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Ghosts and Dolls
On the writings of artificial intelligence.
Better not to say that we use language because we think, or mean, or intend to communicate, but that we do it as we walk, eat, drink, or play (especially that last), which is to say in such varied contexts that any account of these activities that attributes to them a single purpose or structure inevitably misleads about some, and likely most, instances of the phenomenon under discussion. When we renounce that machinery, or, better, give it its proper place as a verbal activity of specialized interest, beautiful in its own way, like good jazz improvisation, but without purchase upon or power over the array of speech and writing which it purports to be about, we can then see, clearly enough, that most of our language is fluent, and is therefore not in fact informed by deliberation. Perhaps thought is not phenomenological data bound up in the act of composition nor a mere characteristic disposition but a condition, more or less invisible from the perspective of introspection or even memory, common to all living speakers, attributable to them precisely because they are animate—ensouled as that word suggests, and ruled out for machines just because they are soulless.
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