"You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words."

and his interlocutor, Phaedrus, immediately accuses Socrates of making up the legend, to which Socrates simply shrugs. Plato is very sly in writing this scene.

In fact it is Plato's Socrates in Phaedrus recounting an old Egyptian legend and he attributes the words to the god Thamus

Turns out Socrates was a tech-phobe. Only, he's not talking about the horror of smartphones. He's talking about reading and writing. Tech panics are as old as philosophy.

I’m not convinced we’re in the habit of thinking. Which is kind of Socrates point in the Phaedrus, and Plato’s apparent indifference to writing as a medium. I think we can share this indifference towards LLM chat bots. The more pressing problem IMO is the sheer wastefulness of these machines

In the Phaedrus, a 2,400 year old dialogue, Socrates' (possibly ironic?) criticism of writing looks almost identical to contemporary criticism of LLMs.

There's a much-mocked passage in Plato's Phaedrus in which Socrates rips into the use of written texts in philosophy, on the basis that they enable the ignorant to pretend knowledge of subjects they don't understand. These days I sometimes feel the old irritant had a point.

I keep thinking of Plato’s “Phaedrus” and Socrates saying the written word would lead people to become “hearers of many things”, but actually to be learners of nothing.

To become a “companion” (sunopados) of the gods (Phaedrus 248c), the soul had to re-enter its first ochēma at the moment of creation. According to Iamblichus, this vehicle was a microcosm, “produced from the entire aether . . . which possesses a generative power.”

.@leoflores.bsky.social reminding us that there was a panic about how people would lose the ability to think . . . because of writing. all the way back in the Phaedrus. #FLDH10