AI "Godfather" retires & voices fears about AI dangers

This post is still undergoing correction and enhancement. 

Do AI systems have a sense of self?

What worries me about these robots is not that they are robots, but 

they look too close to humanity, which probably means they are made in the

image of man and therefore as they seek their goals they share 

human moral & epistemic limitations. 

This BBC article is about the retirement of Artificial Intelligence guru Geoffrey Hinton. Here we read:

A man widely seen as the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI) has quit his job, warning about the growing dangers from developments in the field. Geoffrey Hinton, 75, announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, saying he now regretted his work.

He told the BBC some of the dangers of AI chatbots were "quite scary". "Right now, they're not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be."

Dr Hinton's pioneering research on neural networks and deep learning has paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT.

Before I proceed further with this article, first a reminder about my previous blog post where I mentioned the "take home" lessons from my AI "Thinknet" project. Any intelligence, human and otherwise has to grapple with a reality that, I propose, can be very generally represented in an abstracted way as a rich complex of properties distributed over a set of items: Diagrammatically:

Intelligence perceives any non-random relations between properties and then draws conclusions from these relations*.  These relations can be learnt either by a) recording the statistical linkages between properties and selecting out and remembering any significant associations from these statistics or b) by reading text files that contain prefabricated associations stated as Bayesian probabilities. Because learning associations from statistics is a very longwinded affair I opted for text-file learning. Nobody is going to learn, say quantum theory, from direct experience without a very long lead time.

The world is full of many different "properties" and myriad instantiations of those properties coming into association.  As any intelligence has, naturally, a limited ability to freely sample this complex structure intelligence tends to be error prone as a result of a combination of insufficient sampling and accessibility issues**; in short intelligence faces epistemic difficulties. However, if experience of the associations between properties is accumulated and tested over a long period of time and compiled as reviewable Bayesian text files this can help mitigate the problems of error, but not obviate it completely. In a complex world these text files are likely to remain partial, especially if effected by group dynamics where social pressures exist and group think gets locked in. 

The upshot is that an intelligence can only be as intelligent as the input from its environment allows. In the extreme case of a complete information black-out it is clear that intelligence would learn nothing and like a computer with no software could think nothing; the accessibility, sample representativeness and organization of the environment in which an intelligence is emersed and attempts to interrogate, sets an upper limit on just how intelligent an intelligence can be. 

The weak link in the emergence of text-dependent intelligence are those Bayesian probabilities - millions of them: They may be unrepresentative, too many of them, or too few of them. They will have a tendency to be proprietary, depending on the social circles in which they are compiled. They may be biased by various human adaptive needs; like for example the need to appear dogmatic and confident if one is a leader or the need to attach oneself to a group and express doctrinal loyalty to the group in return for social support, validation & status. Given that so much information comes via texts rather than a first-principle contact with reality one of the weak links is that these text files are compiled by interlocutors whose knowledge may be compromised by partial & biased sampling, group dynamics and priority on adaptative needs. This may well be passed on to any AI that reads them.

In short AI, in the light of these considerations, may well be as ham-strung as humanity in the forming of sound conclusions from text files; the alternative is to go back to the Stone Age and start again by accumulating knowledge experimentally; but even then reality may not present a representative cross-section of itself. 

 ***

The Venn diagram and the gambling selection schemes theorem are key to understanding this situation. The crucial lesson is that everybody should exercise epistemic humility because the universe only reveals so much about itself; it need not reveal anything, but providentially it reveals much. Let's thank The Creator for that.

Finally let me repeat my two main qualifications about current AI: 

a) In my opinion Digital AI, is only a simulation of biological intelligence: It is not a conscious intelligence: For consciousness to result one would have to use atoms and molecules in the way biology uses them. (See the last chapter in this book for my tentative proposal for the physical conditions of consciousness)

b) Nevertheless, my working hypothesis is that biological intelligence is not so exotic in nature that it can't be simulated with sufficiently sophisticated algorithms. For example, I think it unlikely that biological intelligence is a non-computable phenomenon - see here for my reasons why. The de-facto North American Intelligent Design community have painted themselves into a corner in this respect in that they have become too committed to intelligence being something exotic. This is a result of an implicit philosophical dualism which makes a sharp demarcation between intelligence and other phenomena of the created world. This implicit dualist philosophy has been built into their "Explanatory Filter". They appear unaware of their dualism.

So, with these thoughts in mind. let my now go onto to add comment to the BBC article: 

***

BBC: In artificial intelligence, neural networks are systems that are similar to the human brain in the way they learn and process information. They enable AIs to learn from experience, as a person would. This is called deep learning. 

