ChatGPT answers metaphysical questions :)

[Federica]

Thanks for the poke Federica.

Nowadays play is almost always worth my time and focus. You know -- for the fun of it.

What does that mean - could you elaborate a little more?

[Lou Gold]

Thanks for the poke Federica.

Nowadays play is almost always worth my time and focus. You know -- for the fun of it.

What does that mean - could you elaborate a little more?

Spirit has told me that in my final days, be they few or many, my mission is to be a happy person. Play is the way I'm doing it. Sometimes ii is super and sometimes I 'fall down, go boom.' That's how "the perfect joy" works.

[Federica]

Thanks for the poke Federica.

Nowadays play is almost always worth my time and focus. You know -- for the fun of it.

What does that mean - could you elaborate a little more?

Spirit has told me that in my final days, be they few or many, my mission is to be a happy person. Play is the way I'm doing it. Sometimes ii is super and sometimes I 'fall down, go boom.' That's how "the perfect joy" works.

Yes but Spirit didn't say anything about how to do it. Or did it?

[Lou Gold]

What does that mean - could you elaborate a little more?

Spirit has told me that in my final days, be they few or many, my mission is to be a happy person. Play is the way I'm doing it. Sometimes ii is super and sometimes I 'fall down, go boom.' That's how "the perfect joy" works.

Yes but Spirit didn't say anything about how to do it. Or did it?

Spirit, always honoring choice, simply says I can find out within and own my own results but, NO!, Spirit in my communion does not elaborate. My understanding arrives as I stand under its advice.

The general mantra is in my signature (below).

[AshvinP]

Oh man, it appears our concerns about PoF-reduced via GPT have been realized.

https://chat.openai.com/g/g-3qNcmtS3U-p ... m-chat-bot

It requires a paid version so I haven't tested it out yet.

[Federica]

Oh man, it appears our concerns about PoF-reduced via GPT have been realized.

https://chat.openai.com/g/g-3qNcmtS3U-p ... m-chat-bot

It requires a paid version so I haven't tested it out yet.

oh, I see... it is created by:

https://philosophyoffreedom.com/members/00yzc179qgdki

whose website we noticed before.
There's also this other Steiner bot by the same author:

https://chat.openai.com/g/g-up53oc4E4-w ... ws-chatbot

[Cleric]

I decided to play a little with Google’s https://notebooklm.google.com/ tool. It allows to add several sources and then ask questions about the contents.

Let me explain my motivation. We have often heard here that things presented are incomprehensible or that they are even simply gibberish that is made to look clever. Language models do not ‘understand’ things. As we have explored before, it’s all just an algorithm that operates on numbers. In principle, we can execute this algorithm by hand with paper and pencil (even though it would take us years). For example, when we import the sources in the above tool, they are simply a long sequence of numbers. Then a question that can be asked is simply a few more numbers added to the string. Then we begin to execute the algorithm, which adds and multiplies the numbers in the string in different ways and patterns, weighs these results against a large statistical database (the language model itself) and as a result, a new number is added to the sequence. This process is repeated until all the numbers of the response are generated. There’s no ‘understanding’ here, no thinking, no insight. We can generate the whole answer number by number and we may never even suspect that these numbers can in any way be mapped to human language.

The reason the added numbers to the string (the response) seem meaningful is because they, together with the source text, fit the complicated statistics of the model and these statistics are derived from text that is already structured meaningfully (to us humans). If the model was built from text that was already gibberish – random sequences of words – then the statistics would capture that and the new numbers/words added to the string by the algorithm would reflect it.

So assuming that the models have been trained upon text that is meaningfully structured, we could expect that it can be a kind of measure for whether the text of the sources more or less satisfies these statistics.

This is what I wanted to see: whether the written text – in this particular case I'm experimenting with the text of the Inner Space Stretching essays – is at least statistically coherent. Not whether it makes deep sense that only the human spirit can grasp, not whether it is right or wrong, but simply whether the numerical relations between the words/tokens satisfy the statistics of well-structured human language.

