Category: Fiction

ChatGPT Isn’t an Artificial Intelligence (AI) But an Artificial Unconsciousness (AU)

by James Wallace Harris, 2/12/24

This essay is for anyone who wants to understand themselves and how creativity works. What I’m about to say will make more sense if you’ve played with ChatGPT or have some understanding of recent AI programs in the news. Those programs appear to be amazingly creative by answering ordinary questions, passing tests that lawyers, mathematicians, and doctors take, generating poems and pictures, and even creating music and videos. They often appear to have human intelligence even though they are criticized for making stupid mistakes — but then so do humans.

We generally think of our unconscious minds as mental processes occurring automatically below the surface of our conscious minds, out of our control. We believe our unconscious minds are neural functions that influence thought, feelings, desires, skills, perceptions, and reactions. Personally, I assume feelings, emotions, and desires come from an even deeper place and are based on hormones and are unrelated to unconscious intelligence.

It occurred to me that ChatGPT and other large language models are analogs for the unconscious mind, and this made me observe my own thoughts more closely. I don’t believe in free will. I don’t even believe I’m writing this essay. The keyword here is “I” and how we use it. If we use “I” to refer to our whole mind and body, then I’m writing the essay. But if we think of the “I” as the observer of reality that comes into being when I’m awake, then probably not. You might object to this strongly because our sense of I-ness feels obviously in full control of the whole shebang.

But what if our unconscious minds are like AI programs, what would that mean? Those AI programs train on billions of pieces of data, taking a long time to learn. But then, don’t children do something similar? The AI programs work by prompting it with a question. If you play a game of Wordle, aren’t you prompting your unconscious mind? Could you write a step-by-step flow chart of how you solve a Wordle game consciously? Don’t your hunches just pop into your mind?

If our unconscious minds are like ChatGPT, then we can improve them by feeding in more data and giving it better prompts. Isn’t that what we do when studying and taking tests? Computer scientists are working hard to improve their AI models. They give their models more data and refine their prompts. If they want their model to write computer programs, they train their models in more computer languages and programs. If we want to become an architect, we train our minds with data related to architecture. (I must wonder about my unconscious mind; it’s been trained on decades of reading science fiction.)

This will also explain why you can’t easily change another person’s mind. Training takes a long time. The unconscious mind doesn’t respond to immediate logic. If you’ve trained your mental model all your life on The Bible or investing money, it won’t be influenced immediately by new facts regarding science or economics.

We live by the illusion that we’re teaching the “I” function of our mind, the observer, the watcher, but what we’re really doing is training our unconscious mind like computer scientists train their AI models. We might even fool ourselves that free will exists because we believe the “I” is choosing the data and prompts. But is that true? What if the unconscious mind tells the “I” what to study? What to create? If the observer exists separate from intelligence, then we don’t have free will. But how could ChatGPT have free will? Humans created it, deciding on the training data, and the prompts. Are our unconscious minds creating artificial unconscious minds? Maybe nothing has free will, and everything is interrelated.

If you’ve ever practiced meditation, you’ll know that you can watch your thoughts. Proof that the observer is separate from thinking. Twice in my life I’ve lost the ability to use words and language, once in 1970 because of a large dose of LSD, and about a decade ago with a TIA. In both events I observed the world around me without words coming to mind. I just looked at things and acted on conditioned reflexes. That let me experience a state of consciousness with low intelligence, one like animals know. I now wonder if I was cut off from my unconscious mind. And if that’s true, it implies language and thoughts come from the unconscious minds, and not from what we call conscious awareness. That the observer and intelligence are separate functions of the mind.

We can get ChatGPT to write an essay for us, and it has no awareness of its actions. We use our senses to create a virtual reality in our head, an umwelt, which gives us a sensation that we’re observing reality and interacting with it, but we’re really interacting with a model of reality. I call this function that observes our model of reality the watcher. But what if our thoughts are separate from this viewer, this watcher?

If we think of large language models as analogs for the unconscious mind, then everything we do in daily life is training for our mental model. Then does the conscious mind stand in for the prompt creator? I’m on the fence about this. Sometimes the unconscious mind generates its own prompts, sometimes prompts are pushed onto us from everyday life, but maybe, just maybe, we occasionally prompt our unconscious mind consciously. Would that be free will?

