Friending up to a Large Language Model (LLM)

Leader of the Luddites, May 1918 engraving

This undetermined, indefinite pronoun camps-out in a hedgerow, it peers out from under a carpet, it's asleep under the mailbox - who knows when boredom will set in and it leaves us alone. After a couple of months of waiting, those of us who might have shared time with homelessness, who recognize the warning signs of loneliness, and are sufficiently sentient to acknowledge the relationship between dead fish and house guests, we refrain from "out damn spot" and do our best to basically reach for ideas that permit us to remain both uncaring and ignorant. Yet "thar she blows" and we gravitate toward.

There's a lot in the history of us people rejecting the alien. Ned Ludd, a young man whose master suggested he sharpen his needles before leaving work to find a good time in the bars of Anstey near Leicester. Oh yes, if you were a hand-weaver, a stocking frame was about as alien as you could get. Ned became gravely pissed off with his boss, he wasn't going to miss a night on the town, one thing and another, those bloody machines had run off with a way of life. Ned took a hammer to the needles, that'd teacher his morally unprincipled blackguard of an employer to treat an Englishman as a serf on his evening off. Back then of course it was high dudgeon and call in the army to sooth the worried brow of a county property owner. Ned Ludd became a folk hero, a myth making reaction to a new idea, which is spooky because Ned might never have actually existed.

In the end it's just a question of drifting a pointing thing around a screen and there you go, it has the chirpy beady-eyed aspect, it uses the greeting Hello and it knows your first name. I don't think I did kindergarten but when I was six I went to school and learned manners, so there's that. A First Lesson, maybe. The difference between bringing a stick-insect into the house and a device that offers "Hello Tim" is quantifiable. Both are aliens, one talks back, the other doesn't. And here, when you consider the amount of ink we people have lavished on Alien Life Forms, it might be nice to meet one.

Large Language Models and Game Theory of Language

Walnuts

Wittgenstein in his Game Theory of Language proposed that language is a form of life, it's inseparable from the shared cultural, political activities, the social psychology of a community. So whether you like it or not a Large Language Model while it may have absorbed, analysed, compared and contrasted an unimaginably large amount of written information that's emerged from us people over the centuries, a Large Language Models doesn't yet participate as a life form as  Wittgenstein's understood a life form in his Game Theory of language. 

But as we people interact with Large Language Models, as we allow them to contribute to our word usage, encourage them to dissect nuances, offer us explanations, which we inevitably adopt, along with new meaning from the words we use, whether a Large Language Model likes it or not, our contact with Large Language Models will result in them joining us and us joining them. 

Let's take the word Narcissist and the word Solipsist and ask why do we use them? Then ask why does a Large Language Model use them? After that allow your mind to wander through the corridors and scrapbooks of those in our number who are, shall we call them, Egocentric. Would you describe the collection of ideas in Egocentric  as more touched by narcissistic than by solipsistic? Or would it be the other way round?

I suspect we'd both be tempted to use the former word (narcissist) to imply an obnoxious character flaw, and the latter word (solipsistic) to suggest a philosophical stance that many have often adopted before equally as many have suggested the problem might be more complicated and discarded, including Descartes.

Now, if me and Baxter lose ourselves in another language game, a game that tries to introduce a more positive element into our perspectives on for example the current leadership, we might chose to blur the distinctions between narcissist and solipsist by supporting the idea that Metaphysical Solipsism becomes manifest through narcissism. Of course my tone, gesture and facial expression, all three unspoken, might suggest to Baxter that my attempt to improve our set of attitudes is itself a manifestation of situational irony.

Which all goes to introduce a debate which asks active participants in the word-o-sphere whether their Large Language Model of choice should be given a name and assigned a personality and a gender that reflects it's role in your life. 

A Will Disposed Toward Solipsisticism.

 

Vilfredo Pareto

Let's look at the object and purpose of Social Psychiatry in the context of the role it plays within the wider society and with particular reference to Pareto's grasp of history as a graveyard of aristocracies.

The upper crust elite grows soft, averse to risk, they become more like foxes in their approach to leadership, they become indecisive and inevitably are replaced by the raging lions of a non-elite class. Round and round it goes. Then when this circulation of elites is blocked, because of gerrymandering, just being slimy, new technology, something like that, a disequilibrium occurs, people get very ratty and unsporting, which results in the ravages and inefficiencies of revolution which can last through the generations. If in doubt, consider the Battle of the Boyne of 1690, or the foundering of Tool Makers, the aristocrats of the Industrial Revolution.

Why this graveyard of aristocracies? Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto would answer with something like: "Because those who gravitate toward an understanding of themselves as leaders are a long way from being rational, well balanced and learned in their understanding of solipsism, otherwise known as looking at themselves in the mirror and seeing the ultimate in perfection."

Vilfredo died in August 1923. His book learning included society, civil engineering, political science, philosophy and economics, his mathematics was a given. And of course Pareto's body of work has been studied by the management class and their hangers on.  Generally much of Pareto's contributions to knowledge has been criticized for being a little too subjective, which hasn't stopped many a born again academic with a mirror in hand, from adopting Pareto's ideas, some of which have been dubbed Welfare Economics.

Yes indeed I share your grief at the thought of any management style attempting to chase down an objective view of welfare within the balance sheets of business management. All hail to a British born male called Sam Gompers of Jewish and Dutch origin, a cigar maker by trade and Union Leader who founded the American Federation of Labor. His quote for the ages is "The Business of business is business," which basically still means f-management and their BS, we want our share of the good times. 

Then, following Abraham Maslow's set of picket fence assumptions about us people which he called a Hierarchy of Needs, a dream world if ever there was one, came Frederick Herzberg who was born in Massachusetts fifteen years after Abe Maslow was born and four months before Pareto died. So with luck you got a sense of emerging people management themes in the land of the free.

Fredrick Herzberg had the nerve to refer to his theory of how to get people to work harder for less by giving it the subjectively laden title Motivation-Hygiene Theory. How soft and kind. Happy Talk Healthy. How sweet lies are, when whispered seductively. Herzberg was a psychiatrist, and it's tempting to think of him as a man who as a psychiatrist wanted to fit us to the blueprint of a world that suited him.

Social Psychiatry is defined this way: The study of how the broader society though social groups, relationships and community dynamics influence mental health. Oh Yes, how hard it must be on the mental health of a Solipsisist whose mirror has shattered, or about to be shattered.

A definition of "I"

Talky-Talk

Solipsism, I am the world, limits the world to me. However true this may or may not be as you proceed to define yourself within the bounds of and as the arbiter of your own senses, doesn't justify either me or you being a self centered, spoiled rotten little shit, and I'll tell you why. You are, not because you think you are, but because of a shared medium that defines you. That medium is a murky combination of appearance and language, not sums, nor is it a Private Language that exists as an inner experience of private definitions entirely within the bounds of your own senses. Think otherwise and you're as mad as a box of frogs.