Retired AIDS/Oncology Clinical Nurse Specialist who’d become curious about the question of the Machine after all those years in clinical practice
Hopkins Stanley
Karma: 9
Follow-up Posting on Cyborg Psychologist
¡Mucho Gracias! Especially since I didn’t realize I’d cut/paste from the old, inactive test url as well. 🤭
Hi and thanks…apologies for my being naive, but what do you mean be an extraneous ‘i’? I just checked the the link and they seems to work on both my iPad and Mac desktop.
The app link is https://martinburckhardt.substack.com/p/psychologie-des-cyborgs
Cyborg Psychologist
I have to Say that this essay made me chuckle a bit. It made me think of the notion of a Social Suit I’ve learned to put on after 66 years that helps me be social comfortably and fit in…meaning I applaud you for pointing this out. I think we all have our own inherent strangeness that our Modern psychotope’s socioplasm en-structurates our behavior around that our individual selves emerge from. I notice it in how many of my younger friends find putting on make-up, wearing a suit, or, conversely, being incredibly strange makes fitting and being successful in the workplace reflected in the new psychotopic norm of Everyone is Queer.
Looking back on it, this wasn’t always the case, and I was fortunate having spent most of my working years in the edgy academic environment of a San Francisco General HIV/AIDS clinical where being weird was the norm. What I think I finally learned from a cultural theorist friend, who’s spent his career reflecting on the Philosophy and Psychology of the Machine, is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with this normative psychotopic structure that’s built into the edifice of Modernity’s rational edifice as long as you recognize it as the stage-prop it is. The problem is remembering it’s an artificial mean of central tendency as a ratio of a central perspective that we all deviate from in our humanness. Today when I look at the left and right in terms of Wokenstanism or Christian Nationalism, I see this Social suit as a way of conforming towards a totalitarian unity.
Meaning I hope the younger generations continue embracing individual differences as what makes up the diverse social background we all emerge from as individuals…
Ex nihilo
Your discourse on “equanimity” reminds me of notions about awareness, attentiveness, and being engaged in ways that don‘t necessarily bind you to a specific moment in all of it’s associated latency. Rather your lens is that of awareness coming from a meditative calming space that is distancing from the phenomena, allowing for Reflexion without attachment and getting lost in all those mirrored fragments of a particular moments’ latencies…at least that’s what these eyes see in your Saying….
Your thought has resonances with my own way of being that, hopefully, allows me to view phenomena of my Immanent life and the Transcendental life around me without becoming overwhelmed bye it or excessively colouring it (of course it’s important to point phenomenologically that speaking we can never not see through our own lens despite any claims of neutrality or transparency). It’s the funny and sacred place to walk thru as we eternally cross the Abysmal Void between myself and my neighbors…at least IMHO.
Thank-you for taking the time to share - ❄️
Apologies if I caused you any consternation. I saw the string and thought it’d be fun to take a stab at it. I only had a vague awareness of the actual song, took a quick listen and played out my lyrics in my head based on some readings I’ve been doing on the psychotop & AI. Unfortunately I didn’t realize there’s rigid structure to Hip-hop stuff. My background is more along the lines of psychedelia and I tend to see lyric structures more in line with a Grace Slick style where vocal lyrics can be playfully varied around the song structure. best—hopkins
I‘m going to make myself better
When I merge with my AI
I’m going evolve myself higher
When I merge with my AI
I’m going to join the psychotope
When I merge with my AI
Oh yes, it’s my AI
Can’t you see it’s my AI
Oh yes, it’s me & my AI
Ugh! I’m just realizing you haven’t even been told if Gluten-intolerance is the underlying etiology which is understandable frustrating...apologies. I looked closer at some other NCBI articles and we really don’t have a good understanding of gluten intolerance other than it appears related to some underlying autoimmune disorder. That leaves you 1) experimenting with eliminating gluten, which it sounds like you‘re already working on, to see if there’s any correlation with gluten intake at all; and 2) getting tested for the various biomarkers folks have suggested below.
There is a recent discussion article I read in the NEJM on “An Allergic Basis for Abdominal Pain” discussing some recent research on Allergies and IBS you may or may not find useful. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcibr2104146?rss=searchAndBrowse Let me know you want to read it but can’t access it and I’ll be happy to email you a copy of my pdf.
Another thought is if your specialists have mentioned small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO)? I’ve had vague IBS issues that had worsened over the past year that we’d been working on without any resolution. A physician friend suggested I try a nutritional supplement called Atrantil which my GI doc said was worth trying since nothing else was working. Short story is it helped which led to trying a course of xifaxin/neomycin for SIBO that I’ve had good results with. Problematic is that diagnosing SIBO isn’t really good and is trial/error of trying various antibiotics.
Please excuse typos & autocorrect strangeness
This is probably one of those dumb, obvious questions but I’ll ask anyway. Have you consulted with a Gastroenterologist yet? If not, you might want to consider consulting w/one to help interpreting the biochemistry stuff for a more precise “scientific/medical” simulacrum of the underlying pathophysiology from from the clinical standpoint. Otherwise I think you’re best bet is probably working with your Dietitian and the various Gluten Intolerance groups online for more practical advice on dealing with it in the day-to-day world. Unfortunately, from my own clinical experience, there’s a lot of the “art of medicine” involved in phenomenologically interpreting/applying medical research findings clinically.
If you haven’t looked at Wikipedia yet, their entry covers the etiological basics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten-related_disorders
I also saw this article that might give you some more in-depth understandings of its underlying etiology: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6182669/
Hope those help…❄️
Haha! The one book I always say I’m going to read. Much thanks!
