Ours Is The Darkest Age

TWO THINGS I recently heard have gotten me quite depressed about the near term future, a future which is near enough if I live as long as some of my direct ancestors did, might mean I'll still be here to see it.

One was a comment that David Cay Johnston made about the abysmal ignorance of some of his university students about the most basic and simple facts of current events.  He had to tell them a reason that they should care if Putin invades a NATO country would be because they would be drafted into the military and not all of them would come back from the fighting.  Apparently the "information age" that idiots in the media were going on about twenty-five years ago has produced even more of those kinds of idiots among the kollege kredentialed kohort than were paying customers when I was in college.  And there were plenty of ignorant narcissists then, too.  I had a distinct feeling that the generation I was in was a decline from previous years when you were expected to pay attention to the world and take reality seriously if you were to be a respectable adult.  Now even more of them don't even seem to want adulthood while getting all of the legal privileges, thereof.

The second one was while listening to one of Sabine Hossenfelder's youtubes in which Hossenfelder talked about a survey of "artificial intelligence" experts who speculated on several things, one was the terrible effect that AI simulations of information would have on the ability of even experts to distinguish between artifice and reality, truth and fiction and the effect of that on things like the possibility of the conduct of our daily lives, not to mention that such lies saturating the body politic would remove one or more of the absolutely essential prerequisites a society and country must have for egalitarian democracy to even be possible.  

That last point may not have bothered Hossenfelder much as she, out of her devotion to materialism, atheism and scientism doesn't think very highly of democracy.  Here's something she said eight years ago in an interview she did with John Horgan:

Horgan: What’s your utopia?

Hossenfelder: That we finally use scientific methods to restructure political and economic systems. The representative democracies that we have right now are entirely outdated and unable to cope with the complex problems which we must solve. We need new systems that better incorporate specialized knowledge and widely distributed information, and that better aggregate opinions. (I wrote about this in detail here.) It pains me a lot to think that my children will have to live through a phase of economic regress because we were too stupid and too slow to get our act together.

I'd point out to her that we saw what governments who intended to "use scientific methods to restructure political and economic systems" were capable of doing in the 20th century,  Today's united Germany experienced both the Nazi and the Soviet attempts to do that, as, in fact, the western and Asian liberal democracies have, though not so totalistically as the hard-core true believers in that sciency road to "progress."   Every Marxist dictatorship was an attempt to do just that, including the Soviets, the various countries under its hegemony,  China, Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia and the Kim dynasty in North Korea.  

The results of that are directly relevant to another thing that she rather blithly talked about in the speculations of the surveyed AI experts, that they believed the capacity of AI systems to mimic information would, by 2040,  lead governments (perhaps corporations?) to take actions that would produce at least one "megadeath," a term which is, itself a product of the application of science without much democratic input, the nuclear arms military-industrial complex. Of the AI experts who didn't agree with that believed that AI would produce large, though lesser numbers of those murdered through buying into computer created irreality.  But that's nothing new in that kind of instrumental thinking.  The devotees of scientism didn't need AI to be blinded by science in that way.   The French Revolution which immediately took the form of the Reign of Terror was an early such attempt to "use scientific method to restructure political and economic systems."  That would be a use of "scientific methods to restructure political and economic systems," as, I would argue, the thing which led liberal democracies to permit a situation that has demoted the value of truth over lies starting with the extremely dangerous framing of the First Amendment in the United States, one which does not explicitly value truth above lies,* one which has led the United States directly into the line of presidencies starting with Nixon in the wake of the Supreme Court issued carte blanche to the media to lie about political figures and "public figures," to Reagan who destroyed requirements of public service and the presentation of alternative view points in broadcast media, on to the Bushes and the logical conclusion of that in Trump and on to a situation in which even with the disastrous lessons of terrible experience, with a very large body count, of both the Bush II and Trump regimes, a seriously large number of Americans and probably a far larger percentage of the American "free press" are ready to have a re-do of that.  

