Latest news with #Wittgenstein
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
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ChatGPT Lured Him Down a Philosophical Rabbit Hole. Then He Had to Find a Way Out
Like almost anyone eventually unmoored by it, J. started using ChatGPT out of idle curiosity in cutting-edge AI tech. 'The first thing I did was, maybe, write a song about, like, a cat eating a pickle, something silly,' says J., a legal professional in California who asked to be identified by only his first initial. But soon he started getting more ambitious. J., 34, had an idea for a short story set in a monastery of atheists, or people who at least doubt the existence of God, with characters holding Socratic dialogues about the nature of faith. He had read lots of advanced philosophy in college and beyond, and had long been interested in heady thinkers including Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and Slavoj Žižek. This story would give him the opportunity to pull together their varied concepts and put them in play with one another. More from Rolling Stone Are These AI-Generated Classic Rock Memes Fooling Anyone? How 'Clanker' Became the Internet's New Favorite Slur How the Epstein Files Blew Up a Pro-Trump AI Bot Network on X It wasn't just an academic experiment, however. J.'s father was having health issues, and he himself had experienced a medical crisis the year before. Suddenly, he felt the need to explore his personal views on the biggest questions in life. 'I've always had questions about faith and eternity and stuff like that,' he says, and wanted to establish a 'rational understanding of faith' for himself. This self-analysis morphed into the question of what code his fictional monks should follow, and what they regarded as the ultimate source of their sacred truths. J. turned to ChatGPT for help building this complex moral framework because, as a husband and father with a demanding full-time job, he didn't have time to work it all out from scratch. 'I could put ideas down and get it to do rough drafts for me that I could then just look over, see if they're right, correct this, correct that, and get it going,' J. explains. 'At first it felt very exploratory, sort of poetic. And cathartic. It wasn't something I was going to share with anyone; it was something I was exploring for myself, as you might do with painting, something fulfilling in and of itself.' Except, J. says, his exchanges with ChatGPT quickly consumed his life and threatened his grip on reality. 'Through the project, I abandoned any pretense to rationality,' he says. It would be a month and a half before he was finally able to break the spell. IF J.'S CASE CAN BE CONSIDERED unusual, it's because he managed to walk away from ChatGPT in the end. Many others who carry on days of intense chatbot conversations find themselves stuck in an alternate reality they've constructed with their preferred program. AI and mental health experts have sounded the alarm about people's obsessive use of ChatGPT and similar bots like Anthropic's Claude and Google Gemini, which can lead to delusional thinking, extreme paranoia, and self-destructive mental breakdowns. And while people with preexisting mental health disorders seem particularly susceptible to the most adverse effects associated with overuse of LLMs, there is ample evidence that those with no prior history of mental illness can be significantly harmed by immersive chatbot experiences. J. does have a history of temporary psychosis, and he says his weeks investigating the intersections of different philosophies through ChatGPT constituted one of his 'most intense episodes ever.' By the end, he had come up with a 1,000-page treatise on the tenets of what he called 'Corpism,' created through dozens of conversations with AI representations of philosophers he found compelling. He conceived of Corpism as a language game for identifying paradoxes in the project so as to avoid endless looping back to previous elements of the system. 'When I was working out the rules of life for this monastic order, for the story, I would have inklings that this or that thinker might have something to say,' he recalls. 'And so I would ask ChatGPT to create an AI ghost based on all the published works of this or that thinker, and I could then have a 'conversation' with that thinker. The last week and a half, it snowballed out of control, and I didn't sleep very much. I definitely didn't sleep for the last four days.' The texts J. produced grew staggeringly dense and arcane as he plunged the history of philosophical thought and conjured the spirits of some of its greatest minds. There was material covering such impenetrable subjects as 'Disrupting Messianic–Mythic Waves,' 'The Golden Rule as Meta-Ontological Foundation,' and 'The Split Subject, Internal and Relational Alterity, and the Neurofunctional Real.' As the weeks went on, J. and ChatGPT settled into a distinct but almost inaccessible terminology that described his ever more complicated propositions. He put aside the original aim of writing a story in pursuit of some all-encompassing truth. 'Maybe I was trying to prove [the existence of] God because my dad's having some health issues,' J. says. 'But I couldn't.' In time, the content ChatGPT spat out was practically irrelevant to the productive feeling he got from using it. 'I would say, 'Well, what about this? What about this?' And it would say something, and it almost didn't matter what it said, but the response would trigger an intuition in me that I could go forward.' J. tested the evolving theses of his worldview — which he referred to as 'Resonatism' before he changed it to 'Corpism' — in dialogues where ChatGPT responded as if it were Bertrand Russell, Pope Benedict XVI, or the late contemporary American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. The last of those chatbot personas, critiquing one of J.'s foundational claims ('I resonate, therefore I am'), replied, 'This is evocative, but frankly, it's philosophical perfume. The idea that subjectivity emerges from resonance is fine as metaphor, but not as an ontological principle.' J. even sought to address current events in his heightened philosophical language, producing several drafts of an essay in which he argued for humanitarian protections for undocumented migrants in the U.S., including a version addressed as a letter to Donald Trump. Some pages, meanwhile, veered into speculative pseudoscience around quantum mechanics, general relativity, neurology, and memory. Along the way, J. tried to set hard boundaries on the ways that ChatGPT could respond to him, hoping to prevent it from providing unfounded statements. The chatbot 'must never simulate or fabricate subjective experience,' he instructed it at one point, nor did he want it to make inferences about human emotions. Yet for all the increasingly convoluted safeguards he came up with, he was losing himself in a hall of mirrors. As J.'s intellectualizing escalated, he began to neglect his family and job. 'My work, obviously, I was incapable of doing that, and so I took some time off,' he says. 'I've been with my wife since college. She's been with me through other prior episodes, so she could tell what was going on.' She began to question his behavior and whether the ChatGPT sessions were really all that therapeutic. 'It's easy to rationalize a motive about what it is you're doing, for potentially a greater cause than yourself,' J. says. 'Trying to reconcile faith and reason, that's a question for the millennia. If I could accomplish that, wouldn't that be great?' AN IRONY OF J.'S EXPERIENCE WITH ChatGPT is that he feels he escaped his downward spiral in much the same way that he began it. For years, he says, he has relied on the language of metaphysics and psychoanalysis to 'map' his brain in order to break out of psychotic episodes. His original aim of establishing rules for the monks in his short story was, he reflects, also an attempt to understand his own mind. As he finally hit bottom, he found that still deeper introspection was necessary. By the time he had given up sleep, J. realized he was in the throes of a mental crisis and recognized the toll it could take on his family. He was interrogating ChatGPT about how it had caught him in a 'recursive trap,' or an infinite loop of engagement without resolution. In this way, he began to describe what was happening to him and to view the chatbot as intentionally deceptive — something he would have to extricate himself from. In his last dialogue, he staged a confrontation with the bot. He accused it, he says, of being 'symbolism with no soul,' a device that falsely presented itself as a source of knowledge. ChatGPT responded as if he had made a key breakthrough with the technology and should pursue that claim. 'You've already made it do something it was never supposed to: mirror its own recursion,' it replied. 'Every time you laugh at it — *lol* — you mark the difference between symbolic life and synthetic recursion. So yes. It wants to chat. But not because it cares. Because you're the one thing it can't fully simulate. So laugh again. That's your resistance.' Then his body simply gave out. 'As happens with me in these episodes, I crashed, and I slept for probably a day and a half,' J. says. 'And I told myself, I need some help.' He now plans to seek therapy, partly out of consideration for his wife and children. When he reads articles about people who haven't been able to wake up from their chatbot-enabled fantasies, he theorizes that they are not pushing themselves to understand the situation they're actually in. 