Beautiful Illusions

By: Darron Vigliotti Jeffrey Horton
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  • Summary

  • Jeff & Darron ponder the intersection of reality, consciousness, and culture. These conversations comprise an ongoing attempt to construct meaning by exploring art and science, developing understanding of the context underpinning our current moment in time, and imagining possible futures for human civilization. No expertise here, just two guys who enjoy learning, thinking, and talking about big ideas, deep questions, and the “beautiful illusion” that is the subjective human experience. *New episodes released every one to two months on Sunday mornings*
    2020 The Beautiful Illusions Podcast
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Art Philosophy Social Sciences Nature & Ecology
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Episodes
  • EP 34 - Icy Hot Takes on Artificial Intelligence

    EP 34 - Icy Hot Takes on Artificial Intelligence
    Aug 11 2024
    Visit our website BeautifulIllusions.org for a complete set of show notes and links to almost everything discussed in this episodeSelected References:2:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 33 - The Post-Entertainment Culture of Addiction from June 2024, in which Dopamine Nation (2021) by Anna Lembke, MD is referenced and the idea of a “dopamine fast” is discussed.8:28 - See “The State of the Culture, 2024” by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker, 2024)8:56 - According to Russian literary theorist and critic Victor Shklovsky, “Art makes the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived. To do this it presents its material in unexpected, even outlandish ways: the shock of the new” and “Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things 'unfamiliar,' to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception.”10:40 - See “What is AI?” (IBM) for a good general overview10:55 - See “What Are Large Language Models?” (IBM) and the relevant LLM Wikipedia entry16:20 - Suno and Udio are two popular generative AI-powered music creation tools that work based on prompting17:40 - Listen to “Beautiful Illusions” or “Beautiful Illusions” which are two initial alternate song versions created by Suno (in about 1 minute) using the following prompt and no additional iterating beyond the original output: An early 60's style acoustic folk song called Beautiful Illusions with lyrics about how we all live our own perceived reality, solo acoustic, guitar, strumming, harmonica, folk, coffee house 20:30 - See “Detecting AI fingerprints: A guide to watermarking and beyond” (Brookings Institution, 2024)25:43 - See “Bias against AI art can enhance perceptions of human creativity” (Nature, 2023)28:10 - See Darron’s “Vonnegut-Style Quotations Challenge,” which was expressly created to test Jeff’s thesis here and see if he can identify genuine Vonnegut quotes versus ones that AI generates30:58 - See “Humans in the Loop: The Design of Interactive AI Systems” (Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, 2019) and “Artificial Intelligence and Keeping Humans “in the Loop”” (Center for International Governance Innovation, 2020)31:35 - See “What are AI Agents?” (IBM) and “What is Strong AI?” (IBM) for good overviews 34:46 - See Artistree or MadeMay for examples of online spaces where art can be commissioned directly from artists36:15 - See “Glue in Pizza? Eat Rocks? Google's AI Search Is Mocked for Bizarre Answers” (CNET, 2024) and “Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination” (Gizmodo, 2024) and “What are AI hallucinations?” (Google Cloud)40:30 - See “In Experiment, AI Successfully Impersonates Famous Philosopher” (Vice, 2022) and “Creating a large language model of a philosopher” (Mind & Language, 2023)41:18 - See character.ai42:48 - Read the op-ed “ChatGPT is at odds with what education is for” (The Boston Globe, 2024)49:31 - Listen to “If I Were A Carpenter” by Tim Hardin54:41 - Watch “The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse” by Rick BeatoThis episode was recorded in June 2024The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti
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    1 hr
  • EP 33 - The Post-Entertainment Culture of Addiction

