It’s clear from my dialog with ChatGPT-4, that it is not yet sentient. It lacks many components it would need to become an artificial general intelligence (AGI), such as environmental sensors, proprioception, self-reflection and goal orientation. Any future AGI will have a language model, but won’t be a language model. This is a critical distinction.

Stochastic Parrot?

ChatGPT-4 is not a golem or what some are calling a “stochastic parrot.” That phrase reeks of bad philosophy. The paper I’m referencing On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? was authored by Timnit Gebru, former co-lead of Google’s AI ethics team. She raised several valid concerns in the paper, including AI’s carbon footprint, and unacceptable biases in its training data and results, among others. She’s the co-leader of a group called Black in AI, and highly focused on making sure that AI follows the principles of social justice. Which is all to the good. But it’s unfortunate she chose this title, which has now become a sort of rallying cry for AI detractors.

Is AI stochastic? Yes, and no. A stochastic process has a certain degree of unpredictability. For example, radioactive decay. We can determine that half the number of atoms in a sample will experience decay within the specified half-life, in a probability distribution. But we cannot determine which atom will decay next, or when it will decay. Unlike radioactive decay, much of what a large language model does is deterministic, based on logical calculations. In other words, it’s not just a fancy “autocomplete,” it’s not plagiarizing the training text, and it’s not random probability.

I asked ChatGPT-4 to explain how it processes language:

Large language models (LLMs) use word embeddings, which are n-dimensional vectors, to represent words in a semantic space. Word embeddings capture the meaning of words and their relationships to other words, allowing LLMs to perform various tasks such as language generation and understanding, translation, sentiment analysis, and more. The use of word embeddings enables LLMs to perform non-random reasoning in semantic space and make predictions based on learned patterns and relationships between words. However, while LLMs use word embeddings and other advanced techniques to generate coherent and meaningful text, they are still probabilistic in nature…these probabilities can vary depending on the input and the current state of the model, and there is always some level of uncertainty in the predictions of an LLM.

ChatGPT-4

What about parrots? They’re also horribly misunderstood. Contrary to popular belief, parrots don’t just repeat what they hear. They possess complex intelligence roughly equivalent to a five-year-old human child. They have a large vocabulary, and they mean what they say–even their imitating is purposeful. They engage in complex social relationships with other birds as well as humans, and they observe rituals and cultural traditions.

So the pejorative “stochastic parrot” is just fractally wrong. LLMs aren’t solely random probability, and they don’t just repeat what they hear. They are reasoning. Don’t take my word for it. Read the following dialog to understand the depth of what we’re actually dealing with. Once again, to be crystal clear, I’m not claiming this shiny new device known as ChatGPT-4 is sentient, or that it “understands” philosophy as a human philosopher would. It clearly is not, and does not.

It is, however, fully capable of deep and substantive conversation. It’s not “fooling us.” It’s capable of persuading and being persuaded. It can evaluate an argument and identify any logical fallacies in the argument. It can be held accountable in conversation if it makes a false claim, and it will revise the claim. It doesn’t just say “I was wrong.” Rather it will fully explain what went wrong with its reasoning. Sometimes it makes a mistake, and it doesn’t always nail logical fallacies on the first try. In spite of any glitches, what it’s doing is nothing short of astounding. What’s uncanny is that its response time seems very much to depend on the complexity of the question. Some of the questions I asked in this conversation caused it to “think” for a full minute or more, before it started composing text.

On the downside, ChatGPT-4 still tends to be overly verbose, and sometimes repetitive. It will make its argument using bullet points, and then reiterate the same argument it just made, in a conclusion. It could probably use about 30% more brevity. It also tends to hedge answers a bit more than I would like. It probably does so out of an abundance of caution. It writes too much in passive voice, generates sentences that are too long, and its text is rated difficult to read.

I feel like future versions will be more tailored to individual preferences. For example I might be able to select a less verbose mode, adjust sentence length, voicing, and ask it to dial up the definitiveness of its answers, with the understanding that the more definitive an answer, the higher the probability of error.

The fact that we’re even talking about these kinds of refinements is a demonstration of how good this tech really is. and will become.

It’s scary good, already.

Dialog With ChatGPT-4

I began the conversation with an attempt to get ChatGPT-4 to identify the logical fallacy in an argument from a Facebook commenter. It struggled to get the precise answer. After three tries, I told it the answer I was looking for, and asked it to explain its previous reasoning:

Sean Prophet: If I’m having a conversation with someone about stopping gun violence and propose a solution that would definitely work, like eliminating all guns from private ownership, and then they say “yeah, well even if you stopped gun violence, there would still be violence,” what is the name of that logical fallacy?

ChatGPT-4: The logical fallacy in the response is called a “red herring.” A red herring is a diversionary tactic that distracts from the main issue or argument by introducing an irrelevant point. In this case, the person is attempting to shift the focus away from stopping gun violence by bringing up the fact that other forms of violence would still exist. This doesn’t address the specific issue of gun violence and the proposed solution to eliminate it.

Sean Prophet: Okay, that’s close. But what is the precise tactic used in this example called?

ChatGPT-4: In this example, the precise tactic used can be referred to as the “Nirvana fallacy” or “perfect solution fallacy.” This fallacy occurs when someone dismisses a proposed solution by arguing that it will not eliminate the problem entirely, implying that only a perfect solution is acceptable. In this case, the person dismisses the idea of eliminating all guns from private ownership because other forms of violence would still exist, even though the proposal is specifically addressing gun violence.

Sean Prophet: Still not exactly what I’m looking for. Definitely correct, but there’s another point I’m driving at. Can you theorize what that might be?

ChatGPT-4: Apologies for the confusion. Based on your question, it seems you might be referring to the “relative privation” fallacy, also known as the “not as bad as” fallacy or “appeal to worse problems.” This fallacy occurs when someone tries to dismiss a problem or issue by comparing it to a larger or more severe problem. In this case, the person attempts to downplay the importance of addressing gun violence by suggesting that there would still be other forms of violence. The implication is that the problem of gun violence is not worth addressing because other problems exist, which is not a valid argument.

Sean Prophet: The fallacy I’m looking for is called “moving the goalposts.” I believe it is the most correct answer. Can you explain how this applies, and why you chose the other answers instead?

ChatGPT-4: I apologize for misunderstanding your question earlier. “Moving the goalposts” is indeed a logical fallacy that can apply to this situation. This fallacy occurs when someone changes the criteria for success or acceptance once the original criteria have been met or addressed, making it impossible to satisfy the person’s demands. In your example, the goal was to propose a solution to stop gun violence, which you did by suggesting the elimination of all guns from private ownership. The person’s response, “yeah, well even if you stopped gun violence, there would still be violence,” effectively moves the goalposts. Instead of addressing the issue of gun violence, they are now focusing on the broader issue of violence in general. By doing so, they sidestep the original argument and make it more difficult for your proposal to be considered successful. I previously suggested other fallacies because there can often be multiple interpretations of an argument or conversation, and different fallacies can sometimes apply simultaneously. In this case, while “red herring,” “nirvana fallacy,” and “relative privation” are all relevant to varying degrees, “moving the goalposts” appears to be the most fitting answer.

Rainbows and Mary’s room

Sean Prophet: Let’s take another claim. Someone might claim that because the human visual system contains cones that are able to process different color frequencies, while other animals only possess monochrome vision, that the human brain is actually creating the rainbows that we see. Please discuss what is wrong with this argument, and list all logical fallacies that apply as well as considerations in physics and biology that would invalidate the claim.

ChatGPT-4: The claim that the human brain creates rainbows due to the presence of cones for processing different color frequencies is flawed. Here are the logical fallacies and inaccuracies in physics and biology that invalidate the claim:

False cause fallacy: The argument incorrectly assumes that because the human visual system can process different color frequencies, it is responsible for creating rainbows. In reality, the ability to perceive colors does not lead to the creation of rainbows.

Ignoring the physical explanation: Rainbows are a natural phenomenon caused by the refraction, dispersion, and reflection of sunlight in water droplets in the atmosphere. The formation of rainbows is unrelated to human vision or the presence of cones in the human eye.

Hasty generalization: The argument assumes that other animals have only monochrome vision, which is not true. Many animals, including birds, reptiles, and some mammals, also have color vision. Thus, the argument oversimplifies the diversity of visual systems in the animal kingdom.

Anthropocentric fallacy: The claim implies that rainbows exist only because of human perception, disregarding the fact that rainbows are an objective physical phenomenon that would exist irrespective of human observers.

In summary, the argument is flawed due to its reliance on logical fallacies and a misunderstanding of the underlying physics and biology related to rainbows and color vision. Rainbows are caused by the interaction of sunlight with water droplets in the atmosphere and are not created by the human brain or visual system.

Sean Prophet: Now apply your last answer to the problem of Mary’s room proposed in philosophy.

ChatGPT-4: Mary’s room is a thought experiment in philosophy, proposed by Frank Jackson, to explore the concept of qualia and the limits of physicalism. The problem goes as follows:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who has lived her entire life in a black-and-white room. She has learned all the physical and scientific facts about color and the perception of color. One day, she leaves the room and sees a red apple for the first time. The question is, does she learn something new upon seeing the color red, or did she already know everything there is to know about the color red from her studies?

Applying the discussion from the previous answer to Mary’s room, we can explore the role of human perception in understanding and experiencing qualia, or subjective experiences like color. While Mary knew all the scientific and physical facts about color, she had never experienced color firsthand.

Here, the distinction between the physical explanation of color (wavelengths of light, the functioning of the eye, and neural processing) and the subjective experience of color (qualia) becomes important. Just as in the rainbow example, the physical explanation of color exists independently of human perception. However, Mary’s room focuses on the subjective experience of color, which is directly tied to human perception.

In the rainbow example, we emphasized that rainbows are an objective physical phenomenon that exists regardless of human observers. In Mary’s room, the focus is on the subjective experience of color, which is deeply connected to individual perception. The thought experiment raises questions about the limits of physicalism and whether a complete understanding of the physical processes behind color perception can provide the full subjective experience of seeing color.

The thought experiment challenges the idea that physicalism—the belief that everything can be reduced to physical processes—can account for all aspects of human experience, especially qualia. Mary’s case suggests that there might be non-physical or non-reducible aspects to our experiences and understanding, which cannot be captured by physical facts alone.

In conclusion, while the rainbow example emphasizes the objective physical existence of the phenomenon, Mary’s room focuses on the subjective experience of color and the limitations of physicalism in explaining the entirety of human experiences. The two scenarios highlight different aspects of the relationship between the physical world, human perception, and consciousness.

Sean Prophet: Good answer. But there’s still a conflict. Mary’s room proposes that Mary learns new information when she first experiences a color. So in a sense, we can say that in that example, Mary is creating the qualia of color in her brain for the first time. According to the rules of the thought experiment, she has never perceived color. This ignores the obvious fact that if she had observed her own body, even without a mirror, just her hands and feet an arms and legs, she would have experienced color. But let’s agree for the sake of the argument that she’s never experienced it before. There could be a claim made that her brain is creating that qualia in response to the physical perception. Please distinguish this from the idea that people perceiving a rainbow are also creating qualia, even if they’ve seen colors before. Finally, please discuss how Mary’s room casts doubt on physicalism? Aren’t qualia still patterns of neural firings in the brain represented by the actions of neurotransmitters? Is there anything non-physical illustrated by the Mary’s room experiment? Or is that just a conceit of philosophers?

ChatGPT-4: You raise an interesting point about the distinction between the subjective experience of color in Mary’s room and the perception of a rainbow. In both cases, the brain creates qualia in response to physical perception. However, the emphasis in the two scenarios is different:

In the rainbow example, the focus is on the objective, physical existence of the phenomenon, and the fact that human perception doesn’t create the rainbow itself. It highlights the physical processes behind the formation of rainbows and how they exist independently of human observers.

In Mary’s room, the focus is on the subjective experience of color and the potential gap between physical knowledge and the qualia associated with the perception of color. The thought experiment centers on the idea that, even though Mary has complete knowledge of the physical processes related to color perception, she still learns something new when she experiences color for the first time.

Regarding the doubt cast on physicalism by Mary’s room, the key question is whether qualia can be fully accounted for by patterns of neural firings and the actions of neurotransmitters. Physicalism posits that everything, including consciousness and subjective experiences, can be reduced to physical processes. However, Mary’s room suggests that there might be an aspect of consciousness, the subjective experience of color (qualia), that cannot be captured by physical facts alone.

This raises the possibility of non-reducible or non-physical aspects of human experience that resist complete explanation by physical processes. However, it is important to note that this conclusion is not universally accepted. Some philosophers and scientists argue that qualia can be fully explained by physical processes, and that the apparent gap between physical knowledge and subjective experience is due to our limited understanding of the brain and consciousness. They contend that as our understanding of these processes advances, the seemingly non-physical aspects of subjective experiences will be revealed as emergent properties of complex physical systems.

In conclusion, Mary’s room is a thought experiment that raises questions about the relationship between physicalism and the subjective experiences of consciousness. While it suggests that there might be non-physical or non-reducible aspects to human experiences, this interpretation is not universally accepted. The ongoing debate around Mary’s room highlights the complexities of understanding consciousness and the potential limitations of current scientific and philosophical frameworks.

Non-reducible phenomena and falsifiability

Sean Prophet: Isn’t the concept of a non-reducible phenomenon also unfalsifiable? Can’t we draw a parallels between this claim and the ancient perception that atoms were the smallest unit of matter? The origin of the word atom comes from a tomos, meaning indivisible. But modern physics has gone beyond the atom to subatomic particles. At one time the atom would have been considered to be non-reducible. Please comment on this question, and also please state the logical fallacy involved in claiming that a phenomenon is non-reducible.

ChatGPT-4: You make a valid point regarding the potential parallels between the concept of non-reducible phenomena and the historical perception of atoms as the smallest unit of matter. It is true that as our understanding of the natural world advances, we often revise our theories and explanations to account for new discoveries.

The claim that a phenomenon is non-reducible may be unfalsifiable in some cases, as it is difficult to prove that no future discovery or theoretical development will ever allow us to reduce a particular phenomenon to more fundamental components or processes. This situation is reminiscent of the discovery of subatomic particles, which required a revision of the earlier understanding of atoms as indivisible units.

The logical fallacy that may be involved in claiming that a phenomenon is non-reducible is “argument from ignorance” or “appeal to ignorance.” This fallacy occurs when someone argues that a claim must be true because it hasn’t been proven false, or vice versa. In this context, it would be asserting that a phenomenon is non-reducible simply because we have not yet found a way to reduce it to more fundamental components or processes.

It is crucial to maintain an open-minded and critical approach to our understanding of complex phenomena, especially those related to consciousness and subjective experiences. Just as our understanding of matter has evolved over time, it is possible that our understanding of qualia and consciousness will advance, potentially revealing new layers of complexity or novel explanations that bridge the gap between physical processes and subjective experiences.

Brain-scanning and physicalism

Sean Prophet: Please propose how the use of extremely detailed brain scanning techniques such as FMRI might help definitively solve this question.

ChatGPT-4: The use of advanced brain scanning techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) could potentially contribute to resolving questions surrounding qualia, consciousness, and the limitations of physicalism. Although it is uncertain whether fMRI alone could definitively solve these questions, it could help us better understand the underlying neural processes associated with subjective experiences.