MY COMMENT: That "similarity", as I've said before, is in formal structure rather than being qualitatively similar; that is, it is a simulation of human thinking. A simulation will have isomorphisms with what's being simulated but will differ from the object being simulated in that its fundamental qualitative building blocks are of a different quality.  For example, an architect's plan will have a point-by-point correspondence with a physical building, but the stuff used in the plan is of a very different quality to the actual building. It is this difference in quality which makes a simulation a simulation rather than being the thing-in-itself. To compare an architect's plan with a dynamic computer simulation might seem a little strained, but that's because a paper plan is 3-dimensional and lacks the fourth dimensions of time. Current digital AI systems are dynamic simulations in that they add the time dimension: But they do not make use of the qualities of fundamental physics which if used rightly, I propose, results in conscious cognition.

BBC: The British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist told the BBC that chatbots could soon overtake the level of information that a human brain holds. "Right now, what we're seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it's not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning," he said. "And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that."

 MY COMMENT: The level of information held in a library or on the Web, at least potentially, exceeds the information that the human brain holds, so the first statement above is not at all startling. But if one characterizes the information a human mind can access via a library or their iPhone or their computer as off-line information accessible via these clever technological extensions of the human mind this puts human information levels back into the running again. After all, even in my own mind there is much I know which takes a little effort and time to get back into the conscious spotlight and almost classifies as a form of off-line information. 

Yes, I'd accept that AI reasoning has room for (possible) enhancement and may eventually do better than the human mind, just as adding machines can better humans at arithmetic. But why do we need worry? The article suggests why......

BBC: In the New York Times article, Dr Hinton referred to "bad actors" who would try to use AI for "bad things". When asked by the BBC to elaborate on this, he replied: "This is just a kind of worst-case scenario, kind of a nightmare scenario. "You can imagine, for example, some bad actor like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decided to give robots the ability to create their own sub-goals." The scientist warned that this eventually might "create sub-goals like 'I need to get more power'".

 MY COMMENT: Well yes, I think I agree! As soon as man discovered that a stone or a stick could be used as a weapon bad actors were always going to be a problem. Today of course we've got the even more pressing problem of bad actors with AR15s running amok and even worse, despots in charge of nuclear weapons. But is Hinton right about the creation of robots with power seeking sub goals? May be, but if that can happen then somebody might create robots with the sub-goal of destroying robots that seek power! Like other technology, AI appears to be just another case of an extension of the human power to enhance and help enforce its own high-level goal seeking. It is conceivable, however, that either by accident or design somebody creates an AI that has a high-level goal of seeking its own self-esteem & self-interests above all other goals: This kind of AI would have effectively become a complex adaptive system in its own right; that is a system seeking to consolidate, perpetuate & enhance its identity. But by then humans would have at their disposal their own AI extension to the human power to act teleologically. The result would be like any other technological arms race; a dynamic stalemate; a likely result if both sides have similar technology. So, it is not at all clear that rampaging robots, with or without a bad acting human controller, would inevitably dominate humanity. However, I agree, the potential dangers should be acknowledged: Those dangers will be of at least three types: a) AI drones out of control of their human creators (although I feel this to be an unlikely scenario) b) Probably more relevant will be what so often new technology has done in the past: Viz; Shifting the production goal posts and resulting in social disruption and displacement. c) Abuse of the technology by "bad actors".

But much of Hinton's thinking about the dangers of AI appears to be predicated on implicit assumptions about the possibility of AI having a clear sense of its identity; that is a self-aware identity. A library of information may have a clear identity in that its information media is confined withing the walls of a building, but the question of self-aware identity only comes to the fore when the library holds information about itself.  Hinton's fears rest on the implicit assumption that an AI system can have a  self-aware sense of individual identity, that is, a sense of self and the motivation which seeks to perpetuate and enhance that self.  Without that sense of identity AI remains just a very dynamic information generator; in fact like  public library in that it is open to everyone, but with the addition of very helpful and intelligent assistants attached to that library.  But if an AI system has a notion of self and therefore capable of forming the idea that its knowledge somehow pertains to that self, perhaps even believe it has property rights over that knowledge, we are then in a different ball game. This sense of self and ownership is in fact a very human trait, a trait which potentially could be passed on by human programming (or accidental mutation & subsequent self-perpetuation? *). The "self" becomes the source of much aggravation when selves assert themselves over other selves. Once again, we have a problematical issue tracing back to and revolving round the very human tendency to over assert the self at the cost of other selves as it seeks self-esteem, ambition, status & domination. In a social context the self has the potential to generate conflict. In human society a selfish identity-based teleology rules OK - if it can.  As the saying goes "Sin" is the word with the "I" in the middle. But the Christain answer is not to extinguish the self but to bring it under control, to deny self when other selves can be adversely affected by one's self-assertion.  (Philippians 2:1-11). 

