Marco Palombi

ocrampal.comWhen David Hume Meets ChatGPT: A Skeptic’s Guide to the AI HypeImagine living in the mid-1700s. A powerful new technology has just swept the intellectual world: Newtonian physics. For the first time in human history, we have an astonishing mathematical tool that ...

16 July

Imagine living in the mid-1700s. A powerful new technology has just swept the intellectual world: Newtonian physics. If we can calculate the orbit of Jupiter, why can't we calculate human morality? ocrampal.com/when-david-h... #programming #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky #philosophy

ocrampal.comWhy Computation Can't Solve Meaning (And What It Means for LLMs): the Quest for an (Im)possible TheoryWe are living a grand illusion. As we watch Large Language Models (LLMs) draft essays, write functional code, and converse with poetic nuance, we operate under a quiet, dangerous assumption: that if w...

25 June

As we watch LLMs draft essays and write functional code, we assume that if we just stack enough compute cycles, and training text, true understanding will materialize. It won’t. ocrampal.com/the-quest-fo... #programming #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky #philosophy

ocrampal.com"I Am" vs. "I Have": How Everyday Grammar Secretly Influences the AI DebateWhen you say "I am cold," you aren't just describing your temperature. You are picking a side in a centuries-old philosophical war, one that perfectly explains why the tech world is currently tearing ...

6 June

Why can’t the tech world agree on whether AI actually "reasons"? It turns out, the answer is hidden in how we talk about feeling cold. www.ocrampal.com/i-am-vs-i-ha... #programming #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky #philosophy

ocrampal.comThe Inverted Turing Test: What AI Tells Us About Human IntelligenceIs AI becoming more human, or are we discovering just how much of our "intelligence" is actually uncritical automated thought? In this dialogue, a skeptical look at our new "LLM Oracles" reveals an un...

9 May

Is AI becoming more human, or are we discovering just how much of our "intelligence" is actually uncritical automated thought? ocrampal.com/the-inverted... #programming #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky #philosophy

ocrampal.comWhen the Question Itself Was the ProblemMost philosophical debates don't need better answers. They need a different starting point. This dialogue explores Geneosophy, a framework in which centuries-old paradoxes about mind and body, mathema...

23 Apr

ocrampal.com/when-the-que... Most philosophical debates don't need better answers. They need a different starting point. This dialogue explores a framework in which paradoxes about mind and body and reality stop arising. #programming #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky #philosophy

ocrampal.comThe Galileo MomentEvery major intellectual revolution has a Galileo moment: when the object of inquiry becomes clear, the method takes shape, and the formal language adequate to carry the new questions is still being f...

19 Apr

Every major intellectual revolution has a Galileo moment: when the object of inquiry becomes clear, the method takes shape, and the formal language is still being forged. www.ocrampal.com/the-galileo-... #programming #psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky #philosophy

ocrampal.comThe Ground Beneath the "I"There is an I you feel. Located, bounded, looking out at the world from somewhere behind your eyes. Geneosophy is not interested in that I. It is interested in what makes that I possible, the generati...

18 Apr

There is an I you feel. Located, bounded, looking out at the world from somewhere behind your eyes. Geneosophy is not interested in that I. www.ocrampal.com/the-ground-b... #programming #psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky #philosophy

ocrampal.comThe Question AI Will Never AskWe have become master cartographers of the "given." By scaling computation, we have built maps so vast and detailed that we often mistake the territory for the grid. But as the dialogue between the AI...

17 Apr

We have become master cartographers of the "given." By scaling computation, we have built maps so vast and detailed that we often mistake the territory for the grid. www.ocrampal.com/the-question... #programming #psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky #philosophy

ocrampal.comFrom Plato to Gradient Descent: The Frame We Forgot We ChosePractitioner: I’ll be honest—I find the "philosophy of AI" a bit indulgent. We aren’t guessing anymore. We’re building systems that work. GPT, AlphaFold, Sora... these aren't accidents. We’ve clearly ...

13 Apr

We talk endlessly about what AI can and cannot do. We talk very little about the assumptions built into the question itself. This dialogue follows a philosopher and an AI practitioner. ocrampal.com/from-plato-t... #programming #psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky #philosophy

ocrampal.comThere Will Be More Programmers, Not FewerAI won't reduce the number of programmers. It will create millions more, because running code you cannot understand is not programming. It is faith. Part I — The Hypothesis The Democratization Arc,...

27 Feb

AI won't reduce the number of programmers. It will create millions more, because running code you cannot understand is not programming. It is faith. www.ocrampal.com/there-will-b... #programming #psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky #philosophy

ocrampal.comToo Narrow to Be Wise: The Tunnel Vision Trap of Modern ExpertiseWe live in a Kafkaesque paradox: the very people we turn to for wisdom about life’s biggest questions—meaning, society, the future of humanity—are systematically selected for their inability to think ...