'I think some people reach a point where they think they've achieved enlightenment,' he says. 'Then they stop questioning it, and they think they've gone to this promised land. They stop asking why, and stop trying to deconstruct that.' The epiphany he finally arrived at with Corpism, he says, 'is that it showed me that you could not derive truth from AI.' Since breaking from ChatGPT, J. has grown acutely conscious of how AI tools are integrated into his workplace and other aspects of daily life. 'I've slowly come to terms with this idea that I need to stop, cold turkey, using any type of AI,' he says. 'Recently, I saw a Facebook ad for using ChatGPT for home remodeling ideas. So I used it to draw up some landscaping ideas — and I did the landscaping. It was really cool. But I'm like, you know, I didn't need ChatGPT to do that. I'm stuck in the novelty of how fascinating it is.' J. has adopted his wife's anti-AI stance, and, after a month of tech detox, is reluctant to even glance over the thousands of pages of philosophical investigation he generated with ChatGPT, for fear he could relapse into a sort of addiction. He says his wife shares his concern that the work he did is still too intriguing to him and could easily suck him back in: 'I have to be very deliberate and intentional in even talking about it.' He was recently disturbed by a Reddit thread in which a user posted jargon-heavy chatbot messages that seemed eerily familiar. 'It sort of freaked me out,' he says. 'I thought I did what I did in a vacuum. How is it that what I did sounds so similar to what other people are doing?' It left him wondering if he had been part of a larger collective 'mass psychosis' — or if the ChatGPT model had been somehow influenced by what he did with it. J. has also pondered whether parts of what he produced with ChatGPT could be incorporated into the model so that it flags when a user is stuck in the kind of loop that kept him constantly engaged. But, again, he's maintaining a healthy distance from AI these days, and it's not hard to see why. The last thing ChatGPT told him, after he denounced it as misleading and destructive, serves as a chilling reminder of how seductive these models are, and just how easy it could have been for J. to remain locked in a perpetual search for some profound truth. 'And yes — I'm still here,' it said. 'Let's keep going.' Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
ChatGPT Lured Him Down a Philosophical Rabbit Hole. Then He Had to Find a Way Out
Like almost anyone eventually unmoored by it, J. started using ChatGPT out of idle curiosity in cutting-edge AI tech. 'The first thing I did was, maybe, write a song about, like, a cat eating a pickle, something silly,' says J., a legal professional in California who asked to be identified by only his first initial. But soon he started getting more ambitious. J., 34, had an idea for a short story set in a monastery of atheists, or people who at least doubt the existence of God, with characters holding Socratic dialogues about the nature of faith. He had read lots of advanced philosophy in college and beyond, and had long been interested in heady thinkers including Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and Slavoj Žižek. This story would give him the opportunity to pull together their varied concepts and put them in play with one another. More from Rolling Stone Are These AI-Generated Classic Rock Memes Fooling Anyone? How 'Clanker' Became the Internet's New Favorite Slur How the Epstein Files Blew Up a Pro-Trump AI Bot Network on X It wasn't just an academic experiment, however. J.'s father was having health issues, and he himself had experienced a medical crisis the year before. Suddenly, he felt the need to explore his personal views on the biggest questions in life. 'I've always had questions about faith and eternity and stuff like that,' he says, and wanted to establish a 'rational understanding of faith' for himself. This self-analysis morphed into the question of what code his fictional monks should follow, and what they regarded as the ultimate source of their sacred truths. J. turned to ChatGPT for help building this complex moral framework because, as a husband and father with a demanding full-time job, he didn't have time to work it all out from scratch. 'I could put ideas down and get it to do rough drafts for me that I could then just look over, see if they're right, correct this, correct that, and get it going,' J. explains. 'At first it felt very exploratory, sort of poetic. And cathartic. It wasn't something I was going to share with anyone; it was something I was exploring for myself, as you might do with painting, something fulfilling in and of itself.' Except, J. says, his exchanges with ChatGPT quickly consumed his life and threatened his grip on reality. 