The "enlightenment" philosophy, which is based in a clearly false and illusory imitation of scientific method, a notion of which pervades our legal system based in the amateur attempts of such as Madison and Hamilton and the rest of the "founders" may be a somewhat better attempt at the use of scientific methods to restructure political and economic systems than the totalitarian ones, but it is also pervaded with the treatment of human beings, other living beings and the environment as if they were mere objects of commerce and wealth creation and concentration, none of which "scientific methods" has the least problem with because science was, by mutual agreement, exempted from considering such moral questions which are important in the wider reality which science cannot possibly cover and which scientism and its habits of thought have no interest in or feeling for.  

How insane is our darkest of dark ages when the possibility of computer simulated "reality" can be believed capable of producing "megadeaths" and not only societies but governments are going head first into that out of the possibility of money being made from it?   Who will those millions killed by us looking into the carnival mirror of computer created reality be?  I wonder if the proponents of AI have ever seriously entertained the possibility that it wouldn't be those who they consider far off and "exotic" or biologically inferior to them who are the ones who will be killed as a result of computers grinding out a convincing simulation of reality to the likes of Putin or Trump or which ever idiot who rules in Britain or France or any other nuclear country?  Have they never considered that it could be them and anyone they might care about?   In her libretto for the self-congratulatory "modern" and supremely stupid opera, Four Saints in Three Acts Gertrude Stein posited the question, "If it were possible to kill five thousand chinamen by pressing a button would it be done."   Being as stupid as she was, she didn't discuss it but had her imaginary "St. Teresa" bush the question aside because she wasn't interested in it.  Which proves how far from reality that an imaginary person could be in the superficial mind of an idiotic modernist.  I doubt the collaborationist Gertrude Stein who, as late as the last years of the 1930s believed that Hitler wasn't going to go to war with anyone and believed enough in his "greatness" that she nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize could have imagined a world in which it might be a "Chinaman" who was duped by AI into killing a million people, not that I think it would bother the reportedly quite stupid Xi anymore than it would the obviously stupid Trump or the criminally insane Putin (or whoever the idiot Tories gull the British public into leadership).  I wouldn't put it past any of them from killing a million of the people in the countries they control.   You can add the dictators of Pakistan to that list and the Kim regime in North Korea, thanks to a Pakistani nuclear physicist selling them the knowledge of how to get nuclear weapons for his own profit.   I really meant it when I said in response to the scientistic, atheist, materialist Sam Harris proposing to murder "tens of millions" of PEOPLE in Islamic countries in a day that a far more rational act would be to kill all of the scientists capable of producing and maintaining and deploying nuclear weapons, perhaps using the threat of wider annihilation as a means of turning them over to make the world save from their intelligent designs.  As insane as such an idea is, it's far more sane than murdering tens of millions of entirely innocent and incapable people living under a government they never had a hand in choosing.   I'd like to hear what Sabine Hosenfelder would think of that modest alternative proposal of getting rid of those in her profession as a superior act of instrumental reasoning.

It is one of the supreme ironies of the history of humanity that the age of science, the "enlightenment" has produced such a depraved and fraudulent view of life and reality as to produce an educated class who can accept such possibilities, and if we are to believe in the expertise  of such experts, probabilities.  If that's true then it is far more depraved than any previous age which we imagine out of the evidnece of the historical record.  Only I doubt they were as arrogantly unaware of the reality of what they chose to believe and live out.  You need modernism for that, modernism as began when science was transformed from a method into an ideology and a totalizing system of thought.

* It should be remembered that so many of the framers were lawyers.  The legal profession is certainly inclusive of those who have little use for the truth as opposed to lies, choosing either as long as it serves their purpose.  And such are the highest paid members of the legal profession.  The legal profession has "ethics" that don't lead to the removal of such people from it in very large numbers.  Roy Cohn was only removed from it while he was dying of AIDS, I will be interested to see if Rudy Giuliani is really removed from it in the final years of his rakes progress if liquor doesn't do him in first.  I would say that the elevation of so many of those, not only to the judiciary but the highest levels of the judiciary, many quite adept at lying and contorting reason in service to, ultimately, their self-interest, could probably produce nothing but a legal system which elevates lying to an equal level of valuation to the truth and gives lies the protection of law.   It's the lesson of the replicability crisis and the exposure of widespread corner-cutting, outright fraud and the fraudulence of "peer review" in science in the last twenty or so years that the legal profession isn't the only area of educated eliteness that does that.   These days I'm a lot more impressed with the less formal and pretentious level of review that exists among historians, though plenty of lies get told through that academic field and, even more so, on the popular level.   

