Tag: simulation

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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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Making a Barbarian World

It has been a long time since I last blogged, and there’s a lot to talk about: my entrance into academia as a full-time lecturer at the American University of Central Asia, my marriage, my ongoing PhD, the growing clarity of my philosophical interests — “philosophical” for me being both academic-intellectual and spiritual-psychological, even spiritual-therapeutic — not to mention my interests’ evolving focus and scope. However, my first post in a long time will not be about these things, and it will even constitute a thematic break in the sense that what I want to post about right now is, well, very un-spiritual!

This post is intended to indulge in a hobby, namely, strategy gaming and the possibilities for tinkering (see this old 2010 post, “Checkmate by Checkers”, for example). In this particular case, the game is FreeCiv, the online fan-made version of Sid Meier’s Civilization history simulation franchise. This past summer, I have been playing the role of Saruman with the Orcs, experimenting with the game’s Barbarians. Here is my potentially crazy idea: it is possible to “social engineer” the Barbarian AI without any tinkering to the ruleset using the default settings of the average online easy-mode game. Furthermore, it may even be possible using such social engineering to establish a “Barbarian World”, i.e., a play scenario in which the Barbarian AI has seized control of all of the major civilizations and production centers, relegating the human and AI players to the margins, from which they will need to find a way to fight their way back to power.

This, then, is a love-letter post by one fan to other fans, although it is also part of a growing historical fascination of mine for social engineering, of which post-Soviet Central Asia is arguably (and controversially) a potential prime example in real-world history (and more about which I will hopefully be writing about in this space and elsewhere in the future). So, without further ado, what follows are my “mad scientist notes” about the progress I have thus far made in my experiment. The intention is that this will not be the final post. The experiment will be ongoing, so I will try to provide updates with screen-caps whenever possible. I now have a career, a family and fitness to attend to, so if this post attracts an audience, be forewarned that there may be long gaps in time between reporting. That said, if anyone would like to “carry on my (ig)noble work” (*ahem) please do!

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