Category: Personality

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

I’m Too Dumb to Use Artificial Intelligence

by James Wallace Harris, 1/19/24

I haven’t done any programming since I retired. Before I retired, I assumed I’d do programming for fun, but I never found a reason to write a program over the last ten years. Then, this week, I saw a YouTube video about PrivateGPT that would allow me to train an AI to read my own documents (.pdf, docx, txt, epub). At the time I was researching Philip K. Dick, and I was overwhelmed by the amount of content I was finding about the writer. So, this light bulb went off in my head. Why not use AI to help me read and research Philip K. Dick. I really wanted to feed the six volumes of collected letters of PKD to the AI so I could query it.

PrivateGPT is free. All I had to do was install it. I’ve spent days trying to install the dang program. The common wisdom is Python is the easiest programming language to learn right now. That might be true. But installing a Python program with all its libraries and dependencies is a nightmare. What I quickly learned is distributing and installing a Python program is an endless dumpster fire. I have Anaconda, Python 3.11, Visual Studio Code, Git, Docker, Pip, installed on three computers, Windows, Mac, and Linux, and I’ve yet to get anything to work consistently. I haven’t even gotten to part where I’d need the Poetry tool. I can run Python code under plain Python and Anaconda and set up virtual environments on each. But I can’t get VS Code to recognize those virtual environments no matter what I do.

Now I don’t need VS Code at all, but it’s so nice and universal that I felt I must get it going. VS Code is so cool looking, and it feels like it could control a jumbo jet. I’ve spent hours trying to get it working with the custom environments Conda created. There’s just some conceptual configuration I’m missing. I’ve tried it on Windows, Mac, and Linux just in case it’s a messed-up configuration on a particular machine. But they all fail in the same way.

I decided I needed to give up on using VS Code with Conda commands. If I continue, I’ll just use the Anaconda prompt terminal on Windows, or the terminal on Mac or Linux.

However, after days of banging my head against a wall so I could use AI might have taught me something. Whenever I think of creating a program, I think of something that will help me organize my thoughts and research what I read. I might end up spending a year just to get PrivateGPT trained on reading and understanding articles and dissertations on Philip K. Dick. Maybe it would be easier if I just read and processed the documents myself. I thought an AI would save me time, but it requires learning a whole new specialization. And if I did that, I might just end up becoming a programmer again, rather than an essayist.

This got me thinking about a minimalistic programming paradigm. This was partly inspired by seeing the video “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Plain Text.”

Basically, this video advocates doing everything in plain text, and using the Markdown format. That’s the default format of Obsidian, a note taking program.

It might save me lot of time if I just read the six volumes of PKD’s letters and take notes over trying to teach a computer how to read those volumes and understand my queries. I’m not even sure I could train PrivateGPT to become a literary researcher.

Visual Studio Code is loved because it does so much for the programmer. It’s full of artificial intelligence. And more AI is being added every day. Plus, it’s supposed to work with other brilliant programming tools. But using those tools and getting them to cooperate with each other is befuddling my brain.

This frustrating week has shown me I’m not smart enough to use smart tools. This reminds me of a classic science fiction short story by Poul Anderson, “The Man Who Came Early.” It’s about a 20th century man who thrown back in time to the Vikings, around the year 1000 AD. He thinks he will be useful to the people of that time because he can invent all kinds of marvels. What he learns is he doesn’t even know how to make the tools, in which to make the tools, that made the tools he was used to in the 20th century.

I can use a basic text editor and compiler, but my aging brain just can’t handle more advance modern programming tools, especially if they’re full of AI.

I need to solve my data processing needs with basic tools. But I also realized something else. My real goal was to process information about Philip K. Dick and write a summarizing essay. Even if I took a year and wrote an AI essay writing program, it would only teach me a whole lot about programming, and not about Philip K. Dick or writing essays.

What I really want is for me to be more intelligent, not my computer.

