AI on Lorenzo Bolla

On the Non-portability of the Concept of Consciousness to AI

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I discussed The Abstraction Fallacy at length with my friend Harsha Perera. We both found the paper interesting, but somehow incomplete.

Harsha distilled our dissatisfaction in a paper: https://philpapers.org/rec/PEROTN.

PhilPapers is a treasure trove of great articles. I’m reading Why You Can’T Make A Computer That Feels Pain now!

The Abstraction Fallacy

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Abstraction Fallacy

The full title of the article is: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness. The article claims that computational functionalism is committing a categorical mistake when asserting that consciousness can arise from the symbolic manipulation of abstract concepts. This is called The Abstraction Fallacy. Functionalism ignores the physical origin of information and its causal chain. Instead of the natural order, from raw sensations to conscience to abstract concepts, functionalism assumes that conscience can be instantiated from abstract concepts, “backwards”. The article claims that this inversion is not possible, and conscience cannot be instantiated from symbolic manipulation of abstract concepts, because it ignores the fundamental role of the mapmaker. The mapmaker is who extracts abstract concepts from raw sensory data: it’s the giver of meaning to the abstract symbols.

Understanding Media

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Understanding Media

by Marshall McLuhan • 1994

Why

I wanted to understand better what “The medium is the message ” sentence means. I also wanted to know if McLuhan’s framework can be applied to understand how the communication landscape will change with the advent of #AI technologies.

What I liked

The first few chapters are great. The whole framework is laid out and can be absorbed in few reading sessions. The second half of the book are “applications” of the framework itself, e.g. how radio or television shaped the communication landscape.

AI chart of Ulysses characters

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Circe chapter of Ulysses features lots of characters from earlier in the book. I needed some help remembering them all, so I asked Gemini to draw a chart of all characters in Ulysses and their relationships.

Here is my first prompt:

Draw a diagram of all characters in Ulysses. Draw lines connecting them if they have a direct relationship in the story

It produced this chart.

First of all, I love the style: the yellowish background reminds me of an old drawing; the characters dresses and hairstyle is very much early 1900. But, the chart itself has some issues: for example, characters are duplicated (e.g. Dennis Breen) and some relations seem wrong. I tried another prompt.

Crystal Mentality

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Crystal Mentality

by Max Harms • 2017

Why

Second volume of The Crystal trilogy. First book is Crystal Society.

What I liked

What I disliked

Crystal Society

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Crystal Society

by Max Harms • 2016

Why

I heard about Max Harms on the 80000 hours podcast, talking about AI alignment.

What I liked

From the outside, most humans interact with the AI (protagonist of the book) as if it was a single coherent entity: but it isn’t. The AI is a “society” (hence the title of the book) of interacting “personalities”. The analog is obviously with AI agents, each focused on their narrow goal, called The Purpose. The AI’s personality then arises from the interaction of often opposing goals, in a mostly democratic way. There is no single dominant “agent”, but they cooperate to advance their purpose.