Is the first action hero also the first antihero...? The transformation of Uruk's tyrant and the flaws of the legendary Greek heroes reveal a time before good and evil
I asked Perplexity what it “thought” of this piece. A few quotes:
“In the world of ancient Mesopotamia, there was no binary of good versus evil akin to the later dualisms introduced by Zoroastrianism and, subsequently, Abrahamic religions.”
“Gilgamesh's journey is about the civilizing force of companionship and the challenges of leadership in the first great city, not about embodying or failing to embody a moral ideal.”
Perplexity lists half a dozen sources, but no footnotes, which it usually does. I asked it about this. From the reply it appears that all it did was paraphrase your text.
I’ve been thinking about the concepts of good and evil. I find it heartening to learn that we invented these concepts. Perhaps in the near future we can invent some equally critical concepts that will help us continue to develop civilization in the atomic/AI age.
These large language models are only really a map of language connections (a probability map of word connections), and it is quite happy to run a functional thesaurus over a text and send it back at you merely paraphrased. 🙂
As someone whose Masters degree was in AI, I am sceptical that this is the 'AI age', for all that this story is being sold very heavily right now. The transition from knowledge to information, which we covered at Stranger Worlds previously, strikes me as the key watershed, and we are sadly still very much trapped in the 'information age'.
What we currently call AI, no matter how impressive it may seem, might be most significant in the near future for the extent that it will make censorship and propaganda easier to execute. This is not, I would suggest, something to celebrate.
"I’ve been thinking about the concepts of good and evil. I find it heartening to learn that we invented these concepts. Perhaps in the near future we can invent some equally critical concepts that will help us continue to develop civilization in the atomic/AI age."
I think it worth pointing out that one who believed in divine revelation would claim these concepts were revealed, rather than invented, but I appreciate that from where you sit there are no appeals to the cosmic umpire! 😉
Although I'm open to the idea of new concepts emerging (crafted or revealed!), I am not convinced new concepts is the solution to any of our predicaments. One of the strange and wonderful things about studying philosophy is the convergence of ideas (E.O. Wilson called this 'consilience', although I largely reject the specific metaphysical conclusions he throws on top of this general idea).
I believe we already have all the concepts we need to get us out of any pickle, even this one. The trick is going to be working out which of the concepts we have will have the power to help us rescue ourselves.
Dichotomies are one of the mental tools we have for constructing models of what is. We use them as thought anchors; often we use them as end points on a spectrum. The dichotomy: believers non-believers, is one of the many templates that we use to model each other’s subjective realities.
My definitions:
believers: persons who hold that entities/forces exist that intrinsically cannot be understood by rational/evidentiary investigation.
non-believers: persons who hold that it is not productive to posit entities/forces that intrinsically cannot be understood by rational/evidentiary investigation.
As usual the slipperiness of words results in this dichotomy not really being that clear-cut. But when it comes to making societal action decisions, either the believers or the non-believers prevail. I believe (ha!) that in the long run the survival of human civilization depends on human actions being commensurate with the eternal laws of physical reality, and that we should base all of our significant decisions on the best understanding we have of these laws at the time. So, I do not personally accept “it is God’s will” that we do such-and-such as a useful way of proceeding. While I accept that this may be opposing parties’ real reason, unless a majority overrides, I seek a rational/evidentiary arguments for any action that significantly affects social wellbeing.
A Multi-millennia Global Civilization
During my body/mind maintenance noon and evening walks I’ve been listening to the Great Courses “Big History” lectures. From these lectures I conclude that almost ALL previous civilizations have been autocratic. They have all eventually disintegrated; either due to environmental factors or social disruption. None of these disintegrations was a threat to the on-going development of human civilization per se because for the most part they were only loosely connected.
Reality shifted on July 16, 1945, and November 1, 1952. On those two days humankind’s insatiable curiosity and irrepressible creativity, coupled with never ceasing inter-species competition, brought it to the point where it can now commit civilization suicide. My reading of current social forces is that our most likely soon-to-be-realized future is something like that of 1984. That is, most states will be under the sway of a handful of autocratic super states. For me, that in itself will not necessarily be an existential disaster. Human curiosity and creativity can flourish to some extent in a benign autocracy. But the nature of the human psyche seems to be that sooner or later an insane autocrat will seek to expand his power by using her nuclear weapons.
At the present moment, the only alternative I can envision is a world of mostly democratic states held together by a few universally committed-to principles. The rub is that the evidence appears to indicate that the human psyche is so constructed that this is not likely. On the other hand, perhaps we can come up with some way of combining/strengthening existing concepts, or we will craft (or if you prefer, have revealed) new concepts.