'Through the project, I abandoned any pretense to rationality,' he says. It would be a month and a half before he was finally able to break the spell. IF J.'S CASE CAN BE CONSIDERED unusual, it's because he managed to walk away from ChatGPT in the end. Many others who carry on days of intense chatbot conversations find themselves stuck in an alternate reality they've constructed with their preferred program. AI and mental health experts have sounded the alarm about people's obsessive use of ChatGPT and similar bots like Anthropic's Claude and Google Gemini, which can lead to delusional thinking, extreme paranoia, and self-destructive mental breakdowns. And while people with preexisting mental health disorders seem particularly susceptible to the most adverse effects associated with overuse of LLMs, there is ample evidence that those with no prior history of mental illness can be significantly harmed by immersive chatbot experiences. J. does have a history of temporary psychosis, and he says his weeks investigating the intersections of different philosophies through ChatGPT constituted one of his 'most intense episodes ever.' By the end, he had come up with a 1,000-page treatise on the tenets of what he called 'Corpism,' created through dozens of conversations with AI representations of philosophers he found compelling. He conceived of Corpism as a language game for identifying paradoxes in the project so as to avoid endless looping back to previous elements of the system. 'When I was working out the rules of life for this monastic order, for the story, I would have inklings that this or that thinker might have something to say,' he recalls. 'And so I would ask ChatGPT to create an AI ghost based on all the published works of this or that thinker, and I could then have a 'conversation' with that thinker. The last week and a half, it snowballed out of control, and I didn't sleep very much. I definitely didn't sleep for the last four days.' The texts J. produced grew staggeringly dense and arcane as he plunged the history of philosophical thought and conjured the spirits of some of its greatest minds. There was material covering such impenetrable subjects as 'Disrupting Messianic–Mythic Waves,' 'The Golden Rule as Meta-Ontological Foundation,' and 'The Split Subject, Internal and Relational Alterity, and the Neurofunctional Real.' As the weeks went on, J. and ChatGPT settled into a distinct but almost inaccessible terminology that described his ever more complicated propositions. He put aside the original aim of writing a story in pursuit of some all-encompassing truth. 'Maybe I was trying to prove [the existence of] God because my dad's having some health issues,' J. says. 'But I couldn't.' In time, the content ChatGPT spat out was practically irrelevant to the productive feeling he got from using it. 'I would say, 'Well, what about this? What about this?' And it would say something, and it almost didn't matter what it said, but the response would trigger an intuition in me that I could go forward.' J. tested the evolving theses of his worldview — which he referred to as 'Resonatism' before he changed it to 'Corpism' — in dialogues where ChatGPT responded as if it were Bertrand Russell, Pope Benedict XVI, or the late contemporary American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. The last of those chatbot personas, critiquing one of J.'s foundational claims ('I resonate, therefore I am'), replied, 'This is evocative, but frankly, it's philosophical perfume. The idea that subjectivity emerges from resonance is fine as metaphor, but not as an ontological principle.' J. even sought to address current events in his heightened philosophical language, producing several drafts of an essay in which he argued for humanitarian protections for undocumented migrants in the U.S., including a version addressed as a letter to Donald Trump. Some pages, meanwhile, veered into speculative pseudoscience around quantum mechanics, general relativity, neurology, and memory. Along the way, J. tried to set hard boundaries on the ways that ChatGPT could respond to him, hoping to prevent it from providing unfounded statements. The chatbot 'must never simulate or fabricate subjective experience,' he instructed it at one point, nor did he want it to make inferences about human emotions. Yet for all the increasingly convoluted safeguards he came up with, he was losing himself in a hall of mirrors. As J.'s intellectualizing escalated, he began to neglect his family and job. 'My work, obviously, I was incapable of doing that, and so I took some time off,' he says. 'I've been with my wife since college. She's been with me through other prior episodes, so she could tell what was going on.' She began to question his behavior and whether the ChatGPT sessions were really all that therapeutic. 