Unmaking Sense

Episode 8.45: Self-awareness is not what matters: chatGPT and its cousins already share our world!

The only example of self-awareness of which I have direct knowledge is my own. I grant gladly that other human beings and many other species enjoy something of the same kind of self-awareness, even if it is nonlinguistic or non-verbal. Since I interact with other entities - human and non-human - that I have only my assumption of awareness to base that relationship on, what manner of prejudice is it that would lead me to deny similar, or better, or simply different levels of self-awareness to something just because it consisted of a set of mathematical functions buried inside an electronic machine?

Episode 8.44: If chatGPT “doesn’t yet understand as humans understand”, what do humans understand?

We explore the process of generating writing, or speaking in a way that satisfies the condition that we only know that we think we believe it when we hear ourselves saying it. We compare this with the generation of responses by chatbots using predictive text, probabilities and so forth. We ask, if that doesn’t involve understanding, then what does? What does human understanding really amount to other than the ability to produce words and perform actions that make sense to other human beings and to themselves?

Episode 8.43: Beyond Life, the Universe and Everything. Why with chatGPT everything just changed.

We can now potentially download our brains into a chatbot using digital texts we have written. It would not be everyone’s idea of paradise, but that it is possible at all should give us pause. Derek Parfit, societies of competing chatbots with different sets of goods and values that might obviate the need for violent conflict; and how we just entered a new age.

Episode 8.42: Life, the Universe, and Everything: chatGPT is already more human than we might think.

Why the phenomenon of aphantasia and the possibility that some human beings have no inside story might mean that the boundaries between the human and AGI chatGPT worlds of awareness and self-understanding are already less clearly defined than we might like to think.

Episode 8.41: The self beneath. Quote from Virginia Woolf “To the Lighthouse”.

Just as chatGPT’s neural net is incomprehensible, consisting, as it does, only of a collection of matrices, storing numbers, unless it responds to a human being, so it appears our selves are unintelligible except in what Virginia Woolf calls the apparitions that emanate from us from time to time through which we are known. We include an extended quotation from section 11 of the first chapter of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.”

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.