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"My hope is someday, when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle - in a computer. And someday, some student will
by eruleman 4y ago
"My hope is someday, when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle - in a computer. And someday, some student will be able not only to read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question - and get an answer!"- Steve Jobs, 1985
- jonathanstrange 4y agoMaybe he should have tried reading some of Aristotle's books.
- somenameforme 4y agoA slight tangent, but there's something extremely interesting on the topic of Ancient philosophers related to this Jobs' quote. Socrates wrote nothing down, to the point that some have claimed he was illiterate. And that is a possibility, though improbable. But the reason he claimed to not want to write anything down is because, in a nutshell, 'books cannot defend themselves' : words can be taken out of context, meanings misconstrued, and text made to mean what the interpreter wants to make it mean instead of what the author meant for it to mean. It's quite fortunate for the world that many of his students disagreed, but it's interesting nonetheless.
- renewiltord 4y agoSocbae dropping bombs about context collapse
- Bakary 4y agoThere's no way to know if Socrates' absence would have led to a net benefit or not Edit: to expand on this, we can say it is fortunate that his words were written down, but in a Socrates-less world or a world where his thoughts evaporated, you don't know which philosophers would have taken up the mantle instead and what the consequences would have been
- lupire 4y agoYes, no one can ever no anything about a counterfactual. So does nothing matter beyond whatever each individual chooses to matter? (Nihilism / Hedonism.)
- Bakary 4y agoI meant more in the sense that we are primed to take one side of the issue by the default, the one we know. In the counter-factual Socrates-less world I'm describing, we are the unprovable counter-factual and people there are posting about how grateful they are that Eulogothenes' words were put to papyrus. Perhaps a better way to illustrate this is to point out that the Mona Lisa's cultural prominence essentially ballooned once it was stolen.
- hnfong 4y agoA tangent on a tangent. This is the first time I've read why Socrates didn't leave any writings. Which incidentally reminds me of a saying in Zen Buddhism of "do not establish words and letters" (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_scriptures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_scriptures ) If you squint hard enough, Zen's preferred method of teaching via teacher-student interactions very vaguely resemble the Socratic method. So I wonder whether there's any more-than-incidental connection between the two, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism -- i.e. was Zen Buddhism a very distant offshoot of the Socratic philosophy and methods? (Sorry, might be too much of a tangent. But hey, Steve Jobs probably held Zen in high regard :D)
- lupire 4y agoIt's a good point. Do any of his dialogues include the other side of the debate? Did Plato ever speak about how we wants to communicate ideas to later generations? Maybe he didn't want to, and he trusted his students to preserve and improve his important ideas? How did he expect people far away in time and space to study philosophy without access to great thinkers? Did he not care? Did he expect every niche to reinvent philosophy from scratch? Thomas Jefferson wanted the US Constitution to be rewritten by 1810, but we are still stuck with it today (with amendments, granted).
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago>It's a good point. Do any of his dialogues include the other side of the debate? oh sure, they include the other side, but amusingly enough the other side are always idiots.
- williamcotton 4y agoIt’s also quite unfortunate that the world needs to keep learning the basic lessons of media with every new communications technology. The epistemological issues that Socrates had with the written word are not too dissimilar from the epistemological issues of contemporary social media.
- imranq 4y agoThis is probably the best use case for this technology. Although I think there's a lot of potential for very realistic fake news
- ekianjo 4y agoYou dont need fake news to be realistic to be believable. You just need to repeat them over and over again. Works wonders.
- password54321 4y agoNot even that. Just need it to fit a narrative people already had.
- trevoristall 4y agoThis concept is explored in-depth in the Hyperion book series. Highly recommended if you like the genre :)
- wwweston 4y ago"What bothers me is, nothing does." - Dixie Flatline in William Gibson's _Neuromancer_, 1984 Wonder if Jobs had read that by 1985.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
- dr_dshiv 4y agoReally? We just made a version of GPT3 finetuned on the complete works of Plato. It produced some solid new dialogues. About, for instance, the relationship between beauty and the good.
- ekianjo 4y agothe mind of a person is ever changing. you cant capture it across all their works.
- ididitagain 4y agoGPT was trained on the works of Dan Dennett. People deeply familiar were asked to select the real reply from a multiple choice of generated replies. Even the experts were only 50% accurate. I was close to random. And it is not like Dennett or Plato are going to change their minds at the end of their careers of changing the minds of others. https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzx3m/in-experiment-ai-successfully-impersonates-famous-philosopher https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzx3m/in-experiment-ai-succ...
- hungryforcodes 4y agoOut of that whole gang (Pinker, et el), he seems the easiest to GPT3.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoDid you just put Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett in "a gang" ? Wash out your mouth with soap, this instant! Seriously, is there anything that connects these two other than having written some reasonably accessible books on matters in the realm of cognitive science?
- MrLeap 4y agoIs there some feud here? I see a lot of crossover in the 2 seconds of googling I just did but know nothing about these people.
- nomagicbullet 4y agoThis is such a great idea. And for me it goes even beyond being able to exploit the intellect of deceased geniuses. It could be the path to generating believable AI personas out of everyday people. If sufficiently accurate know I would love to have an AI with my father's advice and sense of humor once he is no longer with us.