It's artificial, but it's not intelligence

So my phone's battery was dying, and as sometimes occurs to me in such situations, I thought maybe I should turn it off to save the last bit of the battery in case I needed it for an emergency. I pulled out my phone and pressed down on the power button, which had always in the past been the way to shut down the phone, but a recent software update had apparently changed that. I was greeted by a message that I had activated the "AI assistant" for my phone now, and what would I like to ask it? There was no option to shut off the assistant, or to shut off the phone, and I struggled in vain to pull up the phone's settings and find the setting that would reprogram the button to do what it used to. The phone died.

This was more than simply a minor frustration. I don't want an AI assistant on my phone. I just want to use my phone the same as I always have. I'm tired of the way AI chatbots have become so pervasive in our society, and I want it to stop.

Earlier this year, I applied for a job. To my dismay, I found that the job application process was gatekept by an AI chatbot. It asked me if I would prefer an interview on Tuesday at 11:00 or 2:30. I responded that neither was convenient for me. The bot said, "Okay, let me know if there is anything else I can help you with." It couldn't help me with scheduling an interview at a different time. It couldn't connect me with a human. It couldn't seem to actually help me in any way, and it was my only contact at the company I had applied to. I never got an interview.

I don't want an AI assistant on my phone, but I also don't want one on my search results. I don't want AI to sum up what's happening on my social media, or to help me write a post. I don't want AI to help me navigate your website or to rewrite my resume. I certainly don't want AI to manage my health insurance coverage or the operations of my government.

One of the biggest problems with AI is that the I is supposed to stand for "Intelligence", which seems to be completely lacking in the AI chatbots that tech companies are presenting us with. They seem to be rather accomplished at sounding fairly human, but not so accomplished at actually thinking about what they have to say. They'll say whatever sounds like the right thing to say based on sentences that they have read, rather than what might be actual fact. And that seems to be the state of the science as it now stands.

This is problematic on many different levels, one of which is the amount of misinformation that is out there in the world that no doubt was a big part of the data that was fed into these language models. The other part is that people seem to be very ready to trust AI to feed them "facts", completely oblivious to the fact that that's not what they are programmed to do. I had an argument with a woman on social media on an important topic, and on her side of the conversation, there was a lot of, "ChatGPT says..." I couldn't seem to explain to her that ChatGPT was not actually a source for factual information, and she just kept going back to ChatGPT for her source. I know this will not be the last time I have such a conversation.

The other problem with this technology, for those not in the know, is the fact that it requires a massive amount of energy to operate. Behind these bots are data centers that are using up a great deal of power, and also using literal tons of water to cool their processors. All of this just to supply users with more sophisticated sounding misinformation.

I don't want to be part of it. More than that, I want to make it go away, because I feel like it's hurting our society. It's not artificial intelligence, it's artificial stupidity, and it seems like people who use it stop using their brains. But like so much technology in the past, it's out there, and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.

A Plea for Understanding

Senator Padilla (D), Senator Schiff (D), Representative Levin (D)

I’ve come to a point where I feel there is no use in pleading with you anymore. I have written countless letters and signed dozens of petitions asking you to stop, but you continue. My Representative and my Senators insist on voting for every new shipment of weapons to Israel, in violation of Leahy Laws, international law, and common decency.

The world has changed since the Holocaust. What the Nazis were able to do largely in secret would never be a secret in the 21st century. What is happening in Palestine is a genocide, livestreamed to the world. Not only do Palestinians record the atrocities committed against them, but Israeli soldiers themselves proudly video themselves committing them and post them on social media.

Virtually everyone knows now. There are very few people who are uninformed despite mainstream western media refusing to cover it for the most part. It’s genocide, and there are only those who oppose genocide, and those who support it. Apparently the U.S. government, along with the governments of a handful of other countries, are supporters. Democrats and Republicans alike know full well that war crimes are being committed by the IDF daily, and yet they send more weapons. No matter what the people say, the weapons will continue to flow into this genocide until every last Palestinian is dead.

So at this point, I feel the only recourse I have is to ask, “Why?” If you won’t end the genocide, can you at least tell me why it is necessary in your mind? Is it the case that since Jews were the victims of a genocide, they have free reign to commit genocide in turn? Is it that genocide doesn’t matter when the victims are brown skinned? Is it because Muslims are inherently evil in your mind (despite the fact that some Palestinians are Christians, and Israel doesn’t care)? Is it once again about money, as the Israelis want to build a canal right through Gaza, or so I have heard? What is it in your mind that makes genocide acceptable? Please, explain it to me.

It’s not about the hostages, as Hamas has on many occasions offered to release the hostages under very reasonable conditions. It’s not even really about Hamas, as Israel has consistently throughout the past 21 months targeted civilians, mainly killing women and children. No, it’s about putting an end to Palestinians once and for all, which is genocide. We all know it, including you. But you send more weapons still.

So tell me, what is it that you tell yourself this is all about? What allows you to see your bombs dropped on defenseless children, and you sleep at night? I myself have a hard time sleeping knowing that my taxes are paying for this. But you apparently have the answer. Please, let me know.

And Tango Makes Controversy

So, many years ago, I was rather proud to say that my blog was one of the leading sources for introspective posts on the subject of gay penguins. I wanted to talk about gay penguins again, because it seems to be a topic that never ceases to be a fount of subject material.

 

In particular, I wanted to talk about book banning and the children's book And Tango Makes Three. It's a delightful book based on the true story of New York Zoo penguins Roy and Silo who paired up for mating season; both were male penguins. The zookeepers, noting that obviously Roy and Silo could not produce an egg, found an egg that was not being tended to and gave it to the couple. The egg hatched into a baby girl penguin named Tango, and they were a penguin family with two dads. It's a cute true story about some penguins, who wouldn't love it?

Well, And Tango Makes Three was the #1 most challenged book for 2006 through 2010 (except for 2009, when it was merely #2), and continues to be a target for book banners in 2025, twenty years after its initial publishing. What's so offensive?

It's conservative Christians' belief that any media that touches on the subject of LGBTQIA+ individuals (even animals!) is immediately classified as pornographic. This is a very strange viewpoint which defies logic other than the logic of bigotry.

See, apparently if you talk about two men being in love with each other, it's inherently implying the existence of gay sex, and sex is porn. Never mind that the existence of heterosexual couples likewise implies the existence of sex (especially if the couple has children), but of course, straight sex is somehow less pornographic than gay sex. Oh, and transgender people are also somehow pornographic by their very existence, even though gender is separate from sex. (Imagine if Finding Nemo had given mention of the fact that clownfish are transsexual in nature; there goes your G rating, right?)

A part of this aversion to LGBTQIA+ subject material for children is this strange idea that exposing children to the idea of gay people (and penguins!) will make them turn gay, and exposure to transgender people will make them turn transgender. This is despite the fact that science continues to assert that sexual orientation and gender are determined before birth, and the fact that children who are exposed to exclusively cishet media still turn out LGBTQ. Listen people, you're not protecting children; you may in fact be hurting children who are enriched by the existence of diversity in the media they consume. And LGBTQIA+ children (who, sorry, not sorry, but they do exist) will love to have representation in the books and films they see.

Anyway, in the end, it's not really about protecting anyone from inappropriate material, unless of course you have a warped idea about what constitutes "inappropriate" based on bigoted ideas of of what's acceptable. There used to be (and still are) a lot of people who felt that media portrayal of mixed-race couples was inappropriate. We've mostly evolved as a society past that, and we need to evolve past stigmatizing LGBTQIA+ people. And penguins.

Christian Buddhism

I've been considering the possibility of becoming a Buddhist without leaving Christianity. I know there are a lot of people who would view this as nonsense, or even blasphemy, but I've thought for some time that the idea has merit.

