-0025- Just Say No to Non-Human Tarot
Why? Well … it’s not that complicated after all. Tarot isn’t something you can program computers to do, nor let some AI/LLM take a spin of it. There is one importat thing that will be missing in these occasions … The human interaction. More precisely intuition.
Tarot isn’t just cross-referencing some database of possible meaningns of the given cards and/or pattern recognition. Tarot is combination of intuition and intellectual reading. Where the intellectual part is about the symbols and the meanings of the cards. Which is the part, that in theory can be done by computa-tek scripthingie.
BUT!
Computers doesn’t possess understanding out of the parameters set for the process by human. Computers have no concept of outside of those give parameters, the outside world. The Universe, if you will. Computers only run the program with the given data. Once ready, print out the results. Nothing more.
If tarot would be only interpretation of the meanings of the cards dealt, it would be task for some scripthingie. But it is not. Tarot reading is much more complex than just 1+1=1. Even it is not … but it is.
Artificial intelligence does not have the capacity to be creative. True creativity leads to what has never existed, it goes far beyond combining what already exists. If we ask it to redesign this theatre, the AI shuffles the chairs it finds in the room, but it is we who have to decide whether or not we like the way it does it, remembering that those chairs were derived from algorithms from data created by us. The computer recognises the correlation between symbols, but it does not understand and it is useless to pretend it does, because it will never understand nothing.
And where we do differ from the computa-tek is quite simplex, but then again much more than some of the technozealots would admit:
We are spiritual beings, temporarily imprisoned in a physical body that is similar to a machine. But we are much more than a machine. We are consciousness, infinite and irreducible entities.
Before you, dear (mostlikely a young) reader, mouth foam something like “WTF is this new age woo-woo quakery now‽”, let me introduce you to this new age woo-woo quack called Federico Faggin, mostly know for designing the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004. You know, the OG shite that makes it possible for you to read this as you are right now. But also co-founder and CEO of Synaptics in the 80s. Synaptics was/is/whatever all for trying to understand if and how machines might learn like human brains do. Those quotes above are by Federico, if it wasn’t clear already.
Even Jon Sewell’s sceptical tarot methods are based on human interaction and ultimately our ability to draw intuitive relations between symbols and meaning of the cards. And this computers cannot do. Just as Federico stated above, computers and AI cannot be creative. And creativity is exactly what is needed in order to give a good tarot reading. After I listened to Jon’s lecture about the matter, it inspired me to start writing this post. So, thanks Jon … I suppose :)
There are those who are trying to do somekind of tarot scripthingies … looking, a wee bit, at you Vi Grey … just a tiny little bit :) There is nothing wrong in that per se. But the results for the time spent are probably not the most fruitful.
Sure the hobbyists pastime is fruitful enough for the person. And that is absolutely fine. But we need to understand the realities.
Federico does give a very fitting example in his brilliant book Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature.
Which is as follows:
Let me give you an example: Suppose my brother-in-law meets me on the street raising his hand with the thumbs-up sign, and two other people witness the same event besides me. Person A does not know what the thumbs-up sign means, so she hasn’t recveived any objective information, even though she has seen the sign and may wonder what it means. Person B knows that the sign means “something good has happened,” therefore he has reveived some objective information, but he does not know who and what that sign is for, therefore he has only received a small amount of meaning. For me, that sign means that the surgery undergone by my sister was succesful, and I am delighted and relieved. Therefore, I received the same amount of objective information as B, but also a large amount of subjective meaning, since my uncertainty was overcome and my emotional state drastically improved. If the same sign meant that my brother-in-law had won a ten-dollar bet, its impact on me would have been significally less.
And continues later in the book:
Philosophers use the term “qualia” for the sensations and feelings we experience in our consciousness. Qualia refer to what it feels like in our inner experience afrer the automatic recognition of a symbol. The symbols are the carriers of qualia and qualia are the carriers of meaning. A computer feels nothing and, when a symbol is recognized, that recognition simply causes another symbol to be instantiated. That is all that a computer can do. Qualia and meaning are properties of consciousness not available to computers.
That is very good explanation of the differences between consciousness and deterministic computa-tek machine. And furthermore why scripthingies cannot do true tarot readings. Even how hard one wants them to.
Maybe this post should have been titled something along the lines “Just Say No To AI/LLM/Neural Networks Slop And The Like” or some fuckery like that. But I am not changing it. A good example how consciousness is creative and can drift from one subject to another, yet keep it relevant. If I had given a task for some scripthingie to halluciante this post, it wouldn’t contain quotes from Federico Faggin’s book and such. Well … could, but it would have been necessary to determine such thing in the description of the task given for the scripthingie. And I couln’t have done so, since those things came along in the process of writing. They were not planned beforehand. Writing is a creative process, and computa-tek scripthingies cannot write from the scratch. No creativity to be found in the land of silicon transistors.
I’ll end this post here, for it’s already rather long one and I’m positive that all what I wanted to say has been said.
Just want to add that I have updated the links page again and close with a quote by Werner Heisenberg:
The idea of an objective real world whose smaller parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, regardless of whether we observe them or not … is impossible.
Yours drooly,
Lobotomy Patient Z