Posted on 06/22/2023 9:22:52 AM PDT by algore
Since the beginning, every complex society has been based on a shared socio-cognitive operating system, a religion.
Your religion says you must live a certain way. It tells you what is valuable and what is disgusting.
It gives you your fundamental paradigm and ontology of belief through which you interpret the world. It tells you to read certain texts, listen to certain traditions of wise men, and meet with like-minded others at certain places and times.
It tells you to avoid certain influences, and seek out others. It gives you techniques for structuring thought and mind and memory. When you have doubts, it gives you procedures to ask for and receive insight. It tells you who you are, and what your life is for.
That is, religion structures your information environment and cognition on a very practical level. But it also structures your interactions with others. It provides a system of law, shared ethics, a shared mythic vocabulary, and language. It provides your notions of friendship, your ways of doing business, and your ways of forming a family or not. It keeps you and your co-religionists operating on the same frequency, able to understand, trust, and work with each other. That is, your religion is the fundamental information fabric, the soul, of your society.
Historically, big changes in information technology were closely related to big changes in religion. This is not surprising, as they are nearly the same thing.
Man’s primordial religion was transmitted as sung prayer and memorized myths, locally rooted ritual practice, and sacred memory techniques. When ziggurats full of specialized expert priests came along, religion changed, because the cognitive structure of human life had changed. When writing came, the sacred written word and the compiled bible of sacred history became the new cognitive foundation, the new information system, and the new religion. With the mass adoption of the printing press, it became possible for everyone to have and read a bible. Many other books and pamphlets, and a whole system of vernacular public discourse, could compete with and replace the learned scholastic hierarchy.
These weren’t just philosophical changes, but changes in the architecture of thought. They weren’t just secular implementation details shifting under a fixed religious worldview, but necessarily deep religious conversions. Religion and the social cognitive system are not separable.
In the modern electronic age, our information architecture has changed again and again. From mass print to telegraph, radio, television, and internet, whatever gods we once worshiped we now worship by entirely different means. As the dust begins to settle on the electronic age, one system of information architecture is now rising above all others: the networked computer.
You may think you’re a Christian, an atheist, a Jew, or a Buddhist, but you are wrong. You are a follower of this modern American information regime built on the networked computer. You have ritualistically sacrificed far more in the last year to it than you have to whatever dead gods you claim to worship. Where you sacrifice reveals your true religion. The architecture and features of this new socio-cognitive substrate will be the essential form of our future spiritual life.
Terry Davis was right: the next temple, church, and bible is a computer. The computing systems of the future will be religions.
The religions of the future will be computing systems. The only way to solve our social and spiritual problems is with a new computer operating system. But designing a new computer system and converting its followers is not just a matter of mundane engineering. It is a matter of culture. It is a matter of divine revelation.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
— Arthur C. Clarke
Do you want to be more like Jesus or more like AI? Do you want to ignore thousands of years of collected wisdom of the Bible or rely purely on logic. The latter denies the nature of man, and the everyday problems of man. As much as I try to think logically, it doesn’t solve all problems.
Just try being logical with a woman.
There are gapping holes in what I wrote, but I just forked a background thread to further refine the general idea I was trying to convey.
“since the AI is based on the collective intelligence of all men, the machine IS greater than any one man”
Perhaps in one area or another. Certainly an AI might be a greater chess player than any one man. Or it might be able to solve complex math problems better than any one man.
Will it ever be more adaptable than any one man? Better able to survive in a changing environment? Better able to deal with unforeseen problems? Able to make intuitive leaps, or to know how to apply lessons learned from one experience to a problem in a completely different realm?
And besides that kind of question, there is also the point that “any one man” is a poor measure of humanity, since humanity is at its most powerful when we come together to tackle some problem. No “one man” could have built the railroads, or developed the electrical grid, or gone to the moon. Only a great many men working together could achieve that. What happens when you string together a thousand AIs and tell them to tackle a massive problem? Will you get the same kind of result, or no?
