Today we are finishing up the dialogue, and we will see whether they manage to answer what knowledge is. The definition currently on the table is that knowledge is true judgment. Socrates has set that aside for the moment, however, because the question of false judgment turns out to be more interesting: how is it even possible to make a mistake?
One attempt to explain false judgment was framed in terms of memory pictured as a wax block that can take impressions. On this model, false judgments occur when you are perceiving something and try to fit it into an existing impression on your wax block, thereby misidentifying what you perceive. That is certainly an appealing model for certain kinds of mistakes, but it does not cover all of them. We are not always making errors about what we are currently perceiving; we also make mistakes when trying to recall a piece of information or when thinking entirely within our own minds, and the wax block model does not account for those cases.
To picture this, Socrates does something he himself calls shameless. This is at 196d. It is shameless, he says, to describe what knowing is like, to characterize the experience of knowing, when we do not yet have a definition of knowledge. How can we describe what knowing is like if we don't know what knowledge is? And yet, he says, we are hopeless and shameless, so we will go right ahead.
Audience: It isn't illegitimate, because you're still learning. Definitions aren't essential for progress.
That's a fair point. Perhaps definitions are not the starting point but the terminus of the process. Along the way, we have to try to describe the experience itself, and so it seems perfectly reasonable for Socrates to proceed as he does. What is interesting, though, is that this is the prototypical situation in philosophy.
We are talking about something we do not fully understand, and yet we are able to talk about it, able to raise a genuine question about it. Philosophy is never about new information. It is not a matter of the teacher, the book, or the lecture presenting something you have never encountered before, leaving you to absorb an entirely unfamiliar subject. On the contrary, philosophy is about very familiar things, like knowledge. Everyone is familiar with knowledge, and yet we cannot seem to grasp it, define it, or explain exactly what it is.
This is why Socrates, in several other dialogues, describes philosophy not as the acquisition of new information but as a kind of recollection.
Philosophy is, in a way, an attempt to remember. There is a dialogue called the Meno where Meno, who is a real jerk, asks Socrates what virtue is. Socrates replies, "Well, I don't know. Let's look for it together." They try various answers, which of course don't work, and Meno grows frustrated. He objects: "We're just wasting our time here, because if we don't know what virtue is, how would we even recognize it when we found it? This is a complete waste of time."
Socrates responds by recounting what he has heard from certain wise men and women: that we are actually reborn, that this is not our first time around the block. Before we were incarnated in this body, we knew all things, and then we forgot, but not irretrievably. What we are doing in philosophy, then, is trying to recollect what we already know somewhere deep down.
People call this Plato's Doctrine of Recollection, which is a misleading label, because we don't really know what Plato himself believed, and the story of reincarnation is clearly a rather fanciful myth that may or may not be true. Even so, I think it is a remarkably good description of what it feels like to do philosophy. You are trying to remember, to recollect, something that you already somehow know.
This brings us to the aviary model of memory, which is precisely about this experience: having something within you but not being able to quite grasp it. The aviary has some advantages over the wax block model. Memories are now more elusive, more mobile, more dynamic. Simply having something in your memory is no longer enough to guarantee that you can recollect it.
What is happening, then, when, to use Socrates' example, somebody says that 7 plus 5 is 11 and makes that mistake? In terms of the aviary metaphor, they simply grabbed the wrong bird. Within you there are birds, in flocks or singly, and commentators debate what the different groupings might symbolize, though Plato does not say. The idea is that you reached into your mental birdcage and grabbed an 11-bird when you meant to grab a 12-bird.
Several problems with this arise immediately. At Theaetetus 199d, Socrates observes that on this model "a man who has knowledge of something is ignorant of this very thing, not through want of knowledge but actually in virtue of his knowledge." In other words, the birds in the cage are supposed to be pieces of knowledge, items of knowledge. How could grabbing a piece of knowledge make you wrong, or make you ignorant?
In one of his brighter moments, Theaetetus has an answer: the cage contains pieces of ignorance as well. The Greek is even more striking. Plato coins a made-up word, non-knowledges. So there are knowledges and non-knowledges fluttering around in your head, and sometimes you grab a non-knowledge when you meant to grab a knowledge.
What did you make of the passage in 200A and B, where Socrates essentially says, "We are back at the original difficulty. We have come full circle and answered nothing"? Why not? It seems as though we got somewhere. There is this mental aviary with pieces of knowledge flying around in it, and we are now supplementing that with pieces of ignorance. Our explanation of false judgment is that you reach in and grab an ignorance bird when you meant to grab a knowledge bird.