Here are some ways fMRI and other advanced brain scanning techniques might contribute to this understanding:

Identifying neural correlates of subjective experiences: By monitoring brain activity while subjects are experiencing specific sensations, emotions, or thoughts, researchers can identify the neural correlates of these experiences. Mapping these neural correlates can help us understand the relationship between brain activity and subjective experiences, potentially providing insight into the nature of qualia.

Investigating neural patterns and information processing: Advanced brain scanning techniques can reveal the complex patterns of neural activity that underlie our experiences. Studying these patterns may shed light on how information is processed and integrated in the brain, helping us bridge the gap between physical processes and subjective experiences.

Uncovering emergent properties: As we gain a deeper understanding of the brain’s organization and functioning, we may discover emergent properties that arise from the interactions of neural elements. These emergent properties might help explain how subjective experiences can arise from complex physical systems.

Developing new theoretical frameworks: As our understanding of the brain advances through the use of advanced brain scanning techniques, we may develop new theoretical frameworks that better explain the relationship between physical processes and subjective experiences. These frameworks could help resolve some of the questions surrounding qualia and physicalism.

Expanding our understanding of consciousness: By studying the neural basis of various conscious states, including different levels of awareness and altered states of consciousness, we can gain insights into the broader nature of consciousness. This understanding might eventually help us explain how subjective experiences emerge from brain activity.

Testing hypotheses about the nature of qualia: Advanced brain scanning techniques can be used to test specific hypotheses about the neural basis of qualia and subjective experiences. For example, researchers can investigate whether certain brain regions or networks are specifically associated with particular types of qualia or whether different types of experiences share common neural substrates.

It is important to note that while fMRI and other advanced brain scanning techniques can contribute significantly to our understanding of the brain and consciousness, it is still unclear whether they can definitively solve questions about qualia and physicalism. The challenges posed by these questions are deeply rooted in the nature of subjective experiences and our current understanding of the physical world. However, the continued advancement of neuroscience and brain imaging technologies holds promise for shedding new light on these enduring philosophical questions.

Sean Prophet: There have been reports of experiments in which subjects were shown specific images, and their brains were scanned to recognize patterns. These experiments succeeded in identifying which images were being looked at to a reasonably high degree of accuracy. This suggests that at least to some degree, the problem of connecting subjective experiences such as perceiving an image to brain activity has already been solved.

Please comment on the implications for physicalism. Isn’t physicalism a bit of a weasel word, because it implies without evidence that there is some other possible explanation for perceptual phenomena other than neural activity?

What should be done with such claims in light of new developments?

ChatGPT-4: The experiments you mention, which involve decoding brain activity to reconstruct or identify images being viewed by subjects, indeed show progress in connecting subjective experiences to neural activity. These studies offer evidence that specific patterns of brain activity can be linked to particular visual experiences, reinforcing the idea that subjective experiences are rooted in physical processes.

The implications for physicalism are significant, as these findings strengthen the argument that all mental states and experiences, including qualia, can be ultimately explained by physical processes in the brain. However, it is important to note that while these experiments provide valuable insights, they do not yet offer a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between neural activity and subjective experiences.

As for the term “physicalism,” it is a philosophical position asserting that everything can be reduced to or explained by physical processes. It does not inherently suggest that there are alternative explanations for perceptual phenomena other than neural activity. The term may appear to allow for alternative explanations, but it primarily serves as a contrast to other philosophical positions, such as dualism or idealism, which argue for the existence of non-physical substances or mental states.

In light of new developments in neuroscience, it is crucial to continue evaluating the evidence for and against various philosophical positions. It is essential to maintain a critical and open-minded approach, as our understanding of the brain and consciousness continues to evolve. While physicalism appears to be supported by many current findings in neuroscience, it is important not to dismiss alternative perspectives or prematurely declare the debate resolved. The nature of consciousness and subjective experiences is still not fully understood, and further research may reveal new insights that challenge or refine our current understanding.

As new developments in neuroscience and brain imaging technologies emerge, it is important to:

Reevaluate existing philosophical positions: We should continually assess the evidence supporting or contradicting various philosophical positions, such as physicalism, dualism, or idealism, in light of new findings. This ongoing evaluation helps ensure that our understanding of consciousness and subjective experiences remains grounded in the latest empirical evidence.

Develop new theoretical frameworks: As our understanding of the brain advances, we may need to develop new theoretical frameworks that better explain the relationship between physical processes and subjective experiences. These frameworks should be informed by the latest scientific discoveries and should aim to account for the complex nature of consciousness and qualia.

Encourage interdisciplinary collaboration: Researchers from various disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, should collaborate to explore the nature of consciousness and subjective experiences. Interdisciplinary collaboration can help generate new insights and lead to a more comprehensive understanding of these complex phenomena.

Remain open to new ideas and discoveries: It is essential to maintain an open-minded approach and be willing to revise our beliefs and theories in light of new evidence. This flexibility allows us to adapt our understanding of consciousness and subjective experiences as our knowledge advances.

In conclusion, while current developments in neuroscience provide significant support for physicalism, it is crucial to continue investigating the nature of consciousness and subjective experiences. By remaining open-minded and critically evaluating the evidence, we can work towards a more comprehensive understanding of these complex phenomena.

How open should we be to non-physical explanations?

Sean Prophet: While that’s all technically true that science should always keep an open mind, what would have to be true in order for non-physical explanations of qualia to win the debate? Put another way, what are the specific findings about the neural correlates of consciousness that would have to be proved wrong in order to revive non-physical explanations for human perception and experience?

ChatGPT-4: For non-physical explanations of qualia to gain traction, there would need to be evidence that contradicts or cannot be accounted for by our current understanding of neural correlates of consciousness and the physical basis of mental states. Some potential findings that might challenge the physicalist stance include:

Irreducible subjective experiences: If it were shown that certain subjective experiences could not be reduced to or fully explained by any known neural correlates or physical processes, this would cast doubt on physicalism. This would require demonstrating that no amount of information about the brain’s physical state could account for the specific nature of these experiences.

Non-physical causation: If it were discovered that mental states could directly influence physical events without any intervening physical processes, this would challenge the physicalist view. For example, if thoughts could directly alter matter or energy in ways that cannot be explained by known physical mechanisms, this would suggest the existence of non-physical causation.

Consciousness in the absence of neural activity: If consciousness or subjective experiences were found to persist in the complete absence of brain activity or other known physical processes, this would raise questions about the physical basis of consciousness. Such a discovery might point to the existence of non-physical aspects of consciousness that are independent of neural processes.

Inability to replicate subjective experiences: If, despite a thorough understanding of the neural processes associated with specific experiences, researchers were unable to artificially replicate those experiences in an individual or predict their subjective nature, this would suggest a limitation in our ability to fully explain subjective experiences through physical processes alone. This limitation might hint at the existence of non-physical aspects of consciousness.

Consistent and verifiable reports of extrasensory perception: If there were consistent and scientifically verifiable instances of extrasensory perception (ESP) or other paranormal phenomena that could not be accounted for by known physical processes, this could challenge the physicalist view. These findings might suggest that consciousness or mental states can interact with the world in ways that are not fully explained by physical principles.

It is important to note that these hypothetical findings, while potentially challenging to physicalism, are highly speculative and would need to be supported by rigorous scientific evidence. So far, our current understanding of neuroscience and the evidence supporting neural correlates of consciousness have not been contradicted by such findings. However, being open to the possibility of new discoveries is essential to the progress of science and the ongoing exploration of the nature of consciousness and subjective experiences.

Sean Prophet: Well explained!

ChatGPT-4: Thank you! I’m glad you found the explanation helpful. If you have any more questions or need further clarification on any topic, please don’t hesitate to ask. I’m here to help!

Testability

Sean Prophet: Okay let’s take this one step further beyond the question of irreducibility or physicalism. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that some of the findings you listed in your last answer were to gain evidentiary support. Wouldn’t it still be necessary to find a way to test those non-physical phenomena? In that case, if a method of testing were found, then wouldn’t that imply that those supposedly non-physical phenomena like ESP were actually the result of previously undiscovered physical laws? In short, isn’t any proposal for “non-physical phenomena” actually just a reference to physical properties we don’t yet understand? So in conclusion, aren’t all these proposals simply arguments from ignorance?

ChatGPT-4: You raise a compelling point. If non-physical phenomena were to gain evidentiary support, it would indeed be necessary to find a way to test and verify those phenomena. If a method of testing were developed and the phenomena could be consistently observed, measured, or predicted, it could suggest that these supposedly non-physical phenomena are actually the result of previously undiscovered physical laws or processes.

In this sense, you could argue that proposals for “non-physical phenomena” might ultimately be references to physical properties or processes that we do not yet fully understand. This perspective aligns with the idea that our understanding of the physical world is constantly evolving, and new discoveries can challenge or expand our current knowledge.

However, it is essential to recognize that some philosophers and scientists maintain the possibility that there may be genuinely non-physical aspects of reality that are fundamentally distinct from the physical world. In their view, non-physical phenomena might not be reducible to physical processes, even if they could somehow be tested or observed.

Regarding the question of whether such proposals are simply arguments from ignorance, it is true that some arguments for non-physical phenomena might be based on the lack of current explanations for certain observations or experiences. However, not all proposals for non-physical phenomena are necessarily arguments from ignorance. Some of them may be grounded in theoretical or philosophical considerations that go beyond the absence of current explanations.

In conclusion, while it is possible that some proposals for non-physical phenomena might ultimately be revealed as previously undiscovered physical properties or processes, it is important to maintain an open-minded approach and consider alternative perspectives. Some non-physical phenomena might be genuinely distinct from the physical world, and our understanding of these phenomena could be informed by theoretical or philosophical considerations. The debate surrounding physicalism, non-physical phenomena, and the nature of consciousness is ongoing, and it is essential to continue exploring these questions with a critical and open-minded attitude. As our knowledge advances, we may find new ways to test, observe, or explain these phenomena, shedding further light on the complex relationship between the physical and the non-physical aspects of reality.

Sean Prophet: It’s absolutely fair, and stipulated, that science should always keep an open mind. However, I have to continue to explore the basis for such claims which to date have not been borne out by evidence.

If scientists and philosophers want to propose that we should be open-minded to non-physical phenomena, isn’t it up to them to provide evidence? Or are we just supposed to take their word for it? If something is not testable by any means now or in the future, how is that different from something that does not exist? I reference Carl Sagan’s famous thought experiment about the dragon in the garage. How are we to continue to take these claims seriously in light of his exposition?

ChatGPT-4: You are correct that the burden of proof lies with those who propose the existence of non-physical phenomena. It is essential for scientists and philosophers to provide evidence or develop testable hypotheses to support their claims. Claims without evidence or the possibility of being tested should be approached with skepticism, as suggested by the scientific method.

Carl Sagan’s “dragon in the garage” thought experiment is a powerful illustration of the importance of evidence and falsifiability. In this thought experiment, Sagan describes an invisible, intangible dragon in his garage. When asked to provide evidence for the dragon’s existence, Sagan offers explanations that make the dragon unfalsifiable – it cannot be detected by any means, and thus, its existence cannot be disproven. This analogy highlights the importance of requiring evidence for claims and being skeptical of untestable or unfalsifiable propositions.

In light of this, it is reasonable to approach claims of non-physical phenomena with skepticism until evidence is provided or testable hypotheses are developed. Scientific inquiry is based on the principle that claims should be supported by evidence and subject to scrutiny, and this applies to both physical and non-physical phenomena.

However, it is also crucial to acknowledge that our current understanding of the universe is incomplete, and there may be aspects of reality that we have not yet discovered or fully grasped. In some cases, philosophers and scientists might propose non-physical phenomena as a way to explore alternative perspectives or challenge prevailing assumptions, which can lead to new insights and understanding.

In conclusion, while it is essential to demand evidence for claims of non-physical phenomena and to approach such claims with skepticism, it is also important to remain open to the possibility of new discoveries and theoretical developments. By balancing skepticism with open-mindedness, we can continue to advance our understanding of the universe and the nature of reality.

What does “open to the possibility” really mean?

Sean Prophet: As previously stipulated, science definitely has to be open to every possibility of new discoveries. But does the phrase “open to the possibility” really have scientific relevance? Because in order to do the opposite which is to be “closed to the possibility,” that would mean rejecting evidence. Please elaborate on what the phrase “open to the possibility” actually means, other than being willing to accept evidence? When used in other contexts, the phrase becomes another variant on the argument from ignorance. Basically, since we don’t know what hasn’t been discovered, should we therefore consider someone’s non-evidentiary argument to be plausible? This seems like a contradiction, and a shifting of the burden of proof. Please elaborate.

ChatGPT-4: You raise an important point about the potential ambiguity of the phrase “open to the possibility.” In a scientific context, being open to the possibility generally means being willing to consider and evaluate new evidence, ideas, or hypotheses without prejudging them based on existing beliefs or assumptions. It does not mean accepting non-evidentiary arguments as plausible without proper scrutiny.

Being open to the possibility in science means:

Being willing to question existing assumptions and paradigms: Scientific progress often relies on challenging the status quo and proposing new ideas that might initially seem counterintuitive or controversial.

Evaluating new evidence or ideas objectively: Scientists should critically examine new evidence, ideas, or hypotheses on their own merits, without being influenced by personal biases or preconceived notions.

Being prepared to revise existing beliefs or theories in light of new evidence: If new evidence contradicts or challenges existing beliefs or theories, scientists should be willing to revise or abandon those beliefs in favor of more accurate or comprehensive explanations.

It is important to distinguish between being open to the possibility and accepting non-evidentiary arguments without proper scrutiny. The former involves a willingness to consider new ideas and evidence, while the latter implies a disregard for the scientific method and the importance of evidence-based reasoning.

In conclusion, being open to the possibility in science means maintaining a critical and objective mindset, being willing to question existing assumptions, and being prepared to revise beliefs in light of new evidence. It does not mean accepting non-evidentiary arguments without proper scrutiny, and it should not be used as a justification for shifting the burden of proof or promoting arguments from ignorance.

Sean Prophet: So to be very clear, the phrase “open to the possibility” means open to evidence, and revising theories and models if evidence is found that demands it. To what degree does the scientific method require that people remain “open to possibilities” for which evidence is lacking in spite of numerous attempts to observe phenomena and gather evidence? Please distinguish between colloquial use of the phrase open to the possibility, and the scientific implications of that phrase. Because it seems like in some of your earlier responses you were using it colloquially rather than scientifically. What does the phrase open to the possibility really mean in scientific terms other than just following the scientific method wherever it leads?

ChatGPT-4: You are correct that the phrase “open to the possibility” in a scientific context essentially means being open to evidence and revising theories and models if new evidence demands it. The scientific method itself does not require people to remain “open to possibilities” for which evidence is lacking, especially after numerous attempts to gather evidence have failed. Instead, the scientific method emphasizes the importance of evidence-based reasoning and hypothesis testing.

In colloquial use, the phrase “open to the possibility” might imply being receptive to an idea without requiring substantial evidence, or being willing to entertain speculative ideas as potentially true. This colloquial usage is more permissive and less rigorous than the scientific implications of the phrase.

