Podcast appearance - Doomer Optimism
AI, Language, and Animal Consciousness
Writers have always had to confront their mortality.
In many cases, this has produced deeply compelling work: the yearning to enter the literary pantheon is embedded in the time-limit of one’s own lifespan. Time-restricted output is a motor of creative production.
Now, for the first time, writers are confronting their mortality as a class.
If writing is distilled thinking, and thinking is a form of computation, then one can conclude that writers derive meaning from computation.
It doesn’t feel good, then, to watch AI evolve over time.
As LLM’s continue to rapidly improve, this is creating a crisis of meaning for the wordcel class. This has birthed a new class of book: the “it’s not over for wordcels yet!” genre.
Beneath this lies a sort of future-anxiety: we’re watching AI capabilities increase over time and praying that this line doesn’t intersect with the human capacity for written creativity.
The weakness of this general class works is that these writers are typically non-technical.
If a commentator is ignorant of the technical details of LLM’s, this substantially reduces my confidence in their predictions about its future capabilities.
(Here, I am forced to defer to experts when it comes to extrapolating LLM improvement into the future. Even people who we long thought ridiculous, like Ray Kurzweil, seem to be directionally correct about their predictions).
David Bentley Hart’s book, All Things are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life, is a wide-ranging work that covers numerous topics in anti-materialist philosophy of mind. Notably, it also includes a critique of LLM capabilities that I was felt very skeptical about.
Charles Carman of Doomer Optimism has written an excellent review of this work which you can find here (paywalled, unfortunately).
We discussed the book and Charles’ review of it in a very enjoyable discussion that is available here:
Notably, we also talked about a number of interrelated topics around theism, the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, and animal suffering.1
Other formats:
It’s also available on YouTube below:
I’ll be toning down the voice modulator in future appearances.
Finding out Post Liberal Book Reviews has the same first and last name as my childhood best friend has put me in a weird place.