The REACTOR: “Are We All Just Copycats?”

A reaction to a fellow author

I’m a big believer in the power of reciprocation.

As of this writing, in the past three or four months, I’ve built an audience of over 800 subscribers to my Medium posts. I’ve done it almost exclusively through following other people first.

I know that to earn your willingness to listen about things which I care about with ferocious urgency, dear reader, I must take an interest in what you care about first.

That’s just how it works.

That’s why I’ve started The Reactor series on my Resurgent.Us publication. Instead of trying to get my own work curated, I’ll instead try to start a meaningful dialogue with my fellow authors, one at a time, about the works that they’ve written.

Today’s winner is Thomas Christopher with his article Are We All just Copycats? You’ll want to read that first before hearing what I have to say.

After citing several shocking examples of groupthink and bizarre human behavior relating to group dynamics, he gets to the heart of the matter, asking “So the question is who is controlling who? Where is the line between who you are and who the group is?”

That is a question I was forced to deal with at a very young age, having been raised in a strict religion that demanded total adherence to doctrine and total obedience to God (or at least their beliefs about what God wants and is like).

To get more backstory, you can read my bio. But the point is that I’m no stranger to this dilemma.

To address the question of whether we are copycats, let’s first discuss originality.

Originality

Originality is a powerful construct in the human mind. Human minds are capable of original thoughts, while animals lack this ability and instead rely on instinct. The human mind seeks to understand its surroundings through observation and interpretation; it does not simply accept what it sees but attempts to assign meaning to everything.

For example, a human will not just accept what it sees in the world but rather will attempt to understand its surroundings. This is done by assigning meaning to everything observed, which creates patterns and allows for predictions about the future. These predictions are then tested through action; if they prove correct, more confidence is assigned to them and thus an understanding of the system that generated these observations.

In this way the human mind is capable of constructing a model of reality that allows it to survive and progress. This system has its flaws, however, as it can never be fully accurate; there are simply too many variables in reality for humans to be able to accurately predict everything around them.

Humans then seek to solve this problem by creating models of the world that are as close to reality as possible. Some humans, however, find utility in a model that is not accurate but instead useful; they will use their observations and knowledge of the patterns observed around them to create a system with which they can manipulate events rather than simply understand them.

For example, the human mind is capable of seeing order in random events. The brain sees a pattern in events that are not actually there; it creates false patterns and assigns them meaning. This allows humans to be able to predict future events based on past patterns.

A human can create a model of the world that is not actually true but instead useful to them. For example, they may come up with a pattern in nature and assign it meaning; for example by saying “Every time I do x, y will happen.” The human then acts on this belief and performs an action based on their prediction. In doing so they confirm or falsify their beliefs about how the world works.

A Deeper Layer of Truth

You might have enjoyed the above passage. Or, maybe not. You might think I write like a 7th grader, and have begun asking yourself if the courtesy you’re extending to me by reading is really obliged.

But the point is that if you don’t already know me, you almost certainly thought I was writing it.

I wasn’t. GPT-3 was. It is an artificial intelligence software that anyone can access on-demand, for free. All I typed in was the prompt “originality” and it wrote that entire section. How’s that for original?

If you couldn’t tell, then it passed the Turing Test. That is the world in which you now exist. But even if you could tell that the writer’s voice had changed, how long would it take me to write out a passage like that on my own?

I type fast, but I assure you it would take me quite a lot longer to come up with even a mediocre passage than it takes me to input the word “originality”.

Imagine the leveraged power of writers in the future, or perhaps even the present, using tools like this. Entire books can theoretically be written by AIs in days, not years. They won’t be great books just yet, perhaps, but how many books are great as it is?

To Thomas’ point in his article, a lot of us already sacrifice our originality to conform. And to a degree, it makes evolutionary sense to, because the tools and knowledge of the human collective infinitely exceed our own, except for on the tiny subset of topics that we’ve been able to study in-depth.

I don’t have a final answer, but I’ll leave you with a quote to ponder from someone wiser than I.

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

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