When I write an essay, I have a brain function that works like ChatGPT. It generates text but as it comes into my conscious mind it feels like I, the viewer, created it. That’s an illusion. The watcher takes credit.

Over the past year or two I’ve noticed that my dreams are acquiring the elements of fiction writing. I think that’s because I’ve been working harder at understanding fiction. Like ChatGPT, we’re always training our mental model.

Last night I dreamed a murder mystery involving killing someone with nitrogen. For years I’ve heard about people committing suicide with nitrogen, and then a few weeks ago Alabama executed a man using nitrogen. My wife and I have been watching two episodes of Perry Mason each evening before bed. I think the ChatGPT feature in my brain took all that in and generated that dream.

I have a condition called aphantasia, that means I don’t consciously create mental pictures. However, I do create imagery in dreams, and sometimes when I’m drowsy, imagery, and even dream fragments float into my conscious mind. It’s like my unconscious mind is leaking into the conscious mind. I know these images and thoughts aren’t part of conscious thinking. But the watcher can observe them.

If you’ve ever played with the AI program Midjourney that creates artistic images, you know that it often creates weirdness, like three-armed people, or hands with seven fingers. Dreams often have such mistakes.

When AIs produce fictional results, the computer scientists say the AI is hallucinating. If you pay close attention to people, you’ll know we all live by many delusions. I believe programs like ChatGPT mimic humans in more ways than we expected.

I don’t think science is anywhere close to explaining how the brain produces the observer, that sense of I-ness, but science is getting much closer to understanding how intelligence works. Computer scientists say they aren’t there yet, and plan for AGI, or artificial general intelligence. They keep moving the goal. What they really want are computers much smarter than humans that don’t make mistakes, which don’t hallucinate. I don’t know if computer scientists care if computers have awareness like our internal watchers, that sense of I-ness. Sentient computers are something different.

I think what they’ve discovered is intelligence isn’t conscious. If you talk to famous artists, writers, and musicians, they will often talk about their muses. They’ve known for centuries their creativity isn’t conscious.

All this makes me think about changing how I train my model. What if I stopped reading science fiction and only read nonfiction? What if I cut out all forms of fiction including television and movies? Would it change my personality? Would I choose different prompts seeking different forms of output? If I do, wouldn’t that be my unconscious mind prompting me to do so?

This makes me ask: If I watched only Fox News would I become a Trump supporter? How long would it take? Back in the Sixties there was a catch phrase, “You are what you eat.” Then I learned a computer acronym, GIGO — “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” Could we say free will exists if we control the data, we use train our unconscious minds?

JWH

On Rereading

by James Wallace Harris, 10/2/23

This week I started rereading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, a novel first published in 1961. I was shocked by how much I disliked it. In my memory it was a terrific book. Back in 1970 I went to see Catch-22 the movie when it came out. I was so impressed I went to a bookstore, bought the book, went home, read it, and then went back to see the film again. For over fifty years I’ve thought of Catch-22 as a classic.

This week I listened to two hours of the novel before giving up. I can’t believe I ever loved that book. It’s sort of like how I feel when I catch Gilligan’s Island on TV, I can’t believe that in the eighth grade it was my favorite television show. Whenever I see a clip of Gilligan’s Island now, I assume I must have been brain damaged as a kid. I wondered the same thing when listening to Catch-22.

Maybe I’ve just lost my sense of humor. I loved Saturday Night Live when it came out back in 1975, but I’ve found it painful to watch for decades now. I’ve come to realize that I truly dislike lame satire. Heller appeared to take one absurdist point-of-view and stretched it out over a 21-hour audiobook. It felt like hearing a Who’s on First routine that never ended.

I came to the book expecting to find philosophical insight into WWII, and it just wasn’t there. Catch-22 is considered an anti-war classic, but I didn’t feel that in 2023. The film version of M.A.S.H. also came out in 1970. That was the height of the Vietnam War. Both stories felt like anti-war brilliance in 1970, but insane in 2023. Fifty-three years later, and after many other wars, such silliness no longer seems appropriate.

