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The Convivial Society
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Re-sourcing the Mind
The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 9
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[10]L. M. Sacasas
Aug 01, 2024
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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter exploring the relationship
between technology, culture, and the moral life. This post about LLMs, the
labor of articulation, and memory began as what I thought would be a brief
installment. As if to prove one of the core claims of the essay, that the labor
of articulation is itself generative, it grew in the writing. I hope you’ll
find some things of use in it.
Cheers,
Michael
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
The founding text of technology criticism is found in one of Plato’s
better-known dialogues, the Phaedrus.[15]1 During the course of Socrates’s
conversation about love and rhetoric, he recounts the legend of an Egyptian
king named Thamus and an inventor-god named Theuth. Theuth presents a number of
inventions to Thamus for his consideration, touting their benefits for the
Egyptian people. Among these was the gift of writing, but, surprisingly to
Theuth, Thamus was less than enthused about this particular invention.
Here’s how the relevant portion of the dialogue goes. It begins with Theuth
declaring,“Here is an accomplishment, my lord the King, which will improve both
the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt
for memory and wisdom.”
And here is Thamus’s reply:
“Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best
judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it
is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for
your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function.
Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become
forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance
by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have
discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for
wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality:
they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and
in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most
part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom
instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”
There are two typical responses to the critique of writing Plato here expresses
through Socrates. The first is to see this as the prototypical “moral panic”
about a new technology. If one takes this view, the best use of this text is to
demonstrate how all contemporary tech criticism is similarly misguided and
short-sighted. Plato was wrong about writing, thus contemporary critics who
adopt the same pattern of analysis are likewise wrong about whatever novel
technology they happen to be complaining about.[16]2
The second typical response would be, “Yep, Plato was basically right.”
In this way the passage serves as a Rorschach test for fundamental attitudes
about technology.
But there is a third way, of course. Neil Postman, for example, began his
discussion of this story by explaining the error of Thamus[17]3:
“The error is not in his claim that writing will damage memory and create
false wisdom. It is demonstrable that writing has had such an effect.
Thamus’ error is in his believing that writing will be a burden to society
and nothing but a burden. For all his wisdom, he fails to imagine what
writing’s benefits might be, which, as we know, have been considerable.”
Postman refers to Thamus as a “one-eyed prophet,” seeing only the harms and
burdens that a new technology brings. In Postman’s view, however, “We are
currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see
only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will
undo.”
The point, Postman argued, was to see with both eyes. To recognize both the
gains and the losses, the benefits and the burdens. Only then would we be able
to judge soundly and wisely. This is, as it turns out, easier said than done.
Cycles of hype and criti-hype tend to obscure our collective vision, and we
seem to have a predilection for one-eyed prophets.[18]4
That said, my purpose in recalling Plato’s critique of writing is to set up a
brief consideration of the work that large language models (LLM) like Chat GPT
or Gemini promise to do for us, which I take to be, in short, the work of
helping us say what we need to say.
I’ve started with Plato because my thesis here is roughly this: the use of LLMs
is rendered plausible by the externalization and outsourcing of memory
initiated by writing.
Maybe that sounds like an inelegant way of stating something rather obvious,
but there are two claims in that thesis, the obvious one and another less
obvious, possibly more contentious claim.
First, the obvious one. LLMs work, in part, by mining massive datasets of the
written (and then digitized) word and drawing mathematical correlations among
the words in these massive datasets in order to make predictions about what
words should follow other words in a string. (There are other critical inputs,
but this is the relevant bit for now.) Frankly, it is hard not to be impressed
by what can be achieved through this method, which I have described
inadequately, to be sure. There can be errors of fact, or what are called
hallucinations, and the outputs are often soulless. Nonetheless, while
breathless agitation about super-intelligence and x-risk is, in my view,
misguided, it would be disingenuous to simply shrug a shoulder at the technical
achievement. But the key point here is that none of this would have been
possible had we not first received the gift of Theuth, the invention of
writing, which, as Plato correctly observed, amounts to the externalization of
memory.
So, then, in an obvious and uninteresting sense, externalized memory in the
form of writing can be understood as the technical precondition of LLMs. But
there’s a second, I think more interesting, way of framing externalized memory
as a plausibility structure for the use of LLMs.
