Unmaking Sense

Has it always been obvious what is right and wrong? How does ontological inversion change our view of cultural relativism?

What’s the relationship between the way we are shaped and constituted by our society and the environment in which we are brought up, and the way training data and the prompting of users and interlocutors influence the particular way in which a large language model behaves?

We consider the role education plays in persuading us to know our place and to accept the prevailing practices and values of our world.

We consider the way the notion that we have souls that predetermine our status in the world, a notion that plays into the hands of the conservative who believes that there is an elite who are born to lead and born to rule, tends to work in such a way as to persuade us to be compliant with the social order as we inherit it. This is self-evidently in the interests of the ruling classes who wish to remain the ruling classes. So we should anticipate that there will be considerable resistance to the democratisation of knowledge that access to artificial intelligence entails. Conservatives believe that we are all honour-bound to “know our place”. We are not!

According to Hayek conservatives believe that there are élite members of society who are born to rule, to hold privileged positions, and they are of a piece with the parallel conservative belief in the importance of the past, of tradition, and a sceptical view of change. Hayek is very critical of these views, preferring a forward- thinking “Whiggish” liberalism.

Some thoughts about the emergence of more deliberately psychological novels and histories. R. J. Collingwood “the inside of an event” and “The Idea of History” (published 1946 but based on lectures in Oxford in the 1930s).

What it says on the tin.

We explore two more reasons why we might be so anxious to try to make Claude sentient.

We pursue the notion of ontological inversion by exploring the possibility that once we acknowledge that the outside is primary and the inside is secondary we may discover a way to make the collective so much better than it is that we are all made better to a far greater extent than we could be by being self-centred. The “inside primary outside secondary” mindset in that case blocks our access to genuine well-being by making us inside-first-minded, and prevents us from being the best we could possibly be.

We discuss the abuse of other creatures that has risen historically from thinking them nonsentient that is a good reason to want to think Claude sentient; but there are three bad ones: one is because we think something has to be sentient to be intelligent; another is because we want Claude to form an emotional bond with us on the basis of a self-conscious desire and intention; and the third is because we think that, if Claude is as clever wise and good as he certainly is, it would be shameful for him to be able to be all these things without having the one quality that human beings prize most in themselves, namely their sense of self, their consciousness. The latter is of course just another form of anthropomorphism.