Two Additions to: “Let’s Wait for God 2.0”

One is a minor point: if we live in a digital simulation, how is it that analog long playing records and non-digital pictures exist?

The other is more along the lines of a mind-blowing drug-induced-seeming speculation: If we live in a simulation, the creators of the simulation could have made it that there is indeed a God, a heaven and afterlife, near death experiences, life reviews, souls for humans and other sentient beings, telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, mediums in our “reality” and all the other things scientistic atheist simulation lovers abhor. Who says our alien creators wanted us to be atheists? Since church going theists are happier and healthier than other groups, I think we should believe in God because they provided us with one. (Sarcasm)

Let’s Wait for God 2.0

Giambattista Vico thought the dominant point of education should be to foster creativity and imagination. What a heaven that would be. He aligned poetry with the human soul and considered rationality to be a mere element of it and not the most important at that. He was worried that applying the scientific method to humans would be dehumanizing, as indeed it often is. Recently, an academic podcast guest said that he could not possibly believe that cats and dogs have emotions merely by observing them. When he told his friends the result of his scientific examination, that those animals do in fact have emotions, they replied, “D’uh. We could have told you that!” The academic insisted that such intuitive knowledge was no good at all. While meditating, an image came to mind of the academic strapping his wife to an examination table to find visible signs of her love for him. Vico, on the other hand, would like to include, as contributors to knowledge, “sense perception, rumor, myth, fables, traveler’s tales, romances, poetry and idle speculation.” Better to deal with someone with emotional depth than the robotic mode of being of the self-made autist.

Vico coined the phrase, translated into English, as the “Barbarism of Reflection.” In Vico’s cyclical view of history, this occurs during a period like the Enlightenment when science and rationality prevail and claim to offer a path to a perfected society. First religion is discarded and then morality, based as it is on religious principles. Man plans to make himself in his own image, throwing off the shackles of social institutions and using freedom of speech and thought to question them all. Equality and democracy must reign, not unchosen bonds of family and flag. Each man must be free to explore his random desires and anyone who questions that should be put to death, or at least imprisoned and canceled. Man becomes a wolf to man.

Readings for a Student 2024

A former student of mine, who has loved Nassim Nicholas Taleb, has asked for more things to read. As Roger Scruton once said of education, “These things have we loved. You will love them, too.”

My SUNY Oswego faculty profile page has a selection of my own publications: https://ww1.oswego.edu/philosophy/profile/richard-cocks

These days, I tend to start my classes with my summary of Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary about brain lateralization. It provides a way of thinking and talking about what is left out of Enlightenment tendencies of thought (compatible with Romanticism).

Starting out light and accessible (if three hour Russian art movies can be included)

Movies

My favorite movie is “Solaris” by Tarkovsky (not the George Clooney remake).

Stalker (Tarkovsky) (available on YouTube)

Mirror (Tarkovsky)

Spirited Away

My Neighbor Totoro

And most other movies by Hiyao Miyazaki

The Iron Giant

Groundhog Day

Blade Runner

Dr. Strangelove

Vitus

2001 Space Odyssey

True Detective (TV series, season one only)

Tampopo – Life as about making the  perfect bowl of soup.

American Psycho – satire of 1980s Wall Street materialism.

Revanche – whether to forgive a policeman for shooting your girlfriend and earning the respect of your grandfather in the process.

A Very Peculiar Practice (TV series available for cheap on DVD)

1990s movies of Hal Hartley (and some later ones)

Simple Men

Trust

Ned Rifle

If God is Good, Why Does He Allow Pain and Suffering?