Yes, you have pointed out that having a consortium of mostly democratic states is no guarantee against civilizational suicide. My opinion is that such a configuration would have substantially better survival odds than a configuration dominated by dictators.
You: ” Although I'm open to the idea of new concepts emerging (crafted or revealed!), I am not convinced new concepts is the solution to any of our predicaments. One of the strange and wonderful things about studying philosophy is the convergence of ideas (E.O. Wilson called this 'consilience') … I believe we already have all the concepts we need to get us out of any pickle, even this one. The trick is going to be working out which of the concepts we have will have the power to help us rescue ourselves.”
I find it heartening that over time humanity has been able to firmly hold a few life-affirming concepts. Complete abstinence from human sacrifices is one. Another is the rejection of legal human slavery; another is the rejection of infanticide. Perhaps there are others.
You: “The transition from knowledge to information, which we covered at Stranger Worlds previously, strikes me as the key watershed, and we are sadly still very much trapped in the 'information age'.”
I remember that you had a piece awhile back that discussed information versus knowledge, but with my deteriorating memory I need to re-read and study it before I can cogently comment.
Where is your piece? I ask Windows File Explorer to list all files in my Stranger Worlds folder that contain the string ‘information’. File Explorer displays a list of around fifty files. For a few of these it highlights some text. I display “Lost In Information” (07/02/24), but I want the hard copy I marked up and filed. “Find” in Word on my list of Stranger Worlds posts and comments gives me my document number. Ah!
You: “At this point in time we were already giving up the sense of information being a process of reaching an understanding, and were much closer to the lone fact swirling through infospace.”
and
“Over half a millennia, the meaning of ‘information’ was entirely transformed - from a process of education, explication, and enlightenment that lasted until the closing decades of the eighteenth century, into its contemporary role as a hopelessly inadequate substitute for truth.”
As with “fascist”, perhaps it is the case that we’re just dealing with the meaning of a word changing over time. But I think it’s more than that. If I use ‘fact’ to point to an assertion about objective reality that we think is true, then perhaps I can claim that in the vast infosphere there are some facts that can be assembled into knowledge. The rub is not that the meaning of ‘information’ has changed, but that the process of corralling truth from facts has been largely abandoned.
In a comment at “Lost in Information” you cite an earlier Stranger Worlds piece: “Facing Books”. In my view, in this piece you introduce, via Turing, the concept of ‘information’ as a metaphor of mind that you contrast with ‘mechanism’. You go on to say: “The literary mind gives way to what Maurice Berman called “the cybernetic dream”, a term Illich evokes in his address on technological literacy .... There is a watershed here, a divide into two different kinds of human: the literate mind, and the cybernetic mind.”
further on:
“To the cybernetic mind, conversely, “words are units of information”, strung together into messages, and thoughts are operations performed upon abstractions, programmed with data. The cybernetic mind composes ‘texts’, and the faces of those who do so are hidden. You cannot face someone who lives in such a way, you can only ‘interface’ with them. This transformation, this chasm between two different ways of understanding knowledge, has had wide-ranging and largely unnoticed effects upon human existence. In the field of scholarship alone, the last century shows a decline of academic writing as a form of discourse, replaced by a disembodied assessment of the informational content of texts.”
If there are just two types of minds, Iiterate and cybernetic, I would have to cope to the later.
Are there really any anomalies in the way the universe unfolds? It seems to me that the rise of the cybernetic mind fits naturally into humankind’s continuing evolution. The problem is that this rise has sidelined the literate mind . The solution is not bashing the cybernetic mind but establishing cooperative dialogue. It seems to me that this is one of the things you and I are attempting to do here at Stranger Worlds and Citizen Philosophers. It does not appear that to date we’re meeting with much success in enlisting others to participate in, or themselves initiate, such an endeavor.
My mind began its final development prior to the advent of computers. My mind’s cybernetic orientation is an add-on that has become dominant. The present societal dominance of the cybernetic mind is dangerous. It is imperative that we move toward better balance. Personally, the only path I see, other than attempting to nourish the literary part of my own mind, is to keep on tacking up pieces on public bulletin boards, and to keep on trying to get others to initiate truth seeking dialogues.
Nice reply. Thank you. Our intermittent long-term dialogue over some of the subjects and thinkers you touch on in your posts and replies is personally quite satisfying.
In my mind there are several interesting questions here:
.a) What sort of machines are the current AI interlocutors?
.b) What effect will the current AI interlocutors have on social reality in the coming decade?
