By Jacob Potash
A bad date once told me that something called the master-slave dialectic is core to Hegel: a philosophic parable in which “master” is enslaved by his dependence on “slave” for recognition. The date mentioned this in reference to pets who conquer us with subservience. That paradigm occurred to me as I thought about how I’ve grown swiftly dependent on AI as an extinguisher of curiosity and a “second pair of eyes” on drafts, forms, decisions. The digital helper is designed to be docile, sycophantic, collusive. A golden retriever poses no threat. Nevertheless: I have lost control, and I don’t know who is in charge.
→ So when he is called the Messiah, is that just an honorific that means he is an anointed special prophet of God?
→ Does it not really have any theological meaning in Islam?
→ When he comes back to rule over the world as the perfect Muslim king, will he be “redeeming” or saving the world?
Maybe Alphabet Inc, for all its software’s stated eagerness to comply with every reasonable request, is in fact domming users like me with a subtle seduction of convenience—manipulating their attentional cravings, passing information through a secret filter, redirecting requests that stray outside its guardrails, absorbing each prompt as so much more proprietary training data. Prompt is a clever word for industry to have adopted to define our interaction with AI, as it sidesteps overtones both of domination and submission. A person who “prompts” expects cooperation, but to prompt also implies a measure of consent and participation on the part of the prompted. Am I properly prompter or prompted? In this perfectly artificial world of the program, is there freedom? The possibility of agency was fraught enough as it was.
→ What would Foucault have preferred us to be, if not self-repressing, orderly and productive?
→ an aesthetics of existence… so no aesthetic at all? or an aesthetic existence, ie, an existence of aesthetic intention and design…?
→ where did he come up with this “lives as a work of art” concept? was there really an ancient conception of one’s life as a work of art?
Obedience and omniscience—or their illusion—are a charming combination in a partner, and I didn’t dissemble long to the LLM. The format elicited from me a diction that became ever less guarded, even less grammatical, as the lesson sank in that the software would invariably understand without judgment. One can flail unselfconsciously on waves of curiosity in the presence of, say, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, the model which I’ve given more time lately than any person. At the springs of perfect information, where you can try to slake an infinite thirst, there is little goad to restraint.
→ How did Yeats support himself in Paris? Did he think about his poetry as lending itself to being set to music? Also why did Yeats choose Byzantium as “heaven” and what was the real Byzantium? Also how did Jewish system of melodic notation for Torah reading develop? And what’s the logic by which different tunes are applied to different words/syllables? Is there a difference between evangelicals and fundamentalists in USA context? How do you define each? No intro pls to maximize room for responses.
A core element in my experience of AI’s intrusion on the market in the last three years was the obviousness to me since the beginning, first, that money and competition would not pause for liberal alarm over the environmental, economic, and ethical effects of AI, and second, that research and implementation would move far faster than traditional media could make sense of: its emergent properties might tip it in new directions of significance at any point, making scientists’ and investors’ assumptions instantly outdated, much less the moralizing of Op-Ed pages. My attitude toward the technology has been the one Oscar Wilde advised us to take toward art: Openness—or rather, a continual withholding of judgment, in light of possible expansions of consciousness that might render prior judgments irrelevant. What the indeterminacy of the technology and its unannounced leaps forward mean is that each of us in every moment is on the vanguard, particle of a bleeding edge that outraces analysis.
→ On a different note, what have Islamic countries’ response to climate change or acknowledgment of it been?
→ Not regarding translation, but more broadly, is the Muslim attitude towards the Quran more similar to Catholic or Protestant attitudes toward scripture?
→ Do most interfaith disagreements come down to citing one or the other as their final authority? As evidence that Jesus‘s message was misinterpreted, do they point to the fact that Jesus himself doesn’t say that he is God? How do Christians and Muslims explain how a human being is able to judge between those ultimate claims about divine revelation?