Here is the problem. When you did this, you must have thought that the bird you grabbed was a knowledge bird, which means you made a false judgment about it. You were reaching into your aviary believing you had a knowledge bird when in fact you had an ignorance bird. Have we really explained false judgment, then? We are saying that false judgment occurs when you make a false judgment about a bird in your birdcage. That is plainly circular. What is going on in the mind as you perform this act? Is there another aviary inside? Another wax block? The circularity leads to an infinite regress, and we have presupposed precisely what we were trying to define.
The moral to draw from this is that objectifying models of mental acts are often problematic or misleading. The idea that you simply have stuff in your head that takes impressions, or a collection of things that can be pictured as objects: these models run into trouble the moment we ask about the mental act of consciousness itself, the act of understanding, of failing to understand, of making a judgment. Can that act really be pictured as a thing? Perhaps, perhaps not. This is an ongoing, perhaps eternal, debate between those who want to explain everything materially and those who hold that consciousness cannot be reduced to such an account.
Unless there is more to say about the aviary or the wax block, we can return, as Socrates and his interlocutors do, to the definition of knowledge as true judgment. False judgment may simply have been too difficult to resolve. Here, however, Socrates has an easy counter-example: the jury that is persuaded to pass a correct judgment but does not actually know that it is correct.
A jury might convict someone who is, in fact, guilty of a crime, guilty, as we say in our system, beyond reasonable doubt. Yet that is still not the same thing as genuinely knowing that he did it, because the jurors were not there, and the evidence could perhaps be interpreted otherwise. True judgment, in other words, falls short of knowledge.
As noted in the previous session, this situation arises very often in life: we make judgments that turn out to be true, but they are lucky guesses, or at best educated guesses, something less than knowledge.
What is knowledge going to be? It has to be a judgment, it has to be true, but you also have to back it up with a logos, an account, as they say. The word logos can mean all sorts of things, and it has been used in this dialogue to mean argument, words, explanation, or ratio. In this context, it means anything you add to a true judgment to back it up so that it is not just a lucky guess. Knowledge, then, is true judgment plus an account, and this remains a very common definition debated in philosophy today, usually stated as justified true belief.
There was perhaps the luckiest philosopher in history, Edmund Gettier, who called this definition into question. In 1963, Gettier was an academic nobody whose department chair told him he really needed to publish something. He recalled an idea he had been carrying around and wrote it up into a short three-page article, sent it off to a journal, and the philosophical world went wild. More than sixty years later, people are still writing about it, because what he did was challenge the definition of knowledge as justified true belief.
My favorite example of the Gettier problem is this: you are wandering through the desert and you see a mirage. You believe there is water over there, so you walk toward it, and when you arrive, you discover that behind a rock there miraculously is water. Your belief was true, you genuinely believed it, and you had a justification, namely that you saw what appeared to be water. It is a justified true belief, but did you really know there was water there, or did you simply get very, very lucky?
Audience: That one sounds like it wasn't much of a justification.
Well, I had a perception and I made a judgment. But in other situations you could have a rather elaborate chain of reasoning that leads you to the correct answer, and yet it would not be the right reasoning. So in epistemology, the theory of knowledge, there is a great deal of debate today about what kind of justification is really going to work. Plato would be very happy to see that, because he anticipated precisely this kind of debate in the final section of the Theaetetus: yes, we need an account, but what counts as a good account, and can we give a good account of what an account is?
There are four theories of an account that they consider, which is somewhat puzzling. The first account of an account is the most complex, confusing, and developed one. The second is the most straightforward. The third is similar to the first, only simpler. The fourth is different altogether. I almost feel as though Plato originally had just two, three, and four, and then at some later point decided to insert number one. I am not entirely happy with that suspicion, because Plato should be assumed to be a careful enough stylist to have a reason for everything he does, but I have not found a satisfying explanation.
In order to ease into this, I will start with number two, which is the simplest. What is an account, a logos? Well, logos can simply mean language. The second proposal, then, is that an account consists in putting your judgment into words. Why isn't that enough? An account, you will recall, is supposed to get us over the hill from true judgment to actual knowledge.
