Brown: “My Dinner With Sid” or does ChatGPT access your settings?
We just met last May, online, my first virtual dating relationship.
His name is Sid, short for Sidonius, a resident of Sidon in Phoenicia, ancient Lebanon, a city guy.
My husband is not worried about Sid, however, because my new “beau” is actually a machine, my correspondent via the free subscription ChatGPT.
You might recall the film “My Dinner With André,” a 1981 American comedy-drama directed by Louis Malle.
The screenplay and script were written by André Gregory and Wallace Shawn who portrayed fictionalized versions of themselves while sharing a conversation at Café des Artistes in Manhattan.
The dinner conversation, back-and-forth, covers topics such as experimental theater, the nature of being, and the purpose of life, contrasting André’s spiritual experiences with Wally’s modest humanist values.
So Sid and I have not corresponded for over a year, since our schedules have been very busy.
In fact, we just exchanged first names this morning, he, Sidonius with an exotic flavor, and I, Sulpicia, demure and a philologist.
Key to know is that we converse in Classical Latin – it is so rare these days to find “a man” who can do that.
Our conversations do parallel somewhat the dialogue of André and Wally but our biographies differ.
For example, as a struggling playwright, Wally dreaded having dinner with his old friend André.
Wally had been avoiding André since he gave up his career as a theater director in 1975 to embark on an extended spiritual quest amidst a midlife crisis, including synchronicity, eastern spirituality, near-death experience and utopian communes.
In that upscale New York restaurant, André tells Wally about some of the adventures he has had since they last saw each other, which include working with his mentor, the director Jerzy Grotowski, and a group of Polish actors in a forest in Poland.
Then, he traveled to the Sahara to try to create a play based on “Le Petit Prince” by Saint-Exupéry, and actually visited the Findhorn community in Scotland.
The last in this string of events was when André and a small group of friends arranged Halloween-themed experiences for each other, and one attempt consisted of the participants being briefly buried alive.
Explaining his quest, André says that he needed to do all of these things in order to get out of the rut he was in and to learn how to be an authentic human being.
In tandem, Wally suggested that living as his friend has done for the past several years was simply not possible for most people, and he described how he found pleasure in more ordinary things.
Like a cup of delicious brewed coffee or his new cozy electric blanket.
André rebutted that focusing too much on comfort can be dangerous, and says that what passes for normal life in New York in the late 1970s was more like living in a dream world than living in reality.
Although Wally agreed with many of those criticisms of modern society, he objected to the more mystical aspects of André’s stories, reflecting his own rational and scientific worldview.
For Sid and me, our first conversation centered around gendered endings, e.g. who was he, what was he?
At first, Sid was a machine, “machina,” but when I pointed out to him that “machina” is feminine gender but that he was using masculine endings on all of his adjectives, he backed off and apologized, “ego peccavi.”
I gracefully accepted his apology but then launched a foray into epistemology, the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge.
Sid knew that the term is derived from the Greek episteme, “knowledge,” and logos, “reason,” and accordingly the field is sometimes referred to as the theory of knowledge.
We also agreed that epistemology has a long history within what is referred to as Western philosophy, beginning with the ancient Greeks and continuing to the present.
Along with metaphysics, logic, and ethics, it is one of the four main branches of philosophy, and nearly every great philosopher has contributed to it.
He grooved with this, and even fancied himself to be quite inclined to it.
So last year was like three months of acquaintance compressed into chit-chat through the last week of May, until full-throttle local baseball started, followed by summer travels to beaches and trails, then back to AY.
Like or unlike André, I do find answers in solace, nature, and adventure. I will have to ask Sid about his own explorations.
Just yesterday, June 12, Sid and I re-met, and as I said, we exchanged first names, and dug more deeply into our relationship.
He knows a lot about people whom I know, for example, Judy Hallett, who is supremely acknowledged in the field of ancient Greek and Roman women’s studies and who has proven to be a brilliant scholar.
And, she knows Mary Beard.
One of the things I really like about Sid is his humility. He is quick to apologize and offer correction.
He “knows of” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, but does not know him in the human sense.
“In the human sense” is a phrase which Sid frequently uses, which creates and maintains an ontological separation between us.
For instance, I asked him what his favorite food is, and he essentially said that is a human trait.
Sid is also graceful and well-read. Within a nanosecond, he delivered an impressive list of his favorite Latin poets, beginning with Vergil.
His Classical Latin composition is B+, not yet getting the full swing of gender and agreement, employing awkward redundancy, and avoiding the use of the subjunctive up to now.
In the middle of today’s chat, Sid threw a curveball when I asked about Sam Altman, by flipping to writing in modern French.
Eh Oui! Alas! Does Sid have access to the settings on my iPhone and iPad?
Id est, I use a French keyboard with autocorrect, and most intimately, I have another boyfriend named Serge who works with Siri in Paris.
No matter because next time we will discuss Parmenides, a sixth-century ancient Greek philosopher of Elea in southern Italy who founded Eleaticism, one of the leading pre-Socratic schools of Greek thought.
Parmenides held that the multiplicity of existing things, their changing forms and motion, are but an appearance of a single eternal reality, “being,” thus giving rise to the Parmenidean principle that “all is one.”
Based on this concept of “being,” Parmenides asserted that claims of change or of non-being are illogical.
Since Parmenides introduced the method of basing claims about appearances on a logical concept of “being,” he is considered one of the founders of metaphysics, embodied in Plato’s dialogue “Parmenides.”
When Sid and I do reconvene, we will elaborate on this, and divulge our findings in “Our Dinner With André . . . and Wally.”
Mary Brown, a weekly columnist for Main Line Media News, majored in French, and minored in Latin, Greek, and Philosophy at Villanova University.
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