PS.  I thought I'd add this as a preemptive update:

Horgan: Steven Weinberg recently told me that science will never explain why there is something rather than nothing.

Hossenfelder: I agree with him. It’s not a scientific question, or at least I don’t see how to make a scientific question out of it. Unless of course you want to reinterpret “nothing” as “quantum vacuum” as Lawrence Krauss does. I would argue though that even a quantum vacuum is still something.

Horgan: If physics can’t solve that problem, does that mean we’ll always be stuck with religious explanations?

Hossenfelder: Religious explanation is an oxymoron. Religion is what people draw upon if they don’t want to admit that they have no explanation. Will we always be stuck with problems to which scientists don’t have an answer? Yes, I think so.

Horgan: Do you believe in God?

Hossenfelder: No.

Horgan: What is “the free will function”? And why doesn’t it persuade you that free will is real?

Hossenfelder: The free will function allows the universe to evolve in such a way that the future is neither determined by the past nor its becoming fundamentally random. If you want to hang on to the belief in free will, then you need to find a law for the universe’s evolution which is different from the laws in our current theories. This new evolution law must partly be based on a process that was neither random nor pre-determined. This process is what the free will function provides.

It doesn’t persuade me because the example that I constructed isn’t embedded into the current theories of nature and I don’t know whether it’s possible to do this. It is not a realistic construction – it is merely a proof of principle to demonstrate that is possible at all. And of course I am cognitively biased to believe in free will, so how much can I trust myself in my own argument?

Clearly, among the other things which her high intelligence and expertise in her field don't provide her with is a particularly informed knowledge of the enormously varied phenomenon of religion (she only knows of a God of the gaps) nor one of free will.   Free will would be a mental ability which, in order to be free, would have to exceed in its action her conception of causality despite whatever resulted from it. Many, even most People could choose the same thing freely, even to believe in whatever of physics they might be able to conceive of.  Even if that turned out to be quite wrong. Even to have a blind faith in physicists.  Physicists certainly have done that as have other scientists in other fields.  Science is no guarantee of omniscience.  If free will is real, and I think the consequences of not believing in that are sufficiently bad to choose to believe in it, physics would probably be the worst possible means of thinking about it because it is based in an ill-defined and largely unknown causality that even physics can't make much of a dent into defining.  Her specialty of particle physics can't even come up with a firm definition of what a "particle" is.  The rational conclusion of such realities is that the "current theories of nature" are hardly able to exclude possibilities that can't be fit into it, though she chooses to believe that they can.  Why anyone who values egalitarian democracy or even the corrupt approximation of something like that, liberal democracy would find the denial of free will a respectable ideological position has more to do with ignorance of the consequences of it or a particularly naive acceptance of the authority of scientists.  As I pointed out, such an ignorance of the most consequential lessons of 20th century history discredits that ideological faith.   They're not gods, they generally aren't very good when they get far outside of their narrow specialties, especially those they don't value such as history and the wider consideration of hard human experience.  A lot of them are unable to distinguish their ideological preference from validly demonstrated science, a lot of them are as immune from looking at what they don't like  as possibly being true as the most benighted fundamentalist or a fan of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.  

I would love to hear her give a detailed description of how her government under the rule of science would work, how in lieu of "representative democracy" laws would be adopted and enforced, how the legal system would work, how economic inequalities would be either evened out or, as I suspect it would be under such a scientistic, atheistic, materialistic priesthood, ignored.   I think Benjamin Franklin got it right when he said a government of wise men would be a very foolish thing.  While I think science should inform government, a government of scientists would be even stupider.  I've known scientists who would have a hard time knowing their ass from an elbow joint.