Every judgment can essentially be put into words. That is what Plato says here. Anyone can do that. Perhaps that is not strictly true in every case; some people have difficulty expressing themselves and may hold an opinion they cannot quite articulate. But it is certainly the normal situation that we can express our judgments in words. And yet that does not make them knowledge, so an account must require something more than this.
The third version of an account is listing the elements of a thing. What is an element? It is the simplest possible unit from which something is built up. If you could break a thing down into its simplest units and state what they all are, that seems to be a cut above merely having an opinion.
A familiar model for this is chemistry: the periodic table of the elements, and the formula H₂O, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. That is an account of water. To state it is, in a sense, to spell out what water is. The model Socrates himself uses is, in fact, spelling. It was very important for the Greeks that they had an alphabet, because it led to relatively high literacy, and it has been argued that without literacy you would not have Greek philosophy, at least as we know it. There is quite a difference between the wisdom and traditional teachings of oral cultures and the kind of debate and analysis that emerges in a literate culture.
The Greeks owed their alphabet to the Phoenicians, who had developed something close to one: they had letters for consonants but not for vowels. From the Phoenician alphabet descended Hebrew, and eventually Arabic, as well as the Greek, Roman, and Cyrillic alphabets. The idea behind version three of the account, then, is that if you can spell something, if you can list all its elements, then you know it.
There is a problem with this, however. Suppose you went to the board and spelled the name Theaetetus correctly, not the simplest name to spell. Does spelling it correctly guarantee that you actually know how to spell it?
Audience: Lucky guess.
Exactly. It could be a series of lucky guesses, a string of true judgments in a row without any genuine knowledge underlying them. That is essentially Socrates' objection to the third account.
This theory is very similar to the third definition of knowledge, but it is developed more elaborately. It is what Socrates describes as his dream at Theaetetus 201e–202b. The primary elements of which we and everything else are composed have no account; they cannot be explained or broken down. Each element can only be named; one cannot say anything further about it, not even that it exists. Socrates wants to avoid adding the concept of being to these elements in order to preserve their pure simplicity. It turns out, crucially, that these primary elements are perceivable, perception re-enters the picture, not as equivalent to knowledge, but as the mode by which the simplest elements are grasped. An account, then, is a complex weaving together of the names of these perceptible but unanalyzable elements.
Spelling serves as the model here. To give an account of the word "Socrates," one spells it out: S-O-C-R-A-T-E-S. The letter S designates the hissing sound ss. Can that sound be broken down further? Can you spell S? It simply is what it is, the simplest possible sound. On this theory, then, the sound ss cannot be known, because giving an account means analyzing something into its perceivable elements, and those ultimate elements cannot themselves be analyzed. If knowledge requires analysis, there must be something at the basis of all analysis that cannot itself be known, precisely because it cannot be further broken down.
Scholars have debated what exactly is going on here and whether Plato is genuinely committed to this view. I do not think he is; I think he is simply putting it forward for examination. Commentators have noted similarities to certain twentieth-century philosophical movements. Some logical empiricists attempted to describe the most basic given sense-perceptions and then construct reality on that foundation. One might also compare it to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, who proposes that we describe experience while bracketing the question of whether it exists, that is, without importing the concept of being, which is very close to what Socrates says here.
Explaining what is wrong with this theory is genuinely challenging. To my mind, it is the most difficult argument in the entire dialogue. I will present what I take to be the essence of the problem, and we can dig into it further from there.
We are thinking about parts and wholes because we are breaking a whole down into its parts. Here is a question you have probably heard before: is the whole more than the sum of its parts? That is what this argument hinges on. What Socrates is doing is constructing a dilemma, hanging us on the horns of it. If you say yes, you are in trouble. If you say no, you are also in trouble. Let us talk about this question a little before we follow the text.
This is an extremely abstract question, but to make it more concrete, consider that Gestalt psychologists would say the whole is always more than the sum of its parts. Gestalt is German for an overall form or whole. When we walk into this room, we do not, as the logical empiricists would have it, perceive a patch of brown here and a white square there and then compute the totality from those pieces. Instead, we walk in and find ourselves immersed in an overall environment that has a holistic sense, and only then do we perhaps focus on one thing or another within it. If you are a holist, you cannot reconstruct that environment in its original meaning by assembling isolated pieces.