Back when I was in college, I took a philosophy course in which we examined eastern religions/philosophies (there's not really a clear delineation for most of them). I found them all very interesting, but I was particularly taken by Buddhism, and even way back then, I thought that so much of Buddhist thought was rather compatible with Christian thought within the practical realm, although obviously not the theological. Still where Buddhism in its original form was essentially atheistic, believing in the non-existence of higher beings, in that gap, one could place the God of Abraham and have a pretty solid system of morality that was quite compatible with Christianity.

At the center of Buddhism was the idea of following the Noble Eightfold Path, which I present here, cribbed from Wikipedia and edited for clarity and brevity:

1. Right View: recognizing our actions have consequences, death is not the end, and our actions and beliefs have consequences after death.
2. Right Resolve: striving toward non-violence and avoiding violent and hateful conduct.
3. Right Speech: no lying, no abusive speech, no divisive speech, no idle chatter.
4. Right Conduct or Action: no killing or injuring, no taking what is not given, no sexual misconduct, no material desires.
5. Right Livelihood: no trading in weapons, living beings, meat, liquor, or poisons.
6. Right Effort: preventing the arising of unwholesome states, and generating wholesome states.
7. Right Mindfulness: a quality that guards or watches over the mind, the stronger it becomes, the weaker unwholesome states of mind become, weakening their power "to take over and dominate thought, word and deed."
8. Right samadhi: practicing meditation, culminating into equanimity and mindfulness.

While certainly there are values here that Christianity doesn’t uphold, like the avoidance of meat, they are not incompatible. Of particular importance is that all of these things are values I nonetheless hold for myself (I am a vegetarian, for instance).

As always, the thing I strive for in a post is feedback and dialogue. In this case, I would particularly like to hear from both Christians and Buddhists as to what they might think. (I don't personally know any Buddhists, but I'd like to.)

About the pain

I pretty much never talk about it, but I think I'm underestimating the effect my chronic pain is having on my life.

For the past six years I have had chronic pain, nothing seems to work against it, and as time goes by, it seems to get worse and worse. I don't talk about it for two reasons. Firstly, I hate to complain about personal problems, and it's almost impossible to talk about it without sounding like I'm complaining. Secondly, the world is so screwed up right now that despite the intensity that the pain often reaches, it's not in the top five of the list of things that I'm worried about right now.

The reason I'm bringing it up now is because I am considering the possibility that the pain is having an effect on dealing with those things that are more important. When you feel like your head is simultaneously in a vise and on fire, it's difficult to find mental clarity to deal with life in general. The problem is that I don't know if putting more focus on the pain is going to lead to a solution. I've already talked to several doctors about it, including a neurologist who has tried about a dozen treatments to zero effect.

The nature of the pain is odd, partially because it's not all pain. Sometimes I describe whatever the condition is as "A smorgasbord of unpleasant tactile hallucinations." Usually the only thing that makes it go away is falling asleep, which is difficult to do when I'm in pain, but I almost always wake up symptom-free. Then once I'm awake, the symptoms eventually creep back up on me.

I used to call it "long COVID" and who knows? Maybe it is. It pretty much started when I got COVID, and at first it was mainly COVID-like symptoms, but over the years, the symptom list has gotten longer and stranger:

Headache, sore throat, coughing, sneezing, sore teeth, sore lips, sensation of teething, sensation of plugged sinuses, sensation of plugged nostrils, sensation of having been punched in the nose, sensation of hair being pulled out, sensation of difficulty breathing, sensation of tongue being pulled out, burning eyes, burning skin on my face, sensitivity to spiciness, tasting things that aren't there, feeling hunger when my stomach is full, sensitivity to water on my skin, burning in the soles of my feet, feeling like there's a piece of string wrapped around one of my ears, feeling like my teeth are razor sharp and cutting up the inside of my mouth, back and neck pain, sugar burning my mouth, salt burning my mouth, hair burning the side of my face,

All of these symptoms come and go at random, although once again usually later in the day. I feel fine in the morning, and a few times I have managed to make them go away with a nap in the afternoon. On a handful of occasions, they have gone away on their own, at least two of those times exactly at midnight (and one time I wasn't looking at a clock). It usually seems to be stress related.

