Category: Science

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Chinese Room GPT

Would you like to undergo a surreal, kind of boring, yet also kind of interesting philosophical experience? Then I invite you to try my newly patented “Chinese Room GPT”! That’s right, it’s time for you to play John Searle in this awful simulation of a simulation!

The Chinese Room is a thought experiment devised in 1980 by the philosopher John Searle. Now, before I dive in, here is a little overview of how this blog post is going to unfold.

First, I will explain the Chinese Room. Note that I will get into a bit of philosophy in this section, so if that is not interesting for you, after you read the summary of the original thought experiment, just go straight to the second section, “Simulating the Simulation”. There, I will discuss how a virtual Chinese Room could actually be built using ChatGPT 4 (or any LLM-based chatbot, as the baseline capabilities of all such chatbots is rising).

There are two versions of Chinese Room GPT I will discuss: the four-window and one-window version. The four-window version requires software, the one-window version just regular access to ChatGPT. Regrettably, I do not have the coding skills to build the four-window version, so I must leave that task to whoever might be interested enough to try to develop the necessary software. Yet, fear not! You can play the one-window version just by copy-pasting a single prompt (and you can also tinker with that prompt to your heart’s content to make it more interesting or functional).

Finally, I will close this blog post by showing you a sample of a Chinese Room GPT I am running right now (Tuesday, April 2, 2024), and in the comments section you can tell me which of the inputs you think I should use.

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The coming Global War on Hacking?

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I’ve got a suspicion that 2013 could very well go down as a fulcrum point in contemporary history, as well as in my own meager part in it. Julian Assange’s pinprick has now become Edward Snowden’s stab to the jugular vein, and meanwhile, I’ve had to provisionally decide how I’m going to steer the imminent deluge.

Here’s my thought process, and I’ll put it frankly to my audience: we should all be expecting in the near future the replacement of the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism) with the GWOH (Global War on Hacking). Consider: all it would take would be one massive power grid failure or some other similar immense infrastructural disruption, and then a logical but ultimately evidence-independent speculation (“we have reason to believe hackers were behind it”) to roll out new Patriot Act-like powers that effectively render criminal any technological attempt to maintain individual or collective privacy, much less to peer into the secrets of power.

The idea is not strictly-speaking mine. I heard it mumbled about in some quarters at the recent OHM2013 convention. However, other than an obscure comment to a 2011 editorial (copied in the post-script of this post), there’s nothing about in on the public web. So, let me spell it out a bit here, and then explain my own position, which I hope is moderate. And if not moderate, then at least independent…

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Inside Belgium’s heart of darkness

Yesterday Liza and I biked to Tervuren to visit the Musee Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, otherwise known more simply as the Africa Museum. In terms of sheer aesthetic creepiness, this museum is second only to Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum, but in moral terms it may be far worse because of what it says about the history of Belgium, colonialism, and science. Briefly, for those of my readers who don’t know, the Africa Museum was established by King Leopold II to showcase the Congo Free State, but which was in reality an active act of apologetic for, if not even deception about, the horrible brutalization of the Congo’s native peoples. Much of the Africa Museum today remains relatively unchanged since its start, revealing much about the mindset that constituted it.

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The assemblage of shadows

I recently got into a disheartening debate with a young woman, a fellow intern at RFE/RL, about religion. My heart sank so much because, at no older than eighteen years old, she already has a rigid, cynical, and contradictory view of the world. On the one hand, this life is all there is, and it should be sufficient — all kinds of metaphysical talk about God, the soul, afterlives, and so on, is only unprovable distracting claptrap. On the other hand, this life is also insufficient — human beings are evil, civilization is a moral failure, and the empirical, measurable universe is a cold, indifferent wasteland.

I tried to explain my point of view: human beings aren’t evil, they’re stumbling in the dark, and civilization is only a moral failure if we hold it to an impossible and abstract standard. Evil exists, yes, but, ironically, it’s not always so evil. We never know the true fruits of actions. For example, had the Khmer Rouge never brutalized Cambodia, I would never have known my first love, and had Socrates not suffered injustice, Plato might never have written his dialogues and Aristotle his meditations, and who knows how art and science would have fared without them?

