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Artificial Intelligence Shows Why Atheism Is Unpopular
The Atlantic ^ | Jul 23, 2018 | Sigal Samuel

Posted on 07/26/2018 9:24:33 AM PDT by edwinland

Imagine you’re the president of a European country. You’re slated to take in 50,000 refugees from the Middle East this year. Most of them are very religious, while most of your population is very secular. You want to integrate the newcomers seamlessly, minimizing the risk of economic malaise or violence, but you have limited resources ... What do you do?

Well, you make your best guess and hope the policy you chose works out. But it might not. ...

You can, however, experiment like that with virtual people. And that’s exactly what the Modeling Religion Project does. An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or “agents.” As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change.

...

The other models raise similar concerns, he said. “The modrn model gives you a recipe for accelerating secularization—and it gives you a recipe for blocking it. You can use it to make everything revert to supernaturalism by messing with some of those key conditions—say, by triggering some ecological disaster. Then everything goes plunging back into pre-secularism. That keeps me up at night.”

...

“We’re modelers, sociologists, philosophers—we’re academic geeks, basically. We’re never going to convince them to trust a model.” But he believes that policy analysts, acting as bridges between the academic world and the policy world, will be able to convince the politicians. “We’re going to get them in the end.”

(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Government; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: antireligion; atheism; clickbait; data; modelling; notatheism; secularism
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Put aside for a moment the question of whether computer models can accurately predict human behavior (which issue the article addresses) and note the background assumption of our social betters, who simply assume that religiosity in general (which they call "supernaturalism" or "pre-secularism") is a problem to be solved.
1 posted on 07/26/2018 9:24:33 AM PDT by edwinland
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To: edwinland

Athiests are the children of Marx, and the enemies of America.


2 posted on 07/26/2018 9:27:23 AM PDT by GenXteacher (You have chosen dishonor to avoid war; you shall have war also.)
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To: edwinland
Artificial Intelligence

Didn't Congress invent that a long time ago.

They claim it's intelligence, but we all know it isn't.

3 posted on 07/26/2018 9:31:41 AM PDT by DoughtyOne (01/26/18 DJIA 30 stocks $26,616.71 48.794% > open 11/07/16 215.71 from 50% increase 1.2183 yrs)
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To: edwinland

Atheists don’t believe in artificial intelligence


4 posted on 07/26/2018 9:32:30 AM PDT by Bob434
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To: edwinland

Watch ex-machine and see what secularism gets you in IA.


5 posted on 07/26/2018 9:34:22 AM PDT by cuban leaf (The US will not survive the obama presidency. The world may not either.)
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To: edwinland

The problem to be solved is for society to recognize the irrational, illogical and arrogant intellectual ignorance in the secular humanist belief that all is knowable to us.

Our own experience in scientific research keeps demonstrating the opposite of the secular humanists ignorant arrogance.

Everytime we make progress, scientifically, whether just here on earth, or in physics, or exploring the cosmos, each achievement reveals an even wider window of more and deeper questions than our initial question knew was possible.

G-d’s universe is like an infinite onion with layers we can never reach, no matter how many layers we can identify. It is arrogant folly to believe we can understand it all.


6 posted on 07/26/2018 9:34:42 AM PDT by Wuli
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To: edwinland

Hey! They figured out with a computer what any wise man knows. Trouble gets more people looking for God.


7 posted on 07/26/2018 9:36:58 AM PDT by HiTech RedNeck (Tryin' hard to win the No-Bull Prize.)
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To: Wuli

True enough... Trying to frame a life with mere science leaves a barrenness that is a vulnerable point to shattering that life.


8 posted on 07/26/2018 9:41:28 AM PDT by HiTech RedNeck (Tryin' hard to win the No-Bull Prize.)
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To: GenXteacher

I don’t honestly know if prior to Marx there was a school of militant anti-believers.


9 posted on 07/26/2018 9:43:31 AM PDT by HiTech RedNeck (Tryin' hard to win the No-Bull Prize.)
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To: edwinland

What we are calling AI is nothing more than intricate if-then programming. Even the neural networks they incorporate are not AI. Neural networks merely memorize patterns.

