Baudrillard Bonus Episode!

So I think, first of all, on the topic of AI and subjectivity, I think the way he kind of cuts to the core of something with a lot of the neo-rationalist thought and a lot of the, I don't know, functionalist thought or maybe even the Deleuzian thought or even the standard mainline theory of mind thought from a more analytic perspective the subject is the thing that plays this game of asking and providing for reasons of like what life and what's happening for a lot of people it's like a Post hoc rationalization illusion.

You have people like Robert Sapolsky who think the subject is just an illusion.

There's no such thing.

There's these hard determinists.

And it's like, yeah, okay, determinism, sure.

But I mean, I'm a compatibilist.

I think that's missing the point.

Are you an absolute 100% free will person? Or are you an absolute 100% determinist person? no i think compatibilism is is the right position to hold on that answer um but a lot of the mainstream theories of mind i guess the the subject is positioned as an agent and the agent is the thing that demands and provides reasons reasoning for it all rationalization if you will and Dominic is like yeah sure there's that but then there's this kind of excess of subjectivity and it's like that's it dude that's that's the point like that's what we're getting at with our transcendental materialism with this kind of emergentist position of like yeah we come from the raw matter we are biological creatures but we're also cultural creatures we're symbolic we're linguistic so we're this biocultural thing That used to be an agent, but is no longer an agent.

It has become a subject, and subjectivity is what we're concerned with.

We're not concerned with human agency.

We're not concerned with human will.

We're not concerned with just bare intelligence.

We are concerned with subjectivity, and I think Dominic framing it as excess subjectivity, I think it's an excellent point.

It kind of elucidates what we...

We would say the whole point of subjectivity is it's the ground of agency.

The reason we can be agentic or willful beings with impulses or desires that are not just reducible to our biological programming is because we've been split asunder.

And that split itself being subjectivity That's

why.

And just to make it more robust, I think that the universe as this process of becoming, this dynamic process of unfolding, is the agent.

And because we're cut away, because we're severed from nature...

We can also be agents ourselves.

And that's not to impute any type of consciousness or any type of desire or even any type of preformed will or anything like that to the universe.

It's just to say, no, I believe the universe acts.

It makes things.

It literally produces things.