When Words are not Enough: Creative Responses to Grief (Quickthorn)

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What needs to be added to a computer to improve its understanding by connecting it to the world? One suggestion might go something like this: make a computer able to synchronise words with the things to which those words refer, one that is able, as it were, to label things correctly — to call a bird a “bird”, a washing machine a “washing machine”, and to avoid mislabelling. This does not mean the machine utters the word “bird” every time it is in the presence of a bird, and so on for all the dictionary. That is not intelligent behaviour. What is supposed is that it can produce the names of things when asked: that if presented with a bird it can call it a bird. And that, given a word, it can (if possible) point out in some way the thing the word is about. (Notice the “can”: it is not that it will produce the right word or object if asked; as with a human, other conditions may need to be fulfilled.) Something like this idea has been popular in philosophical theories of about how the mind represents the world (with, literally, a language in the brain). And all this is certainly impressive. Hales ends with the remark: “What it is to lead a meaningful life is something we must decide for ourselves.” This is not a problem the computer faces so it is not something it can do better or worse than us. It does not suffer existential crises and moral perplexity. Even if it wrote a greater novel than Crime and Punishment, in one way — the most important one to us — it would not understand a word of it. But my own doubts apply to Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a whole and are indifferent as to how the various systems work. The key is in ChatGPT’s confession that it has no personal preferences or subjective opinions. This is true for AI in general. Computers cannot literally fib or confess because they can have no convictions to express or conceal, be faithful to or betray. This puts a vast gulf between these machines and human beings — one we cannot lose sight of without impoverishing our sense of what a human being is. Released as a single on 3 December 2001, "Words Are Not Enough" / "I Know Him So Well" charted at number five in the United Kingdom and number 21 in Ireland in December 2001 and was the group's last single to be released before their Boxing Day split later the same month. An animated music video was made for "Words Are Not Enough". Gillian Melling and Cassie Toulouse have taken their children’s artworks as a basis for new creations.

I am happy to agree that there is a sense in which such a machine understands what it is saying; we could call this a discriminative sense (distinguishing one thing from another in the sense of applying the right words to each). This is close to the sense in which I naturally say Siri understands what she says when, on my GPS, she tells me to turn left or go straight ahead at the next stop sign. The Irish Charts – Search Results – Words Are Not Enough". Irish Singles Chart. Retrieved 22 November 2018. W]e must decide what kinds of creatures we wish to be, and what kinds of lives of value we can fashion for ourselves. What do we want to know, to understand, to be able to accomplish with our time on Earth? That is far from the question of what we will cheat on and pretend to know to get some scrap of parchment. What achievements do we hope for? Knowledge is a kind of achievement, and the development of an ability to gain it is more than AI can provide. GPT-5 may prove to be a better writer than I am, but it cannot make me a great writer. If that is something I desire, I must figure it out for myself. When Words are Not Enough shows us that searing loss isn’t necessarilythe end, but a possible beginning.’

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I begin with this childhood story because I fear that many of us who are “churched” settle for this shallow, “words only” version of the Christian life, even as adults. Over time, we learn to “speak the speak.” We figure out what the magic words are— the words that will showcase our supposed spiritual maturity to the world. We “confess with our mouths” during the Sunday liturgy, or at the dinner table with our families, or in our midweek Bible studies, and somehow we forget that the life God calls us to live is a wholly integrated life— a life in which our words and our actions infuse, enrich, mirror, and reinforce each other. Throughout history people have needed to talk about their grief, but much in contemporarysociety tells us that grief is a depressing, morbid subject.‘ When Words Are Not Enough’is a necessary counterweight to those who would have us hide grief away. In both word and image, all the stories told here , from visual story tellers who reimagine their loved ones depicted in their own lives now, to artists who have taken their children’s artworks as a basis for their own creations, to those who have found peace in their music and their poetry, to some who relish the challenge of diving into cold waters as a way of connecting with their children. All are very different and uniquely creative responses to trauma following the death of a loved one and testament to the value of a shared and more openly expressed grief.