The answer seems to be ‘yes’. This simply confirms what we have been saying all along – that these ideas are not resisted because they make no sense (even if only grammatical sense!) but because of purely human factors, such as antipathy, disinterestedness, and so on. To me, this was a kind of relief. Now I know that if nothing else, the words are at least grammatically consistent and form a kind of coherent numerical pattern, resonating with the statistics of the model. I repeat that this has nothing to do with whether the ideal message is right or wrong, but simply that, if nothing else, at least the words are not random gibberish and fit the statistics of well-structured human language.

The tool can not only respond with written text but can also generate a short audio, podcast-style summary of the sources. I must admit I was quite blown away by this feature. Not only that the content itself makes sense but also the quality of the generated voices is impressive. To be fair, if I had heard that without knowing, I wouldn’t have guessed that it was generated.

Here’s an example: Link 1

Here are two more versions generated over earlier versions of the text: Link 2, Link 3

The voice quality and the articulation are really almost scary to behold. The summarization, of course, is not perfect but, to be honest, I don’t think it would have sounded much too different if it was made by any two random real podcasters who are not very familiar with the depth of the phenomenology we’re dealing with here. The summaries clearly reflect the tons of self-help and popular spiritual materials that the models have been trained on, but nevertheless, it manages to capture some of the essential points, which again, only shows that if nothing else, they at least make mechanically fitting sense.

For those who haven’t read the essays, I wouldn’t suggest that hearing these automatically generated summaries makes reading unnecessary. Remember that the words are not there to just make statistically plausible sense – that is, to remain as more or less fitting mental puzzle pieces in the intellectual sphere. Like an art form, they only fulfill their mission when grasped as a communication of a living soul to the inner experience of another soul. It’s not about making sense of the words like mere puzzle pieces but discovering for ourselves the living flow that the words describe.

As said, it is somewhat relieving that if nothing else, the words are at least mechanically fitting together. I could refer to this next time when there’s an argument about the random noise that inner phenomenology consists of. I hope that we can then move the conversation in a region where it should really belong. It’s like saying: “Look, blaming that the words don’t even make mechanical sense, is not really plausible. This can be seen from the fact that a computational algorithm, which doesn’t suffer from laziness or irrational antipathy toward the text, can pretty well match the numerical patterns against the statistical database of coherent grammatically sound human language. With this out of the way, let’s focus on the real issues – these inner forces that prevent us from approaching the meaning and its living experience, by trying to convince us that there’s no reason to even try read the text because we have apriori assumed that it makes not even grammatical sense.”

If anyone wants to experiment on their own, here’s a short how-to.

1. I’ve concatenated together the essays in a Google Doc because it’s easier to import into the LM notepad. Open it here and add a shortcut to your Drive (the icon with triangle with a plus above the menu).
2. Open https://notebooklm.google.com/, create a new Notepad, add a new Source, choose Google Docs, and select the document.
3. Explore the possibilities.

I emphasize once again that this is not meant to promote the miracle of language models. No matter how many questions we ask the model, it will be all the same if these things remain only floating mental images. The goal is simply to help us face the real resisting forces within ourselves, instead of externalizing them.

[Federica]

It's interesting, earlier today I also passed some of your writings through AI - obviously with a very different goal (I would never have had the idea to check their grammatical and syntactical coherence).
I was rather trying to see if Chat GPT would confirm my impression that your writing is quite different today from what it was for example in TCT. I picked one piece of text from TCT (second text) and one from Part 5 of Inner Space Stretching (first text), of comparable size. It seems the answer is 'yes'. Here are the analysis' conclusions:

"Conclusion:
While both texts share certain thematic overlaps—particularly a critical stance on the limitations of modern intellectual processes—their styles, structures, and tones are quite different. The first text is more introspective and metaphorical, while the second text is more intellectual and historical in its approach.
It seems likely that the two texts were written by different authors, or at least by the same author adopting very different approaches for different contexts. The first text feels more like a meditative guide or philosophical reflection, while the second is closer to a philosophical essay or critique."

