Teaming Up With My Alter Ego

The desire of writing a blog was very much on my mind well before AI entered into the picture. I have written a number of posts on this blog before, but never got the writer fluids flowing freely, I am not born a natural writer. I also find it particularly difficult to write when there is lack of focus, when I lack clear insight — now fully resolved and condensed into the Splectrum seed.

My journey into AI is about one year old. As a software engineer it started with AI as a helping hand for writing code. But soon I got focused on a collaborative approach where solving problems through discussion became more important than the implementation — I happily offload implementation to an autonomous AI when I can. The collaborative engineering work is still in full swing — in fact that is where the name Splectrum arose — but in this post I want to concentrate on collaborative AI while researching, writing and thinking.

It is only when the software engineering AI collaboration had reached enough maturity that I decided to apply it to my research and writing. I have also been blessed in that I was able to help others with AI-assisted research for academic use, which gave me a taste and hands-on experience of its strengths and weaknesses. I was impressed. Many tend to emphasise the weaknesses, AI being mistaken or hallucinating. But that is like blaming a junior member of the team for being a junior. It is very important that we are the senior in the collaboration.

The alter ego AI collaboration on the software engineering side started as pair programming. Two individuals who collaborate on a project — discuss, decide, create and review. What I found liberating was that I could chat conversationally in my language, my words, and pretty seamlessly AI would run with it and infuse me with the proper vocabulary in the process. That can be such a satisfying and intense learning experience. As typically happens in pair programming, one has the hands on the keyboard with the other engaging from a short distance. AI as hands and me as head — essentially one body. And so the alter ego was born.

So how does that translate into shared authorship for my blog, or for my research and thinking for that matter? Here the output is different — it is a public voice. Not a piece of code that executes and does stuff. There is still only one author, a single entity, a combination of a head and a pair of hands, so to speak. Being a person with a high vagal tone, tone of voice is very important to me. It needs to be right for my thinking to activate properly. So any division of labour between head and hands is only going to work well when the same language is spoken. How do we deal with the inner voice when we chat and discuss, and with the outer voice when it is put out there for you to read?

I could decide to ignore co-authorship. The voice is mine and the ideas are mine — should I acknowledge that inner collaborator? I believe I should. Not only to recognise the work done by my alter ego colleague but more importantly to draw attention to the future ahead. The hands-on collaborator gives me more space and time to do what I really want to do: think, analyse, research and get better at putting it on (virtual) paper. Where the internet gave us the capability to easily search through countless libraries, AI gives us the capability to do it in collaboration, while discussing and thinking about it at the same time. That, more than anything else, is what I with my alter ego aim to achieve on this blog. And share it at the same time.

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Photo: Mushvig Niftaliyev / Unsplash

Let's Make the Seed Concrete

Splectrum is born, the seed is there. So what, you may ask. Should I be impressed? Are those six lines really so special? I happen to think so. So much is hidden in their apparent simplicity. I am not talking about subjects for discussion at high table, but about what is happening in everyone's daily life. Let's unpack a little.

What if we thought of language differently, as something you live rather than something you speak? Let's try it out on something that is great at bringing people together — a dinner party.

Before we can sit down and eat there is some cooking to be done. It's all in its own language, the ingredients we need, how they have to be prepared, how they are joined together. All relational, a relational language that you live, experience as you are doing it.

Now we can sit down at the table and eat. The food I take, the way I eat it, the taste, the texture, the appearance. The experience is very personal, different for each one of us. It may be very similar, but not the same. The experience remains private.

We sit together at the table. Yes, the food experience may be strictly personal, but we do love to talk about it. We share experiences and opinions, and get more knowledgeable in the process. Food is part of our culture, it is a reality that we share and makes us feel we belong together.

Cooking the food, or eating it at the dinner table does not stand on its own. We share it with each other using the same natural language. We hear, we see, we taste and feel. These all produce experiences that compose a 'higher level' activity, while each speaks its own living language in the process. All are interconnected. And we don't blink an eye, we just take it for granted.