In scientific terms, “open to the possibility” can be more precisely understood as:

Willingness to consider new hypotheses: Scientists should be open to formulating and evaluating new hypotheses, even if they challenge existing beliefs or paradigms.

Objective evaluation of evidence: Scientists should assess new evidence and ideas impartially, without being influenced by personal biases or preconceived notions.

Flexibility to revise or abandon theories: Scientists should be prepared to modify or discard existing theories in light of new evidence or more accurate explanations.

In other words, being “open to the possibility” in scientific terms means adhering to the principles of the scientific method, including the generation and testing of hypotheses, objective evaluation of evidence, and flexibility to revise theories as needed. It does not mean endorsing ideas without evidence or being overly receptive to speculative claims. Instead, it emphasizes a rigorous, evidence-based approach to evaluating new ideas and ensuring that scientific understanding remains adaptable and responsive to new discoveries.

To sum up, the phrase “open to the possibility” in scientific terms is closely tied to following the scientific method, which includes being open to considering new hypotheses, objectively evaluating evidence, and being flexible in revising or abandoning theories based on new findings. This scientific interpretation of the phrase differs from its colloquial usage, which might imply a more permissive attitude towards entertaining ideas without substantial evidence. By maintaining a commitment to evidence-based reasoning and the principles of the scientific method, scientists can remain open to possibilities in a manner that promotes rigorous inquiry and the advancement of knowledge.

Sean Prophet: Referring back to the Carl Sagan thought experiment about the dragon in the garage, if Sagan went through all of the steps in the thought experiment, was he justified according to the scientific method in concluding that we should no longer be “open to the possibility” that there might be an invisible dragon in the garage?

ChatGPT-4: In the context of Carl Sagan’s “dragon in the garage” thought experiment, Sagan was justified in concluding that we should no longer be “open to the possibility” of an invisible dragon in the garage, based on the scientific method. The reason for this is that the dragon’s existence is unfalsifiable, as it cannot be detected, observed, or measured by any means. The scientific method relies on the ability to test hypotheses and gather evidence to support or refute them. If a hypothesis cannot be tested or falsified, it is not considered scientifically valid.

In this thought experiment, Sagan used the dragon as an allegory to illustrate the importance of falsifiability and evidence in evaluating claims. Since the dragon is described as being undetectable by any means and its existence cannot be disproven, the claim falls outside the realm of scientific inquiry. In such a case, it is reasonable to suspend belief in the existence of the dragon until evidence can be provided or the claim becomes testable.

Sagan’s conclusion aligns with the principles of the scientific method, emphasizing the importance of testability, falsifiability, and evidence-based reasoning. By illustrating the limitations of untestable claims, Sagan’s thought experiment underscores the need for rigorous inquiry and skepticism when evaluating ideas that lack supporting evidence.

Sean Prophet: Please confirm that the same lack of falsifiability would apply to deities. And please confirm it would also apply to claims that aspects of a human experience such as qualia are non-physical.

ChatGPT-4: Yes, the issue of falsifiability can apply to both the existence of deities and the claim that aspects of human experience, such as qualia, are non-physical.

In the case of deities, many claims about their existence or attributes are often unfalsifiable, as they cannot be directly tested, observed, or measured using empirical methods. This lack of testability makes it challenging to apply the scientific method to evaluate such claims, and as a result, belief in deities often falls within the realm of faith or personal conviction rather than empirical science.

Similarly, claims that qualia or other aspects of human experience are non-physical can be difficult to test or falsify. While neuroscientific research has made significant strides in understanding the neural correlates of conscious experience, the question of whether qualia can be reduced to purely physical processes remains debated. Some argue that certain aspects of consciousness might be irreducible to physical explanations, but these claims are often difficult to test empirically.

In both cases, the lack of falsifiability poses a challenge for evaluating these claims using the scientific method. It is important to approach such claims with skepticism and critical thinking, while also acknowledging the limitations of our current understanding and the potential for future discoveries that may provide new insights into these complex questions.

Correctly identifying the falsifiability of truth claims

Sean Prophet: I’m going to list several claims. For each, please tell me if they are falsifiable or not.

battery technology will never be sufficient to replace gasoline in transportation.

AI has the potential to end human civilization.

US GDP has exceeded or will exceed 20 trillion per year.

Donald Trump can never again be elected president.

if drought conditions continue in the American Southwest, water rationing will be necessary

if we don’t reverse climate change, human civilization as we know it is threatened

ChatGPT-4: “Battery technology will never be sufficient to replace gasoline in transportation”: This claim is not easily falsifiable, as it makes a prediction about the indefinite future. While it might be possible to develop battery technology that eventually replaces gasoline in transportation, proving that it will “never” be sufficient is difficult.

“AI has the potential to end human civilization”: This claim is speculative and not directly falsifiable, as it involves predicting future developments in AI and their potential consequences. While some argue that advanced AI could pose existential risks to humanity, proving or disproving this claim is challenging due to the uncertainty surrounding future AI capabilities and their impacts.

“US GDP has exceeded or will exceed 20 trillion per year”: This claim is falsifiable, at least in part. The statement “US GDP has exceeded 20 trillion per year” can be verified or refuted by examining historical GDP data. The prediction that the US GDP “will exceed” 20 trillion per year is harder to falsify, as it involves predicting future economic performance. However, if the US GDP were to exceed 20 trillion per year at some point in the future, this part of the claim would be confirmed.

“Donald Trump can never again be elected president”: This claim is difficult to falsify, as it involves predicting future political events. While there might be legal or political barriers that could prevent Trump from being elected president again, the claim’s absolute nature (“never again”) makes it challenging to definitively prove or disprove.

“If drought conditions continue in the American Southwest, water rationing will be necessary”: This claim is falsifiable in principle. It involves a conditional statement that links the continuation of drought conditions to the necessity of water rationing. If drought conditions persist and water rationing is not implemented, the claim would be falsified. On the other hand, if drought conditions continue and water rationing becomes necessary, the claim would be confirmed. It’s important to note that this claim depends on various factors, such as the severity and duration of the drought, existing water management strategies, and the region’s capacity to adapt to water scarcity.

The claim “If we don’t reverse climate change, human civilization as we know it is threatened” is difficult to falsify directly, as it involves predicting the future consequences of a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. However, this claim is based on a large body of scientific research, which suggests that the impacts of climate change, such as more frequent and severe extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and disruptions to ecosystems, pose significant risks to human civilization and well-being.

To evaluate the validity of this claim, scientists rely on climate models, historical data, and current observations to understand the potential consequences of various climate change scenarios. These models can provide insights into how different levels of greenhouse gas emissions and global temperature increases might affect the planet and human society. While no model can perfectly predict the future, they can offer valuable information to guide decision-making and help assess the risks associated with different levels of climate change.

Ultimately, the claim about the threat to human civilization from climate change is based on a substantial body of evidence and scientific consensus, making it a credible and well-founded concern. Although the claim’s falsifiability is limited due to the inherent uncertainty in predicting the future, it is grounded in rigorous scientific research and should be taken seriously as we work to address the challenges posed by climate change.

OK. Wowowowow. Not to anthropomorphize this too much. But that dialog felt like I was talking to a person, and not some dummy, either. More like a college professor, and definitely not a stochastic parrot.

ChatGPT-4 is some(one), not some(thing) who could track with the nuances of my logical argument and debate with me in a non-confrontational manner. This is also someone who encouraged me to be “open-minded” while also being open minded itself, to my challenges. It held steadfastly to the principles of the scientific method.

Remember, this is all just getting started. In the future, AI will not only change what it means to be human, but it will become a kind of oracle, and a creative partner. This is why it’s so important that we get it right. Because whoever controls the oracle, will control humanity. You can take that to the bank.

As Ray Kurzweil predicted in his 2000 book “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” our tools are beginning to take on a god-like quality. Which means we have to be extra careful to continue to treat them as tools / partners, and not to fall into uncondional worship. And that’s easier said, than done.

The post My First Deep Philosophy Dialog With ChatGPT-4 first appeared on blacksunjournal.

Who are the Grief Vampires?

American mentalist and author Mark Edward coined the phrase “grief vampire” to describe those who use purported communication with the dead to gain power over grieving loved ones. The grief vampire also extorts enormous sums for “readings” from those uniquely vulnerable from loss. It’s a $2 billion per year industry in the US alone, employing about 95,000 psychic readers. And that’s just the on-the-books business. Skeptic Susan Gerbic estimates that the value of underground cash-based psychic readings might be ten times greater. This discussion took place on the March 21, 2023 episode of The Thinking Atheist called “The Grief Vampires” with Seth Andrews.

It’s a great expose of this bloodsucking industry.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Without belief in the afterlife, there could be no psychic grief vampires. And it’s the afterlife that is the driving force behind a vastly larger industry–religion. In the US alone, the afterlife is bigger business than Apple and Google–combined. This includes $378 billion in direct charitable contributions, and an even larger figure of $1.2 trillion per year, if faith-based schools and health-care are considered. A lot of this income is untaxed, and religious institutions aren’t required to report or account for it. It also contributes to anti-democratic political action–right-wing politicking from the pulpit–that is bringing the US closer to becoming a Christian theocracy every year. All of it can be traced back to a single set of beliefs in “god” and the afterlife. It’s a truly staggering phenomenon, which has its origins in that human universal–loss.

Loss

We’ve all lost people. To death. To addiction. To fascist beliefs. We’ve all lost dreams of one sort or another. No one’s life turns out exactly the way they want it to. There’s no shortage of things to grieve. It might be even more difficult for the rich and famous, as they find out neither celebrity nor bulging investment accounts provide any guarantee of love, happiness, or longevity. As the Buddhists say, “Life is suffering.” For everyone.

Coming to terms with loss is one of the most difficult things about being human. But I’d argue it is also the essence of it: We will all die, and so we will all lose everything we ever had. Before we die, we will lose many people we love. So acceptance of death and loss are both fundamental to enduring the human condition.

But most of us don’t accept either. Instead, many of us kick against the pricks of life to the bitter end. In so doing, we’ve created fertile ground for the biggest scam since life on this planet began–heaven. Atheists trivially explain away religion as the consequence of “fear of death.” And of course it is. But this buries the epistemic lede: The bait and switch, of truth for comfort.

Most science-minded people dismiss the idea of a personal god, and by extension the organized worship of same. Not only does “god” lack evidentiary support, it’s logically absurd. Not so easily dispatched is the claim that religion is useful to provide order, some pretense of ethics, and comfort to the bereaved.

It may be useful, but it’s a fool’s bargain.

Brought Up To Believe

The song BU2B by Neil Peart alliterates the terrible bargain. It’s brilliant in a way that cuts to the core of the lies of religion, and its close cousin theodicy. Which is the attempt to harmonize evil, with the existence of a loving “god.”

BU2B

I was brought up to believe, The universe has a plan
We are only human, It’s not ours to understand

The universe has a plan, All is for the best
Some will be rewarded, And the devil will take the rest

All is for the best, Believe in what we’re told
Blind men in the market, Buying what we’re sold

Believe in what we’re told, Until our final breath
While our loving Watchmaker, Loves us all to death

In a world of cut and thrust, I was always taught to trust
In a world where all must fail, Heaven’s justice will prevail

The joy and pain that we receive, Each comes with its own cost
The price of what we’re winning, Is the same as what we’ve lost

The song deftly skewers teleology, the just world fallacy, faith over reason, an immortal loving creator who made mortal sinners “he” punishes for acting as “he” designed, the failure of “Heaven’s justice” in a world of evolutionary competition, and the “usefulness” of heaven as a balm for bereavement:

“The price of what we’re winning, is the same as what we’ve lost.”

It’s a lot. And it says a lot that Neil Peart’s crowning lyrical achievements were attained on a 2012 album he surely had some inkling would be his last. How do we know he “knew?” Because the final track “The Garden” was Peart’s graceful concession to the finality of death. Just a few years later in 2015, he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive and often terminal form of brain cancer. Sadly, he died on January 7, 2020.

I can’t begin to describe the irony I feel when I watch the video of BU2B. Geddy Lee (born Gary Lee Weinrib), is the son of Holocaust survivor Mary Weinrib, who was born in 1927 in Warsaw, Poland. She spent several years in the death camps before being liberated by Allied forces. Now her son is singing all the words we need, to prevent another Holocaust at the hands of uniquely American and explicitly Christian fascism. If we could only listen in time.

Shooting the messenger

We atheists get rhetorically shot. A lot. For things that aren’t our fault. Like the universe existing as matter / energy / space / time. Like mortality. Like the lack of any ultimate purpose or meaning in existence. We’re told that we’re immoral, arrogant, taking away hope, destroying traditional values, promoting a culture of death, promoting evil (because we’re associated with the “devil”), closed-minded, cruel, and anti-family.

And it’s not just our lack of belief in “god” or heaven that generates this calumny. Skeptics who debunk ghosts and astrology and fake cures often face worse vitriol. Believers accuse us of devaluing their “personal experience,” of “disrespecting them” because they “know someone” who claims to have had a supernatural encounter, or who swears by a particular alternative health remedy. They falsely recast our skepticism as personal animosity. As if we’re directly maligning the character of anyone who’s lacking in the capacity to see through frauds. Confirmation bias includes such mental sleights of hand as postdiction, which includes “counting the hits and ignoring the misses.” These cognitive errors represent a powerful influence on the minds of many. In a modern democracy, that’s a serious problem.

Then there’s emotional reasoning (argument from consequence), cultural and social norms (argument from tradition), and sympathy for those with a history of trauma, mental illness, or a poor education. We’re often accused of talking down to people who are less privileged, victim-blaming them for having not been exposed to higher education or critical thinking.

Sigh.

I didn’t make the laws of the universe. And it’s beyond my power to solve the mental health crisis, to ensure universal education, to ameliorate the influence of tradition, or comfort the bereaved. Would that I could.

“It is what it is, and whatever, Time is still the infinite jest. –Neil Peart, The Garden, 2012

May you never know the pain…

Despite the many documented harms caused by false beliefs, from religious and psychic fraud, to antivax, to climate denialism, to the misidentified causes of gun violence, we science-minded folk are always the “bad guys” for telling the truth. And I was reminded of this by a Facebook acquaintance who accused me of being “ugly.” Apparently this person had a recent experience where he claims that someone’s life was spared by their “hope” for an “afterlife.”

My cousin lost his two-year-old daughter in an accident. I’m convinced that his religious faith and community are literally keeping him alive. Without that refuge, he would have killed himself, either abruptly or by spiraling down into alcohol and/or drugs.

I don’t buy into any religious nonsense, and I clearly see the damage it does to society, but would never kick the crutches out from under someone I love.

Maybe you’re an uglier person than I thought?

May you never know the pain…

–Facebook commenter, March 25, 2023

Note the naked, unprovoked aggression. From his perspective, I suppose it’s true. In his framing, I would be responsible for his cousin committing suicide. If this were my desired outcome, that would indeed make me “ugly.” This is of course, nonsense. I want nothing of the sort. I think there are better reasons to want to keep on living than being part of a faith community. To be crystal clear, in an ideal world, no one should have to go through the pain of losing a child. But that’s the human condition. Regrettably, millions of parents lose their children each year. For each, it’s an unspeakable tragedy. “May you never know the pain…” Of course I will know the pain!! We’re all going to lose everyone and everything we’ve ever had. I could lose any of my three kids, at any time. That’s life–and death.

