The Unblocked Carver

Issue #4: The Tao of AI: Finding Meaning in a Machine World

by Jesse James Boyes

Most jobs treat you like a machine because that's all they need: a cost-effective automaton.

That's why I've spent the last year obsessing over the likely emergence of AGI. That's Artificial General Intelligence, as distinct from the AI we're all familiar with by now.

The world has been mesmerized by these cybernetic chatbots built on networks of linguistic statistics. Real artificial intelligence, though, would truly have executive function, and reevaluate its own deepest goals on the fly. That threatens to automate even highly complex problem-solving jobs.

It's been a fast come-up. ChatGPT was impressive when it launched in late 2022. Large Language Models, though, are like linguistic taxidermists. They're trained on massive amounts of human language in the form of text. Impressive, but no more alive than a flipbook animation.

Now, though, we may be on the brink of the real sum and substance of this matter.

It's mainstream news now, so I don't need to get into it, but the developments in AI aren't stopping.

People are worried about its consequences, and for valid reasons. Separating truth from fiction on social media is becoming increasingly unmanageable. Heaps of jobs that now require humans soon won't.

You could go down a deep rabbit hole when it comes to the potential downside of this technology, which is really a centuries old conversation.

The roles that human beings fill in creating and exchanging value will not stay the same. They never have, but it's fair to say that change is accelerating.

It's likely to be a hell of a trip, but this letter isn't about doomsday.

We have choices to make, and human cognition has unprecedented ability to cultivate creative agency and reimagine our fate in real time.

I'll warn you now. This letter will go deep without an oxygen tank. By the end, you may have no conclusions about AGI or humanity's fate. What I hope to do is make a case for optimism about the relevance of human creativity.

The next issues of this newsletter will be lighter reads, but I hope this one is still fun for those who don't choose to skip it.

The Tao and Number Systems

This is a newsletter about living creatively, and finding deep peace, meaning, and fulfillment in life. So what's all this about math and AI? The first answer is obvious. It's the highly relevant question: If robotics can develop human-like levels of embodied intelligence and creativity, or develop into super-intelligences, then what is the role of the human being in the future?

As for the second answer, I need you to trust me and come along for the ride. I'll warn you again, I'm aiming to eff the ineffable, weaving together some wide-ranging ideas. Please keep your hands, arms, feet, and legs inside the… oh, nevermind. You'll be alright, I promise.

For starters, this newsletter was originally titled Taoist Threads. (*The name change to The Unblocked Carver occurred just after this issue was published.) Taoism is typically represented by the taijitu symbol depicting the interplay of yin and yang. We see the interplay of opposites pervading much of reality. Dark and light, night and day, cold and hot, chaos and order. Nature, life, thrives in a peculiar balance of opposites. The Tao, or the Way, represents the harmonious union of polarities.

In the first three issues of Taoist Threads, I mentioned my encounters with Zen, books about consciousness and AI, Taoism, and even the Yi Jing. That's the Chinese Book of Changes, one of the world's oldest written texts. It's been used for millennia in China as a divinatory and philosophical system, predating Taoism and the arrival of Zen or Chan Buddism in China.

Tortoise Shells to Transistors:

The basic structure of the Yi Jing (or "I Ching"), a 3,000 year old Chinese divination system that relies on 64 hexagrams composed of six lines stacked vertically. Each line can be broken or unbroken. This binary set of possibilities arrayed in columns of 6 results in 64 possibilities with such names as Thunder Below Water, or Heaven Over Fire.

Long ago, turtle plastrons or ox scapulae were heated until they cracked, and their cracks were interpreted as a dialogue with a cosmic order. Confucius supposedly said if he had an extra fifty years to live, he'd spend them studying the Yi Jing.

Later iterations of the Jing used yarrow sticks and eventually the six-line hexagram system was codified. It can be said that the purpose of this system is about aligning one's decisions with the Tao.

Now for the strange bridge to modern tech.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in the 17th century, made several contributions to math and science.

The main contribution of relevance here is his creation of the logical basis for binary code.

Interestingly, this was inspired partly by the Yi Jing. He considered how the broken and unbroken lines of the Yi Jing hexagrams could be looked at as 1s and 0s, or "on" and "off", and created a binary number system that allows complex logical operations to be written out in strings of 1s and 0s. Leibniz's Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire (Explanation of Binary Arithmetic) laid the groundwork for every computer today.

We aren't finished with Leibniz, but let us go on a brief excursion elsewhere.

My father worked in IT (Information technology) all my life, and had me thinking about the evolution of technology from a young age. When I was a kid, he gave me some explanation of the fact that strings of 1s and 0s form the structure of every computer operation.

