The saga of surrogate McKenna West and the baby she refused to abort despite the demands of the bio parents is really Biblical. I think the latest now is the bio parents, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, have custody but are not allowed to leave Texas until the court hearing later this month.
The baby will get the first heart surgery at least (typically this type of heart defect requires 3 surgeries during childhood).
West is not allowed to be near the baby or say she is the parent.
Surrogacy is really a quagmire. I think it shouldn’t be allowed. Babies are not possessions. Women are not AirBnBs.
“Memorial of Unborn Children II” by Slovakian sculptor Martin Hudáček
Fauci said the Covid vaccine was safe for pregnant women, but he knew that it caused miscarriages. 82% of pregnant women in their first trimester lost their baby after getting the vaccine.
The blood of these innocents cry out to the heavens for justice.
I write this mostly to prove that I can still convey my thoughts into written words. I hope it is worth a read. These particular thoughts were sparked by a recent article on AI.
Pixy linked this article the other day – a blog-style write-up of the paper “Prompt Injection as Role Confusion” and while I can’t claim to understand the technicalities, it certainly got me philosophizing.
You don’t have to read the paper, but I am quoting the relevant in the fold below in case you are interested.
The World to an LLM
How does an LLM know the difference between its own thoughts and someone else’s words?
To see why this is hard, let’s look at what the world actually looks like to a model. Here’s a simple chat where we ask Claude to check the day of the week. I took a snapshot of it midway through its follow-up response:
Left = what we see; right = what the LLM gets.
On the left is what we see in the chat interface: a structured conversation with distinct turns. On the right is what the model actually receives as input: a single, continuous stream of text.
This string contains everything: system prompts, user messages, tool outputs, the LLM’s own previous responses and reasoning. An LLM is just a function that takes in a string and predicts the next token, so everything it knows, remembers, or has thought must live somewhere in one string (aside from its weights). If you edit the string, you edit the model’s reality. Delete a turn and that exchange never happened; rewrite its previous response and those become its new memories. The string isn’t a record of the model’s experience so much as it is the experience.
This has strange implications. I can distinguish my own thoughts from your speech without effort; they arrive through completely different channels with completely different sensory signatures.But for an LLM, everything arrives through the same channel as one long token soup. Its own thoughts sit next to your instructions, which sit next to the contents of a random webpage it just fetched.
“Its own thoughts sit next to your instructions, which sit next to the contents of a random webpage it just fetched.”
Here’s what I got from that article: AI has no body, no senses, no experience of reality. All it has are text streams. Rivers of text. Everything is text. Thought is text. Reality is text. There’s no boundary between thought and reality.
I find it hard to imagine that state of existence because it has no boundaries. As humans we are formed with boundaries, we are defined by our boundaries – the boundaries of flesh.
I am my body, my body is me. I know I am not you because you are bounded by your body, which is distinct from my body.
I am not saying we are just flesh – not at all. We are both body and spirit:
The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. [CCC 362]
It is that union of flesh and spirit, body and intellect, that makes us individuals. The body that senses, that perceives, through which cognition arises. The individual. The I.
This is a foundational reality. Standing firmly on this rock, we can safely start looking at the other implications within that AI article. AI itself, of course, but also modern follies like neo-gnosticism (aka queerness and fluidity of identity), as well as try to understand non-corporeal creations – beings of pure intellect, like angels.
In 1775, the United States Postal Service was established with the appointment of Ben Franklin as our first Postmaster General. He had experience, previously serving as Philadelphia’s Postmaster.
A couple of centuries later, also on this day in 1908, the FBI was born when the Chief Examiner Stanley W. Finch was given oversight of the Department of Justice’s first permanent investigators. I still have mixed feelings about this.
Colorized photo of Ulysses S. Grant, 1864, taken by Mathew B. Brady
On this day in 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was appointed the first General of the Army of the United States, a newly created four‑star rank in the U.S. Army.
The Crawdad Hole 