Gossip is a vital element of community, according to historian Yuval Harari, necessary as an ingredient in social bonding. People who gossip also like to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations, then pass along what they hear. Dialogue in stories meets a similar need. Stories that include dialogue encourage engagement. Readers put themselves in the position…More
Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence
Text therapy redux
Text therapy is simply communication between clients and their counsellors, clinicians or therapists via text media, such as email (non-synchronous) or real-time (synchronous) chat. Text chat has grown in many consumer contexts, abetted by automation: archiving, analysis, templates and AI-assisted bot technology. Those who are sufficiently literate sometimes prefer the protections and security afforded by…More
Text therapy
I met with my text therapist last week. She advised me to incorporate more story-telling into my writing. “It will help you connect with your readers on a deeper level,” she said. “How do I do that?” There was a pause. This communication was online. She could have been sipping her coffee, or composing her…More
Heidegger and panpsychism
Martin Heidegger’s teacher Edmund Husserl foregrounded consciousness, though Heidegger adopted a different vocabulary and different concepts. Nor does the term “panpsychism” or anything like it crop up in Heidegger’s writing, though no doubt it can be inferred. In his latest book Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy David Chalmers references Heidegger. The 20th-century…More
Panpsychic city
In my recent “conversation,” the openAI GPT-3 natural language processing (NLP) platform responded to my question about whether a city could be conscious with: “Yes, it makes sense to think that cities are conscious if you believe that all matter has a conscious mind. This is because cities are made of matter, and therefore they…More
Urban consciousness
What follows is a “Socratic dialogue” I had with the openAI’s GPT-3 platform about consciousness. In spite of the limitations, the conversation is likely as good or better than I have had or will have with human interlocutors on this difficult subject. The text here is verbatim and unedited, except for some comments indicated in…More
Benefits of artificial misinformation
Natural language processing (NLP) programs seem able to take as input words and phrases provided by a human operator and generate coherent sentences in response, simulating a kind of dialogue that some scholars (e.g. David Chalmers) think “hints of general intelligence.” I think that one aspect of that dialogue is to simulate how human interlocutors…More
Automated essay writing
Copysmith is a web-based AI writing tool that deploys an extensive database of texts to generate new content. The human writer provides a few key terms, a title or phrases relevant to their subject of interest. In response, the program offers up a selection of relevant short paragraphs. The writer selects from these to spur…More
The hallucination machine
Imagination is a commonplace idea. To imagine is to form an image in the mind, to contrive, devise or represent something. Most would affirm that a vivid imagination is an asset, a function exercised by competent designers, poets, artists, authors and inventors. Here I am continuing a theme from an earlier post Creative cognition. Now…More
Creative cognition
As I’m reading about brains and cognition again, I thought I would revisit an article I penned some time ago that tried to address the issue of creativity. Coyne, Richard. “Design reasoning without explanation.” AI Magazine 11, no. 4 (1990): 72-80. At the time there was a debate between two schools concerning how human reason…More