JWH

Ethical vs. Virtuous

by James Wallace Harris, 10/23/23

I try to be an ethical person but I’m not a particularly virtuous person. Some might define both terms, “ethical person” and “virtuous person,” as a good person. I’m reading The Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman and it’s making me wonder if being ethical, or even a moral person is not the same thing as being a good, or virtuous person.

I believe morality is defined by theology, and ethics are defined by the consensus of humans. It’s how we divide right from wrong. Before I thought about it today, I assumed being moral or ethical meant you were a good person, and being unethical or amoral meant you were a bad person. But now that I’m reading the Stoics I’m wonder if they offer a different definition for being good or bad, mainly because they bring in the term virtue.

Stoicism is all about how you live life. Actions speak louder than philosophy. Being a virtuous person, a good person means acting in the positive. Doing good for yourself, your family and friends, for you community, nation, species, and planet. Being ethical or moral only means not breaking the rules, not being bad. That doesn’t make you good.

And I can imagine amoral and unethical people doing constructive things. And I can imagine ethical and moral people being destructive. I can see why the Stoics, and philosophers in general, argue so much.

Most of us fear and despise amoral, unethical, destructive people because they hurt us or people we know. But I’m not sure we are good people if we’re just ethical and moral. In my reading of the Stoics I’m getting the feeling that by virture we have to do something good to be good. But doing what is where philosophical problems arise.

We make exceptional people in our society who can do amazing things into stars and heroes. But should we equate success with virtue? Expecially success measured by money and fame? For the early Stoics like Zeno, working hard all day at a job was virtuous. To handle whatever life threw at you without complaining was virtuous. To take hardships and disease in your stride was virtuous. Of course, today we’d say that’s only being stoic.

Maybe I want to define virtue by what some people call saintly. Does someone have to bring diplomatic peace to the Mideast to be virtuous, or does just volunteering at food bank count? I haven’t read enough of ancient philosophy to know yet.

I do know the more philosophical I become the more I distrust words and concepts. I do enjoy reading about the Stoics, but ultimately, I’m not sure philosophy will be any more valid than religion was to me.

I used to say I was a Puritanical Atheist. Now I want to label myself an Existential Buddhist.

JWH

Is Ethical Capitalism Even Possible?

by James Wallace Harris, 10/20/23

This month, several of my friends have separately expressed doubt about the future. I don’t hold much hope either. Our current world civilization seems to be falling apart. Capitalism is consuming the planet, but capitalism is the only economic system that creates enough jobs to end poverty. The only alternative to free market capitalism I can imagine is if we adapt capitalism to an ethical system. So, I’ve been keeping my eye open for signs of emerging ethical capitalism.

Here’s one: “The Workers Behind AI Rarely See Its Rewards. This Indian Startup Wants to Fix That” from Time Magazine (8/14/23). The article describes how AI startups need vast amounts of sample data from other languages for their large language models. In India, many data companies are exploiting poor people for their unique language data and keeping the profit, but one company, Karya, is giving the poor people they employ a larger share of the profits. This helps lift them out of poverty.

Capitalism has two dangerous side effects. It destroys the environment and creates inequality. For capitalism to become ethical it will need to be environmentally friendly, or at least neutral, and it will need to be more equitable. If we want to have hope for the future, we need to see more signs of that happening.

Right now, profits drive capitalism. Profits are used to expand a corporation’s ability to grow profits, and to make management and investors rich. Labor and environmental controls are seen as expenses that reduce profits. For a corporation to be ethical it will have to have a neutral or positive impact on the environment, and it will need to share more of its profits with labor.

Since the pandemic hourly wages have been going up, and so has inflation. If capitalism becomes more ethical, costs for environmentalism and labor will go up, thus ethical capitalism will be inflationary. Some people have gotten extraordinarily rich by making things cheap, but it’s also shifted labor and environmental costs away from corporations onto the government and the public. The price at the store does not reflect the actual cost of making what you buy. You pay the difference in taxes.

For ethical capitalism to come about things will need to be sold for what they cost to make. That will involve getting rid of governmental and corporate corruption. It will involve political change. And it will be inflationary until the new system stabilizes.

