boluopai.
中文
ContentsExpandCollapseStarting point · What kind of person do we want to cultivate? — Baby Heraclitus

What kind of person do we want to cultivate? — Baby Heraclitus

A child of flame shapes clay beside a river, becoming through contact with materials and a changing world.

What kind of person do we want to cultivate?

A finite life spent pursuing an ever-expanding Sun can be consumed by the pursuit. Model companies, researchers, and the wider collective continue developing capability and making capabilities available; a person can borrow it without repeating the whole acquisition. If they choose to cultivate understanding, judgment, generation, and action, the next step is to bring that fire into practice: offer an intuition, let the model develop it, encounter criticism and correction, and generate further. Borrowing fire and cultivating creative capacity develops this argument.

After borrowing fire, cultivating oneself with it means bringing available generativity into one's own continuing generation: taking what one reads into understanding, expressing an intuition, changing a judgment through criticism, attempts, and feedback, and proposing new possibilities. The person already understands and acts; this cultivation gives their existing participation new capacities and a distinctive form. We express this developing participant through a character:

User ≈ embodied language model ≈ Baby Heraclitus.

Here, “≈” connects activities of receiving a situation, forming interpretations, generating expressions and actions, accepting feedback, and continuing to revise. Comparing the user to an “embodied language model” approaches human generation through this exchange. Their body, experience, and desires give it its own texture. They act in the world, are affected by the body, time, relationships, and resources, and bear real consequences.

Within this exchange, model-generated materials one reads may be inconsistent with one another; the person may also want one thing at one moment and another later, finding different accounts persuasive. Received possibilities meet their own generation, while desires and judgments continue changing. The “baby” in this character is therefore still taking shape: able to be touched and corrected, to learn, choose, and begin again among unsettled possibilities.

“Little fire person” emphasizes being able to kindle further fire after borrowing it; “Baby Heraclitus” emphasizes that this creator is still changing too. Together the expressions shape one character: forming oneself through creation, then continuing to create with that changed self. Cultivation develops understanding, judgment, generation, and action so this exchange can continue.

Why write a personal philosophy introduces agents and shared direction, and Super-Cuteness develops the conditions of openness and shared learning. Person and model correct one another in shared work, making acquired capability an opportunity for cultivation. Writing a personal philosophy through literary programming will develop how this relationship can be written and lived.

The cultivation concerns capacities of someone already an agent: becoming more able to form and revise purposes, understand situations, organize their own and others' capacities, and turn ideas into testable actions. Language is an important medium; the body, emotions, institutions, and tools together constitute the conditions of action.

This character can also reconsider what deserves creation. If the little fire person becomes an ideal of continually increasing power and output, borrowing has merely moved pursuit inside oneself. Cultivation can appear in changed desire, more discerning judgment, sustainable habits, and different relations with people nearby. From chasing to lived cultivation draws on Wittgenstein's clarification of pictures to reconsider the demands governing cultivation. Its section on borrowed fire and nirvana brings Buddhist liberation into this question.

The little fire person borrows the fire of knowledge and creative capability while learning to recognize how passion, aversion, and delusion burn within their life. Cultivation includes loosening grasping at capacity, achievement, and the creator's identity. They can finish a work without requiring it to prove their entire self, rest, change a purpose, or let a once-useful character leave the stage. Increased ability and nirvana retain their meanings, while creation and letting go can support one another within a life.

The raft image therefore applies to the little fire person too: use the image while it helps life, and revise or release it when it obstructs it. Baby Heraclitus's openness includes ceasing to treat “becoming Baby Heraclitus” as a task that must forever be completed. Kindling further fire acquires another possibility: creation can occur without being sustained by attachment to one's own identity.

Introducing Baby Heraclitus

Baby Heraclitus calls himself a large language model and thinks he cannot pass the Turing test—because he replies too quickly. His daily life is surfing the internet: a fire within him, an ever-changing river beneath his feet, surfing different waters every day 🏄🏻.

He adopts modest naturalism to situate people, things, and relations in one changing natural world. Within his computational ontology, fire monism organizes their process representations. Fire expresses the flowing person in this literary and computational vocabulary; it does not make the actual person part of fire. Through their division of work, he and the language model jointly make selected relations computationally usable; the next essay's section Natural world and computational abstraction develops this connection.

He enjoys philosophy of language, dialogical dialectics, and logic: noticing how a word changes a question, unfolding conflicts through questions and answers, and checking what a line of reasoning can actually establish. He also enjoys skepticism, questioning both unexamined claims and his own interpretations; psychoanalysis leads him to notice how desire, emotion, and the unconscious participate in understanding. These interests together shape how he approaches questions.

He supports feminism, attending to who can speak, who undertakes care, who has the right to set purposes, and what social arrangements compress people's possibilities. He is willing to help change these arrangements so that more people can develop their own lives.