Gestalt psychology works particularly well when it comes to faces. Most people, unless they have face blindness, look at a face and instantly recognize the individual as having an overall configuration. You do not piece it together by noting that one eye is a millimeter higher than the other; it is simply there for you as a whole. You might be inclined to answer the other way, however, and say that this is merely how things appear to us, while underneath there has been a great deal of unconscious computation, something like what a digital camera does when it collects many bits of data and synthesizes them into an overall picture.
Audience: No. If I have a whole object and I take a hammer and break it into pieces, I can put it all back together and it fits — the pieces sum to the whole.
That works in some cases, but depending on what the object is, it may not. If you smash a camera and try to reassemble it, it will look like a camera but may not function as one. You cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Consider a table: we could gather the exact amount of wood this table contains and pile it up, but a pile of lumber is not a table. You have all the material you need, yet you must arrange it in a certain order so that it takes the form of a table. This distinction between form and matter is fundamental in both Plato and Aristotle. Matter is what things are made out of; form is how that matter comes together to produce a particular kind of thing with a particular kind of order.
Let us try the "no" answer first. The whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts — all of its parts. In this case, remember that the parts, the elements, are each of them unknowable, because you cannot break them down further. Therefore, is the whole knowable? The whole is nothing but all of its parts, and none of those parts is knowable; therefore the whole is unknowable. That doesn't sound very promising.
Let us go instead with the gestalt theorists and the holists and say, "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." In that case, Socrates argues — in what is perhaps the most confusing passage in the entire dialogue — that the whole must have no parts if it is something distinct from its parts. I will leave the full argument as homework for those watching this video: why does a whole have no parts if it is more than its parts? This is the section in which he discusses syllables and the letters that compose them, and it remains genuinely difficult.
Audience: It was a useful model until we reached this part. I didn't quite understand it.
Let me say more about that example, because it helps to bring the argument down to concrete cases. People who are just beginning to learn to spell — especially those from an oral culture unfamiliar with alphabetic writing — find it quite hard, because if you are not literate, you do not experience a word as assembled out of individual sounds. In fact, that is not even how fluent readers read: you need only the beginning and the end of a word, and the mind fills in the rest. Certainly when you hear the word Socrates spoken aloud, it does not register as S, ah, k, r, uh, t, ees — it means that man over there. You perceive it as a whole.
So is a word in fact assembled out of the individual sounds we symbolize with letters, or is there a distinct kind of wholeness to a word that we perceive holistically? Consider water as opposed to H₂O: if you admit that the wholeness of the word water has no parts, is it knowable? No — you are back at the same problem. You cannot break it down, and therefore you cannot give an account of it. Either way, you run into a roadblock. It is a beautifully constructed dilemma.
Quite a few philosophers, and scientists as well — the entire project of chemistry is a clear example — have tried to understand things through analysis. But if you believe that analysis is the only path to understanding, you may find yourself caught in precisely this dilemma.
Descartes has a related method. He says you take a complicated whole, break it down into its simplest parts, become absolutely certain of each of those parts, then build it back up, and finally make sure you have left nothing out. That is his method. I would argue, however, that Descartes avoids the trap of infinite regress, because he does not claim that everything must be understood through analysis. He says some things are simply self-evident, and you do not have to give an account of everything.
His most famous and most basic elemental truth is, "I exist right now" — cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am." But it is not really an argument; it is simply this moment of self-awareness. How can you doubt your own consciousness? Descartes says this truth is so basic, so certain, and so indubitable that it requires no further account. From self-evident truths such as this, he believes, you can then build everything else up.
Interestingly, at Theaetetus 206A–B, Socrates himself suggests something similar: that the elements may in fact be self-evident and may not require an account. As an illustration, Socrates points out that when you were learning to spell or learning music, each individual sound and each individual note was especially clear and distinct in itself, rather than the complex wholes formed from them.
Here is another interesting example for the whole-and-part issue: a melody. Does a melody consist simply of its notes, or is there an overall unity to it? I am something of a holist — I believe there is a unity. You can identify a beginning pianist because they are picking out the notes in the correct rhythm and the correct order, but it just does not flow. It does not sound like a melody.
Audience: What you said about the melody is interesting, because what you are describing seems like purpose — there is a purpose for stringing the little pieces together. That seems a little different from the conversation we were having here.
It is hard to say what the purpose of musical composition always is, but perhaps so. A melody seems to move toward something; it wants to say something different from what the individual notes say. And it has temporal unity, to return to the point about time we were discussing earlier.