I listened to a Zoom talk by Martin Burckhardt titled “Alien Logic: The Universal Machine and the Psyche of the Social Apparatus” last week. There were some acoustic issues understanding him and I think his main point was/is that we’re machines/computers ourselves. I’m still sorting out what he was saying and was struck by his comment on wondering why we, as a species, are so worried about controlling/mastering our creations as in the AI concerns about AI becoming smarter than us.
Just finished watching a Martin Burckhardt Webinar that, I think, essentially says we are the machine where the computer is our social unconsciousness if I’m understanding him correctly? So this is timely as I learn more about the AI skepticism arguments, much thanks for pointing it out….
I’m just reading your work for the first time and appreciating your synthesis on phenomenology and all the weird in/outs of intuition & consciousness as part of my own readings. The notions of inspiration/expiration remind much of Levinsian extension of Husserl I’m currently reading about & I‘m struck by the notions of simulcra/dissimulation I keep getting traces of. Much thanks for writing this!
Hi and apologies, I haven’t figured out how to be notified of a posting reply and just found this.
My experience was yes, using a phenomenology frame was very helpful getting clinical care folks focused on looking at QA/QM as something more than “busy work” getting in the way of doing important clinical work. For example, there was an issue with critically-ill homeless/immigrant patients in the public health system making f/u appts. after hospital discharge resulting in costly high readmission rates. The hospital service Attending/staff were directed to solve problem, met as a group & decided issue was patients simply didn’t know when/where their discharge appointments were and printing out better discharge appointment cards with explicit maps/directions & date/time of the f/u appointment was the answer. Problem solved, group dissolved, cards were promptly printed and given to discharge patients, end of story so they could get back to clinical care except that patients still didn’t show up and the readmission rate didn’t change.
As silly as it may seem, reframing the problem in terms of grounded theory/lived experience helped the medical staff realize they needed to actually interview/talk to patients to find out why they were missing discharge appointments instead of just assuming what the problem was. Of course the underlying issues varied pt. to pt. & could be generalized into basic themes like not having money for transportation, having disorganized cognitive follow-thru problems, not understanding language and importance of medical f/u, etc… I’m not sure if using phenomenological language gave medical staff permission to look deeper or better tools to examine the underlying issues or just slowed them down enough to think the problem through/outside of the box? The end result was we developed funding resources proposals for outreach discharge services w/patient advocates that saw/assessed critically-ill at risk patients before discharge to make specific plans to ensure they were seen in their specific Discharge Clinics, including accompanying them if needed. Success was measured by decreased early readmission rates, etc...which made folks feel good about the effort and the importance of doing good QA/QM.
Hope that’s a helpful exemplar?
Hey LessWrong: I stumbled across you after coming across references to rationalist and the Grey tribe on Twitter I think, along with the Post-Rats. Anyhow, you caught my curiosity and I’ve been “dabbling” around the edges to understand your “hypostatical basis” of the world while trying not to get too lost in the weeds. My background is as an AIDS/Oncology CNS before crashing out with health stuff. Part of my nursing background involved learning Heidegger from Bert Dreyfus and Kierkegaard from Jane Rubin as part of learning Phenomenological methodologies for clinical research. However, I ended up going down the rabbit hole with Levinas and Blanchot and then Derrida and ditching research for clinical practice. Oddly enough it took me into Medical QA/QM stuff.
Cutting to the chase, I’d read some Timothy Snyder stuff which piqued my phenomenological interests enough to decide I would attempt to re-read all those texts and see if I really understood any of it. To the end, I recently re-read Derrida’s The Gift and am working on starting to reread both T&I and OTB by Levinas along with Blanchot’s Infinite Conversation; followed by Derrida’s Dissemination with luck. Part of my curiosity was seeing how differently folks were defining simulacrum compared to my understanding and the differences. In a nutshell, I’ve understood a simulacrum as being like a genotype and its‘ phenotype as it’s dissimulation. That‘s pretty packed and there’s lots for me to sort out there...
I’ve been reading a few posts by Scott and sorting out what I’ve missed on AI; trying to make sense of Baye’s theory stuff and how it maps on Neuroscience stuff. In particular I just read his review on “Surfing Uncertainty” and was struck by the similarities between it and Levinasian notions of proximity, substitution, saying/said, etc. I don’t know how much I’ll have to contribute but saw the open/welcome thread and thought it probably best to introduce myself....hopkins (aka heideana)
Please excuse typos & autocorrect strangeness
Thank you for taking the time to take the test, and I appreciate your letting us know how you perceived its results, as this is most helpful for its authors in refining the tool.
As we said in the short essay explaining the little Cyborg Psychologist, its planning and evaluative process weren’t the result of AI but a combination of existing testing techniques put together in what is meant to be a humorous way. The testing items are based on the Big Five Personality Traits, which have become, in some ways, the hard currency of psychological trait theory. This experiment was meant to point out that artificial intelligence doesn’t replace the human being but is a reflection of ourselves in the mirror — and, in the process, demonstrates how this reflection necessarily changes our self-image.
And, as we described, the AI component of the application is meant as a demonstration of how state-of-the-art, on-on-the-shelf elements can already be cobbled together into a functional black box with many practical uses ranging from replacing television announcers to developing sophisticated educational assistants as Philipp Burckhardt has designed for learning statistical methodologies. What is so interesting is how he envisions creating individually-tailored educational assistants that could follow a specific student across their educational path, becoming attuned explicitly to their learning styles and disabilities. This possibility could also be extended to those with physical disabilities or, as you point out, assisting folks with self-reflective psychological analysis, which was the thinking behind the Cyborg Psychologist. Probably the most critical point in this little experiment is demonstrating that AI’s aren’t a way of eventually supplanting human intelligence and creativity, but as an assisting supplementation of the human ability to create something out of nothing: ex creatio nihilo.