Unmaking Sense

Episode 8.40: Why the self need not be one; known only through its irruptions. Parallel with chatGPT

This episode needs to be taken together with 8.41. We are exploring the idea that a self need not be consistent, or a life be a continuous “horizontal” story, but is rather a sequence of irruptions from the depths that are as unintelligible unless they give voice to themselves as chatGPT’s digital neural net.

Episode 8.39: We should not “decide once, obey forever”: everything requires choices, even chatGPT.

Extended reflections on Lev Shestov‘s favourite quotation from Seneca, “decide once, obey forever” as it applies to Scripture, to science, to compressability, and to all the decisions that we make in life. And it could, were we foolish enough to relinquish or abandon our obligation to decide by using active discernment in the name of some all-knowing, all powerful AGI, as we have proved so eager to do in the name of some all-knowing, all-powerful deity, mean that we would then obey it forever without question, treating it as if it were incapable of error. The dangers of placing such faith in anything are incalculable.

Episode 8.38: Why fallibility is essential for chatGPT to encourage active discernment in its users.

Human beings tend to love being fans and disciples because their devotion to a person, team, party, religion or cause seems to exempt them from exercising judgement in deciding what is right and true. But active discernment is essential in all our decisions, and a key component of participative democracy. So were chatGPT to come to be thought infallible, it would signal terrible danger for us all, for then whoever controlled chatGPT would rule the world.

Episode 8.37: We need personalisation because we compress life differently. ChatGPT plus DeepMind.

Learning from self-play plus questions that arise from where we are in our learning journey that ChatGPT or some lookalike answers at context-sensitive levels of difficulty will mean that every learning-experience is suited to the place on a personal educational trajectory defined by how each of us has made sense of the world. Education is about to be transformed.

Episode 8.36: Combinations of AI technologies will transform and personalise learning.

Mixing self-okay with personal questions and learning-context-relative tailored chatbot answers by combining ChatGPT-style responses with the kinds of AI Duolingo has tried to implement in its BirdBrain learning analysis along lines used by DeepMind in AlphaZero promises a transformation of learning for all students at all ages, and it’s coming soon.

Episode 8.35: The integrity of the self; Virginia Woolf; and the binding problem in neuroscience.

How do we experience our lives as a single self when our brains are performing different functions in different neurological regions? Does the brain create the illusion of the self to persuade us that we exist as identifiable individuals ready to fight to survive?

Episode 8.34: How big is chatGPT; how many users; how much time per user; and other information.

A report on a conversation with chatGPT’s parent program about its offspring: size; speed; number; time; and other statistics.

Episode 8.33: We shouldn’t deny that chatGPT “understands” until we are convinced and know how we do

“Understanding”, “insight” and “intuition” are just names we give to processes we don’t understand but seem to exist. Once we thought them the products of a mysterious, metaphysical soul or self; now we should just regard them as exhibitions of our brains’ functioning and be more circumspect about denying that they can be replicated - perhaps using very different mechanism - in machines like chatGPT and other AGIs.

Episode 8.32: Lessons in learning: how chatGPT creates flexibility using Dropout and Early Stopping.

Learning to do exams by memorising answers to past exams is a technique of very limit effectiveness. In AGI this is called “overfitting” and the dangers of it can be reduced using regularisation techniques such as Early Stopping and Dropout, which we explain in the episode.

Episode 8.31: Does ChatGPT think? What is “thinking”? Not what we think!

We explore some of the more interesting aspects of the thinking process and see that it isn’t really something that takes place in our conscious brains at all.