[Cleric]

It's interesting, earlier today I also passed some of your writings through AI - obviously with a very different goal (I would never have had the idea to check their grammatical and syntactical coherence).
I was rather trying to see if Chat GPT would confirm my impression that your writing is quite different today from what it was for example in TCT. I picked one piece of text from TCT (second text) and one from Part 5 of Inner Space Stretching (first text), of comparable size. It seems the answer is 'yes'. Here are the analysis' conclusions:

"Conclusion:
While both texts share certain thematic overlaps—particularly a critical stance on the limitations of modern intellectual processes—their styles, structures, and tones are quite different. The first text is more introspective and metaphorical, while the second text is more intellectual and historical in its approach.
It seems likely that the two texts were written by different authors, or at least by the same author adopting very different approaches for different contexts. The first text feels more like a meditative guide or philosophical reflection, while the second is closer to a philosophical essay or critique."

Thank you, Federica,

this is interesting indeed. I'm aware that the style is changing. I hope I'll be able to grasp this process in the future when I look back on it. For the time being, from within this process, I'm simply driven by the urge to make everything as direct and clear as possible. This first happens for myself personally, of course. It is a strange feeling because the more clear it becomes, the more I see how... well.. simple it really is (not the complexity of the World flow but our proper stance within it). This hits me even when I listen to these audio summaries. Not so much the summaries themselves but simply the opportunity to assume the position of a listener. On one hand I realize how these things do not sound too different from any other general material. Everyone has heard something like "Well, you should take the steering wheel of your life, listen to your inner self" and so on. This is what anyone with at least some spiritual inclination is doing anyway, right? Of course, what we have been trying to convey is how our intellectual self can awaken within the inner depth of experience. This is what generally gets lost in the communication and one is left with the general guidelines which surely sound like a reiteration of just about every other self-help book. Yet the fact that you and the several other people here grasp that there's real consciousness transformation involved, that we really begin to feel ourselves placed differently within the World flow, gives me hope that these writings are not completely in vain. Let me be clear, I'm not suggesting that these writings give anything more than one can already extract from working deeply with PoF, for example. Yet, for me personally, developing this expanded palette of inner movements, finding this high-resolution experience on the flow, adds tremendously to the general intuitions and indeed transforms existence into a completely different 'game', with new 'controls' and new 'graphics'.

The way I see it is that probably my later writings attempt to be more participatory (and it seems ChatGPT captures that). After all, this whole series took form along the backbone of an exercise. And I think this is really the direction where things should be moving. As we often say, we are communicating the movements of intuitive asanas. The possibilities of mere thinking from a philosophical armchair have been exhausted decades ago. It's about time we begin to explore the possibilities of our inner being by standing up from the armchair and stretching around.

[Federica]

The tool can not only respond with written text but can also generate a short audio, podcast-style summary of the sources. I must admit I was quite blown away by this feature. Not only that the content itself makes sense but also the quality of the generated voices is impressive. To be fair, if I had heard that without knowing, I wouldn’t have guessed that it was generated.

Here’s an example: Link 1

Here are two more versions generated over earlier versions of the text: Link 2, Link 3

The voice quality and the articulation are really almost scary to behold.

Indeed, the resemblance with the auditory expression of human reasoning and dialogue is impressive.

I guess this is spiritually very helpful, in that it puts under our nose the demonstration that the linguistic (word-conceptual) layer in which we operate verbally (in thought and speech) has mostly become in our times so abstract and disconnected from meaningful gesture and meaningful sound, that we can hardly make the difference between an expression of truly human spiritual activity and a statistically significant but fake patching of verbal sequences, be it in speech or in text form.

Our thinking voice and physical voice (our language) rarely convey our intuitive human potential. It is rather the expression of our dwelling in a sort of internally coherent, but parallel and disconnected layer of ideal existence, and can therefore be easily hacked. If we were to reconnect language with feeling and to reinfuse it with music and gesture, the LLMs would read and sound like childish caricatures of an authentically human voice, because we would be able to both express ourselves in a much more pregnant language, and to detect that character in our fellow humans.