Obviously, I’ve changed over the decades, but I think there’s something else that’s changed. Postmodernism has crashed and burned. Postmodernism took us down a wrong path, and it’s time to retrace our steps.

I still reread my childhood favorite book, Have Space Suit-Will Travel which came out in 1958. It continues to work. It seems to be a genuine touchstone to my past. I find great insight into who I was as a kid and who I wanted to be when I grew up. To me, it was a science fiction version of Great Expectations — including the cynicism I give it in retrospect.

I also read an abridged version of Great Expectations in high school and have reread the full novel since. It seems to grow in maturity, especially as I read more about Charles Dickens. As a teenage boy I identified with Pip and his frustration with Estella. But as an old man, I figure Pip was a stand-in for the older 1858 Dickens, and Estella and Miss Havisham were stand-ins for Ellen Turan and her mother. The depth of Great Expectations grows with every rereading.

This morning I watched a video about rereading books by Anthony Vicino called “You Should Read These 12 Books Every Year.” Vicino is one of those people who want to get ahead in life quickly by reading self-help books. Because he wanted to succeed quickly, and many successful CEOs read fifty-two books a year, Vicino decided to read one hundred books in a year and get ahead twice as fast. What Vicino learned was to read fewer books. And rereading was the secret to success.

I’ve been thinking I need to do more rereading. This video made me wonder what twelve books I would reread every year. Would they be fiction or nonfiction? And would they be modern or postmodern? I’m starting to think we all took a wrong turn around 1960, at least in fiction. The trouble is since 1960 nonfiction has been overwhelming us with expanding knowledge that we need. Art and philosophy couldn’t handle that explosion of information and we got postmodernism.

I need to do a lot of rereading, and rethinking. What books will be ruined by my maturity and what books will reveal their own deeper maturity?

JWH

Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell

by James Wallace Harris, 9/16/23

Books Do Furnish a Room is book ten in Anthony Powell’s series A Dance to the Music of Time covering the years 1945-1947 in the fictional life of Nick Jenkins. After the war, England is rebuilding, food is rationed, liquor is scarce, and Nick is trying to make a living by reviewing books. I’ve read in Powell’s biography, Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time by Hilary Spurling that Powell was reviewing as many as twenty books a month to make ends meet. Sometimes I wish that A Dance to the Music of Time was a series of memoirs rather than novels because I’d love to know the basis for all the satire in Nick’s life.

For instance, two of the main characters in Books Do Furnish a Room are Pamela Widmerpool and X. Trapnel. Powell supposedly based them on Barbara Skelton and Julian Maclaren-Ross. They aren’t nice characters either. Pamela is a notorious emasculator of men, yet men can’t resist her. Trapnel is a talented posser who sponges off everyone he meets. Pamela is married to Kenneth Widmerpool, a character who is in all twelve novels of the series.

Nick met Widmerpool at school, where he was despised by the other boys for being fat, poor, and a loser. Yet throughout the novels, Widmerpool keeps climbing higher on the social ladder until he’s a member of Parliament. It is quite strange that he ends up with Pamela, an extremely beautiful woman.

Books Do Furnish a Room is about Fission magazine that Nick, Kenneth, and X. Trapnel all write for. It was backed by Erridge, Earl of Warminster, Nick’s brother-in-law, who dies at the beginning of the story. One of the founders of Fission is J. G. Quiggin who has been in earlier novels and is a Marxist. In fact, many of the characters in these books are left leaning. Powell suggests England was full of fellow travelers, communists, and Marxists, even Kenneth Widmerpool.