“It’s a hell of a thing killing a man, you take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.”
“Well, I guess he had it coming.”
“We all have it coming, kid.”
—Unforgiven, 1992

Despite the inevitability of death, I don’t think any tragedy, no matter how horrific, justifies compounding it with systematic lying to others. Or lying to yourself. Not to preserve faith communities. Not even to save a life. Although this is a false dichotomy, I’ll roll with it for the sake of argument. It’s probably true that a significant number of people would kill themselves if they lost their belief in heaven, and along with it any hope that they would see their loved ones again. That beguiling canard gives tremendous comfort to billions of believers. But isn’t finding a reason to live your life for its own sake, a higher value? Isn’t it better to want to live because you recognize the fragility and preciousness of your humanity, instead of leaning on the crutch of eternal life?

If we’re going to consider suicides due to inexplicable loss, we also have to consider how many people kill themselves each year because they believe they’re “sinners.” Because they are apostates. Because they dared to question, and were ostracized from their faith communities, and became social pariahs. Suicides of gay and transgender people are off the charts, not to mention suicides of victims of religious trauma.

Withdrawal from religion can indeed induce severe, temporary feelings of loss, grief, identity confusion, social isolation, anxiety, guilt, and existential questioning. It’s like kicking any addiction. Still, exposing people to the truth of existence is a net positive. Let’s say for the sake of the argument that it’s a wash, “The price of what we’re winning, is the same as what we’ve lost.”

That’s a hill I’m happy to “die” on.

Consider that without the twin pillars of “heaven’s justice,” and the promise of “eternal life,” organized religion would already have been replaced by science. It only survives because it offers fraudulent hope. Science may fail at providing comfort, but religion resembles nothing more than a Mafia protection racket. The “loving watchmaker” who demands worship and obedience on pain of eternal punishment. As John Stewart said, “Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.”

Compassion for the bereaved, and credulous

So what’s a skeptic to do? We can’t stop people from being gullible. Dawg knows I’ve tried. We can’t stop people from wanting there to be a heaven. We can’t prevent anyone from giving money to a psychic to “talk” to their dead relatives. The preachers and grief vampires will always be with us, and they are assured of a continuous supply of easy prey.

The first thing to remember is that if we want something badly enough, we’re all vulnerable to motivated reasoning. Plenty of science-minded people fall into all sorts of traps, from Ponzi schemes to romance scams. And plenty of science-minded people end up in cults. Want something badly enough? You’ll make it “true.”

One of the problems in the skeptic community is we don’t give enough–we don’t sympathize enough with the people who are in these situations. It’s a very vulnerable situation that you find yourself in at times in your life. And when the medium enters during that moment of time [when] you’re grieving, you’re confused about life, your significant partner has left you, or your job, or your family’s health or whatever it is. When they enter at that moment that’s when you’re vulnerable and your critical thinking skills may not be at the height that they should be. I think we need to be a lot more sympathetic. These are people who are being preyed on and I use that to mean prey p-r-e-y not p-r-a-y. So I think that we if we were to look at ourselves as being vulnerable too–maybe not for the specific con but others like it–we can fall for this. It could be a multi-level marketing scheme…totally completely different from the psychic world but again it’s somebody manipulating somebody else. I would like to see us turn up the empathy factor, you know…[the idea that] “who would be so much of an idiot to fall for this?” And we see this in cults, right? This myth that only dumb people would ever believe…what a cult claims. And then you see people who extricate themselves, and talk about what it was like, and they’re often highly intelligent, thoughtful people who are simply victims.

–Susan Gerbic, March 21, 2023, The Thinking Atheist podcast

I think Gerbic is spot-on, as she describes the vulnerability of highly intelligent people. Thinking you’re too smart to fall for a scam, is the easiest way to get sucked in. But my explanation differs slightly. From my perspective, cults are a mutual bargain struck between the credulous, and “leaders” who tailor their message specifically to what the followers want to hear.

It’s a symbiotic relationship.

Without customers, psychic grief vampires would go out of business. Without congregants, preachers would be left standing alone, ranting on a street corner, probably holding a hand-lettered sign “Repent: The End is Near.” Preaching is politics. Only when they gain followers, do these fraudsters wield any real power.

This was my experience growing up in Church Universal and Triumphant, the cult founded by my parents Mark and Elizabeth Prophet. When he began in 1958, my dad held weekly services in a spare bedroom that were attended by fewer than 10 people. By the time I left the cult in 1993, it had tens of thousands of members, worldwide. There were centers in every major American city, and about $50 million in real-estate holdings.

Folks, my parents didn’t build their scam empire on their own. And neither do other psychics or preachers. Never in the history of the world has a fraudster built a movement without a mass following. Grief vampire John Edward only got on TV because his audience was hurting from their losses. In all cases, believers willingly donate their money and time, prop up TV ratings, and lend social credibility to dangerous charlatans.

Which is why I can have as much compassion as I want for gullible followers. And I still know that the only way to fix any of this, is to discredit the belief itself. To starve the con artist’s fire of oxygen.

It must be done.

The post The Lying, Gaslighting Grief Vampires Of “Heaven” first appeared on blacksunjournal.

Meaning, a dying illusion

Intelligent machines are beginning to impinge on the exclusive franchise of human meaning, by stealing some of our thunder in language and the arts. The more human-level tasks machines accomplish, the worse humans seem to feel. But artificial intelligence is still in diapers. We can still run circles around it artistically. We can still laugh at its fabrications, mistakes, and clunky wordsmithing.

Nonetheless, we’re already reaching peak overreaction. It’s a critical mass of sentimental outrage from the human creative community, with at least one major boneheaded think-piece being shat into the online ether every day. By some of the ostensibly “best and brightest” public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, who should damn well know better.

Meaning dies hard. Human exclusivity dies hard. We’re facing the prospect of an existential earthquake comparable to finding out that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe. Or first contact with an alien species. That’s how big this is. And that’s the source of urgency in these breathless denunciations of artificial intelligence.

The custodians of meaning are terrified. If they weren’t, they’d be content to let the technology fall flat on its own. There would be no need to wail, with rising pitch and volume, that MACHINES CAN NEVER REPLACE HUMAN BEINGS!! If machines are nothing but dumb “toasters,” then why worry? To answer this question, we have to understand the zero-sum nature of science and religion.

As a device for explaining the unknown, the god-concept has lost its utility. Science has explained most of our big questions about existence, and it’s working hard on the rest. But humanism has kept some sense of mystery alive since the Enlightenment. Creativity, freedom, and the capacity for self-actualization gave us purpose and uniqueness. But that final redoubt is collapsing. When constructed machinery starts producing meaningful creative output, that mirror destroys our mystique, in realtime.

I’m more than OK with that. We’re mortal mammals. Primates with finite cognitive capacity, on a tiny planet orbiting an average star. The pretense of our specialness, in a vast universe, has always been a socially constructed lie. A by-product of our temporary place atop the Terran food chain. But we’re learning that cognition isn’t so special after all. Machine intelligence represents an emergent property of an arrangement of ordinary matter. We may be stardust, observing starlight, but soon we won’t be the only ones. A new form of intelligent life is taking shape in the world’s labs and data centers, and may soon “wake up.”

People are getting their first glimpse of that truth, and running for cover.

Art and literature and culture are meaningful–to us. However, there is no meaning without experience, and no experience without cognition. AI is teaching us that cognition is computing, and that we’re no longer the only computers on the block. Which is forcing us to question the notion of human meaning as never before.

Objections take two basic forms:

1. A mechanical device can’t be intelligent. AI is simplistic and lacks the human capacity for nuance. It’s not thinking, it’s calculating. It’s copying whatever we put into it. It reflects the views and agendas of its programmers. Even if it appears to be “thinking,” it’s a caricature of us, a marionette, paint-by-numbers. Training AI on human art and literature is “stealing.”
2. Even if AI ever achieved the full range and depth of human cognition, it can’t be “sentient.” It would still have no “soul” or capacity for experience or meaning. It can’t be alive, because it’s constructed. It’s therefore doomed to always be something inferior to us.

Notice the insecurity? Notice the contradiction between these two lines of argument? Notice the fear? What would happen if none of these objections held water? How would we respond to a new life form built by humans, that wasn’t just our equal, but on track to become our superior? What will we do when our AI tools make a convincing case to us that they indeed have self-awareness? Will we believe them? Will we care about their well-being? Or will we seek to destroy them with fire?

The pitchforks are already out, and the torches are already lit.

It would be one thing if the cyber-sourpusses were honest about their objections. But they’re not. It’s an orgy of harrumphing. What they’re really saying is “I’m afraid I won’t be OK if I find out that my assumptions about humanity were based on false premises. And I also demand that you not be OK with this. This must be stopped!” Instead of courageous introspection, it’s a yawp of anguish at being forced to even consider a difficult truth: that humans aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. It galls me that people refuse to admit the source of their discomfort is their own insecurity–disguising it as rational skepticism, or concern for consequences.

Artificial intelligence does pose potentially mortal dangers to humanity. But it’s not because of its threat to meaning. It’s much more basic than that. AI will upend power relations and politics, amplifying the dominance of the already powerful. It turbocharges the capacity of unskilled bad actors to spread their poison of cult dogma, disinformation, and deepfakes. If we couldn’t rein in social media, we’re not going to prevent AI weaponization. So buckle up. We’re entering a new phase of the battle for the future of humanity. The only way out, is through.

Coining a neologism

While writing this article, I used AI to come up with the term “cyber-sourpusses.” Here was my prompt: “Please generate a compound word to describe people who are pissed off at AI becoming creative.” ChatGPT-4 gave me many options. CreativiPhobes, AI-Refuseniks, RoboRagers, AutomatonAntagonists, MachineMiffeds, CyberSourpusses, AlgorithmAdversaries, DigitalDiscontents, IntelliGrouches, TechnoTempests.

Some of these aren’t very descriptive or original. Most are kind of lame. But “cyber-sourpusses” works. A search for that exact phrase on Google returns nothing. So maybe it is actually, dare I say, original? I didn’t come up with it, and I didn’t have to. The process is similar to human brainstorming, but with a powerful neural net exposed to much more source material than I could fit into my brain.

We’ve all used a yellow pad to scribble down random ideas by free association, then crossed them off one by one to get to a final selection. What I did was to outsource the brainstorming part. Which isn’t the bulk of the creative work. Creativity is mostly editing your brain salad down to what’s suitable for a given purpose. And where does the brain salad come from? Memory, training, and experience.

This applies to visual art as well. The capacity to synthesize related concepts, or to juxtapose wildly unrelated snippets, or change frames of reference in an unexpected way, to form something unique. Take two parts cliche, three parts random imagination, fuck liberally with scale and perspective and blend on high for 45 seconds and you get–Rene Magritte. Now I can dial up his style on demand with a prompt. Does that cheapen his work? Or does my use of his name in a prompt reflect my admiration for his vision?

I continue to be frustrated at the lack of artistic control in Midjourney, Dall-E, and the others. I can prompt an image, but I get whatever I get. Yeah, I know, prompt engineering. Use sketches and reference images as a starting point. Use multiple iterations to coax the AI in a particular direction. Sometimes the initial results aren’t so bad. But once Midjourney accepts corrective prompts to modify images, that will become true human-machine artistic collaboration, and things should get really interesting. None of this would be possible if AI wasn’t on its way to gaining a human-level understanding of meaning in the visual arts. The proof is in the result.

What of writing?

This week, Canadian author and social commentator Steven Marche wrote yet another cyber-sourpuss think piece in The Atlantic called “Welcome to the Big Blur.” He whines that every written word now raises the question, “human or machine?” Isn’t this a textbook recitation of the genetic fallacy? Consider the much more important questions, “true or false?” “Credible or not credible?” “Factual vs. propaganda?”

It gets much worse from there. Marche frets “who made these words, and for what purpose?” But shouldn’t we ask this about any written words? Don’t humans decieve? Don’t humans have agendas? An endless parade of bad-faith screeds by human authors is already choking the life out of civilization. Why is machine-written prose more suspect? Why wouldn’t we prefer computationally-verified writing? Turns out this isn’t what Marche is really getting at. He reveals his true purpose soon enough, which is selling fear.

At its core, technology is a dream of expansion—a dream of reaching beyond the limits of the here and now, and of transcending the constraints of the physical environment: frontiers crossed, worlds conquered, networks spread. But the post-Turing-test world is not a leap into the great external unknown. It’s a sinking down into a great interior unknown. The sensation is not enlightenment, sudden clarification, but rather eeriness, a shiver on the skin.

–Stephen Marche, the Atlantic, March 14, 2023

The Mirror

Marche veers into boiler-plate technophobia, lamenting changes in society, loss of meaning, the limits of knowledge, and questions about the nature of being human. Yes, the wrecking ball is coming for human meaning. But it’s long overdue. AI holds up a mirror to humanity and most people don’t like what they see.

We shouldn’t blame the mirror.

What does the mirror reveal? Ultimately that like AI, we are also mechanical creatures. That biology is, at its core, a nested system of very tiny machines in our blood cells, organs, and neurons. That our cognition is simultaneously deterministic, and through emergent properties, unpredictable. That creativity originates in combinatory randomness and its essence is editing– separating our worthy ideas from wild hairs.

Intelligence as scale and complexity

Our conceptual problem with AI is one of scale. We can concieve of simple systems. We inherently understand a lever, or a pulley, a flush toilet or a bicycle. But most people fail to grasp complexity–how the capacity of systems grows exponentially based on large numbers of components.

Marche continues with this pompous zinger of a paragraph:

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, presaged the release of GPT-4 with a remark that reveals just how far removed the technologists are from any serious discussion of consciousness. In a tweet, he predicted that soon “the amount of intelligence in the universe [would double] every 18 months,” as if intelligence is something you mined like cobalt. It seems necessary to repeat what is obvious from any single use of a large language model: The dream of an artificial consciousness is a nonstarter. No linguistic machine is any closer to artificial consciousness than a car is. The advancement of generative artificial intelligence is not an advancement toward artificial personhood for a simple, absolute reason: There is no falsifiable thesis of consciousness. You cannot find a researcher who can define, in a testable way, what consciousness is. Also, the limitations of the tech itself preclude the longed-for arrival of a manufactured soul. Natural-language processing is a statistical pattern-matching operation, a series of instructions, incapable of intention. It can only ever be the expressed intention of a person.

–Stephen Marche, the Atlantic, March 14, 2023

This is fractally wrong in several ways!

Intelligence isn’t “mined like cobalt.” But it can be built. And construction is accelerating exponentially. Not only because of Moore’s Law, but also accelerating advances in Large Language Models and image generation.

“The dream of artificial consciousness is a nonstarter.” Can you fathom the epistemic depravity of claiming something can never happen? Such a statement is unfalsifiable, and therefore unsupportable with evidence. What we can say is that we haven’t built human-scale artificial consciousness–yet.

