Are we robots?

Patterns of Thought and Indoctrination in the Light of AI, Literature, Music and Scripture

Abstract

Are We Robots? Patterns of Thought and Indoctrination in the Light of AI, Literature, Music and Scripture

The advent of generative AI prompts a study of the thought patterns cultivated by humans and simulated by AI. This intellectual self-examination leads to an attitudinal and existential re-evaluation of scholarship towards de-individualized symbiotic “co-operation”.

Central to the paper are “integration” and “dispersion” as culturally pervasive cognitive impulses. They are examined in the symphonic tradition and then in literature: writers are “leavers-outers” or “putters-inners” (Thomas Wolfe), and theorists may advocate strict organicism or a more inclusive “reality effect” (Roland Barthes).

These phenomena are then placed in the context of two views of what constitutes essential reality: “the empirical case model” versus “the conceptual type model”, illustrated in various constellations by fiction, documentary literature, historiography and scriptural texts.

In literary studies the paper highlights abstraction as a dominant thought pattern characterized by a selection of one aspect of the object of inquiry, followed by vertical and lateral movements of generalization and further exemplification of the aspect in question. Additional patterns described include double abstraction (Isaiah Berlin); abstractions organized by a combination of criteria (Northrop Frye); and family resemblances (Wittgenstein).

These observations may furnish the “post critique” movement spearheaded by Rita Felski with a methodological framework which it has been hard pressed to develop. In line with that movement, the paper privileges inductive procedures over a deductive approach which is seen to be more self-confirmatory than illuminating. However, all types of scholarship are considered to be permeated by epigonism and a lack of creativity as inescapable aspects of our servitude under cultural thought patterns. 

In conclusion the paper dedramatizes AI as a supposed invasion of soulless mechanics, casting it instead as a condensation of human thought and therefore a natural part of the symbiotic “co-operation” recommended as a post-AI modus vivendi.