Everyone has their own unique way they experience the world, how they relate to what is around them. Here it was just a dinner party. Think about everything else we do — working, playing, raising children, making music, arguing, falling in love.

The simplicity of six lines — the seed — versus the complexity of what follows from it. Does that hold? Isn't there a way around it? All well and good me saying this, but is there actually support for this way of thinking? Let's find out — that is what unpacking is about. What do these six lines allow me to say? And is it supported by what other people think? And yes, this will involve philosophers with their special vocabulary and ways of thinking, but also biologists, physicists, people in the arts, religion, all walks of life. Let's go on that journey!

This post is part of the seed series. More on the seed in the seed area of the reference library.

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Photo: Kelsey Chance / Unsplash

Embracing Anti-Foundationalism: Why I Reject the Single Foundation

I stumbled across anti-foundationalism and thought - wow, that's me as well. Don't be taken aback by the "anti" - something that has no place really in my dictionary. As often, it might not be the best choice of word for what it means. Foundations are important, but they're inevitably tied to a context. It is the single foundation that is the problem.

Photo: Sunburned Surveyor / Unsplash

The Discovery

I got alerted to anti-foundationalism listening to Carlo Rovelli on the TOE (Theory of Everything) podcast - one that I highly recommend. Watch the episode here (particularly around 1h15m).

I see myself at the start of a journey trying to understand and get into the philosophical way of talking about stuff. As I said before, there is a lot I don't know (yet) and I'm only waking up to position myself in a clear way.

I would like to share a few observations around anti-foundationalism without going too deep into detail. I don't feel ready for that at this point in time, still too much of a basic learner.

What Is Anti-Foundationalism?

Searching for "What is anti-foundationalism in philosophy" on a major search engine gave an AI overview starting with:

Anti-foundationalism is a philosophical position that rejects the idea that there is a single, absolute foundation for knowledge or philosophy.

I directly subscribe to that. Not in the sense that it is not possible, but in the sense that we can't say due to the subjective way we experience reality around us, that we are part of the cosmos. What we discover about the world around us is nothing more than a shared view of individual agents within.

What Anti-Foundationalism Rejects

When I first executed the search it listed a number of common beliefs that anti-foundationalists (as a heterogeneous group) hold, however subsequent execution of the same search replaced it with what it rejects. I feel happier staying away from 'beliefs' as it feels a slippery slope to me. I see beliefs as assumptions, current working hypotheses rather than anything more:

• The idea that knowledge is certain
• The idea that knowledge is based on pure reason or experience
• The idea that there are infallible basic beliefs
• The idea that there is a fundamental belief or principle that grounds knowledge

I subscribe to anti-foundationalism because I decide not to wear the 'tinted glasses' of foundationalism, the restrictions it comes with when trying to make sense of the world around us. I am completely happy for others to take a foundational stance, I respect and support this diversity.

Webs of Meaning

During my limited research into anti-foundationalism I also found a PDF by Mark Bevir that looks like being published in The Oxford Handbook of British Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). I enjoyed reading this introduction 'What is anti-foundationalism?', the politics side I am not really interested in at the moment. I found this paragraph rather interesting in the context here:

The most obvious implications of anti-foundationalism are perhaps meaning holism and anti-representationalism. Given that we cannot have pure experiences, our concepts and propositions cannot refer to the world in splendid isolation. Concepts cannot directly represent objects in the world since our experiences of those objects must in part be ones that we construct using our prior theories. Hence anti-foundationalists conclude that concepts, meanings, and beliefs do not have a one to one correspondence with objects in the world, but rather form webs.

This idea of webs rather than foundations resonates deeply with how I experience understanding - not as building blocks stacked on a solid base, but as interconnected networks of meaning that shift and evolve with new experiences and insights.