GPT-4 considers the Cartesian cogito, its implications for LLMs, and the ethnical responsibilities of humans

On April 16 I queried GPT-4 (March 23 version) on Descartes and related matters. I began by asking it the meaning of “cogito, ergo sum.” Then I asked it about the role that God played in Descartes’ reasoning. Why? Because, at GPT-4 pointed out, Descartes “uses the concept of God as a guarantor of truth to establish the certainty of knowledge beyond the ‘Cogito’ argument.”

Beyond that, I was setting the stage for having GPT-4 consider the relevance of Descartes’ reasoning to its own situation as an LLM trained on text without access to the external world. ...