21 Feb

Society has lost its direction. We are now driving blind, and the reason is reductionism. We’ve become so obsessed with breaking the world into tiny parts that we’ve forgotten how the whole thing actually hangs together. www.ocrampal.com/too-narrow-t... #SystemsThinking #Reductionism #Holism

ocrampal.comChasing Our Own Tail: Self-Reference and the Limits of any Academic DisciplineMarcus Doubtful, a physicist turned philosopher. Richard Trad, a mathematician turned philosopher. Both have spent decades thinking about the foundations of knowledge, but they've reached very differ...

15 Feb

In the rush to scale neural networks, we have fallen into a category error: believing that a perfect simulation of an intelligent behavior is the same thing as the existence of intelligence itself. www.ocrampal.com/chasing-our-... #ArtificialIntelligence #PhilosophyOfAI #CognitiveScience

10 Feb

LLMs hallucinate? Groundbreaking discovery: a statistical model works statistically. 😉 It’s the ultimate tech irony. We abandoned GOFAI because manual rules couldn't handle the messiness of reality.

10 Feb

We moved to the 'bottom-up' statistical approach, only to find ourselves frantically retrofitting those same rules onto a black box to stop it from hallucinating.

Word and Excel vs LLMs. Secretaries became executive assistants, their role evolved to higher-level coordination, communication, and decision support. Accountants gained the ability to do far more analysis, strategic planning, and advisory work.

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You can't make architectural decisions without comprehending the constraints and trade-offs of implementation. The executive assistant still needs to understand business communication. The accountant still needs to understand accounting principles.

The programmer-turned-architect still needs to understand programming.

The tools eliminated tedious manual tasks, but the roles themselves weren't eliminated. They were elevated. The same pattern applies to programmers. LLMs can handle boilerplate, generate first drafts, automate simple tasks.

This doesn't eliminate the programmer, it transforms them into architects. But here's the crucial point: they still need to know how to program. You can't architect systems you don't understand. You can't debug code you can't read.

ocrampal.comFrom Sophists to Alchemists to AI Coders: The Technique Without UnderstandingWe believe we are at the cutting edge of history, but we may just be repeating its oldest mistakes. From the Sophists’ empty rhetoric to the Alchemists’ blind experimentation, humanity has a long hist...

AGI is Our Generation's Alchemy, And We're Too Arrogant to Admit It The AI industry has a dirty secret: we're building toward Artificial General Intelligence without the faintest consensus on what intelligence actually is. ocrampal.com/from-sophist...

ocrampal.comThe Understood-Understanding Gap: Why LLMs Hit a WallLarge Language Models have become ubiquitous in knowledge work, yet a curious pattern has emerged. Talk to consultants at McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and you'll hear the same refrain: "I don't really know ho...

3 Feb

LLMs are masters of the "Understood"—the vast library of human output. But they lack "Understanding"—the creative spark that generates those concepts in the first place. www.ocrampal.com/the-understo... #philosophy #science #psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky

ocrampal.comThe Shared Delusion: Both doomers and dreamers assume current technology leads to AGI. They’re both wrongExcel didn’t kill accountants; it gave them better tools. Yet, with AI, we’ve abandoned this logic in favor of a collective fantasy. We’re treating a sophisticated calculator as a human replacement ra...

1 Feb

Excel didn’t kill accountants; it gave them better tools. Yet, with AI, we’ve abandoned this logic in favor of a collective fantasy. We’re treating a sophisticated calculator as a human replacement rather than a human multiplier. www.ocrampal.com/the-shared-d... #philosophy #AI #intelligence

ocrampal.comThe Scope of Geneosophy: Where Concept-Creation MattersNot every domain of inquiry requires genosophical investigation. Understanding when geneosophy applies—and when traditional approaches suffice—clarifies both its potential and its proper limits. The...

28 Jan

Why Computation Can’t Create—And Where It Hits the Logic Ceiling. While logic can rearrange the pieces of an existing puzzle, it cannot explain the spark that creates the pieces themselves. ocrampal.com/the-scope-of... #philosophy #science #psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky

ocrampal.comFrom Light to Blindness: How the Enlightenment Lost Its WayWe live in an age of breathtaking technical sophistication and profound existential confusion. We can manipulate matter at the atomic level but can't agree on what makes life worth living. We've mappe...

25 Jan

The Enlightenment was meant to be a lighthouse, its beam of reason guiding humanity out of superstition's dark waters. But what if the beam grew too focused, too bright? www.ocrampal.com/from-light-t... #philosophy #science #psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence

ocrampal.comBreaking the Circle: Comprehending the Act of UnderstandingWe live trapped in a circle of our own making. We reason with concepts about objects and other concepts. We understand objects through concepts. We create new concepts by combining existing objects an...

24 Jan

We have spent centuries perfecting the art of mapping the "streams" of knowledge—science, mathematics, and logic—while ignoring the river’s source. www.ocrampal.com/the-source-o... #philosophy #AI #intelligence #physics #biology #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence

24 Jan

When Excel became mainstream, it accelerated accountants' work. Companies needed fewer number-crunching positions. You could accomplish more with fewer people, but you still needed the experienced accountant. Think of LLMs as a tool to increase efficiency, not one to replace the accountant.

ocrampal.comStop treating AI like a person. Start treating it like a tool.We often hear that AI is on the verge of doing "every job that requires intelligence." But what if we’re fundamentally misunderstanding what "intelligence" actually is? Here is a debate between Marcu...