The list of questions, an exercise in parataxis, is a portrait of a mind free to figure. I have always believed in the literary potential of the list, the poetry of juxtaposition, but it also draws attention to the intractability of a certain problem, namely our informational regime: If the list-as-form came to the fore (Umberto Eco in 2009: “the list has prevailed”) because of the convergence of computers with a broader culture in which metanarratives lost legitimacy (‘we can’t make sense of things, but we can list them’), we have now reached a paralyzingly literal point in this convergence: the set of all information online is not just storable, not just searchable, but gains a kind of sentience, and cannot just be queried in natural language, but can query us in turn. Under these conditions, I would think that meaning might be irrecoverable. The time that it takes to experience meaning and enact the rituals that give rise to it lie under the tempting pressure of a perfect oracle whose proclamations, tailored to request, come in 500 word spurts and replace themselves too fast to be remembered. It is not hard to conceive of the risk of becoming a kind of information addict-prisoner for whom space is collapsed into the phone or laptop, time crushed into an eternal present of submitting prompts and receiving responses.
→ If I want to make my desk shorter so that I can read and write more easily in my chair, can I just get a saw and saw the same amount off all four legs?
→ Briefly—when was Nietzsche’s work no longer …obscure? How did his insanity manifest and at what age?
And yet: the opposite could be true. This phenomenon could be simpler and more innocent: I have had illuminating exchanges in the past week. I learned that Islam views Jesus as a kind of Messiah. Am I wiser or better? and can I break away from the magic glowy rock long enough to make use of the information?
→ And what the fuck is alchemical purification if not dark magic? Stanza number two is about purification and stanza number four is about purification? I could never have gotten to it without some key. I think that’s a quality of a bad poem. As a spiritual vision, this does not move me at all.
→ How did he come to “actually believe” in this vision?
→ So his wife basically came up with the symbols?
→ Wow, weird. Had he not married before that? How at 25 did she know him so well?
Can a list be meaningful? All language (including this paragraph) could be seen as a list of words, ranged horizontally. I hope by turning the list into an art object to get far enough away from it to transform myself from inadvertent participant in the culture of lists to a witness in a gathering storm of information, a participant in the mental processes that are to be protected if we are to fulfill the preconditions for feeling that life is meaningful.
→ Can you unravel this a bit? “They saw Luther’s “freedom of a Christian” as a crucial step in creating the disciplined, guilt-driven individual required by capitalism.”
→ Not to be too cute and clever, but isn’t the argument that rationalism turns to barbarism ironic, in the sense that it’s an example of rationalist argument, and in fact their thought has been used to justify a kind of barbarism?
I speak to AI in the language of thoughts. In doing so I am an explorer not just of knowledge of the world but also of my own relationship to knowledge, my curiosity and its submerged associations. When we step out of the stream of a conversation and examine the pattern our questions form, we see it is not a meaningless juxtaposition but a kind of sequential language that describes our own minds, a portrait of ourselves. The list is disorganized, it is unconscious, but it traces a shape.
→ What does it mean that their water boiler broke? How would they have noticed?
→ What more to say as a nice response. You can see I started with I’m so sorry
→ How do I make this little flipped up corner of the carpet go down
→ What about – A sword is sharpened and also furbished
→ whats the rep of holocene hedge fund?
→ what does “uncorrelated” mean here?
→ I got up and gave it to him woooo
→ Was the geffen doc in 2012 made with his approval…
→ best book on Jewish gangsters?
→ Assess each person’s performance and their personality and style
→ I noticed when I babysit this kid Lucas, who is adorable and smart and sweet and loves me, sometimes when I look at him, I get this sort of rush in my chest. I don’t know how to describe it flood of something in my chest, maybe something to do with my heart? and then the other day when I was subbing in the school they were just so adorable waddling around and trying to communicate with words and I felt that rush again. I’m tempted to call it love… It feels sort of like a burning excess of care. There’s something double edged about it, it’s a responsibility, it’s a protective feeling, like you care enough that you suffer because of it. Do you know what this is?
Author bio: Jacob Potash is from Iowa.
blindfieldjournal.com 