My old friend Charles was one of the first people to build something that passed the Turing Test. Time is almost up for that benchmark, but he did so long before the hockey stick of generators. While he was still a Ramblin’ Wreck, and many of his students were heading off to Google, he stopped by here in LA with his family.
I asked him if anyone has done some of the things I have mentioned in the Logos Project, specifically I asked him about WWID. He said no, it’s a novel idea. Well, aside from it being my idea, that helped me solidify confidence in my own fraction of genius. What is WWID, you ask? I’m glad you did.
What Would I Do
WWID is my attempt to move people off the political X and towards a slightly more disciplined aspect of philosophical thought. Over the past several years, I have heard lots of smart people argue that we are losing Western Civilization. I think they’re wrong because I believe the distance between Western Civ and the rest is more significant than they all believe. Thus they are just having political fights within the context of the West, which is how it should be. Nobody is getting rid of Church or State, we’re just not sure what fraction of power belongs to whom. Interestingly enough we’re fighting all of that within the State, so it boils down to politics. Unfortunately it’s mostly populist identity politics which is a degenerate form, but still well within the proper domain of Western philosophy. But what about Western philosophy itself?
WWID is a program I’m building that will put together an interactive set of questions that allow people to align themselves with those philosophies that they actually believe, if not discipline themselves for. It aims to ask some basic questions about metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy so people can align themselves - or at the very least have a deeper understanding of the sources of the concepts they hold dear.
Over the past week, I’ve taken a stride forward on this project and I’m very pleased with the variety of questions I’ve come up with in collaboration with my interactive friend Chadt. I’m not going to say I’ve become a prompting genius but I’m getting the right gist of what I’m aiming for. Here’s an example from aesthetics.
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Q5-B: Is originality essential to great art, or can repetition be creative?
“Must great art be original, or can something be great even if it repeats or borrows?”
| “Originality is essential” → Romanticism, Tolstoy, Nietzsche
| “Repetition and remix can be profound” → Warhol, postmodernists, hip-hop aesthetics
| “Art emerges from tradition and variation” → Confucius, Islamic ornamentation, oral cultures.
If you’ve ever wondered if you think like Plato or Derrida, this is the app for you. Hopefully it will be a lot more subtle than that, and I expect it will. Who knows, I could be the next 23&Me of things you actually have control over, your values and beliefs.
Another old friend of mine is a professor of Philosophy here in LA County. I’m going to get together with him this weekend to see what he thinks about WWID and maybe get some input from him. If things work out, I can have a product this year. I can think of a lot of extensions from this and I want to invert the idea of ‘the product is you’ such that the beneficiary of understanding you is you.