I'm reading Edmund Husserl's book The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness right now and he is a turgid writer--one suspects that all phenomenologists have to attend a special class in inspissated prose. In any case, noticing that the Brave browser now has an AI component I decided to put it to the test so I asked:
Summarize Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time
The reply:
Edmund Husserl, a prominent philosopher, described phenomenology of time as a study of the structures of experience and consciousness. He believed that time is experienced as a continuous flow, which he called "internal time-consciousness." It consists of three aspects: retention (past), impression (present), and protection (future). This model emphasizes the subjective, lived experience of time, rather than objective, physical time.
Which I was initially very impressed by. But then I noticed:
Actually, isn't anticipation of future events called "protention"?
It answered:
Yes, you are correct. I apologize for the mistake. The term "protection" in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time refers to the anticipation or pre-awareness of future events. It's a form of intentionality that prepares us for what is about to happen. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
So I said:
But you said "protection" again?
The reply:
I apologize for the oversight. Yes, I mistakenly used the term "protection" again. The correct term is indeed "protention," which refers to the anticipation or pre-awareness of future events in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time. Thank you for your patience and for helping me improve my response.
So here is what I think: AI seems to temptingly facilitate the task of summarizing the thoughts of an obscure philosopher, but it is not actual knowledge because the fact that it is a mechanical sifting of acres of prose floating around on the internet means that both the source of the information and the methodology of how it is collected are unknown or at least obscure. So it isn't genuine knowledge because it is both unreliable and possibly unjustified.
I'm going to put up my review of the Husserl book alongside a fascinating new book on the rap producer J Dilla titled Dilla Time because, oddly, they often are talking about the same thing: how we perceive time.
3 comments:
Dilla Time is one of the best musicological, biographical and historical studies I have read in quite a while and I don't just say that because the author is a friend of mine.
I thought you might be friends! You both teach at NYU? I am very impressed with the book so far--it is going to fill in some huge gaps in my knowledge of popular music. And it is good on the historical context as well.
Yes these helpful AI bots are everywhere until you ask them a specific question that is not on their list of correct phrases. Then they will helpfully tell you to keep rephrasing your question or not so helpfully choose from one of their 3 options rather than what you want. As I noted before they basically rely on brute force processing of thousands of texts and rely on frequency percentages of terms and position within the text and paragraph. They are like a really dumb version of College Summary Notes books.
Post a Comment