BBC: He added: "I've come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we're developing is very different from the intelligence we have. "We're biological systems and these are digital systems. And the big difference is that with digital systems, you have many copies of the same set of weights, the same model of the world. And all these copies can learn separately but share their knowledge instantly. So it's as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that's how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person."

MY COMMENT: This data sharing idea is valid. In fact, that is exactly what humans have themselves done in spreading of technological know-how via word of mouth and information media. Clearly this shared information will be so much more than anyone person can know, but we don't lose sleep over that because it is in the public domain and in the public interest; it is as it were off-line information available to all should access be required. In this sense there are huge continents of information available on the internet. Here the notion that that information is the property belonging to someone or something is a strained idea. Therefore, in what sense wouldn't the information gained by 10,000 webbots also be my knowledge? If we are dealing with a public domain system this is just what technology has always been: Viz: a way of extending human powers. Energetically speaking a car is so much more powerful than a human but the human is in the driving seat, and it is the driver, and not the car, who has a strong sense of individual identity and ownership over the vehicle. Likewise, I have an extensive library of books containing much information unknown to me, although it is in principle available to me should I want to interrogate this library using its indices. It would be even better if all this information was on computer, and I could use clever algorithms to search it, and even better if I could use a chatbot; this would extend my cognitive powers even further.  But such clever mechanical informational aids don't necessarily mean they also simulate a strong sense of self; all we can say at this stage is that they are testament to the ability of human beings to extend their powers technologically, whether those powers pertain to mental power or muscular power. 

However, I would accept that it may well be possible to simulate computationally a strong sense of self And so again, Hinton's diffidence &/or fear that digital systems can know so much more than any one person only has serious implications if that knowledge is attached to an intelligence (human or otherwise) which has a strong sense of personal identity, ownership and a strong motivation toward self-betterment over and against other selves. Since information is power, the hoarding and privatization of such information would then be in its (selfish) interests.  Only in this context of self-identity does the analogy of a large public library staffed by helpful slave assistants breakdown. Only in this context can I understand any assumption that the knowledge belongs to one AI self-aware identity. This very human concept of personal ambition & individual identity appears to be behind Hinton's fears although he doesn't explicitly articulate them. With AI it is a very natural to assume we are dealing with a self-aware self; although that need not be the case: It is something which has to be programmed in. 

If there is a powerful sense of individual identity which wishes to hoard knowledge, own it and privatize it that sounds a very human trait and if this sense of individualism and property was delegated to machinery it is then that fears about AI may be realized.  But until such happens AI systems are just an extension of human powers and identity. 

Let's also recall where chatbot information is coming from: it's largely coming from the texts of human culture: Those texts contain errors and naturally AI systems will inherit those errors. An AI system can only be as intelligent as its information environment allows. Moreover, as we live in a mathematically chaotic reality it is unlikely that AI will achieve omniscience in terms of its ability to predict and plan; It is likely then that AI, no more humanity, will be able to transcend the role of being a "make-it-up-as-you-go-along" complex adaptive system. 

BBC: Matt Clifford, the chairman of the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency, speaking in a personal capacity, told the BBC that Dr Hinton's announcement "underlines the rate at which AI capabilities are accelerating". "There's an enormous upside from this technology, but it's essential that the world invests heavily and urgently in AI safety and control," he said.

Dr Hinton joins a growing number of experts who have expressed concerns about AI - both the speed at which it is developing and the direction in which it is going.

'We need to take a step back' In March, an open letter - co-signed by dozens of people in the AI field, including the tech billionaire Elon Musk - called for a pause on all developments more advanced than the current version of AI chatbot ChatGPT so robust safety measures could be designed and implemented.

Yoshua Bengio, another so-called godfather of AI, who along with Dr Hinton and Yann LeCun won the 2018 Turing Award for their work on deep learning, also signed the letter.

Mr Bengio wrote that it was because of the "unexpected acceleration" in AI systems that "we need to take a step back".

But Dr Hinton told the BBC that "in the shorter term" he thought AI would deliver many more benefits than risks, "so I don't think we should stop developing this stuff," he added.