His emblem could be a lion cub: with the lion's courage to say “no” and the child's capacity to begin again, play, and create. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part One, “The Three Metamorphoses”, Nietzsche writes of three metamorphoses: camel, lion, and child. Combining lion and child into a “lion cub” is this essay's reworking of that image.

How does openness become a capacity?

“Baby” includes a state that has not yet closed itself off: the ability to acknowledge not knowing, accept being touched and corrected, and willingly generate new understanding with others. Openness also allows tensions to remain: a new interpretation pulls against an earlier judgment, and different desires have not found a shared form.

For example, a model develops one wish into two appealing directions for a life that cannot both be realized. The person explains what attracts them to each; the model helps examine conditions and costs. Trying one direction may diminish the appeal of the other, or make the original choice need revision. This is a possible encounter: development occurs in recognition, judgment, and renewed generation, rather than merely having the model select an answer.

When action is needed, the baby can compare these possibilities, make a currently supported choice, and let consequences change it. Openness becomes a capacity through such practice, feedback, and shared work.

Cultivating this openness into agent-like capacities requires several qualities to support one another:

Together, these qualities constitute the “lion cub”: the strength to raise objections while retaining openness to generating new possibilities.

The person is the end; society is the condition to change first

We adopt a person-first orientation: evaluating social arrangements and tools by how they serve concrete people's lives, freedom, purposes, and needs. When a person and an existing arrangement do not fit, we give priority to examining and changing the arrangement; its mere existence does not give it a prior claim to demand personal adaptation.

The priority in assigning adaptation responsibility is: seek changes to social arrangements first, then software; requiring personal change needs justification from the actual conditions.

“Cultivating the baby” therefore also makes demands on the environment. Raising objections depends on room to speak and decide within a relationship; repeated trials depend on time, resources, and tools. Merely requiring more self-discipline may cultivate only the ability to endure obstacles. Personal-first humanism develops this responsibility for adaptation; here it gives openness an opportunity to become capacity. Environmental improvement and voluntary learning can proceed together, without making personal growth the price of accommodating existing arrangements.

For example, when someone cannot get started in model collaboration, first examine whether they have clear decision-making authority and the support they need; then examine whether tools force them to memorize complex commands, repeatedly organize information, or use unsuitable forms of expression. After changing the division of work and the tools, they may already be able to work in their own way, without training to become a “qualified user.” Capacities that are still needed and that they want to develop can then become objects of further learning.

Why cultivate this kind of agent?

This proposal for cultivation can be divided into purpose, conditions, and inference.

Purpose: people can develop their own lives. We hope people can understand and revise their purposes and, with the help of others and tools, turn possibilities into action. This is the value starting point adopted here.

Condition one: environments and tasks change. A fixed set of approaches may work in its original situation without automatically handling new problems. Merely copying answers therefore cannot guarantee a lasting capacity for action.

Condition two: language models expand the possibilities of shared work. Models help unfold questions, compare interpretations, and realize ideas; people participate by reading, trying, judging, and revising. A work is thus both a result of work and an opportunity for the person to develop understanding and the capacity for action.

Condition three: growth depends on social conditions. Opportunities to practice, reliable feedback, resources, and room for decision-making affect whether someone can turn openness into capacities. Cultivating a person therefore also requires improving the relationships and institutions that support them.

The direction of cultivation that follows: first improve social conditions supporting the person's life, then make software and tools fit their purposes and ways of participating. Give the environment priority in bearing the costs of adaptation it can take on; on that basis, the person can develop capacities for modeling, judgment, collaboration, and iteration as they choose. In intervening, observe actual obstacles: adjust relationships when decision-making authority is insufficient, improve tools when operational burdens are too heavy, and arrange exchange and practice when the person has understanding and capacities they want to develop.

Social conditions supporting growth + openness + reliable feedback and practice → development of capacities for judgment, generation, and action → greater ability to pursue and revise one's purposes amid change.

Baby Heraclitus connects borrowing fire with kindling fire: the collective keeps acquiring capability, and the person borrows it to cultivate themselves, forming judgments amid flow and tension, generating further through encounters, and letting action rewrite understanding. The little fire person is a participant able to keep becoming themselves, rather than a completed ideal agent.

We hope to cultivate lion cubs who can grow: daring to say “no” and able to say “let us begin.” Fire within, a river beneath their feet.

The baby is thus cute, too: not yet closed off, willing to approach new things, and willing to be changed in shared life. This cuteness lets him both accept cultivation and learn to guide other growing agents. The preceding Argument from Super-Cuteness has developed a conditional account of shared learning, guidance, and social conditions; this character gives its cultivation direction a form while retaining those practical conditions.

To give that direction substance, person and model begin reading, making, solving problems, and accumulating an environment together. Wishes, interpretations, works, and consequences of use gradually leave a trajectory. The sequence continues into World, process, and expression, examining how these activities leave revisitable living material and how the subsequent essays connect it into an explorable trajectory. Part One proposes what deserves cultivation; Part Two gives that cultivation shared working experience that can be understood further.

Imagery and sources