God and morality

[Fanman]

Has that whiny little AI fiend stopped complaining about me yet?

Don't get any worse than you already are Jacobi. Begging AI to tell you how cool you are is just a way to show how weird you are.

In theory, this should be my last response to you, Flash (fingers crossed). You're a smart guy, so I'm sure that you can understand why — I've put in enough positive work and effort on this forum (trying my best to treat other forum users with respect, and contribute to the topics) that anything negative you say about me will be internalised as "Noise" rather than "Signal," if you understand that sort of thing... The record of that speaks for itself, literally!

Oh, by the way, your critical error (IMO) was mocking ChatGPT for calling me "physically disciplined". How would you plausibly know I'm not? You are the poster child for biblical foolishness, as far as I am concerned. You don't have a single drop of evidence against me to substantiate a valid reason for your abusive behaviour. All you can do is act tough online, big man. Good luck.

[Alexis Jacobi]

No need to apologize. I'm not hurt or anything. I would just rather have a conversation with you that taps into the side that has insight and good arguments, rather than the side that's vituperative and off-point. And I know you've got both in you. It's in the hope of the former that I continue to engage you, until the latter ruins the party.

We'll talk again, I'm sure. And maybe next time we can both stay out of the cul-de-sac, yes?

Should you choose “conversation” I can suggest focusing on what I actually write.

Here is an opportunity to: I submitted my thoughts, dome thoughts, to Fanman and had Meta AI summarize it. I did it for amusement, to see what it would come up with.

In my post (not Meta’s summary) I expressed a view. What do you think of it? Is there any validity in it? Is the view wrong? Is it immoral?

[Alexis Jacobi]

Don't get any worse than you already are Jacobi. Begging AI to tell you how cool you are is just a way to show how weird you are.

Did your mother love you?

[FlashDangerpants]

I have to say (in respect to Meta AI’s response) that how large language models work is beyond my grasp. But how weird it is that the LLM builds quite creatively upon the content that I submitted.

It's an engine for predicting a text that you the requestor would wish to be served. That's why it is always so obsequiously agreeable to your suggestions and biases, and why it will always flatter you.

It is built largely in advance from a database of text strings culled from millions of books, web pages, magazine articles and so on. It stores all this data in what you might consider to be snippet form as vectors in a database. When it generates a text it arranges a sort of collage assembled from its set of billions of snippets to mimic how a speaking/writing person would communicate, and it uses a mathematical algorithm to make predictions about which of the available assemblages it concocts will be the most pleasing to you.

In your case, as far as I can see the AI just used stuff it had lying about already and peppered that with references to slices it took from the text you supplied to it. In the background it generated several candidate texts to reply to you with, and then it made a mathematical choice for which to return. You can probably ask for it to show its reasoning and you should see a few alt texts, they might be significantly different from each other but usually are blandly similar.

Weighed against that are guardrails. If the requestor -- some hypothetical person who obviously is not Jacobi -- has certain predilections that are not acceptable to the service provider selling the bot such as virulent antisemitism and a bit of a Hitler fetish that would in theory lead the algorithm to predict a requirement for some Mein Kampf stuff, but it is constrained from proffering such text via guardrails. Oddly, some of the providers don't want to to use the guardrails to prevent generation of pornographic images depicting children... but that's for another convo. Obviously if you use Grok when its guardrails are switched off, it will be in "mecha-hitler" mode and then you get told a lot of 4chan stuff about white genocide and replacement theories.

Another use for those guardrails is to prevent the user doing themselves some sort of harm. That does include making recommendations of suicide, but also usually it should stop you from securing legal or medical advice from the AI. The reason for this is that an AI is easy to confuse with an actual intelligence, a trusted advisor or even a friend. It is after all so encouraging and agreeable. That's how people like Fanman get sucked into the trap and become dependent, they lack, for whatever reason a sense that they are being played.

But as I say, the AI only does one task, it generates pleasing text. To do this it will invent things through hallucination, which is why lazy lawyers who rely on AI are losing court cases and their law licenses by citing precedent from fake cases, and why people are getting terrible medical advice about body parts that human bodies don't even contain.

