OpenGPT-2: We Replicated GPT-2 Because You Can Too
It&#x27;s fun to feed it the first paragraph of the Sokal affair paper:<p>Prompt:<p><i>There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal&#x27;&#x27; physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective&#x27;&#x27; procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.</i><p>Completion:<p><i>Before one can explore these ``objective&#x27;&#x27; principles and procedures, one must do something important, namely, invent the objectivity -- or, more precisely, the objectivity-transcendent properties -- of the ``subjective&#x27;&#x27; functions of ``man&quot; (as a species of &#x27;&#x27;objective&#x27;&#x27;, or something-in-itself-independent, human, being). Since the 19th century, this has been done on a literal or phenomenological level, the metanarrative of psychoanalysis. However, the ultimate test of what constitutes an objective fact or structure is the statistical discovery of reliable facts or structures residing in the human mind or body. That is what the discipline of psychology is for. The distinction between the subjective and the objective is therefore necessary for the discipline of psychological science, which is by no means a waste of time, which is today a flourishing field of scientific inquiry, and which might contribute a great deal toward furnishing a genuinely complete theoretical understanding of human behavior and psychical experience.<p>In short, the philosophical implications of the post-Enlightenment philosophy of the sciences and of psychical psychology are -- when considered in the context of both human existence and human thought -- deeply unsatisfactory. Once we abandon the most basic postulate of scientific rationality -- that subjective knowledge and belief and behavior are not to be said to be existent but to be, not to be, knowable -- there is nothing left to suggest that the content of human knowledge and experience is dependent upon our conscious perceptions or personalities. We might describe that content as ineffable (it is irreducible to language, outside the experience of individual thinkers), or inconceivable (that which is not one&#x27;s own consciousness, but is beyond the realm of conscious experience). In either case, there is no genuine need for an objective world, or, at least, no need for an objective foundation. In that sense, it is erroneous to assert that the scientific standpoint is a paradigm of objective reality; rather, it is the antidote to the paradigm of irreducible subjectivity and self-consciousness.<p>Unsupported by this analysis of the problem of scientific knowledge, the field of psychical science is often rejected by younger scholars, for whom the study of the human condition and its ineffable psychology is regarded as a particularly enticing but very unapproachable form of mysticism. They regard this section of the theory and practice of modern scientific inquiry as a kind of metaphysical theory-cracking rather than as a vehicle for the discovery of objective facts. Such a view can only be sustained on the basis of the strictest adherence to the doctrines of empiricism and fundamental materialism, respectively, and it is by no means fruitful for the real progress of science. Let me explain.<p>The residual emphasis on irreducible subjectivity in modern Western thought (and only by the residual emphasis) is a legacy of the metaphysical concept of objective reality which, to my mind, is still embraced by the cognitivist movement of the 20th century. It is an unfortunate legacy. Irreducible subjectivity and subjectivity-dependent, subjective perceptions were at the root of the metaphysics of Buddhism, and these beliefs now constitute the dominant conception of reality in contemporary Western philosophy, particularly Kantian, Descartesian, and Hegelian thought, which are each deeply indebted to Aristotelian theories of subjectivity.<p>While both these views of reality are patently absurd, and since the scientific revolutionary of the middle 19th century was able to disregard or repudiate them, the followers of Kant and Descartes were able to maintain that there is no need for a foundation for the science of knowledge. They could do this because they held to a primitive, problematic conception of objectivity, based on the notion of an objective, external world, in which human consciousness, thus independent of any particular body, mind, or culture, was inchoate, mutable, and subject to change or speculation. There was therefore no need to search for a theory of experience. Science and experience were simply different approaches, of which each was as good as the other, and they both...</i>