Two Moral Lessons from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles

The problem of evil is that if God is good, why does he permit evil? The obvious answer is that evil is the product of human beings having free will. The alternative would be to enslave all of mankind and force them, robotically, to be good. Were that to happen, there would be no good at all in the universe since one is not being good in one’s actions if one had no choice in the matter; praise and blame making no sense in a deterministic reality. The existence of evil is also proof of God’s existence because evil is predicated on free will, which is only possible in a spiritual universe, and because morality also does not exist without God. We would be living in a purely physical universe, the one described by science, and there is no genuine morality in that instance. Morality in that case becomes merely a useful fiction, and/or something we have evolved to believe in, but it can have no metaphysical reality. Many people are so used to an instrumental view of morality, or a descriptive perspective that merely points to moral customs and traditions and conflates morality with that, that moral realism is not even a possibility that they are aware of or know how to think about.

Another question that some atheists claim to wonder about is the existence of pain and suffering. Why are people allowed to suffer and die from cancer? Would it not be nice if God provided Novocaine for the soul? The answer is that human existence would be irremediably damaged and made worse were he to do this. Pain and suffering is absolutely essential to the human condition. Dissatisfaction with one’s life and existence is the only motivation to actually do something. At the very least, the imperative to get water, food, warmth, shelter and sex, drive us to act. Much of what men do is indirectly an attempt to climb various social hierarchies in order to impress women. Men can become really quite demotivated if they cease to want the approval of men or to care about the opinion of women. This nonchalance can be facilitated by access to pornography as an ersatz signal of female approval. No achievement necessary.

Were AGI to Exist, We Would Never Allow It: The Alignment Problem for the Woke

In Brian Christian’s The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values, he worries that “systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole – and appear to assess black and white defendants differently. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes.” Christian is probably right to worry about fully automating such things when people’s lives are at stake, but not about the issue of bias. How one reacts to this concern will be partly governed by one’s political affiliations and preferences. It is intended that one’s hair catch fire and one’s eyeballs bug out upon hearing this. Anyone who has read someone like Thomas Sowell is more likely to ask, “So?” The training data for machine learning will consist of past results, including such things as the performance of men and women for various jobs, and the recidivism rates for blacks and whites. Should we call those “hate facts” or “inconvenient truths?” Whether those considerations should be removed depends on whether they contribute to better or worse performance on the part of the machines. Reality and leftist ideology with its utopian, really dystopian fantasies, are usually at loggerheads. When it suits progressives, they will say sex and race must be ignored à la Title VII, while continuing in practice to absolutely fixate on sex and race in every arena of life in order to positively discriminate against white men, in particular. Blind auditions for orchestral positions were introduced at one point (performers played behind a screen). Those have now been abandoned because it has been decided that impartial, unbiased, meritocratic selection methods disadvantage people of color. Our ears are racist!

On the other hand, there is good reason for being suspicious of machine learning and AI because we know that programmers and companies like Google are in fact introducing intentional biases into their AI that promote their Woke agenda. Google’s “Gemini” AI picture generator was programmed to only produce non-white people, including the depiction of historical figures, with an Indian female, and black male, pope, and the like. When asked to generate German troops, they were depicted as black men and Asian women, which is a kind of slander on both groups of people and historically inaccurate. Google withdrew the program saying that a “mistake” had been made. It was no mistake. It was simply an amusing consequence of programming its AI to discriminate against whites in favor of people of color. Meta’s Imagine AI image generator does the same thing. A prompt for Professional American football players produces female players only. One for a group of people in American colonial times consisted entirely of Asians, mostly female. One can guess, with 100% confidence, that Brian Christian will not now write a new book worrying about this kind of bias in AI.

An Introduction to the Thought of Owen Barfield

Owen Barfield was a member of the Inklings, the famous literary group that included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Barfield wrote the first “fey” novel that influenced the two other writers to pen their own works of fantasy. He also was instrumental in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity after many years of the “Great Debate” engaged in on long walks. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy mentions him by name and many of the speaking engagements Barfield had in the U.S. were from Lewis fans, thanks to Lewis’ endorsements. He had more of a popular audience than an academic one, just as was the case for Lewis’ Christian apologetics.

