A reflective morning photo walk
The artisan human experience, artificial intelligence, and a pun.
The birds are back in town. Winter feels like it lasts longer than it used to, but it makes the arrival of spring that much sweeter. The sun is out nearly every day, bouncing off objects in space to bend new forms. Shadow shapes, light shapes, rendering color in vivid detail.
Three geese circle the lake made of glass, broadcasting their voices into the echo chamber mountain side, signaling to everyone spring is alive. The translucent water, permeated by the sun’s light, guides the eye below the surface into a seasonally unseen world. Most days, my camera doesn’t leave f/5.6 in these woods. The glass lake usually reflects the clouds like a frosted mirror, while the low available light acts as natural diffusion. No shadows, no depth. The f/16 weather is a special occasion, and special it is.
Through the years, I’ve noticed the transitional periods of my life tend to sync with the seasons. The aging of the forest around me, humbled as the vegetation falls silent and the snow crystallizes fern leaves like Persephone.
A deep rooted wisdom guides the space between a season’s change. The air comes alive again. Bird sounds resonate through the walls from dawn to dusk. In the warmth of the golden hour, I’m reminded how fortunate I am to be sentient.
On the precipice of an artificially intelligent society, we open doors into new ways of existing. We’re now seamlessly able to extend our thoughts into new forms of intelligence.
I recently learned of a model explicitly trained on Dostoevsky, with interesting and inquisitive human-crafted prompts to guide it. The blog is self-described as:
This text, therefore, is an experiment. It stands at the crossroads of past and present, of human and machine, and invites you, the reader, to reflect not only on the content of these words but their origin, asking: can technology ever truly touch the human soul?
“Can technology ever truly touch the human soul?” Admittedly I’m quite fond of The Brothers Karamazov so this model alone had tall order on its proverbial hands. I can’t tell you how weird it is to be imagining the brothers’ deeply existential crisis with faith and free will be compared to doom scrolling and red notification bubbles, but I get it. (I mean, I guess there’s a kind of god in excessive dopamine, but possibly something of the evil variety). It’s not to say the article is supposed to be a replica of any famous Dostoevsky novel, but instead a new interpretation of our modern world captured in a Dostoevsky-like way. Point being, seeing a model develop from its training is something we see anecdotally all the time in our user experience. They’re learning at a rapid rate and visibly improving at some tasks, though in many cases, still communicate in relatively inexperienced ways. Or at least, we recognize it’s not quite… well, human. We’re starting to learn the ways in which human wisdom feels different than simulated wisdom. I imagine by the time large language models learn to correct themselves from the detailed critiques human writers publish on the public internet, we’ll already be too good at knowing the difference to be impressed with it anymore. At least, that’s what I want to think.
Distinguishing human from computer isn’t a new concept when it comes to the development of more powerful computer systems. In the 1950s, computer scientist Alan Turing created what became known as the Turing test, a measure of a human’s ability to separate human from machine. If a human cannot distinguish if they’re communicating with human or computer, the computer passes the Turing test. If we accept this as a man’s measure of intelligence at face value, it’s easy to give up on the position that humans can, even in subtle ways, generally tell the difference between computer and human. However, if we look at arguments attempting to invalidate the Turing test, we get a better sense of important nuances that may leave room for hope.
The first point comes from a philosopher named John Searle. He famously designed the Chinese Room Argument, which Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes as:
Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he sends appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room.
In essence, Searle makes the argument that just because a computer appears to understand language, that doesn’t translate directly to real understanding. Computers are purely syntactic, while human minds are innately semantic. I would even go so far as to draw a correlation to the a priori knowledge as represented by Descartes’ Epistemology, where the act of thinking itself is true self-awareness, and the highly intelligent simulated consciousness resembles Descartes’ demon.
A second point from Noam Chomsky in “The False Promise of ChatGPT”, describes the human mind as “a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.” In other words, while the Turing test attempts to measure man’s perception of machine, and Searle rebuts with the question, “what is intelligence?”, Chomsky aims to give a frame of reference to our biological efficiency, in that our brains aren’t just a massive pool of data sorting out predictions from probabilistic inputs. We are smelling, tasting, seeing, sentient and semantically capable organisms with a much different description of intelligence. We not only posses the capacity to understand our universe, but we can also feel our environment through our intuition. Chomsky goes on to argue this is what makes things like AI generated scientific prediction “superficial and dubious”, in that scientific innovation and “true intelligence is demonstrated in the ability to think and express improbable but insightful things.” The way I personally deduce these points is in the broader argument that intelligence is not the same as wisdom.
All that said, one thing remains particularly true.
Being human is revelatory.
We are animals, but unlike our wild relatives, we can think about our existence. We are no longer the most intelligent entities on the planet, yet we somehow still instinctively recognize our sentience holds significant space. Of course, there are a variety of alternative arguments to the viewpoint that our subjective experience distinguishes us from machine, including the premise that any system with a high enough level of interconnection can obtain consciousness, similar to our brains. Could it be that in X number years, our AI models have enough time to “evolve” a sense of consciousness, just like early Homo sapiens? Is our sentience not unique, just the first of its kind? Our initial predictions about the development of AGI (artificial general intelligence) haven’t been very accurate and with a wide variety of opinion on if/when it will arrive, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t moving closer to a conceptual future where sentience takes on a new definition, or rather, we adapt our understanding of it. Do Searle’s and Chomsky’s analyses still withstand in an AGI world, or do we see the line between man and machine dissolve if we are no longer able to distinguish in any capacity?
This leaves much for us to ponder in the cyber realm.
As for the human realm, it remains essential as ever.
It remains a space where heartfelt art is possible. Where free thinking can dance in the mind’s eye. It knows of love and loss and the taste of chocolate (probably in that order). Where we can know the vile hatred of our own kin, human to human, despite a uniquely shared significance in the universe.
Our world remains a place where we can open the backyard door on a late April morning and smell a new, but familiar season. One we know intimately and intuitively, giving us the capacity to appreciate the awareness of sensory wisdom.
