The app for independent voices
The difference between the sciences and the humanities isn’t about areas of study as ontologically different things, but about what it takes to describe them. We shouldn’t forget how much of the cultural realm has yielded to scientific analysis, and how much of science has yielded to cultural analysis. As our instruments improve and our insight into scientific methodology becomes more nuanced, these “two cultures” are going to become increasingly complementary, braided, and mutualistic in a fundamentally multi- and meta-disciplinary approach.
Another way of putting it is that there are always multiple “right” ways of looking at anything in particular, and science (which is in essence the testing of agreement against ever-more alien perspectives) only benefits from embracing and including nth-person verification as a technique for addressing its own issues with reproducibility and deep specification. There is no view from nowhere, and including the epistemological and methodological address of researchers alongside their validity claims is going to be the new minimally rigorous norm for scientific research within our lifetimes.
This is a necessary adaptation to AI as a medium, the way the outputs of LLMs in particular show us how mechanistic frameworks are vector embeddings in high-dimensional latent spaces of correlated data points. We’ve revealed the highly contextual, high-dimensional associative learning that underpins any kind of truth claim, and the consequence is in assigning more contingency to, and accepting more uncertainty about, whatever we wish to claim is simply “true”.
What comes next is going to look like “science eats the humanities” or “the humanities eat science” depending on where you stand. It is the same kind of major evolutionary transition by endosymbiosis we see in our own bodies, the products of microbes who fought each other to a standstill and became obligate mutualists in order to address a crisis in metabolic and information scaling.
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• How this looks as a response to the epistemic crisis of generative media:
• How this looks as a result of the proliferation of perspectives afforded by the computing revolution:
• How this looks as just another turn up the spiral of the evolution of intelligence, following the emergence of complex cells and syntactic language: