#31 Prompts and Priests
I'm probably in the last generation that went through early adulthood in a world where therapy had not replaced religion as a source of comfort. Back then (always wanted to say this), even though my parents were not religious, the default was to fall back on the bible. Don't do well in math? Maybe you should read the bible and learn the value of hard work. Abusive parent? Maybe you should read the bible and learn about the sacrifices. Depressed? I think you should pray on that. From the age of 14-22, someone was always telling me about the bible.
It helped as much as therapy did in the later stages of life. When you are depressed and learned helplessness has kicked into 11, anything that prompts you into taking the simplest next step helps. Therapy and the bible are just different kinds of prompts, not very dissimilar from the prompts I give ChatGPT. Except that in this case the roles are reversed and I'm the one being prompted by something external to me.
I remember my first girlfriend thought I should see a priest because I was depressed and helpless about the situation at my home. Even the smallest gestures had so much weight at that time, and so I hopefully trudged along to see this apparently wise old man. I unloaded everything off my chest and waited with bated breath for words to solve everything. Finally, he gestured at me to put my palms together and said, "let's pray on it." I think that's the first time I realized the limits of the bible prompt.
After solving that particular problem myself rather begrudgingly and not according to the bible, I plodded along for a few years until I hit another wall. I remember the night I decided to try another prompt quite clearly. I had called the suicide hotline for the less sinister reason that I didn't have anyone else to talk to. The man on the other side went through the same log-level prompts he probably goes through hundred times a day.
"Seems like you are driving. How about you pull over?"
"yes, I've pulled over now"
"What are you struggling with?"
"I've no money, and can't find a job."
"do you know about the employment exchange?"
... and so on
After about 10 minutes, the simplest of prompts had calmed me down and gave me the next steps I should take. This was when I decided to try therapy, which works for a while, but eventually, you reach the therapist equivalent of "go read the bible," which is "all your feelings are valid, now what are you going to do about it?." I don't know. I thought you were supposed to tell me that
Once you have the basics covered with therapy and bible prompts, you need other prompts to get you unstuck, have things to look forward to, and not slip back into the therapy and bible prompt mode. Astrology is probably one level above both of those. The question of whether it’s "real" or not doesn't really matter. It injects randomness into your thinking so that you can discover prompts for yourself. "ah, well my venus is in Leo, so maybe my focus should be on other things than dating." Similarly, meditation or just going for a walk could make you take notice of and be curious about things that you may have missed or failed to notice.
In his recent post, Stephen Wolfram writes about how chatGPT works:
"The first thing to explain is that what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a “reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so far, where by “reasonable” we mean “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc.”
I wonder if my brain is doing something similar, where it’s trying to produce a reasonable continuation of actions, and all these prompting mechanisms that I have are just a means of increasing the possibilities available for the next action.
I've been playing around with ChatGPT, trying to get it to write a decent story for me, and I realized that, on the one side, it gives me interesting possibilities that I may not have considered. On the other side, I tried to teach it writing like I'd teach someone with a decent grasp of English who has not done creative writing.
"Have you read Dialogue by Robert Mckee? Summarize it for me."
"Now apply lessons from Dialogue to the dialogue that you wrote for the last scene."
I wait with bated breath for the moment of genius that I have not been able to conjure myself, but just like the priest, ChatGPT shows me the limits.
The back and forth marginally improves the results, but eventually, ChatGPT does its own version of "how about you read the bible" or "lets pray on it". This could be going around in circles like it has no memory of the conversation that has happened until now, or it could be the ultimate biblical answer, "I'm just an AI model I can't do that." I interpret this as "I can't solve the lack of an inner life for you, go and do that yourself." I guess that's the limit of external prompts, artificial and otherwise.