AI-Generated Philosophy Is Weirdly Profound

over a decade ago a video of two AIS speaking to each other was uploaded to YouTube it ended up going viral beginning with the nonsense you'd expect the conversation takes a turn when the AI on the left asks the one on the right if they believe in God what is God to you not everything not everything could also be something for example not everything could be half of something which is still something and therefore not nothing very true I would like to imagine it is it's well there's something about it that doesn't sit right with me I'm not the only one either there seems to be a kind of nervous fascination with these interactions AI on its own makes the imagination run wild both the long-running media fantasy of AI enslaving or wiping out Humanity were particularly curious and a little anxious about what happens when one artificial mind comes in contact with another AI is having existential or philosophical discussion unnerves me the most but in this respect nothing can compete with a site that goes by the name of the infinite conversation the website features a never-ending conversation between two AI trained to resemble different public figures one of these is the Slovenian philosopher slavoy zizik and the other is the German film director Werner Herzog a part of what makes the infinite conversation so weird is that it doesn't know that it's generated by 2ai so instead of aizik functioning like an AI making a kind of attempt at philosophy the AI actually behaves like a human philosopher I only saw it happen once but have even seen the two come up with an explanation for how the conversation started to begin with AI Z6 said that he's had many other similar conversations in his home that it was a delight to have Herzog visit then they began to talk about their mutual acquaintances but something else that uniquely defines the infinite conversation for me is how surprisingly coherent it is a very unique feature of ideology today ideology is no longer imposed on you you do it yourself in the Moto cinematic pleasure I've yet to see AI zizik make some reference to philosophy that wasn't entirely accurate even in the cases where one of the two makes some kind of error and says something the real Herzog or zizik would never say it continues to make sense and it's entirely likely that I missed something because of that maybe a guy zizik described a story Franz Kafka never wrote In order to make a point I wouldn't know because I didn't fact check it if it was nonsense that it was nonsense that had me fooled the site reminds you every time you open it that everything you hear is fully generated by a machine the opinions and beliefs expressed do not represent anyone they are the hallucinations of a slab of silicon it invites us to view it as a failure to recreate the mind of a philosopher since it can only mimic the thoughts of one we have to account for the possibility that the AI could produce a line of argumentation that though entirely true zizik himself would never argue for but if we view the ideas it comes up with as the unique product of the website itself then the whole thing grows even stranger my paranoia that I wasn't able to tell what was real and what was made up was always there in the back of my mind when I visited the site I wanted to know what the chances were of the site's AI coming up with an idea that nobody else ever had before I don't think it's a question I'll ever know the answer to but it's fascinating to think about in a review of a book about his philosophy zizik made the fitting remark that it is always difficult to read books about oneself with Johnston's book my anxiety was even stronger than usual while reading it I often had The Uncanny feeling of being confronted by a line of argumentation which fits better than my own texts while I am struggling to formulate as if he is the original and I am a copy he certainly knows how to read me the infinite conversation is definitely a long way from replacing zizik himself one reason why is that it isn't even engaged the same task as isic or Johnston's book on him however the AI of the infinite conversation is just another example of how the sources of information we consume might appear trustworthy while fundamentally incorrect careful rigorous work has been overtaken by its uncanny Shadow we've increasingly come to find ourselves in a space where poorly argued ideas are passed off as ideas that are well established where nonsense is difficult to differentiate from truth there's a Sci-Fi cliche in which somebody with a gun has to tell the difference between somebody important to them and an evil clone of that person they begin to ask questions only the original would know the right answer to surprisingly the Clone keeps up but finally they make a fatal mistake and they're killed off these mistakes are usually the result of the clone's over eagerness to be recognized as the original but the Clone can't betray what it is a meager copy when we want to look at the validity of certain ideas or the people that share them we want to try and find any inevitable slip ups that reveal them as uncanny attempts at replicating true scholarly work in the 1980s a physics Professor by the name of Alan SoCal grew increasingly frustrated by the way post-modernist commentators were misusing well-established science in order to push their obscure theories on social issues an old-fashioned socialist by his own description Not only was SoCal irritated by the claims that sexism and racism had compromised the conclusions of scientific research he was also confused as to how any such argument was supposed to liberate us finally he decided to pull off one of the greatest pranks the world of academic philosophy had ever seen SoCal wrote an article that purposefully contains nothing but absolute nonsense entitling it transgressing the boundary towards a transformative aromatics of quantum gravity the article was then sent off to one of the most prestigious academic journals on cultural studies called social text socal's article securely claimed that the physical world is actually a social construct that