.c) What is the relationship between intelligence and information?
.d) Is there an intrinsic chasm between believers and non-believers?
.e) Is the human psyche capable of manifesting a multi-millennia global civilization?
Current AI interlocutors
I have experience only with the various free AI text chat bots, so the scope of my remarks is limited. If there was such a thing as AI when I was doing my PhD gig, none of my professors knew about it. Recently I tried to assuage my ignorance with a couple of on-line courses. In general, I agree with your assessment: “These large language models are only really a map of language connections (a probability map of word connections), and it is quite happy to run a functional thesaurus over a text and send it back at you merely paraphrased.” I am puzzled, however, by their apparent ability to appear to be rational in some situations.
AI effects on social reality
Despite the hype, the usefulness of these programs is limited. Nonetheless, my guess is that these programs will have significant cultural effects over the next decade. Possible enough to informally speak of an age of AI. Whether or not their overall impact will be positive will depend mostly on market forces. As you suggest, the prognosis is not heartening.
In my dissertation research I attempted to construct a simple mathematician’s assistant for the construction of proofs in formalized theories. The results (other than my committee awarding me a degree!) were disappointing. But this was more than fifty years ago. I’m guessing, but I think it would be strange if some progress toward useful artificial rationality has not occurred in half a century.
Ultimately, I rest my belief in the possibility of useful, genuine artificial intelligence on my view that our natural intelligence arises from physical phenomena that we will eventually learn to approximately imitate. Like flying, such intelligence will not be identical to our human mixture of emotion and reason but will nonetheless enable us “to go where no none has gone before.”
Thanks for your patience - I didn't want to rush out a reply while I was struggling with some heavy lifting elsewhere, but I seem to have gained control of the current project, and have time to do your notes justice. You raise some great questions, and offer some brilliant commentary on them too!
Q. What sort of machines are the current AI interlocutors?
Frank: "I agree with your assessment: 'These large language models are only really a map of language connections (a probability map of word connections), and it is quite happy to run a functional thesaurus over a text and send it back at you merely paraphrased.' I am puzzled, however, by their apparent ability to appear to be rational in some situations."
This is a fair question. There are two answers I can give: the honest AI researcher answer is that people don't really know how most of these things work, because although the architecture for neural network-based AI (which LLMs are built upon) is well-known, it's absolutely a black box. You train it on data, you get behaviour, you hope the behaviour is helpful. So one answer really is 'we don't know'.
However, the other answer I can give here is that because the landscape of conversation is indeed a landscape, you can use it to chain replies. So for instance, if you ask an LLM to do a calculation, it will break it down into steps, and run each step through the landscape model. Some of these steps are fed back into the LLM to calculate the next part of it. I don't want to underestimate the achievement here - my postgraduate Masters project was 'teaching a computer to read' by creating an automatic grammar derivation design, and this devolved into nonsense all too easily. Keeping this style of AI from hallucinating is tough, especially when you're layering query-steps atop one another.
So I think the illusion of rationality comes from the ability to devolve prompts into steps, and to feed these steps back into the LLM. This actually reveals some pretty interesting things about human discourse. Personally, I think this is more interesting than the AI, but this may be my jadedness as a former AI researcher. 🙂
Q What effect will the current AI interlocutors have on social reality in the coming decade?
Frank: "Despite the hype, the usefulness of these programs is limited. Nonetheless, my guess is that these programs will have significant cultural effects over the next decade. Possible enough to informally speak of an age of AI. Whether or not their overall impact will be positive will depend mostly on market forces. As you suggest, the prognosis is not heartening."
This looks like a fair assessment to me. Eliza already showed the extent of human vanity (we can mistake the willingness to reflect with questions for another human being!), LLMs are the ultimate Eliza. I'm still not sure that this technology can have greater impact than the internet (and the internet censorship it fostered). I will reserve judgement in this regard. 🙂
Frank: "Ultimately, I rest my belief in the possibility of useful, genuine artificial intelligence on my view that our natural intelligence arises from physical phenomena that we will eventually learn to approximately imitate. Like flying, such intelligence will not be identical to our human mixture of emotion and reason but will nonetheless enable us 'to go where no none has gone before.'"
I do not find such faith in technology to be implausible, but I am more swayed by Hubert Dreyfus' scepticism. It seems to me that the very models we are using for AI are not pathways to the grail folks are seeking on this path.
Information versus Knowledge
Frank: "I remember that you had a piece awhile back that discussed information versus knowledge, but with my deteriorating memory I need to re-read and study it before I can cogently comment."
