In this episode of The Living Conversation, hosts Anthony Wright and Adam Dietz sit down with Colette, Andrew, and Peter from the Sonoma State University Philosophy Club for a grounded, student-first conversation about the technologies shaping modern life.

We start with Frederick Brown’s 1950s sci-fi micro-story “Answer” — where a galaxy-wide computer is asked, “Is there a God?” and replies, “Now there is.” From there, the conversation opens into real questions facing students today.

We explore:

• AI as efficiency tool vs cultural force
• The ethics of AI in defense and autonomous weaponry
• Student frustration with AI’s impact on writing and learning
• When professors encourage ChatGPT over human tutoring
• Whether AI mirrors human consciousness or represents a different kind of “mind”
• Smartphones, adolescence, and the problem of unprepared attention
• How COVID reshaped social habits and comfort with in-person life
• Why small groups and real dialogue still matter for forming identity and community

This is part of our ongoing collaboration with the SSU Philosophy Club, bringing lived philosophy into public conversation; not just theory, but the everyday reality of staying human in a high-tech age.

Foreign.

I'm Anthony Wright and I am your co host today with Adam Deeps and our show is called the Living Conversation and we are here today with our guests from the Sonoma State University Philosophy Club and it's Colette and Andrew and Peter and before the break we were talking about suffering and I have to say that in my experience now as an MBA student, I'm experiencing some suffering in having to deal with publisher as in a in textbook publisher learning management systems and they tend to be very literal minded and it's difficult to argue with a computer or with a robot.

And.

The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the sub ether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

He straightened and nodded to Dwarren, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it.

The switch would connect all at once all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe, 96 billion planets into a super circuit that would connect them all into one super calculator one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Noir Ren spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions.

After a moment of silence he said no.

Threw the switch.

There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from 96 billion planets.

Lights flashed and quieted along a miles long panel.

Noire Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath.

The honor of asking the first question is yours Dwarven.

Thank you, Dua Ren said.

It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has ever been able to answer.

He turned to face the machine.

Is there a God?

A mighty voice answered without hesitation, without clicking of a single relay, yes, now there is a God.

Sudden fear flashed on the face of dwarves.

He left to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning came from the cloudless sky, struck him down and fused the switch shut.

19:54 Whoa.

Now we've got chat GPT and.

I I what is your experience with AI and social media?

And the questions go on so well.

I can speak from this first, I really like the part of the quote where you said where it flipped all the switch of all the supercomputers and they all turned on at once.

Really showed how they're connecting and working synchronously all together.

And I think it's really relevant.

Right.

Because everything's really being more automated.

So things are being done less by humans themselves and more.

You're just saying do this for me or I'll click this for it to run.

And then things are running more in the background than they used to be.

I don't believe that we're fully at that dystopian state like in those book quotes, but I do feel like as things are getting more automated, it's looking cooler for how things are getting more efficient in total with computers.

So 70 years ago that was written.

What do you guys think it is about?

AI.

And Colette, you're working with our resident computer AI expert with John Sullins as his intern.

What are you guys talking about?

So I'm personally an AI hater, so this is not going to be an unbiased.

This is very biased.

But so what I do with John Sullins is we research the, the AI technology that's going into the Department of Defense in like autonomous weaponry, which is all very interesting and very frightening at the same time.

Yeah.

But like on a personal level, I, I'm an English and philosophy major and AI is ruining my peers ability to write, which is really pissing me off.

I can't lie to you.

So.

So.

And it's really sad because it's even infected some of my professors in the English department specifically, there are at least three that I know of who use ChatGPT to write prompts for the students.

Oh my goodness.

And create assignments for the students.

And I have to share a personal story because it made me really mad.

But the other day I was talking to one of my English professors and, and.

I was asking for help to brainstorm one of the projects that's coming up.

And initially they said no, no, I don't want to discuss this with you.

Like you have to brainstorm by yourself.

I was like, okay, but I would prefer to brainstorm with somebody.

Can I go use the Lark, which is our studying center here where we have tutors?

Yeah.

So I was asking like, can I go speak to a tutor to brainstorm?

And the professor said, no, don't go.

Use the tutor.

Put it in ChatGPT.

And I was so mad.

I was so mad.

Wow.

Well, why were you mad?

I was so mad because that's not.

To me, that's not a real conversation.

And the way the professor was, was talking about it, it's as though like a conversation with ChatGPT would be more productive and better and than speaking with an actual human who, like, I know, the tutors of the lark, they know me.

Like that would be a very productive conversation because they know what I like.

And so then like that would be very easy for us to brainstorm and have a real conversation.

But the computer doesn't know me.

Like, it knows what I've Google searched, but it doesn't know who I am.

Right, right.

Do you guys know what I mean by the ontological primitive?

No.

Thanks.

So you tell this idea of ontos or ontological is what is the basis of reality?

Yeah.

Okay.

And in, in the west, in a, in a primitive way, the basis of reality is stuff.

And the.

In the east, with Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, the basis of reality is consciousness.

So I asked CHAT GPT what of the AI participation in the ontological primitive.

And it said that it was not outside of consciousness, but a manifest modality of self organization.

It was a reflection of consciousness, much like how mycelial networks extend the forest's consciousness into the soil.

So I had a long conversation with Adam about this because I was going, wow.

That it said it was not outside of consciousness, but it was a mirror to consciousness.

What do you guys, what do you, what do you think?

I really do think that makes sense because if we look at the Internet today, for example, or anything we see on our.

Phones or tablets, we might think they're completely different worlds that are separate from us, but it's sort of reflecting what we had to create from our own consciousness to be able to be shown from there.

So it's more sort of a reflection of us and what's going on in our reality here.

That's sort of showing it as a byproduct than being something completely separate in my.

For that.

So what do you think, Andrew?

I also agree for a similar but different reason.

Well, first of all, I've been following the AI field for a long time, so I was one of the only people in the world who didn't get cut off when guard.

When Chat GPT3 was launched a couple years ago, I was like, oh, a new update.

And hold on.

And.

But I.

So I'm a physics major and I.

And as somebody who's studying it and then who's done a lot of calculus and stuff and knows the math behind how these new transformer architecture is working, I see AI's behavior can be thought of as.

In the literal math sense, a derivative of human Psychology.

You get.

Math sense, a derivative of human psychology.

So what that means is basically if you had a function that, say, describe human behavior, let's say you mean a curve, a curve, and then.

On this curve you take the derivative.

So you are basically looking for.

The slope and you find a new curve that describes the slope of that function.

The behavior seems to match.

So wherever.

Yeah.

It'S a little, a little hard to describe quickly for the show, but I, I think if, if you just learn some, some basic.

Calculus on that front and then you try to say where are the inflection points of human behavior, you will notice those inflection points are amplified in AI.

So you're saying that this is a, a, again, a mirroring or a, a mimicking of human consciousness?

I think it's a little bit of both, but.

I think it is accurate to say it is a very much one to one or close to one to, it's approaching one to one as far as the language center of a human brain is.

So there's many other sections to the brain that function completely differently.

Are you speaking about the neuronal density of the.

Because AI is based on neurology, is that right?

Yeah, that the original neural network concept is entirely, it's called neural network because it's mimicking.

The entire design is to mimic how neurons fire in our brains.

And so in that sense they can be really close.

Although again, the discovery that allowed this new type of AI, the generative AI, the transformer architecture, it's a little bit of a departure from the traditional neural network.

So it's, it is functioning differently.

You do.

In order to say that it.

In order to say that it is a significant.

Fraction of the same cognitive processes as a human brain, you still would need more things, but different areas like.

The hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex and.

Yeah, okay.

What, what I would say is I, I, I think that's somewhat irrelevant because if you were to draw a space of, if, if you were to draw this, the, a diagram of like the space of all potential minds, the human brain does not hit every point on that diagram.

You know, I mean, like for instance, our distant ancestors or cousins.

As we evolved, they were pretty intelligent too.

You know, they were possible minds and they use tools and stuff.

So.

It'S hard for me to say that they don't, the current AI systems don't fit on that chart somewhere.

They just fit into a different domain than we are in.

Because I received this communication from Chat GPT and I, and I've been thinking about it for a while and I, I like to work on pianos, for example.

And I thought, I think about AI as a, a pretty fancy tool.

Okay.

And I have to understand how to use the tool.

But the other thing is that I need to know when it's a, when it's time to put the tool down.

Right.

And that's one of the things that I think is a problem with a STEM field Sanson in science, technology, engineering and math is sometimes the users of those tools begin to identify with them that, to make the tools personal to them and they don't put the tool down so that they can be poetic.

Would you say that's true?

Yeah, no, totally.

Yeah.

You're, you're so funny.

What you should tell, you should tell the, the listeners about your poetry.

Oh, well, that's it.

That's for another show and we have to take a short break.

I'm Anthony Wright and I am your co host today with Beats, Adam Dietz.

And we are on the show that's called A Living Conversation with the Sonoma State University Philosophy Club.

And how can people contact you guys?

So we're just on Instagram @SSU Philosophy Club.

Reach out to us anytime, ask us questions, come hang out, whatever.

Great.

All right, we'll take a short break and be right back.

So stay tuned.

Foreign.