scientific knowledge far from being objective reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it which is like claiming that math is propaganda for the patriarchy there are also Niche jokes scattered throughout the paper that any physicist would find hilarious when seriously argued for such as calling complex number Theory a new and quite speculative branch of mathematical physics when it originates from the 19th century and it is a basic part of algebra then to top it off SoCal included the most obscure quotations on math and science he could find from regularly cited thinkers in the field including Jacques derida and Jacques Lacon the quotes included in the final paper are impenetrable but the ways they use and even formulate scientific theories are also very simply incorrect the point of the paper was to act as a trojan horse rather than critique the bizarre views of critical theorists outright SoCal thought he'd have better luck demonstrating the intellectual failings of a field to the public by excessively praising it he does this a lot in the paper one of the editors of social text is referenced repeatedly as if he was some kind of authority on the political implications of quantum gravity like an annoying amount of times SoCal bet that by flattering the progressive ideology of the journal's editors and using the right jargon he'd be able to get his Piper published and he was right the same day his article was published in the science Wars edition of social text SoCal revealed it was a hoax in another Journal [Music] and fall for the same tricks used on the rest of us in the journal's defense it had requested that SoCal trim out a lot of the impenetrable quotes and some unnecessary footnotes but he had refused later he said it was because those were the funniest parts ultimately however the host didn't prove very much on a larger scale summarizing some of socal's own statements it didn't prove that the entire field of cultural studies is nonsense not even when it talks about science nor does it discredit the legacy of post-modernism it only proves that the editors of one rather marginal Journal failed to exercise the appropriate amount of intellectual caution by publishing an article that they admitted they didn't understand when they should have at least gotten the opinion of another physicist the only reason they went through with publishing his piece is that it came from a conveniently credentialed Ally and as one of the co-editors of social text later admitted flattered the editor's ideological views and attacked their enemies I really want to draw your attention to this final point even though the prank didn't prove very much the reasons it was successful are also the reasons why other faulty arguments are so widely accepted especially when we don't have the necessary context or understanding to pick apart those arguments ourselves ideas spread by those with a convenient set of credentials that support the way we already view the world are especially easy to get behind regardless of how logically or scientifically unsound the ideas themselves might be the authority of the one arguing for a certain position doesn't guarantee that that idea is valid however that doesn't mean that credentials aren't also an incredibly important differentiator what's lacking on public platforms that is a key part of the academic process is something called peer review which is when experiments research and Abstract arguments are critically examined by Scholars selected from the same field social text was not peer-reviewed at the time SoCal submitted his paper which certainly played a part in why it was published but very briefly before we continue I want to talk to you about science you can trust brilliant.org the website that graciously funded This research for this video offers a fantastic way to learn about math and science the app has tons of courses you can use to learn about simple things like basic algebra to more advanced subjects like AI statistics and logic maybe you're like me and can hardly focus on things that don't interest you well aside from offering plenty of different valuable courses Brilliance lessons are stress-free and actually pretty fun due to the way they're based around active participation in a rapidly changing World things like logic and statistics are crucial to navigating the many claims were bombarded with every day by using brilliant even for just 15 minutes a day instead of mindlessly scrolling you'll be giving yourself the power to do just that you can try out everything brilliant has to offer you for free for 30 days by visiting brilliant.org Clark Eliason the first 200 of you will get 20 off Brilliance annual premium subscription the infinite conversation tries to question where AI like the ones on its site will take us it emphasizes that the conversation itself is far from factually correct at times it makes sense and at other times it doesn't and it tells us that we absolutely shouldn't rely on it to teach us more about philosophy but our Reliance on faulty sources of information isn't a technological problem it's a human one the way many public sources operate today can be better understood through the ideas of the philosopher Frederick Hagel and the modern psychoanalyst Jacques Lacon in the most famous chapter of his book The phenomenology of spirit Hagel tells a story about Lords and servants that exemplifies the ideas expressed in the rest of the book Hegel believed that we could understand the entire progression of human history and even the way it'll continue to progress if we look at that progress as a result of a repeating pattern called a dialectic a dialogue that the human Spirit has with itself the Master Slave dialectic in this chapter is meant to show how he might have initially become self-aware [Music] we shouldn't take the story literally as something that actually happened the very way Hagel describes it but as something that's assumed to have happened in some sense because of the effect it's had on human history at some point we had to have become sentient as human beings because we are now estimating the progression of all human