Comment by causal
14 hours ago
There's something richly ironic about a man who famously spent his career demanding hard evidence for the gods so quickly succumbing to AI psychosis.
14 hours ago
There's something richly ironic about a man who famously spent his career demanding hard evidence for the gods so quickly succumbing to AI psychosis.
I'm reminded of the David Foster Wallace quote:
> Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship, be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles, is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
I think DFW is wrong and the statement "Everybody worships" is false. I don't worship anything I can think of in any meaningful sense of the word.
“Show me where you spend your time, money and energy and I’ll tell you what you worship...” — John Wimber
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What's the first thing people say when they get into a car accident?
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I'd never read this passage but I've often had a similar thought, that maybe the benefit religion provides people is as a placeholder that saves you from subordinating your life to the wrong things. When devout people say "I really had to pray on it" about a big decision, it means at least that they spent some time asking about their real priorities and their duties, that kind of thing. If "nothing is more important than God", maybe that helps prevent people from making any one thing too important in their life— something that likely benefits them whether their god exists or not.
"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays." – Søren Kierkegaard
I mean sure if you define worship as anything people do or anything believe as important then everyone worships something. That seems categorically different to the standard definition of worship though.
Islam established this over 1400 years ago in the Quran. For example:
* https://quran.com/al-furqan/43
* https://quran.com/al-jathiyah/23
Not sure how that's relevant. Still think the statement is false.
His positions on religion and AI seem consistent to me.
Whether AI is or isn't sentient is more of a definitional claim, and how low a bar you set for human consciousness. It has essentially nothing to do with with questions about the supernatural.
Is it really psychosis for someone, who already thinks consciousness isn't supernatural, to think that consciousness isn't special enough to be out of reach of current primitive AI efforts?
> Is it really psychosis for someone, who already thinks consciousness isn't supernatural, to think that consciousness isn't special enough to be out of reach of current primitive AI efforts?
This is what I also thought. By definition, a hard atheist must be a materialist which means that consciousness - no matter how it’s defined specifically - must be a product of a material configuration. Though I do think he’s fallen for the parrot and uses this belief to self-rationalise, it’s a valid position for a hard atheist/materialist to hold. In that case how do you test an AI for consciousness?
He's also older than Trump. His mind is likely not as sharp as it used to be.