Re-sourcing the Mind

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology, culture, and the moral life. This post about LLMs, the labor of articulation, and memory began as what I thought would be a brief installment. As if to prove one of the core claims of the essay, that the labor of articulation is itself generative, it grew in the writing. I hope you’ll find some things of use in it.

Cheers,

Michael

The founding text of technology criticism is found in one of Plato’s better-known dialogues, the Phaedrus.1 During the course of Socrates’s conversation about love and rhetoric, he recounts the legend of an Egyptian king named Thamus and an inventor-god named Theuth. Theuth presents a number of inventions to Thamus for his consideration, touting their benefits for the Egyptian people. Among these was the gift of writing, but, surprisingly to Theuth, Thamus was less than enthused about this particular invention.

Here’s how the relevant portion of the dialogue goes. It begins with Theuth declaring,“Here is an accomplishment, my lord the King, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom.”

And here is Thamus’s reply:

“Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”

There are two typical responses to the critique of writing Plato here expresses through Socrates. The first is to see this as the prototypical “moral panic” about a new technology. If ...