Andrew Sage

I mean, you're right.

Thank you.

Go on.

So Burroughs' concept of the third mind, this book that he wrote, right?

When two minds collaborate, a third mind or intelligence communicates with you.

Again, not about creating the new, but about revealing itself in what was already present.

Yes.

But the idea is that...

You have to have two minds in order to get to this dialectical third mind that was inherent in the conditions, the situation, the language of the two.

When one interacts with any form of large language model or chat GBT, I, in my mind, and with what I carry, sit in front of a computer and type my input.

That's one mind.

Can you tell me where the second is?

Because even if you're cutting up a book, there's a mind in the book.

But even if we're going to be generous and say that these large language models are the ones that are doing the cut-up process and you are secondary or tertiary or even further down the line to it, I mean, it doesn't involve a human intelligence at that point.

So just in terms of the, you know, the Borogian current, it's just not a third mind.

The material conditions are such that it is not and cannot be a third mind.

Where I would like to take this discussion is actually to the very next talk that I attended.

It was part of a three-talk series called The Politics of Tarot.

And the specific one that I think continued on this line of thought and even stuff like automatic writing was From Icon to Index by Thomas Leake, The Generative Logic of Tarot.

in which he discussed, I'll have to check his name later, but discussed an author in the 80s who was trying to use tarot as a way to remove the human element of writing, try to create an automatic story using the tarot archetypes assembled in a randomized shuffling to generate a story based on the linkages between each of the cards and remove his own