One-on-one · Mill Valley, Palo Alto and online
An invitation not to learn but to know.
Every AI product, from a chatbot to an augmented reality headset, makes claims about what a machine sees, knows, understands and chooses. Philosophers argued over those same questions for a thousand years, in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman.
You bring a question you keep coming back to. I find the argument that meets it, in the original texts and manuscripts, and read it with you. Afterward you get a written page: the text, my translation, and the questions we reached.
The practice
You bring something live: a question about minds, seeing, knowing, memory or choice that your work keeps raising. I bring one text to read beside it. You need no background in its language. Sessions are online, in Mill Valley or in Palo Alto.
Two one-hour meetings over four weeks, a classical passage chosen for your question, and a written page after each meeting: the text, my translation and our questions.
For founding teams and research groups.
I work with a few people at a time.
A second offer
Private reading of Arabic, Persian and Ottoman texts in the original, one-on-one. Hafez, Rumi and Sa'di in Persian; Ibn Khaldun and Ibn al-Haytham in Arabic; Ottoman texts and manuscripts in their own script.
$75 / hour online · $90 / hour in person, Southern Marin
See Reading in the originalOne argument
Ibn Sina said you only think the face is in the glass. Ibn al-Haytham worked out where the image appears, even in curved mirrors. Suhrawardi said the image is not in the glass at all: it is suspended, in no place. Ibn Arabi said the one who says “I saw my face” is neither telling the truth nor lying. If you are building a vision model, a world model or an augmented reality device, you are standing inside this argument.
Notes
One sentence from a source, in the original and in English, and three questions. A new one each week.
این جهان کوه است و فعل ما ندا
سوی ما آید نداها را صدا
This world is a mountain, and what we do is a call; the echo of our calls comes back to us.
Rumi, Masnavi, Book I
About
I am a literary translator and an independent researcher in comparative experimental philosophy, based in Mill Valley. I read the classical sources on perception, knowledge, mind and choice in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman, and I put their arguments to the machines being built now. Technosophia is my own working name for that line of inquiry.
I have no degree in AI and I don't pretend to know your stack. What I bring is a long memory of the arguments your product is quietly taking a side in.
العلم هو ظنّ لا يتغير
Knowledge is a judgment that does not change.
Ibn al-Haytham, Maqāla fī al-maʿlūmāt (ed. Rashed, vol. 4, p. 467)
المختار مجبور في اختياره
We choose, yet our choosing is compelled.
Ibn Arabi, al-Futūḥāt, Bāb 72 (ed. Yahya, vol. 10, p. 204)
Contact
Write me a few lines about the question you're working on, or the text you want to read. I reply personally.