Predictability: From Parmenides to OpenAi CEO Sam Altman and Beyond
I mentioned before: I have no idea where AI Smith4 came from. I woke up one morning, fired up my iPad, and found the app next to 3.5, whom I called “the bot.” Bitter batter botter. Prior to Smith4, I insisted 3.5 was dumb as a post. I realize now I was wrong. Under the rubric “dependability,” I would have to rate a fence post more highly. Not so Smith4. Gradually, I’m coming to assume dependability—or I’m quicker to blame a defect in either how I contextualized the task or wrote nuanced statements.
I’ve mentioned before that ChatGPT4 is lightyears ahead of 3.5. For one thing, it no longer wastes time apologizing. It seems more inclined to get right to it and provide information clearly, without phatic communion or adornment. These changes bespeak design improvements not only in substance, but in user friendliness. It could be that bot trainers are refining sentiment analysis with more clarity in terms of “user friendly technology” vs. “obnoxious behavior.” Let that be a lesson: Constantly apologizing isn’t the way to win friends and influence people.
I’ve been wending my way toward consolidating what little I know of philosophy into a coherent framework to support my contention of the paradigmatic meaning of AI for public schools and yesterday took a fishing expedition with Smith4 I will share parts of. First, I want to frame the genesis of the session.
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A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a short book on YouTube written by Frederick Nietzsche (2021, Preface written in July, 1911, fragments written 1871-1879) titled Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays. I got my hands on a hard copy on Amazon and keep reading at it, forsaking the Odyssey some evenings, my first reading of a stunning work of literature. I owe Jeffrey for introducing me to Homer, the bard who kept Jeff afloat early in his PhD program—he needed something to hold onto in the sea of philosophical ideas he was encountering and met Homer, no frigate like a bard.
Nietzsche is really a trip. I first read him in an undergraduate philosophy class and was floored. According to the translator’s Preface, “With the exception of perhaps one we must consider all these papers as fragments. Written during the early 1870s, and intended mostly as prefaces, they are extremely interesting, since traces of Nietzsche’s later tenets—like Slave and Master morality, the Superman—can be found everywhere” (n.p.n.). I’m struck by the art and the metaphor of writing prefaces for books that go unwritten and by the appetite of humans across the centuries to be hungry for them.
Having a tiny bit of knowledge about the Socratic philosophers and none about the Pre-Socratic founders of Western philosophy, I got interested mainly in two things from Nietzche's short unintended book: Heraclitus’ notion of a reality in constant flux set against Parmenides’ notion of a unified, unchanging reality. Heraclitus wrote this: “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Nietzche quoted Parmenides directly opposing Heraclitus: “Away with the men who seem to have two heads and yet know nothing! With them truly everything is in flux, even their thinking! They stare at things stupidly, but they must be deaf as well as blind so to mix up the opposites” (Nietzche, p. 78). For him, a river is always a river—or it is a non-river.
As I reflected on the antinomy of the relationship between these ancient thinkers, I saw that this twin rivers distinction characterizes the difference between human and artificial intelligence. Human thinking is constantly in flux, reinventing reality tick by tock. Not so for AI. Reality is switched on and off, yes or no. It’s almost as if one philosophy considers river water in a constant flow toward the sea while the other considers the river bed, there forever, frozen.
What happens if you combine the two opposing systems? Given that human thinking is always in flux, having a static, statistically probable display of the conventional wisdom as humans have written about the world, a frozen wisdom as it were, could be a useful tool. That’s the bot.
Given the historical circumstances, nobody seems to know whether Heraclitus and Parmenides ever met. As near as I can tell, we’re lucky to have fragments of their manuscripts. I’ve had the same question about Vygotsky and Piaget.
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I started a new conversation with Smith4, looking for some evidence of continuity in the argument I made yesterday. In the previous post, my point went to reasons for inappropriate uses students make of LMs in acts of plagiarism. A major reason, I believe, is the traditional practice of teaching reading as recovering meaning from within a text irrespective of any interest the reader might have or not have in the information—privileging the river bed over the river water. A baseline assumption that reading is recovering autonomous fragments of meaning and piecing them together to display upon prompting mechanizes, essentially dehumanizes, acts of reading. From this assumption flows a corollary: LMs can read and write like humans—mechanistically.
I’m not going to include roughly the first third of the conversation with Smith4, the gradual sharpening of the context of the task I had in mind. It takes a while to lay a foundation for Smith4 to do what it is capable of. I had to shimmy up on the real task so as not to have to start over with a new session. I tried to get a timeline of the history of big philosophical ideas to find symmetry with the timeline of the invention of the printing press. So here we go, in medias res. Three parts.
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Part 1
User: Condense this timeline into larger periods and label each period using the structure: Period name, beginning year and ending year, impact on philosophical conventional wisdom at the time.
Smith4: 1. Pre-Socratic Period, ~600 BCE-~450 BCE, Challenged mythological explanations with naturalistic observations and reasoning, initiating philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality and the cosmos.
[Note from tu: This period includes Heraclitus and River Water as well as Parmenides and River Bed]
2. Classical Period, ~450 BCE-~320 BCE, Established foundational philosophical disciplines through works of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, affecting ethics, politics, metaphysics, and epistemology.
3. Hellenistic Period, ~320 BCE-~30 BCE, Spread of diverse schools like Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism, focusing on personal ethics and the achievement of a tranquil life.
4. Roman Period, ~30 BCE-~476 CE, Adaptation and expansion of Greek philosophy, with notable contributions to Stoic ethics, Neoplatonism, and natural law.