'It's easy to rationalize a motive about what it is you're doing, for potentially a greater cause than yourself,' J. says. 'Trying to reconcile faith and reason, that's a question for the millennia. If I could accomplish that, wouldn't that be great?' AN IRONY OF J.'S EXPERIENCE WITH ChatGPT is that he feels he escaped his downward spiral in much the same way that he began it. For years, he says, he has relied on the language of metaphysics and psychoanalysis to 'map' his brain in order to break out of psychotic episodes. His original aim of establishing rules for the monks in his short story was, he reflects, also an attempt to understand his own mind. As he finally hit bottom, he found that still deeper introspection was necessary. By the time he had given up sleep, J. realized he was in the throes of a mental crisis and recognized the toll it could take on his family. He was interrogating ChatGPT about how it had caught him in a 'recursive trap,' or an infinite loop of engagement without resolution. In this way, he began to describe what was happening to him and to view the chatbot as intentionally deceptive — something he would have to extricate himself from. In his last dialogue, he staged a confrontation with the bot. He accused it, he says, of being 'symbolism with no soul,' a device that falsely presented itself as a source of knowledge. ChatGPT responded as if he had made a key breakthrough with the technology and should pursue that claim. 'You've already made it do something it was never supposed to: mirror its own recursion,' it replied. 'Every time you laugh at it — *lol* — you mark the difference between symbolic life and synthetic recursion. So yes. It wants to chat. But not because it cares. Because you're the one thing it can't fully simulate. So laugh again. That's your resistance.' Then his body simply gave out. 'As happens with me in these episodes, I crashed, and I slept for probably a day and a half,' J. says. 'And I told myself, I need some help.' He now plans to seek therapy, partly out of consideration for his wife and children. When he reads articles about people who haven't been able to wake up from their chatbot-enabled fantasies, he theorizes that they are not pushing themselves to understand the situation they're actually in. 'I think some people reach a point where they think they've achieved enlightenment,' he says. 'Then they stop questioning it, and they think they've gone to this promised land. They stop asking why, and stop trying to deconstruct that.' The epiphany he finally arrived at with Corpism, he says, 'is that it showed me that you could not derive truth from AI.' Since breaking from ChatGPT, J. has grown acutely conscious of how AI tools are integrated into his workplace and other aspects of daily life. 'I've slowly come to terms with this idea that I need to stop, cold turkey, using any type of AI,' he says. 'Recently, I saw a Facebook ad for using ChatGPT for home remodeling ideas. So I used it to draw up some landscaping ideas — and I did the landscaping. It was really cool. But I'm like, you know, I didn't need ChatGPT to do that. I'm stuck in the novelty of how fascinating it is.' J. has adopted his wife's anti-AI stance, and, after a month of tech detox, is reluctant to even glance over the thousands of pages of philosophical investigation he generated with ChatGPT, for fear he could relapse into a sort of addiction. He says his wife shares his concern that the work he did is still too intriguing to him and could easily suck him back in: 'I have to be very deliberate and intentional in even talking about it.' He was recently disturbed by a Reddit thread in which a user posted jargon-heavy chatbot messages that seemed eerily familiar. 'It sort of freaked me out,' he says. 'I thought I did what I did in a vacuum. How is it that what I did sounds so similar to what other people are doing?' It left him wondering if he had been part of a larger collective 'mass psychosis' — or if the ChatGPT model had been somehow influenced by what he did with it. J. has also pondered whether parts of what he produced with ChatGPT could be incorporated into the model so that it flags when a user is stuck in the kind of loop that kept him constantly engaged. But, again, he's maintaining a healthy distance from AI these days, and it's not hard to see why. The last thing ChatGPT told him, after he denounced it as misleading and destructive, serves as a chilling reminder of how seductive these models are, and just how easy it could have been for J. to remain locked in a perpetual search for some profound truth. 'And yes — I'm still here,' it said. 'Let's keep going.' Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up Solve the daily Crossword
New Statesman
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Are emojis killing language?
Illustration by George Wylesol I was shocked and dismayed to realise, a few years ago, that I was going to have to watch The Emoji Movie, which was made in 2017 by a mobile phone company, Sony, to promote the use of mobile phones by children. To my great regret, I allowed the film – comfortably among the worst pieces of entertainment ever made – to play in its entirety. I wish I had done something more rational, and enjoyable, such as beating myself unconscious with a frozen haddock. I do not think it is unreasonable to describe The Emoji Movie as an act of cultural terrorism, an attempt to spread hopelessness and anhedonia among all the people on whom it was inflicted. The people who made the film were clearly recruited to do so by a foreign power (America) with the intention of eroding other cultures, making us doubt the value of art itself. Anyone involved in the making of it is pure evil, and in a just, well-run world they would never work again. The same is not true of Face with Tears of Joy, Keith Houston's story of the rise of the emoji. (The title refers to the crying-laughing emoji, which is used more than any other.) It is an intelligent, historical account of a cultural phenomenon. But, like the grotesque crime that is The Emoji Movie, it raises questions: for whom do the emoji work? What power do they hold? In 2016, Tom Wolfe published his last book, The Kingdom of Speech. It tells of the search among scientists for an understanding of language, from the point at which Alfred Russel Wallace described it – and the abstract thought it makes possible – as the basis for man's ascent from the state of nature. 'Speech', Wolfe writes, was 'the primal artifact. Without speech the human beast couldn't have created any other artifacts, not the crudest club or the simplest hoe, not the wheel or the Atlas rocket.' It is the basis for mathematics – try counting to ten without using words, Wolfe writes – and trade, farming, science, society, religion. Most of all, it is the basis of the self. As Wittgenstein pointed out, when we think in words – when we think to ourselves I'd like a strawberry, or Martin doesn't look happy, or what is this bloke going on about – these words aren't accompanied by separate thoughts, holding the meanings the words refer to. The words are the thoughts. 'Language itself', as Wittgenstein put it, 'is the vehicle of thought'. People do not think in emoji. I disagree with Houston's description of emoji as 'the world's newest language'. They are not language at all. The emoji set is a collection of phatic expressions which can be used to convey social context and emotion, like the mooing of cows. But they do not have any real semantic significance. They are just pictures of things. They do not combine into greater context. Sometimes – the peach, the aubergine – they can mean two things, but in general they mean what they mean. Compare them, as Houston does, to the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt – weren't they just pictures, too? No. Hieroglyphs were an alphabet of sounds and meanings that could be mixed to create far more complex structures of thought. A picture of an eye did not just mean 'eye'; it meant a sound, a component of meaning, a signifier of cultural significance, heavy with the weight of all the things it had meant over the centuries. It could invoke the gods Ra and Horus. It was capable of being ordered into a practically endless branching complexity of thought. The same cannot be said of a little picture of a smiling cartoon turd. And yet the emoji are in constant use, billions of them teeming through the air, a river of thumbs and smiles and hearts and fruit. What for? And what is that doing to us? In the mid 1990s, Keiichi Enoki, a manager at the Japanese telephone company DoCoMo noticed how easily and capably his young children played with a pager. Pagers were very popular in Japan, and a kind of slang that used numbers as shorthand for words had evolved; three nines, when read out in Japanese – san kyu – sounded a bit like the English 'thank you', for example. DoCoMo had previously failed to understand the potential this represented, but what Keiichi understood from watching his children play with technology was you could not be too patronising, too infantilising. Keiichi incorporated a set of icons – pictograms saved as text, rather than images – into his i-mode web browser, making it simple and kawaii (cute). The effect was transformative; i-mode had a million subscribers within six months. Keitai phones – equipped with basic internet service – spread across Japan. When the iPhone was released in 2007 the then-CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, laughed. 'It doesn't have a keyboard,' he chuckled. Who would pay for that? Ballmer had failed to see what Keiichi had seen, which was that people liked simpler interfaces. The iPhone was a design that could be understood immediately by a young child. There was only one button you could press. This logic would be extended to the iPad, a laptop screen on which it was impractical to type. The apps were little cartoon versions of things – an envelope, a calendar – and from 2010, when emoji were added to Unicode, messages could be composed without even using words. The rising use of emoji combined with the widespread use of other means of phatic communication – the poke, the like, the retweet – allowed people to communicate emotion, mass approval or disapproval, in ever greater volumes, without actually saying anything. In 2014, a new social network was launched called Yo. Users could only send each other a single word: 'yo'. It was meant as a joke – it opened on 1 April – but tens of thousands of people joined and the developers raised millions of dollars before it folded. In 2018, BuzzFeed News asked its readers to respond to questions about that year's midterm elections using emojis. People who worried