Vice and inadequacy: Spinoza's naturalism and the mental life of generative artificial intelligence

Motivated by increasingly superstitious usage and socially corrosive scandals surrounding the generative artificial intelligence models (e.g., GPT-4) of today, this paper draws on the work of canonical philosophical diagnostician of superstition, Baruch Spinoza, to develop a political-psychological accounting of AI minds and their consequences. Elaborating Spinoza’s naturalism and panpsychism, we show that the Spinozian view affirms that LLMs have minds which are fundamentally similar to human minds. However, following Spinoza’s epistemology, these minds are composed of broadly inadequate ideas, lacking any sort of comprehensive accounting of their causal generation. We then relate Spinoza’s account of how inadequate ideas generate ethically vicious relationships between entities dovetails with contemporary empirical studies of LLM’s racism and their capacity to shape human minds in biased ways, concluding that only a mind sufficiently like ours could effectively promulgate such vice and superstition. We conclude by proposing several policy recommendations which follow from this account of LLMs.

Duke Scholars

Author Emerson Robert Bodde DKU Faculty