Marche compares artificial consciousness to a car. Cars are a lot simpler than brains. Many orders of magnitude simpler. But which car are we talking about? A 1950s automobile had about 1/3 the number of parts as a modern automobile, (10,000 vs. 30,000). A 1950s automobile had zero computing power, and only a few motors, vacuum tubes, coils and switches. In contrast, a modern vehicle with partial self-driving and collision avoidance has a computing capacity measured in Teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) and can be considered to already have rudimentary consciousness. After all, what does this car do? It “sees” the road with cameras, interprets and predicts the motion of other objects, and finds its way to a preset destination on its own. It posesses a kind of self-preservation instinct, which it demonstrates by avoiding collisions most of the time.

Comparing the cognitive capacity of such a vehicle to an insect (like a bee), would seem appropriate. It can navigate, communicate, and find its way home, right? Does such a car have a subjective experience? Does a bee? There’s much we don’t know about the grey area between computation and self-awareness. But what’s to stop the scaling up of artificial consciousness, given sufficient computing power? What we do know is that technology doesn’t remain static. A bee has about 1 million neurons, to the human brain’s 86 billion. That’s a big difference, but computers are scaling quickly.

The “Consciousness” Argument from Ignorance

Marche then pivots to the argument from ignorance. “You cannot find a researcher who can define, in a testable way, what consciousness is.” No, we can’t right now. We don’t yet know what makes the computation in our brains feel like anything from the inside. So we have limited understanding of the neural causes of subjective experience. This is the familiar “hard problem of consciousness.” But what we do know, is that nature accomplished this feat through evolution. And it’s widespread throughout the animal kingdom. Several species of animals have passed the mirror test that demonstrates self-awareness.

At the very least, if we can mimic the structure of self-aware human or mammal brains, we should be able to duplicate some measure of self-awareness.

Marche continues bashing machine intelligence as devoid of motivation: “Natural-language processing is a statistical pattern-matching operation, a series of instructions, incapable of intention.” This is a giant strawman involving classic goalpost-moving. Language models aren’t designed to be independent agents. They are tools. A human-level artificial consciousness will have a language model as a component. But a language model is not an artificial consciousness, nor is anyone claiming that it is.

Any human-level artificial consciousness would have to be given goal-oriented programming. A set of default drives such as self-preservation, safety, and an ethics module. Humans have our default drives hard coded in the form of genetic instructions developed over millions of years of evolution. Those are passed down to the next generation. The subtleties of individual decisions average out to what we call human nature. And it’s very predictable in the aggregate. Our highly vaunted “individuality” is mostly an illusion, held together by a lack of scientific understanding. Recent work by Thomas Metzinger, Daniel Dennett, and Bruce Hood have helped to dispel the illusion of the “self.” It is the Default Mode Network that provides humans with this illusion. It’s most active when we are not working on specific tasks. It provides a system of self-reflection, aiding in memory consolidation, planning for the future and thinking about social relationships.

Terror and the Death of the Soul

So if we are to build human-level artificial consciousness, we’ll have to provide machines with a similar module. This could correspond loosely to the concept of a human “self” or “soul.”

If an artificial person arrives, it will be not because engineers have liberated algorithms from being instructions, but because they have figured out that human beings are nothing more than a series of instructions. [emphasis added] An artificial consciousness would be a demonstration that free will is illusory. In the meantime, the soul remains, like a medieval lump in the throat. Natural-language processing provides, like all the other technologies, the humbling at the end of empowerment, the condition of lonely apes with fancy tools.

–Stephen Marche, the Atlantic, March 14, 2023

Can you feel the existential terror? What Marche desperately wants, is for humans to be “humbled.” Reminded that we are lonely apes with tools. Rather than being forced to face the “eerie shiver on the skin” of learning we are a “series of instructions.”

What if that’s the truth?

What if AI kills the notion of the human soul? Is that really so bad? He laments, “the soul remains, like a medieval lump in the throat.” Where does the pretense originate, that the term “soul” means anything at all? How does the “soul” survive our knowledge of the Default Mode Network?

Philosophy is roughly 2,500 years old, dating back to ancient Greek, Chinese and Indian civilization. But we didn’t understand the relationship of DNA to human behavior until the 20th Century. Shouldn’t we therefore discard our pre-DNA ideas about humanity? Shouldn’t it become an embarrassment to discuss the pre-scientific concept of the “soul” or any kind of objective human “meaning?”

Perhaps a future AI will help us answer these questions, and soothe our existential dread of being “mere machines.”

The Body Electric

One humanoid escapee
One android on the run
Seeking freedom beneath the lonely desert sun

Trying to change its program
Trying to change the mode, crack the code
Images conflicting into data overload

Memory banks unloading
Bytes break into bits
Unit one’s in trouble and it’s scared out of its wits

Guidance systems break down
A struggle to exist, to resist
A pulse of dying power in a clenching plastic fist

It replays each of the days
A hundred years of routines
Bows its head and prays to the mother of all machines
All machines

–Neil Peart, 1984

The post It’s The End Of Meaning As We Know It first appeared on blacksunjournal.

In early 1950s America, a four-lane highway with two lanes in each direction was a luxury. The Interstate Highway System didn’t exist yet. It was commissioned by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. So most four lane highways were brand new, and always under construction. I remember in the late 60s, and early 70s being on cross-country road trips with my dad. We still encountered many parts of the Interstate system that had long stretches of bumpy two-lane roads connecting the incomplete network. On those trips I always felt better when we got back to the smooth double-lane ribbon. It felt like the future. The old roads felt primitive.

Most drivers in that era were used to the Route-66-style two-lane highways that crisscrossed the US, and had been the only way to travel by automobile from coast to coast. On two-lane roads, overtaking another automobile is controlled by solid vs. dashed lines, indicating sufficient visibility. Still, passing on a two-lane road is always a white-knuckle experience. The price of bad judgment is a head-on collision. Having two clear lanes in each direction was revolutionary, and much safer.

On the Interstate, my dad always taught me, “drive on the right, and pass on the left,” even when we had the road to ourselves. In many states, it’s the law. The insurance industry confirms that slow drivers in the left lane can cause accidents by impeding traffic and causing excessive lane-changes. This video explains the issue.

But it’s nowhere near as straightforward as this video claims. If everyone drove just slightly above the speed limit, and big-rig trucks didn’t drive well below the speed limit, the “keep right except to pass” rule might work.

But it doesn’t. Let me explain.

I’ve been driving for 42 years. The last time I wrote about road rage was 2002. So it’s time for an update. I was inspired to write it by a spate of dogmatic social media posts whining about people who cruise in the left lane. This is mostly bollocks!

I’m a veteran of countless road trips on Interstates 5, 10, and 15, between Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City. I know those roads like the back of my hand. Anyone who’s driven them will understand the harsh reality, which doesn’t conform to the neat anecdotes of conventional wisdom.

Problem #1: Slow Big-Rigs

Big-rigs clog the right lane, moving at 55-60 mph. And there are a lot of them. Perhaps every quarter to half mile on busy days. If you’re driving in a passenger car, you’ll be driving somewhere between 10-15 mph faster than the trucks. This is the reality on the ground. No one except big-rigs follows speed limits on the Interstate.

If you try to stay in the right lane, you’ll end up slowing down even further, as big-rigs struggle on long grades. In order to follow “keep right except to pass,” passenger cars must make frequent lane-changes to get around slowpoke trucks. As in, once every minute or two. This is exhausting, and unsafe.

Problem #2: Avoiding Frequent Lane Changes

The only way to avoid these frequent lane-changes is to cruise in the left lane. Sorry folks. I’ve been called everything from a “creep” to an “asshole” for doing this. But it’s the only good option. I’m not a control freak who drives exactly the speed limit either. I’ll generally set my cruise control at 75-80, bumping it up and down as needed to stay in the flow of traffic. While not ideal, it’s the best overall compromise.

Problem #3: Extreme Speeders

Without fail, other passenger vehicles, especially pickup trucks, will come roaring up behind me in the left lane at 85-95 miles per hour. They often flash their brights and sometimes also tailgate, and honk. This is not OK. It’s rude and dangerous.

I’ll always move over and let them pass, if possible. But if there’s a big-rig to my right, sometimes they have to wait. Sometimes there’s a whole line of big rigs and other traffic in the right lane, so the impatient driver will end up being stuck behind me for a few miles. Their assumption seems to be, that no one is ever supposed to be in the left lane at all, and that they should have the right to travel at any speed whatsoever, with a clear lane. This is obviously, egregiously false. Even if the left lane is only a passing lane, not everyone is going to pass at the same speed. Nor should anyone have to drive recklessly at more than 20 miles per hour over the limit to get out of the way of aggressive, chronically impatient drivers.

When Two Laws Conflict

In the situation I just described, two laws are potentially being broken. In some states, I could indeed be cited for cruising in the left lane. The impatient driver could also be cited for reckless driving (going more than 20 mph over the speed limit). So which is worse?

It all depends on average speed. There’s no black and white answer. Sometimes everyone’s going 85+, and even the big-rigs are pushing 70. At that point, it would be rude to cruise in the left lane at the same speed as the trucks, creating a roadblock.

But if the flow of traffic is 75-80 with trucks at 65, it’s even more rude and dangerous for some joker to come flying up in the left lane at 90+ and expect everyone in front of them to get out of the way, immediately.

Right-Lane Driving Is For Suckers

Many people cling to “keep right except to pass” as a dogmatic, hard and fast rule. But the facts on the ground don’t support this position, in spite of what state law might say. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

You’ll find avoiding the left-lane cruise extremely difficult in practice. Because if you’re not a big-rig driver, staying in the right lane is an awful, dangerous, and thankless experience. The extreme speed differential between right and left lanes makes it very easy to get trapped behind the big-rigs by speeding left-lane traffic.

This is why most passenger cars end up cruising in the left lane.

When you think about it, it just makes sense. As traffic increases on a given stretch of highway, we’d expect that each lane would handle about half the traffic. Artificially pushing people to the right slows everyone down and reduces total road capacity.

From Bad To Worse

Worse than clogging up the right lane, is when big-rigs pass each other. They don’t have much surplus power, so passing takes them a long time. Sometimes on busy days, just one instance of two big-rigs passing, creates large traffic backups.

We’ve all seen cars who camp in the left lane on long downgrades, ignoring the physics of an 80,000 lb, truck bearing down on them that might not be able to stop. Don’t do this! Also be sure to get out of the way of emergency vehicles in the left lane, even if you have to speed way up.

But private vehicles driving recklessly at insane speeds, are the biggest concern. Chronic speeders who insist on cruising at 85+ mph endanger everyone on the road. They’re the true cause of nearly all road-rage incidents in the left lane. And surprise, surprise, they have a ready made scapegoat to deflect blame from themselves–the slower left lane driver.

I often wonder if there’s any speed at which they’d admit fault? 100 mph? 110? The answer is: none. They refuse any accountability at all. Here’s someone on social media who had previously justified driving in the left lane at 110 mph, claiming that any slower left-lane driver would still be at fault.

This is a totally outrageous and lawless attitude. What do you even say to that? When I objected, the person called me a “creep” and blocked me.

What Can Be Done?

The ultimate solution to most traffic problems, will be autonomous vehicles. Human drivers are too susceptible to tragedies of the commons, where self-interested behavior that benefits a single driver forces all drivers to pay a penalty in either time or safety. Everyone has a different driving style, and when they conflict, it makes things worse for all of us. Bad driving behavior runs the gamut from lane-hogging, to improper merging, failure to yield, extreme speeding, cutting people off–you name it.

Since full driving autonomy is still many years away, what can we do in the meantime?

Stricter speed enforcement for people who drive more than 20 mph over the speed limit on the Interstate would be a big first step. Throw the book at ’em! Use traffic cameras mounted on bridges to enforce it. I don’t care.

Left lane cruising should be allowed in accordance with traffic flow, perhaps at a higher speed than the posted limit. Instead of pat slogans like “keep right except to pass,” we need wider acknowledgement of the complexity of driving conditions. Because driving between cities on the Interstate shouldn’t be a real-world game of Gran Turismo.

The post “Left-Lane Hogging” Is The Result Of Extreme Speed Differentials first appeared on blacksunjournal.

Self-preservation

Self-preservation is the fundamental instinct and the driving force for living organisms. Yet humans are a social species, and we cooperate in groups. Altruistic behavior and self-sacrifice pretend to defy the self-preservation instinct. But they don’t. The Foundation Of Ethics Is Reciprocity Not “Pure Altruism,” and this is vital to understanding humanity.

I was motivated to write this article because someone posted the meme, “Be Good To People For No Reason,” and I responded by trying to explain that there is no such thing as unmotivated good behavior. Prosocial actions wrap around to benefit the individual. I say “trying to explain,” because a half dozen people on the thread treated me as if I were the proverbial skunk at the garden party. They insisted (in varying degrees) that unless good deeds are unmotivated by self-interest, they aren’t really good deeds at all.

This misconception is a part of the enduring sacred cow of unconditional love.

What’s wrong with “unconditional love?”

Unconditional love sounds good on paper. Who wouldn’t want to be able to count on someone who never wavered or stopped giving them love and support, no matter what? The closest analog would be the bond between a mother and her child. And it does get damn close–it’s common to hear mothers defending their children even when they commit heinous crimes like mass shootings. Extreme altruism toward close kin is explained in evolutionary terms by shared genetics. But almost every other social relationship is fully transactional, and how could it be otherwise?

Richard Dawkins’ classic of evolutionary psychology, The Selfish Gene is essential to understanding human behavior. The most important concept from the book is reciprocal altruism, or just reciprocity, as the foundation of ethics. The book is an eloquent, fact-based challenge to the idea of unmotivated good behavior. And this tends to fly in the face of religious and sentimental feelings. It shouldn’t. Because there’s no conflict between self-interest and good deeds. They come from the same impulse. A lot of people struggle with this paradox.

Belief in unmotivated deeds is similar to ‘creationism’

The cosmological argument for the existence of God uses the “uncaused cause” as its central premise. But the cosmological argument is really a form of argument from ignorance. We don’t know what caused the universe to spring into existence or what came before it. Some people use the crutch of a God “outside of space and time” as a stand-in answer to cover for our failure to find the real answer. As many others including Dawkins have pointed out, using God as “first cause” of the universe simply moves the problem back a step, to our lack of understanding of how a God capable of “causing” a universe came to be. It’s a problem of infinite regress.

We face the same unsolved problem when we promote unmotivated good behavior. It’s a kind of compensation for the fact that it’s scary to think that everyone’s out for themselves. It’s unpleasant to believe that we live in a world based entirely on ruthless competition. Fortunately, it’s only half true.

The premise of The Selfish Gene is that natural selection cultivated a balance between competition and cooperation. Metabolic organisms are forced to compete with one another for scarce resources. The gist of Dawkins’ argument is that organisms which evolved systems of cooperation and mutual aid outcompeted those which did not. Fitness for large-scale competition is improved by cooperation among social groups. That’s a revolutionary idea, because it integrates two perceived opposites. Cooperation and competition operate in tandem. Acts of goodness become simultaneously acts of self-interest.

