Is this sort of thing reproducible? I must confess I'm sceptical of the idea that this was entirely produced by a machine.
Is that a joke at the end? I'm loosing perspective.
It reminded me of child super-prodigies that get lost in thoughts about death: https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/leaders/the-curse-of-be...
There's a lot of religions with varying notions of the divine, but the divine as personified into a single q-like entity seems to be a pretty common conception, and not just in reddit. For that matter, if whichever deity you believe in is good, all powerful and all knowing, why is there still evil & pain in the world, is probably one of the most common criticisms of religion, and not just on reddit. And that seems to be roughly the criticism gpt-3 is making.
However, at least ancedotally, its not usually the view that i usually hear religious people espouse. Typically religious people i have met believe in some sort of sacred text with rules of behaviour that was at the very least divinely inspired. They believe that a divine power will intercede on their behalf based on prayer (or other offerings), and so on. All these things imply a deity that has independent will, can be influenced, has opinions on moral questions, etc. The theists i have met do not believe in some abstract first cause deity. They believe in a deity that is very much a being, a maximal one, albeit perhaps very far removed from earthly existence.
So who is to say the "reddit" conception of a "being among beings" is wrong or a category error. If we have to chose a specific conception, wouldn't the most popular conception (regardless of what any particular group's doctrine might say) be the right one to choose? And if we dont have to pick a specific conception, aren't any and all conceptions equally right?
So far you've claimed that gpt is "wrong" in its religious conception (comparing it to "reddit" in a condescending way). You presented an alternate view on what religion is. You missed the step where you show your view is more right than GPT's is, in context.
Which to be fair is a really hard step to show. If you know somebody's particular religious beliefs you can appeal to doctrine, but we dont know which denomination/doctrine for the gpt-3 story.
I don't think we can show that gpt-3 or your category mistake version is right based on the given information. Or even that one is slightly more right. But that is a different question from is the gpt-3 story "wrong". I'm not positing that "being among beings" is correct, only that there isn't any argument to conclude its any more wrong than any other conception, especially when we don't know the religious beliefs of the protaganist in the story, and thus its wrong to conclude he is "wrong" (being wrong is not the opposite of being right)
Thought experiment: An array of GPT-3 agents trained on decade or century intervals of philosophical text/literature would have different ‘views’. Assuming the existence of mistakes, the post-enlightenment mistake is to assume the correct output is the latest GTP-3 agent.
https://amp.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hmu5lm/fict...
As well as multiple examples given by gwern.
And I'm starting to wonder how many news articles are just basically GPT-3. Or really, how many people are earning good money doing less work than GTP-3 could do in an instant.