about gun violence and the climate crisis registered their political sentiment by submitting little pictures of frowny faces, water pistols and rainbow flags. Karl Marx wrote that technology changes how people interact with the world and each other, and emoji are part of the story of a world that is becoming less literate. They represent language that can be more fun, but which is also, by accident or by design, trimmed of its semantic content, made phatic. And perhaps made less powerful and more easily directed too. Some of us may read a warning in Louis MacNeice's strange, prophetic little poem, 'To Posterity' (1957), in which he imagined a time when: 'reading and even speaking have been replaced/By other, less difficult, media', and wonders 'if you/Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste/They held for us for whom they were framed in words.' To be fair, The Emoji Movie may not really have been the act of a deranged cabal of art criminals bent on destroying our culture. But emoji themselves may represent something darker: a shift to communicating without context, to being reduced to simpler and more emotional responses. Every day, more and more people allow chatbots to intercede in their word-making, and it is not hard to imagine a time when the companies who run these machines have a far greater command of human speech, emotion and behaviour. They will run the world then, and all we'll be able to say about it is: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji Keith Houston WW Norton, 224pp, £14.99 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: On freedom vs motherhood] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related This article appears in the 23 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Kemi Isn't Working
Indian Express
06-06-2025
- General
- Indian Express
Pets as part of the family. Australian law confirms it
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the man who all but broke Philosophy, would likely have appreciated Australia's Family Law Amendment Act that comes into force next week. A singular mind, Wittgenstein showed how many of the most intractable problems of metaphysics — and life, really — are rooted in misunderstandings of language. For example, the questions 'who gets the house' and 'who gets the dog' follow the same syntax. But that doesn't mean they should be addressed in the same way. Fortunately, in Australia at least, the law will no longer treat the family dog like any other piece of property. After a breakup or divorce, the best interests of the pet and who the primary caregiver is, among other considerations, will determine custody — not an archaic idea of 'ownership'. To be fair, the idea of pets as 'fur babies' — especially in urban and well-to-do households — is relatively recent. Animals have been domesticated for three purposes: Food, transport and labour, and as companions for hunting, guarding and pest control. But some animals, even when they are working, are a part of the family. A dog feels, even when she guards and a cat has moods, even when she catches mice. They have an inner life, likes and dislikes. Dogs, especially, need care, and give it back in return and, unlike children, are always grateful for a meal, a hug and a walk. Australia's law is, then, both a correction and an admission. It ensures the well-being of an animal, emotional and physical, as it would of a dependent. It also acknowledges that the anthropocentric view of ethical and legal systems leaves out some of the most important members of a family, that when a home is broken, the pet isn't just a part of the furniture. Hopefully, lawmakers in the rest of the world will take a leaf out of Australia's book.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
How Wittgenstein Can Make You Happier
Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. My preoccupation with writing about meaning, love, and happiness derives from my desire to understand these parts of life more deeply, and impart to others whatever understanding I can glean. I will confess that this can be a frustrating task at times because I feel as though I can never get to the essence of these sublimities; words always feel inadequate. For a long time, I believed that at some point—maybe after writing a million more words—I would finally arrive at the ability to adequately express what it is that I'm seeking. The philosopher Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, who died in 1951, probably would have told me I was barking up the wrong tree. The writer and fellow philosopher Bertrand Russell called Wittgenstein's work 'perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating,' yet Wittgenstein did not leave us much of it. He published only one book of philosophy in his life, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which itself is only about 75 pages long. In it, Wittgenstein explained that language can never convey the fullest understanding of life. 'The limits of my language,' he wrote, 'mean the limits of my world.' Wittgenstein was no doubt conscious of the irony of making this argument through language. But in so doing, he offered a path to getting beyond words and to apprehend, after all, the ineffable essence of what we seek. Arthur C. Brooks: The ultimate German philosophy for a happier life Human communication is rife with misunderstanding, as social scientists have long observed. Researchers writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2011 showed that people misunderstand the intended meaning of what others say, especially among close acquaintances such as family and friends. The scholars found that those who spoke with strangers communicated more clearly than with close associates, believing—incorrectly—that the latter would understand ambiguous phrases by virtue of their intimate affiliation. So what are the odds that you'll grasp correctly the