As with most months, they can be read individually, or form a set that can be read as one essay (in this case, a 1,750 word essay, which is roughly the length of a short academic paper).
Literate vs Cybernetic Minds
I greatly appreciate your engagement on this topic, which was thoughtful and highly relevant.
Frank: "It seems to me that the rise of the cybernetic mind fits naturally into humankind’s continuing evolution. The problem is that this rise has sidelined the literate mind. The solution is not bashing the cybernetic mind but establishing cooperative dialogue. It seems to me that this is one of the things you and I are attempting to do here at Stranger Worlds and Citizen Philosophers. It does not appear that to date we’re meeting with much success in enlisting others to participate in, or themselves initiate, such an endeavor."
I agree with you that bashing the cybernetic mind is a non-starter (I conceded the game when I wrote my book, The Virtuous Cyborg, which I am not recommending to you, as I don't think it's method is a good fit for yours). However, the problem is that the forms of the internet are unravelling the capacity to read or, if you like, that video is supplanting text. This is an ever-growing disaster that I suspect is directly connected to the skills crisis that most nations are experiencing.
Frank: "Personally, the only path I see, other than attempting to nourish the literary part of my own mind, is to keep on tacking up pieces on public bulletin boards, and to keep on trying to get others to initiate truth seeking dialogues."
I hope this is enough! I am beginning to wonder. But I have to believe that we can pull out of this nosedive, for my own sanity if for no other reason.
Q. Is there an intrinsic chasm between believers and non-believers?
Frank: "Dichotomies are one of the mental tools we have for constructing models of what is. We use them as thought anchors; often we use them as end points on a spectrum. The dichotomy: believers non-believers, is one of the many templates that we use to model each other’s subjective realities."
I remain conflicted on dichotomies. They are so very, very useful that we literally cannot think without them. But they also conceal as much as they reveal. Yet replacing dichotomies with models typically makes the situation worse and not better!
I find your definitions interesting:
Frank: "believers: persons who hold that entities/forces exist that intrinsically cannot be understood by rational/evidentiary investigation.
non-believers: persons who hold that it is not productive to posit entities/forces that intrinsically cannot be understood by rational/evidentiary investigation."
Your nonbelievers are what I call in The Mythology of Evolution and Chaos Ethics 'positivists'. I think it is more helpful to describe people's belief systems positively than negatively. 'Non-believer' emphasises the potential contrast with 'believers'... this conflict has been unbelievable destructive and pointless. Hence my preference to talk about 'positivists' instead of 'non-believer'. The trouble with this is that the twentieth century was more or less the last time anyone positively identified as a positivist. I feel like I've fought and lost on this point, but that doesn't mean I can stand down, as the damage being caused is ongoing.
As for believers, I absolutely hold that there are some phenomena that cannot be understood by rational-evidentiary investigation. So to you, I am a believer. But to me, it is not this trait that would make me 'a believer'. This is the trait that would make me a sceptic! 🙂
Frank: "I seek a rational/evidentiary arguments for any action that significantly affects social wellbeing."
And now we see how your category of nonbeliever is, paradoxically, riven through with belief! Because you belief both that 'social wellbeing' is a category that is amenable both to rational/evidentiary investigation *and* that plausible selections of courses of action necessarily follow from those investigations. On both counts I consider myself extremely sceptical. I find it odd that this scepticism should make me 'a believer!'. 🙂
Q. Is the human psyche capable of manifesting a multi-millennia global civilization?
Frank: "My reading of current social forces is that our most likely soon-to-be-realized future is something like that of 1984.... At the present moment, the only alternative I can envision is a world of mostly democratic states held together by a few universally committed-to principles."
This foreshadows July's Stranger Worlds. Stay tuned!
Frank: "Yes, you have pointed out that having a consortium of mostly democratic states is no guarantee against civilizational suicide. My opinion is that such a configuration would have substantially better survival odds than a configuration dominated by dictators."
Within your model, I concur. But I no longer think dictatorship is the primary risk (still a risk, but not the primary one). Again, I hope to get to these points in July (I'm about halfway through these pieces currently). I may not get everything into July, but it will explore some of these avenues for certain.
Many, many thanks for continuing our conversation, Frank. I found a great deal of wisdom and temperance in your remarks, and I hope you will enjoy July's Stranger Worlds, which will follow on quite nicely to some of these themes.
Hi Chris,
Very nice. Thanks.
I asked Perplexity what it “thought” of this piece. A few quotes:
“In the world of ancient Mesopotamia, there was no binary of good versus evil akin to the later dualisms introduced by Zoroastrianism and, subsequently, Abrahamic religions.”