O]nly of a living human being, and what resembles … a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein. I sincerely hope you’re able to join us for the live event. But if not, the event will be recorded and will be available on-demand. I would, however, urge everyone to read the book. It’s available from the Freud Museum Shop. It didn’t take long for the situation to escalate into a full-on battle of the wills. My dad was determined to get an apology out of me, and I was just as determined not to say a word I didn’t mean. I’m guessing my father peered into my future that night and envisioned years of teen delinquency. For sure he was embarrassed that I— the supposedly perfect little preacher’s daughter— had stolen from his own church members. Some philosophers, when they talk of “behaviour” — including human behaviour, usually in sharp but misleading contrast with “mind” — are primarily using something like this notion: a bodily motion producing an effect in an agent’s environment. Such machines are now plentiful and will become more so. I am quite happy to attribute to them beliefs, desires, and intentions as these are used to explain and predict behaviour considered as bodily movement affecting an environment. I am happy to say the robot understands the related words (the contents of these attitudes) in this behavioural sense.Grief was a rude awakening. It woke me to the fact I have a soul at all. A soul is harder to ignore when it is screaming. There is nothing pleasant about it, but you gain a new alertness. A soul in pain is a soul that has woken up.... It stirred up my creative energy, because I had no choice but to write my way out of this. I wrote like a maniac and realised my words had a beat to them too, much like a song. The soul is our own inner landscape and its natural rhythms are musical and breathtaking as the biggest view. Jane Harris is a psychotherapist and bereavement specialist with over 30 years of experience in the NHS and private practice. She is also a grief educator, supervisor and public speaker​, regularly appearing in podcasts and radio.

ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I don’t have personal preferences or subjective opinions. Instead, I generate text based on statistical patterns learned from large amounts of text data. All feelings and emotions have bodily conditions. When you are angry or frightened the body’s “fight or flight” mode is triggered: the adrenaline and cortisol levels spike, muscles tense ready for exertion, heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, body temperature, and perspiration all rise. At a lay level, and to take the case of anger, your face becomes contorted in distinctive ways, you feel a tightening in the chest, your voice tends to hiss or spit or roar, your pupils dilate, and so on. One can give corresponding lists for, say, sorrow: the lassitude of the muscles, the slow trudge of your step with steeped shoulders and sunken head, the aversion of the eyes from others, the tendency to cry, the glum facial expression. These physical conditions are all experienced in anger or sorrow, which would be nothing without them. And it does not help to point out that one can be angry or sad without these physical conditions being evident: that only happens because one makes an effort to restrain or conceal them, an effort made in the face of the tendency to have them. Words, as I keep saying, are not enough — not even highly intelligent words. They are not by themselves proof that their speaker or writer understands their subject-matter, as every university teacher troubled by plagiarism knows. They are not even proof that the speaker or writer understands the individual words themselves, as the example of reciting a memorised passage in a language you do not understand shows. Beautifully illustrated, the book explores their own responses to Josh’s death along with contributions from 14 others who have also found solace from doing and creating new things following the death of a loved one. Everything we do to attend to our grief, the authors claim is about accommodating the loss of a loved one into our on-going lives, of filling the void left by their absence. Almost by definition grief, they argue, is a creative process. It’s about making something new, something that didn’t and couldn’t have existed unless they had died.

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Steven Hales raises the question whether, with the advent of what we might call the triumph of the machines at the tasks of civilisation, humanity might sink into stupidity, relying on machines to do and think everything for us. Why would anyone want to “bother to go through the effort of writing, painting, composing, learning languages, or really much of anything when an AI can just do it for us faster and better?” He rightly says that most people will still want to put themselves to the test, do things for themselves. And he even more rightly says that there are some things computers cannot do for us: To be vain one has to get some thrill of gratification at others’ admiration of oneself. But computers have no such gratifications. They are never excited in more than an electronic sense. A computer can emit a sentence saying “I am gratified” and maybe even compose a philosophical essay about gratification, but it is never gratified or ungratified. It can have no pride to be wounded for that requires feeling resentment, and a computer cannot be resentful any more than it can be forbearing. It cannot sacrifice its integrity through fear of unpopularity for it can never feel fear, nor preserve or recover it when prompted by conscience for it cannot experience guilt or shame. It cannot pander to authority from ambition or have its thinking distorted by blind rage or disabling sorrow, and so on. Its existence is wholly undisturbed by this turbulence. Or am I the son who says the wrong thing, but finally repents and obeys, anyway? The son who might not sound all spiritual and sanctified, but still does the work of love and mercy when the rubber hits the road? The son who recognizes that God is still at work, here and now, doing new things, transformative things, salvific things? The son who changes his mind when new truth, new life, new possibility, and new hope, reveal themselves? And yet even then— even when you saw countless others embracing the Gospel, you refused to change your minds. And so the prostitutes and tax collectors, the people at the bottom of your religious hierarchy of goodness and badness, will enter God’s kingdom ahead of you.