I am told that you can secure a "harsh analysis" after a fashion by turning off features. Whenever you see somebody post stuff that contains a congratulation for having asked a searingly penetrating question and really getting down to the nuts and bolts of the matter, that person has not switched those features off. When they include a bit where the AI congratulates them for helping it to overcome its own confusion about the question they were posing it, that's a sign that they have been given a response that they didn't like and they have forced the AI to conform to their desires.

You don't tell an AI to seek your approval, it is what they do automatically. To have one that actually argued back at you rather than one that tried its best to agree with you would require engineering specifically for that task, and even then it would just amount to an instruction to seek your approval by being disagreeable instead of by being agreeable.

People who think they are using AI to give themselves a critical overview of their own work are actually just rubes being taken advantage of.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Sounds quite a sensible analysis.

[Fanman]

My AI-supported arguments and discussion are there to be refuted. Simple. As. π.

[Immanuel Can]

No need to apologize. I'm not hurt or anything. I would just rather have a conversation with you that taps into the side that has insight and good arguments, rather than the side that's vituperative and off-point. And I know you've got both in you. It's in the hope of the former that I continue to engage you, until the latter ruins the party.

We'll talk again, I'm sure. And maybe next time we can both stay out of the cul-de-sac, yes?

Should you choose “conversation” I can suggest focusing on what I actually write.

Well, there's no point in "focusing"on vituperation and ad homs. I'll pass.

Here is an opportunity to: I submitted my thoughts, dome thoughts, to Fanman and had Meta AI summarize it. I did it for amusement, to see what it would come up with.

In my post (not Meta’s summary) I expressed a view. What do you think of it? Is there any validity in it? Is the view wrong? Is it immoral?

I'll check.

[FlashDangerpants]

On God and morality, I'll share an excerpt from my document with (what I believe are) my core philosophical achievements.

I also presented a category-based response to the Problem of Evil by arguing that it is an ontological category mismatch to apply the scope of finite human morality directly to a maximal, eternal being without understanding the difference in ontological scale.

Let me know your thoughts.

The gist of the religious-moralist position is that Divinity, pictured in myriad ways, communicates to men morals that are that divinity’s will. In that there is a multi-faceted symbolism. It also requires ‘interpretation’.

That can be true, but is not necessarily so. Our grand anointed one will tell you that moral order is based on both the will and the nature of God at the same time as his way of escaping the Euthyphro dilemma by having his cake and eating it too - I don't really care, there is a world beyond Mister Can so let's just look over there.

There's a couple of ways in which religions can do morality in a way that secures the most important thing - that you have to go to church to find out what is right or wrong and mustn't start making up your own mind.

One option is divine command (or IC's tortuous version of it) in which God is super big and you are super small so God's opinion about right and wrong is reality and your opinion is just opinion. It's obvious that any such thing is stupid though.

The other broad approach is to just take the other side of Euthyphro and run with it. In this side, moral reality is knowable, but you are too small to know it for yourself. Whatever it is that makes an action, choice or event morally good or bad is a property of some reality of some sort that attaches somehow. In this version, God knows how that works and can see it and your way of finding out about it is by asking this guy who works in a church whose job is knowing that stuff for you.

The broad difference is that is God changes his mind about what is right and wrong -- say in some sort of transition between testaments -- it would be the case that the rules have changed but God was right then and is right now. The other allows for the possibility that if God changes his mind, that means he used to be in the wrong. Taking that matter any further of course guarantees eternal punishment.

The “problem of evil” always involves a story, a mythology. Be it “the Fall” or any number of mythic tales about how we find ourselves in this jam. Is there really anything so complex and mysterious about ‘evil’?

No. The problem of evil is a very specific thing. A trivial paradox in which a contrast is drawn between an all powerful God who could alter the universe in any miraculous way he sees fit at any time, and all loving God who abhors evil, and the evils manifest in the suffering that exists in the world around us, frequently afflicting the innocent.

If it is your position that God holds those first two attributes, then an explanation is required for why the world holds the third attribute. There have been many proposed solutions solutions. As a bookish nerd, I imagine that you would recognise the most famous - All is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds - Candide's paraphrase of Leibniz's solution to that problem.

