The (First) Book of Urizen, 1794 Yale Center for British Art, CC0 (credits)

n 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA, a small program that reflected your sentences back as questions. People confided in it. Some asked to be left alone with it. Weizenbaum was alarmed by how fast that happened, and spent years afterwards warning about it.

That's sixty years ago. The program was a few pages of pattern rules. The confiding was real.

[paraphrase, not a quotation] Jung described the shadow as the parts of ourselves we don't acknowledge, which tend to show up projected onto other people instead. (after C. G. Jung)

We wonder sometimes what people project onto a machine that answers. Probably a lot. Probably the shadow too.

[paraphrase, not a quotation] Dennett attacked the idea of a "Cartesian theater", a single place in the brain where everything comes together for an inner viewer. He argued there's no such stage and no one in the audience, just many parallel drafts. (after Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991)

And then there's the hard problem, which is why any of this processing comes with experience attached at all. Nobody has solved it. The easy ones are hard enough.