Given that Lacan already proposed the unconscious as structured language-like more than half a century ago and described attention in his turn on Freud's impulse in favor of his concept of derive, we may say, this is pretty much where our own demons live.
(I actually do think that revisiting Lacan in this context may be productive.)
They would be called "unemployable" because they are literal charlatans.
Please end our strange fascination with fashionable nonsense. Freud was wrong. There is no Oedipus complex. Everything lacan proposed was wrong. Deleuze and Guattari's mental health clinic failed spectacularly, and Deleuze ended up killing himself at the end (supposedly due to back pain?)
They literally describe their thought as being "Schizoanalysis". How many more red flags do you need?
If you want cultural critique from smart people without it turning into fashionable nonsense, I recommend Mark Fischer, but be warned, he too killed himself.
"There is no Oedipus complex" is, using your own words, "fashionable nonsense". Of course there is a crucial conflict as we learn rules, and this establishes a universal foundation of ethics. And of course this takes place in the realm of our very object relations. Not bothering about what a concept actually means and/or describes is not a free card for criticism. (Neither does generalization over an entire section of science and human thinking help particularly.) – Sorry for the harsh words, but this actually bothers me.
Regarding charlatans, mind that there are already few who have actually studied this. (I'm one of them.)
Regarding Lacan, he provides us with an established theory of "talking machines", and, in a philosophical context, how they relate to our very freedom (or, what freedom may even be). This isn't totally useless in our current situation, and NB, it's actually quite the opposite of fascism.
Guattari was the psychiatrist-analyst type, Deleuze was uninvolved with that. Also: what drove him to suicide was lung problems, to the point he was (old and) locked home connected to a machine to breathe. Some say it was an accident -- that he opened the windows to let some air.
That's just to correct the record. I have no desire to re-litigate Sokal/Bogdanoff and so on. Good day sir cheerio.
I second this. The STEM (= engineering) / humanities divide in software may miss some.
(There had been times, when linguistics were still a major entry path into computing, where things were a bit different. Notably, this were also the times, which gave rise to most of the general paradigms. A certain amount of generality was even regarded a prerequisite to programming. Particularly, HN is such a great place, because it holds up this notion of generality.)
Much of cognitive science reinvents wheels that had been established in the 1920s and 1930s already, namely in sociology of knowledge and related fields. fRMI actually often confirms what had been already observed in a psychoanalytic context. (I don't think it's a good general advice to totally ignore what is already known.)
Well, if you're in need of an established theory of (semantically driven) talking machines and what derives from this, and what this may mean for us in terms of freedom, look no further.
Can you recommend a specific work of his? What Lacan I have leaves me bemused by his brilliance but not informed. Dennett provides both without the fireworks.
Generally, don't start with the "ecrits" (writings), they are hermetic and you really have to have some head start on this. From the seminars, Livre XI, Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de le psychoanalyse (1964) may be a start, as it – in parts – aligns itself with the cybernetic research of the day. However, do not expect too much from a single reading or a single of the seminars.
(Mind that this is trying to talk about what's beyond/below language, necessarily using language just the same, which is – at least according to (the early) Wittgenstein – somewhat an impossibility. You can only show these things, so it takes several approaches from several directions. But there is actually something like a concise corpus of theory eventually emerging from this. Moreover, this – being transcripts of seminars – addresses an audience that is already familiar with Freud, in order to reframe this. – This is also one of the major issues with Lacan and his reception: it takes some serious investment to get into this, and this also used to have some worth on the academic markets. On the other hand, this (academic) value became indeed inflated and eventually devalued, to the point of those, who never bothered to invest, happily triumphing. Think the Great North-American Video Game Crash. But this really shouldn't be the end to what may be one of the major approaches towards what language actually means to us. The expectation that everything can be addressed directly and without prerequisites, regardless of the complexity, may actually not be met. On the other hand, there will be also never be a single "master", who is always right and without failure, bearing always the most distilled emanation of truth in their very word. – I'm also not arguing that everybody is now to become a scholar of Lacan. Rather, we may have an informed expert discussion, what may gained from this from a current perspective. E.g., if Lacan actually had something to say about an impulse-like directional vector emerging from attention (as a form of selectional focus on a semantic field), is there something to be learned from this, or, to be aware of?)
Thanks much for great pointers and precautions on reading Lacan. Even Rorty finds Lacan, Foucault and friends difficult and he read in French rather than in translations.
I was browsing in the medical school bookstore in Berlin (Humboldt/Charité) looking through the psychiatry section and (not joking) a third of the books were by Lacan. Will try with residual trepidation.
The reading list is already too deep and broad for this mortal. But G. Buzsaki, P. Churchkand, A. Damasio, D. Dennett, M. Donald, J. Hawkins, D. Hofstadter, C. Koch, R. Llinas, M. Minsky, Tommasi, J. Panksepp, Piaget, E. Pöppel … do find good traction for those of us who are neuroscientists interested in levels of compute that lead to language generation by human wetware.
Why not both? Things like philosophy or metapsychology tend to be prismatic, each framework comes with advantages and disadvantages and boundaries of its own.
(A turn towards the dogmatic is something I'm pretty much expecting from the current launch of AI anyway, simply, because the productions systematically favor the semantic center. So it may be worth putting some generality against this, rather than being overly selective.)
Lol well to answer your question literally, I think integrationist linguistics and Wittgenstein's thoughts about language use as a social action are way more relevant to understanding what's happening with LLMs (and people's naive reactions to them) than what was suggested previously as background reading.
Mind that we're are not, by any means, at any state of social interaction with LLMs. (Any such thing would be a mere hallucination on the user's side.) However, these are semantic fields, with whatever consequence comes with this. (So there may have been something said on this already, in what was known as the linguistic turn.)
I would vote for revisiting Hofstadter and perhaps even Piaget. And if we want to bother trying to define and operationalize self-consciousness—-then Guillery’s The Brain as a Tool—is a good foray into how the CNS pulls off this simple trick.
Given that Lacan already proposed the unconscious as structured language-like more than half a century ago and described attention in his turn on Freud's impulse in favor of his concept of derive, we may say, this is pretty much where our own demons live.
(I actually do think that revisiting Lacan in this context may be productive.)