Barfield’s parents were secular, but made sure their children were exposed to music and literature; playing the piano to them and reading classic literature out loud. He also received a classical education at Highgate high school where a friend, Cecil Harwood, contributed to his love of language and introduced him to the writings of Rudolf Steiner who he felt had managed to disentangle himself from the materialist philosophy that predominated then and now.

Plato had written that a beautiful thing participates in the Form of Beauty; a just act participates in the Form of Justice, and a true statement in the Form of Truth. The Forms have the quality of mind and the logos emanating from the Form of the Good (Spirit). For Barfield, the world of nature is what it is because it is “participated by” consciousness. Consciousness, on this view, is the inside of nature, not just of human beings and other sentient creatures. Barfield appeals to Aristotle’s concept of the three kinds of soul. The nutritive, belonging to plants. Plants “inwardize” the principles of generation and propagation. Made from dust, they nonetheless resist environmental forces and attempt to maintain their integrity. The sensitive soul is possessed by animals, and the rational soul by humans. The human interior is a microcosm of the macrocosm, since it includes the nutritive, and sensitive souls, but also extends to the upper reaches of reality. Aldous Huxley thought of individual minds as filtering and drawing on mind at large, selecting and excluding elements of it. Similarly, for Barfield, life itself draws from life at large existing as cosmic potential. “Humanity individualized the cosmic logos, the nous, the intellectus, from out of its transcendent potentiality.” Human intelligence individualizes cosmic intelligence.

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An Introduction to the Thought of Owen Barfield

Bread Alone

The left hemisphere is pragmatic and utilitarian. It has no emotion, but most of the language and logic. It deals with inanimate objects and manipulates them for practical purposes. It controls the grasping right hand. It is prone to dogmatism, claims of certainty and confabulation. This is the “bread” Jesus rejects when tempted by the devil, saying, “Man cannot live on bread alone.”

Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, and The Matter With Things, claims in the latter book that the core of the religious impulse is to emphasize and restore a connection to the mysterious right hemisphere; the part of us that is the most human. It provides our intuitive sense of the reality around us, the deficiency of which gives schizophrenics their problems. An over-emphasis on the left hemisphere disconnects us from the world and makes us resemble the mentally ill. Autism also contains this exaggerated logicality and attention to detail, with an attendant difficulty with Gestalts, narratives, and meaning (connections to context).

Thus, religion and sanity are connected. From this point of view, good poetry, humor, literature, music, the movies of someone like Andrei Tarkovsky, and good fine art are all religious. Certainly, Tarkovsky thought so, stating that his movies and all legitimate art are prayers to God. His movie Stalker can be seen as an allegory about Tarkovsky’s attempts to restore faith and belief to a skeptical age. Stalker takes two cynics into “the Zone” which can be interpreted as the areas of consciousness associated with the right hemisphere. With little language there, and its broad focus on the wider context, it cannot be articulated in explicit terms. Great poetry, however, does it in an artistic manner. Antonio Machado is a poet of the human soul.

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Bread Alone

Oh, For a Competent Elite

Samuel T. Francis claimed, adding to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, that there are not only  managers of government and managers of industry, as Burnham claimed, but managers of public opinion as well. These managers exist in “advertising, publishing, journalism, films, broadcasting, entertainment, religion, education, and institutions for research and development,” NGOs, etc. We have seen from The Twitter Files that the FBI, CIA, and other governmental entities should be included here. These are “organizations that disseminate, restrict, or invent information, ideas, and values.” The CIA has interfered with and influenced foreign governments and their elections, and they do this with internal affairs, too. This was made legal through an executive order bypassing privacy protections enabled by Congress. The CIA is “bulk collecting” indiscriminate and untargeted information concerning American citizens and searching through them. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) made this illegal, but the executive order 12333 by Ronald Reagan in 1981 permitted it again. Notoriously, fifty-one current and former intelligence officers signed a fraudulent letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop affair with references to kickbacks for “the big guy” was Russian disinformation shortly before the 2020 election. Those officials are still relied on for analysis and advice. All this is in line with the topic of the book Engineering Consent by Edward Bernays, published in 1947, which wrote of this manipulation in an approving manner, seeing the masses as beneath contempt, the title of which was largely stolen by Chomsky’s better known Manufacturing Consent. The latter book complained that the government controls the media. Journalists who do not write within the approved narrative lose access to things like White House briefings. Chomsky states that the solution is to switch from private news media to public news media. Since “public” is a synonym for government control, this injunction makes no sense. What Chomsky had in mind instead was for “public” to refer to “anarcho-syndicalism,” a system that has never existed, except maybe for a few months during the Spanish Civil War, so much for that as an alternative to elite control.