I’m more interested in what renders the use of LLMs plausible than in what
makes them technically possible. The concept of a plausibility structure, drawn
from the sociology of religion, is meant to describe social contexts,
structures, or conditions that make it easier to hold certain beliefs.[19]5
Apart from such structures, a belief may become implausible or untenable.
Relatedly, I sometimes find it useful to ask, “What do I have to believe to
adopt this or that new technology?”[20]6 Or, to put it somewhat differently,
“What facts about my social world incline me to adopt a new technology?”
So, in the case of LLMs, we might say that the existing soulless and
bureaucratic context of much of our writing—the filling out of forms,
thoughtless school exercises, endless email—constitutes a plausibility
structure for LLMs. Under such conditions, of course, it becomes perfectly
reasonable to adopt a new technology that promised to relieve us of such tasks.
I’m less interested in these cases, however, than I am in the use of LLMs to
accomplish what, for the lack of a better word, we might call more personal
tasks. Consider, for instance, the anecdote recently shared by
[21]Matthew B. Crawford
in an [22]essay for the Hedgehog Review, which explores some of the same
terrain I’m traversing here. Crawford tells of a recent conversation with a
father who told him about how he had used Chat GPT to craft a toast for his
daughter’s wedding. It’s the use of LLMs for this kind of writing that might be
worth considering a bit more deeply, especially because it's abundantly clear
that tech companies want us to use their products in this way.[23]7
Here too, of course, a relatively straightforward consideration presents
itself—writing is hard. Many people find it intimidating, perhaps especially
when you’ll be expressing yourself in public as in the case of a wedding toast.
As Walter Ong, among others has noted, writing is not natural. While the use of
language is natural to the human animal, the emergence of writing was not,
strictly speaking, necessary. So if writing does not come easily, why not take
up a tool that promises to do it for us, particularly in cases that call for
something more personal than inconsequential boilerplate? Part of the response
to that question involves showing what might be at stake, which I attempt to do
in the next two or three paragraphs. But then I’ll also come back to why I
started with Plato and conclude by considering whether there is not also a case
of conditioned dependence stemming from our readiness to externalize our
memory.
So let’s start with the observation that in these cases LLMs are more than a
tool for writing, narrowly understood, because the act of writing is also the
more basic act of articulation.[24]8 When we turn to an LLM to write for us, we
are also inviting it to undertake the more fundamental task of articulation,
and this is no small thing. Indeed, given the centrality of language to the
human condition, we should wonder about the degree to which the outsourcing of
the labor of articulation is the outsourcing of a fundamentally human activity.
To see this more clearly, consider what is entailed in the labor of
articulation, and it often is, quite literally, a laborious activity. It is not
simply the case that articulating ourselves in language is a matter of matching
a set of words to a set of internal pre-existing feelings or inchoate
impressions, as if the work of articulation left untouched and unchanged what
it was we sought to articulate. Rather, the labor of articulation itself shapes
what we think and feel. Articulation is not dictation, articulation constitutes
our perception of the world.[25]9 To search for a word is not merely to search
for a label, the search is interwoven with the very capacity to perceive and
understand the thing, idea, or feeling. It is, in fact, generative of thought
and feeling, and, ultimately, of who we understand ourselves to be. To
articulate is also to interpret, thus it also constitutes the experience of
meaning. The labor of articulation binds us to our experience and in
relationship with others. The labor of articulation always presupposes the
other, and is thus an ethical act that relies on candor, honesty, and
attention. And while it is, in part, for the sake of the other that I set out
to articulate myself, it is in this way that I also come into focus for myself.
If I might be forgiven the analogy, it is through the labor of articulation
that the self is birthed.
In the essay I mentioned above, Crawford cited remarks from the philosopher
Talbot Brewer in an unpublished paper about what he termed “degenerative AI.”
As it happens, I’ve also had occasion to hear some unpublished remarks by
Brewer through a friend who attended a recent conference. One phrase in
particular caught my attention. As I understood it, Brewer argued that
dependence on LLMs took the self “out of play.” This is an evocative way of
getting at the matter. In the labor of articulation, we put ourselves in play,
with all the risks, rewards, burdens, challenges, and consolations that
entails. To outsource the labor of articulation is to sideline ourselves.