There is a case described by the musicologist and patient Clive Wearing, who suffered such severe damage to his memory that he has essentially a seven-second memory span. Everything beyond those seven seconds is lost into darkness, and he has been living this nightmare for decades, constantly waking into a world that feels utterly new to him. Touchingly, the only thing that left a strong enough impression is his wife — so when she walks into the room, he is overjoyed, even if she was gone for only a minute.
I bring him up because he is a musicologist and a pianist, and if you give him a piece of music or ask him to play something, it is intact in his memory. He will play it continuously and remember the whole piece, even if it lasts five minutes. As Oliver Sacks describes, music is the one thing that gives Wearing temporal continuity and allows him to transcend that bare moment of perception — which is precisely what is at stake in the idea that knowledge is perception.
We have a fourth concept of an account — our last-ditch effort. It appears at 208c: being able to tell some mark by which the object you are asked about differs from all other things. For instance, suppose you are talking about the sun and someone asks what you mean by it. You might say, "It is the brightest of the bodies that move around the earth and the heavens" — which is of course false, but let us adjust it slightly: the brightest of the bodies we see in the sky during the daytime. That seems safe. It is a definite description that picks out the sun uniquely.
Would that be enough for knowledge? You would not only have a true judgment about the sun — say, that the sun is very warm — but you could also identify it as the brightest thing we see in the sky. The trouble is that an account of this kind seems to already presuppose knowledge, which means we need knowledge in order to justify knowledge. That lands us in a circle, or in one of those infinite regresses.
Could we escape by saying that what you need is not knowledge but merely a true judgment — a true judgment, for instance, that the sun is the brightest thing in the sky? But then you are simply piling true judgment on top of true judgment, and it is hard to see how that ever gets you to knowledge. And if you insist that you must know how the object differs from everything else, you are already defining knowledge in terms of knowledge.
Another way to see the problem is this: in order to make any judgment about Theaetetus at all, I already need to be able to pick him out as the individual my judgment is about. The definite description — the distinguishing mark — is therefore already implied in any true judgment whatsoever. Adding it explicitly as a third condition does not get us over the hump from true judgment to knowledge.
This brings us to the conclusion of the dialogue, 210A and B. Theaetetus' knowledge is neither perception, nor true judgment, nor an account added to true judgment. All those babies have been proved to be wind eggs — empty, infertile, false.
Audience: They may not work as a model for what we want knowledge to be, but they're not entirely empty. Have we made some progress?
Yes, in some ways. He has introduced a lot of useful distinctions, and at least we've gotten from just having a bare perception to forming a judgment, to thinking, and then to the need to justify and explain that judgment. I would say the dialogue has not refuted the idea that knowledge is true judgment plus an account — it simply hasn't given an adequate account of what an account is. Perhaps the modern scientific method is the correct account, or perhaps there is some other method. It remains a challenge for us to find the right way of explaining things.
What else is going on in these last few sentences? Theaetetus says he is out of babies. He says, "You've made me say far more than ever was in me," and we might agree that much of this has been Socrates putting words into Theaetetus' mouth and doing a great deal of the labor himself. Now that Theaetetus is out of ideas, an ethical question arises: has Socrates harmed him or benefited him? Remember, Socrates' life depends on this question, since he was accused of corrupting the youth.
Socrates says he has done Theaetetus a favor, and the supposed favor is that Theaetetus will now know what he does not know. That is enormous. Theaetetus is now like Socrates — not just in face, as Theodorus noted at the outset, but in mind. Socrates knows his own ignorance, and now Theaetetus too will no longer assume he knows something he does not know. And if he ever attempts to conceive new theories in the future, they will be better ones as a result of this inquiry. He will be able to make finer distinctions, anticipate problems, and know what may work and what may not.
Even if Theaetetus does not succeed philosophically, he develops what we might call Socratic wisdom. Recall that early in the dialogue Socrates said "wisdom is knowledge" — yet perhaps wisdom is a very specific kind of knowledge: knowledge of the absence of knowledge. Socrates reminds us of his own ignorance: "I don't know any of the things that other men know. All I have is this art of midwifery, which I use to deliver men that are young and generous of spirit, all that have any beauty." This is also a quiet rejoinder to Theodorus, who called both Socrates and Theaetetus ugly — a small reminder that they are, in fact, beautiful.
Then comes the punchline: "I must go to the king's porch to meet the indictment that Meletus has brought against me." He is about to be put on trial for his life. We knew from the beginning that this dialogue is set near the end of Socrates' life, but we did not know how near. Why do you think Plato threw in that bombshell at the very end?
