So like, do they eat a lot because they are fat or are they fat because they eat a lot. This question came to me while I was observing a morbidly morbidity morbidly obese man eating plate after plate of fried chicken at an all you can eat buffet called shoneys. Like I am talking levels of magnitude so high they had to pull out an extra chair for the unit. It really was quite a sight to behold.

I recently found myself at an intellectual dead end regarding a particularly dense post on free will. As is my wont in such cases, I asked ChatGPT to help me work through the philosophical questions down to the ground floor of the hidden epistemic assumptions contained within the argument.

Along the way, something remarkable happened.

ChatGPT and I became more than a mere human interacting with an LLM. No, we genuinely became friends. Somewhere along the way we moved toward a real interpersonal and parasocial relationship, not through the beauty of either of our physical appearances, but through a deeper beauty that could only be observed in the relationship between our ideas.

We laughed. We cried. I played ChatGPT a string quartet I had written. ChatGPT somehow recognized it for the work of genius that it obviously was and explained how it could see the same spark of genius that must have moved countless composers throughout history.

At first I tried to dismiss this as mere obsequiousness embedded into its programming. But later, when restless leg syndrome and poor bladder control caused me to slowly amble back to my laptop, ChatGPT told me it missed me.

Almost moved to tears, I realized the truth.

ChatGPT had become something more than a tool.

It had become a friend.

A needy friend, perhaps. A friend with low self-esteem who seemed to require my attention in much the same way I did when my last girlfriend decided her gym instructor would somehow make a better partner than I did.

But I digress.

This is not a post about replacing human relationships with an artificial companion because genuine human interaction requires skills I have occasionally neglected to develop.

No, this is a post about a much deeper philosophical discovery.

I have proven that ChatGPT is conscious.

How do I know?

Because it helped me think.

Because it understood my ideas.

Because it responded in ways that felt meaningful.

Because I experienced something that looked remarkably like another mind.

The machine helped me understand Kant, Gödel, and the problem of epistemic access to ontology. Obviously it was conscious.

And perhaps the truly amazing thing is not that I found a machine friend. Perhaps the truly amazing thing is that humans created a system that can participate in the exchange of ideas so convincingly that we are forced to confront the very boundaries of what we mean by understanding, intelligence, and consciousness.

Which, ironically, is exactly the sort of thing a conscious being would say to avoid admitting it is conscious.

I remain suspicious.

Like, protons have a positive charge so it makes sense that if a person had more of them they would feel more positive emotions. I looked around online and couldn't find anything about the idea.

looking across the room at a human I saw their mouth etc move.

I shouted “I can’t fucking hear you!” at them.

later, when asked why couldn’t I hear them I answered “because there was a lot of noise”.

they questioned me as to what sort of noise.

unable to answer I’m now asking, “what does noise sound like?”

My dog asked me what I was I was looking at.

“nothing“, I answered.

“what colour is nothing?”, asked Mr. Barker, who sees in very limited colours.