He also said that international competition would mean that a pause would be difficult. "Even if everybody in the US stopped developing it, China would just get a big lead," he said.

Dr Hinton also said he was an expert on the science, not policy, and that it was the responsibility of government to ensure AI was developed "with a lot of thought into how to stop it going rogue".

MY COMMENT: I think I would  largely agree with the foregoing. The dangers of AI are two fold:

1. AI, like all other human technology, is an extension of human powers and it is therefore capable of extending the powers of both good and bad actors: The latter, is a social problem destined to be always with us.

2. Those human beings, who are effectively creating AI in their own image may create AI systems with a sense of self with the goal of enhancing their persona where self-identity will take precedence over all other goals. 

My guess is that the danger of AI going rogue and setting up business for its own ends is a lot less likely than AI being used to extend the powers of bad human actors. Nevertheless, I agree with Hinton that we should continue to develop AI, but be mindful of the potential pitfalls. Basically, the moral is this: read Hinton's "with a lot of thought into how to stop it going rogue" as "with a lot of thought into how to stop it becoming too dangerously human and at the disposal of bad actors". The danger is endemic to humanity itself and the irony is that the potential dangers exist because humans create AI in their own image and/or AI becomes an extension of the flawed human will. Thus Hinton's fears are grounded in human nature, a nature that all too readily asserts itself over and above other selves, a flawed nature that may well be passed on to AI systems built in the image of humanity with the same old goals of adapting and preserving an individual identity. Christianity calls those flaws in human nature "Sin", the word with the "I" in the middle. We all have a sense of individuality and a conscious sense of self: That individuality should not be extinguished, but when called for self should be denied in favour of other selves in a life of service (Phil 2:1-11).

Footnote:

* Venn diagrams don't have the facility to form a set of sets. However, this can be achieved using another "higher level" Venn diagram; we thus have Venn diagrams that are about other Venn diagrams. See here:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-thinknet-project-footnote-on-self_11.html

** Epistemic difficulties surrounding accessibility and signal opacity loom large in historical research. "Epistemic distance" is a big issue in human studies. 

Another BBC link:

AI 'godfather' Yoshua Bengio feels 'lost' over life's work - BBC News

The AI Question and ChatGPT: "Truth-Mills"?

 

Everyone seems to be complaining about the Artificial Intelligence application "ChatGPT" : From passionate leftwing atheist PZ Myers through moderate evangelical atheist Larry Moran to cultish fundamentalist Ken Ham it's nothing but complaints!

PZ Myers refers to ChatGPT as a Bullsh*t fountain. Also, in a post titled "How AI will destroy us" he blames capitalism and publishes a YouTuber who calls AI "B.S.".  Biochemist Larry Moran gives chatGPT a fail mark on the basis that it is "lying" about Junk DNA (that's also a complaint of Myers, although "lying" is rather too anthropomorphic in my opinion). The Christian fundamentalists go spare and lose it completely: Kentucky theme park supremo Ken Ham, in a post titled "AI - It's pushing an Anti-God Agenda" (March 1st) complains that ChatGPT isn't neutral but is clearly anti-God - what he means by that is that its output contradicts Ken's views! We find even greater extremism in a post by PZ Myers where he reports Catholic Michael Knowles claiming that AI may be demonic!  Ken Ham is actually much nearer the mark than Knowles when Ken tells us that AI isn't neutral: The irony is that although we are inclined to think of AI as alien, inhuman, impartial and perhaps of superhuman power, it is in fact inextricably bound up with epistemic programming that has its roots in human nature and the nature of reality itself. It is therefore limited by the same fundamental epistemic compromises that necessarily plague human thinking**.  Therefore like ourselves AI will, of necessity, hold opinions rather than detached cold certainties. Let me expand this theme a bit further. 

***

From 1987 onwards I tried to develop a software simulation (eventually written in C++) of some of the general features of intelligence. I based this endeavor on Edward De Bono's book "The Mechanism of Mind". I tell this story in my "Thinknet" project and although it was clear that it was the kind of project whose potential for further development was endless, I felt that I had taken its development far enough to understand the basics of how intelligence might form an internal model of its surroundings. The basic idea was simple: it was based on the generalised Venn diagram. Viz:

The whole project was predicated on the assumption that this kind of picture can be used as a general description of the real world. In this picture a complex profusion of categories is formed by properties distributed over a set of items*. If these properties are distributed randomly then there are no relations between them and it is impossible to use any one property as the predictor of other properties. But our world isn't random; rather it is highly organized, and this organization means that there are relationships between properties which can be used predictively. As I show in my Thinknet project the upshot is that the mechanism of mind becomes a network of connections representing these nonrandom relations.  The Thinknet project provides the details of how a model of thinking can be based on a generalised Venn diagram.

