We really should move right on to Euthyphro, but maybe your homework per the previous video was a bit too hard. Program and agony aunt. I didn't make programming a prerequisite for the course. Even so maybe someone out there on Coursera land can whip up a Jave Script implementation of the suspiciously simple algorithm. That Socrates seem to be employing, to inflict his signature brand of self help on his fellow citizens. What do I have in mind? Do you know what the difference is between a philosopher and a comedian? I'll tell you, it's not the jokes. It's that philosophers have a horrible compulsion to kill the jokes by explaining them. Example, in my textbook on page 111, there's a joke, and the text doesn't explain it, so it's really funny. It's been bothering me ever since, i've just got to be me. Here's the graphic from the book with just a bit more color. As you can see it's a cartoon with some sort of crude computer interface. Sort of the mimicking the opening of Euthyphro. I call it the Elizian Mystery Program, in honor of an early AI, really a mock AI, called Eliza. Elizian Mystery, because it sounds a bit like Eleusinian Mysteries, which was a cult based in a town about 20 kilometers from Athens. Thankfully, it's a bit of a mystery, so I can't waste time explaining. But we'll hear more about the mysteries a bit, when we get to [UNKNOWN]. Anyway, ELIZA was a simple computer program written in the mid-60s to be your therapist. The programmer was a guy named Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT. I say, be your therapist, actually it was more like a parody the program doesn't know anything. The only way it can convincingly pretend to be a person is by consistently tossing all of your questions back at you, making you do all the work. This makes it sound sort of like a Rogerian therapist, that's what Weizenbaum thought. It can also make you sound a bit like Socrates. Probably the simplest way to get a feel, is to go Google Eliza, eliza. There's a wikipedia entry, and a bunch of pages, where people helpfully implemented Weizenbaums original script. And you can also find, and find out about various descendants of Eliza to this day. I suggest try to get into philosophical debate with one of these little chatter box see where it gets you or read Wikipedia. If you like program has an interesting history. Weizenbaum got sort of annoyed when people took his little puppet seriously. How dumb can you get? Getting fooled by something that is obviously just snipping little syntactic strings, in a very simple and mechanical way. I have a confession to make. When I was about 10, about this tall. I went to the Omni science museum in Eugene, Oregon. They had tons of cool stuff, but my friends and I were most fascinated by this super advanced computer you could talk to, through a keyboard. We didn't even have home computers back then. I had only ever typed on my dad's typewriter. Yes, a typewriter, that's how old I am, true story. Anyway, this amazing super computer was called Eliza. We typed a lot at it for quite a long time. It had an answer for everything. It was really talking to us about all the stuff going on in our lives, amazing. Embarrassing, well I went on to become a philosopher of course, my friend, he was 10 too. He's now a political science professor.You never can tell how these things will work out. Right. Term I used earlier, what's Rogerian therapy? Weizenbaum explained Eliza to people using that term, but it's less well known today. Even though the general ideas have very much seeped into the culture. You're probably more of a Rogerian than you know. It's called person centered therapy or client centered therapy. I'm not an expert, but I can give you the short version. The idea isn't that the therapist just plays dumb, much less is just plain dumb, like Eliza. But the therapist believes the patient has within him or herself untapped capacity for self realization. Forcing people to answer their own questions is the most basic, direct way to bore down into those untapped resources of the self. Who knows you better than you do? So answer your own questions already. That tells you at least what you think, which is most of who you are. Makes a kind of sense, right? Rogerian therapy is supposed to be a lot of friendlier, more empathic, less adversarial. Certainly less passive aggressive than this cradic stuff. You weren't suppose to suffer shame in front of your friends and fellow citizens when you don't answer your own questions sensibly. The therapist not, not, not troll the patient, or even do anything that looks like he might be doing that it's more honest too. The therapist should not wear a professional mask. You hear that Plato, no pretending to be your dead teacher. But apart from these major differences in rhetorical tone, you might say, philosophically, Socrates is just doing rogerian therapy. Plus a lot of dictionary stuff. What is holiness? What is virtue? What is justice? Or rather, Rogers was just doing Socrates stuff minus the dictionary stuff. If someone wants to try to implement a Socrates chatter box, by attaching a dictionary function to an Elisha script. I would be curious how close we can get to a cut rate playdom, and a automatic platonic agony aunt. And note you don't even need a dictionary, you just need to polk a human with a stick until he or she writes it herself or her self. Suppose someone asks you to pick the book that means the most to you, that expresses who you truly are, or that has really helped you. The kind of thing that would go in the sidebar where your faves are listed for whatever Facebooky reasons you might have. You might pick a poem, Walt Whitman's song of myself. Or a religious text. Something spiritual. You might pick the Harry Potter novels, because, this course era stuff is alright. But really, you're just really waiting for that Hogwart's letter you know is coming any day now. Maybe you will pick a book to express the fact that the real you, more like a vampire, a sparkly one, I try not to be judgmental. Probably not you're going to say the dictionary, I pick the dictionary. The dictionary seems like the most impersonal choice to say that's my book. Can you imagine if someone picked that to signal to everyone else who they were in their hearts of hearts. We might as well pick the phonebook, shesh. But think, if someone erased J.K. Rowling's famous wizard books from your mind, so it was like you never heard of Harry or any of his friends. That would be tragic, I grant you. Your life would go worse. But it would go on. On the other hand, if you forgot all the words in the dictionary, worse. If you forgot all the concepts associated with all of the words in the dictionary, that would be pretty much game over for you as a person, I think it's safe to say. So maybe it's not so much crazy to program your electronic Agony Aunt to pester everyone to define their terms all the time. She just wants you to say who you really are, which is what self help is all about.