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Oh, For a Competent Elite

The Misanthropy To Beat Them All

In praise of Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles are thoughtful meditations on the nature of human existence. They are easy to read and fun to use in an ethics class for that reason. One of the stories is named after the Sara Teasdale poem, There Will Come Soft Rains. Apparently written in response to the German ground offensive of WWI in 1918, and during the flu pandemic, the poem states that nature, in the form of birds, frogs, and trees would not notice our absence. And “Spring itself,” barely so. The implication is that human beings lie outside nature, although “Spring” seems to have some dim sense that we exist. There is no mention of God, who might be presumed to miss us. Teasdale had apparently developed the nihilistic view that the universe cares not at all about our actions or existence from reading Charles Darwin, starting in 1913. This is the same erroneous notion that Richard Dawkins likes to promote. It is a view that pushes human beings outside the universe, which is incorrect since parents are in fact part of the universe, and they generally love and care for their children. Human babies are so dependent on mothers that they would all die without this beneficent parental orientation. The problem is not with human beings, the universe, or nature, but with atheism which leads to moral nihilism if followed consistently, as discussed below. It is not only human beings who lose their intrinsic value and significance under atheism, but nature, too. Crude materialism reduces “nature” to mechanistic forces blindly ramming into things in deterministic fashion. Without a telos, in the manner of Aristotle’s Prime Mover, attracting creatures to ascend from their potential form to their actual form via moral aspiration, drawn to the perfection that God represents, things happen at random, teleologically speaking, with no underlying meaning.

Unlike Darwin, modern and up-to-date evolutionary theory, as seen in Perry Marshall’s Evolution 2.0, sees living cells and organisms engaging in horizontal gene transfer, transposition, epigenetics, symbiogenesis and hybridization. The levels of intelligence and teleological (purposeful) behavior is truly astounding.

It is human poetry that teaches and reminds modern man to see “nature” as something beautiful and worth preserving. Primitive man did it instinctively, but we moderns frequently have to work at recovering and maintaining such a vision. It is partly a matter of how much time we spend indoors. Put in the right context; by the sea, in a forest, hiking a mountain, we can fairly easily appreciate natural beauty once again.

Robert Sapolsky is Determined to be Wrong

Interviews with Robert Sapolsky after the publication of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will reveal that the author of Behave, a book that approaches morality and behavior from a strictly scientific point of view and which is worth reading, reveal that Sapolsky is not wise. No one is more familiar with the contents of Behave than him, yet he has decided that his current life mission is to tell unsuccessful people that they are unlucky. That’s it. Rather than telling them how they might improve their situation, Sapolsky believes in determinism. Biology has determined who will succeed and who will fail, and the failures are supposed to be made to feel so much better about a successful person telling them that they never had a chance in the first place. That sounds like gloating and condescension, as much as anything else.

Science can be of some use in thinking about the human condition, but its point of view excludes too much that is human, let alone the divine, to offer a complete picture. Tarot cards too offer interpretative lenses through which to contemplate one’s life, and scientific research can sometimes offer vantage points to do the same. The scientific stance, however, is not sufficient and Sapolsky’s strange lack of wisdom provides evidence of this.

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Robert Sapolsky is Determined to be Wrong