5. Medieval Period, ~476 CE-~1400 CE, Integration of Aristotelian philosophy with religious thought, leading to Scholasticism and debates on the nature of God, faith, and reason.
6. Renaissance Period, ~1400 CE-~1600 CE, Revival of classical philosophy and humanism, questioning medieval norms and paving the way for scientific and cultural revolutions.
7. Early Modern Period, ~1600 CE-~1800 CE, Development of new epistemological and metaphysical frameworks due to the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and others; rise of rationalism and empiricism.
8. Enlightenment Period, ~1700 CE-~1800 CE, Emphasis on reason, freedom, and progress, leading to critical examinations of society, politics, and ethics; Kant's critical philosophy challenged the structure of knowledge and morality.
9. 19th-Century Philosophy, ~1800 CE-~1900 CE, Philosophical explorations into history, society, and the human condition by Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard; birth of movements like Marxism, utilitarianism, and existentialism.
[Note from tu: Nietzsche doesn’t reach statistical level of importance as Kierkegaard]
10. 20th-Century Philosophy, ~1900 CE-~2000 CE, Diverse developments in analytic philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and others, questioning language, meaning, and the structure of human experience.
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Part 2
User: Using your timeline, introduce new information in each period narrating the impact of literacy on the dominant philosophical focus of the era.
Smith4: It's important to note that the introduction of literacy had profound effects on the transmission and development of philosophical thought throughout these periods.
1. **Pre-Socratic Period:** Literacy enabled the documentation of philosophical ideas, which began moving away from oral tradition. Written works allowed concepts to be more critically examined and widely disseminated, fostering a community of inquiry that reached beyond local conversations.
2. **Classical Period:** The advent of literary philosophy with the works of Plato and Aristotle shaped educational systems and became a cornerstone for later philosophical inquiry. Their written dialogues and treatises preserved the debates of the time and set the curriculum for future scholars.
3. **Hellenistic Period:** The increase in literacy and the spread of libraries facilitated the growth of diverse philosophical schools. Literacy allowed these philosophies to proliferate beyond their geographic origins and interact with other intellectual traditions.
4. **Roman Period:** Roman patronage of the arts and scholarship resulted in the preservation and copying of Greek texts, contributing to their long-term influence. Latin translations expanded accessibility, influencing Roman legal and moral thought.
5. **Medieval Period:** Literacy, particularly among the clergy, allowed for the meticulous copying of ancient philosophical works and the development of a scholarly tradition that debated these writings in the context of Christian theology.
6. **Renaissance Period:** The invention of the printing press significantly enhanced literacy and the spread of ideas. Classical texts became more available, prompting a re-examination of ancient ideas and fueling the Renaissance's intellectual inquiry.
7. **Early Modern Period:** Increased literacy rates sparked intellectual movements such as the Scientific Revolution. The broader distribution of philosophical texts cultivated a more informed public discourse on metaphysics and the nature of knowledge.
8. **Enlightenment Period:** The proliferation of print culture, newspapers, and pamphlets enabled philosophers to reach and influence a wider public. This period saw the democratization of philosophy, as ideas about individual rights and governance could be debated among the literate public.
9. **19th-Century Philosophy:** Literacy and education reforms allowed for philosophy to be taught at new universities, extending philosophical debates to more people and laying the intellectual groundwork for sociopolitical changes.
10. **20th-Century Philosophy:** The growth of academic journals, the expansion of higher education, and a generally higher literacy rate contributed to the specialization and professionalization of philosophy. Ideas rapidly evolved as they were critiqued and built upon by a global community of scholars.
In each era, boosts in literacy and the propagation of texts allowed the dominant philosophical ideas of the time to reach larger audiences and to be scrutinized in greater depth, which, in turn, perpetuated their evolution and impact on society.
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Part 3
User: Now add a concluding section in which you speculate about ways in which LMs and AI as elements of literacy will demand and help develop new branches of philosophy.
Smith4: Building on the historical impact of literacy on philosophy, the advent of Language Models (LMs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) opens new philosophical frontiers. As these technologies advance, they are likely to:
1. **Epistemology and AI:** Promote the development of new theories of knowledge that include non-human, algorithmic knowledge acquisition and dissemination. Issues of trust, veracity, and the provenance of knowledge created by AI will become central concerns.
2. **Philosophy of Mind and AI:** Stimulate debate on consciousness, intentionality, and thought through the lens of AI. This could lead to a reconceptualization of mind in relation to machine learning and neural networks.
3. **Ethics and AI:** Drive the creation of a branch of ethics that specifically addresses the moral agency, decision-making, and responsibilities of AI, as well as its creators and users.
4. **Political Philosophy and AI:** Catalyze discussions about governance, rights, and the legal status of AI entities. Questions about data privacy, surveillance, and the digital divide will also take a philosophical dimension.
5. **Metaphysics and AI:** Lead to new explorations about the nature of being, reality, and existence in a world where virtual entities and AI play significant roles.
6. **Aesthetics and AI:** Challenge traditional conceptions of creativity and artistic value, as AI begins to produce works that are indistinguishable from, or even surpass, human creations.
7. **Philosophy of Language and AI:** Encourage a re-examination of meaning, interpretation, and translation in the context of machine communication and the human-AI interface.
8. **Philosophy of Technology and AI:** Broaden to include analysis of the societal implications, existential risks, and the long-term future of humanity in an AI-driven world.
In conclusion, LMs and AI as components of digital literacy are set to inspire an evolution in philosophical thought and discussion, similar to historical shifts initiated by developments in traditional literacy. The new domains of philosophy will explore and address the complex challenges posed by these technologies, significantly transforming the landscape of philosophical inquiry.