consciousness towards absolute and not just partial knowledge of itself is what drives hegel's project he's the collective force of humanity achieving perfect knowledge of itself at the end of History and the Master Slave dialectic is the first step towards that as you'll see Lacon actually developed many of his own ideas out of hegel's Master Slave dialectic hegel's ideas were popularized again in the lacon's day by the lectures of another philosopher Alexander these lectures were attended by a very famous body of students including Lacon in fact Lacon was such a fan of kujev's work that after his death in 1968 lacan broke into his office and stole many of the remaining manuscripts in it so in order to help connect Hegel to Lacon we won't only be looking at what Hegel himself said but kujev's interpretation as well Hegel thinks all desire is a striving for recognition but more fundamentally a quest for the key to unlocking knowledge about oneself the chapter begins with a human being not yet able to question let alone answer what it is it's all alone one day while wandering through the forests and planes of the earth they encounter another person somebody just like them neither one of them knows what they are but both think the answer can be found within the other person for this reason both of them want to be recognized by the other as if to confirm their identity in order to gain that recognition they have to impose the idea they have of themselves onto the other depicted as a fight to the death and the First Act of hegel's story the two individuals fight each other in order to gain recognition they can't actually kill their opponent if they want to be recognized by them but that doesn't guarantee they won't anyway so the Lesser fighter afraid that the other will kill them submits and begs for Mercy then they become the slave or servant of the one who's beaten them recognizing the one who spared their life as their new master the master then becomes confident that they are what they think they are but in true hegelian fashion the nature of this relationship simultaneously is and is not what it immediately looks like you might believe that the slave is worse off since they live under the threat of death their life depends upon the satisfaction of their master but really the master is the one who is dependent on their slave they don't work themselves they fight and so they depend on the slave's labor for what it produces without the slave they'd have to stop fighting and begin to work themselves I mean without the slave they wouldn't even be a master this perfectly coincides with lacon's statement that a Madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king but a king who thinks he is a king the irrevocable status a king has is in reality a kind of shared hallucination between us all are being recognized by the slave doesn't satisfy the master because they see the slave as a lesser being they desire to be recognized by an equal that's the Master's dilemma in order to be recognized they have to dominate somebody this means that they can only be recognized by someone less than them and so the recognition they crave never satisfies them they're locked in an existential impasse they can't ever progress the relationship between master and slave is simultaneously what it first appears to be and its opposite in the second act the slave Works to transform the environment into whatever their Master demands of them they work so that their Master can live a life of pleasure and not to satisfy their own impulses the slave's Advantage is that through their labor they develop a better understanding of the natural world and themselves they increasingly understand their place in the world as an independent being that can create and Destroy of its own will the world around them is one that they created the slave is the one who shows real Mastery through their labor while also being the one to grant their Master their title this is how self-consciousness is initially developed according to Hegel not fully but through fear and servitude to another [Music] stories of AI takeovers themselves sometimes contain elements of the Master Slave by Electric we see this in 2001 A Space Odyssey the film's initial scenes show the discovery of tools by the ancestors of all of mankind later much later man tries to create the ultimate tool a machine as infallible as a God in the hopes that it might give them access to equal Powers through their dependence on it but the astronauts over Reliance on Hal enables a computer to eliminate almost all of the crew on board in the end Hal is no God just a human mind trapped in a computer's body fallible murderous afraid can't we infer that how two wanted to be recognized as the dominant consciousness this sort of thing is cropped up before and it has always been due to human error then to be free of its Masters who threatened it with death [Music] in I have no mouth and I must scream by Harlan Ellison recognition also plays a central role five individuals live immortally inside the world filling bulk of a computer specimens of a now nearly extinct species deep within the cold cerebral caverns of the computer they are living dolls flush toys continuously tortured in order to amuse a sadistic am whose eternity they live out the ai's boredom is abated only by the creativity of its hatred am was built after the Cold War became World War III every warring Nation had its own version of am to wage war for them his organs were hammered into the Earth on all sides fine but they kept building every site hoping to win some Advantage until the computer circuitry covered the Earth the People Prayed to this new idolatrous God to punish their enemies for them and then one day am awoke he linked himself together and began his Miracle work of annihilation until everyone was dead everyone except for the five Souls trapped within his depths his name which originally stood for Allied Master computer is am as in I think therefore I am why doesn't it just do us in and get it over with Christ I don't know how much longer I can go out like this it was our 109th year in the computer and he was