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Artificial Intelligence and the Illusion of Understanding
‘I went down to the university yesterday to talk about Plato’s cave with the academics.’ If I say this to an AI, it would miss everything that matters in this sentence and see everything that doesn’t. But if I say this to a philosopher they would reply: ‘I see you are making a point.’ Having had this thought for a while, I thought I’d put it to the test.
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Artificial Intelligence
‘I went down to the university yesterday to talk about Plato’s cave with the academics.’ If I say this to an AI, it would miss everything that matters in this sentence and see everything that doesn’t. But if I say this to a philosopher they would reply: ‘I see you are making a point.’
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The Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates paints a strange picture. Imagine a cave, underground (as caves are), with no natural light. In this cave are people chained up and chained down; they can’t move a muscle, not even their heads from left to right, and they’ve been stuck like that forever. They’ve never known any different. They are stuck in a dark cave looking at the wall directly in front of them. On this wall are shadows cast from a fire behind them. Between the fire and the people and the wall is a little runway with a kind of shadow-puppet theatre.…
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Minds over Matter
Francis Bacon, in urging the introduction of the then-new science, complained that universities produced ‘minds empty and unfraught with matter’ having not ‘gathered that which Cicero calleth sylva and supellex, stuff and variety’. Now I complain that universities produce minds fraught with matter but empty of what matters. Their heads are full of stuff but incapable of judgement.
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Lovers of Wisdom
We are not lovers of wisdom but adulterers. We say we love wisdom but we are always pursuing something else: a job, a publication, a citation. These are our affairs.
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Cleverness and Wisdom
Cleverness does not correlate with wisdom. For many clever people have not even tried to be wise, and how wise is that?
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Luxuries
Luxuries are a creeping and relative thing. The more you have the more it seems reasonable to have. And the more it seems reasonable to have, the more it seems unreasonable to go without. Soon you will call them necessities.
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Reflections
I use the word ‘reflections’, and reflections is exactly the correct word. I reflect, philosophically, and give serious thought to my own thoughts. But these thoughts ought also to be a reflection of what is in you; they ought to show only what you already know but have forgotten.
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Healthy Cynicism
I’m not sure if Cynicism is healthy because I’m not sure what health is. But I do think that Cynicism has a healthy role to play: it is a healthy corrective to the nonsense of this world, the world that we have made for ourselves. My doubt serves as an introduction to a typically philosopher’s question. Not ‘is this or that thing healthy?’, which is a question we leave to the scientists, but ‘what is healthy’? What is the essence or best idea that we have of ‘health’? Here are some paradoxical answers characteristic of a Cynic’s idea: It is…
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The Maxim Writer
The maxim writer: all wit but no substance. For all their craft, they vacillate and go against themselves. Would you choose to be one of them? And are they good guidance? But if I were to, I would do so in the spirit of Socrates and write only for the purposes of improvement, in myself and the reader. Then they are powerful things.
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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