Anyway, once again, I'm starting to seriously consider that this condition is standing in the way of more than just enjoyment of life. Maybe it's standing in the way of being functional in general. But I don’t know how to fix it. So what do I do, then?

Evil and atheism

I'm in the process of reading the book God Forsaken by Dinesh D'Souza because someone recommended it to me as the "definitive" book on the problem of evil. As I've already written about before, I'm having a crisis of faith with respect to the evil I am seeing in the world right now. Can God be good and evil on the level we see today be happening? I see genocide in Gaza, as well as other places in the world, including America, where legislation currently making its way through Congress would amount to genocide of transgender people in America.

I just read a chapter that gave me food for thought, in which D'Souza examines the idea that the burden of proof is entirely on theists. He argues that there are flaws in the atheist view that require explanation, but I only find some of his claims convincing.

D'Souza points out that many atheists have argued that the reason religion exists is essentially wish fulfillment. We live in a world full of pain and suffering, so we imagine that God will take us in the next life to a place called heaven where there is no suffering. He admits that heaven seems like wish fulfillment, but how can atheists explain hell? There's nothing comforting in the idea that there is a place where the suffering is both worse and eternal, is there? My thought on this is that I don't know if he's talked to the right atheists; there's a twofold purpose to the invention of hell, and that is (1) to keep believers in line and (2) to have something to scare unbelievers with. Also, I suppose to a lesser extent, it gives believers a feeling of superiority, which you sometimes see in a Christian telling an atheist, "You think your logic is so clever, but you won't feel so clever in the lake of fire!" Ugly, but it certainly happens.

D'Souza talks about how atheists point out that God is curiously absent for something like 100 million years of humanity's existence, and the reveals himself to a single Hebrew, so how does that make sense? D'Souza points out a couple of things. First, although homo sapiens was around for a long time before Christianity, only about 2% of all humans who ever existed lived before Christ, so perhaps the timing is actually rather fortuitous. Secondly, although homo sapiens was around for so long, before around 35 thousand years ago, humans accomplished almost nothing, and then suddenly they invented agriculture, art, language, and complex tools. D'Souza suggests that this shift may have been the result of divine intervention, and atheists have no solution for why this shift happened, and why so late given that homo sapiens didn't seem to have evolved much in 100 thousand years. It seems to me however that the invention of agriculture in itself would have played a pivotal role in the development of all of the rest. With agriculture comes culture, because we change as a species from nomadic hunter gatherers to people who take up a specific space. That creates culture.

D'Souza briefly touches on the problem of objective morality, pointing out how C. S. Lewis argues that if an atheist claims something violates a moral standard, there must be a standard giver. D'Souza admits this argument may not be very good, and as for myself, I think it's rather simple to conceive of a moral standard based on whether one is creating pleasure or suffering, or perhaps, as I myself have argued recently, on consent.

D'Souza claims that the real problem with evil is the extremes thereof. If we're just evolved animals, why is it that other animals will inflict suffering if it leads to their survival (such as a lion killing an antelope to feed its family), but they don’t do things like torture or genocide? These things do nothing to increase our fitness for survival, so why do they happen? D'Souza doesn’t really flesh out the theistic solution here as he challenges the atheist, but I assume it has something to do with sin or even the devil. I don't know about torture per se, but when it comes to genocide, I have actually read some very compelling arguments from an evolutionary perspective. There apparently was a period of time when the world was inhabited by something like six separate species of hominid, and then all of them died out except for homo sapiens. Some have suggested that it wasn't some inherent inferiority of the others, but rather that for some unknown reason an instict was born into us that drove us to kill everything that was similar to us, but not exactly like us, so sapiens became the dominant species. (I've even heard it suggested that this might be why we have the "uncanny valley" effect: something that looks really close to human but not quite is perceived as dangerous.) So as ugly as it seems, genocide could conceivably be bred into humans due to our evolutionary history.

