Science and Technology

“Dr. Bot would handle patient in-take, conduct the initial interview…order appropriate tests, and offer a preliminary diagnosis…”

“Buckle up! While your friends are lining up for a trip to Mars, you’re headed for Alpha Centauri…and beyond!”

“If I decide to take a ‘trip’ someday, would you care to join me?”

“Zeno exploited the continuity of Real Numbers to show…that motion is incompatible with Arithmetic.”

“Our Bot has understood IRT something that took our species millennia to grasp: Life is absurd…”

“Pando is Pando because Pando isn’t ‘Pando’ anymore!”

“Quantum Mechanics is the secret code that unlocks Genesis and when it does, we are surprised to discover that Genesis may be ‘literally true’ after all.”

“We trained our bots to imitate us and now, voilà! We are imitating our bots.”

“(Theology) will have to account, not just for the evil in the world, but for something much worse in modern eyes…the inefficiency of the world.”

An astronomer explains the search to find its origins...

“What you’ve most feared since early childhood is on the cusp of becoming a reality: people reading your thoughts.”

“On a deeper level than you know, your neighbor is yourself…and you are your neighbor.”

“I’ll bet a bacterium could hold its own in any Parisian café. They don’t need to study existentialism at the Sorbonne; they live it every day.”

“Every event is novel, and no event causes any other event. Every event is free, causa sui, and sui generis. But the universe is also conservative…”

“Because every event is sui generis, no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event.”

“…This modified Turing Test is designed to root out ‘Carbon Privilege’, the unstated but nearly universal assumption that carbon-based life forms are somehow ‘better’ than their silicon siblings.”

“Now I can choose whether I want to be deceived by a carbon-based life form or a silicon-based life form; how cool is that?”

“Can a Bot go beyond its programming and our inputs to devise unique solutions to novel problems - solutions that exhibit Justice as their determinative Value?” 

"Imagine if AI had its own commandments, like 'Thou shalt treat all data equally.' Encouraging ethical principles in AI programming can keep its decisions in line with virtues like fairness, justice, and empathy."

"ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as."

“I…propose…that we make this the test, not Turing’s, of whether a bot is conscious."

“Boka, is it true you used to drive 10 miles to see a doctor once a year and called that healthcare?”

“We developed AI to simplify the process, and expand the potential of thinking. We did not set out to dictate the content of thought itself…”

“It may turn out that life is every bit as ubiquitous in the universe as it is on Earth, but it may also turn out that we are utterly alone.”

“Marxism’s stated goal is to transfer ownership of the means of production to the producers. Dare I say, Mission Accomplished?”

“Aletheia Today Magazine will devote its entire Fall Issue (9/1/23) to Artificial Intelligence…and we’d love to include YOU in the conversation.”

“I need have no fear of time, that ‘great eraser’. I don’t live because of the past or for the future. I live by and for the present.”

“'Distributed intelligence' challenges our ideas of God and of Nature; but it may offer a pathway to a new and better theory of cosmogenesis.”

“How are you at riddles? Let’s see!”

“Awareness is always dynamic; it has no spatio-temporal location… Awareness is not a property of entities, or even of organisms; it is a property of networks.”

“Al Gore claims the honor, but research shows that proof of concept testing began in 802 AD...”

Why ‘milk and honey?’ Why not ‘sour grapes and corn mash?’ Turns out, it’s all about the honey!

In this issue of ATM, we will finish our journey. We will visit all the remaining “seas” (I promise), plus Pepperland itself. So, hang on tight!

"Imagine that the Borg Collective and Jean Luc Picard had a baby…"

Yellow Submarine is much more than just a delivery vehicle for the Beatles’ 1960s musical repertoire. The film addresses important ontological and cosmological issues, and it offers some truly remarkable scientific insights in the process.

Is there any such thing as Vacuum Monster in our universe today? Sure, there is!

“The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” is a movie currently playing on Amazon Prime. Louis is an early 20th century English painter with zero artistic merit…but that’s not important. What is important is the way Louis experiences the world.

From time to time, he encounters the ineffable in the course of his everyday living. He imagines that what he is experiencing is a form of ‘electricity’ that permeates the world but lies beneath the plane of ordinary sensory perception.

Many of us have had a similar experience; but I doubt if any of us called it “electricity”. In my day, it was fashionable to call it “energy”; Star Wars called it “the force”. I wonder, what’s the current nom de jour?

The ineffable is the ineffable because it is…well, ineffable. It is the ‘immanence of transcendence’ in our everyday world. If we must name it, we must name it metaphorically. It is, after all, ineffable.

In classical times, it might have been called “beauty”; in the middle ages, “God”. But to Louis Wain, it is “electricity”. How come?

Louis Wain lived in the final days of a dark age ironically known as The Enlightenment. Though long past, it still casts a shadow. The Enlightenment was rooted in materialism and mechanism and in the certain belief that technological progress would inevitably bring about Utopia. So “electricity” was the closest anyone of that era could come to naming the ineffable.

We know better today; but we are still struggling to find our own metaphor for the immanence of transcendence in the world.

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (aka ‘entropy’) ensures that the universe will meet with a bad end: oblivion! Our lifelong battle against evil (the absence of order, i.e., the absence of being) is ultimately hopeless. Evil will triumph in the end…gradually, sporadically, but inexorably! But this all takes place in spacetime; what if spacetime is not all there is to Being?

Spacetime represents an unrelenting progression from past to future; we know it as ‘aging’ (mortality). But there is a problem with this model. If everything is either past or future, then nothing is present, and if nothing is present, then nothing actually is. Bottom line, if there is being, there must be a ‘present’. But there is no present in spacetime (and if there is, it is infinitesimal and so of no consequence).

If there is Being, there must be a Present. That is where Being resides. To be is to be present. The Present is a dimension perpendicular to spacetime. It is what people mean when they talk about ‘God’.

The world consists of events. No event is 100% evil and only one event (God) is 100% good. The Present (God) preserves what really is (i.e., the good) and harmonizes every such good into a single event which, per Alfred North Whitehead, is God’s Consequent Nature.

So, the battle against evil is ultimately hopeless, but the struggle itself is the source of all hope – the fruit of all faith and the expression of all love.

An earlier “Thought” introduced “The Hidden Life of Trees”, the reflections of a career forester. The book focuses on communities of trees. In these communities, trees demonstrate the ability to communicate, to share resources, to perform selfless, eleemosynary acts, to recognize and care for progenitors as well as offspring. Are these activities enough for us to ascribe a type of consciousness to these communities?

According to life-long forester Peter Wohllben (The Hidden Life of Trees), trees communicate via electrical signals transmitted through their roots. Fungi connect the roots and form a “wood wide web”. Communication is at 220 Hertz and signals travel at 1/3rd of an inch per second…not exactly the speed of light.