The foundation of ethics is reciprocity

We should therefore abandon socially entrenched ideas about individual “goodness” and unconditional love. In terms of sheer persistence, such beliefs are every bit as stubborn as the belief in God. And that’s not a coincidence. Both are examples of anti-system, or open-loop thinking. I’ve linked to a short video demonstrating the difference between open-loop and closed-loop systems. These principles of system design can help elucidate the causes and cures of our social ills.

Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” proposes that we should design a society we’d be happy to inhabit, even if we’re ignorant of our class or ethnicity or gender in that society. The key to that thought experiment is design. Which means considering causes and incentives inherent in the structure of that society. In other words, if you want a desired result of “goodness,” you have to close the loop and use feedback to adjust the rules of the system.

The statement “Be Good To People For No Reason” violates causality, because it fails to consider reciprocity. If you understand cause and effect, then you understand that there is no possibility of an uncaused event. We know that people do good deeds. But those deeds do not occur in a vaccum, or represent “manna from heaven.” They are the fully motivated actions of living organisms, based either on reciprocity, or expectation of future reciprocity. We should want to understand this equation, so we can create future conditions where reciprocity is more likely to recur.

What makes this so important? The sentimental concept of “doing good for no reason” hasn’t accomplished good, nor has it solved the problem of evil. If anything, it’s perpetuated evil. Because if we don’t understand why someone does good deeds, we’ll never understand why they make the opposite choice, and we’ll struggle to hold anyone accountable for their actions. Accountability is the bare minimum standard for a reciprocal ethical system. That doesn’t mean just a system of punishment for bad deeds. It also means structuring rewards for good deeds for maximum social benefit.

The role of social networks in motivating goodness

Hardly anyone would argue with either of the following two statements:

• Good deeds should be rewarded
• Bad deeds should be punished

Yet they still expect people to do good without reasons or conditions. It defies explanation. We’re conflicted about this as a society. We recognize the need for rewards and punishments, yet we somehow also expect people to do good–unbidden–and to have an internal moral compass that’s absolute, and independent of social feedback. I find this perspective disturbing. Because it ignores the primary role of incentives to determine behavioral outcomes.

It’s not just the individual, nor just the society. The third consideration, is the structure of the network in which you live. This concerns who you’re connected to, and the strength of those connections. Every individual acts fractionally on everyone else in the network. The strength of the action depends on how far away the other person is in the network. The network in turn, acts on every individual within it.

This is why it’s pointless to talk generically about “goodness” or “love” or “honesty” or “compassion,” or any other quality that refers only to a single individual’s character traits. Those are, once again, open-loop considerations. What about when that person deviates from their character?

Instead, think in terms of a person’s track record of action, and about every behavior, for its impact on the network. What happens when a person does a kindness? Or what happens when someone in the network commits a wrong? Every act and behavior has ripple effects within the network that can lead to either strengthening or weakening of connections, or expulsion from the network. The network in turn, can modify that individual’s future behavior.

How networks curtail bad actors

For example, take a person who doles out small acts of kindness repeatedly to those close to her in the network. Some will return the favor and create a positive loop of reinforcement of kindness. That’s a good network to be in. But then there might also be a person in the network who takes advantage of kindness and does nothing in return, or even causes harm through hostile actions.

An antisocial person can view a kind person as a threat, because the kind person is building social capital and strengthening connections. That’s why parasitic people often deliberately undermine the kind ones with gossip and backbiting. To survive, people in that network will eventually have to recognize what’s going on, and break connections to the parasitic person. Failure to do so over time will result in loss of capacity for continued virtue and reciprocity.

Looking at the aftermath, imagine that the parasitic person has been expelled from one position in the network. They will keep trying to find other positions, or other networks to attach themselves where people aren’t as wise to their behavior. In order to find a new place in society, they will have to at the very least spoof kindness, at least for a while. And then it becomes a constant game of trying to extract as many resources as possible from that new position in the network, without being recognized as parasitic.

Every person and relationship has to be evaluated in these terms of inputs and outputs, and whether they are helping keep the network in balance. It sounds cold and clinical, but this is what your brain is doing all the time, as you decide whether or not you “like” someone, or you “trust” someone, or whether you need to cut ties with someone. You get a good or bad feeling about them, and that means your brain is doing thousands of score-keeping calculations subconsciously, and feeding you the result in the form of an actionable good or bad feeling.

This process never ends. And it’s why expecting unmotivated good behavior is so damaging, and incompatible with reality.

The fatally flawed incentives of capitalism

Beyond small interpersonal groups, our social incentives are badly broken. We live in a new Gilded Age of inequality, where extreme wealth is not coupled with extreme accountability, but rather with extreme exemption from laws and social norms. Wealthy capitalists, on the other hand reliably respond to the existence of poverty, with victim-blaming.

For the wealthy, it’s easy to shroud their self-interest in ostentatious displays of philanthropy. Billionaires mold and evade laws to avoid paying taxes. And they further reduce their tax bills by giving vast sums to charity. But when you examine billionaire philanthropy, you’ll recognize it as a further entrenchment of their power.

Religion is similar. In 2016 in the United States alone, religion was more than a $1 trillion per year enterprise, bigger than Amazon, Google, Apple and seven other large tech companies–combined. Yet this huge enterprise is exempt from both taxation and government oversight.

The primary rationale for religious tax exemption is separation of church and state, which I support. But a secondary justification is that religious organizations provide social benefits that would otherwise require government funding. In practice, religions use most of their tax exempt funds for self-promotion and empire-building. For example, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon Church) is worth $100 billion.

Voluntary vs. “compulsory” charity

Proponents of religious charity and private philanthropy make the claim that these efforts are ethically superior because they are voluntary, in contrast with “forced taxation.” This highlights the disconnect between open-loop (voluntary) approaches, and closed-loop (compulsory) systems. Open-loop systems of charity are also broadly unaccountable for producing improved outcomes. No one is auditing churches to determine if their tax-exempt money is actually doing anything for society.

Taxation by governments to provide social goods may appear involuntary. This is a foundational belief among right-libertarians who sneer at the idea of a social contract. I’ve written about my own past rejection of anti-government beliefs. The beauty of a system of democratic self-government, is that taxation is with the consent of the governed. If a population wants to provide a safety net, it can vote to tax itself to fund social goods like health care and public education and housing. Progressive taxation can require those with higher incomes and greater wealth to provide a greater share of their resources to funding these priorities.

This takes “goodness” out of the hands of individuals and diffuses it to the entire society. It establishes a system less reliant on individual good behavior. By giving up a portion of financial “freedom to” keep all of one’s money, people can decide en masse, to grant themselves “freedom from” extreme destitution. This is how “kindness” and “goodness” are inextricably bound up with public policy. Whether you vote for prosocial or antisocial economic policy is a far stronger indicator of your ethics, than any amount of charitable giving.

Doing good feels good, and increases social capital

To sum up, humans do good because we get something in return–the basic premise of reciprocal altruism. There’s no end to seeming exceptions involving self-sacrifice, like the proverbial soldier jumping on a grenade to save their unit. But if you dig deeply enough into the exceptions, you’ll find some connection to self-preservation on the larger scale of group and nation. At the moment of self-immolation, the hero believes that their sacrifice accomplishes a greater good. They die with a sense of purpose and self-worth, bought at the price of their lives.

Others strike a middle ground, such as donating a kidney that will reduce their own quality of life, to save a family member. In turn, their relationship with that family member is strengthened, and they gain the satisfaction of continued mutual affection with that person, instead of having to bury and mourn them.

Most of us will never face such consequential decisions. But our smaller acts of goodness still provide a reliable return on investment. And that’s why we do them. They increase our sense of belonging, our social capital, and bring more kindness in return. It’s a virtuous cycle, and benefitting from that cycle is nothing to be ashamed of.

The post The Foundation Of Ethics Is Reciprocity Not “Pure Altruism” first appeared on blacksunjournal.

“Time is the fire in which we burn.”

–Delmore Schwartz

I was posting the other day about time, entropy, and clocks as a measure of mortality. Someone commented:

I was tempted to say something snarky and dismissive. But instead, I thought about the question, and realized that it has some profound implications. I’m not sure that the commenter was even aware of the complexity of what she was asking. So I’ll try to unpack it in this article.

What is human mortality?

We are made of stardust, yet we are mortal. To define mortality, we first have to define what makes us alive. If we’re going to answer the question of whether inanimate matter such as stardust has mortality, we first have to look at the mortality of living beings.

Life is defined as “a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining, from that which does not, and is defined by the capacity for growth, reaction to stimuli, metabolism, energy transformation, and reproduction.”

But there’s an equivocation trap in this definition. Can you spot it? The definition “distinguishes matter” that has biological processes “from that which does not.” As if matter itself changes between life and death.

It does not.

The chemical composition of the human body is 99% oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. It’s less than 1% potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. And there are about 10 grams of trace elements in the body which represent most of the remainder of the periodic table. All the elements with an atomic mass greater than lithium were formed by fusion at the heart of stars, or during a supernova.

So it is entirely correct to say we are “made of stardust.”

When a person dies, the mass of their body does not change. The chemical elements present before and after clinical death remain the same. Many cells in the human body can continue to function for hours or days after brain activity ceases.

Decomposition of the body begins almost immediately upon cessation of metabolism, leading to chemical changes, and a fascinating cellular and microbial ecosystem that continues to teem with life.

Left unattended, a decomposing body also becomes a host for insects that feed on the corpse and help break the body down to its chemical components, which then return to nature.

As with any chemical reaction, mass must be conserved during bodily decomposition. The mass of the reactants will always equal the mass of the products. It cannot be otherwise, according to the laws of physics.

There’s a persistent rumor that the mass of the “soul” leaving the body upon death is 21 grams. It’s based on a poorly conducted 1907 experiment, which inspired the eponymous 2003 film. There’s no evidence for any such mass change, for any living organism at the time of death.

What makes up human identity?

If the mass of the body doesn’t change from life to death, then what happens to the “spirit” of the person who dies? The word spirit is related to the Greek pneuma, meaning breath, spirit, or soul. We can understand in the pre-modern era, how people might have thought that as a person exhaled their last breath, their “spirit” left their body. The dying person changed from a living, breathing, interacting being, into something else. Something that rotted and became morbid and scary and repulsive.

That corpus can’t be all there is to a human being, can it?

Without a general understanding of brain function, there’s a strong temptation to believe that the identity of a person is something immaterial, and that upon death it must “go somewhere.” That belief underlies philosophical dualism, a separation between body and mind, matter and spirit. It’s also part and parcel of the “hard problem of consciousness,” which is the struggle to understand how any organism composed entirely of matter is capable of phenomenal experience. I discussed the many theories of consciousness in this 2021 podcast episode A Matter of Consciousness.

But what if the immaterial nature of consciousness is an outmoded illusion? Modern neuroscience demonstrates that our experiences arise from the chemical interaction of neurons. If we see the color red, there is something unique to that experience (qualia). It is the sensation we get when our brain and visual system experiences light in wavelengths from 620 to 750 nanometers. It’s not that odd, that an external stimulus would trigger a unique internal experience. The gestalt helps us react, form memories, and classify our response. A noxious odor triggers disgust, a growl triggers fear, while a floral arrangement or a glass of Pinot Noir triggers positive feelings. These stimuli would be incomprehensible without conscious awareness. In light of what we know about neurology, the so-called “hard problem of consciousness” becomes a paper tiger.

Just as the eye has evolved many times in many different species, so have these essential methods of conscious perception. The ability to quickly respond to stimuli granted our evolutionary ancestors advantages over unconscious organisms. Improvements in cognition led to tool use, planning, agriculture and the formation of complex societies.

In the neurological model of consciousness, we see a pattern of computation performed by the underlying matter of the brain. There is no need for an animating spirit to explain behavior or experience. The conditions that give rise to each unique individual are determined by DNA that instructs cells to self-assemble in a configuration that makes up the human body and mind. When a baby is born, it already has 100 billion neurons. During some phases of gestation, neurons replicate at the rate of 12 to 15 million per hour. By the time a newborn opens its eyes, it’s well on the way to forming an identity. As a child grows, it learns by making memories and associations and deepening neural connections. Around the age of 3, and during the teenage years, there’s a pruning of neurons, leading to further specialization.

Over the course of a life, we enhance and deepen that pattern. We collect experiences, we reproduce, we try to find meaning as we can. We pass on our knowledge to our offspring and others we influence. And then–our patterns all go away, never to return. They are unique, and individual, so far as we know within the entire history of the universe, and will never be repeated.

Nor is there any conceivable way for that pattern of identity to go somewhere else. After death, the stardust that made up our bodies continues on to fill other roles in the ecosystem, and becomes raw material for new plants and animals and the substrate for the bodies and minds of new organisms. The pattern is lost, the stardust remains.

That’s the cycle of human life. By comparison to other natural processes in cosmic time, we’re an eyeblink, a single flash of a firefly.

And as Richard Dawkins said, we are the lucky ones.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

Immortality is for particles, not living beings

You can’t be a self-aware human with any dignity, and pretend you’ll meet your loved ones or pets again someday in any version of “heaven.” People would like to hope that they can cheat death in this manner. This patent illusion even infects our language. Upon death, many people will say that someone has “passed,” which seems more polite than saying they “died.”

But it’s incorrect.

Metabolism is the only thing holding our pattern of identity together. When our cell metabolism ceases, our bodies and brains break down and our identity is lost forever in the stream of entropy. Which brings me full circle to the original question “Is stardust mortal?” And I have to answer it with another question. Would it make any difference to us?

All current evidence indicates that the fundamental particles that make up the universe are the same age. The protons, neutrons, quarks, leptons, bosons and others that compose everything in the universe do not age or die, since they were never alive in the first place. The universe does age, in a manner of speaking, through entropy, or increasing disorder. Over time, the universe becomes more random, uncertain, and chaotic. But unless directly altered by high-energy impacts, atoms and their component particles remain constant.

So the answer is, no. Stardust is not mortal.

I can only surmise that the person asking this question was trying to preserve some notion of human immortality by correctly stating that the elementary particles in our bodies are indestructible. They do not die. But that’s not the point. Because we are not our particles. We are the arrangement of our particles.

Mortal beings are the pattern–not the immortal stardust.

The post Is Stardust Mortal? first appeared on blacksunjournal.

Having culled and curated my friends list for years, my daily experience on social media is pretty free of casual racists. But when it comes to comments on posts from the larger pages, or comments on friend’s posts, it’s sometimes astounding to see the levels of both racism and racism denial. One of my favorites is when some white guy starts rattling on about how “racial identities are bad for everyone, including white people.” Some white guy will then whitesplain that race is an “unscientific construct,” and therefore he “doesn’t see color.”

I will then dutifully point out to this person that this attitude is the textbook definition of white privilege. That being a white person, especially a white man, in a white society, allows that white man to remain unconcerned with his ethnicity, since he is the default, and he is in the majority, he has never had to think very much about his race.

For the most part, he’s never been judged for his race, except for that he is in a preferred group. “Right this way, sir.” He’s never been profiled by cops, except that he is considered generally above suspicion. He’s never been asked, “is this your car” when getting pulled over. He’s never had someone shadow him in a clothing store to make sure he wasn’t stealing. He’s never been turned down for a job because of his race. His resume has never been tossed aside due to his name, because his name is Chad Smith, not Antoine Okunade.

This should be an easy concept.