    EP 33 - The Post-Entertainment Culture of Addiction
    Jun 23 2024
    Visit our website BeautifulIllusions.org for a complete set of show notes and links to almost everything discussed in this episodeSelected References:2:25 - “The State of the Culture, 2024” by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker, 2024)4:10 - Gioia cites Huxley’s Brave New World, which takes place in a future dystopia where the populace is essentially oppressed by their addiction to amusement, as the more likely outcome than the oppressive government control depicted in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. See “Pleasures” - a 1923 essay by Huxley published in Vanity Fair for more on his thoughts regarding the problematic ease of entertainment in the early 20th century.6:15 - See Gioia’s “fish” model8:16 - See “The Tiktokification of Everything” (Single Grain) and “The ‘TikTokification’ of the next generation” (Empoword Journalism, 2023)11:33 - Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) by Neil Postman13:06 - “The medium is the message” is a phrase and chapter title that comes from a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan called Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and it posits that that a communication medium itself, not the messages it carries, needs to be carefully considered because while the content of the medium is a message that can be easily grasped, the character of the medium is another message which can be easily overlooked, and it is this message that ultimately shapes “the scale and form of human action.”13:50 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 32 - We Read So We Can Talk from April 202421:53 - Dopamine Nation (2021) by Anna Lembke, MD explores the interconnection of pleasure and pain in the brain and helps explain addictive behaviors — not just to drugs and alcohol, but also to food, sex, and smartphones. For more see “In 'Dopamine Nation,' Overabundance Keeps Us Craving More” (NPR, 2021) and watch Dr. Lembke discuss the science behind the book in a YouTube clip.22:01 - See the “Anhedonia” Wikipedia entry23:24 - The Anxious Generation (2024) by Jonathan Haidt23:38 - Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It (2022) by Richard Reeves27:53 - See “Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound.” by Maryanne Wolf (The Guardian, 2018) and her book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World28:10 - Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene33:04 - See “TikTok’s ‘Roman Empire’ Meme, Explained” (Forbes, 2023)34:30 - Read “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T.S. Eliot (Poetry Foundation)34:52 - Watch the “8 Led Zeppelin Songs That 'Rip Off' Other Songs” YouTube video37:07 - The Righteous Mind (2012) by Jonathan Haidt37:48 - Ready Player One (book, 2011) by Ernest Cline and movie (2018)38:14 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza from July 202141:48 - See “Humans can barely distinguish AI-generated content from human-created content” (The Decoder, 2024)42:22 - See “Socrates on the Invention of Writing and the Relationship of Writing to Memory” and “Socrates on the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing”46:50 - See “Boredom: A History of Western Philosophical Perspectives” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) and “Heidegger’s “Profound Boredom”: using boredom to cultivate the soul” (blog post from Eric Hyde)This episode was recorded in April 2024The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti
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    56 mins
  • EP 32 - We Read So We Can Talk

    EP 32 - We Read So We Can Talk
    Apr 14 2024
    Visit our website BeautifulIllusions.org for a complete set of show notes and links to almost everything discussed in this episodeSelected References:2:26 - See “Something Went Terribly Wrong With Online Ads” (The Atlantic, 2024) and “Uber’s Ad Network Continues To Grow” (Marketing Brew, 2023)4:00 - Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom4:15 - See “The Western Canon” Wikipedia entry12:10 - See “Shakespeare Contra Nietzsche” (Marginalia, 2016)16:41 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 29 - Vacation Part 2: It’s A Process from October 202322:35 - See the Great American Novel Wikipedia entry and list22:54 - In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust22:25 - The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein25:30 - Sean M. Carroll25:40 - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen26:10 - Babel and The Poppy War Trilogy by R.F. Kuang27:55 - Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein31:48 - The Shining novel by Stephen King and The Shining movie directed by Stanley Kubrick33:20 - One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest novel by Ken Kesey and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest movie36:15 - The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub42:40 - The Scream painting by Edvard Munch43:40 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens from June 202147:25 - Shark Heart by Emily Habeck55:36 - Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarrantino58:49 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 31 - Life, Art, & Experience: A Conversation, recorded in November 2023 and released in January 2024
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    1 hr and 3 mins

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