So much then for what is at stake in the outsourcing of the labor of
articulation. It was an important digression establishing the stakes, but now
let’s come back to the main point. When we externalized our memory in the form
of writing, we began building the databases upon which LLMs rely. But we also,
as Plato argued, began emptying ourselves of the resources upon which the labor
of articulation works. Plato was ultimately ahead of his time. It took a good
long while for writing to be widely adopted. The residue of oral culture,
including its valorization of memory, lingered for millennia. But digital
technologies brought us across a critical threshold. The scale and ubiquity of
digital databases, the vaunted access they provide to information, the promise
of having all human knowledge at our fingertips have made it increasingly
likely that people will “rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance
by external signs instead of by their own internal resources.”
My contention, then, is that when we are confronted with the opportunity to
outsource the labor of articulation, we will find that possibility more
tempting to the degree that we experience a sense of incompetency and
inadequacy, a sense which may have many sources, not least among which is the
failure to stock our mind, heart, and imagination. There was, after all, a
reason why memory was one of the five canons of classical rhetoric.[26]10 It
was not just a matter of committing to memory what you had planned to say. It
was also a matter of having internal resources to draw on in order to say
anything at all. Of course, very few of us have any reason to see ourselves as
rhetoricians, except that there may simply be something deeply humane and
satisfying about the ability to express oneself well.[27]11
And this is to say nothing of how we might distinguish knowledge from the mere
aggregation of disparate, readily accessible facts. Others may distinguish the
two differently, but I think of knowledge as something more personal, something
that emerges within us as we take in the world from our own unique perspective
but also as members of particular communities. In doing so, we construct
relationships among the things we come to know (and not merely know about),
these relationships are shaped by our history and our desires. And this
knowledge, carried within, shapes our ongoing encounters with the world,
building a cascading experience of “understanding in light of,” a form of
poetic knowledge. But this seems hardly possible if we too readily dismiss the
need to curate our memory as carefully as we might curate our feeds.
I am reminded, too, of something the avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman
observed many years ago[28]12:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal)
was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly
educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside
themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire
heritage of the West. But today, I see within us all (myself included) the
replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under
the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly
available.” A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner
repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake
people”—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of
information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
My modest suggestion in conclusion is this: perhaps we do well to re-evaluate
how we think about memory and what I have called the labor of articulation.
New technologies challenge us. If we are up to the challenge, they give us the
opportunity to reconsider things we have taken for granted. They invite us to
rethink and recalibrate our assumptions about what it means to be human,
perhaps even to reclaim some goods we had lost sight of along the way. LLMs
confront us with just such a challenge, and in the vital realm of language no
less. If we have assented, in large measure, to the promise of outsourcing our
memory and now consequently find ourselves tempted to surrender the labor of
articulation. Perhaps the best way to respond to the challenge is to consider
how we might deliberately re-source our minds so that we might take up the
labor of articulation with confidence and enjoy its very human satisfactions
and consolations.
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[42]1
I say that somewhat facetiously. Some might take issue with the claim. Maybe
there’s another earlier text that better fits the bill.
[43]2
Even if one grants that Plato was wrong about writing, this is a non-sequitur.
[44]3
In Postman’s 1993 book, [45]Technopoly.
[46]4
“Criti-hype” is historian Lee Vinsel’s [47]term for criticism of technology
that takes the hype for granted and thus appears as an equally unhelpful
inversion of the tech boosterism.
[48]5
To the best of my knowledge, the term was coined by the late sociologist Peter
Berger.
[49]6
The relationship can be dialectical. I may adopt certain technologies and find
that their use becomes the plausibility structure for the formation of tacit
beliefs. In using the tool, I find that I come to believe something about the
world or about the self that I would not have otherwise. So it is not simply a
matter of what I had to believe to justify my use of a technology, it’s also a
question of what I come to believe because of my use of the technology (in
order to justify my use, for example).
[50]7
Consider the Google Gemini ad that has run during the Olympics. It features a
father using Gemini to help his daughter write a fan letter to an Olympic
athlete.
[51]Max Read
had a useful discussion of these ads in his latest [52]installment.
[53]8
I want to acknowledge that writing is a distinct use of language, one that is
already informed by a technology, the alphabet. Writing and articulation are
not necessarily co-terminous, and articulation in literate societies is already
influenced by writing.
[54]9
Some will rightly note echoes of Charles Taylor’s work here.
[55]10
Along with invention, arrangement, style, and delivery.