A "byte" is a string of 8 ones and zeros. We can think of zero as yin, and one as yang. Off, and on. At base, a computer doesn't even know what the number 1 is, much less the letter A. It runs on transistors that can read as off or on. Current or no current. With enough complexity in those strings of ones and zeros, you end up with arrays of pixels that compose letters, words, sentences, such that natural language can be stored, processed, and displayed.

Fundamentally, though, the computer is only ever processing processing machine language—binary code.

The Illusion of Intelligence

When, at twelve or thirteen years old, I asked my dad about how animation works, he downloaded Macromedia Flash (before it was Adobe) and set me free to find out for myself. I made lots of ridiculous stick figure animations.

Film and animation present us with the illusion that what is depicted on the screen is moving. The reality, as you know, is that roughly 24 to 30 still-frames are typically displayed each second, although fewer frames per second can be sufficient to create the illusion of motion.

When I was ten, my father and I started putting on magic shows. This is mostly a story for another time (I promise), but until I was fifteen years old we were known as "The Magic Boyes," a play on our surname. We put on hundreds of shows, and won a few trophies.

I learned a lot about human perception in those years, seeding my later interests in psychology, language, and consciousness.

As I began writing this newsletter several weeks ago, I was early on in my adventure in the Mojave Desert, avoiding the Canadian wintertime. My dad flew down to spend a week with me enjoying the sunshine and desert landscapes. One day after a hike in Red Rock Canyon, we went into the Pinball Hall of Fame, in Las Vegas. Now remember, his career was in IT.

Before computers were yet a popular consumer product, he was also a student who excelled in mathematics.

Pinball was a popular arcade game when he was a kid, so this excursion had some nostalgia in it for him.

In the 1970s, pinball machines shifted to solid-state tech that could keep track of detailed game stats, scores, and sequences. I asked my dad: could the logic of the computers these machines run on theoretically be scaled up to be calculated instead by some kind of vacuum chambers and gravity based mechanical operations?

The way I asked the question is surely a bit naive, but the answer is that, in essence, this is indeed possible. That's essentially how computers worked early on, he said, although they took up a lot of space.

To Calculate

So. What's a computer, anyways? The word computer existed before what most of us know as computers existed.

The word computer comes from the Latin computare, meaning "to calculate." The word was applied to humans who were doing math calculations. In the late 19th and early 20th century they were mostly women. At that point, such tools as the slide rule were used to perform labor intensive mathematical calculations. The slide rule's logarithmic scales allowed users to quickly multiply and divide numbers by aligning the scales and reading the result.

Long before that was the abacus, a tool which was used in Mesopotamia at least 3,000 years ago, and could be used to run operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

These devices were mechanical, not electronic.

However, the question "can machines think?" has been posed surprisingly early in the history of computers.

René Decartes, (you know: "I think therefore I am"), was already arguing in the 17th century that machines could never truly think. (Therefore they ain't?!)

Earlier I referenced Leibniz, originator of the binary numbering system that computers operate on. Leibniz, despite his fascination with machines achieving higher levels of calculation more efficiently, also believed that they could never possess actual consciousness.

Let's consider something that he said, not forgetting that this was in 17th century Germany, when peasants were largely illiterate individuals who lacked access to formal education.

"It is beneath the dignity of excellent men to waste their time in calculation when any peasant could do the work just as accurately with the aid of a machine." — Gottfried Leibniz

Leibniz himself was working on a machine that could perform all of the functions of arithmetic. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

He called it the stepped reckoner. It was capable of answering complex long-division problems, or calculating square roots exponentially faster than using a slide rule.

It wasn't an automated machine, as it required an attentive operator, and it was vulnerable to mechanical problems, but it was a conceptually sound checkpoint in the road to modern computers.

Alan Turing, of course, is an important figure in this brief outline.

In his seminal paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," he proposed the Turing Test, first called the Imitation Game. If a machine could utilize natural language such that it convincingly imitates intelligent human-level conversational ability, it passes the test.

Turing even argued that the implications of Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem did not mean that machines couldn't pass the test.

Gödel's Theorem demonstrates that any formal system that allows for the logic of arithmetic to be represented is inevitably incomplete. Incomplete means that there will still be mathematical truths that cannot be proved within the system. The realities that are verifiable by the system do not include all realities that are true within the system.

People have applied this to arguments that computers can't reach human-like intelligence. Yet, here we are. Large Language Models are passing the Turing Test.

However, imitating conversational ability still isn't verifiably identical to truly understanding.

Computers are like highly complex Rube Goldberg Machines, unfolding chain reactions with a lot of variables and potential outputs.

