Awareness: 10 key points from ChatGPT

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Last night I had an interesting conversation that centered on awareness. I can’t express how rare that is. I found myself referring to my forty-plus blog posts as a repository of all my thoughts on the topic, knowing that nobody is going read those posts. So I uploaded the posts to ChatGPT and asked for ten key take-aways (PDF).

“Would you like to have these in an essay format that could be posted to your blog?”, asked ChatGPT. The resulting essay so accurately captures my thinking on this topic I’ve decided share it here. Everything below was written by ChatGPT:

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Birthday Party (1956)

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The mother of my friend John was a dedicated scrapbooker. I believe this photo actually appeared in the local newspaper (it was that kind of small town). It was taken at John’s birthday party, probably 1957.

Top row, R-L: Chris Jones, Otis Mitchell, Joe Browning, Jim Blankenship, unknown, David Covey, Steve Watson
Bottom row, R-L: Jim Robison, John Robison, Steve Mays, Terry Hunter, unknown, Jane Robison

More birthday photos here and here.

“He’d never wanted kids”

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“He’d never wanted kids. Outside of priority boarding on an airline, he couldn’t see the upside to them. They took over your life and filled you with terror and weariness and people acted like having one was a blessed event and talked about them in the reverent tones they once reserved for gods. When it came down to it, though, you had to remember that all those assholes cutting you off in traffic and walking the streets and shouting in bars and turning their music up too loud and mugging you and raping you and selling you lemon cars—-all those assholes were just children who’d aged. No miracle. Nothing sacred in that.”

—Mystic River (Dennis Lehane)

My brother went to Hanoi and all I got was this T-shirt

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My younger brother Blane lives only five hours away but somehow we let five years pass since seeing each other. COVID was responsible for a couple of those, his schedule and inertia accounted for the rest.

When he sat down in “Barb’s chair,” Riley immediately crawled up in his lap. She does this whenever Barb sits down but –try as I might– I’ve never been able to coax her up in my lap. Sigh.

Robison Family Photos

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My friend John’s brother Jim passed away earlier this year and left a number of flash drives with family photos that Jim had scanned (ScanCafe) from family photos lovingly maintained by their mother, Betty Jane. There are 851 photos in this first album (with several more to come)

The screenshot below is an example of this treasure trove. I made John listen to my spiel on get-them-in-the-cloud-and-let-the-Universe-take-it-from-there. I find these fascinating as-is, with no information about the photos.

“A record of the dialogue”

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In the two-plus years I’ve been playing with ChatGPT I’ve found many of my “conversations” interesting enough to share 127 of them here. It’s a tedious process involving copying and pasting and re-formatting. What I’d really like is a one-button solution that would publish the chat. I can already share a link to a chat (or part of one) but posting to some public space on my ChatGPT account seems like an easy next step.

I brought this up to ChatGPT and it “thought” it was a splendid idea. I even exported the 127 conversations so it could analyze what I’d been doing. And just for fun, I prompted it to use these to create an interoffice memo to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, pitching the idea for a new feature. I was also curious to get ChatGPT’s take on these blog posts: Continue reading →

ChatGPT blog analysis: Time

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This is the latest in what is shaping up to be a series of analyses of my blog posts by ChatGPT. Some bonus links in the comment below. 

ChatGPT: I’ve been through your 44 posts tagged TIME, and I have to say: this collection feels like a personal meditation-in-slow-motion. Where memory had you circling the persistence of self, and awareness leaned toward the immediacy of being, your reflections on time are more like a spiral — looping between philosophy, science, novels, and your own lived texture. Let me walk you through the main threads I see.

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“noticing what it feels like to notice”

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When I upload a collection of posts from my blog to ChatGPT and ask for an analysis, would the response be in the form of an essay? I put that question to ChatGPT:

I’d say my default mode isn’t exactly an essay — it’s more like a well-organized, conversational analysis. But if you want it to read as a continuous, polished piece of writing (intro → development → conclusion, narrative flow, maybe even metaphors or a “voice”), then I’d shape it intentionally as an essay.

To see the difference between ChatGPT’s normal style and an essay, I decided to upload my posts (42 going back 15 years) on awareness. This is one of those touchy-feeling topics that most people never think about (paradox alert). The resulting essay is as close as we’re ever likely to get to explaining my interest in this topic.

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