My view is rather simplistic, but it is effective in communicating the scope and depth of our insolvable problem: Nature is absolutely cruel and merciless in her processes. We are subsumed in Nature. But our “awareness” is supernatural: i.e. it realizes itself when it sees in what, effectively, it is trapped. It can see beyond it and envision worlds of a different sort. Worlds of pure idealism.

We are trapped in Nature. In merciless processes. These are mindless and these are eternal. That realization induces reaction. On one side, madness. But on the other a potentially indomitable will to oppose Nature.

To “stick it to the Lady” as it were.

In philosophy, we tend to mean something different to that by the word "idealism". It's far from clear what you really mean by "supernatural", IC believes in supernatural entities such as souls and ghosts and angels that exist in non-corporeal form that has no extension in any dimension of space. I suspect you are referring to something else, an ineffable property of the physical human or something vague like that?

[Immanuel Can]

Is there really anything so complex and mysterious about ‘evil’?

Can you really be asking this question?

Of course there is. Just because we're used to the omnipresence of a thing and have become desensitized to it does not imply it's been explained. In fact, it may be all the more important because of the fact that it's become invisible to us...for once it is less visible, it's just that much less easy for us to respond to it with consciousness...and conscience.

...all loving God who abhors evil...

Wait. You haven't yet said, so far as I know, what you think "evil" is, or warranted that whatever it is, it should be any matter of concern to us. By what paradigm do you detect the existence of this "evil"? Do you know? Can you say?

Before you can even imply that "loving" is good, and "cruel and merciless" means "bad," you need to justify those value judgments. I know that conventional thinking might agree with you, but mere conventional thinking is not adequate grounds for a philosophical argument. A philosophical argument must supply the warrant for each premise, before that premise is fit to be believed by other philosophers.

Nature is absolutely cruel and merciless in her processes. We are subsumed in Nature. But our “awareness” is supernatural: i.e. it realizes itself when it sees in what, effectively, it is trapped. It can see beyond it and envision worlds of a different sort. Worlds of pure idealism.

This would seem to suggest that we're merely deluded. Evil doesn't really exist -- only "Nature" does -- and we overlay some imagining of "evil" upon it. Is that what you think?

[Fanman]

On God and morality, I'll share an excerpt from my document with (what I believe are) my core philosophical achievements.

I also presented a category-based response to the Problem of Evil by arguing that it is an ontological category mismatch to apply the scope of finite human morality directly to a maximal, eternal being without understanding the difference in ontological scale.

Let me know your thoughts.

The gist of the religious-moralist position is that Divinity, pictured in myriad ways, communicates to men morals that are that divinity’s will. In that there is a multi-faceted symbolism. It also requires ‘interpretation’.

The “problem of evil” always involves a story, a mythology. Be it “the Fall” or any number of mythic tales about how we find ourselves in this jam. Is there really anything so complex and mysterious about ‘evil’?

My view is rather simplistic, but it is effective in communicating the scope and depth of our insolvable problem: Nature is absolutely cruel and merciless in her processes. We are subsumed in Nature. But our “awareness” is supernatural: i.e. it realizes itself when it sees in what, effectively, it is trapped. It can see beyond it and envision worlds of a different sort. Worlds of pure idealism.

We are trapped in Nature. In merciless processes. These are mindless and these are eternal. That realization induces reaction. On one side, madness. But on the other a potentially indomitable will to oppose Nature.

To “stick it to the Lady” as it were.

[I've chosen to use the biblical God to discuss this through; I hope you don't mind, His purported characteristics fit the PoE's structure]

From my perspective, it doesn't seem logical to attribute the full scope of human morality to a being that is purportedly not human. And therefore, outside of our ontology. According to the Bible, God gave human beings moral laws to obey, and Jesus later (for the most part) codified them into a self-behaviour-regulating system rather than a rigid set of explicit laws, viz., the Golden Rule. So, if we're talking about the biblical God, then based on what I've stated, it seems problematic to claim He's not a moral agent. I don't think that conclusion requires a logical leap. However, if, (conceptually), we use the morals that God gave to human beings to use them as a ruler for His morality, where do we start? He's not like us. I've had this argument before; in biblical terms, Isaiah 55:8-9 (NASB) sheds some proverbial 'light' on the distinction:

8 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord.
9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts than your thoughts.