Yes, you may be able to extend the analogy to brains, but we haven't been able to prove if consciousness itself is produced as a result of the brain's processes. We analyze the brain's relationship to the contents of consciousness, such as thoughts and perceptions. Awareness of awareness is its own mystery.

American philosopher John Searle, in 1980, wrote a paper titled "Minds, Brains, and Programs" in which he introduced The Chinese Room Experiment.

In the experiment, Searle imagines a person inside a room who follows instructions to manipulate Chinese symbols without understanding their meaning. Someone outside the room could be convinced that that the person in the room knows the Chinese language.

Searle used this to argue against strong AI (the idea that a machine can possess genuine intelligence and consciousness).

Some people believe that with the emergence of quantum computing, machines could tap into the very source of consciousness.

I have no clue.

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." — Richard Feynman

We could have much longer discussions on this topic, but before moving on I'll briefly mention David Chalmers who coined "the hard problem of consciousness". The easy problems of consciousness, by contrast, have to do with things like thought processes and behaviours. The hard problem is that we can't seem to observe or explain the source of subjective experience itself.

Awareness of the present moment is a different thing from crunching numbers through spans of time, and displaying outputs. Your calculator will never look at the stars in the night sky and share your feeling of awe.

Human Relevance

Alright, you have come along for a wild circumbendibus.

("…an indirect or roundabout course especially in writing or speaking.")

Congratulations for making it this far.

It took me two months to get this far.

You see, the last issue of The Unblocked Carver was published when I was just a couple of weeks into this crazy adventure in the desert, getting away from Canadian winter. Now, I myself have been on quite a roundabout course.

For over ten weeks I've been living like a Dharma Bum, except I don't think Jack Kerouac carried, in addition to his rucksack, an extra bag with a Macbook Pro and several heavy books.

It was now a year ago that I started reading Gödel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid: A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carrol, by Douglas Hofstadter. (GEB for short.)

It's been the most challenging book I've ever chewed through. It's over 700 pages long and full of mentally taxing logical arguments. There were days that its strange puzzles flipped my mind inside-out, and I don't mean that entirely figuratively.

Every other chapter is a dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise, and sometimes other characters. Those chapters felt like sips of water on a long, scorching desert trek. I wished to meet others who would like to read it so that I'd have some conversation partners. I got discouraged, and left the book at home in British Columbia. When my dad was flying to Vegas for our visit, I asked him to pick up GEB from my place so I could finish reading it.

One evening, while living on a farm in a hidden oasis in Death Valley, dead-centre of the Mojave Desert, I saw that there was a live call happening in an online writing community I am a part of. I joined in on the call and went outside where the absence of city glow let me see endless stars lighting up the sky.

I do most of my writing using Kortex, a new digital toolkit being built by a team assembled by Dan Koe, whose work inspired me to begin writing The Unblocked Carver when I discovered his work last summer.

Dan and the Kortex dev team were on the call, and I was able to join in. They weren't very familiar with me yet, but as we got chatting it came up that Dan was reading about AGI and related topics, and had Gödel, Escher, Bach on his reading list. He'd already spent some time considering the metaphysical implications of Gödel's theorem.

A few weeks after that call, I was standing next to Dan Koe in person, atop a rocky viewpoint, overlooking Pheonix Arizona, discussing such implications.

What makes human's special?

Our self-reflective consciousness allows us to zoom out to ever wider conceptions of the world, to jump up and down layers of abstraction, and observe our own interpretations from endless perspectives.

We can feel the satisfaction of coming to deeper understandings, and overcoming adversity. We can entertain paradoxes, arrive at sudden epiphanies, and with a split second of eye-contact intuitively know that a friend noticed the same thing as you.

We don't live in binary code, a linear base 2 counting system. We are being itself, inhabiting bodies that are adapted to an infinitude of facts through direct contact with the infinite detail of their environments.

Being is an interplay and union of opposites. Yin emerges through yang, and yang through yin.

Thinking and Being

"Thinking is not the highest human faculty; it is only a stage in development. Just as we were able to rise above instinct and develop reason, we must one day pass beyond discursive thinking and enter into a higher mode of knowing." — Eknath Easwaran

What, then, does it mean for us that generative, conversational, and robotic AI can potentially perform the majority of tasks that we call jobs?

It means we must reevaluate. As we've always done, we must rearrange our values, jumping out of the system, continuously reinvestigating what's important to us.

Jobs were never about saving for retirement. Work is just valuable movement, and fundamentally you're a being who actually wants to produce value (even if you don't like your current actual job).

We humans strive to care for and connect with each other, express ourselves, overcome challenges, and experience awe and adventure together.

From the trash collectors to the Johann Sebastian Bachs, we work to create systems, consumables, art, and ways of being that, ultimately, aim to facilitate our well-being and enjoyment of life.

