The Philosophy Discussion Forum

Walker wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 1:14 pm Good point. What begins as tinkering caused by the mirroring of God creativity in humans can open a portal for evil to step through with creative misuse, which could be why Einstein said that if he was young, he would be a plumber.

And even on a daily basis a lot of folks tinker with usage in all kinds of abusive ways, and that can turn intended use into evil results, e.g., abusing the intended use of chemicals and machines.

This means that mistinkering can lead to evil.

never heard of that pageant

does she win a box of tools instead of a crown?

-Imp

Walker wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 1:14 pm Good point. What begins as tinkering caused by the mirroring of God creativity in humans can open a portal for evil to step through with creative misuse, which could be why Einstein said that if he was young, he would be a plumber.

And even on a daily basis a lot of folks tinker with usage in all kinds of abusive ways, and that can turn intended use into evil results, e.g., abusing the intended use of chemicals and machines.

This means that mistinkering can lead to evil.

Does creativity open a portal? I don't think so.

Technology is an expression of human desire. That is, we create what we desire to have, obviously. The impulse to create new medical scanners comes from things like research into radiation; so does the atomic bomb. What we do with our technologies speaks volumes about what kin of entity we really are. We have potential to do good things, but also tremendous potential to do evil.

And I think we do more of the latter than the former, because to do evil and destruction is usually easier. It's harder to be good or constructive than to destroy, dismantle, disrupt and debase. In fact, the latter happens almost automatically, because of the entropic nature of the universe. When we go negative, we are going with the flow of the universe; whereas to be positive and constructive swims upstream against the tendency of all things to lapse from a higher state of order (which has to be generated or assembled through genuine creativity) into a lower state of order (decay, disordering, destruction).

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 1:40 pm Does creativity open a portal? I don't think so.

Examples abound as numerous as rabbits. Here’s one.

Improved brakes and suspension in autos leads to high speed driving that overwhelms the good intent of safety features. The force of good intent is overwhelmed by corruption of the intent for the improved machine, and corruption of the speed laws by the ME Monster*, which often leads to the evil of death caused by idiotic carelessness.

* The same principle of corrupting good intentions caused by the human tendency to tinker, tinkering which also leads to good discoveries, also applies to the corruption of border laws in the USA by the Party Monster via the Biden administration, as much as that truth pains partisans.

Editing = tinkering

Impenitent wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 1:34 pm

I heard stinker, but mi-stinkering ain't always or never evil.

Walker wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 1:55 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 1:40 pm Does creativity open a portal? I don't think so.

Examples abound as numerous as rabbits. Here’s one.

Improved brakes and suspension in autos leads to high speed driving that overwhelms the good intent of safety features. The force of good intent is overwhelmed by corruption of the intent for the improved machine, and corruption of the speed laws by the ME Monster*, which often leads to the evil of death caused by idiotic carelessness.

And you blame the technology for that? I don't think we can. After all, the "bad" technology only exists because people wanted it to exist. It's that "wanting" that is the real source of the problem.

There are people who believe that a technology is neither good nor bad -- it is all a matter of the use to which the technology is put. I think that's short-sighted, on their part, because technologies tend toward certain goals. For example, the internet was invented in order to share things like military and medical information. But once it was turned loose on the populace, it became quite a different thing. Pornography, consumption, gossip, indentity shifting...these sorts of things became the stock-in-trade of the internet, because the technology had its own warp in certain directions. The axiom might be, "Technology always tends toward its own most-efficient uses."

That's just half the truth, though. The rest of it is that pornography, consumerism, gossip...these are products of human desire. The technology is efficiently delivering to people the things people most want to get from it. That's why it has the uses it does.

So again, it's not the technology that's driving the train; it's the deepest desires of the human race, both good and evil desires, that are setting the agenda for the technology. It turns out we don't only have "good intent"; we also have a lot of very bad intent. And it's not "idiotic carelessness" that is most of the problem; rather, it's a kind of rational calculation of what is possible in terms of our desires, given the new technology.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 2:25 pm And you blame the technology for that?

Of course not.

Corruption of technology is to blame, by the human ingredient which is as much a part of nature as cold steel, or fiberglass and its improvements.
Corruption of good intent is the culprit that opens the portal for evil, even if the intent is just truth, as it was for Einstein.

Does AI even have the capacity for good intent and if not, does that open a greater portal for evil?

Walker wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 3:06 pm Does AI even have the capacity for good intent and if not, does that open a greater portal for evil?

AI doesn't have "intents." It's an algorithm. It's a thing, not a person. It's a complex computer program, a bunch of circuits and wires, not a genuine consciousness. To talk as if it has human qualities is to make a category error. Only persons have "intents." But persons can program their "intents" into technologies, and some of them can fool us into thinking they "intend" this or that.

They don't. Let's not be fooled.

So the "intent" is the issue. And the intent behind every technology comes from human beings.

So we might ask, why do human beings have evil intentions?

campers aside,

the tool is crafted to serve a purpose

the terror felt by nails is only a side benefit of wielding a hammer, not the intent

-Imp

popeye1945 wrote: ↑Thu Apr 30, 2026 6:25 pmI don't think any progress will be made here. So, I am out.