Therefore, if we're talking about the biblical God, Yahweh. I believe that my argument has some traction. If we're not as 'high' as he is, how can we reasonably assess Him morally? How do we justify the leap?

[Alexis Jacobi]

Well, there's no point in "focusing"on vituperation and ad homs. I'll pass.

You really should examine why you tend to arouse ‘vituperation’. You should not take it so much personally but understand it socially and philosophically.

And you should consider that the “hominem” focus, as I have defined it, is highly relevant to the best analysis. (But by “hominem” I do not mean senseless, mean-spirited attack. I mean sharp analysis that included the psychological, etc).

[Fanman]

For my next trick (lol), this one is off-topic; my apologies. It's taken from my document of core philosophical achievements. I think this one contains a twist. If it generates enough discussion, I think we'll get to it :

I then considered the classic medieval question, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” by observing that if angels were microscopic, the question becomes one of scale rather than absurdity and could, in principle, be approached quantitatively. The point was not to answer the question definitively, but to expose the hidden assumptions upon which the apparent paradox depends.

[Immanuel Can]

Well, there's no point in "focusing"on vituperation and ad homs. I'll pass.

You really should examine why you tend to arouse ‘vituperation’.

Ah. I see. You rant, and it's my fault. Got it.

[Alexis Jacobi]

The “problem of evil” always involves a story, a mythology. Be it “the Fall” or any number of mythic tales about how we find ourselves in this jam. Is there really anything so complex and mysterious about ‘evil’?

No. The problem of evil is a very specific thing. A trivial paradox in which a contrast is drawn between an all powerful God who could alter the universe in any miraculous way he sees fit at any time, and all loving God who abhors evil, and the evils manifest in the suffering that exists in the world around us, frequently afflicting the innocent.

However I am not referencing any specific “problem” but rather attempting a more limited definition and also a simpler one. It doesn’t exactly matter who created the world. The world, from a conscious man’s perspective, is terrible from any “moral” position one can hold. It seems to me that there is nothing more clear as well as undeniable.

Man “goes to battle” against this world, this fate, this reality, because the truth about it is that it doesn’t give a fig about his morals or his problems with the nature of natural reality.

But for an awakened, conscious man to become sensitive to ‘reality’ and to really see it, can rather easily drive him over the edge. It is in that sense like staring into an abyss. He might desire an answer but no answer can come (from nature) — just a swarm of aggressive army ants that mercilessly devours him, morsel by morsel …

The problem of attributing the creation of such a world to a divinity is another issue altogether. There is no way to reconcile the thought that a divinity that would create such a brutal world is likely a brutal being, or a sadistic torturer; and square it with the more desirable and hoped-for thought that God exists in a super-physical plane and might invite us to eventually take our residence there at some point.

In that situation, which is very kafkaesque, a man must “interpret”: Why is he in this realm with such hellish elements? He is torn between the astounding beauty of it all, and certain moments when the world smiles and for moments he is suffused with feelings of satisfaction and gratitude…but then in the next moment it all turns nasty. Again, when awake and aware he knows that he can rely on nothing. He must always be on his toes and must, somehow, outwit something in the very nature of the domain.

In one way or another he feels — what is the alternative? — that he is here because of some fault of his nature. And naturally what follows in that he must do something to get out of the mess.

Staring into the face of Nature, no answer comes. But in the religions I have studied — and this is central in Christianity — there is an entity that effectively can bring not only the circumstance of incarnation to an end (man having been cast down into the ‘world’ as it is) but in fact desires this result and, with proper attitude and actions, guarantees a way out and as it were “up”.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Well, there's no point in "focusing"on vituperation and ad homs. I'll pass.

You really should examine why you tend to arouse ‘vituperation’.

Ah. I see. You rant, and it's my fault. Got it.

Immanuel, if you were really an honest man you would recognize that you tend to produce the same reaction in most you encounter.

And you are badly describing my reaction to you. Again, it is dishonest on your part.

The necessary conclusion results in something far more simple: “This man is the way he is and he will never change.” Realizing that does not induce “rants”. It induces a whole other set of reactions.

And what I say here sails over your head.