Matt Booguy > Recent Status Updates

Jesus Christ... 😨😱😭

Can it be?—a coming-of-age story for an artificial intelligence? Ishiguro continues to tug at my heartstrings. Klara’s unwavering hopefulness, mingled with unconscious naiveté, has stirred deep emotion and self-reflection from me. Her quiet observations of human love and fragility, alongside her reasoning within social contexts imbued with subtlety, feel both affectionate and profound.

Things are getting somewhat unsettling—Josie’s shift in behavior at the interaction meeting and her mom roleplaying with Klara as Josie both hit hard. That line about it being nice not to look back and remember?—oof. Pacing feels steady, same poignant Ishiguro style. But now there’s another hook—Klara seems to have noticed patterns invisible to us concerning Josie’s health. I’m even more invested in the story now.

Already pulling at my heartstrings. Klara’s calm, hopeful, and observant perspective has me feeling emotional as it resonates with my own early history. Her sense of longing, separation, and the responsorial fear the very possible transience of human connections brings forth hits close to home. I'm enjoying what is for me the cutting depth surrounded by the gentleness of the narrative and look forward to continuing.

”[A]s with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.”

As tenebrous as it is, the story has a dream-like aura to it. Enjoying.

It is impressive how Ishiguro makes me feel the anxiety and psychological claustrophobia that, on the outside, Stevens does not acknowledge or won't allow himself to feel amidst his duties. How powerful it is for these emotions to spill over into my empathy as Stevens stifles something human for an ideal of dignity.

Introducing the importance of formal systems, DRH gives us the MU-Puzzle. With 4 rules of inference and an axiom, namely the string MI, we are instructed to derive the string MU. I did it within 5-10 mins. Message me if you're interested in trying it out for yourself. It's a fun and semi-problematic challenge; the latter since we don't know if MU is derivable in the system and we lack explicit decision procedures.

This seems like an expansive but hopeful project. Hofstadter concentrates music, mathematics (pure & applied), and visual arts around Strange Loop Theory, which states the head of hierarchical systems 'loops' in on the system to relate to the ground level. He hopes we face head-on the contradictions between intelligence and A.I., the formal and the informal, materialism and theology, etc. Looking forward to this.