“Gilgamesh's journey is about the civilizing force of companionship and the challenges of leadership in the first great city, not about embodying or failing to embody a moral ideal.”
Perplexity lists half a dozen sources, but no footnotes, which it usually does. I asked it about this. From the reply it appears that all it did was paraphrase your text.
I’ve been thinking about the concepts of good and evil. I find it heartening to learn that we invented these concepts. Perhaps in the near future we can invent some equally critical concepts that will help us continue to develop civilization in the atomic/AI age.
Frank
Dear Frank,
Thanks for the kind words!
These large language models are only really a map of language connections (a probability map of word connections), and it is quite happy to run a functional thesaurus over a text and send it back at you merely paraphrased. 🙂
As someone whose Masters degree was in AI, I am sceptical that this is the 'AI age', for all that this story is being sold very heavily right now. The transition from knowledge to information, which we covered at Stranger Worlds previously, strikes me as the key watershed, and we are sadly still very much trapped in the 'information age'.
What we currently call AI, no matter how impressive it may seem, might be most significant in the near future for the extent that it will make censorship and propaganda easier to execute. This is not, I would suggest, something to celebrate.
"I’ve been thinking about the concepts of good and evil. I find it heartening to learn that we invented these concepts. Perhaps in the near future we can invent some equally critical concepts that will help us continue to develop civilization in the atomic/AI age."
I think it worth pointing out that one who believed in divine revelation would claim these concepts were revealed, rather than invented, but I appreciate that from where you sit there are no appeals to the cosmic umpire! 😉
Although I'm open to the idea of new concepts emerging (crafted or revealed!), I am not convinced new concepts is the solution to any of our predicaments. One of the strange and wonderful things about studying philosophy is the convergence of ideas (E.O. Wilson called this 'consilience', although I largely reject the specific metaphysical conclusions he throws on top of this general idea).
I believe we already have all the concepts we need to get us out of any pickle, even this one. The trick is going to be working out which of the concepts we have will have the power to help us rescue ourselves.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
Comment 3 of 3
Believers and Non-believers
Dichotomies are one of the mental tools we have for constructing models of what is. We use them as thought anchors; often we use them as end points on a spectrum. The dichotomy: believers non-believers, is one of the many templates that we use to model each other’s subjective realities.
My definitions:
believers: persons who hold that entities/forces exist that intrinsically cannot be understood by rational/evidentiary investigation.
non-believers: persons who hold that it is not productive to posit entities/forces that intrinsically cannot be understood by rational/evidentiary investigation.
As usual the slipperiness of words results in this dichotomy not really being that clear-cut. But when it comes to making societal action decisions, either the believers or the non-believers prevail. I believe (ha!) that in the long run the survival of human civilization depends on human actions being commensurate with the eternal laws of physical reality, and that we should base all of our significant decisions on the best understanding we have of these laws at the time. So, I do not personally accept “it is God’s will” that we do such-and-such as a useful way of proceeding. While I accept that this may be opposing parties’ real reason, unless a majority overrides, I seek a rational/evidentiary arguments for any action that significantly affects social wellbeing.
A Multi-millennia Global Civilization
During my body/mind maintenance noon and evening walks I’ve been listening to the Great Courses “Big History” lectures. From these lectures I conclude that almost ALL previous civilizations have been autocratic. They have all eventually disintegrated; either due to environmental factors or social disruption. None of these disintegrations was a threat to the on-going development of human civilization per se because for the most part they were only loosely connected.
Reality shifted on July 16, 1945, and November 1, 1952. On those two days humankind’s insatiable curiosity and irrepressible creativity, coupled with never ceasing inter-species competition, brought it to the point where it can now commit civilization suicide. My reading of current social forces is that our most likely soon-to-be-realized future is something like that of 1984. That is, most states will be under the sway of a handful of autocratic super states. For me, that in itself will not necessarily be an existential disaster. Human curiosity and creativity can flourish to some extent in a benign autocracy. But the nature of the human psyche seems to be that sooner or later an insane autocrat will seek to expand his power by using her nuclear weapons.
At the present moment, the only alternative I can envision is a world of mostly democratic states held together by a few universally committed-to principles. The rub is that the evidence appears to indicate that the human psyche is so constructed that this is not likely. On the other hand, perhaps we can come up with some way of combining/strengthening existing concepts, or we will craft (or if you prefer, have revealed) new concepts.
Yes, you have pointed out that having a consortium of mostly democratic states is no guarantee against civilizational suicide. My opinion is that such a configuration would have substantially better survival odds than a configuration dominated by dictators.