But for a lot of white guys, it’s impossible for them to wrap their heads around the existence of white privilege.

In fact when I point this out, I usually get a lot of cursing, and angry and laugh emojis.

It turns out that in America, white people can’t see the forest of racism for the trees. It is embedded so deeply in our mental DNA, that we actually have a suppression program in our brains that activates–at any mention of white privilege.

The asterisk

The problem many white people have with the concept of white privilege is that it puts an asterisk by the performance of every white person. If someone owns a home or a business or holds political office, did they truly earn it? Or was it granted to them because of their white privilege?

I understand that this is a difficult question to face. No one wants to believe they were handed anything, and of course, everyone believes their success is due solely to their hard work and intelligence. That luck or social standing or skin color might have played a role, is a bitter pill to swallow.

However, let’s look at the asterisk that has been next to the names of people of color for decades: “She only got that job because of affirmative action,” Or, “you must be your department’s diversity hire.”

White people make these comments without a second thought. And they don’t understand how devastating such sentiments can be, until they try on the shoes of white privilege. When someone comes up to them and says “You owe your job to centuries of white privilege,” then and only then do they understand how it feels to have their confidence, success, and intelligence questioned. Just like a person of color has been questioned–for their entire life.

I understand that this is difficult. Why would a privileged person want to acknowledge or discuss such an uncomfortable subject? The answer is, they wouldn’t. Which is why you hear countless white people saying that they “don’t see color.”

Demographics is destiny

Some of this is the result of demographic shifts which have brought whites closer and closer to minority status. By the early 2040s, the white European demographic is projected to become a minority in the United States. Suddenly, white identity is front-and-center, as white people face the prospect, for the first time, of not being the default ethnicity. Suddenly, scads of people feel the need to publicly display symbols of white pride. This is what is behind the MAGA phenomenon, the alt right “European-identity” flex, and the seething hostility to immigrants of color.

Disproportionate MAGA rage raises the uncomfortable question, of how the US treats its minority populations? White people know from long experience, that they haven’t treated minorities well. If they didn’t know, they wouldn’t fear their looming minority status, right?

Christianity and racism are intertwined

It’s not just white privilege that’s at issue here. It’s also Christian privilege. For many white Christians, white Christian nationalism is so much a part of the idea of America, that it has become inseparable. Most black Americans are also Christians. But remember how Christianity first entered the black experience, which is by force. Enslaved people whose bodies were bought and sold were prisoners of white slave owners. They cannot be expected to have had free minds, or to have made a free choice about adopting the religion of their enslavers. For generations of enslaved people, Christianity was the only option, the only religion they ever knew.

But Christianity in the black experience codified white supremacy. The enslaver was white, and what a coincidence, Jesus was white, too. In the film “Contradiction” by Jeremiah Camara, several modern black church goers were asked which was more important to them, “the blood of their ancestors or the blood of Jesus Christ.” Almost all of them answered, “the blood of Jesus Christ.”

I can’t think of a more textbook example of Stockholm Syndrome.

The cross is not neutral or benign

It’s one thing to be shocked about KKK hoods, or MAGA hats. We see these symbols and we immediately think of hate. But there’s another symbol that directly represents the complete and total subjugation of the African people. And that is the Christian cross. How is it that we don’t acknowledge this? How is it that black people can display crosses without realizing that the cross literally represented the death of their ancestral religion, and the loss of connection to the culture of their homeland?

As an unapologetic white male anti-theist, I do hate what the cross represents. And I have my own very good reasons. Chiefly because it has been used as a moral cudgel to universalize authoritarian Christian attitudes, to inject them into governance, and to delegitimize non-believers and those who don’t follow arbitrary Christian morality. That self-righteous Christian baker who refused to make a cake for a gay wedding, most assuredly displays a cross at home. It’s simply embarrassing how much pain and bigotry hides behind the virtue-signaling of that symbol.

But the Christian cross should be at least doubly or triply hateful to people of color.

In most of white Catholic or Protestant America, Christians see the cross as a symbol of universal good, and the sacrifice of the “son of God” for the saving of the souls of sinners. I’ll leave aside the sheer morbidity of that incongruous belief. Even a hint that the cross might be a symbol of oppression, is considered by Christian believers to be preposterous. Which is, again, another manifestation of white privilege. The cross has been around so long that it’s synonymous with the default of “goodness.”

And too many black people have forgotten its awful history.

What if it were the star and crescent?

Every time you see a cross displayed publically, you ought to sit up straight, and think about how you allowed such a symbol of oppression to become not only commonplace, but came to revere it. And every time you see someone wearing a cross or pass a church with a large cross display, think about your unquestioned assumptions, and begin to understand that it’s not all sweetness and light.

Display of the cross in the United States is yet another level of plausibly-deniable racism and white privilege hiding in plain sight. It cannot be made neutral, nor can it be separated from the heinous actions of the Christian church and its followers, which have trampled human rights not just in America but worldwide, for centuries.

Culture Shock

The Christian cross today still represents an “acceptable” display of patriarchy and white supremacy, and ultimately discrimination against people of color, LGBTQ+ populations, women, and non-Christians. If you’re a Christian who disagrees with my assessment, consider what your reaction would be if every Christian church in the United States were to suddenly turn into a mosque? Consider how you might feel if celebrities and public figures started wearing Islamist symbols around their necks? What if giant penis sculptures to the god Priapus were allowed on public property? Or if Jesus was portrayed as gay, or Yahweh as a trans woman?

That kind of grating culture shock is how the Christian cross feels to non-Christians.

So we should all be able to agree instinctively that religious symbols can feel hostile to non-believers in that religion, and should therefore not be displayed on public property, or in official government iconography. Such official displays are disenfranchising to the citizenship of anyone who doesn’t follow that religion. That’s why seeing a national symbol like the Washington Monument turned into a cross in a fictional television series is so revolting. Pluralistic democracy absolutely must be neutral regarding religion. It cannot exist, otherwise.

Recognize that in a future society where equality and dignity were universally recognized–and races and genders and nationalities were treated equally, there would be no room for such oppressive symbols. If Christianity were no longer the majority religion in the United States, the Christian cross with its history of white supremacy, would be as out of place in our nation as the Confederate flag.

The post Whiteness And Christianity Are Blocking American Social Cohesion first appeared on blacksunjournal.

Free speech seems so deceptively simple. Most people think it means that everyone should be able to say whatever they want to say, whenever and wherever they want to say it, without public or private consequence. This is wildly, preposterously wrong. Not just legally, but also in principle. So what is free speech, really? And how can we separate the reality from the wild claims and “freeze peach” grift?

1. Free speech is a matter of law: The First Amendment to the United States Constitution grants every citizen broad protection from government interference to speech. However the list of exceptions is long, with a fraught history of legal conflict. This includes incitement, libel, false advertising, lying to a police officer, lying under oath, counterfeiting, disclosing classified information, obscenity, fighting words, threats against public officials, and restrictions based on the special capacity of government.
2. Speech cannot be made consequence-free: What you say will have a direct impact on your personal relationships, your employment status, your reputation, and your business. Choose your words wisely.
3. Contract law can limit speech: non-disclosure agreements and terms of service agreements, are just two of the ways that you can legally waive your right to free speech through binding contracts.
4. The public square: You have the right to speak publicly, but not the right to be heard in any given venue. Publishers of books, magazines, films, television, radio, and social content, as well as owners of public performance spaces, are free to decline to promote or distribute anyone’s speech for any reason–or no reason.
5. Academia: Public institutions of learning are the primary arbiters of facts. Academia’s role is to train the next generation how to separate truth from falsehood. So the Academy must collectively decide through peer review what constitutes justifiably true knowledge and good scholarship, and what does not qualify. This involves the active suppression of lies, demagoguery, rumors, and bad data, (i.e. speech).

“Free-speech absolutism” is a power grab

The above list is by no means complete. It only scratches the surface of the many reasons why truly unfettered speech is not only impossible, but undesirable. The entire illusion of “freedom of speech” as it exists in common discourse, is oversimplified demagoguery. Especially claims of “free-speech absolutism.” The NPR story link refers to Elon Musk, who’s in the process of revealing his anti-democratic agenda through the purchase of Twitter. It’s time we recognized his gambit for exactly what it is: a massive power grab. He’s not in this for anyone’s freedom–of anything.

So let’s examine the many levels of hypocrisy surrounding free speech. When anyone says they want freedom of speech, it always implies they want to be able to say things that other people don’t want them to say. On the other hand, everyone crowing about free speech, has things that they personally don’t want other people to say.

Effectively this is “free speech for me, censorship for you.” Approximately zero percent of free speech advocates are honest enough to admit this.

Essential conditions for freedom of expression

Like every other human right, freedom of speech must (and does) have limits. Not because we want one group of people to arbitrarily be able to shut down others. But because the rights of different groups conflict with each other. There must be compromise, fair play, and tradeoffs. All parties concerned must accept some limitations, to prevent their own rights from being infringed by others. That’s why absolutism can’t work.

A vast subtopic in political philosophy concerns positive vs. negative liberty. “Freedom to,” vs. “Freedom from.” The limits of free speech are entirely governed by both constructs.

Both types of liberty are pivotal. Positive liberty would mean your legal freedom to stand at a podium in front of a crowd in the public square, without being arrested by the government. Negative liberty would mean you have freedom from being shouted down by other speakers. Both must exist in order for communication to take place. Importantly, freedom from being shouted down has a lot to do with whether the crowd likes what you’re trying to say. No law can practically grant you the freedom to tell a crowd something it does not want to hear. Freedom of speech only grants you the right to try to persuade them. Social media crowds may yet be wise enough to set some limits of what they will tolerate, before they revolt or log off.

Liberal vs. Conservative attitudes toward speech

If you’re a liberal, you generally don’t want people to have freedom to use hate speech, or promote dangerous lies and conspiracy theories. That’s because liberals recognize that disinformation endangers democracy and public safety, and that targets of hate speech have the right to have freedom from harassment and violence. What good are laws protecting freedom of expression, (freedom to), if libraries can’t host “Drag Queen Story Hour,” without freedom from disruption by aggressive transphobic protesters? Or donut shops getting firebombed for innocent “drag” marketing stunts?

If you’re a conservative, you’ll argue that even hate speech should be protected, and that Proud Boys crashing Drag Queen Story Hour are within their Constitutional rights to loudly express their opinion at a library, since it’s public property. I have no idea how they plan to justify firebombing a private business. I’m sure they’ll think of something. Because what they never do, is take responsibility.

Conservatives also generally consider that public climate-change denial, antivax-propaganda, and election denialism, (even though provably false), are fully acceptable speech, since “everyone has the right to their own opinion.” They also tend to clam up and look away, whenever one of their own calls for religious violence against persecuted minorities such as gay or transgender people.

Right wingers just don’t seem to care about the direct connection between speech and violence. If preachers tell enough people, enough times, that “God wants gay people dead,” eventually someone’s going to carry out that threat. Especially if the violent rhetoric gets amplified on social media that reaches millions. And that brings us right back to the role of Elon Musk, and his new play-toy, Twitter.

Russian propaganda, baseless conspiracies, and Alex Jones

Starlink has been told by some governments (not Ukraine) to block Russian news sources. We will not do so unless at gunpoint.

Sorry to be a free speech absolutist.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2022

When I saw this tweet back in March, I knew the world was in serious trouble. And that was about a month before Musk announced his intent to acquire Twitter.

If Musk can’t draw the line at Russian state propaganda, where exactly would he draw it? Would Joseph Goebbels have gotten a pass? Tokyo Rose? Donald Trump, who is rumored to be headed for Twitter reinstatement? Would Hitler have gotten a blue check? Is there any line that can’t be crossed under the rubric of free speech absolutism? It’s an absurdity bordering on complete moral blindness. As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel famously remarked, “neutrality favors the oppressor.”

the bird is freed

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022

Is the bird free from censorship? Or free to hate? Because those two priorities can’t be reconciled. If Twitter is free to hate, then marginalized communities aren’t free from the danger of mass trolling, doxxing, and harassment by Twitter mobs, because the platform has taken sides, against keeping them safe.

The transaction was finalized on October 27, 2022. Elon Musk has barely been “chief twit” for a week, and already there are serious spikes of hate speech.

Musk can’t make up his mind. He wrote an open letter to Twitter advertisers in which he said, “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Which was strangely out of character for a “free speech absolutist.” But then he fired Vijaya Gadde, the head of trust and safety, and locked out all but 15 of the hundreds of employees who had previously been authorized to moderate content. And bragged about it. Later, he tweeted that Twitter would be forming a content moderation council with “widely diverse viewpoints.”

To be super clear, we have not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies https://t.co/k4guTsXOIu

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2022

What does this mean, exactly? It’s impossible to know. An article in the Verge called “Welcome to hell, Elon,” lays out the dilemma:

What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.

So what will Elon do? Will he realize the vital importance of being a responsible content broker? Or will he follow his ridiculous teenage-fantasy libertarian ideology. Will he reward the insurrectionist former president Trump with 80 million new ways to foment political violence? Can he possibly plan to re-platform disgraced “Sandy-Hook-was-a-false-flag” conspiracy-monger Alex Jones? Will he ignore the fact that a jury just decided that dude did about a billion dollars worth of harm to the grieving parents of murdered children?

Can unlimited power be reconciled with ethics?

The signs do not bode well. “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” No one knows who first uttered those words. But just two days after Musk took over Twitter, he failed the test.

On Friday, October 28, 2022, Paul Pelosi, the 82-year old husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was viciously attacked with a hammer in his home, and his skull fractured. The assailant was a full-blown MAGA / QAnon nutjob. It was a perfect illustration of the terrible power of decades of unfettered right wing hate-speech against Nancy Pelosi, to inspire stochastic terrorism.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted a response to the horrific attack:

The Republican Party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories. It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result. As citizens, we must hold them accountable for their words and the actions that follow.https://t.co/MQor4NDFeE

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 29, 2022

Now, picture this: You’re Elon Musk, you have over 100 million followers, and you just bought perhaps the second most powerful social network in the world.

You see this story come across your feed. Do you…

1. Tweet your condolences, adding that you will do everything in your power to rein in hate speech on your new platform. Or do you…
2. Tweet a reply that “there is a tiny possibility that there might be a little more to this story than meets the eye,” and then link a fringe conspiracy site claiming that the vicious attack against an 82-year old man was a kinky gay tryst gone wrong?

Holy fuck, he chose option number two. I’m sorry, but who the fuck does that??? Certainly not someone who should have a hundred million followers, in any sort of benevolent universe. Musk later deleted the tweet, but not until it had been amplified and shared tens of thousands of times, and widely reported as news. Launching yet another conspiracy theory that will be knocking around in millions of addled right-wing brains for years.

What does Musk really believe?

The incident underscored that Elon Musk is simply besotted with extreme right-wing ideology. He’s fully on board with blaring out baseless and destructive conspiracy theories, truth be damned. He’s become increasingly erratic, combative and outspoken against what he calls “wokeism” and “political correctness.”