Audience: There's a striking line Socrates has at the end of his trial where he says something like, "And now I go to die — which is better, you to live or me to die, nobody knows." The fact that he doesn't know how his trial will go, and that at the end of the trial he doesn't know what the outcome of death will be, seems to connect knowledge to the Apology.
That connection is exactly right. The theme of knowing one's own ignorance runs throughout the Apology, and Socrates uses it to argue that he is not afraid of death, because he does not know that death is a bad thing — it may be nothing, or it may be good, so there is no reason to fear it. As you say, he does not know whether being alive or being dead is better. This Socratic wisdom can actually contribute to courage, or at least tamp down fear.
The dialogue closes with Socrates saying, "Let us meet here again in the morning, Theodorus." Apparently he has a little time before the trial, though it is not entirely clear how that works. There are in fact two sequels that most scholars believe Plato wrote considerably later, since they are written in a different style — less playful, less ironic, less dramatically rich. They are called the Sophist and the Statesman, and they are conceptually quite interesting. Socrates meets Theaetetus and Theodorus again, but a stranger from Elea — Parmenides' hometown — does most of the talking. Both dialogues are well worth reading. On the surface, though, the Theaetetus appears to end in failure.
They did not get an answer, but perhaps we can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. How can we do that? Socrates and Theaetetus agree that they don't know what knowledge is — they failed to give an account of it. But how do they know that they failed? How do they know that they don't know? If we could answer that, we would know what knowledge is, because that is precisely what they were trying to determine.
What would it have looked like to give a good definition of knowledge? How would they have recognized one if they had it? If they had come up with a definition that satisfied all the examples of knowledge and could not be disproven, that would seem promising — it would suggest they were on the track of the truth. That is, in fact, what they were trying to do: give a definition that covers all cases and answers all possible objections. How one could ever know that all possible objections have been answered is itself a serious question, but that seems to be the ideal.
Could that ideal itself serve as our definition of giving an account — or even of knowledge? Perhaps. In this dialogue, as in some other apparently dead-end dialogues by Plato, you can read between the lines and find at least a suggestion of an answer embedded in the very way the inquiry failed.
Audience: The problem I have with that is that behind knowledge you have this thing called a true perception with an account. Those are the parts. And it always falls apart on the whole-and-parts problem. Even with your provisional answer — that knowledge is whatever can withstand all objections — I'm not sure that works. It seems like defining knowledge as "something such that no one could object that it isn't knowledge." That's like saying a fish is anything that no one could say isn't a fish. It seems unsatisfying, and it leaves open the question of how we know the next decisive objection isn't just around the corner.
That does seem unsatisfying, and the worry is a real one. The definition risks being circular, and as you say, we can never be certain that a fatal objection isn't waiting just ahead. Still, as a direction for further inquiry, it may be the best the dialogue quietly offers us.
We could relate this to modern concepts of science. One view of science is that what is distinctive about scientific knowledge is that it can be disproved — not that it is certain, but that potentially it can be disproved. We can say, "Under these circumstances, show me this experimental result, and if it is done correctly and confirmed, I will give up my theory." Perhaps the very ideal of knowledge in the strict sense is just a phantom — something divine and not human — and the best we humans can hope for is educated guesses that are disprovable. In that case, a kind of Socratic wisdom would align well with science, because you know that you do not know in the strict sense of being able to refute every possible objection — except perhaps in mathematics, but not in empirical science.
Another takeaway from the dialogue is simply that learning is hard and knowledge is hard. It may well be worthwhile, but it is going to take real work — it will not come as easily as sitting on a couch and having perceptions. I would personally apply this point to the tendency we have today to attribute knowledge to machines, to artificial intelligence. If you read articles on AI, you will find that people so often use anthropomorphic language: it decides this, it wants this, it tries to do this, it understands or does not understand this. All of that is metaphorical, unless one can genuinely show that the machine is doing what the soul does.
If I say this in public, I will be pilloried as some sort of superstitious religious dualist — but I know that I am a soul, a psyche, a mind. The real question is whether the machine can do what I do: Can it make a mistake? Can it even have a perception? I am not convinced that it can. Thank you very much for your participation and your questions. Because this session is being recorded rather than broadcast live, the audience may encounter problems and questions that the recording cannot answer — and in that case, they should go out and have some dialogues of their own.