In an article on The Life Today, I expanded an old post from here on Coffee With Allan about Freeform Writing and using it to overcome Writer’s block.
I said that philosophers have long championed the value of independent thinking.
I also mentioned that in Arthur Schopenhauer’s famous essay On Thinking for Oneself, he distinguishes between a genuine thinker and a “mere man of learning.” Schopenhauer argues that secondhand knowledge—truth merely read or memorized—is like an artificial limb or false tooth that never truly belongs to us.
In contrast, truths you discover through your own reasoning and reflection become a natural, living part of your mind.
The quote struck me again later, when I asked ChatGPT to create a sketch image of someone doing transcription from the Bible. What it came up with was a middle aged man with three arms, and while sometimes an extra hand would be handy, actually having a second right arm doesn’t quite fit!
This brings me back to Arthur Schopenhauer’s point about being taught second hand knowledge isn’t necessarily the best way to go either, unless it’s fully thought out, and becomes our own.
Artificial Intelligence doesn’t think the way we do. A simple explanation is that it gathers knowledge by accessing and analyzing data that is either scraped off databases or fed to it. But it can’t actually think.
That’s how it can come up with blokes with three arms sometimes.
Anyway, after trying a few times, ChatGPT admitted that it had failed Anatomy 101, I laughed and tried again. This time our character had two right hands, so it’s back to the proverbial drawing board.
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