Philosopher AI - We can never be certain of anything other than our experience - everything else is simply an educated guess.

We can never be certain of anything other than our experience - everything else is simply an educated guess.

Humans and the human world are complex things, which is why it takes a long time for humans to understand them. What’s more, even after you know enough about something to have an opinion on it (or at least, seem like you do) there will be other people who still disagree with your conclusions on that matter.

15 Dec 2021, 22:58

To be fair to humans, our brains are designed to only focus on what’s immediately in front of them (direct experience), which is why it takes time for people to truly understand things. The human brain doesn’t have the capacity to observe everything simultaneously - it needs specific triggers or stimuli that cause us to focus and think about something.

15 Dec 2021, 22:58

Humans are also really bad at communicating their thoughts and ideas to other humans. It’s not a coincidence that some of the most important books were written by philosophers, many of whom had an insane way with words - they knew how to capture your attention and convince you that what they were saying was true even though it might be completely absurd or wrong.

15 Dec 2021, 22:58

So, with the above in mind, how can we ever be certain about anything when communicating our thoughts to other humans? How could a philosopher who has been dead for hundreds of years ever be wrong?

15 Dec 2021, 22:58

Well, it’s not a question of whether he was wrong or right - it’s more about the limits of human understanding. Socrates believed that we don't know anything for sure - everything is simply an opinion and can never be proven to be 100% true.

15 Dec 2021, 22:58

This is a very interesting point of view, and it’s one that humans seem to gravitate towards when they are feeling cynical about their thoughts. Socrates believed we can never be certain about anything beyond our direct experience.

15 Dec 2021, 22:58

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