You: ” Although I'm open to the idea of new concepts emerging (crafted or revealed!), I am not convinced new concepts is the solution to any of our predicaments. One of the strange and wonderful things about studying philosophy is the convergence of ideas (E.O. Wilson called this 'consilience') … I believe we already have all the concepts we need to get us out of any pickle, even this one. The trick is going to be working out which of the concepts we have will have the power to help us rescue ourselves.”
I find it heartening that over time humanity has been able to firmly hold a few life-affirming concepts. Complete abstinence from human sacrifices is one. Another is the rejection of legal human slavery; another is the rejection of infanticide. Perhaps there are others.
As always,
Frank
Comment 2 of 3
Information versus knowledge
You: “The transition from knowledge to information, which we covered at Stranger Worlds previously, strikes me as the key watershed, and we are sadly still very much trapped in the 'information age'.”
I remember that you had a piece awhile back that discussed information versus knowledge, but with my deteriorating memory I need to re-read and study it before I can cogently comment.
Where is your piece? I ask Windows File Explorer to list all files in my Stranger Worlds folder that contain the string ‘information’. File Explorer displays a list of around fifty files. For a few of these it highlights some text. I display “Lost In Information” (07/02/24), but I want the hard copy I marked up and filed. “Find” in Word on my list of Stranger Worlds posts and comments gives me my document number. Ah!
You: “At this point in time we were already giving up the sense of information being a process of reaching an understanding, and were much closer to the lone fact swirling through infospace.”
and
“Over half a millennia, the meaning of ‘information’ was entirely transformed - from a process of education, explication, and enlightenment that lasted until the closing decades of the eighteenth century, into its contemporary role as a hopelessly inadequate substitute for truth.”
As with “fascist”, perhaps it is the case that we’re just dealing with the meaning of a word changing over time. But I think it’s more than that. If I use ‘fact’ to point to an assertion about objective reality that we think is true, then perhaps I can claim that in the vast infosphere there are some facts that can be assembled into knowledge. The rub is not that the meaning of ‘information’ has changed, but that the process of corralling truth from facts has been largely abandoned.
In a comment at “Lost in Information” you cite an earlier Stranger Worlds piece: “Facing Books”. In my view, in this piece you introduce, via Turing, the concept of ‘information’ as a metaphor of mind that you contrast with ‘mechanism’. You go on to say: “The literary mind gives way to what Maurice Berman called “the cybernetic dream”, a term Illich evokes in his address on technological literacy .... There is a watershed here, a divide into two different kinds of human: the literate mind, and the cybernetic mind.”
further on:
“To the cybernetic mind, conversely, “words are units of information”, strung together into messages, and thoughts are operations performed upon abstractions, programmed with data. The cybernetic mind composes ‘texts’, and the faces of those who do so are hidden. You cannot face someone who lives in such a way, you can only ‘interface’ with them. This transformation, this chasm between two different ways of understanding knowledge, has had wide-ranging and largely unnoticed effects upon human existence. In the field of scholarship alone, the last century shows a decline of academic writing as a form of discourse, replaced by a disembodied assessment of the informational content of texts.”
If there are just two types of minds, Iiterate and cybernetic, I would have to cope to the later.
Are there really any anomalies in the way the universe unfolds? It seems to me that the rise of the cybernetic mind fits naturally into humankind’s continuing evolution. The problem is that this rise has sidelined the literate mind . The solution is not bashing the cybernetic mind but establishing cooperative dialogue. It seems to me that this is one of the things you and I are attempting to do here at Stranger Worlds and Citizen Philosophers. It does not appear that to date we’re meeting with much success in enlisting others to participate in, or themselves initiate, such an endeavor.
My mind began its final development prior to the advent of computers. My mind’s cybernetic orientation is an add-on that has become dominant. The present societal dominance of the cybernetic mind is dangerous. It is imperative that we move toward better balance. Personally, the only path I see, other than attempting to nourish the literary part of my own mind, is to keep on tacking up pieces on public bulletin boards, and to keep on trying to get others to initiate truth seeking dialogues.
Comment 1 of 3
Hi Chris,
Nice reply. Thank you. Our intermittent long-term dialogue over some of the subjects and thinkers you touch on in your posts and replies is personally quite satisfying.
In my mind there are several interesting questions here:
.a) What sort of machines are the current AI interlocutors?
.b) What effect will the current AI interlocutors have on social reality in the coming decade?
.c) What is the relationship between intelligence and information?
.d) Is there an intrinsic chasm between believers and non-believers?