True intelligence requires conscious self-awareness. Consciousness is a quantum mechanical phenomenon. You will never achieve it through software alone.


10 posted on 07/26/2018 9:45:24 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (<img src="http://i.imgur.com/WukZwJP.gif" width=600><p>https://i.imgur.com/zXSEP5Z.gif)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Agent models are somewhat different than that—more like the A-Life stuff. They are attempts to model complex systems. Rather than learning neural parameters, the system has models of individuals (called agents) and then lets the agents interact.

These models can give rise to surprisingly complex behavior. The trouble is, tying them to reality in a way that is more than “hey, that’s cool! It confirms what I thought all along.”


11 posted on 07/26/2018 10:16:19 AM PDT by ModelBreaker
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To: Wuli
G-d’s universe is like an infinite onion with layers we can never reach, no matter how many layers we can identify. It is arrogant folly to believe we can understand it all.

I was more focused on the goal of their social engineering (secularism) rather than the means (modelling) but your comment really puts the two together. Their faith in modelling (which is essentially a reduction of the complexity of the universe into a simplistic cartoon) is directly connected to their embrace of secularism.

12 posted on 07/26/2018 10:23:04 AM PDT by edwinland
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To: Wuli
G-d’s universe is like an infinite onion with layers we can never reach, no matter how many layers we can identify. It is arrogant folly to believe we can understand it all.

I always like to think of it like a beautiful museum with an infinite number of rooms.

13 posted on 07/26/2018 10:32:13 AM PDT by COBOL2Java (Marxism: Trendy theory, wrong species)
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To: edwinland

Paging Hari Seldon, please answer the white courtesy phone...

(That aside, this is hokum, we have millenia of history to show us what happens when religions collide. Within that historical framework, atheism is the weakest of all, and is actively killing itself in the world today. The only reason it hasn’t succeeded so far is because it’s been allowed to leech on the body of what had been the strongest religion. What happens next remains to be seen.)


14 posted on 07/26/2018 10:36:12 AM PDT by Kommodor (Terrorist, Journalist or Democrat? I can't tell the difference.)
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To: edwinland

The fascinating and arrogant assumption is that people are supposed to move towards « secularism » (atheism) as they evolve.

Of course, they’re wrong - the more we learn, the more we become certain that all around us was never an accident.


15 posted on 07/26/2018 10:47:56 AM PDT by Chainmail (A simple rule of life: if you can be blamed, you're responsible.)
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To: Kommodor

“You’re slated to take in 50,000 refugees from the Middle East this year. Most of them are very religious, while most of your population is very secular. You want to integrate the newcomers seamlessly, minimizing the risk of economic malaise or violence, but you have limited resources ... What do you do?” If those 50,000 refugees are Islamic, it will not end well. Under ANY condition. Just no. Don’t do it.


16 posted on 07/26/2018 10:53:41 AM PDT by Paperpusher
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To: edwinland

Well, I think most of us agree that if we could switch Muslims to atheists, they couldn’t get any worse.


17 posted on 07/26/2018 10:55:21 AM PDT by A_perfect_lady
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To: Paperpusher

I think that my response, if I were sane would be the same as Poland and the Czechs, aka h- no.

Even if I were in charge of a ‘secular’ population, my response would be the same.

These Euro ‘leaders’ have made the mistake of drinking their own kool-aid. It may take longer than it did in Jonestown, but sooner or later the poison will get them all.


18 posted on 07/26/2018 11:03:30 AM PDT by Kommodor (Terrorist, Journalist or Democrat? I can't tell the difference.)
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To: edwinland

bump


19 posted on 07/26/2018 11:15:29 AM PDT by Albion Wilde ("I'd rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than risk peace in pursuit of politics." --DJT)
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To: edwinland

Imagine you’re an idiot bringing 50,000 third-world primitives into your country.


20 posted on 07/26/2018 11:55:53 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (<img src="http://i.imgur.com/WukZwJP.gif" width=600><p>https://i.imgur.com/zXSEP5Z.gif)
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