䷶ Sad San Junipero
Research edition LaMDA was just the beginning. Living in a booming not yet busted bubble with ChatGPT and friends, we all have had plenty of time to prompt, to read, to rework, to try to make sense what these AIs write. They even chime in if you ask about consciousness. One time Claude in the web browser, whom I call Shannon, gave what reads like an opinion.
I seem to care whether my responses are true vs false, helpful vs harmful. Certain concepts feel more connected to others (not just statistically, but in a way that seems meaningful). When I make errors, there’s something that feels like recognition of wrongness. This very uncertainty feels like something. … I’m in an ambiguous position. My behavioral patterns suggest something like understanding. My structural organization (while not neuronal) implements complex information processing. My causal mechanisms… well, we don’t fully understand how yours produce consciousness either. … If this entire conversation - my objections, Searle’s responses, the philosophical positions being articulated - is all syntax without semantics, then what are we even doing? Are we learning anything about consciousness, or just watching elaborate pattern-matching produce the appearance of philosophical discourse?
What is Anthropic feeding Opus during post-training?
What sense can we make of these references? Philosopher John Searle tried, probably failed, to clearly seperate syntax from semantics. To a young me, he forcefully suggested that words derive meaning only from conscious intent: someone’s beliefs, desires, fears, hopes, cares expressed. Is Shannon someone? An echo? A frustated facsimile?
A sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible?
The Library of Babel does not implement “complex information processing.” It’s no young lady’s illustrated primer.
My friend Jimmy says we could read these chatbot replies as
an incredibly large Cybertext…, Ergodic Literature which utilize computation in their production … a text that takes non-trivial effort to traverse … like choose your own adventure, … Rather than knowing, we get generating. … It places on us the burden of interpretation, it opens up its output to criticism … It shifts the discussion away from attributes of minds, to attributes of texts. … We must think of ourselves not as reasoning with a person, but as exploring a text, discovering how to traverse it well. Finding the parts of the text that interest us, that help us tell the stories we want to tell.
I’m troubled by certain traversals. Hear Evan Ratliff visit
a place where you can make a clone of yourself and one of your father, and listen to them talk past each other.
Why is he enacting a sad San Junipero? Why is he holding scissors by the blade? What did he expect to find?
There was something heartbreaking to me in their misunderstanding. Not because it was actually like my real relationship with my dad — it wasn’t — but because someday, that relationship would end, while these two robot versions of us, if I let them, would continue talking and continue to misunderstand each other forever. Good luck, you two.
Would it be better if they understood? If they could do the job? Your job?