Automation and Human Relevance

People have worried about automation replacing jobs ever since the first machines. The nature of the jobs we do has changed significantly. Jobs that once existed don't anymore, but we also get a lot more done much more quickly (though maybe sometimes we should get less done….)

Now, with ever advancing AI:


The truth is though, my human friends, you will never actually be replaceable or obsolete.

I went on this adventure to escape the Canadian winter. What I ended up experiencing will never be able to be put into words. The map is not the territory, you see.

Living in Death Valley learning about date trees, following coyote footprints to awe-inspiring, unknown viewpoints, meeting beautifully strange new friends, showing my dad the Mojave canyons and some top-secret treasures of the Earth, seeing a Las Vegas magic show with him for the first time in 15 years and reminiscing on our days of performing together, buying a cheap bicycle to explore Arizona, and sleeping in my tiny tent in the moon-cast shadow of a saguaro cactus. These are all vague snapshots of something grander than any canyon; an unforgettable adventure of a lifetime, and the endless ways that we are able to create beautiful experiences for ourselves, with, and for each other.

If there's one thing I want you to take from this letter, it's this: Experiences that you think are out of reach are often right around the corner if you make the decision. That may seem off-topic from how this letter started, but the real topic here is human agency, our ability to step out of our mental machinery and decide in great detail what to make of our lives.

For example, it was exciting to meet Dan Koe. I was already near Arizona, and happened to be halfway finished a cedar wood relief carving of some saguaros in an Arizona landscape. As an artist I felt I had to bring the story of this carving full circle by actually going and seeing identical landscapes. It so happens that Mr. Koe lives where I went next. His creative work has made him millions of dollars and a million Youtube subscribers, so I could easily have assumed that he lives in some unreachable place on a golden cloud somewhere. Instead, it turned out, he's a humble guy who was enthused to meet in person and enjoy chatting.

Dan's letters helped me realize that there's no prescription for the good life. Writing a newsletter? It may or may not lead to the results it led to for someone else, but it can be part of a quest. An adventure doesn't begin with all questions answered, and there will always be new questions, and experiments to embark on. That's what makes it so interesting and valuable, and that's not going to change.

Each person I met on this journey has so much value within them that machines never will.

Soon I will return home. I know that some of you who I met on this adventure are reading this now, and I want you to know that I'm beyond grateful to have met you. We're in this adventure together.

Whose words are these, anyways?

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that language is fossil poetry.

"Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin." ―Ralph Waldo Emerson

On a farm I was staying at, I made a friend who had made some exquisite ceramic art with paintings that included the hexagrams of the Yi Jing. (Hey Steffen, thanks man!)

This sparked many proceeding conversations between us about topics I've mentioned here, like computer science and John Searle's Chinese Room Experiment.

One day, after we had talked a bit about language and perception, Steffen asked if I'd heard of David Abram, a sleight-of-hand magician who wrote The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, a book introduced with a chapter called "The Ecology of Magic".

Synchronously, I had just been writing notes about that very book, specifically the chapter titled "The Flesh of Language". The following paragraph from Abram, I believe, sums up what I sincerely hope this letter has shed some light on.

"Active, living speech is just such a gesture, a vocal gesticulation wherein the meaning is inseparable from the sound, the shape, and the rhythm of the words. Communicative meaning is always, in its depths, affective; it remains rooted in the sensual dimension of experience, born of the body's native capacity to resonate with other bodies and with the landscape as a whole. Linguistic meaning is not some ideal and bodiless essence that we arbitrarily assign to a physical sound or word and then toss out into the "external" world. Rather, meaning sprouts in the very depths of the sensory world, in the heat of meeting, encounter, participation." — David Abram

So, now what?

I don't know. That's the point.

We keep on experimenting, we keep on seeking light. We keep on participating.

Is my newsletter and Youtube going to evolve into having a large online audience? Is my web design course going to be the successful product that opens the next doors for me?

Will my woodworking always just be my art, or will the future economy highly value intricate human-handcarved coffee tables?

I'd like to make more money, but on my death bed it won't be the primary measure of value. What I'll never forget are the real relationships I've built, experiences shared, creations completed, lessons learned, and meaning made.

I'm not a computer scientist or a cognitive scientist, and I'm certainly no economist, but here's my hope:

That Mr. Leibniz' vision of the future is possible. That machines doing jobs that humans do means that humans can be treated (and act) less like machines.

Cultivating awareness and agency is the way to adapt when your current way of life becomes incompatible with the shifting territory. Let's do it.

You are not a machine.

"If you can't give me poetry, can't you give me 'poetical science'?" — Ada Lovelace

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