On depersonifying oneself

Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature, writes: To liken the mountain to a man and talk of its “humor” or “rage” does little harm. But to liken the man to the mountain proposes that all human relationships are what Martin Buber might have called I-it or perhaps it-it relations. The mountain, personified in our speech, will not become a person, will not learn a more personal way of being. But the human being, depersonified in his own talk, and thought, may indeed learn more thingish habits of action. Bateson 1979:101 Two thoughts on this. First thought. I haven’t edited out the casual sexism here because it is fitting to the case this made me think of: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proudly declaring “I am a stochastic parrot”, appropriating the metaphor Emily Bender and colleagues put forward to highlight the nature of large language models. It was a cheap shot, and (therefore) it was widely boosted by techbros, who have long given up about reading or understanding any sophisticated argument, and…