Most of your opinions aren't yours - and a philosopher has a name for it

People inherit institutions, values, and patterns of thinking, speaking, and behaving from ancestors. Outsourcing thinking to AI is one risk, but another older risk is outsourcing to inherited beliefs and authority. People often accept ideas because someone with authority said they are right or because everyone has always done it that way. Noticing inherited “dead closures” can enable change, but most of the time people do not notice. A closure is a way of seeing and using the world, such as how an artist uses a pencil or how a child uses it as a weapon. Dead closures are widespread lines people repeat without examining alternatives. Modernity can treat nature as a “standing reserve,” turning trees into lumber, water into sewage, and animals into food, which is one closure among others.

"A lot is being written about how AI risks dumbing us down. We outsource thinking to ChatGPT and trust an LLM's output or understanding more than our own. But there is a more ancient outsourcing going on - one in which we think the thoughts our ancestors thought. Someone with authority tells us it's right, so we say it's right. Everyone's always done it this way, so I'll carry on doing it this way."

"The good news is that we can notice this and take steps to challenge it. The bad news is that most of the time, we don't. Closing the world In this week's Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Hilary Lawson about HowTheLightGetsIn, the world's largest philosophy and music festival. And during our conversation, Lawson argued that we all operate under what he called the "dead closures of previous folk.""

"A closure, for Lawson, is a way of seeing the world and using the world. An artist "closes" a pencil for drawing, a writer "closes" it for writing, and an angry child might "close" it as a weapon to stab the wall. Sometimes these closures can be humdrum and practical like this, but they can also be far more widespread."

"The philosopher Martin Heidegger, for example, argued that modernity has learned to see nature as a "standing reserve." We see trees in terms of lumber, water in terms of sewage, and animals in terms of food. This is a "closure." It's one way to see and use the world, but, as Heidegger and Lawson both argue, it's not the only one."

Read at Big Think