My guess is ethical capitalism will never come about. If I were writing a science fiction novel that envisioned life in the 2060s it would be very bleak. Life in America will be like what we see in failed states today. Back in the 1960s we often heard of the domino theory regarding communism. Failed states are falling like dominoes now. Environmental catastrophes, political unrest, dwindling natural resources, and viral inequality will homogenize our current world civilization. Either we work together to make it something good, or we’ll all just tear everything apart.

Civilization is something we should all shape by conscious design and not a byproduct of capitalistic greed.

We have all the knowledge we need to fix our problems, but we lack the self-control to apply it. I have some friends who think I’m a dope for even holding out a smidgen of hope. Maybe my belief that we could theoretically solve our problems is Pollyannish.

I have two theories that support that sliver of hope. One theory says humans have always been the same psychological for two hundred thousand years. In other words, our habits and passions don’t change. The other theory says we create cultures, languages, technologies, systems that can organize us into diverse kinds of social systems that control our behavior.

We could choose better systems to manage ourselves. However, we always vote by greed and self-interest. We need to vote for preserving all.

In other words, we don’t change on the inside, but we do change how we live on the outside. My sliver of hope is we’ll make laws and invent technology that will create a society based on ethical capitalism and we’ll adapt our personalities to it.

I know that’s a long shot, but it’s the only one I have.

I’m working to develop a new habit of reading one substantial article a day and breaking my bad habit of consuming dozens of useless tidbits of data that catch my eye as clickbait. In other words, one healthy meal of wisdom versus snacking all day on junk ideas. Wisdom doesn’t come packaged like cookies or chips.

JWH

Looking Back at My First 10 Years of Retirement

by James Wallace Harris, 10/15/23

Friday was my 10th anniversary of retiring. I started work at Memphis State University in 1977 and retired from The University of Memphis in 2013. I hadn’t moved, they changed the name. Those 36 years represents half of my 72 years. The second largest chunk of time in my life was K-12 schooling. It’s interesting to see retirement has become the third largest segment of this pie chart.

These ten years of retirement were the same number of years as third grade through twelfth, but they certainly didn’t feel the same. For some reason, 1963-1969 were the longest seven years of my life, way longer than the last ten years of retirement. Isn’t that weird? Why have they sped by so fast?

When I look back, I can see a lot has happened. Three presidents. A pandemic. Several wars. Quite a bit of economic ups and downs. In the past ten years we’ve all seen society transformed by smartphones. The worst political polarization of my lifetime has happened in this last decade. There were lots of marriages and babies in our family, and several deaths. I entered my socialist years with social security and Medicare. I’ve had several surgeries and lots of MRIs, CT scans, a couple ER visits, and endless medical tests. Yet, I’m basically healthy.

I have lived in the same house since I retired. Those seven years I mentioned, I lived in nine different houses in three different states. Maybe that’s why those were the longest years of my life. These past ten years have been the most stable of my entire lifetime, and I’m not bored.

I thought when I retired I would do so much with all the free time I would have, but that hasn’t happened. The past ten years has been a slow decline into inactivity. I guess that’s what getting old means. And I accept that decline.

When I first retired, I didn’t watch TV until about eight o’clock at night. I tried to stay active all day. Susan worked out of town, and I spent a lot of time socializing.

Now my daily routine starts with an hour of YouTube videos after I do my physical therapy exercises. Then I putter around doing chores, eating lunch (breakfast since I’m intermittent fasting), writing blogs, listening to music. Then another hour of TV with Jeopardy and NBC Nightly News at 5:30 with Susan. After dinner I wash dishes and try to watch TV by myself while Susan watches her shows. I usually fail and switch to blogging, reading, or listening to music. I finish the evening at nine with two hours of TV watching with Susan, shows we both like.

In 2013 I probably watched 1-2 hours of TV a day, and not every day. Susan was working out of town, and I’d only watch TV when I had friends over in the evening. Now, I’m logging 4-5 hours a day. Television has become an addiction in retirement. I’ve been thinking about breaking it, but I’m not sure I can be more active anymore.

