I have long been fascinated by the mechanistic view of the world that assumes it can be broken up into little pieces and then put back together again. I have though yet to meet someone who has had their head chopped off, their arms and legs removed and all their innards taken out who has been neatly sewn together by the surgeon and been what we call 'alive'!!
Or who hasn't had the experience of taking something apart to fix or clean it, and when you put it back together again it works perfectly but there's some parts left over?
"Why read a scientific paper on world beliefs, when you can have a personal AI guru whispering the secrets of the universe through a smartphone?"
I suspect this is one of the (if not *the*) end game goals of AI. No need to think, just ask the machine and it will reveal to you all 'truth'. The early phase to gain adoption will be more neutral and seemingly less biased so that it can gain our trust. Once it's been full bought into and implemented in our daily lives, those behind the scenes can tweak the data/feedback provided to our queries to lead us to the desired conclusions.
This is rather salient, from a recent issue of Touchstone:
"Say a person professes he does or does not “believe in traditional morality.” On one hand, everyone knows what “traditional morality” means: following the law of God found in the Ten Commandments, the universal Tao: do not steal, do no murder, do not commit adultery, honor your father and mother, and so on. But on the other hand, there are always those who wish to “find out precisely what this means” by subjecting the term to analysis: “What, exactly,” they ask, “do we mean by this, for in one culture traditional morality allows polygamy and in another it doesn’t; to some, war is theft, while others see it in heroic terms?” Some believe concerns about “sin” should be overridden for the greater good, while others do not.
At the end of this process, nothing is left but ashes: there is no such thing, really, as “traditional morality”—even though everyone not only knows that there is, but also has a pretty good idea of what it looks like—and knows that it carries with it an “ought,” a moral imperative that applies to everyone. The proposition that “traditional morality” exists and that one should order his life in accordance therewith, along with every other intelligible sentence, analytic or synthetic, breaks down under analysis—this Greek word means “a breaking apart”—and along with this comes the breaking of intelligible discourse altogether. For analysis, as a dis-assembling of a meaningful unity, of something meaningful only as a unity, is an agent of chaos, of brokenness."
Thanks so much for this sharing. It evoked a certain sickness in the stomach for me. The anthropocentrism of the three primal tenants felt hollow, shallow and synthetically simplistic. Disconnected from the feeling body of existence, all wrapped up in the flat, 2D thinking mind. Perhaps it’s because I live with a deeply rich and spiritual life? Perhaps it’s because I’m an animist? Either way I’d have been willing to sit down with these researchers/scientists on the edge of a boggy marsh at sunset listening to frogs and breezes moving through grasses, knowing that we ‘might’ be snapped at by gators and asked them to consider that perhaps our opinions/lives were not the epitome of existence - just one beautiful and banal thread woven into the fabric of the fierce living earth, and, that their pursuit would ultimately lead to an empty result, at least a vastly incomplete one, because reductive thought based exercises always lead us there, as they have led us to the rot of this time.
I have long been fascinated by the mechanistic view of the world that assumes it can be broken up into little pieces and then put back together again. I have though yet to meet someone who has had their head chopped off, their arms and legs removed and all their innards taken out who has been neatly sewn together by the surgeon and been what we call 'alive'!!
Or who hasn't had the experience of taking something apart to fix or clean it, and when you put it back together again it works perfectly but there's some parts left over?
True, but they are never living things are they - it's usually radios or motorbikes Steve :-)
Mary Harrington would call this “meat-Lego gnosticism”.
https://stangoff.medium.com/bio-libertarinaism-meat-lego-gnosticism-and-other-matters-d126afe8ce40
Nice phrase - I'll go and take a look :-)
"Why read a scientific paper on world beliefs, when you can have a personal AI guru whispering the secrets of the universe through a smartphone?"
I suspect this is one of the (if not *the*) end game goals of AI. No need to think, just ask the machine and it will reveal to you all 'truth'. The early phase to gain adoption will be more neutral and seemingly less biased so that it can gain our trust. Once it's been full bought into and implemented in our daily lives, those behind the scenes can tweak the data/feedback provided to our queries to lead us to the desired conclusions.
“The early phase to gain adoption will be more neutral and seemingly less biased so that it can gain our trust.”
Which is, alas, the really insidious thing.
This is rather salient, from a recent issue of Touchstone:
"Say a person professes he does or does not “believe in traditional morality.” On one hand, everyone knows what “traditional morality” means: following the law of God found in the Ten Commandments, the universal Tao: do not steal, do no murder, do not commit adultery, honor your father and mother, and so on. But on the other hand, there are always those who wish to “find out precisely what this means” by subjecting the term to analysis: “What, exactly,” they ask, “do we mean by this, for in one culture traditional morality allows polygamy and in another it doesn’t; to some, war is theft, while others see it in heroic terms?” Some believe concerns about “sin” should be overridden for the greater good, while others do not.
At the end of this process, nothing is left but ashes: there is no such thing, really, as “traditional morality”—even though everyone not only knows that there is, but also has a pretty good idea of what it looks like—and knows that it carries with it an “ought,” a moral imperative that applies to everyone. The proposition that “traditional morality” exists and that one should order his life in accordance therewith, along with every other intelligible sentence, analytic or synthetic, breaks down under analysis—this Greek word means “a breaking apart”—and along with this comes the breaking of intelligible discourse altogether. For analysis, as a dis-assembling of a meaningful unity, of something meaningful only as a unity, is an agent of chaos, of brokenness."
https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=35-06-003-e
Thanks for this link! I will take a look at it...
Thanks so much for this sharing. It evoked a certain sickness in the stomach for me. The anthropocentrism of the three primal tenants felt hollow, shallow and synthetically simplistic. Disconnected from the feeling body of existence, all wrapped up in the flat, 2D thinking mind. Perhaps it’s because I live with a deeply rich and spiritual life? Perhaps it’s because I’m an animist? Either way I’d have been willing to sit down with these researchers/scientists on the edge of a boggy marsh at sunset listening to frogs and breezes moving through grasses, knowing that we ‘might’ be snapped at by gators and asked them to consider that perhaps our opinions/lives were not the epitome of existence - just one beautiful and banal thread woven into the fabric of the fierce living earth, and, that their pursuit would ultimately lead to an empty result, at least a vastly incomplete one, because reductive thought based exercises always lead us there, as they have led us to the rot of this time.
Beautifully said!