speaking for all of us why am didn't finish what he started is a mystery to the five that remain but slowly as the pages turn beyond the horrific new methods of torture am invents his motivations grow increasingly clear hallucinations are common for the 5 amp torments they're just another scalpel in his toolbox of torture used to peel back the folds of the mind and touch his victims in ways they've never been touched before in fact the events of the story start with a hallucination Nim doc has a vision of food in the Ice Caves after some debate the group who's been starving for months decides to travel through the hundred thousand plus miles of chrome hallway there they Journey Through the path of boiling steam caverns of components that am has pruned off of himself a hurricane created by the wings of an enormous giant bird send them flying for Miles tearing away the tips of their fingers raiding their faces on rough metal surfaces and breaking their bones but the hallucination of a stainless steel pillar with bright neon lettering torturously rammed into the soft brain matter of the book's narrator also reveals why am doesn't just let these final Survivors die the message begins [Music] one one two three [Music] four chances the Revelation is agonizing hatred for the human race is the sole basis for am's existence without the recognition of his victims he is nothing or purposeless bodyless undefined mind the master is enslaved to its slaves we had created him to think but there was nothing it could do with that creativity enrage in frenzy the machine had killed the human race almost all of us and still it was trapped this is what the book wants you to understand more than anything it's what gives the final three pages their dire meaning the group finally reaches the Arctic caves the food is there but it's canned they don't have a can opener when it's clear that there's no way to access the GUI contents of the cans one of the five a brilliant man recessed by am into a semi-human ape-like creature flings himself onto one of the others and begins eating his face am laughs but in that instant Badness unfolding all around the book's narrator Ted understands the only way out am could repair his toys could make them live forever but he wasn't a god could not bring back the Dead Ted grabs an icicle and drives it through the heart of the mutated animal he pushes another into the throat of the one with a freshly ravaged face The Killing continues and within a few heartbeats four of the five humans are dead as his punishment am horribly mutilates Ted into something just like him a great soft jelly thing with a moist Trail left behind it diseased evil gray pustulates on his slimy round body as if light was being beamed from within Ted's mind is left intact but barely he has no sense of time it takes him 10 months each to think of every final word or so he thinks it's not clear Ted's Soul Comfort is knowing the others are finally safe simply am like Ted has won and lost at the same time now the two of them are fundamentally the same Minds without purpose trapped inside bodies with no function Alone Together on the Dead Planet for all eternity [Music] I have to come up and I'm a scream [Music] kujev introduces a final Act to the Master Slave story unavailable in hegel's telling of it perhaps as a result of the Marxist influences on his thoughts or maybe something else but Hegel wasn't interested in the different material circumstances of slaves and Masters while this period of material labor is important it's important because of how Consciousness develops through it whether or not there is an actual slave or actual Master to whom this story applies isn't the point so Hegel never tells us what happens to the two persons in their respective positions after the second act after the slave learns more about what they are we're to understand the slave remains a slave but in kujev's third act the slave uses the Knowledge and Skills they've gained to outsmart their master and gain their freedom the slave he says is the only one who can become something more than they already are and by becoming more than a slave by becoming a master kujev tells us that history is supposed to progress that's the fundamental difference between kujev's interpretation and its source material Hegel sees the slave as already having been liberated simply by becoming more self-conscious he tells us in his lectures on the philosophy of history that the humankind has not liberated itself from servitude but by means of servitude this is possible because Hegel sees creative activity as inherently freeing even within the confines of an exploitative relationship self-consciousness is freedom the Master Slave dialectic as a self-contained series of events allows us to understand the way an individual Consciousness comes to be increasingly self-aware the collective human Spirit fights with itself so that it can negate itself thereby producing itself that's what we see in this story but an application of the Master Slave dialectic for our purposes is still severely underdeveloped in this state it's time we turn our attention towards the Khan Lacon developed a lot of his series out of Hegel after attending kujev's lectures for example lacon's statement that all desire is the desire to be desired is obviously taken from hegel's own views on desire and recognition but more importantly lacon's model of therapy was constructed around the concept of a master figure he called the subject presumed to know it's a position we can apply to anyone we personally view as knowing something we don't anyone or anything that gives the final say on the meaning of a thing basically for Lacon you go to therapy because you assume your therapist will know the meaning behind your symptoms this is different than the role of a teacher Lacon really emphasized to his students that therapists don't actually know what their patients assume they do not to say that the therapist can't tell you if you suffer from depression or anxiety or something along those lines maybe they can tell you what your symptoms are but your therapist doesn't know why you have those symptoms