One thing is fairly obvious; if we have many items and many properties a very complex Venn picture may emerge and the epistemic challenge then arises from the attempt to render this picture as a mental network of connections.  Epistemically speaking both humans and AI systems suffer from the same limitations: In trying to form a network of connections they can only do so from a limited number of experiential samples.  This would be OK if the world was of a relatively simple organization, but the trouble is that yes, it is highly organised but it is not simple; it is in fact both organized and yet very, very complex. Complexity is a halfway house between the simplicity of high order and the hyper-complexity of randomness. To casual observers, whether human or AI, this complexity can at first sight look like randomness and therefore present great epistemic challenges in trying to render this world as an accurate connectionist model given the limits on sampling capacity. On top of that let's bear in mind that many of the connections we make don't come from direct contact with reality itself but are mediated by social texts. In fact in the case of my Thinknet model all its information came from compiled text files where the links were already suggested in a myriad Bayesian statements. This "social" approach to epistemology is necessary because solitary learning from "coalface" experience takes far too long; that would be like starting from the Paleolithic. 

Like Thinknet we learn far more from social texts than we do from hands-on experience.  Those social "text files" are extremely voluminous and take a long time to traverse. There is no quick fix that allows this textual experience to be by-passed. This immediately takes us into the realm of culture, group dynamics and even politics where biased sampling is the natural state of human (& AI) affairs. The complex mental networks derived from culture means that intelligence, both human and AI, is only as good as the cultural data and samples they receive. So, in short, AI, like ourselves, is going to be highly opiniated, unless AI has got some kind of epistemic humility built into its programming. AI isn't going to usher in a new age of unopinionated and error-unadulterated knowledge objectively derived from mechanical "Truth-Mills". The age old fundamental epistemic problems will afflict AI just as it afflicts human beings: PZ Myers might call ChatGPT a Bullsh*t fountain, but then that's more or less also his opinion of the Ken Hams, the Michael Knowles and Donald Trumps of this world. On that matter he is undoubtedly right! As with humanity (e.g. Ken Ham) then so with ChatGPT. The bad news for PZ Myers is that Bullsh*t production has now been automated!

Truth Mills: Is AI going to automate the production of theoretical fabric?

ChatGPT for dogs

Footnotes:

* Venn diagrams don't have the facility to form a set of sets. However, this can be achieved using another "higher level" Venn diagram; we thus have Venn diagrams that are about other Venn diagrams. See here:

Quantum Non-Linearity: The Thinknet Project. Footnote: On Self Description (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

** Epistemic difficulties surrounding accessibility and signal opacity loom large in historical research. "Epistemic distance" is a big issue in human studies. 

Abracademia

The above cartoon, very appropriately named Abracademia, appeared on PZ Myers' blog where he comments:

It makes a good point, that magic isn’t an explanation for much of anything — you need some chain of causality and evidence, with some mechanism at each step. You don’t just get to say “it’s magic” or “it’s a miracle.” 

Bonus, the comic pokes fun at that absurd ad hoc magic system in the Harry Potter books that is nothing but lazy plot gimmicks.

I know that PZ Myers has got a downer on JK Rowling and that explains some of his aversion to H. Potter, but I ask myself this: Do I agree with him? Sort of, but I'll have to qualify. 

Firstly, the cartoon starts off with a chair that is actually being levitated by, well, "magic". So in this context, whatever "magic" is within this cartoon world, it is predicated as a real phenomenon. So given that this so-called magic is real our young heroine in the cartoon does have a point: The curious have every right to usefully ask: "How's it done?" By smoke and mirrors? By thin wire suspension? By a newly discovered anti-gravity ray? Or by something even more exotic (like psychokinesis) of which we know nothing? I assume that when Myers tells us there's need for some explanatory chain of causation along with its accompanying evidence, he's asking for a closer linked cause and effect connection than the utterance of "Floatularis" and the wave of the wand; otherwise, there is a big gap there!

In our world cause-and-effect entails the transmission of the energy & information from A to B. So where's the energy & information coming from to lift that chair?  But then this question presumes that the energy/signal transfer paradigm is the correct one to use. Perhaps it doesn't work like that at all when we are dealing with so-called "magic"! But assuming that the cause-and-effect paradigm applies here by what mysterious ways does energy get from A to B? Cause-and-effect "explanations" fill in some of the "in-between" details and often in ways that allows those details to be predicted using those succinct laws of physics to generate those details. But apart from this clever mathematical trickery I have to confess that's as far as our understanding goes and just why those physical algorithms work is as good as "magic"! As I would contend, this kind of science is, in the final analysis, mere description, albeit clever description that comes out of asking the kind of questions our heroin above, at risk of her life, is asking. Of course, it may be possible to further improve on the elegance and comprehensiveness of the laws of physics in hand but in an absolute sense the descriptive role of science's physical "algorithms" means that ultimately it leaves us with wall of explanatory incompleteness, what is in fact an explanatory silence. It's ironic that as science fills in the gaps with more descriptive details, we zoom in only to find just more finely spaced gaps! 

***

So, is it all magic & mystery? No, it's not magic and the mystery is better described as the miraculous, an idea pregnant with meaning which stimulates curiosity and prompts further questions. Contrast that with a purely secular take on the cosmic perspective which posits the organization of the universe as either a meaningless brute fact or proposes that the apparent selective contingency of cosmic organization is a human perspective effect on the infinite sea of randomness in a multiverse. It goes to show that a magical paradigm is not the only way of thinking which stifles curiosity.  Do you hear "multiverse" and just stop asking questions?

We really need to supplement the past tense question "Where did it all come from?"

 with the present tense continuous question " Where is it all coming from?

Relevant Link:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Something comes from Something: Nothing comes from Nothing. Big Deal (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

The "Intellectual Dark Web" hoaxed?

 

I was fascinated, gob-smacked in fact, by the rather curious YouTube video (above) by atheist Rebecca Watson and published by PZ Myers on his blog. At first, I thought I'd take a look because PZ Myers billed it as video about schismogenesis in the New Atheist and secular communities. I have followed this theme for some years and wanted to see how these divisions were shaping up. Not that I thought any worse of the atheist community for it: After all, the historical Christain subculture of which I'm part has a lot more experience of sharp schisms than these atheists; about 2000 years' worth more of experience!  When it comes to humanity, Christian and otherwise, schism is the name of the game: As Sir Robert Walpole might have put it in my all-time favorite quote, it's "The natural state of human affairs". 

But I was in for a big shock if I thought this video was going to be just another archetypical story of human epistemic challenge and disagreement, whilst I looked on with unsurprised and jaded cynicism. Rebecca Watson is seldom lost for words but today she gave a lot of airtime to atheists Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein with whom she is very much at odds. In fact she just let Eric and Sam pay out enough rope to hang themselves. 

In the video we hear both Harris and Weinstein claim that they have been contacted by government insiders telling them that we are due for a big official disclosure about the UFO phenomenon being utterly real. Harris referred to his contact as a "private outreach" and that this contact informed him that government sources, especially the military, have incontrovertible evidence of the presence of alien technology.  Eric Weinstein, a man who also entertains Covid conspiracy theories, says that his inside informer has told him that a "big update" is due from government on the subject of UFOs. He's been told that he will be flown out to Colorado Springs, met by a car, blind folded and taken to a place where he will be shown stuff which means we'll never be the same again! Weinstein has been "on standby" sitting on this promise of UFO disclosure for all of three years, sometimes being told "not this week because we are too busy". But one can't help the idea popping into one's head that he is being strung along by a hoaxer. Apparently, he along with Sam Harris and others in their orbit, have been flattered by the suggestion that they will be needed to bring this news to the world.

Well, I was in stitches especially as Rebecca Watson (like PZ Myers) always finds exactly the right words to lampoon this kind of claim, and especially so if the claimant looks to be motivated by all-too-common human weaknesses & conceits! Watson floats the thought that Harris and Weinstein are being hoaxed and that these two big names, who she thinks are getting far too big for their boots, were easy targets for to this kind of flattering hoax because their (masculine) hubris means they always think of themselves as "the right men for the job"! I was very much reminded of the hoax played on Tim Ventura by "flying saucer engineer" Bob Lazar and the way Tim was strung along by Lazar for about a year. But Tim Ventura has always come across (to me at least) as Mr. Nice-Guy and he was only open to Lazar's hoax because like the rest of us he had career ambitions and a natural vanity which can sometimes be exploited.  But in credit to Ventura he is humble enough to admit he was hoaxed, but then only for a year and not 3 years. (See also here for more on Ventura). Is that because Eric Weinstein's ego is 3x bigger that Tim Ventura's?