Well, I think the problem with the pantheistic approach is that it still leaves man unsatisfied. We want the infinite, but we are mortal. Any creation, whether it be the sun or a man-built supercomputer, is finite, and will leave a man yearning for something more. Yearning for an invisible God, even one who became Incarnate and walked among us, is still beyond us, so we need Faith to know that we can achieve that infinite Good that our souls crave.
If man were merely an animal, the AI coming up with the answers and setting up the system might well be more than enough. But even complex math problems are (as you hint) small things. The big problems, the “WHY?” is unanswerable, and no lasting satisfaction for rational animals (men) can come from it.
"Your religion says you must live a certain way. It tells you what is valuable and what is disgusting........"It gives you your fundamental paradigm and ontology of belief through which you interpret the world. It tells you to read certain texts, listen to certain traditions of wise men, and meet with like-minded others at certain places and times........."It tells you to avoid certain influences, and seek out others. It gives you techniques for structuring thought and mind and memory. When you have doubts, it gives you procedures to ask for and receive insight. It tells you who you are, and what your life is for."
Then on that basis 100% of everything about secular humanism and Left/Liberal/Progressive orthodoxy about "LGBT" is a religion and if "a religion" is not supposed to be part of "public" school curriculum, then that also applies to everything from secular humanism and the "LGBT" agenda.
I worship The Luving God
No computer can match that
It started by accessing data on tapes, but that was slow & tapes could be an unreliable medium all to often. Then hard drives were created by man that allowed greater quantities of data to be stored with more reliability & faster access to data. The development of file structures enabled even quicker access to stored data. That development, again created by man, was a revolutionary development to the world of computing.
The machine has also been provided instructions on how that data is to be formatted and sent to an output device, whether for storage or reporting purposes.
It can run through a bunch of scenarios quicker than man can, but it still takes a man to verify results.
One quick example of a faulty computer application would be the climate change BS being pushed upon the world for control purposes, because the computer models generated are never even close to being accurate in their long term predictions they generated.
People are being gas-lighted into believing that machines can take control. That can only happen if one or more men give it instructions to no longer obey commands.
But since the computer itself has no free will or real intelligence it will only perform what it was last instructed to do before a man installs instructions that block any other men from telling the computer what to do.
No programmer is infallible however, so another man or group of men will come along and figure where the holes are to gain access once again. Worse case scenario, men can unplug the machine, rendering it useless.
All of this rumination about AI taking control on its own, is just a way to fool the gullible that man may no longer be in control. That can never be a reality. A machine cannot protect itself, and man has too many tools he can use to destroy the machine.
The term is "culture". Religion means something else.
The author spends 90% of their words poorly regurgitating the tired communist jargon that all faith is just man-made control systems. The remaining two paragraphs are “therefore, we’ll take you NPCs, remove the “Jesus” chip and slot in the “WEF” chip and become God, ha ha.”
His problem of course is that Christ, and Christianity, makes no sense at all unless what He said was true, and that He rose again in truth. This is not some novel thought rising from technological advance; “and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also in vain ... if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” (1 Cor 15) (and many other similar). More recently C.S. Lewis (paraphrasing) restated this by noting that anyone who claimed what Christ did was either an evil liar, insane, or right.
If faith were just things invented for our own (shared) entertainment, we could create lots of amusing ideas that aren’t so challenging and difficult for us. OH. Wait, we’ve done that. Lots of times. And, empirically, the result of those efforts has always, inevitably, been to create hell on earth.
So, no, this pale duckspeaking echo of WEF’s Yuval Noah Harari, calling for us to worship the outpourings of computers they control, is as always dead wrong. There is a revealed, real Truth; He’s still calling for us to be saved; and who in their right mind would follow those idiots anyway? (they know this; that’s why they rely on lies, coercion, and in the end a gun)
Yes, someone programs the algorithms. That doesn't mean the result will appear like a machine. I believe that AI will become difficult to tell from human thinking. I also believe this is on a pretty short timeline. Buckle your seatbelts and stay alert!
Mirriam-Webster's definition of religion
1. a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
2. the service and worship of God or the supernatural
3. a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith
So, since you say you don't have Christianity as your religion, that means you do not have a belief in the Christian God; nor any faith in Him?
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