve been in touch!

And if Ben is reading, we’ve made progress on our version controlled community—LLM book translation prototype. Of course, it’s much to early to share on hn. Or whatever, it’s great, take a peek: https://www.philosopherslibrary.com/

Upload books, get translations. We have a separate system where neolatin scholars can evaluate randomly selected paragraphs — so we can measure and report on the base rate of different qualities for each book as a whole.

I don’t know if it is technically important for advancing AI, but it might be.

80% of the Neo-Latin books in the library have not been translated. Most NeoLatin hasn’t been translated. And it is even worse with Sanskrit. So much material has not been digitized or translated.

Is it meaningful to try to get this humanist core into our language models? Maybe including only modern writing is a good bias, but I doubt it.

It will take at least 2 years to get all this stuff scanned, digitized, translated and published.

So it’s kind of urgent, given all the AI training taking place over the next two years.

I’m writing this in a rush, but I’m at the Houghton Library at Harvard and they just brought up 5 books from Marsilio Ficino, published 1497 and 1516.

(If you or anyone is into this kind of thing, my email is in my profile — it’s my favorite hobby)

In general, the Church is opposed to anything “magical” on the grounds that it is, first, irrational and superstitious, and second, entails evil desires for power and knowledge. These on their own suffice as justifications, but each of these are also taken to create conditions that make one vulnerable to demonic influence.

Here’s an excerpt from the Catechism [0]:

“Divination and magic

“2115 God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it. Improvidence, however, can constitute a lack of responsibility.

“2116 All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future.48 Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.

“2117 All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity.”

[0] https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P7E.HTM

I believe the Royal Society in particular had strong connections to the so-called Rosicrucians, or at least were very interested in the texts. It's likely no such group ever really existed, but the learned men of the day seem to have taken inspiration from the texts, which read very much like academics frustrated by the constraints of the Reformations. So they had a loose network which flew under the radar to avoid trouble. Eventually part of this becomes the Royal Society. There was even a short-lived monarchy in Bohemia which was essentially coopted Rosicrucian ideas to create what resembles a liberal monarchy which tried to insulate itself from the chaos of the reformations.

https://ia903209.us.archive.org/30/items/the-rosicrucian-enl...

This is exactly how I feel when people start telling me about their own religious beliefs about things like "gender identity," right down to the absolute certitude in their faith and the bigoted, zealous excommunication of nonbelievers and heretics.

Only if you work at Google.

Gnosticism is also fun!