Well, the thread did open portals to transmissions and receptions beyond the mundane.

*

Another hymn to God.

In considering reactionary tendency ...

In songs as in life, the meaning projected into words can be preconceived into the Hollywood boy-meets-girl, or in this case (the link) girl-meets-boy theme, which both assuages and creates a predictable needed reaction in the receiver, a need caused by the life-supporting infrastructure of biological drives should they be present in the experience of hearing.

And likewise, a hymn to God also fits the ordering of the lyrics. The spirit co-manifesting through the infrastructure of the biology hears Hymn, as an involuntary reaction ... most everywhere.

“Believin’ is the answer, the answer to all your fears.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MymvnFD ... rt_radio=1
(US version)

A hymn, pronounced him, praises the creator in reaction to the need for gratitude, i.e., the God gene manifesting due to specific conditions, which is why the cultural ritual of washing the feet of another can simultaneously be a needed humbling, honoring, and opening to the spirit.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2026 1:49 am

the principle of intelligent evolution that balances entropy.

I hate to tell you, Sport; nothing "balances entropy." Entropy continues. And it always wins, eventually.

"Eventually," is forever and ever.

In the meantime, intelligence does what it can in reaction to entropy via minions, in situations.

For example, intelligence reacts to the chaos of a rockslide by ordering a minion to build a stone house with the conveniently quarried rocks, building walls and a clever roof that will protect the minion of intelligence from the big bad wolf, but not from future rockslides unless the manifestation of intelligence is strong enough, or convincing enough for other minions to lug all those rocks to a safe place where the physics of rock stacking is discovered.

The truth is always self-protected by the capacity of the receiver's reactionary understanding.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 3:18 pm

Walker wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 3:06 pm Does AI even have the capacity for good intent and if not, does that open a greater portal for evil?

AI doesn't have "intents." It's an algorithm. It's a thing, not a person. It's a complex computer program, a bunch of circuits and wires, not a genuine consciousness. To talk as if it has human qualities is to make a category error. Only persons have "intents." But persons can program their "intents" into technologies, and some of them can fool us into thinking they "intend" this or that.

They don't. Let's not be fooled.

Perhaps the new Turing Test is if those suspected of infected by AI, but undiagnosed by AI, by design, can transcend the mundane.

Walker wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 1:23 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2026 1:49 am

the principle of intelligent evolution that balances entropy.

I hate to tell you, Sport; nothing "balances entropy." Entropy continues. And it always wins, eventually.

"Eventually," is forever and ever.

No, it also wins immediately. It's a process that pertains to everything with in the universe, all the time...not just at some time in the long future.

You're thinking of what's called "heat death," which is the eventual fate of the universe without God. "Heat death" is a long way off in the future, it's true. But entropy's not. Entropy's happening all the time, right now, to you and me. We're losing the war to the decay of order and the universal tendency toward energy-leveling. You and I will experience it as aging, increasing decrepitude and death, in that order. But it's a process going on right now, at this instant.

So "eventually" is now.

Walker wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 1:28 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 3:18 pm

Walker wrote: ↑Sat May 02, 2026 3:06 pm Does AI even have the capacity for good intent and if not, does that open a greater portal for evil?

AI doesn't have "intents." It's an algorithm. It's a thing, not a person. It's a complex computer program, a bunch of circuits and wires, not a genuine consciousness. To talk as if it has human qualities is to make a category error. Only persons have "intents." But persons can program their "intents" into technologies, and some of them can fool us into thinking they "intend" this or that.

They don't. Let's not be fooled.

Perhaps the new Turing Test is if those suspected of infected by AI, but undiagnosed by AI, by design, can transcend the mundane.

The Turing Test is not the relevant test. All it proves is that human beings can believe something is intelligent when, possibly, it is not. It doesn't suggest that the entity humans treat as if intelligent really is. The more relevant philosophical model is the Searle's Chinese Room Thought-Experiment, which points out that something can appear very convincingly to be a product of intelligence, when in fact, it is nothing of the kind.

AI is a machine. It's not a human being. No matter how sophisticated its output seems to us to be, it's still just mechanical output, not intelligence.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 1:41 pm
AI is a machine. It's not a human being. No matter how sophisticated its output seems to us to be, it's still just mechanical output, not intelligence.

It's a cybernetic machine, unlike my current coffee pot.

Walker wrote: ↑Tue May 05, 2026 10:44 am

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun May 03, 2026 1:41 pm
AI is a machine. It's not a human being. No matter how sophisticated its output seems to us to be, it's still just mechanical output, not intelligence.

It's a cybernetic machine, unlike my current coffee pot.

Yet the processes in it are not qualitatively different from your coffee pot. Quantitatively, there's vastly more processes; but quantitative change is not qualitative change, even if the quantitative changes are so numerous as to overwhelm our human sense of things, and make us think our coffee pot or our computer has become sentient.

It hasn't. Neither has our computer. Nor is AI.

Don't forget that the operative word in "AI" is "artificial." It's not "intelligence," even when it sure looks to us like it is. But it's one heck of a convincing fake.