At the end of 2017 I wrote a post in which I reflected back on my intellectual life, Reflections on entering my eighth decade and why it portends to be the most productive one of my life. That remains a decent overview of what I’ve been up to in the last 50+ years, though it is hardly complete. It gives little sense of my interest in literature beyond “Kubla Khan,” my work on ring-composition, my thinking about form and computation, my commentary on digital humanities. Nor does it say much about my work on cognitive science, the brain, or cultural evolution. And then there’s all the descriptive work I’ve done on films. And music!
So, yeah, I guess it’s not such a good overview. I have no intention to fill in those gaps in this post. But it does give a sense that I’ve been doing other things than thinking and writing, about my involvement in my local community. In that sense, it’s good.
As for what’s next, let’s set that aside for a moment. Every so often I’ve written about my posting habits, how they vary wildly during the course of the year. My most recent such post was in November of 2018, A Mind Over the Long Haul: My Posting Patterns. Let’s see where that stands. The chart below shows my posting habits from the beginning of 2017 through the end of 2022. Each column indicates the number of posts for a single month.
The up and down cycling of my posting productivity is clearly visible. Notice that the slump came in the late Winter and early Spring in 2017, a bit earlier for 2018, and about the same in 2019. Notice that there’s a steep drop at the beginning of 2020, then a rise in summer and into the Fall, with a slump coming in November and continuing through March of 2021, when things move back up, only to drop back down in October and continuing through March of 2022.
So, in 2020, we have slump in November. In 2021 the slump moves to October. Guess when it hits in 2022? That’s right, September. That’s not good. But then we have a major – and unexpected rebound – in December. I know what that’s about; that’s when I started playing with and blogging about ChatGPT. I expect that to continue in this year.
What happened in the Summer of 2020 that brought me back to life? That’s when GPT-3 hit, in June or perhaps July I believe. On August 5, 2020 I issued my working paper, GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons, which I have since revised several times. I don’t recall off-hand what got me revved up in April of 2021, perhaps nothing in particular. But I know what got me revved in 2022. Jerry Seinfeld, Analyze This! AI meets Jerry Seinfeld, and then Grace Lindsey published Models of the Mind, which I read and wrote about, To Model the Mind: Speculative Engineering as Philosophy. Then came a dialog on “Kubla Khan” in May, Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in “Kubla Khan.” That kept things moving on “Kubla Khan,” which as you my recall, is where all this started back at Johns Hopkins in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
And then the big one came in later in May, Relational Nets Over Attractors, A Primer: Part 1, Design for a Mind, which I have subsequently revised. That brought together the work on cognitive networks I had done with David Hays in the 1970s, the work we did on the brain in the 1980s, my conversations about neurodynamics with Walter Freeman in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and my reading of Peter Gärdenfors on the geometry of meaning. It’s all there in one wonderful crazy paper, a major synthesis, albeit a very speculative one. July saw the discussion of Yann LeCun’s position paper, A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence, which I found interesting and discussed over the next couple of weeks.
But, for reasons I don’t understand, the excitement had worn off by September. Come to think of it, I do see why things went downhill. I saw new possibilities of linking my work with what others were doing, but was unable to actualize any of them. I remained in a slump until ChatGPT came out at the very end of November. I signed up for an account and started playing with it.
That’s taken a considerable amount of my time over the last month. I’ve written many blog posts, most with long transcripts of my interaction with ChatGPT. I’ve been working on a paper for the last week and a half – current title, Discursive Competence in ChatGPT, Part 1: Talking with Dragons – and expect to issue it within a week.
Once again I see the possibility of linking my work to the work of others. I do think there is an audience within the technical community for the work I’m doing with ChatGPT. I think I can build on it. But I don’t want to say anything about that here and now. I suppose I don’t want to jinx things by talking in public. Bit mostly I want to finish with this post and get on with the work.
‘Till later.
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