This past weekend, I took my daughter to a nearby waterpark, and, like the other parents there, I ruminated about ego dissolution, ecstasy, and the “fourth drive” toward self-transcendence, which I’ve devoted a large portion of my professional life to studying.
As I watched the panoply of glee and delight unfolding all around me, I wondered why children love slides (and waterslides) so much, and the different ways this could be explained: neuroscientifically, evolutionary-biologically, psychologically (and perhaps psycho-sexually – it seemed to me that the kids’ moments of self-annihilation on the slides was a kind of petit mort), and in terms of the philosophies of religion and mysticism.
And then, that evening, I asked Claude about all of this.
What follows is a two-part essay on the result. First, I will provide, with minimal annotation, Claude’s detailed and, for the most part, excellent responses to my questions. This could be the whole essay – it runs almost 2,000 words, and personally I found it fascinating. But reading it, it seemed as though there was a second meta-conversation in my mind about LLMs and what they can, cannot, and will probably soon be able to do. So the second part of this post is about that, and also about what it means for me.
Oh, and Claude is the name of an LLM (Large Language Model) AI chatbot. It occurs to me that I just assumed you knew that.
1. The conversation
(Me): From a neurological and evolutionary biology perspective, why does it feel good (for kids especially) to go down slides, waterslides, etc.?
(Claude:) Great question! The answer weaves together several fascinating threads of neuroscience and evolutionary biology.