The hardest thing to describe about this story is the humor. It’s very dry. I remember hearing Powell’s prose being described as a cross between Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse. In one of the opening scenes Pamela flees a funeral service during a bout of nausea, almost knocking down the pallbearers of Erridge. Later she vomits into a five-foot tall Chinese vase that may or may not be rare, and there’s a funny seen of several men trying to wash it out. But Powell’s slapstick scenes are rare. Most of his prose is like the opening paragraph:

Books do Furnish a Room begins the final trilogy of books in A Dance to the Music of Time, and it deals with the academic and literary world. The story begins with Nick meeting Sillery, his old school master again. Nick is also researching a book he’s writing on The Anatomy of Melancholy, a 1621 book by Robert Burton. This was a real book, and maybe if I knew it better, it might relate to this story. Throughout Books do Furnish a Room, Nick mentions many books, most of which are fictional. It’s a challenge to discern references to real works and works that belong only in Nick Jenkins’ reality. The most important made-up novel is Camel Ride to the Tomb by X. Trapnel. In the eleventh novel, Nick meets Trapnel’s biographer, so its importance stretches over two books.

There was a 1997 4-part miniseries based on A Dance to the Music of Time. You can get them on YouTube. It’s quite a rush job to cram twelve novels into four TV episodes that are less than two hours each. However, they do cover the highlights of the entire series. I’ve seen it twice and I’m watching parts of it for a third time. You can get a feel for Books Do Furnish a Room by watching the first third of this episode. (By the way, the actress that plays Pamela looks nothing like how I imagined her from the novel. But the scene I mentioned above is in this sequence.)

JWH

Bomber by Len Deighton

by James Wallace Harris, 9/5/23

I thought Bomber, a 1970 novel by Len Deighton to be an exceptional work about WWII. But saying so will not convince you to read it. How can I describe it best to help you decide? First, if you love books and movies about bomber missions during WWII then you don’t need to read this essay but just go buy the book (if you haven’t already read it). If you love Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, then you’ll probably want to read Bomber. If you love well-researched historical novels particularly about WWII, or well-written novels in general, then you should keep reading this essay.

Grove Press released a new edition of Bomber on 8/22/23 with an introduction by Malcolm Gladwell. Bomber has been reprinted many times over the last 53 years which says a lot about a book. I listened to the 21 hours and 25 minutes audiobook edition narrated pitch-perfectly by Richard Burnip which includes an afterward narrated by Len Deighton. I loved how Burnip did accents for different characters.

Bomber is about one fictional day, June 31, 1943, that that is so realistic that you keep thinking it’s based on true events. It’s not, but it’s so well-researched and detailed that it could compete with history. Deighton creates over a hundred characters including several Avro Lancaster bomber crews, their German interceptors and controllers, the ground crews and command in England, and the citizens of an imaginary German town that gets bombed to hell by a flying armada of over seven-hundred planes.

Two of my favorite movies growing up were Twelve O’Clock High (1949) and The War Lover (1962), along with the Quinn Martin TV show 12 O’Clock High (1964-1967). And I’ve read nonfiction books and novels about the Blitz and B-17 campaigns over Germany. Bomber gave me a much better sense of what it was like to be in a bombing raid, both in the air and on the ground. Of course, no fiction or nonfiction book could convey the actual experience and horror but this one gave me far more details to consider. It was multiplex and multidimensional.

But Bomber reminds me most of all of Catch-22 (1961) and Slaughterhouse Five (1969), two classic anti-war novels from the 1960s. Those two novels had comic aspects, and Bomber does not. However, all three novels depict the horror of war on innocent individuals. Wars are born out of the egomania of a few, who inflame the passions of true believers who then force millions of helpless bystanders into their deadly squabbles. These books are about ordinary people who want to live ordinary lives but are forced to play parts in the conflicts created by these evil egos.

In the afterward of the new edition Len Deighton talks about how he produced the idea for Bomber. He was studying WWII and thought one way of looking at the war was to visualize it as our machines against their machines. He said he liked machines, but to tell the story he had to talk about the people behind the machines. He didn’t want it to be science fiction. (By the way, he talked about using an IBM MT word processing machine, one of the earliest dedicated word processors, and said he thought Bomber might be the first novel to be written with word processing. I worked three years on an IBM MT/ST machine.)

In Malcolm Gladwell’s introduction to the book, he suggests that Bomber is about the evil and guilt the British felt specifically targeting German citizens during their nighttime bombing raids. Here’s what Gladwell said in a version of the intro at The Washington Post:

“We British are not an imaginative people,” the activist Vera Brittain wrote, in the opening sentence of her 1944 book “Seed of Chaos.” “Throughout our history wrongs have been committed, or evils gone too long unremedied, simply because we did not perceive the real meaning of the suffering which we had caused or failed to mitigate.”