In 2013 I would go out several times a week with friends. I’d go to the movies once or twice a week, eat out several times, and I’d go to museums, parks, shopping, or just walks. Now I go out once a week to the used bookstore, and every other week to the grocery store. Susan and I take turns grocery shopping since we both hate doing it. The pandemic really changed my habits, but also my spinal stenosis limits my walking. However, staying home more does not bother me at all. In fact, I love it. My mother was that way when she got old too. A lot of people do that as they age. Like most of the old people I’ve known, I want to die at home, in this house.

What I’ve really gotten into these past ten years is reading. I read about fifty books a year, so I’d guess I’ve read about five hundred books since I’ve retired.

And several years ago, I joined with a guy from Britain and another from South Africa on Facebook to moderate a science fiction short story reading group. We discuss one story a day, and I’ve slowly developed several online friends from this activity. I’ve been focusing on reading short stories for the last five years and I’d guess I’ve read at least two thousand since then.

I also write essays for two different personal blogs. For a few years I wrote for three web sites, Book Riot, SF Signal, and Worlds Without End. I’d guess in my ten years of retirement I’ve written at least 1,500 essays.

I don’t keep records, but I’d guess I’ve watched a hundred TV series in my retirement. When Susan worked out of town, I’d watch them with my friend Janis. And since Susan retired, I watch them with her. I don’t really like watching TV by myself, so I tend to watch what other people like. My favorite series with Janis was Breaking Bad. My favorite series with Susan was Call the Midwife. Lately, my friend Annie has been coming over and we’re going through the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Ann and Tony come over to watch various shows, we’re currently finishing Ted Lasso. Our friends Mike and Betsy used to come over for TV or movies but since the pandemic that’s stopped. Watching TV series and movies with other people has been a major social activity for me during my retirement years.

Another recent activity is having people over for games and cards.

Our cats Nick and Nora died during the early years of my retirement, and now we have Ozzy and Lily. They are a big part of our retirement life since Susan and I have no children.

We bought this house; the one Susan grew up in when her parents died. That was 2007, I think. We had Susan’s brothers, wives, and their children over for Thanksgiving and Christmas for several years to continue the tradition of her parents. But by the time I retired, the nephews and nieces were grown up and had families of their own, and we stopped hosting the holidays. In terms of family life, the past ten years have been noticeably quiet. My mother, aunts, and uncles all died off before I retired. Since then, about half my first cousins have died. Our generation is fading away.

My retirement years have been mostly about maintaining friendships. I spend a lot of time on the phone keeping up with people. Some of my friends still come over to the house, but that’s slowing down too. Many of our friends no longer travel or drive at night. My sister still visits. And a few old friends that have moved away come to Memphis now and then. Getting old is weird that way.

Retirement goes hand in hand with aging. I didn’t foresee that before I retired. I thought I wouldn’t feel old for many years, and my first decade of retirement would be more active. When I first retired, I fantasized about moving to New York City for a year. Later, I thought about moving to The Villages in Florida. But NYC was impractical, and the pandemic and health problems killed off Florida. I no longer think about traveling, and the only way I imagine moving is if we need to move into a retirement community or assisted living.

My goals have become less ambitious. I’m reading self-help books about developing good habits. I want to do more reading and writing but be more organized and focused. I’m researching ways to take notes and remember what I read because I’m starting to forget more.

I think the next ten years of retirement will be more streamlined. I want to get rid of stuff and focus on accomplishing small quiet creative projects. I know I’m physically running down. I feel wiser than ever, but I’m losing mental horsepower. I need to become more efficient in my use of mental and physical energy.

These ten years of retirement have been nothing I planned. But then, long ago, even when I was still young, I had learned the future is everything we never imagined. My friend Linda and I are studying Stoicism. I think it’s the perfect time for that philosophy, both in our lives, and in this moment of civilization.

JWH