[56]11
St. Augustine, who was classically trained, wrote movingly of memory: “I come
to fields and vast palaces of memory, where are the treasures of innumerable
images of all kinds of objects brought in by sense-perception.”
[57]12
These lines were cited by cited by Nicholas Carr near the end of his 2008 [58]
essay on some of these very themes of this installment.
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[69]
Eric Dane Walker's avatar
[70]Eric Dane Walker
[71]Aug 1
Liked by L. M. Sacasas
I might have more to write later, but I thought I'd share a favorite quote of
mine that resonates with what you say here.
It's from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's 1945 book, Phenomenology of Perception. (I
pull the quote from p. 182 of the 1970 Colin Smith translation published by
Routledge and Kegan Paul.)
"Linguistic expression does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes
it."
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[74]2 replies by L. M. Sacasas and others
[75]
Heather Blankenship's avatar
[76]Heather Blankenship
[77]Aug 1
It breaks my heart to think of a father utilizing Chat GPT to create a toast
for his daughter’s wedding. I can understand wanting to present yourself in a
“polished” way for such a public offering, but it does feel as if the entire
point of a father personally addressing his daughter (& loved ones in
attendance) is being missed. Your “taking self out of play” is spot on. I’m a
psychotherapist and was recently talking to my close friend and her husband
about challenges they’re having with their adult daughter and made some
suggestions as to ways they could begin a dialogue with her. The husband (who
is the biological dad) wanted me to write down what I had said so he could use
my wording in a letter to her. I declined, and instead wrote out general
suggestions on how to approach the situation. (For example: Let her know in no
uncertain terms your love for her and that you’re hoping to cultivate harmony
in the relationship. Ask her for any unresolved questions or concerns she has
from the past that she still harbors anger or confusion about. Be willing to
apologize and acknowledge your own shortcomings. Let her know her well being
was always the goal of decisions that were made, even when the results ended up
damaging the relationships. Etc.) I also strongly encouraged him to hand write
the letter and in cursive if possible. I know it’s easier and speedier for most
people to use a keyboard, but is ease and speed always preferable? I have
discovered in my own life (and working with clients throughout the years) that
handwritten letters/ journals/correspondence & maybe even wedding toasts) are
more meaningful for the creator and the recipient. When writing things out
(especially in cursive) the feeling you are hoping to convey is accessed easier
AND if you start to write words that don’t adequately reflect what you’re
attempting to articulate, you will be aware of it immediately. Additionally,
most recipients of handwritten letters recognize the time, care and perhaps
even struggles it took to create. I’m 60 years old, so probably “old school”
compared to many, but even my 12 & 10 year old niece and nephew tell me how
much they cherish the handwritten letters and cards I have given them over the
years. I know it’s a bit different from the father of the bride wanting to make
a good impression in a public setting, but I still believe things that come
from the head and heart without mediated by a machine, are priceless, even in
their “imperfections.” If the father had written out his toast himself, he
could present it to his daughter as a keepsake; something he’s unlikely to do
if he used Chat GPT. Thank you as always for your thought provoking sharings… I
think you and I agree that technologies can be very useful, but there is always
a gain AND a loss in adopting them… perhaps humans will develop wisdom and know
when the spoken word is best, when handwritten words are called for, when a
human and keyboard is ideal, and when Chat GPT is optimum. Blessings to you and
all your readers!
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[9] https://substack.com/@theconvivialsociety
[10] https://substack.com/@theconvivialsociety
[12] https://substack.com/home/post/p-146032272?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
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[21] https://open.substack.com/users/21075857-matthew-b-crawford?utm_source=mentions
[22] https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/ai-as-self-erasure
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[45] https://bookshop.org/p/books/technopoly-the-surrender-of-culture-to-technology-neil-postman/6718677?aid=101333&ean=9780679745402&listref=media-ecology&
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[52] https://maxread.substack.com/p/why-is-bitcoin-even-a-campaign-issue?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=392873&post_id=147164386&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=12sxx&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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[60] https://substack.com/home/post/p-146032272?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
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[97] https://substack.com/privacy
[98] https://substack.com/tos
[99] https://substack.com/ccpa#personal-data-collected
[100] https://substack.com/signup?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=footer
[101] https://substack.com/app/app-store-redirect?utm_campaign=app-marketing&utm_content=web-footer-button
[102] https://substack.com/
[104] https://enable-javascript.com/