.e) Is the human psyche capable of manifesting a multi-millennia global civilization?
Current AI interlocutors
I have experience only with the various free AI text chat bots, so the scope of my remarks is limited. If there was such a thing as AI when I was doing my PhD gig, none of my professors knew about it. Recently I tried to assuage my ignorance with a couple of on-line courses. In general, I agree with your assessment: “These large language models are only really a map of language connections (a probability map of word connections), and it is quite happy to run a functional thesaurus over a text and send it back at you merely paraphrased.” I am puzzled, however, by their apparent ability to appear to be rational in some situations.
AI effects on social reality
Despite the hype, the usefulness of these programs is limited. Nonetheless, my guess is that these programs will have significant cultural effects over the next decade. Possible enough to informally speak of an age of AI. Whether or not their overall impact will be positive will depend mostly on market forces. As you suggest, the prognosis is not heartening.
In my dissertation research I attempted to construct a simple mathematician’s assistant for the construction of proofs in formalized theories. The results (other than my committee awarding me a degree!) were disappointing. But this was more than fifty years ago. I’m guessing, but I think it would be strange if some progress toward useful artificial rationality has not occurred in half a century.
Ultimately, I rest my belief in the possibility of useful, genuine artificial intelligence on my view that our natural intelligence arises from physical phenomena that we will eventually learn to approximately imitate. Like flying, such intelligence will not be identical to our human mixture of emotion and reason but will nonetheless enable us “to go where no none has gone before.”
Hi Frank - thanks for these comments! I'm under a tight time deadline this week, but I hope to reply to you soon.
Dear Frank,
Thanks for your patience - I didn't want to rush out a reply while I was struggling with some heavy lifting elsewhere, but I seem to have gained control of the current project, and have time to do your notes justice. You raise some great questions, and offer some brilliant commentary on them too!
Q. What sort of machines are the current AI interlocutors?
Frank: "I agree with your assessment: 'These large language models are only really a map of language connections (a probability map of word connections), and it is quite happy to run a functional thesaurus over a text and send it back at you merely paraphrased.' I am puzzled, however, by their apparent ability to appear to be rational in some situations."
This is a fair question. There are two answers I can give: the honest AI researcher answer is that people don't really know how most of these things work, because although the architecture for neural network-based AI (which LLMs are built upon) is well-known, it's absolutely a black box. You train it on data, you get behaviour, you hope the behaviour is helpful. So one answer really is 'we don't know'.
However, the other answer I can give here is that because the landscape of conversation is indeed a landscape, you can use it to chain replies. So for instance, if you ask an LLM to do a calculation, it will break it down into steps, and run each step through the landscape model. Some of these steps are fed back into the LLM to calculate the next part of it. I don't want to underestimate the achievement here - my postgraduate Masters project was 'teaching a computer to read' by creating an automatic grammar derivation design, and this devolved into nonsense all too easily. Keeping this style of AI from hallucinating is tough, especially when you're layering query-steps atop one another.
So I think the illusion of rationality comes from the ability to devolve prompts into steps, and to feed these steps back into the LLM. This actually reveals some pretty interesting things about human discourse. Personally, I think this is more interesting than the AI, but this may be my jadedness as a former AI researcher. 🙂
Q What effect will the current AI interlocutors have on social reality in the coming decade?
Frank: "Despite the hype, the usefulness of these programs is limited. Nonetheless, my guess is that these programs will have significant cultural effects over the next decade. Possible enough to informally speak of an age of AI. Whether or not their overall impact will be positive will depend mostly on market forces. As you suggest, the prognosis is not heartening."
This looks like a fair assessment to me. Eliza already showed the extent of human vanity (we can mistake the willingness to reflect with questions for another human being!), LLMs are the ultimate Eliza. I'm still not sure that this technology can have greater impact than the internet (and the internet censorship it fostered). I will reserve judgement in this regard. 🙂
Frank: "Ultimately, I rest my belief in the possibility of useful, genuine artificial intelligence on my view that our natural intelligence arises from physical phenomena that we will eventually learn to approximately imitate. Like flying, such intelligence will not be identical to our human mixture of emotion and reason but will nonetheless enable us 'to go where no none has gone before.'"
I do not find such faith in technology to be implausible, but I am more swayed by Hubert Dreyfus' scepticism. It seems to me that the very models we are using for AI are not pathways to the grail folks are seeking on this path.
Information versus Knowledge
Frank: "I remember that you had a piece awhile back that discussed information versus knowledge, but with my deteriorating memory I need to re-read and study it before I can cogently comment."
