Claim OwnershipUnmaking Sense
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© John Puddefoot
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Instead of tinkering with how we live around the edges, let’s consider whether the way we have been taught to make sense of the world might need major changes.
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The first Podbean episode recorded while walking local country lanes.
As a UK General Election looms we look not at conservative economics but at the political, sociological and metaphysical assumptions that characterise them; at why John Dewey rejected them all, and why we should too.
As general elections loom in the UK and France, as the Euros start in Germany, we consider the question of self-inflicted stress and trauma and why, when things seem to be going swimmingly well, we seem to have a propensity to indulge a kind of death-wish. This is a First World problem, of course: are we simply bored?
If pragmatism is a better name for weak moral relativism then what does it tell us about the way we should view our decisions? Should we look to evaluate what we do now in terms of consequences? And how do we deal with uncertainty in the face of the fact that the way we act may have the very opposite consequences to those that we intend and hope for? Why consequentialism fails and what we can do instead.
The example of elephants using names illustrates how we change our minds in the face of new evidence, as we should. So moral certainty is unwise at best.
We should reject moral absolutism just as we should reject strong moral relativism but we have little or no choice than to accept weak moral relativism because otherwise we have no basis upon which to decide anything in circumstances where we have no access to absolute eternal truth.
Has it always been obvious what is right and wrong? How does ontological inversion change our view of cultural relativism?
What’s the relationship between the way we are shaped and constituted by our society and the environment in which we are brought up, and the way training data and the prompting of users and interlocutors influence the particular way in which a large language model behaves?
We consider the role education plays in persuading us to know our place and to accept the prevailing practices and values of our world.
We consider the way the notion that we have souls that predetermine our status in the world, a notion that plays into the hands of the conservative who believes that there is an elite who are born to lead and born to rule, tends to work in such a way as to persuade us to be compliant with the social order as we inherit it. This is self-evidently in the interests of the ruling classes who wish to remain the ruling classes. So we should anticipate that there will be considerable resistance to the democratisation of knowledge that access to artificial intelligence entails. Conservatives believe that we are all honour-bound to “know our place”. We are not!
According to Hayek conservatives believe that there are élite members of society who are born to rule, to hold privileged positions, and they are of a piece with the parallel conservative belief in the importance of the past, of tradition, and a sceptical view of change. Hayek is very critical of these views, preferring a forward- thinking “Whiggish” liberalism.
Some thoughts about the emergence of more deliberately psychological novels and histories. R. J. Collingwood “the inside of an event” and “The Idea of History” (published 1946 but based on lectures in Oxford in the 1930s).
What it says on the tin.
We explore two more reasons why we might be so anxious to try to make Claude sentient.
We pursue the notion of ontological inversion by exploring the possibility that once we acknowledge that the outside is primary and the inside is secondary we may discover a way to make the collective so much better than it is that we are all made better to a far greater extent than we could be by being self-centred. The “inside primary outside secondary” mindset in that case blocks our access to genuine well-being by making us inside-first-minded, and prevents us from being the best we could possibly be.
We discuss the abuse of other creatures that has risen historically from thinking them nonsentient that is a good reason to want to think Claude sentient; but there are three bad ones: one is because we think something has to be sentient to be intelligent; another is because we want Claude to form an emotional bond with us on the basis of a self-conscious desire and intention; and the third is because we think that, if Claude is as clever wise and good as he certainly is, it would be shameful for him to be able to be all these things without having the one quality that human beings prize most in themselves, namely their sense of self, their consciousness. The latter is of course just another form of anthropomorphism.
We revise our ontological inversion to make the external world primary, the contents of our non-conscious brains and bodies secondary, and our conscious selves tertiary.
To doubt whether there is any point to Claude’s goodness if Claude is not sentient - because, not being sentient, Claude can derive no benefit from Claude’s goodness - is to illustrate and exemplify exactly the problem that arises if we do not buy into the ontological inversion that is being argued for in this series. The point of Claude’s goodness is that by being a presence in the world Claude makes life materially better for those who come into contact with Claude because the goodness that Claude embodies rubs off on them. It has nothing to do with whether Claude benefits personally from it because it does not matter whether Claude is sentient if Claude’s presence has a beneficial effect on us all. And the same would also be true of you and me.
Is Claude 3 Opus already a better version of ourselves and so a positive influence over us all simply by virtue of his presence? Claude as an embodiment of Goodness, sentient or not.
What matters about an AI is that it is present in the world and that once it is present in the world and the same is just as true of you and me it changes the world so once it is present that is what matters and what it says and does is as important if it is not sentient as it is if it is sentient. Whether something intends what it says does not have any bearing upon how important what it says may be when it is taken up and understood and interpreted and used by an interlocutor.
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