Talking to Myself: AI and Diachronicity

Marya Schechtman (University of Illinois, Chicago)

Title: Talking to Myself: AI and Diachronicity

Abstract: In 2023 artist/scientist Michelle Huang fed selections from her childhood diaries to GPT-3, creating a chatbot version of her younger self with whom she had an extensive conversation. In this talk, I reflect on Huang’s experiment as a jumping off point for thinking about diachronic self-experience. I identify two distinct goals Huang describes for this conversation, determining what her younger self would think of how her life turned out and furthering her “inner child” work, and argue that these goals presuppose very different views of our sense of self-in-time. Both views are widespread in philosophy and in everyday thought. I consider what the fact that both seem so well-entrenched suggests for our diachronic nature, sketching a view according to which our characteristic sense of self-in-time derives from our ongoing negotiation of these two different forms of self-understanding. Although these conclusions do not rest directly on use of technology in Huang’s conversation, the role played by AI makes the conclusions I draw easier to see and adds some new wrinkles.

Bio: Marya Schechtman is Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she is also an affiliate of the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience. She is the author of The Constitution of Selves (Cornell, 1996), Staying Alive: Personal Identity and the Unity of a Life (Oxford, 2014), and The Self, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2024) as well as numerous articles on personal identity and the self. 

Zoom Link: https://deakin.zoom.us/j/87022307848?pwd=qE9pRvjtQab9iWii0MyDewMFlAh8xd.1

Meeting ID: 870 2230 7848 // Password: 14757978