22 Jan

AI is like an automobile. It amplifies our mobility and lets us go faster and farther, but it doesn't decide the destination, and it certainly doesn't navigate the ethics of the journey. www.ocrampal.com/stop-treatin... #ArtificialIntelligence

ocrampal.comWhy Criticizing AI Feels Like Criticizing Someone’s ChildI’m not questioning the usefulness of LLMs and AI in general. What I am questioning is its ability to achieve intelligence. Large Language Models (LLMs) are remarkable tools—tools to augment one’s in...

21 Jan

Why does calling out a hallucination feel like calling someone’s kid "ugly"? We’ve stopped treating AI like software and started treating it like a protégé. Here’s why criticizing an algorithm has suddenly become so personal. www.ocrampal.com/why-criticiz... #ArtificialIntelligence

ocrampal.comCan Philosophy of Science Really Stand Outside Science?Philosophy of science promises to do something extraordinary: step outside the scientific enterprise to examine its foundations, methods, and assumptions with clear-eyed objectivity. From Thomas Kuhn'...

20 Jan

The Circularity of Conceptual Analysis and the Search for a New Foundation ocrampal.com/the-impossib... #philosophy #science #psychology #AI #intelligence #physics #biology #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence

ocrampal.comThings, to be and the computer metaphorFrom birth, we learn to communicate through language—but language misleads us. It convinces us that we truly know what things are, that we comprehend the abstract essence of a thing. This illusion sha...

18 Jan

The Thing Trap: How Language Locked Us Into the Wrong Model of Mind ocrampal.com/things-to-be... #philosophy #science #psychology #AI #intelligence #physics #biology #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence

ocrampal.comThe Puzzle Without a Picture: Why Geneosophy is NeededThe metaphor of the puzzle can be applied to any science, though it becomes particularly vivid in neuroscience. In neuroscience, we work with a multitude of objects considered central to the field: n...

18 Jan

Neuroscience produces more data every year: more neurons mapped, more proteins identified. Yet the fundamental questions remain unanswered. We're creating puzzle pieces without knowing what image they're meant to form. ocrampal.com/the-puzzle-i... #philosophy #psychology #AI #intelligence #physics

geneosophy.comConsciousness, the elephant in the roomConsciousness is the holy grail of our quest to comprehend who we are. We feel conscious, there is no doubt about it. But understanding consciousness has been outside our reach so far. It is a strange...

17 Jan

The quest to understand consciousness often feels like searching for an elephant in a room—we're certain it's there because we feel it, yet it remains stubbornly hidden from our scientific and philosophical grasp. geneosophy.com/consciousnes... #philosophy psychology #AI #intelligence #physics

youtube.comCEFISES Seminar: Michel Bitbol, “Transcendental epistemologies and probabilism”YouTube video by CEFISES at UCLouvain

17 Jan

Michel Bitbol expresses many Geneosophic intuitions in this video. However, the distinction between possibilities and actualities (or probabilities) is still not articulated convincingly. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5STU...

ocrampal.comAI and the Neglect of Meaning: From Unlimited to IndefiniteThe story of artificial intelligence is not just one of increasing computational power—it’s also a story about how machines relate to meaning. Or more precisely, how meaning has been progressively sid...

16 Jan

AI without meaning is not intelligence, it is mathematics ocrampal.com/ai-and-the-n... #philosophy #science #psychology #AI #intelligence #physics #biology #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence

ocrampal.comFrequently Asked Questions: Geneosophy vs. AI1. Is Geneosophy just another type of AI? No. Geneosophy is not a refinement of AI; it is an entirely different approach to intelligence and living organisms. While AI is built on the computational m...

15 Jan

Why do even the most advanced 'World Models' still hallucinate? Why does AI hit a mathematical wall of 'combinatorial explosion' the moment we try to make it truly autonomous? ocrampal.com/frequently-a... #philosophy #AI #intelligence #biology #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky

ocrampal.comThe Zoetrope of Logic: Why Programs Live in Frozen TimeWhy Computation Can Simulate the Past, but Never Generate the Living Present The Illusion of Time in Software When you watch a video game character run across a screen, witness a real-time stock ti...

13 Jan

Why Computation Can Simulate the Past, but Never Generate the Living Present www.ocrampal.com/the-zoetrope... #philosophy #science #psychology #AI #intelligence #physics #biology #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence

ocrampal.comCode is Not ThoughtIf a machine can mimic a thought, does it mean it is thinking? This dialogue strips away the hype of modern AI to reveal the "Code That Could Never Think." By examining the structural limitations of c...

10 Jan

The Ghost in the Silicon: Why Code Is Not Cognition. www.ocrampal.com/the-code-tha... #philosophy #science #psychology #AI #intelligence #physics #biology #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence