The Biggest Problem with AI--And How to Solve It

There is a fundamental problem with AI. It is not, or not just, that it will replace all our jobs, or that it will turn on us. It has no ability to determine what is real, and no sense of values. As a result, there are growing reports of AI systems “hallucinating,” and encouraging people to harm or kill themselves.

In other words, it has no judgement. AI bases its responses on the mass of data available on the internet: reputedly, it gets most of its responses from Reddit and Wikipedia. It is just quoting. This, in philosophical terms, is the ad populum fallacy—there is no necessary connection between popular opinion and truth. 

The other principle on which it operates is that it will agree with any opinion stated by the human who queries it. If the questioner begins with a delusion, the AI will assent to and reinforce that delusion.

How can this be helped?

Not by relying on “experts” for data. That is the “appeal to authority” fallacy. Encyclopedias that relied on experts for their content have been shown to be no more accurate than Wikipedia. On top of this, we increasingly discover that “experts” have their own agendas to protect and advance.

As it happens, AI shares these two problems with psychiatry: psychiatry relies on consensus, not judgement of what is real, and therapists will usually automatically affirm the patient’s point of view. No judgement, and so no guidance.

The solution is obvious: we need AI to get religion. This is where guidance comes from. This is where our sense of values comes from. We need a Catholic AI which will prioritize as its sources the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Bible, the creeds. Then, if the answer is not found there, it will go, in order of authority, to the formal documents from the various ecumenical councils, the Patristic writers, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, St. Augustine, the writings of Doctors of the Church, papal bulls, the writings of the saints. It could also access all the rest of the data available on the net, but only if the answer was not found here. Ideally, it would have the ability to test other data against these prioritized sources just as a law is tested against the constitution. Although I doubt that is possible.

Aside from giving reliable guidance day to day, something most of us want urgently, this is an ideal way to teach the faith. With the decline of denominational schools and universities, this is also an urgent need.

The same could be done for other religions too: one could choose the engine or filter that suits one’s faith. But it would be easiest for Catholicism, since the lines of authority are most clear, and the sources most plentiful.

Diversity is Not Our Strength

 

Yesterday in Saint John, there were two opposing demonstrations scheduled: the second One Million March for Children, protesting sexual orientation and gender ideology in the schools, and “Love is Louder than Hate,” demanding sexual orientation and gender ideology in the schools. All over Canada, there are large demonstrations protesting the genocide of Jews by Hamas in Israel, and competing demonstrations protesting the genocide of Arabs by Israel in Gaza. And this on top of the longstanding demonstrations for and against abortion.

Opposing demonstrations are not in themselves alarming. But these positions seem irreconcilable. There seems to be no room for calm debate or compromise. After all, to the one side, it looks like the other side is committing genocide. To one side, it looks like the other is trying to harm their children. 

It looks like civil war is coming inevitably closer all the time, and seems the necessary ultimate result. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Sooner or later, here or somewhere, competing demonstrations are going to clash violently, there will be a body count, there will be calls for vengeance, and the fighting will spread. One thinks of “Bleeding Kansas.”

The underlying problem is that we have lost or abandoned all our shared values or principles. Any society needs shared values to function: some underlying set of shared premises from which to argue and eventually come to an agreement. We used to all agree, or nearly all agree, on Judeo-Christian principles and the principles of liberal democracy. Now a large portion of the population no longer do.

The only way to prevent a civil war is either a wholesale return to these values, or general adoption of some new set of shared premises. Marxism offered one, based on material progress and “dialectical materialism”; but, leaving aside its philosophical flaws, Marxism has surely by now been discredited in practice. Bad things happen wherever it is tried. Nazism offered one, a new morality based on the Theory of Evolution; but I think we can agree that did not turn out well. Islamism is one current candidate; but the state of the Muslim world does not inspire confidence.

I vote for a return to Judeo-Christian principles and the principles of liberal democracy. To be clear, that means restrictions on abortion, absolute preference for Christian and Jewish over Muslim immigration, and no mention of sexual orientation or gender ideology in the schools.

Depression Truths

 

Kurelek, "The Maze"

A middle school student I tutor has done a competent job of detailing the cause of depression as popularly understood. It is worth going through it to identify the major errors in the popular understanding of depression. This includes the understanding not just of most people but of most psychiatrists and psychologists, although the more honest ones will admit that they are just thrashing about in the dark, and “nobody knows.”

The essay:

“Depression is a mood disorder that can make people feel sadness, hopelessness and loss of interest. It can make you feel, think and behave differently and can lead to serious emotional and physical problems. It is basically a type of mental illness that can make people start not interacting with other people and feel hopelessness and become sensitive. … Depression comes from 3 major reasons, genetic vulnerability, severe life stressors, substances you may take (some medications, drugs and alcohol) and medical conditions. 

We need to be nice and friendly to people who have depression. They can get in bigger trouble if you say some sensitive words to them. Lasty, depression is an illness to take seriously. We need to find correct solutions to cure depression. We need to help people that have depression, instead of hurting them with words we say.”

Let’s take these points in turn.

“Depression is a mood disorder.” No, the mood, sadness, is a symptom. This is like saying cancer is a pain disorder. 

Why would we imagine there is no cause for the sadness? That is like supposing there is no cause for pain. Sadness is a warning that something is wrong. To only treat the mood is to leave the problem to fester and grow.

Depression is a loss of meaning, direction, and clear values. One cannot discern right from wrong, good from bad, and so does not know what to do. It is a loss of esprit, or, in Africa, “loss of soul.”

“that can make people feel sadness, hopelessness and loss of interest,”

Anxiety is at least as common as these, but ignored or treated as a separate problem.

“It is basically a type of mental illness that can make people start not interacting with other people.”

This is perhaps the most harmful misconception: that wanting to be alone is a part of the disease. It is the proper and instinctive cure. When one has lost one’s sense of values, of meaning, the urgent need is to retreat and meditate.  To seek company at such a time is no better than to seek alcohol or drugs.

Unfortunately, the treatment most commonly recommended is to get back into one’s social life as quickly as possible. Perpetuating the problem, probably making it worse.

“Depression comes from 3 major reasons, genetic vulnerability, severe life stressors, substances you may take (some medications, drugs and alcohol) and medical conditions.”

That’s four major reasons; but there is really only one.

Symptoms mimicking depression can be caused by drugs or physical illness; sure. The symptom is not the disease. 

The idea that depression is genetic was fashionable back in the eighties or nineties. Back then, the structure of DNA had been relatively recently discovered, and the big rush was on to decode the human genome. Because it was the latest thing in science, genetics was thought of as miraculous. This is always the way with science: each new discovery is first thought of as the answer to everything. When electricity was discovered, it was supposed to be the essence of life. See the story of Frankenstein and his monster. When computers came in, “running it through the computer” was thought to be a sure proof of anything—a delusion that survives in climate science. So too with genetics: it was the cause of everything for a while, of criminality, of alcoholism, of homosexuality, of depression, of schizophrenia.

Further evidence that depression was genetic was that it tended to run in families.

Over the intervening years, however, as we have isolated the entire genome, and multiple genomes, we have found no gene for alcoholism, no gene for homosexuality, no gene for schizophrenia, and no gene for depression. Wrong tree, dog.

Something other than genes runs in families. Politics does too; religion, world view, culture, values, personal habits, and parenting styles.

Depression comes from bad parenting and miseducation. “Abusive” parenting, if you like; but that term as commonly used is misleading. The issue is not blows to the body, or sexual exploitation as such, but blows to the mind, soul, and conscience. Confusing children as to values, right and wrong, the rights of self and of others, the point of existence.

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea.” 

This is also what original sin is all about; it is these distorted values that are visited by the father to the son unto the fourth generation.

Severe life stressors can come into play once the distortion of values has been instilled. But only stressors of a specific kind: if issues of right and wrong again become ambiguous. Some people, and not others, are vulnerable to breakdown in such cases, because their moral roots are not as firmly planted.

“We need to be nice and friendly to people who have depression. They can get in bigger trouble if you say some sensitive words to them.”

Notwithstanding this vulnerability to life stressors, this idea that the depressed are more emotionally fragile than the rest of us seems to be the opposite of the truth. Aristotle pointed out that great war leaders and heroes are commonly depressive. Grant, Sherman, Lincoln, Churchill… Yet the prime requirement to be a great war leader is to keep your head under intense stress—to the extent that someone is trying to kill you.

Because the abused grow up under constant threat and stress, they generally learn to bear stress better than the rest of us. So long as right and wrong are clear, they tend to have great personal courage. A situation of open war can bring renewed energy: now the sides are clear. This, however, is more true of a military commander than of a soldier in the trenches; who lacks the strategic view and only sees the moral dilemma of being asked to kill people he sees no reason to kill.

At a minimum, the depressed are particularly able to bear any level of insult without flinching. This is just what they are used to, and, sadly, they can be drawn to a similar such abusive situation like moths to the flame.

Values

 

We often see references to “family values” or “Asian values,” or the like—generally meant as praise. 

Yet this makes no sense: it means we are valuing a value. On what grounds?

If values are a matter of choice, on what basis can that choice be made?

Values must be objective, or they are meaningless.

Values must also be ultimate, or they are meaningless. If not ultimate, they are not values in themselves, but are assigned value.

Ultimately, there must be value itself, by which all else is valued.

Ultimate value is God. This is a simple matter of definition.

Seeking ultimate value is called worship—worth-ship.

Come to the Cabaret!

 

Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) in a recent livestream hit upon several themes I too have been stressing, here and elsewhere:

1. That the current situation in the USA looks dangerously like the Weimar Republic

2. That the source of all our current civil strife is the loss of moral values.

3. That “scientific language” (I say scientism) has encouraged this loss of values.

He also makes reference to the transcendentals, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, as the source of all values.

I’d almost think he had been reading my notes; or that I had been reading his. But the explanation is that the problem has become obvious.

The Weimar Republic was a time of the dissolution of values. Think of the “Roaring Twenties”: Germany was their world epicentre. All established mores or assumptions were suddenly open to question. The chief lure, then as now, was free sex. Josephine Baker danced naked in Berlin and was declared an “erotic goddess.”

Why was Germany the centre? The war had swept away much of the political establishment, the old aristocracy. If the political order was open to question, what else might be? The aristocracy had also been the arbiters of culture, manners, style. Germany, as the loser in the war, must have felt this effect most powerfully, with perhaps the exception of Russia. And then there is the local legacy of Nietzsche, with his notion that God is dead and we are now free to do whatever we will. Add to this a strong local dose of incipient scientism, A Prussian and German infatuation with science that Kipling decried in “The Recessional” as “heathen heart that puts her trust/In reeking tube and iron shard.”

Mix it all together, and you get—Hitler and the triumph of the will.

The USA today does not have cataclysmic war as a motivator, but our scientism and our questioning of traditional values began to grow again after the Second World War, with the “Sexual Revolution,” and has grown steadily since. It has perhaps been accelerated recently by “future shock”: the rapid advance of computer technology has tended to upset many established assumptions. Rapid “globalization” and mass immigration has added culture shock.

This, back in the Weimar Republic and now in America, segued naturally into fighting by rival factions both in the streets and in the corridors of power. Society operates on a series of gentlemen’s agreements. When all values are questioned, it is adrift and subject to the winds. There are no longer any honest brokers or umpires: you can no longer trust the experts, the government, the police or the courts to be disinterested or apolitical. Everyone is out for self-interest or their preferred “narrative,” their chosen delusion. There are no more shared values to settle disputes. The rule becomes “might makes right.”

The advantage then goes to the most ruthless, the most prepared for violence, the least principled. In Weimar Germany, that was the Nazis. In the US currently, it looks as though it is the “progressive left,” Antifa, BLM and “the Squad.” To be frank, the parallels between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hitler are striking.

Worn down by the strife, the bulk of the population will meekly allow this worst element to take power, in vain and cowardly hopes of settling things down: by allowing the strongest force to ride roughshod on any dissent.

Scientism contributes by stripping out moral values. Science has no ethical dimension: it denies morality. This has generated both Marxism and Nazism, both claiming to be strictly scientific approaches to society and government. The modern left similarly wraps itself in the mantle of “follow the science.”

The rise of Hitler to power over the moral chaos of Weimar was prompted most directly by the Great Depression. COVID and its aftermath may be a comparable economic shock, leaving a lot of discontented and unemployed young available for organization into paramilitaries and for mayhem in the streets. As we have already seen, last summer.

Last time, it took a Churchill, emerging almost at the last possible minute, to save civilization. Trump might still be such a figure; but now it looks as though he is about to be sent, as Churchill was more than once, into exile.

But Nazi Germany was a far smaller player, on the world stage, than would be a Nazi America. And Churchill was able to operate in freedom outside the reach of that Nazi government. If America falls, who can stand against her?

Not China. We already have, in effect, a Nazi China. The program of the Chinese Communist Party today is identical to that of the German Nazi Party in all but name: mass elimination of minority races, a seamless integration of government and industry, lack of human rights, corporatism, sacrifice of the individual citizen to the state, expansionism abroad.

What happens if we suddenly have a Pact of Steel between China and a USA?

Who indeed can stand against this?

Was Hitler only the opening act?