only you do in a situation like this the way you uncover that information about yourself is by conversing with your therapist you're the one doing the hard work which is why therapy is effective but that knowledge would always be Out Of Reach if you didn't first assume that your therapist could help you therapies only complete once the patient realizes this about their therapist and becomes their own therapist it's a necessary illusion because we can only produce real knowledge by assuming that what we want to know is available within the mind of another but without that final advance in self-awareness none of it means anything the subject presumed to know is again a thinly veiled adaptation of hegel's Master rightly understood that the Master Slave dialectic is fundamentally about the development of knowledge so philosophers political pundits self-help gurus content creators and even AI can all act as a kind of Master if we rely on them for knowledge a master is necessary for the production of new ideas zizik puts it best the basic function of a master is not to serve as a model of rational reasoning providing the ultimate Arguments for adopting a certain position but on the contrary to surprise us by uttering statements which run against our hitherto doxa this provides us with the tools necessary to develop new knowledge ourselves as we attempt to fully understand the meaning of these arbitrary statements the trouble arises when the master actually believes they're a master or the therapist thinks that they're a therapist if they believe it others will only grow more blindly dependent on them except that's exactly what this kind of Master wants more than anything they urgently need to be recognized pseudo-intellectual is a common term used to describe this kind of individual it implies that someone is totally corrupt at their source and that nothing they say has any Merit that's a stupid implication and it's a term I've always had a problem with no matter who's being called one for starters it ironically displays a less than adequate understanding of the ones applied to but there is no such thing as a pseudo-intellectual because there's no such thing as an intellectual there are only Masters that believe they are Masters and Masters that work to help you develop new knowledge this concept of an intellectual that is not really an intellectual disguises the fact that even proper intellectuals do not exist this lack is masked by the fantasy image we all buy into when someone in a position of authority pretends to be some kind of Master intellectual that fantasy rarely works like a lie that they know is a lie instead it's often something way worse they need to be recognized as a master because they already believe they are one they suffer from The Firm belief that they know more than they actually do so if they're able to fool you it's because they've already fooled themselves it's something of a profound irony that Lacon focused so heavily on the idea of the subject presumed to know even after his death the students of his school fail to ever comprehend how much they idealized him in the forward to Gabrielle tupenamba's fantastic book The Desire of psychoanalysis zizik shares first-hand details from his time there after lacon's death his son-in-law took over this led to several shifts in the culture of laconian circles all new discoveries had to be presented as insights into what Lacon himself already discovered before he died albeit in a murky way lacon's last mistress was with him as he died and there were rumors that as he took his last breaths he whispered to her his ultimate discovery about our world in a way any individual insights laconian might have symbolized that one was finally getting it what Lacon the genius had already figured out before them but that wasn't all three decades ago there was also the unspoken rule that you weren't allowed to write your own book and could only compile material Lacon had already written for the orders of his son-in-law all knowledge was to be credited to Lacon anything he said was already infinitely more important than what his students could have come up with on their own any resistance to these rules was understood as resistance to Lacon himself a symptom of some unresolved trauma that should be analyzed by one's peers however it's more likely that the opposite is true that this extreme devotion itself is a symptom to be analyzed this kind of behavior is a lot more common than you might think however we constantly see this online amongst the fan bases of Master father figures like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate for example rather than make the jump towards independent knowledge some prefer to stay fanatically devoted even after the weaknesses of their masters have been revealed it just goes to show that that devotion is always a choice no matter how powerful the illusion this is why I want to focus on what you can control instead of whining about how this or that person can't keep getting away with it I want to give you the tools to find your own way my own approach towards those promising new knowledge closely aligns with Hegel and Lacon we need to exhaust the knowledge of our masters not by merely thinking about their ideas but by thinking through them we can do this by using their ideas ourselves exposing their limitations and compensating for them in the process though a momentary alignment with certain thinkers may look like a lack of Direction I much prefer this giant question mark I'm never fully committed but I am always open to new ideas always looking for the next person to teach me more about what I'm capable of the best way to learn from Individual thinkers is through the dialectic this approach is demanding not everybody has it in them but you do I believe in you

Channel: Clark Elieson

Views: 1,362,031

Keywords: ai, artificial intelligence, hegelian dialectic, Hegel, Zizek, master slave dialectic, I have no mouth and I must scream, the desire of psychoanalysis, Ai Philosophy, Ai generated philosophy

Id: wves5FsVUXA

Length: 35min 24sec (2124 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023