Federica wrote: ↑Tue Jan 24, 2023 3:32 pmI didn’t read anything whatsoever into Max's post. I simply reported his words without expounding anything additional from them. He has explicitly taken a stance (or opinion, in Max’s words) in the question, as a starting point of the argumentation. There was clearly no need for me to read anything.(1) you are reading a line of argumentation into Max's post which simply isn't there (there is no argument that GPT-like technology is absolutely evil, dangerous, etc. under any and all circumstances, independent of how our living thinking approaches it)
Yes, you did. In your comment, you said, "With reference to the stated opinion that the implications of the technology are deleterious, and that AI is dangerous and pernicious." Now let's look at the sentences Max wrote which used those words:
Max wrote:Countless people have weighed in, whether to sing its praises or to sound the alarm in respect to the deleterious implications of a computer having passed the so-called “Turing Test”2 and thereby becoming capable of producing language-like output indistinguishable from the language of an actual human interlocutor
...
If humanity is outsourcing its innate powers of the soul onto its artefacts and simultaneously allowing these powers to atrophy at their source, then few tasks could strike one with greater exigency than the preservation and cultivation of these same powers as well as the house that sustains and gives rise to them, It is precisely in this respect that the GPT-3 engine presents its most pernicious face.
[he never uses the word "dangerous" in the essay]
You are manufacturing your own generalized, absolutized argument about 'dangerous and pernicious' AI technology, of the sort you employed in the VR discussion as well, and projecting that onto what Max wrote, which is much more contextualized. It's like you assume that because it is the argument you naturally would have made (perhaps prior to the VR exchange), it must be the one he is making. You are not simply reporting what he wrote. Do you still not see this happening, at this point?
Here I have to note that every time I have dared to question the least bit of expression coming from Cleric of Max, without exception, you have become defensive. This makes you come out with hurried and inaccurate statements, such as this one:
(2) You are implicitly holding thinking activity and its outer physiognomy (language-forms) at arms length. If you weren't, then there would be no questioning the premise that thought-meaning is inseparable from language. The problem with "if it can arrange language, then it can arrange meaning" is the assumption that the GPT bot can arrange language independently of human thinking intelligence. The problem is the keeping of our own thinking involvement in the blind spot, so we project out the intelligence onto something external.
If you carefully read my original post, you will notice that I reference "if it can arrange language, then it can arrange meaning" as the wrong premise, held by those who believe the chat bot is intelligent, not by me. They do idolize the language arrangement displayed by the bot as a sign of independent intelligence. I certainly don’t do that. I totally agree that our thinking involvement is the only reason the bot appears to chat like a human.
Yes, I know that. It is you who didn't carefully read what I wrote. The problem with "if it can arrange language, then it can arrange meaning" is not what you think it is, as expressed in the original post. The premise of thought/meaning being inseperable from language is correct, contrary to what you stated in the original post. I am pointing out why you have done something similar to the people who hold its language use reflects intelligence - you have simply assumed it is using language. Since you know it's not intelligent, you conclude that means language must be seperable from thought/meaning. But that's not correct. The correct insight is that it is not using language, because "it" only exists as an extension of our collective intelligence which uses language. It is simply a mirror of that collective intelligence which we have set up. A mirror-image of someone speaking is not itself using language.
Federica wrote:(3) You still don't quite get what principled understanding I was arguing for in our recent VR discussion, and therefore think is it at odds with what Max argued for in this post. Especially this paraphrase of the argument signals to me you aren't quite getting it - “Nonsense, it’s not by looking away from it, it’s not by compensating it with spiritual practice, that VR will be redeemed, but by descending in it. Some will have to do it." Actually the spiritual practice is the only thing which will redeem materialistic technology - not by shutting ourselves into asceticism and pretending the technology doesn't exist, but by bringing the fruits of our spiritual practice (including our rigorous logical reasoning) into the sphere of such technological phenomena. Is that not what Max is doing by writing the very well-reasoned essay?
It could very well be that I still don’t get what you were arguing in the VR discussion. However we don’t need to circumnavigate that far to pursue this present discussion. One thing you were certainly arguing for (I don't have enough time now, but I will go search for the quotes if necessary, later today) is that some people at least should descend in the material/sensorial experience of a technology, and that my opinion that it was deleterious in general was arbitrary, and wrong. Is this correct? Now I agree, what the essay is doing is to prescribe those who are interested to have a prescription, that the technology “must be met with a correlative development and elevation” so yes, with compensating spiritual practice. But what you were arguing for VR was rather that some will have to descend in the practical experience of it, not in a correlative spiritual practice away from it (unless you decide to define “spiritual practice” in a very counter-intuitive, all encompassing way that would cover anything we can ever endeavor, in all spectrums.)
I am not really interested in re-explaining all of my arguments from the entire VR discussion here. Suffice to say, the real question you should be asking yourself is, 'why am I always trying to debate about a current topic by referring to my understanding of someone's old comments and comparing them to my understanding of their new comments?' Instead of that, why not just focus on the logical coherency of the comments I am making right now, right here, on this thread? If you think what Max wrote is completely at odds with the principle that we can redemptively approach material technologies with our elevated thinking for pedagogical value, even though that is what he ostensibly did in the very act of writing the essay, then you are simply reading things into what he wrote, and I have already explained why.
Federica wrote:Yes I would. Because calling cannibals less human on the basis of their behaviors, sets a discontinuity between behaviors that can be considered fully human on the one end, and, on the other end, behaviors that would be less human than human, beyond a certain threshold (that you should now define or explain). The fact that we are all at risk to lapse into these behaviors only transfers the act of discontinuing from segmenting humanity, into segmenting behaviors. As I understood it, this was not the spirit of your quote:
AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Jan 18, 2023 5:56 pm I work to internalize that these are not your thoughts, your habits, or your soul-tendencies, or those of the people who immerse themselves in VR and materialistic technologies, or the rapists and murderers for that matter, but they are ours as a Karmically interwoven collective of individual perspectives which comprise humanity and the Cosmic "I".
You are projecting your obsession with rigid definitions onto me and then assuming that is the 'spirit' in which I wrote something previously. Again, I have to ask why you are holding an artificial debate between your understanding of Max and your understanding of my older comment, instead of just trying to discern the logical coherence of what we are saying right now on this thread? Does it make sense to you or not?
Let me put it this way - I am less than human whenever I approach my fellow humans and beings without the love, respect, dignity they deserve as microcosmic images of God. Yes, I am always fluctuating along a gradient of 'humanness' throughout my day and frequently failing to live up to my 'human' ideal. That is what my true humanity is - an ideal of Earthly evolution. The cannibal is clearly further away from that ideal than I am right now, but animalistic tendencies which lead to cannibalistic behaviors still live within me and could come to outer expression if I do not persistently seek the high ideals with living thinking and progressively transmute-transfigure-redeem those tendencies.