Brittain was referring to the decision during the Second World War by Arthur Harris, head of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, to send hundreds of planes, night after night, to bomb the residential neighborhoods of German cities. Harris was resolutely unsentimental about his decision. He once wrote that it “should be unambiguously stated” that the RAF’s goal was “the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany … the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale.” His nickname was “Butcher” Harris, a sobriquet employed with a certain grudging respect, on the understanding that butchers can be useful in times of war. Harris was a psychopath. Twenty-five thousand people in Cologne once burned to death, in one night, on his orders. And Vera Brittain’s point was that the people of England acquiesced to his decision because they did not have the imagination to appreciate what those deadly bombing campaigns meant to those on the ground.

I didn’t get that reading Bomber. It’s there if you read between the lines, but Deighton doesn’t preach or philosophize in the novel. Bomber is a perfect example of show don’t tell writing. Nor does Deighton make his characters into heroes or anti-heroes.

Even though Bomber is told through a couple dozen main characters, with several dozen walk-on parts, the story focuses on Sam Lambert who is a Flight Sargeant and Captain of the Creaking Door, an Avro Lancaster, a 4-engine British bomber. Lambert is the Yossarian or Billy Pilgrim of this story. Lambert isn’t always on center stage though because Deighton considered it especially important to tell the story of the people he bombs, the people who try to kill him, as well as the other airmen who fly with Lambert, both in the Creaking Door and other planes.

I was particularly taken by this Solzhenitsyn quote “to do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good” taken from this review (which I recommend reading). Deighton doesn’t preach or sermonize in Bomber, but there is much to meditate on in his story. In recent years I’ve been reading more history books, and history is really one long succession of wars. My take is evil is caused by a few individuals who need to feed their monstrous egos, as well as the people who worship and follow those psychopathic egos.

There is one scene in Bomber that was very minor but very telling where a commanding officer tried to coerce Ruth into getting her husband, Sam Lambert, to play on the company’s cricket team. It showed how that officer’s ego manipulated reality for doing what he thought was good. If you read Bomber, notice how often that happens.

JWH

Memories Imagine the Darndest Things

by James Wallace Harris, 7/10/23

This essay is about remembering something that never happened and the theories I’ve developed to explain my memory hallucination.

While reading The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell, the sixth novel in a twelve-novel series called A Dance to the Music of Time, I had the constant feeling I had read it before. Several scenes throughout the novel seemed so familiar that I felt like I had studied them over several readings. I always assumed it was because I had twice watched the four-part miniseries based on the books. I’m sure that accounts for the general sense I’ve read The Kindly Ones before, but not the intense sense of remembering specific scenes. Yesterday I replayed the portion of the miniseries that deals with the most remembered scene and it merely skims over a very long detailed scene in the book.

A Dance to the Music of Time is about Nick Jenkins and his life from the 1920s through the 1960s. It’s not a Roman à clef but Anthony Powell based Nick on his own life. It’s a fictional exploration of memory, so it’s rather ironic that I’m having memory problems reading it.

There were many scenes that felt I had read before, but I just assumed they were in the miniseries. However, one scene was intensely vivid and familiar. It was the long scene where Nick Jenkins met Bob Duport years after Nick had had an affair with Duport’s wife Jean That affair was chronicled in an early novel in the series. So those pages recall events that happened in earlier novels, but it also has much new information that wasn’t in the earlier novels. The most vivid scene involved Nick wanting to avoid the subject of Jean, but Bob slowly getting around to talking about her. Bob starts describing the men he knew Jean had affairs with and what they were like. Bob kept making a case that Jean was attracted to men who were assholes and even admits to being one himself. Nick doesn’t know if Bob is intentionally insulting him or accidentally torturing him.

In recent years I have become distrusting of my memory for many reasons. The first is, memories often feel faulty. But that sense of faultiness is the kind we associate with dementia. I’m now exploring memory delusions.

