Exercise 1
Instructions
Choose one topic or big idea that came up in discussion during the last class. Write questions about that topic or big idea. Allow yourself to be genuinely curious, and then write down whatever questions come to mind when you are in a place of genuine curiosity. You might find that one question leads to another question, or you might find that your mind bounces around to lots of different (seemingly unrelated) questions. Everything is okay. Simply record the questions that arise in your mind. Importantly, do not answer the questions. This exercise is not about answers. It is about questions. The possible answers to the questions do not matter. Only the questions matter. Set a timer for 10 minutes, and then start this exercise. If you discover that you want to keep writing after the 10 minutes, keep going. The important thing is to write for at least 10 minutes.
There was an interesting question about which role Tobias (the teaching assistant) held in the discussion about teachers, students, and the risk of absorbing harmful information without being able to evaluate it beforehand for consumption.
Tobias is in a strange position, where he both learns from the professor and teaches to us as students. This made me think about situations where I am both the teacher and the student, and I came across an interesting question. Maybe I'm a teacher and student to myself! We talk and listen to ourselves far more than anyone else. With this in mind, I think the lessons people felt obvious from class are not lessons they apply to this relationship. We need to be cautious about what information we accept from others, but we also need to be cautious about what information we accept from ourselves.
I don't normally consciously evaluate my own thoughts as dangerous or not; can you really hold yourself back? Does this become some sort of multi-perosnality disorder to argue with your own thoughts? If I spoke to myself five or ten years ago, I would probably get into a lot of disagreements with myself. That feels normal; I've grown as a person. To constantly argue with myself, the same self as I am now, feels a bit like instability or volatility. Are memories of yourself as you were different from the self you are now?
Also, as I've been learning about some AI data manipulation techniques, I started to feel like I could relate them as a simplified version of reality. With AI image generation, like in those age-changing filters, the vectors in the model that represent age are shifted on the tensor formed by the original image's input, and an image is generated from that shifted tensor. Because all of the other vectors remain the same, the output image should be something that looks just like you, but older. This type of simplified definition of people as a set of vectors was a bit interesting to me. Suppose your behavior could truly be defined by a set of vectors, perhaps to truly represent a person that set of vectors has to represent all of the neurons or perhaps it's just an infinite set if you believe in the soul or something greater. I suspect that mapping people onto these vector sets would be the way to put 'people' into a computer. Growth as a person happens constantly as we are 'trained' by our environment. I'm also curious; what is the initial state of a person? What things affect the initial state of a person? Does similarity or uniqueness help prove or disprove the existence of the soul?
Of course this is all just a silly exercise in thinking about how we could map humans to something else. How can we really measure a person? Suppose we really do have 100 trillion vectors, one to represent each neuron in the brain, all perfectly measured to represent a person. With that tangible, manipulable data, how would we go about simplifying it? What trends would emerge? What things are related? What things are reducible? I'd like to understand how close certain polar emotions are. Love and grief would be interesting to see based on my interpretation of the two.
With this, we would be able to categorize people. Ignoring all nefarious consequences of being able to do that, what would be able to gain with a database of all the world's people and their true personalities? Ok. Maybe database is a bad idea. Suppose we reach some libertarian's wet dream of a free society where technology is decentralized and people are in full ownership of their own data and ability to connect with others. Would having access to information about your true self be useful in training yourself? This gives me an idea, which may be stupid: suppose you had this information about yourself, and you were able to process it. What parts of the vector set would you change? Would you immediately have an idea about what to adjust having seen it? Could we apply this to current technology, allowing AI models to analyze and suggest modifications to its own behavior rather than trying to train it with data and backpropagation?
This is a bit technical. I like trying to bridge philosophical thought to pratical applications of that thought. That could be considered a bit of a crime in philosophy, but I see it as more of trying to live my life through the way of philosophy in the sense that was explained in class. Doing heavy reflection is (and has been) a habit, writing it down is not.
