Nov 19, 2023 06:56 PM
(This post was last modified: Nov 20, 2023 05:04 PM by C C.)
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/free-...chatgpt-me
EXCERPT: . . . ChatGPT, you might argue, doesn’t have feelings, as you and I do. But even our most virtuous feelings are just algorithms in disguise. Evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers helped me grok this dark truth. Natural selection, he theorizes, programmed us to pity victims of injustice and to loathe the unjust, because these emotions helped our ancestors reproduce.
Yes, even our most sincere moral sentiments, from a Darwinian perspective, appear to be virtue-signaling underpinned by selfish genes. ChatGPT-Me can generate virtuous signals in its sleep.
Once I start thinking of myself as a machine for turning prompts into paragraphs, it’s hard to stop. I’m not sure where ChatGPT-Me ends and I begin. Do I even have a true self, capable of genuine choices, or am I inseparable from ChatGPT-Me?
I am reminded of “Borges and I,” the creepy little confession of Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. The narrator, who presents himself as the real, authentic Borges, discloses his struggle to maintain his independence from his oppressive public persona, “Borges.” “Borges” shares the narrator’s fondness for hourglasses, maps and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson, “but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor.”
When the narrator tries to re-invent himself by writing in a new style, “Borges” instantly co-opts this new behavior. The narrator concludes: “Thus my life is a flight, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.”
I am writing this column, I suppose it’s all too obvious, to try to assert my independence from ChatGPT-Me, the inductive machine inside my brain. ChatGPT-Me couldn’t write a column like this, which casts doubt on free will! Or could it? (MORE - missing detail)
RELATED (scivillage): Free will and the Sapolsky paradox + Robert Sapolsky is wrong
EXCERPT: . . . ChatGPT, you might argue, doesn’t have feelings, as you and I do. But even our most virtuous feelings are just algorithms in disguise. Evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers helped me grok this dark truth. Natural selection, he theorizes, programmed us to pity victims of injustice and to loathe the unjust, because these emotions helped our ancestors reproduce.
Yes, even our most sincere moral sentiments, from a Darwinian perspective, appear to be virtue-signaling underpinned by selfish genes. ChatGPT-Me can generate virtuous signals in its sleep.
Once I start thinking of myself as a machine for turning prompts into paragraphs, it’s hard to stop. I’m not sure where ChatGPT-Me ends and I begin. Do I even have a true self, capable of genuine choices, or am I inseparable from ChatGPT-Me?
I am reminded of “Borges and I,” the creepy little confession of Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. The narrator, who presents himself as the real, authentic Borges, discloses his struggle to maintain his independence from his oppressive public persona, “Borges.” “Borges” shares the narrator’s fondness for hourglasses, maps and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson, “but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor.”
When the narrator tries to re-invent himself by writing in a new style, “Borges” instantly co-opts this new behavior. The narrator concludes: “Thus my life is a flight, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.”
I am writing this column, I suppose it’s all too obvious, to try to assert my independence from ChatGPT-Me, the inductive machine inside my brain. ChatGPT-Me couldn’t write a column like this, which casts doubt on free will! Or could it? (MORE - missing detail)
RELATED (scivillage): Free will and the Sapolsky paradox + Robert Sapolsky is wrong