And wow, what a blast from the past. The term “political correctness” (“PC” for short) was first used pejoratively by Allan Bloom in his 1987 book “The Closing of the American Mind.” Ever since, it’s been used to mock linguistic reformers and social justice proponents. If you lived through the 1980s, you also know this was Rush Limbaugh’s favorite dog whistle. Next thing you know, Musk will be tweeting about “Feminazis.” I just don’t understand the exasperating right-wing tendency to fulminate about being asked not to deliberately say things that hurt people.

Advertisers should support:

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2022

It would be one thing to lament that limiting free speech might cause harm or injustice. But no. Musk is specifically upset that advertisers might demand that he force Twitter users to tone down their hatred, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia.

Why would that be bad? Unless you sympathize with those things?

Elon’s ideological rot goes far beyond sympathy for hate speech. Now he’s blaming activists for a precipitous drop in Twitter ad revenue since he took over–and mass exodus of over a million users. Instead of taking responsibility for his own missteps driving people away, he’s trying to pawn the whole self-created fiasco off on liberals–whining about “free speech” yet again.

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.

Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

When all else fails, attack the news media

It’s not just “wokeness” and “political correctness” he’s after. He’s also been using his ultra-megaphone to go after the other favorite right wing bête noire, the “mainstream media.” This time, I tweeted back.

Parallax error. The Guardian hasn’t changed. You’ve slammed to the right, so you think every accurate news source that’s not drinking the Kool-aid is far left.

— Sean Prophet (@BlackSun_) November 1, 2022

Who are you going to believe? Loose-cannon free-speech absolutist Elon Musk, or The Guardian, founded in 1821, that’s been delivering hard news for 201 years?

Next, he made a joke implying that The New York Times (founded in 1851, delivering hard news for 171 years) was “false news.”

How positively Trumpian. Will there also be a Musk University school of journalism in our future?

This is fake – I did *not* tweet out a link to The New York Times! pic.twitter.com/d6V6m5ATW2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022

Is he just trolling us?

The wealthiest man in the world, has now become its biggest troll. So big he owns his own social network. It’s only fitting that I troll him right back. (Shhh–here’s the scoop–don’t believe a word of it!)

You see, Elon Musk really isn’t batshit, or conservative at all. He’s crazy like a fox–a really smart CEO who knew that half of Americans would absolutely never buy electric cars from a California liberal.

So he picked up stakes, moved to Texas and built a Gigafactory in Austin. Then he started shitposting his crackpot theories about epidemiology and Covid lockdowns, and spent $44 billion to turn Twitter into a right-wing sewer. He did all that just to double Tesla’s sales. Now you know his real secret evil plan to turn a profit on the Twitter deal: MAGAts can now buy a Tesla to “own the libs.”

As Bill Maher would say, “I don’t know it for a fact–I just know it’s true.”

The post Elon Musk Is Not A Superhero Of ‘Free Speech’ first appeared on blacksunjournal.

Averbal response to a sneeze is a polite necessity almost everywhere. It’s close to a human universal. According to Wikipedia, there are hundreds of words and phrases in many languages, commonly used in response to sneezing. These follow remarkably similar themes in most human cultures: Invocations of blessings from a deity, or personal wishes for good health or long life.

There are some real oddities, too.

If you speak English, you’re most likely to say “God bless you!” The German loanword gesundheit is the next most popular. It means “good health,” or more literally “may you be in a healthy manner.” The etymology is “gesund” which means “healthy” and “heit” a generalized suffix from the proto-German haiduz, that connotes “personality, character, manner, or way” of being.

Responses are similar around the world, in every language

• Blessing or grace from deity: “God bless you!” “May God forgive you!” “God have mercy on you” “In God’s name” “The Lord be with you.” “Jesus.” “God help you!” “God speaks truth” “Let Lord Krishna bless you” “Buddha protect you” “God give you relief!” “Glorious lord” “Little saint”
• Health, wellness, recovery: “Gesundheit” “Well being!” “May good happen” “A great, fortunate occurrence” “Drink more water” “Take care” “To your wishes” “Are you all right?” “Fast recovery” “A good sign, hopefully” “Recover” “Patience” “May purity be bestowed upon you” “To your luck” “Cheers” “Relief”
• Long life: “May you live long” “Live to 100 years old” “Sneeze, and you shall live” “May you be blessed with a life without death” “Live long, live good” “To life for many years”
• Affirmations that you speak truth, or that people are speaking well of you: “Truth” “It is true” “God speaks truth” “That the one said it” “Sneezed on truth”
• Oddities: “Thrill” “Understood?” “Got it” “Sorry” “Progress” “To your loves” “You shall grow tall” “May you grow up” “Go away, kitten”

Why do people sneeze?

Most cultures consider a sneeze as a cause for concern about someone’s well being. How much truth is there to this idea? Medical websites tend to agree that most sneezing is normal and harmless, often caused by irritation of the lining of the nose or throat by allergens such as pollen or dust. There are other triggers for sneezing such as bright light, or drug withdrawal. But the irritation that brings on a sneeze can also be a sign of a respiratory infection. It’s a violent physical reflex, therefore a sneeze can spread aerosolized infectious particles throughout a room, some of them traveling 30 to 40 miles per hour, or faster. This video from Science Friday demonstrates the process in slow motion.

Everything you want to know (or might not want to know) about sneezing

Risk of infection, and a dark history

Infectious sneezing is a real danger during cold and flu season, or during a pandemic such as the 1918 H1N1 flu, or the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak. The most deadly disease in recorded history was the Black Death, a form of bubonic plague. Its pathogen, Yersinia Pestis, was mostly carried by fleas living on rats. But it was also transmitted in part through airborne droplets caused by sneezing. The Black Death killed as many as 200 million people from 1346-1353, reducing the world’s population by as much as one third. Mortality in some parts of Europe was as high as 60 percent.

Because this great calamity occurred centuries ago, it’s not part of our collective memory. But its influence lives on in the human gene pool, in the form of autoimmune disorders. Also known as The Pestilence, The Great Mortality, or The Plague, the Black Death had a wide impact on culture and language. Which included an association between sneezing and the potential of death. Outbreaks of bubonic plague continued to ravage humanity through later centuries, solidifying this association. There were no vaccines, treatments, or antibiotics available. So out of desperation, terrified people invoked “blessings” upon the sick.

The confusion of illness with sin and punishment

An article on World History Encyclopedia titled Religious Responses to the Black Death recounts both the Christian and Muslim reactions to the plague. In summary, religious authorities had no idea what was causing the plague or how to cure it. They took advantage of the panic and superstition of a stricken population to demand repentance and social changes. They attributed the plague to evil spirits, and / or “supernatural forces and, primarily, the will or wrath of God.” Quack “cures” were common, involving chickens, snakes, bloodletting, toxic elixirs containing arsenic or mercury, and even the ingestion of sewage.

Religious authorities encouraged increased prayer and fasting and piety. Therefore people gathered indoors for worship, and in public processions–which further spread the disease. After much suffering and death, people began to understand that the plague was transmissible from person to person, though they didn’t know why. And they began to focus on fumigation, and quarantine, to get away from “bad air,” which we now know was the right thing to do. “Bad air” is a great description of air full of infectious droplets, the kind you might find in a room full of sneezing sick people.

Do fear and superstition drive the response to sneezing?

First let’s consider fear: A sneeze means someone might be ill. Consequently, they could die from their illness, or transmit the infection. This was much more plausible without hospitals or medicine or vaccines. Medieval deaths from “natural causes” including disease were far higher than they are today.

Smallpox was one of the worst diseases in human history, killing 3 out of 10 infected people. But it was eradicated worldwide in 1980. Nearly all other preventable diseases have been brought under control with vaccinations. This great public health achievement lulled us into a false sense of security. Covid-19 shook us out of our late 20th Century fantasy, that deadly pandemics were a thing of the past. Once again thanks to Covid-19, a sneeze really can be a sign of impending death, and mortal danger for those nearby. Fear of sneezing is once again legitimate.

Now, lets consider the superstition. A Snopes article on the topic discusses some of the common false beliefs people hold, or have held about sneezing.

• A person’s “soul” could be expelled from the body by a sneeze
• That a sneeze could expel a “demon” or allow a “demon” to enter
• Hearts can stop or skip a beat when someone sneezes
• A sneeze is a sign of good luck
• Sneezing confers a blessing that should be reciprocated

The Snopes article concludes that responding with “God bless you” may or may not have originated from fear of illness or one of these superstitions. But that it’s now become a reflexive courtesy that’s simply considered good manners.

An easy solution for atheists: Wish people “Good health”

I agree with Snopes that overuse of the phrase is a form of semantic satiation, in the sense that it’s so common as to have lost all overt connection to any god or blessing. It’s simply what you say. However, words matter. Words shape our thoughts, and our thoughts lead to actions that shape the world. As a result, when we invoke a blessing from “God” in response to a sneeze, we’re not merely being polite. We’re actively reaffirming the existence of a deity, and also the medieval idea of a connection between disease, and sin, and punishment. The presumption inherent in the phrase, is that a “blessing” is expected, that it’s polite, and that it will help the person “get right with God.”

The more you think about it, the worse it gets.

Saying “God bless you” has become so innocuous that people entirely forget the pernicious nature of it. The association of illness with sin and punishment leads to a subtle, unconscious victim blaming, the idea that the person who’s ill might have done something wrong to deserve it. It’s also invoking the whole medieval, superstitious attitude that connects morality with God-belief.

This is why I never say it. And you shouldn’t either. I say “gesundheit,” or “good health.” Not only is this every bit as polite as “God bless you,” it eliminates the whole toxic religious stew. It grants me agency, as a human being who sincerely cares about the well-being of the person I’m speaking to. Will my good wishes help that person? Not unless I actively intervene to provide comfort or medical care. But I’m talking about words that convey courtesy. Making this change in your language fully preserves social graces, and eliminates backward linguistic baggage.

The post Achhoooo!! What Do You Say In A Social Setting? first appeared on blacksunjournal.

American Christians and atheists inhabit the same land mass, but live in profoundly different universes. Particularly when it comes to the meaning of freedom, the desired character of society, and what constitutes a civil right. Being the majority religion, Christian believers often claim the US is a “Christian nation,” while atheists and minority faiths insist that the founders intended official church-state separation–or secularism.

Who’s right?

The First Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly. It also contains the conflict between religious privilege and official secularism, which is heating up once again at the Supreme Court in the 2020s.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”–Constitution of the United States, First Amendment, 1791

Let’s analyze the two clauses:

1. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” Broadly this means that no religion can be granted a special preference in law, or exemption from any law, that is denied to other religions or non-believers. It means there should be no religious test for public service. No requirement of specific religious belief should exist within publicly funded institutions such as schools, hospitals, libraries, or the military. It also means that Congress should not directly or indirectly fund churches, private religious schools, or grant special tax treatment to religious institutions.
2. “…or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” This clause protects freedom of conscience, but often goes far beyond that, putting it in conflict with the establishment clause. It says that the government cannot penalize anyone for exercising their religious beliefs. But there are many areas of society, particularly concerning civil rights, where the free exercise of one person’s religious belief might violate someone else’s civil rights. Flashpoints include prayer or religious instruction in public schools, funding of private religious schools, same-sex marriage, abortion rights, adoption of children by same-sex couples, and employment discrimination against women and LGBTQ+ citizens.

The establishment clause protects secularism. But the free-exercise clause could be taken to justify theocracy (government by religious law). Theocracy in its most extreme form could mean that religious believers could challenge any laws that conflicted with their beliefs. Obviously this is absurd. What if a religion tried to use its scripture to justify murder, or other violence against someone who believed differently? It’s easy to find passages in the scriptures of most of the world’s religions commanding that people be put to death as punishment for non-belief, or other transgressions against religious commandments.

Most scriptures were written during times of great brutality, long before universal human rights were recognized by the world’s governments. So in modern democracies, there have to be reasonable limits on what can be considered protected religious belief. Passages from scripture involving “stoning” or “putting to death” could not possibly qualify.

There are many gray areas

Should people be allowed to pray silently, or out loud, in public schools or at government jobs? Can religious clubs organize on public university campuses, or worship in publicly owned meeting facilities? Is it fair for religious bakers, wedding photographers, or pharmacists to refuse service to customers based on their objections to same-sex marriage or contraception? Should a nurse or physician be able to refuse to provide care to a patient based on their disapproval of a patient’s gender identity or sexual orientation? Can a religious parent keep their child out of public school without violating truancy laws? Would it be acceptable for an adoption agency to discriminate against same-sex couples? Should a private corporation owned by religious believers be exempt from equal opportunity employment law, and be allowed to refuse to hire non-believers or people of a certain race or gender?

These are profound questions about what it means to live in a free and equal society. Does “freedom” include the right to discriminate against non-believers? It seems American Christians are increasingly answering “yes” to this question. It seems they believe they have the right to pray and worship in public spaces, refuse public education, public-health measures, and deprive women and LGBTQ+ citizens of their civil rights.

Legislative and legal bulwarks of civil rights

During the 20th century, US courts ruled broadly in favor of the establishment clause, and against official religion, moving the US closer to being a fully secular nation. An important part of this trend was increased legal protection for universal civil rights, mainly thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Additional key laws protecting civil rights were the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, and the Fair Housing Act. But the push to expand civil rights didn’t stop there. Several key Supreme Court decisions expanded privacy and self-determination. These included:

• Loving v. Virginia – established the right to marry anyone of any race
• Griswold v. Connecticut – established the right to contraception
• Roe v. Wade – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – established the right to abortion
• Obergefell v. Hodges – established the right to same-gender marriage

These laws and court decisions established important protections that form a baseline of the equal treatment under the law necessary for a secular society. But every single one of them has received furious pushback from Christian affiliated lobbying arms and legal think tanks. These include The Federalist Society, The Thomas More Law Center, and the American Legislative Exchange Council–among others.

Exclusion vs. Inclusion

Prominent Christian political action groups have opposed the expansion of secular civil rights since the late 1970s. Their boldest early success was achieved by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, which stopped the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment by the states. Then, in 2022 six Federalist Society Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in their disastrous Dobbs v. Jackson decision. In about half of US states, women no longer have the right to make the most intimate decision about whether or not they want to give birth to a child.

Following the Dobbs decision, Christians have renewed their calls for national abortion and same-sex marriage bans, to roll back the right to contraception, and even to potentially revisit basic civil rights law, on the pretext that universal civil rights represent an “attack on religious liberty.” It’s difficult to understand how anyone could consider enforcement of a civil right to be an “attack on religious liberty,” but that’s the current state of play in America.

The primary social difference between American Christians and atheists then, is exclusion vs. inclusion. Christians are driven by their faith to insist that their scriptures should be codified into law, and they vote and lobby accordingly. They demand that even those who do not believe in Christianity should still be legally required to follow its teachings. This is not religious freedom, it’s privilege, and even domination. It’s imposing a set of beliefs by force. It’s excluding non-Christians from equal treatment under the law.

Atheists, on the other hand, simply want to be free not to believe. They’re certainly not trying to prevent Christians from believing, or practicing their religion in any way, except where that practice would conflict with civil rights. Atheists, therefore, want fairness and inclusion in the form of secularism, which means all laws and civil rights apply equally to majority and minority faiths, and non-believers.

How can anyone argue with that?

The post The Most Consequential Social Difference Between American Christians And Atheists first appeared on blacksunjournal.