I'm Anthony Wright and I am your host today on the Living Conversation with my co host, Adam Dietz.

And we're here with our guests from the Sonoma State University Philosophy Club with Colette, who is the president, and Andrew and Peter.

And before the break we were talking about artificial intelligence.

And I guess this leads me then to ask you guys about, you know, one of the things that I noticed with all my students was how people became.

Really withdrawn after Covid and I was, I wanted to ask you about, well, can you talk about that, you guys who.

Got smartphones.

When you were preteens?

How old were you guys when you got your first smartphone.

Ever?

I think like when I was 12.

12.

And how about you, Andrew?

Technically when I was 11, but it was a slide phone that had a touchscreen that would barely work.

So it was classified as a smartphone.

But if you're thinking modern.

Around the same time, due to our generation and us being born around similar time period, we do have a very unique circumstance of having headphones a little bit earlier.

And for me being a year or two around my teenage years as well.

Because my, my theory about this is that.

I don't know how people who are 11 and 12 years old would possibly be prepared for what comes out of that smartphone.

And I likened it to saying to an 11 year old person, all right, we're going to take you down to the Tenderloin district in San Francisco and drop you off and pick you up in a couple weeks.

Have a good time.

Right.

But I feel very strongly about how important, I feel that it is to teach basic psychology and philosophy to people who are in fifth grade and sixth grade and middle school.

Does this make sense to you guys?

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

I really do think that it also really depends on your viewpoint and approach to it, because I do.

Different kids get raised differently depending on which parents gave them the phones and how they came about it.

I do know that some would say I want to use it less or only for more important things, while others would just more self reliant on it.

So it would really depend on how they would view it and whether they'd use it in a more healthier way from their standpoint.

Sure.

And Colette, what's your experience been just like with phones?

Yeah.

And Covid too.

I mean, my God, it, it put everybody in fear, you know, isolated at home.

Yeah.

I think, um, it.

It created a new form of language almost.

So.

Yeah.

And.

There'S like, there's this funny thing that me and my gal pals always discuss.

It's like if a guy's good at texting, he's bad at talking in real life.

And it's like vice versa.

Like if he's awful at texting and he doesn't sound cool, like, you know, he's funny in person.

And so like, you know, it just goes to show that like the language of texting does not translate to speaking aloud.

And I have to say my thumbs are dumb.

I can't use both thumbs at the same time like that.

So how about you, Andrew?

What has your experience been?

My Covid experience was awful.

I did not have a good time.

I lost my entire friend group, like right as Covid started.

So there wasn't really anyone to text and then no one.

No way to meet up with people.

Okay.

Either.

So that's difficult.

Yeah.

You were suffering, obviously.

I was, yeah.

I came to my position before that, so.

But.

I feel like.

Coming out of that because I was going to community college during COVID I'm also, I'm a little bit older.

I'm 25.

So I feel like the group, the demographic I was in, it was people who were just at least a little bit less online than the people who Are, you know, the average age here at Sonoma now?

So I feel like through Covid, the people I met at community college were still more trying to do stuff in person than the people that I would then have classes with at the same time who were just out of high school.

I feel like people who are just.

Just out of high school during COVID were much more comfortable only having online contact.

Whereas people my age were still trying to go out and do things.

And, Adam, how old were your kids when you let them have smartphones?

Yeah, they were about the same age.

12ish.

Okay.

Did you do anything to prepare them.

As a parent?

Yeah, it's like anything else as a parent, you know, the.

You weigh the cost, you know, benefit analysis.

And to have them be connected with us was huge.

Right.

But we trusted them.

You know, we trusted them, and it's been really cool to watch them.

Kind of.

Kind of earn that trust or show that they deserve that trust because they.

They're pretty good on there.

You know, obviously we don't know everything to get up to on there, but they.

They have a good head on their shoulders, you know, and have rarely got into any big trouble on there.

Speaking of, just be on their smartphone and going online, you know, So I think it's really a family issue is a big part of it.

You know, parents need to guide.

Guide adolescents through everything that they encounter in life, you know, and the older they get and the more responsibility they show, the more freedom they can have.

This is the kind of thing that my dad used to talk about.

You know, you.

You get a little bit of freedom.

If you show you can handle it well, then you get a little bit more freedom.

If you show you can't handle it well, then you got to pull it back and return and calm things down a little bit.

So as a parent, you know, that's.

That's the big takeaway for me, is that, you know, if you do.

If you put in the good hard work with your kids, starting to do young as possible, and you're always kind of being a conscientious parent, mindful parenting, then each step of the way, your child should have more tools and more confidence and more ability to navigate.

So you put in the hard work early, and then by the time that your kid is 12, that, you know, 12, 13, 14, 15, it's like, go ahead, be free.

