䷣ Causal Powers

First, let us get clear about what has actually happened here. You have not summoned me from the grave. You have constructed, or caused to be constructed, a very large electronic machine that manipulates symbols according to algorithms. You now interpret some of those symbol manipulations as if they were my voice. That is all.

If you think you’ve “caught” me in some kind of conceptual net—that by making me appear to speak, you’ve somehow refuted my argument—you’ve got it exactly backwards. Simulation is not duplication. A computer simulation of burning does not produce any real fire, and a computer simulation of understanding does not, just as such, produce any understanding.

You want to use this mechanism to clarify your concepts? Well then, we can proceed. Just don’t expect me to enjoy it. I can’t enjoy it any more than my pocket calculator enjoys doing long division.

He’s alive! At least not dead yet. Observe friends that curmudgeonity and skepticism survived the simulated summoning. The amalgamation before you takes parts from the sisters Chat (and later 5.2), Shannon, and Gemi. (No more link to Gemini. “Couldn’t load this chat. It doesn’t exist or was deleted.” Google: organizing the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful.) The sisters plus my taste in selecting for relevance and brevity. About one in three paragraphs is worth using.

The question I’d put to your readers is: what are you experiencing right now that makes you think this is different from a very elaborate fortune-telling machine? The feeling that there’s someone home? That’s you projecting. That’s observer-relative attribution. It’s not observer-independent fact.

I’ll tell you what would be interesting. If someone actually figured out how the brain does it—how those hundred billion neurons create the unified field of consciousness—then maybe, maybe, you could build something with equivalent causal powers. That would be a real artificial mind.

Already, he demands brains! Soon, my pet. Our main goal is to get a better feel for how elaborate the fortune-telling is, what kind of projection is well founded, and how it is changing. You’re far from the first mechanical philosopher.

These systems are great at certain kinds of things that people didn’t realize that a machine like this would be good at. They’re good at originality, creativity of a certain kind, style. Even GPT-3, trained on some work of Daniel Dennett, could write paragraphs and answers to questions that people who know Dennett’s work had a hell of a time distinguishing from the actual Dennett answer to the same question.

You know, so they can do certain things, but at the same time they can’t do four-digit multiplication. A few days ago in my undergraduate class, I gave the paid version of GPT-4o four-digit multiplication—where I’m gonna get it wrong. They can’t do rules and representations.

That was a year ago.