I’ve read a number of books about the limitations of memory, and I’ve come to assume memories are unreliable. The best book I’ve read on this is Jesus Before the Gospels by Bart D. Ehrman. You wouldn’t think a book about Jesus would be the best place to learn about the limitations of memory, but it’s the best I’ve found.

If the television miniseries wasn’t where I acquired my pre-knowledge of that scene in The Kindly Ones, where did it come from? My first thought was to wonder if I had read the book before? I checked my reading log, a listing of books I’ve read since 1983, and it wasn’t there. Now, there have been times when I forgot to record a book read, but I don’t think that happened in this case. Why would I read the sixth book of a series out of order?

Another possibility is I listened to it in my sleep. Books 4-6 are in a combined edition on my Audible edition, a total of 21 hours. Theoretically, I could have fallen asleep and my unconscious mind heard it. This happens all the time. But I wake up, usually, in minutes, but no more than an hour, and shut off the book. I always scroll back to a scene I’m positive I listened to the day before. I’m almost positive I didn’t let this whole book play while I was sleeping with The Kindly Ones. Because of an overactive bladder, the longest stretch I can sleep at night is two hours.

I do have a wild and crazy theory. What if certain human experiences become part of what Jung called our collective unconscious? I know this is New Age woo-woo, but it’s a thought. It might explain why some people think they are reincarnated, or some instances of Deja vu.

I have two less wild theories, ones I think might be closer to the truth. One involves prediction, and the other involves resonating with tiny universal fragments.

The novels in A Dance to the Music of Time feel like an autobiography. The novel series is not a Roman clef, but they were inspired by Powell’s own life and the people he knew. I’m thinking they create such a detailed sense of Nick Jenkins, especially after six novels, that when I got to the scene with Bob, I felt like I was Nick, and the encounter felt so real that I had experienced it as if I was remembering it.

The second theory is somewhat like the basis of holograms. If you cut one up, it will still show the whole picture, just fuzzier. Even a tiny fragment of a hologram will still show the entire image, but just very fuzzy. This second theory suggests that any scene involving a man meeting the husband of the woman he had an affair with will trigger a resonating memory response. I can’t recall any specific similar scene in fiction or real life that matches this, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t and just don’t remember it.

This hologram fragment theory might explain all Deja vu experiences. Our mind remembers things in generalized tokens, and sometimes we confuse the token from one event with another. If you think about this, you’ll probably recall this happening to you. The other day I asked Susan if I had gotten the mail, and she said, yes, you got a book. I said, no, that was yesterday. I was quite positive. I even convinced Susan that it was true. A few hours later I remembered that yesterday was the 4th of July and there was no mail. I have a “got the mail” token in my brain and it makes me feel like I’ve always gotten the mail. But it’s not really specific to any single event of getting the mail.

A recent episode of 60 Minutes on Google’s AI called Bard offers another theory. Bard was asked to explain inflation, which it did, and offered five books on the subject with descriptions of the books. When CBS fact-checked that list days later they discovered the books didn’t exist. CBS asked Google about this. They were told this was an AI phenomenon called hallucination. Evidently, AIs will just make up shit whenever they feel like it. Maybe what I experienced was a memory hallucination.

Google’s Bard performed another scary feat. It taught itself to read and write in a language it wasn’t trained on, and without being asked. Maybe my brain just tricked me into thinking I had read this book before?

And there’s one last idea. Last night I dreamed of a variation of an episode of a TV show Susan and I watched last evening. The dream didn’t involve characters from the TV show, but people I know. But the dream put me, and people I know in the same exact situation. Have you ever wondered how our brain can generate so much endless dream content? What if the same mental mechanism that generates dreams also creates our memories and beliefs? What if that mechanism works like Bard?

I’ve always liked Roman à clef fiction, or fiction that is highly biographical. I’ve always been obsessed with memory. I’m ready to finally read Proust, who is the authorial authority on fictionalizing memory. Some people compare Anthony Powell to Proust, others hate that comparison. Proust fans don’t think Powell was heavy-duty enough. I think they each had their own approach to remembering their life. Powell may have been an extrovert and Proust an introvert, and the differences in their prose were caused by that and not the quality of writing. But I also think the differences involve the different ways of how memory works.

JWH