A well-known psychological phenomenon, semantic satiation can be triggered by repeating a word over and over until it loses its meaning. You can do this with any word. How about “Ghibli?” Just read it over and over: Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. You just keep reading it, each one in turn. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli.
No one knows why semantic satiation happens, exactly. There’s a suspected mechanism in the form of neural habituation, wherein neurons respond less strongly from repeated stimulation; like a muscle, neurons grow tired, releasing fewer neurotransmitters after an action potential, until their formerly robust signal becomes a squeak. One hypothesis is that therefore the signal fails to propagate out from the language processing centers and trigger, as it normally does, all the standard associations that vibrate in your brain’s web of concepts. This leaves behind only the initial sensory information, which, it turns out, is almost nothing at all, just syllabic sounds set in cold relation. Ghibli. Ghibli. Ghibli. But there’s also evidence it’s not just neural fatigue. Semantic satiation reflects something higher-level about neural networks. It’s not just “neurons are tired.” Enough repetition and your attention changes too, shifting from the semantic contents to attending to the syntax alone. Ghibli. Ghibli. The word becomes a signifier only of itself. Ghibli.
I encounter a paradox. I acknowledge that my inability to marvel at a live Caruso opera in Naples has cost me something deep and beautiful. But I cannot wish that the phonograph was never invented. Does the increased variety and quantity of music compensate for the decreased profundity of each musical experience?
Maybe Progress repays us with interest for every medium it takes? Without mass-produced, mass-transmissible images, music, and bright colors, we couldn’t have Studio Ghibli. Dare we hope that, if anime becomes too cheap to appreciate, that very cheapness will open the door to new forms of art? But why should this always be true?
We have recontextualized the semantic apocalypse from a one-time problem with GPT-4 to a recurrent historical pattern of technology undermining the uniqueness of art. But maybe we should zoom out further. This isn’t just about art. Technology breeds hedonic adaptation, and hedonic adaptation undermines everything.
Something bothers me about the whole semantic apocalypse framing. It focuses too much on the social level, denies personal agency. Yes, we as a culture are post- some semantic apocalypse where listening to the great symphonies of the past has become so easy that we never do it. But you, as an individual, could do it right now. You could type “Mozart symphony” into YouTube and see what happens.
I support Erik Hoel’s crusade to chart some society-level solution to the semantic apocalypse problem. You’re not allowed to say “skill issue” to society-level problems, because some people won’t have the skill; that’s why they invented the word “systemic”. But your personal relationship to the meaning in your life is not a society-level problem. While Erik Hoel works on the systemic issue, you should be thinking of your own individual soul.
In this, I take my cue from the later Wittgenstein of The Philosophical Investigations (1953). The principle that underlies Wittgenstein’s rejection of private language – a language with words for sensations that only one person in the world could understand – is that we can talk only about what lies before us, what is public, what is open to collective view. As for anything else, well, ‘a nothing would serve as well as a something about which nothing can be said’. A word that referred to a private, inner sensation would have no useful function in our language.
But to explore the space of possible minds is to entertain the possibility of beings far more exotic than any terrestrial species. Could the space of possible minds include beings so inscrutable that we could not tell whether they had conscious experiences at all? To deny this possibility smacks of biocentrism. Yet to accept it is to flirt once more with the dualistic thought that there is a hidden order of subjective facts
By these lights, in order to establish the presence of consciousness, it would not be sufficient to discover that a system, such as the white box in our thought experiment, had high Φ. We would need to discern purpose in its behaviour. For this to happen, we would have to see the system as embedded in an environment. We would need to see the environment as acting on the system, and the system as acting on the environment for its own ends.
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