Here are the pieces, Frank:
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/lost-in-information
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/the-spectacle-of-unravelling-truth
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/frontiers-of-rationality
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/the-truth-of-ourselves
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/orbiting-the-truth
As with most months, they can be read individually, or form a set that can be read as one essay (in this case, a 1,750 word essay, which is roughly the length of a short academic paper).
Literate vs Cybernetic Minds
I greatly appreciate your engagement on this topic, which was thoughtful and highly relevant.
Frank: "It seems to me that the rise of the cybernetic mind fits naturally into humankind’s continuing evolution. The problem is that this rise has sidelined the literate mind. The solution is not bashing the cybernetic mind but establishing cooperative dialogue. It seems to me that this is one of the things you and I are attempting to do here at Stranger Worlds and Citizen Philosophers. It does not appear that to date we’re meeting with much success in enlisting others to participate in, or themselves initiate, such an endeavor."
I agree with you that bashing the cybernetic mind is a non-starter (I conceded the game when I wrote my book, The Virtuous Cyborg, which I am not recommending to you, as I don't think it's method is a good fit for yours). However, the problem is that the forms of the internet are unravelling the capacity to read or, if you like, that video is supplanting text. This is an ever-growing disaster that I suspect is directly connected to the skills crisis that most nations are experiencing.
Frank: "Personally, the only path I see, other than attempting to nourish the literary part of my own mind, is to keep on tacking up pieces on public bulletin boards, and to keep on trying to get others to initiate truth seeking dialogues."
I hope this is enough! I am beginning to wonder. But I have to believe that we can pull out of this nosedive, for my own sanity if for no other reason.
Q. Is there an intrinsic chasm between believers and non-believers?
Frank: "Dichotomies are one of the mental tools we have for constructing models of what is. We use them as thought anchors; often we use them as end points on a spectrum. The dichotomy: believers non-believers, is one of the many templates that we use to model each other’s subjective realities."
I remain conflicted on dichotomies. They are so very, very useful that we literally cannot think without them. But they also conceal as much as they reveal. Yet replacing dichotomies with models typically makes the situation worse and not better!
I find your definitions interesting:
Frank: "believers: persons who hold that entities/forces exist that intrinsically cannot be understood by rational/evidentiary investigation.
non-believers: persons who hold that it is not productive to posit entities/forces that intrinsically cannot be understood by rational/evidentiary investigation."
Your nonbelievers are what I call in The Mythology of Evolution and Chaos Ethics 'positivists'. I think it is more helpful to describe people's belief systems positively than negatively. 'Non-believer' emphasises the potential contrast with 'believers'... this conflict has been unbelievable destructive and pointless. Hence my preference to talk about 'positivists' instead of 'non-believer'. The trouble with this is that the twentieth century was more or less the last time anyone positively identified as a positivist. I feel like I've fought and lost on this point, but that doesn't mean I can stand down, as the damage being caused is ongoing.
As for believers, I absolutely hold that there are some phenomena that cannot be understood by rational-evidentiary investigation. So to you, I am a believer. But to me, it is not this trait that would make me 'a believer'. This is the trait that would make me a sceptic! 🙂
Frank: "I seek a rational/evidentiary arguments for any action that significantly affects social wellbeing."
And now we see how your category of nonbeliever is, paradoxically, riven through with belief! Because you belief both that 'social wellbeing' is a category that is amenable both to rational/evidentiary investigation *and* that plausible selections of courses of action necessarily follow from those investigations. On both counts I consider myself extremely sceptical. I find it odd that this scepticism should make me 'a believer!'. 🙂
Q. Is the human psyche capable of manifesting a multi-millennia global civilization?
Frank: "My reading of current social forces is that our most likely soon-to-be-realized future is something like that of 1984.... At the present moment, the only alternative I can envision is a world of mostly democratic states held together by a few universally committed-to principles."
This foreshadows July's Stranger Worlds. Stay tuned!
Frank: "Yes, you have pointed out that having a consortium of mostly democratic states is no guarantee against civilizational suicide. My opinion is that such a configuration would have substantially better survival odds than a configuration dominated by dictators."
Within your model, I concur. But I no longer think dictatorship is the primary risk (still a risk, but not the primary one). Again, I hope to get to these points in July (I'm about halfway through these pieces currently). I may not get everything into July, but it will explore some of these avenues for certain.
Many, many thanks for continuing our conversation, Frank. I found a great deal of wisdom and temperance in your remarks, and I hope you will enjoy July's Stranger Worlds, which will follow on quite nicely to some of these themes.
With unlimited love,
Chris.