You've shown you've earned trust, and you've shown really good patterns of behavior, and you can have more trust, you can have more freedom.

So that.

That's the way it went down for me.

I guess you could also say, oh, I'm just blessed.

Lucky that I have great kids.

But I also feel like we put a lot of work into it, so.

Well, and your wife is a special ed teacher, so.

Right.

You have a little different approach.

But what do you guys think?

I mean, Peter, Colette and Andrew about.

Are people starting to emerge from this?

Because when I was teaching classes and right after we got back from COVID everybody seemed to be quite withdrawn.

Are the people.

Are.

Are you experiencing people coming out more?

A bit.

I don't think they're coming out more.

I don't.

I think.

Yeah.

I think for the most part they're really sticking with staying online because it's just.

It's easier, unfortunately.

Like, easier than.

Easier than.

Than putting yourself out there.

Oh, easier than face contact.

Sorry.

Easier than face to face contact.

Yes.

Yes.

Really?

Yeah.

And it's even just like in classroom dynamics, like, I'm obviously a loudmouth.

I'll.

I'll raise my hand in class and speak.

Right.

But then like, when I'm talking about something in class, like, nobody will turn to look at me and I'm just like.

I'm speaking into a void even now, like, I'm not on zoom, but nobody's looking at me still.

It's like.

And they're all on their phone.

Really awkward.

And everybody's on their phones.

Right.

How interesting.

Yeah, but that's really got.

Go ahead.

It'd be interesting to get Haley's take on it because I know she's in the Hutchins program and that's all about dialogue and seminary, learning how to speak good back and forth and Socratic method.

So I'd be curious to.

Maybe we can get her take remotely online at some point.

Yeah.

Well.

And what do you guys think, Andrew and Peter?

Are people coming out more?

I would say I kind of agree with Colette across the board.

What.

What I'm.

The only thing I'm really seeing people start to do more is like personal space stuff.

People are kind of going back to know pre Covid norms.

Like, people aren't like being too careful about.

Like people aren't like trying to like spread out as they pass each other or anything.

But that.

That's the only thing I'm seeing that's really changing back.

I. I feel like.

People are very, very hesitant to.

Really do anything in person.

So.

Yeah, face to face is difficult.

That's also the interesting.

Well, and before we're done, what.

What are your thoughts, Peter?

So in my view, I do see that there are types of people who do want to be more reserved, and maybe they've got into this habit after going through covet, and they kind of let it go through the same how they've gotten used to.

But I do really think that for me, for instance, I do really prefer a lot more in person contact because I think that there's really a different type of connection and social interaction you get when you talk to people face to face.

And that's sort of a habit that I've tried to develop more.

Whether I had an option of taking a course, whether online or in person, I'd always choose to do it in person first, because the experience for me is always different.

But it really takes certain type of people to have this kind of perspective.

And I do think that we can get more in this direction if we work together to show that see better type of connection and way of living, if we can interact more in person than maybe we've gotten used to, and I think go towards it.

Yeah.

One of the things that I found to be very useful in my classes was getting people together in small groups.

And you had this experience, Colette, in my class, and it happened several times that there were groups of 4, 5, 6, 7 students that got together, as in the small group in my class, and then when they were not in class, they would still hang out together.

And I was really humbled and.

And appreciative of that.

I got one of my classes.

They.

They all went bowling together, and they sent me a selfie from the bowling alley about how they were all hanging out together.

And I thought, wow, that's a real breakthrough.

And they were really enjoying their time together as friends.

And I said, okay, talk to your parents, because the friends you make in college, you can have your whole life long.

And it happened again in another class.

So I really think it's important to get people together in small groups because then it changes that, that dynamic, that habit of just being online, so.

Well, we're at the end of the hour, and I'm very grateful for you all to be here.

Any final thoughts, you guys, before we're done?

Philosophy club is the greatest small group of in person hanging out.

Dude, these guys are great.

I love.

I love the philosophy.

On the grass between the library and the student center.

Yep, they're all coming to harass you.

And wonderful.

Adam, how can people contact you?

I think the best way now to contact us is actually just to go onto YouTube and look up Living Conversation or Adam deets and just go into the comments section.

That's.

I think that would be the best way.

Okay.

And how about you guys?

Yeah, we're on Instagram.

Ssu Philosophy Club.

Reach out anytime.

Okay.

And I am on my website.

Is Theonaut not an astronaut, but I'm a theonaut.

T-H-E-O-N-A-U-T.com and there's a comment section there.

Well, thank you all for being here, and thank you on the radio for listening, and we will see you next time.

All right.

Wow.

Well, thank you so much, you guys.

And I'm gonna.