By naming repeated experiences we objectify them, including ourselves

Maybe you can remember when you first discovered your shadow. You were probably outside on a bright, sunny day, or near a street lamp at night, when you noticed a dark shape on the ground in front of you. “What’s that?”…

That’s what’s wrong with some popular “AI” systems, and some people, too

Proponents of some recent “Artificial Intelligent” systems such as GPT-3 claim great success for their software, and to some extent they are right. Here are some quotes from one of their web sites:

“Given any text prompt like…

Games from childhood can show us things about ourselves

Many children, probably most, delight in stacking up blocks into tall structures and then knocking them down. Sometimes they knock them down themselves. Other times playmates knock each other’s towers down. They may laugh or get angry momentarily when the blocks…

Most of us are aware of some of our human limitations, but I don’t think enough people are aware of how profoundly flawed we are. …

That statement may seem obvious, but it’s crucial that we understand its implications

As individual human animals we are limited in what we can know and how we can behave. We know that. …

Like many things, we contain seeds of our own destruction

Almost everything that we know about has a limited life time. Even the whole universe as we know it seems destined, if not to die entirely, to expand and change into a much less interesting structure than we can currently…

We tend to think that assertions we make are either true or false. We sometimes disagree and even argue over their veracity. Or we can ask questions that we assume have true-or-false answers, and disagree over those answers. “Does God exist?” is a particularly controversial example.

But assertions are often…

They reveal limitations to our use of language

Rainbow floating in the sky,
you’re shooting beams into my eye.
With hues from violet to red,
you wake ideas in my head.

Seeing a rainbow is a beautiful and even awe-inspiring experience. Yet rainbows are more ephemeral than the clouds that…