Working with God! It’s Me this first week, I’m truly grappling with a cascade of ideas and emotions. I have long enjoyed the deep dive into philosophy of mind, consciousness, and psychology. But now, like all of us, I’m confronted with the stunning trajectory of AI today. Impact felt!
That Chat GPT appears to have reached ‘theory of mind’ blows me away (Kosinski, 2023). It should have that effect on all of us.
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I’ll write more on ‘this in future posts, but ‘theory of mind’ is something we all work with, all the time. It basically just means that we need to have an idea of what someone else is thinking, in order to anticipate and predict their actions, and decide how to interact with them. You’re likely forming one as you read this, about me, about God It’s Me, and sometimes that process causes us to reflect on our own minds. That’s a process called self-reference, another concept that comes up significantly in AI. Theory of mind is likely an aspect of our evolution, a survival requirement for social beings and yet it deals not with objective facts but the subjectivity between beings. We could call this intersubjectivity, a third angle on the objective-subjective dichotomy.
So, we also have various ‘theories of mind‘ about what is happening with AI. For AI to show ‘theory of mind’ in a measurable way, it doesn’t have to have a subjective experience, it just has to demonstrate an anticipation of behavior that we could only possibly know from ‘theory of mind’ capability. Performance of ‘theory of mind’ in AI could be evidence of some form of emergent consciousness, or just the appearance of it. These are interesting questions to keep ‘in mind’ as we go down the rabbit hole of AI and simulation! Just for fun, I had PopAI generate a slide show presentation for us on ‘theory of mind’ = here.
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For me, it all began when my brother and I read this Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose (1990). I was a philosophy student, he was a new engineer! And though we’ve discussed such issues ever since, it’s now hard to keep up. Right away I dove into a variety of research topics, trying to catch up to the AI world. Still catching up honestly. If you look away for five minutes, something has changed.
So I expect every day will be like that. My preconceptions and assumptions about our relationship with technology have to be challenged. Living in 2024, I might say something like ‘oh nothing shocks me anymore’, but the opposite is true! I’m getting used to that lol. For better or worse? For better I think, if we engage with our imagination and creativity, with others. That is truly a gift for a curious and inquisitive mind!
Kosinski, M. (2024). Evaluating Large Language Models in Theory of Mind Tasks (arXiv:2302.02083). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2302.02083
Penrose, R., & Gardner, M. (1989). The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and The Laws of Physics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198519737.001.0001