never used any AI “tell it to do things” chat bots for a few reasons (time, spiritual inclinations, aesthetics) but my wife’s friend was visiting, had it on his phone, and really wanted me to ask it something niche and complex to test it.

if ur interested heres what i asked it

i wanted to ask it something very niche and speculative that would involve comparing at least two relatively complex systems of thought, and hypothesizing about their interaction.

so, off the cuff, i thought of a guy named sidney rigdon, an early figure in mormon history.

long story short, sidney rigdon was a campbellite - part of the restoration movement, that wanted to restore the new testament church and “just use the bible”. but then he got into mormonism and played a relatively large role in its very early development (bringing that vibe imo)

this was perfect - analyzing “campbellism” and the early restoration movement is pretty niche, and the nascent stages of mormonism is also niche - and requires some concept of mormonisms development over time, philosophical and historical cause and effect, all that.

so, i asked it: speculate on how mormonism would have been different without the influence of sidney rigdon.

it easily did this. gave a 10/10 complex and well thought out answer. i was impressed (ngl) so i wanted to think of something more difficult, which i did.

i tried to think of something that was as speculative and as niche as possible - something that involved making an abstract connection between things, that still had a right or wrong answer, building off of relatively obscure history and ideas.

i was amped about what i landed on

thought my intuition of using mormonism was good. so, joseph smith used seer stones. the mormon view has a very unique relationship to physicality - spirit is actually a form of matter, God has a body - thus a unique take on the mind body problem, i wrote a little about this here

so, those two things fit together - it makes sense the central figure used an actual physical item - considered in terms of a larger system that dissolves the boundary between the physical and the spiritual and makes them one thing.

but, its an abstract philosophical connection.

i asked it: explain the significance of joseph smith using seer stones in light of mormonism’s unique view of the relationship between spirit and matter and God’s physicality.

it totally got it, 100% (this was the newest chat GPT by the way). 100% totally made the connection.

i was very impressed. it full on explained that: if you think about it, it makes sense that this figure used a physical item to interact with the spiritual world, because his system dissolves the classical boundary between matter and spirit. that action is a demonstration of that

to dumb it down it understood that using a seer stone (physical item doing a spiritual thing) was a demonstrable tangible manifestation of having the philosophical view that spirit and matter are actually one thing and not separate.

honestly thats pretty crazy ngl.

i dont believe that machines can think. i thought about how to push it to have a novel insight that would also be correct but the question above was as close as i could get (not novel but as abstract and niche as i could get while still having some kind of ‘correct’ assessment)

was an interesting thought experiment to see how hard i could push it theology wise (without it being something just in aquinas or in a catechism that it could “just” look up). that was the best i could do on the spot. it did exceed my expectations. hopefully i never use it again

basically confirmed my initial assessment that, the way map applications jarred a type of spatial navigation from a lot of the population, or whatever analogy you like, this will do that with writing and to some extent a type of verbal thinking for a huge % of people very soon.

right now you have people who have been using spellcheck since they were 10 so they still misspell the same words now that theyre in their 30s. this will do something like that for writing and thinking for sure.

last addendum for purely pedantic thought experiment reasons (i wont be doing this) - its thundering so my dog woke me up and i was thinking about this.

at first i thought that in order to try to force its system to have a novel insight, youd have to be at the edge of ur field.

as in, you yourself would have to have an unpublished novel insight about your field. however i just realized you could go the opposite direction and just create an extremely niche hypothetical scenario involving the intersection of a philosophical / theological system + history

so, for example, presumably no one has written a paper on the topic of “how would buddhism have developed differently if buddha shakyamuni (the historical buddha) was born on north sentinel island” - but that does have some “correct” lines of reasoning.

great, now its over.