As to the universe being a cold, indifferent wasteland, one might be surprised to discover the contrary. Astronomers often remark about the miracleness of our planet — so much has had to go right, from the position of the moon to the placidity of our immediate cosmic neighborhood — that sometimes it seems the universe is actually conspiring on our behalf.  But even if the universe is indeed a blind machine, then, as Nietzsche thought,  could it not be the mission of intelligent species (ours and perhaps others) to inject moral and aesthetic order into this mechanistic order?

Finally, turning to her Sartrian argument against metaphysics, this seemed to be at the core of her logic: essentially, either there is God, and therefore no freedom and value in life, or there is no God, and therefore this life is all that we have — and yet, precisely because it is transient, it is also naggingly empty. I struggled to find the words for my response at the time, but alas, they come to me only now.

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Quantum religion 2

Was Averroes right: do the activities of science and religion somehow ontologically resonate?  In my last post I lightly explored what this might mean for the content of scientific theory and religious belief vis-à-vis each other. Therein I tentatively proposed a “quantum religion”, which solicited responses both positive and negative, including comparisons to Deepak Chopra and Roger Penrose.  I’m taking a controversial stance for sure, but also a dangerous one.

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Quantum religion

I have previously reflected upon the possible deep ontological resonance between science and religion.  First, a remark: the idea that arbitrariness or order are just interpretations already belies the supposed neutrality of science regarding values, much less religion’s suppose responsibility to leave science alone in its own domain.  And second: if we accept this, then what to do about the content of science and religion?  Ah, this is a very difficult question.

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Hades is Terra, Terra is Hades

Phenomenal and the nouminal, potentiality and actuality, matter and spirit — the philosophers’ vocabulary of division and duality.  A picture emerges of duality, on the one side a physical world of where and when, on the other side a  dimension of nowhere, when and no-when.  Here is causality and motion; there, well, a non-there.  The two have nothing to do with each other.  Let Hades be; we’ll busy ourselves with Terra.

Or at least so we Moderns have long wanted to believe. Our researches into quantum mechanics increasingly seem to bend the philosophers’ hard distinctions to the breaking point.  To our horror, our concrete here is made of quarks and shadows.  We realize that Hades bestrides, enshrouds, and permeates Terra.  We wander the Elysian Fields now, in our offices, our classrooms, our bedrooms, our thoughts and dreams.

Does this mean that we are already dead and risen?  Have we already decomposed into the trace elements of silence?  And in the strings of quanta, intertwined in the great lattice of being, do we already exist forever?  Are we right now those strings, vibrating and trembling and singing beyond the reach of the microscopes of religion and the rituals of science?

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My grandparents, the dawnbreakers

My grandparents, Charles and Bertie Schwartz, published their book Faith Through Reason in 1947, which had a small amount of influence among Jewish and Christian intellectual circles in the United States, especially the Northeast.  The book carried the weight that it did primarily for two reasons, namely, the personal prominence of my grandparents among the professional and religious scenes in New York City, and its extremely cogent, clear, and forthright style.

Hearing about the book my whole life was one of the factors that led to my own strong interest in the question of faith and reason.  Moreover, my grandparents’ views went on to deeply influence the views of their children and grandchildren, and will probably (and hopefully) continue to inform future generations.  Pesach discussions have often turned to the text, during which the subtlety of the title — faith through reason — is emphasized.

What did my grandparents mean precisely?  In the foreword they write, “faith need not be arrived at blindly” and “the test of reason may be applied to both, that religious beliefs may be adopted and that faith may be reached through the intellect”.  The prima facie meaning of this passage would be as my family and undoubtedly my grandparents themselves took it to mean: faith can be established by reason.

However, as I currently see it, to make faith reasonable is to make it something other than faith.  Reason, or at least the cognitive logical variety that my grandparents talked about, is useful to prepare one’s intellectual terrain for the dawning of faith, and more, to resolve doctrinal problems within a particular faith tradition.  However, faith itself is ultimately either a different order of reason, or indeed, concerns something trans-reasonable.

But I’ll return to this issue in a moment, because it eventually has ramifications not only for the philosophy of religion, but of science, as well.  Now, re-reading my grandparents’ book with the hindsights of age and several years of academic training, the following passage from their book leaps out at me:

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