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A book on being an ethical person in the modern age ft AI, art, code, techno-buddhism, and cool pictures 2024-12-09T23:10:16.040Z
A book on being an ethical person in the modern age ft AI, art, code, techno-buddhism, and cool pictures 2024-12-09T23:10:16.006Z

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Comment by geoff bradway (geoff-bradway) on A book on being an ethical person in the modern age ft AI, art, code, techno-buddhism, and cool pictures · 2024-12-10T18:59:52.329Z · LW · GW

Okay, so I think because I have a new account, I can only have three responses before I am rate limited as spam. And including my deleted comment, this will be number 3. For what it is worth, both sentences created there were from ChatGpt. 

 

But in the book, in the essay of on 'Phatasmoriga - Emptiness and Replication', I'm trying to argue that things as we think of them don't really exist, but yet get replicated infinite amounts of time. The visual metaphor I use for this is Magrittes' 'Treachery of Images', where the 'this is not a pipe' is referring to the fact that it is not a pipe, but a picture of a pipe. However, it is also clearly a picture of a pipe, so somehow that image, which is either a photo or a painting of a pipe, depending on how you consume it, still makes you think of the word "pipe". So despite the fact that in some sense it is just "raw stuff" it has overtime developed the associate with the word 'pipe' via endless replication and association. I think Magritte does an excellent job of highlighting the core philosophy of Phatasmoriga with images. 

 

I did just publish a new version. I realized I had failed into include many people in the book who weren't just dudes, so I went ahead an added MLK, Rumi, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Veil, and Simone Weil. I'm sorry for any confusion this has caused, but I am trying my best. 

Comment by geoff bradway (geoff-bradway) on A book on being an ethical person in the modern age ft AI, art, code, techno-buddhism, and cool pictures · 2024-12-10T15:40:01.436Z · LW · GW
Comment by geoff bradway (geoff-bradway) on A book on being an ethical person in the modern age ft AI, art, code, techno-buddhism, and cool pictures · 2024-12-10T15:32:54.386Z · LW · GW

Yeah, I understand that it is very over the top, but that is intentional. I am trying to demonstrate that ChatGPT seems to have a lot of real "knowledge" inside of it somehow, by using it to explain how the West thinks about "knowledge" via hume, how that relates then to how we make "knowledge" via repeated experimentation in probability theory, and then how ChatGPT seems to have "knowledge" built up by words and probabilities. It appears to me that the three processes all seem to work by essentially just associating some bundle of things it perceives together and reasoning about it as such (our sense data for humans, world events for probabilities, and computer speak for LLMs).

 

And it appears that now even academic essays are being marked as spam.  Do you think it would have been a more moral decision for me to leave the ChatGPT sections as unmarked, and to have taken credit for myself? It appears it would have made it more readable, but at the loss of clarity of how AI tools can be used to create interesting content these days. I also copy and pasted a lot straight from the Buddhists as well.