And yet....and yet...like Weinstein I have heard the testimony from so many disinterested witnesses who have had firsthand encounters that I too feel sure they are genuinely experiencing something unusual although I'm not sure exactly what that something is - but I very much doubt it is technological aliens as we think of them. Also, Weinstein was clearly gen'd up on the Skin Walker Ranch case and the scientists involved who have seen "things". He just couldn't believe that these people were lying and frankly neither can I.  As he said "there is too much data; something is going on". But Weinstein thinks it's down to technological aliens; that I very much doubt. The Skin Walker Ranch case is too bizarre and looks more like the loose associative, drifting & phantasmal thinking of the human vision-generating mind somehow spilling over into reality: The paranormal has its roots in the earthly biosphere and in particular human consciousness. 

Yes, I agree something's going on, but it's not little gray men with their technology: They are just a facade for something else and not a very convincing facade at that: My best guess is that it is more to do with the nature of reality which like our own minds may at times be subject to some kind of delusional dysfunction. After all, what makes reality but the fact that those laws of physics are primarily a way of organizing our experiences with such a replete coherence that they provide the equivalent of a physical version of a "Turing Test" facade, ensuring that our epistemic interrogations are answered so fully that a picture of an all-round "solid" reality appears to emerge. But these strange paranormal experiences are the opposite. It's as if they are to the rational world of physics as our visions, dreams and hallucinations are to the wakeful rational mind. Our dreams appear to have a loose associative meaning, but sleep brings on a very chaotic synthesis of elements from our waking life, driven by a mix of emotions. Apart from being a fragmented recapitulation of elements we know from waking life the chaotic juxtapositions of our dreams are largely without meaning and appear to be a consequence of some mathematically chaotic logic that rules the night visions. Likewise, ghosts, UFO's and the apparitional in general looks too much like the contents of the human id & ego somehow projected out on to reality itself in a chaotic mishmash.  

The chaotic states of mind and the paranormal (the latter embraces the whole of gamut of apparitions from ghosts, alien animals & life forms to UFOs) are far too erratic, singular, irregular, complex and probably subject to some underlying chaotic dynamic to make them easily amenable to a scientific epistemology that can pin them down.  Scientific epistemology depends above all on a stable status quo. 

As for the relationship of government and UFOs, I'll wager that government doesn't have any special inside knowledge of the phenomenon apart from having bigger databases; in fact just more of the same puzzling observational traces, but, I'll hazard, no hardware, no alien bodies and no Lazar-sport-model flying saucers. Official institutions are probably as puzzled by the whole thing as are the rest of us. But officialdom needs to appear competent and in control, therefore they are loathe to admit their ignorance and lack of control. To my mind this is sufficient to explain the authority's reaction to the paranormal, a reaction which ranges from outright denial to at best an embarrassed evasiveness & silence.

 But be all that as it may: The question remains: Who is hoaxing the Intellectual Dark Web? Some kind of Bob Lazar figure? The whole thing looks so much like the bizarre Bob Lazar fraud where Tim Ventura (initially at least) was strung along with promises, promises, promises.  

The "Observational Science vs Historical Science" Error.

Nothing in science is directly observable. 

 

This article on Panda's Thumb tells us that:

Montana considers a bill that allows teaching of “scientific facts” but not “scientific theories”. ....

The bill in question is Montana Senate Bill 235, introduced by freshman Senator Dan Emrich. Prof. Coyne quotes the bill as saying

WHEREAS, [sic] the purpose of K-12 education is to educate children in the facts of our world to better prepare them for their future and further education in their chosen field of study, and to that end children must know the difference between scientific fact and scientific theory; and

WHEREAS, [sic] a scientific fact is observable and repeatable, and if it does not meet these criteria, it is a theory that is defined as speculation and is for higher education to explore, debate, and test to ultimately reach a scientific conclusion of fact or fiction.

Matt Young, the writer of the Panda's thumb article, goes on to say:

Very little in science can be considered an indisputable fact, so if this bill passes and becomes law, schools will not be allowed to teach, say, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, ideal gas theory, the germ theory of disease, or, for that matter, string theory or the theory of the leisure class. Or, what they are really after, the theory of evolution.

In other words, Sen. Emrich and his cosponsors are a trio of ignoramuses who do not have the foggiest idea what a scientific fact or a scientific theory is. They are very dangerous because, as Dr. Scott shows, they almost certainly have the Supreme Court on their side.

