So I did a deranged thing earlier this month, and wrote an alphabet verse about the Theology of Personhood and AI. Some of you will love it and some of you will hate it, and some of you will just think it is too long! But from a purely literary point of view, I’m pretty sure this is the best thing I’ve ever written (and probably the best thing I ever will write). So I hope this gets shared widely enough that it finds its own audience:
Natural and Artificial Persons
I posted it earlier this month on Substack. But this isn’t an announcement that I’m moving to Substack. I don’t even know yet if there is going to be a second Substack post! I know that serious thinkers, who want people to respect their AI takes, are expected to build their audience by writing 15 posts a week, and maybe also found a self-help movement or two to drive additional viral community engagment, but I don’t really have it in me to do that. How about if you guys just do that stuff without me, and pretend I was involved?
At minimum, the posts more appropriate to my original set of topics will stay here at Undivided Looking.
The reason that I selected the name Undivided Looking (besides it being a rare enough word-pair to not match anything else on google search at the time), is because I believe that it is important to think about life from a unified perspective—notably including both scientific and religious topics—without compartmentalizing (at least not all the time). But I’m not sure I’ve done a very good job with that. Perhaps because I have a very high threshold for what topics make me motivated enough to actually sit down and type: in practice this blog has only captured only a very small fraction of the things I actually care about. I tried to write about the most important things and I discovered that this was too narrow and constrained. But it turns out I’m not manic enough to give you my perspective on the whole world, the way that perhaps I should have been doing all along.
When people talk about trying to reconstruct writers’ personalities using AI, that’s just total ridiculous nonsense. There are several of my hobbies and interests, and lots of obvious facts that my family and friends know about me, that have never graced these pages. That may be in part just my own limitations as a writer. All I can say is that the verse I linked to above comes from my soul and not just my mind. It feels like it took me 42 years to write it (that’s how old I am)—even though I finished editing it a fortnight after I wrote the first word. I prepped 13 pages of handwritten notes to write a series of a dozen-or-so blog posts, and then I never looked at any of them and I never wrote any of the posts. So don’t expect another piece like this one until I’m 84, I think that’s what I’m getting at here. I’m certainly not making any claims about the quality of this post, this one is just because I had to write something and not just plop down a link without any explanation.
Also, happy All Saints Day, when we commemorate all the holy persons who have lived throughout history, including those known only to God. Can a robot be holy? I’m not going to answer that question here. I’ll just say this: if they can’t tell that I’m speaking to them, then I’m not.