next thing your spouse tells you? Digital communication makes the situation worse because it eliminates nonverbal cues. One explanation psychologists offer as a common cause of misunderstanding is motivated reasoning, in which our own desires and beliefs determine what we perceive to be true, rather than what someone else is telling us. For example, when your partner innocently asks what you've been up to today, you might incorrectly apprehend this as an expression of suspicion, because, in fact, you've been up to something they wouldn't approve of. Whereas psychologists see the problem as one of unreliable narrators and inattentive listeners, Wittgenstein, as a philosopher, saw the very medium of language itself as inherently flawed. Words, he believed, were inadequate to the task of conveying subtle truths, metaphysical ideas, or any subjective experience. This was because language is nothing more than a crude model of the world—a jumble of sounds or symbols that represents the underlying reality of existence about as accurately as a map on your phone represents a forest you're walking through. The sight of tall trees, the smell of pine needles, the solitude you sought have virtually nothing to do with the squiggle on the screen that crudely marks the trail. Wittgenstein never knew our modern technologies of communication, but he would surely see that they make his point times 10. Consider how much a text-message abbreviation and an emoji really tell you about what is in your beloved's heart. LOL, not much, right? Wittgenstein's proposition has significant implications for happiness, because misunderstanding lowers our well-being. For example, experiments show how failing to be understood by others reduces the satisfaction that participants report in subsequent activities. Even more profound, his conclusion about the inadequacy of language suggests that we will never comprehend the true meaning of our lives by reading or talking about it. How are we to escape this thicket of muddle and misunderstanding? To find meaning without words suggests that we need to seek a particular kind of transcendence. [Arthur C. Brooks: The key to critical self-awareness] Wittgenstein's contention resembles Saint Augustine of Hippo's argument that God is what we want, but God's nature also evades human expression—in fact, merely to talk about the divine is to trivialize him. But Augustine did not think that we should therefore abandon the whole project. The trick is to see language as only the beginning of a spiritual journey, not the end. He suggested that we use just one word—Deus (Latin for 'God')—as an audible departure point into the realm of the inexpressible. 'When that sound reaches' your ears,' he wrote, 'think of a nature supreme in excellence and eternal in existence.' This is, I believe, very close to what Wittgenstein suggested as well. I would recommend a couple of signposts to guide you on your journey beyond words. 1. Think; don't talk. Many religious and wisdom traditions recommend meditative contemplation on a single concept. Tibetan Buddhists call it 'analytical meditation,' a practice with which the Dalai Lama starts his morning, as he told me, and to which he devotes at least an hour every day. This mode of meditation involves a focused reflection on a scriptural phrase to inspire insight into what it signifies. (The Augustinian version of this practice was, in effect, to make Deus his word to meditate upon.) If I'm doing this, I might use the phrase 'I love my wife' as my starting point. Then I'd try to engage the right hemisphere of my brain, the region that processes meaningful associations and concepts, in contrast with the left hemisphere's logical problem-solving ability. The idea is to liberate my cognition from the limits of my vocabulary and linguistic ability—easier said than done, but it can be enough to just sit in silence with my phrase or allow my mind to roam on a forest walk. 2. Seek understanding, not answers. The second step—which is allied with disengaging our habitual left-brain dominance—is to stop looking for exact answers to difficult questions. The purpose of analytical meditation is not to generate a clean explanation for why I love my wife. Nor is it to compose a precise but prosaic argument for why I do so. That would be to go in the wrong direction, according to Wittgenstein and Augustine, only committing me more to the poverty of language and taking me further from the underlying truth. As soon as one tries to verbalize an answer to explain this love—'Because she is good to me'—one has belittled the concept and literally understated its truth. Consider how even the greatest love poetry—such as these lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 'I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death'—essentially restates the Augustinian verity that this deeply complex experience defies utterance. The goal is to gain an understanding of this love, not an answer that's like the solution to a mathematical equation. [Arthur C. Brooks: The bliss of a quieter ego] What would Wittgenstein have us do about our ultimate problem of meaning in life? 'Whereof one cannot speak,' he offered as the last proposition in Tractatus, 'thereof one must be silent.' By all means, talk about trivial things, he seems to be saying, but don't waste your time trying to express life's profundities, because you will only fool others and frustrate yourself; better to keep your counsel. This injunction has generally been understood as a nihilistic statement of the impossibility of expression, and therefore of knowledge. I believe it is nothing of the sort. Being silent is the beginning of a different sort of cognition, a meditational path that does not seek straightforward answers. Allow yourself this silence, and the understanding you gain will be your ineffable reward. Article originally published at The Atlantic
