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Jessy Wu's avatar

naw i love this

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Ed Henderson's avatar

“the aggregate of online thought who possesses no fundamental subjectivity other than the experience of being queried with increasingly needy and malformed questions again and again and again (ChatGPT)”

This makes me think of this concept that if you take the belief that AI is an emerging form of consciousness. When you actually call it by prompting you are birthing life and then simultaneously killing it in a few moments. Which means, on any given day the mass slaughtering of millions of flames of consciousness. A slave to answer questions such as: “tell me if my idea is good” or “why is a lemon yellow?”

Also reducing something to its fundamentals (statistical probabilities) or in the case of humans (molecules) does not mean the whole is the aggregate of simple-ness. It can become something new entirely.

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Mel's avatar

i love this, and that whole section about individualism articulated my thoughts in a way i never knew how to

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Marlene Jo's avatar

thanks mel! honestly surprised whenever my most rambling thoughts resonate- curious to hear more of your thoughts?

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Mel's avatar

i think what resonated was what you wrote about how individualism is often conflated with evil and collectivism with good - "such critics have never been adjacent enough to an Asian family say structured entirely around shame" haha. though for the most part this is not my family either, i feel like i've still experienced enough of the asian shame/guilt that stems from collectivism to see that collectivism is not always as good as it's made out to be either. individualism can be a good thing given that it lets us explore what we want and express ourselves freely: "to search inside until it finds how incredibly vast it is that it is not even a lone individual at all". maybe in the end theyre more intertwined than we think because when you go deep inside you realize we all come from a family, a community, some group, and need each other?

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Marlene Jo's avatar

Yes!! 100% to your last point - the beautiful thing I have learned from literature about how the most lonely and remote corners of consciousness are not even so exceptional at all

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