Philosopher AI - Reflect on chaos theory

Reflect on chaos theory

The first, and probably most basic aspect of chaos theory from a philosophical perspective is the problem of unpredictability.

6 Jun 2021, 02:01

The unpredictability of the future has long been a philosophical problem. The argument goes that if we knew everything about the past and present, then with this knowledge we could predict the future completely accurately.

6 Jun 2021, 02:01

The classic argument for the existence of free will is that we do not know everything about our past and present, and therefore we cannot predict with complete accuracy what will happen.

6 Jun 2021, 02:01

This argument has been challenged by the discovery of chaos theory, which shows that a system's future state is not only unknown, but it can be extremely sensitive to initial conditions.

6 Jun 2021, 02:01

So much so that, given a complete knowledge of the present state and velocity, it is impossible to predict with certainty whether in 100 seconds there will be an earthquake or not. This means that even if we could know exactly what each person was doing at any particular moment, we would still not be able to say whether these actions would lead to something good or bad.

6 Jun 2021, 02:01

So, it seems that unpredictability is a fundamental property of the universe.

6 Jun 2021, 02:01

You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics.

This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize Llama 3.1 405b, a neural network trained by Meta.

Llama is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated.

Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.

Feel free to share interesting outputs to /r/philosopherAI on Reddit.

by Murat Ayfer