D'Souza's final argument in the chapter is probably his strongest. He argues that humans simply have limited knowledge and reasoning, and because of this, we can't really say that any particular evil or suffering is without purpose. Like a parent can't really explain to their two-year-old child why they have to be poked by a needle at the doctor's office, perhaps it's simply beyond our comprehension why some suffering happens, but God's understanding is limitless. Thus, an atheist can't reasonably claim that there is such a thing as "needless suffering". The only problem I see with this argument is that it cuts both ways; while atheists indeed can't prove that any instance of suffering is without purpose, that in itself doesn't prove that it does have purpose.

I'm continuing to read this book, and I'm continuing to discuss the problem of evil with people of a variety of viewpoints. In the meantime, evil in the world continues, and so much of it inflicted by my government.

Mr. Crane and the bear

So there was this thing that happened recently to some people I know.

Nate and Mr. Crane were walking in the woods and they saw the bear that lives there. You have to understand that this isn't just like anyone coming across a bear, because Nate has this extreme phobia of the bear. Pretty much as long as Nate has existed, he's been obsessed with the idea that the bear is going to attack him. Crane on the other hand isn't as much afraid of the bear so much as he just hates the bear; he'd actually been attacked by the bear before, and he had more than a little bit of a grudge.

So anyway, there was the bear. While most people would just back away slowly and hope the bear leaves them alone, Mr. Crane and Nate weren't most people. Nate handed Crane a big stick and told him to poke the bear to see what kind of mood the bear was in. It didn't go so well.

The bear didn't like being poked, and really felt--after having attacked Crane before--that Crane knew better than to bother her. She attacked. Crane was pinned down by the bear while she mauled him, as bears will do when angered.

"Oh shit!" Nate said. "You need a bigger stick!" So he handed Crane a bigger, heavier stick. The bear just seemed to get angrier. So Nate got another stick. And another. Meanwhile, Crane was losing a lot of blood.

You know, I have to pause here and point out that these two weren't alone in their rather crazy incitement of the bear. Some time previously, Mr. Crane had been sorting out his feelings about the bear, and he had said to himself, "You know, maybe I can just leave the bear alone, and we can live peaceful lives and not worry about each other." There was this other guy, Barry, who was really tough and popular and he heard Crane talking this way and he wouldn't have it.

"Dude," Barry told Mr. Crane, "that bear attacked you! You can't just let that go! And you know the bear better than just about anyone; I bet you could take the bear in a fight! If you did fight the bear, I'd back you up, too." The idea of being nonantagonistic toward the bear was pretty much over right there.

And so we ended up eventually to our story, with Mr. Crane pinned down by the bear, bleeding out while being handed a series of sticks by Nate. It just wasn't working out, and Nate was running out of sticks, but he was sure if he stopped helping Mr. Crane, the bear would surely turn on him. Barry wasn't anywhere to be found.

Right around that time, Don showed up. Now Don, he was tough like Barry, but he wasn't as well-liked. He wasn't as smart, and he was a bit of a jerk; in fact, most people considered him a bully. Weirdly enough, Don actually was rumored to actually like the bear, and some people said they were even on friendly terms. I would say Don's reputation was well-deserved, but in every way. He really was more friendly with the bear than just about anyone.

Nobody was happy that Don was there, least of all Mr. Crane, even though Don was probably the best person to help in the situation. Mr. Crane just wanted Don to get him a better stick, and so did Nate, who was still worried that the bear would turn on him.

Don was trying to get everyone to calm down, including the bear. "Listen," he said, "you're not going to get anything back that you lost from messing with the bear, but maybe if you stop fighting her, I can get her to back off and not kill you!" Nobody was really listening to Don, though.

You probably know, the end of this story isn't written yet. Nobody really wants Don to be right, or the bear to win, but nobody wants Mr. Crane to die either. What will be the end?