Philosophy through Science Fiction Stories

[1. Exhalation] 2a. Tower of Babylon 2b. Story of Your Life [3. The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling] 4. Hell is the Absence of God 5. Understand 6. The Evolution of Human Science [7. What's Expected of Us] [PDF] 8. Seventy-Two Letters 9. Division By Zero 10. Liking What You See: A Documentary [11. The Great Silence] [12. The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate] [13. Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny] [14. The Lifecycle of Software Objects] [15. It's 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning] [16. Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom] [17. Omphalos]

If Chinese were Phonetic

The Rights and Wrongs of AI

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

"If you're a writer, you will write a lot of unoriginal work before you write something original. And the time and effort expended on that unoriginal work isn't wasted; on the contrary, I would suggest that it is precisely what enables you to eventually create something original. The hours spent choosing the right word and rearranging sentences to better follow one another are what teach you how meaning is conveyed by prose. Having students write essays isn't merely a way to test their grasp of the material; it gives them experience in articulating their thoughts. If students never have to write essays that we have all read before, they will never gain the skills needed to write something that we have never read. And it's not the case that, once you have ceased to be a student, you can safely use the template that a large language model provides. The struggle to express your thoughts doesn't disappear once you graduate--it can take place every time you start drafting a new piece. Sometimes it's only in the process of writing that you discover your original ideas. Some might say that the output of large language models doesn't look all that different from a human writer's first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isn't an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it's an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That's what directs you during rewriting, and that's one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I."

Instructions: How to Write a Good Socratic Dialogue

Socratic Dialogue Evaluation:

The grading criteria is derived from the instructions in How to Write a Good Socratic Dialogue (numbered items listed on pages 344-347 in PDF).

Each criterion is assigned a value of 10% towards a total of 100% from the ten criteria.

	Initial question arising from ordinary situation or conversation (#2, p.346)
	Socrates as questioner, not as preacher (#4, p.346; #3, p.347)
	Socratic irony (##5-6, p.346)
	Spiritual therapy and missionary work (##7-9, p.346)
	Definition of question (##1-2, pp.346-7)
	Socratic strategy (#5, p.347)
	Dramatic interest, turning on a key point (##6-7, p.347)
	Conclusion, either by way of closure or intimations (#9, p.347)
	Historical fidelity (#10, p.347)
	Spiritual fidelity (#4, p.345)
	TOTAL (out of 100)
	GRADE and STUDENT NAME: