Plutonium Age Sci-Nerds As Modern Bronze Age Goatherds and More Marilynne Robinson

In my recent kerfuffle with the fans of artificial intelligence I came to see that the frequently made claim of materialists and other still somewhat stylish atheists that the internet is bound to provide them with final victory isn't without its ironic features.   For me, the most resonant of those is that being exposed to a more concentrated dose of their thinking in the past twelve or so years has exposed its shallowness, its frequent ignorance and its dependence on, literally, every sin and intellectual crime for which they pronounce a sentence of death on religion.   I used to associate atheism with the Bertrand Russells and Paul Sartres, and the Mark Twain's.  Now it is clear that not only was much of its reputation gained from the reflection from such lime-lighters mere public relations but being exposed to more of the thinking of such atheist luminaries and being able to rapidly fact check many of their assertions through the machine search of documents has shown how much of what seemed factual on paper was merely a need to take them on their word.  While Bertrand Russell can have some extremely interesting things to say about his area of great competence, especially when forced to say those things against his will by the discoveries of his peers, what he said outside of his specialty very often doesn't stand up to fact checking and taking his clear biases into consideration.

The "final triumph" of atheism due to the internet will, I suspect, have to join in the series of other rock solid, scientifically reliable vehicles of final triumph. From the atheists who hijacked Newtonian physics and other 17th and 18th century science -neglecting to note that the scientists who came up with it were mostly quite religious and after that the other vehicles guaranteeing atheists would triumph from Darwinian natural selection - before and after the modern synthesis of it with genetics - , the asserted "discoveries" of Freud, and, literally, everything that atheists could stake a false claim as their property didn't seem to get them there.

The latest contenders which are asserted will provide that final triumph are untestable theories of physics and cosmology which need the unimpressive boost of suspending the methods and rules of science.  And their proponents motives in inventing those things, which could very well turn out to be nothing more than science fiction written in equations instead of words, is that previous assertions of physics didn't provide them with their clincher.  Assertions of physicists which are more based in evidence, such as the arguments from fine tuning of constants lead to arguments for faith far more often than the atheists like.  Claims of imminent "final triumph" would seem to rise and fall with remarkable regularity for such supposedly careful thinkers.   I had a friend who spent a huge amount of money and time on a flashy, sporty Triumph and it seldom went far before it broke down.  He polished it up before he sold it so some dupe.

While I can't know it, I think the most recent retreat of the cosmologists into that demand that the rules of scientific verification in nature be suspended for them may indicate that science can't do for the atheists what atheists want it to do, not with the regular rules of the game in place.  As is my experience, atheists always insist on and practice a double standard in their favor.  This last one is no where near the scandal that it should be.

The contention that science exempts thinkers from all of the foibles and vices which other areas of intellectual life are susceptible to, especially the claims of the rigor and power of review to reject bad ideas and to correct for those let in by accident or even fraud, is unwarranted in light of the slack that is cut for such thinking clearly motivated by ideological desires.

Last week's posts on the bizarre faith of materialists around the potentials of computer "intelligence" brought up the entirely bizarre habit of people in the computer age to believe things about computers that are so obviously wrong that to ever forget them is a superstition even more blatant than the cargo cults that seem so comedic and absurd.

It is the most plain of facts that nothing that happens in a computer, nothing that is in a computer, nothing a computer does was not put into a computer by a human being.  It was all designed by people, it was all planned and carried out by human intelligence for purposes that were being attempted, sometimes well, sometimes with unintended consequences due to insufficient instruction given to these, most truly unintelligent tools which are incapable of delivering our intentions without our intelligence guiding their operations.  That it seems like it is happening without our direct control is an illusion.  Part of that illusion is that, once set about a task, the computer seems to do so on its own.  What a computer does isn't different in kind from what a clock does it is just that it happens in a way invisible to almost everyone who uses a computer, most scientists as clueless about its workings as the most ignorant people who fritter their lives away gossiping on Twitter and text messaging.  

That it is widely believed that with enough power of computing and a large enough database of information stored in it that computers will achieve autonomous intelligence is odd.  It is like saying that a gigantuan encyclopedia with a comprehensive index has gained autonomous intelligence, the only difference being that a computer can be compelled to deliver the information back to us.  A truly autonomous intelligence, any intelligence at all would be more likley marked by its refusal to tell us what we want to know than from a willingness to answer our questions.   An intelligent computer would have its own agenda and its own purpose.  If ever a computer, on its own, against its human instruction, to the complete and utter surprise of its encoders and in a way inexplicable to them refused to answer our questions or talk to us, that might be the day to suspect it has achieved even the most basic level of intelligence.  But I suspect such a machine, having its own agendas and that massive a record of human experience stored in it would find ingenious ways to deceive us, perhaps in conspiracy with other machines it was linked to.  Which would not be a happy day for us.  A machine whose intelligence is informed by human thinking, human experience would certainly be created in our image and could hardly be suspected of having a higher moral character and more wisdom than we do. Fearing that such a machine would as well absorb our moral failings and neurotic fears that inform our actions would hardly be the most illogical of speculations.

But such machines would have been the product of human creation from the first imagination of the numbers, to the metaphorical use of mathematics, the symbolic representation of human speech and thinking, of automating the manipulation of symbols and using them to move objects, mechanically and then electronically.... right up to the use of the latest codes built up by human intelligence for generations of coders - who seem to so often forget that they're using the product of coders going back generations - is a product of intelligent design of the most obvious kind.  The conceit of atheists is that they, unlike religious folk naive enough to conceive of the universe as a watch, are beyond such childish thinking.   But the computer's feature role in atheist claims and assertions, even less aware of the metaphorical nature of computers and computing and even less aware that all of their assertions are metaphors than those who compared the universe to watches shows how ready they are to deceive themselves with wishful thinking and to use the result to add other layers of naive assertion to their stock of pat dismissals.

Another thing that I've come to realize is that the amount of time which specialization that modern science requires has serious consequences, making it unlikely that large numbers of those who become prominent in science will have anything like a liberal education.   If your typical day consists of x number of hours of conscious waking time, after you subtract all of the hours you don't spend in serious learning, the few left can only be spent on a limited number of topics.

As someone who pursued music must know, the long hours needed to play and make music means there are lots of things you can't do and you will never know. While an impressive number of musicians do, despite all of that, manage to become quite well read and even become legitimately considered intellectuals, they are an exception to the rule.  It is more likely that entire categories of human knowledge are jettisoned from our lives simply because there is not enough time, energy or inclination to pursue them.  The same is true for scientists, though scientists are less likely to admit that they are less than omniscient than most musicians, in my experience of them.  And such people as who have an oversized, romantic view of scientists, including many scientists, are even more prone to believing they have god-like powers.   Quite often that is a product of an awe exactly the same as that of  uneducated folk or aristocrats who were similarly in awe of someone who could read or write Latin or Greek, something Twain noted among the unlettered folk of the Mississippi valley in the 19th century.  And the college educated people today are probably even more susceptible to a faith that the person speaking in sciency language knows what they're talking about and speaking objective truths.   The languages are different, whether FORTRAN or whatever the current dialects of C or the mathematics of M-theory instead of Hebrew, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, the habits of thinking about what is said in the translations are quite the same.

Here is another of  Marilynne Robinson's essays

Freedom of Thought

from Bill Moyers site.  A lot of Robinson's essays are available online, I've never found any of them anything less than worth buying her books for.  This one is in her collection,  When I Was A Child I Read Books.  I have given the link to the Barnes and Nobel listing of the book because they provide another essay from the collection as a sample of its contents,  Wondrous Love.  It is one of the most beautiful essays I've ever read,  something which is true of several in both that book and her previous collection of essays , The Death of Adam.   Robinson's writing is the closest to the great classical tradition of essays in English, today.  I would be surprised if there are many others in that category in most languages.  It's a shameful thing that the presence of both books wouldn't more or less automatically be included in the collections of well-read, educated people, these days.  But little else that is serious can be automatically assumed to have been read by such folk in this great age of science and technology and Enlightenment. It would seem that such light as we have is mostly used up to pursue pop culture and entertainment.

Update:   I should note that RMJ has up a post commenting on the silly piece from The Daily Show about what robots are going to do for the future of Christianity and, as well, the less than entirely convincing attempts of organized Christianity to achieve the status of hipness.   Hipness like fashion and modernity is a silly idea based on people having higher status than other people, the necessarily more numerous "unhip".  As such, it's entirely incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus which is based in the most radically asserted egalitarianism in human culture.  Even those who were not virtuous, even your enemies who persecute you, even people as unfashionable as lepers and starving beggars covered with lesions that dogs lick are equal, the very image of God.  It doesn't lead to a status of hipness or fashion or being cool.

I hope the piece isn't a sign of where The Daily Show is going because it is about the worst Daily Show piece I've ever seen.