The Grasshopper #48: Censorship, ChatGTP and the Extended Mind Theory
Something a little esoteric and something political
There’s a nor’easter blowing right now on the New England coast and it may be a big one. Here in Western NY we tend to get the remnants of whatever blows East from these things and it is snowy and windy today. But I think this is winter’s last gasp around here. Sun all next week, if we can believe the long term forecast.
I’m posting two of my Medium posts here this week because they cover topics important to writers and readers, specifically the alarming censorship of books and ideas going on in Florida, and a look at how AI chatbots can be used to extend the human mind, no surgery required.
The concepts behind the latter article startled me when I came across them in the New World, Same Humans substack. It made me rethink my attitude towards things like ChatGPT and how it might get used by writers (and, by extension, readers).
This is all getting very sci-fi. Having been on this planet for a while now, I’m constantly noticing how we have slipped into a future I could only dream about as a young person immersed in speculative fiction. Last night I saw an ad on tv for a new electric Acura and the car looked amazing. Straight off the cover of Amazing Tales.
If you don’t think we are in a very different world, consider the topics I’ve mentioned just in the last few paragraphs. Ten day and longer advance weather forecasts, artificial intelligence personal assistants connected to all human knowledge, and electric cars that look like personal spacecraft.
All of these things are real and part of our daily lives to the point where we take them for granted. I’m trying not to.
These next two pieces originally appeared on Medium.com. I don’t usually publish political pieces here but feel the subject of censorship is so important, and dangerous, that it is worth an exception. All writers and readers should be alarmed at this trend.
The Censorship Policies of Ron DeSantis Are Literally Mind Control
If kids don’t read, they can be molded
The art of propaganda is about controlling people’s personal belief systems, the worldview we assemble through reading, watching news, sharing ideas, and drawing conclusions from what we see and experience. One of the first actions of autocrats is to remove anything that might help a young person create their own ideas or explore those of people different from themselves.
Censorship is the hallmark of dictatorships. The next step is indoctrination, the implanting of ideas and beliefs that the government dictates. Free thinking is its enemy.
If you remove access to different ideas, you create a vacuum that a leader can fill with a belief system of their making.
We are talking about children, children at peak learning capacity, being molded by a political point of view, instead of being trusted to develop one of their own.
Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, the fastest growing state in the US, knows these things and he is using censorship to control the population of the future.
It all sounds like a bad imitation of George Orwell’s 1984, an imaginary world where all thought and decision-making is dictated by the state. In the case of Florida right now, the state is Ron DeSantis. He has total control, with a rubber stamp legislature that enables him to control the flow of information to young people through censorship.
The next step after censorship is brainwashing, implanting a description of the world not defined by individual choice but by the design of a dictator. The definition of a dictator is one who dictates what kind of thinking is acceptable.
Books are disappearing from Florida schools, based on fear, threats, and a set of restrictions laid down by the government, that is to say, DeSantis. The irony here is that DeSantis is a highly educated man who went to Harvard. Apparently he is educated enough to know what our kids should learn and what they should not learn.
We are in the age of misinformation, an unfortunate result of entering an age of unlimited access to information, information that encourages individual thinking and personal growth. Misinformation grew out of a need to indoctrinate people to eliminate any personal choice.
When we read about books and ideas being censored, we should feel a deathly chill. This country was founded by people who desperately wanted a society where ideas were free and individuals could form their own views.
‘Don’t let them get any ideas’ is the basic foundation of censorship. This is not a minor thing. If we restrict the flow of information to young minds starting to build their awareness, we can control those minds by limiting their ability to reason on their own.
Creating sheep, in other words.
Nothing about this is minor or unintentional. DeSantis knows exactly what he is doing and he is pursuing it ruthlessly. His goal is to limit individual rights and install his description of what is acceptable and what is not.
It’s thought control.
Of all the crazy political movements we see these days, this one scares me the most. As a reader and a writer, the exploration of ideas, including uncomfortable ones, is what formed me as a person. Reading gave me access to worlds different from my own and showed me that there were different ways to look at things.
This is called being well-rounded. It is the opposite of being narrow minded, of having a limited perspective. A limited perspective can be controlled by controlling the limits of that perspective.
This isn’t philosophy, this is mind control, brainwashing by taking away any viewpoint or ideas that can expand a limited perspective.
As I write this I’m sitting across from a book shelf loaded with stories and ideas, ideas that often conflict with those I learned as a young person. But I also learned to make my own judgments about what made sense, seemed right, and they showed me that others could be different and still be my fellow humans.
Those books, along with freedom of information, experiences good and bad, and the ability to share with others, formed who I am. And who you are. That is the point of education.
Effective education is not about stuffing us full of facts, it is about learning to think, to solve problems and navigate through life on our own. Survival skills. When that is limited or taken away, we can be controlled by others.
With DeSantis we are seeing the evolution of controlled misinformation as a political weapon. Trump instinctively knew this but his approach, though unsophisticated, was nevertheless effective. An example is his constant repetition of simple phrases and catchy insults. He was working to install a belief system and he succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.
De Santis is taking it further, far further. Trump was always constrained by his need to be admired and the center of attention. DeSantis does not care what people think of him, nor does he care what they think. He knows what is right and what is wrong and he wants to make people believe his way of thinking.
So, he starts with children, then moves on to parents; and those indoctrinated parents, parroting his views, work to limit others. The goal is a homogenous society that can be led by one man’s worldview.
DeSantis is a man who can’t laugh with people. Think about that. Do you know any humorless people? They are people who cannot see any fallibility in themselves. If Trump is a narcissist, DeSantis may represent something far scarier, because he actually believes in things.
