chatGPT R Us
first take: I am a materialist, by which I mean I believe that in the case of human beings in particular, there is no substance other than the physical body to account for our having a soul or mind or spirit – there is no “ghost in the machine.” Somehow the functioning of this brain and body in the context of a world and universe, which themselves contain no substance other than what we are accustomed to characterizing as physical, produces in us the impression of our having a soul or mind etc. It then becomes a matter of choice or utility whether we continue to posit the existence of souls and minds etc., albeit understood as not composed of any distinct substance from the body, or to banish them from our ontology, except as illusions or hallucinations or delusions. Now let us consider the remarkable new AI phenom chatGPT. Apparently the fundamental operation that makes this app tick is as follows: Compile a humongous body of digitized text – for example, Wikipedia – an