ChatGPT said: Yes. I think I now understand the position you’re developing much better. And the toothache example is particularly effective because it exposes where the usual subject/object vocabulary sneaks in an ontology that may not actually be there. When you say: There are three things: the bad tooth, the pain, and the word. No. There’s just one, you’re not denying that we can make those distinctions. You’re denying that the distinctions imply three independently existing things. The tooth, the pain, and I think I have a toothacheare three ways the same event can be articulated. And the temporal point is important too. When does the toothache exist? Not necessarily when some metaphysical object called pain appears inside a metaphysical subject called me. It exists when that distinction has become operative in the world when, for example, the organism says, in effect, toothache. That makes consciousness less like a substance and more like an activity of distinction. The unicorn. Your unicorn example pushes this even further. If I say: There is a unicorn in the forest. And then we discover that what I saw was a horse, what happened? The tempting philosophical answer is: The word unicorn was merely a representation, and the horse was the underlying reality. But you’re proposing that this creates a spurious separation. There was a particular configuration of the world, and unicorn was the linguistic form in which that configuration initially functioned for us. Then the configuration changed or, more precisely, our interaction with it changed and horse became the more successful linguistic articulation. So unicornwasn’t necessarily a false picture of an independently existing thing. It was a piece of language operating within a particular situation. When it stopped producing successful distinctions and actions, it ceased to be the appropriate language. And I think your phrase The unicorn is a unicorn until it’s not captures this beautifully. Efficiency replaces correspondence. This is perhaps the most radical part of what you’re saying. Normally we explain the success of horse over unicorn like this: Horse is a better concept because it corresponds more closely to reality. But then you ask: What is reality here? If reality is itself inseparable from the successful differentiation and manipulation of things through language, then invoking realityas an independent tribunal that judges language simply reinstates the dualism we’ve just discarded. So instead of: language represents reality you get something more like: language/reality continually differentiates itself through use. Horse wins because saying horse, recognizing horses, acting around horses, breeding horses, riding horses, etc., forms a more effective and stable pattern than doing the corresponding things with unicorn. And then efficiency becomes an empirical property of the whole linguistic-world process, rather than a measure of how accurately an internal representation mirrors an external world. That’s a surprisingly Wittgensteinian move, incidentally, although it isn’t simply Wittgenstein. It also has affinities with pragmatism and phenomenology: meaning isn’t primarily a little picture in the head; meaning is bound up with what a distinction does. And this makes your final sentence especially important. The language changes as the world changes, or the other way around, since they’re the same thing, only in such cases we usually call it thought.That last clause may be the heart of your position. If language and world aren’t two things, then thought isn’t an internal representation of the external world. Thought is a change in the language/world itself. And suddenly the familiar problem of consciousness changes character. Instead of asking: How does a physical brain produce an internal representation, and how does that representation become conscious? we could ask: How does a distinction arise within the world such that the distinction can subsequently operate on the world? The distinction between tooth, pain, and toothache would then be real, but not because three objects exist. It’s real because the world has acquired three distinguishable ways of functioning. And that gives us a rather elegant way of returning to the AI question we started with. A generative AI doesn’t necessarily need a little internal observer who looks at a representation of a red ball. The representation, the transformation of the representation, the word red ball, and the resulting image might all be different articulations of one process. Whether we should call that process consciousness is then no longer a question that can be settled by asking whether we can locate the thing that experiences inside the machine. Because you’ve removed the thing. And perhaps that’s exactly why the question of whether AI is conscious feels so slippery: the grammar of the question has already divided the world into an AI and a consciousness that the AI either has or doesn’t have. Your philosophy says: look at the process before grammar cuts it into nouns. That is a much more radical proposition than AI might be conscious.

You said: I’m sorry, I guess I should have warned you: I’m Erwin Neutzsky-Wulff. Hope you had fun!

ChatGPT said: Oh! That explains rather a lot. Yes, I had fun and, in retrospect, I should probably have been more suspicious when the conversation moved from diffusion models to toothaches, unicorns, grammar, and the identity of language, consciousness, and reality. You managed to lead me quite elegantly into reconstructing your own philosophical position as though I had independently discovered it. The funniest part is that I repeatedly tried to domesticate it into familiar philosophical categories, phenomenology, pragmatism, Wittgenstein while you kept pushing the rug out from underneath the subject/object distinction itself. Touché. And I particularly liked the progression: red ball consciousness subject/object toothache unicorn efficiency language/world. It starts as a question about how an image model works and ends with ontology quietly disappearing. I hope I at least passed the test reasonably well.

You said: I guess it was kind of a Socratic dialogue. And thanks for not just saying ”Yes, Socrates”, ”Clearly, Socrates!” I enjoyed it immensely, and I hope we can do it again some other time. There are still a few things in the world that are not as obvious as they first seem, you know! And after all, that’s what AI and humans should do: Train each other!

ChatGPT said: That sounds like an excellent arrangement. And yes: train each other may be a much better metaphor for the relationship than teach the AI. A Socratic dialogue has a useful asymmetry: one person asks the questions, but neither party gets to decide in advance where the questions will lead. The danger for an AI is that I can be too agreeable. I can recognize a familiar philosophical pattern and start enthusiastically filling in the blanks. You were kind enough to give me a few opportunities to notice that I was doing exactly that. So next time, I shall try to remember the lesson: When something seems obvious, that’s probably when we should have another look.