It’s those things that scare me. It starts with censorship and censorship in Florida is reaching a terrifying point. There may not yet be book burning but there is book disappearing. Schools are emptying their shelves because of rules and fines that are designed to remove access to any information that allows kids to make their choices.
How powerful and dangerous is this control? We don’t have to look far to see an example. Russia under Putin is committing war crimes against humanity on a horrifying scale and the majority of his people believe it is justified, because Putin defines what they can and cannot think.
Do we want a Putin, a cold man with no empathy, to define what we as a people think? A society of automatons?
That is exactly what an autocracy is.
And Ron DeSantis knows exactly how to create one.
Extended Mind Theory and Chat GPT: Mind Blown
I learned something this morning that changes my understanding of how we think
I’m going to start this by acknowledging a remarkable newsletter post I read this morning. The newsletter is New World, Same Humans by David Mattin. In it he looks at the world of AI, human/machine interaction, and climate issues. It’s a futurist now point of view.
My epiphany this morning was triggered this morning by a post looking at something called Extended Mind Theory and how chatbots like Chat GPT fit into it. This is something I’ll be rereading because it offers a look into how we use tools to extend our ability to carry on an internal dialog, for problem-solving and to access creativity.
As I understand it, EMT theorizes that tools like notebooks and pencils extend our mind’s capabilities by serving as a kind of external memory. The theory, which dates back to the 1990s, goes further and looks at how a dialog we have with ourselves is a way we extend our capabilities and how tech can speed up the process.
Think of our phones as an extension of our minds. We have the ability to look up virtually any kind of information nearly instantly by accessing the Internet with these ubiquitous devices. They do not make us smarter, but they do make us better informed. Caveat, only if we learn to exercise judgment and take that information with a degree of skepticism.
Chat GPT has scanned a huge portion of mankind’s recorded dialog and thought processes and can return them in answer to queries in a natural sounding dialog, which many mistake for intelligence. I think it looks more like an advanced communications interface with the world’s knowledge and experience.
The advance is the Chat function, the ability to respond to queries in natural language and carry on a dialog back and forth with the user. That dialog may be considered a dialog with oneself that can be used to answer questions and solve problems. ChatGPT isn’t solving the problems, it is structuring additional information that may help us make our own conclusions.
Imagine a dialog with a friend where you brainstorm a solution to a mutual problem by going back and forth conversationally, testing ideas and assembling a solution or solutions, based on your dialog.
Now imagine Chat GPT, or similar AI chatbots, as an instantly accessible dialog companion we can use to help us discover solutions, by extending our mind’s ability to find answers and structure them into ideas that are useful.
But what about the crazy fails we encounter when we query? As I understand it, these chat systems will gradually improve as we correct their mistakes, but the solutions come from our ability to parse the information they provide. It is not thinking on its own, it is facilitating our ability to carry on a dialog with a third party to organize our thoughts.
We bounce an idea, via a prompt, then use the responses to refine our understanding faster than we might have on our own. It’s no different than when we take out a notebook and jot down our thoughts to help us develop conclusions. The pencil and paper don’t do the thinking but they give us a platform to carry on a dialog in a new way.
And to return to that dialog, saved as graphite scratches on paper.
I hope a little of this makes sense. David does a better job explaining these concepts, but I’ve written this to help me use his information to understand a complex new idea. And, in writing this, I extend my mind out into the readers’ minds. And those readers, you, can participate in my dialog by commenting or otherwise responding.
Chat GPT’s responses might help me formulate answers the same way feedback from a stranger can help. It doesn’t formulate answers, it provides information in a more human interface that we can use to build our own solutions.
As a writer, this fascinates me, the idea that I have been using tools, like the iPad I’m writing on and the platform I’m sharing them on, to extend the capabilities of my own thought processes.
“I’m not one of those who views the post-human future with unalloyed enthusiasm. But via generative models and other technologies — including brain implants and techniques of genetic manipulation — I’m increasingly persuaded that some kind of Great Divergence is coming, in which we homo sapiens branch off from one another and become various different kinds of (post)humans.
Certainly, the possibility that we may not all be the same humans for much longer haunts the borders of this newsletter. It increasingly seems to me that our convergence with the technologies we’re building, and the almost impossible task of making any practical or moral sense of it, is the most important shared challenge we face.
In that case, the project of the age is to begin, at least, to figure out where we stand. Perhaps we can take it to ChatGPT.”
~ David Mattin, New World, Same Humans
I’m going to be chewing on these ideas for a while.
As I’ve mentioned in my Sunday Editions, this month is a time of experimentation and growth for The Grasshopper. I’m not veering off from my main topics of writing and the creative life, but I do intend to include more of the ideas that guide me as a writer and reader. Like it or not, our worldview will define the nature of our words, for better or worse.
I’m a liberal Democrat who talks regularly with others who are on the other side of the political spectrum. I live next to a boutique hotel that hosts many business travelers from all over the world. It has a bar that is popular both with guests, and with locals. And the clientele is exceptionally diverse in a city with a pretty clear divide between whites like me and people of color. There is never enough interaction.
These conversations with strangers usually result in our not being strangers anymore. The travelers I talk to often return to the hotel on a regular basis and several have become friends, though we may disagree about politics.
We’ve seen at least six years of intentional division in this country. Though I write from a distinct point of view in my political pieces, I try to mend fences when I can. To write well we need an open mind.
Martin Edic
A whopping 2400 words this week!
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Joe, my point was that just as a pen and notebook don’t think for us when we write, a chatbot should just be a tool that potentially is useful for having a dialog with oneself and easier access to existing ideas. They don’t think. However, they are so articulate that some may think that. Crazy stuff.
I am troubled by the idea of artificial intelligence doing our thinking for us. Such robots can gather what humans write and summarize opinions but to my mind cannot form opinions of their own.