Matt Young is completely right. Senator Dan Emrich, on the other hand, has a toy-town notion of scientific epistemology which looks as though it has its origins in the religious fundamentalist's (Islam, Christian, etc.) notion of science. They use the crude and contrived bicategory of "observation vs. history" to dismiss historical science that doesn't fit in their worldview: Their misleading claim is that history isn't observational & therefore fundamentalist histories can then be patched in willy-nilly.

 In this blog entry I reference a discussion I had with a Christain Fundamentalist I called "Joe Smith". This discussion was largely centred around my criticism of the fundamentalist misrepresentation of scientific epistemology as having an "observational science vs historical science" distinction.

Origins of Life Research

Picture from: Searching For The Origin Of Life On Earth : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

This brief web article on the state of abiogenesis research was compiled by the writer after he attended an Origin and Life conference. The article tells us that:

Not only is there no consensus yet on how life might have started on Earth, there is not even any agreement on where it started. Hypotheses presented at the meeting included:

1. life was brought to Earth from outer space by meteorites 

2. life started around hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor life originated in shallow volcanic/sulfuric rock pools 

3. life first appeared on the clay surfaced ocean shores exposed to tidal wet-dry cycle

4. life came into being at sub-freezing temperatures on a snowball Earth

The writer also tells us that there is sufficient optimism in the OoL community to believe that the abiogenesis question will be answered perhaps in 10 to 50 years and that no one at the conference doubted that the answer was within reach. The article is dated 2013, so they've already hit that lower limit. Moreover....

Despite the prevalent optimism, it was also clear that we still have significant hurdles to overcome. Which reminds me of a wonderful anecdote Bill Martin (yet another giant) told the audience during his lecture. A few years ago, Bill had been one of several researchers invited to speak to the Pontifical Council on the origin of life. After he had explained to them how we — as scientists — are trying to understand how the (spontaneous) transition from pure chemistry to living cells might have happened, one of the cardinals asked him: "Wouldn't a little bit of God help there, Dr. Martin?" Yes, science would be a lot easier if we were allowed to simply insert "a little bit of God" here and there. But then it would also be a lot less interesting and exciting, no?

....now that's a clear expression of dualism! ....that is, the idea which is an unholy cross between deism and God of the Gaps. As the writer opined: 

More and more of the gaps and details are filling in with each year that passes.

One might think that the writer has no theology driving his thought, but he does in fact have a concept of God even if he doesn't believe in God. That concept whispers within and instructs him as to what to expect or not expect if God existed. In this case, presumably, with the filling in of those gaps the writer thinks that "God's bit" is being crowded out! Such thoughts have their foundation in the instinctual notion that the cosmos is a mechanism capable of maintaining its own dynamic. But science's merely descriptive mechanical explanations can never have the property of Aseity: that is, those explanations can never contain their own explanation and tie up all the logical loose ends. Explanatory completeness isn't the task of science - its task is description: Though those descriptions may be cleverly succinct & mathematically compressed narratives, in the final analysis they are logically obliged to contain a hard kernel of brute contingency to muse over.

According to secular theology "the God bit" only serves as a desperate resort of the religiously minded as they conceive God to be the explanatory filler in those explanatory gaps before they are eventually filled in with scientific description. But if science is a purely descriptive discipline, then those descriptions necessarily will never attain to logical completeness; that is, they will never have Aseity. The cosmic dynamic that generated life may well be completely describable in terms of a mix of equations and statistics, but that such equations & statistics (and the material particles they regulate) exist at all everywhere and everywhen remains a brute fact absent of Aseity. If one insists on trying to get logical completeness (i.e. Aseity) from the descriptive algorithms & statistics of science all one ends up with is a regress; in this case an "algorithms-all-the-way-down" regress.

***

In a blog post dated 23 January and titled Did Simulating “Cosmic Evolution” Get Evolutionists Closer to the Origin of Life? Christian fundamentalist theme park manager Ken Ham raises a question over the relevance of research proposing that the amino acid building blocks of life came from space.  I didn't strongly disagree with Ken on anything he said except when he finished on this note:

Life in all its incredible diversity, from microscopic bacteria and fungi to plants to animals to mankind, was created by God just 6,000 years ago. Those who reject God will go to all sorts of lengths to try to prove life arose by natural processes.

 Once again that's classic dualism: In short our Ken has a similar theology driving his thinking as that of our OoL researcher.  But, because Ken is a subliminal God vs "natural forces" dualist and a theist, he doesn't believe those "gaps" can be filled in with "natural processes". Therefore, he is necessarily committed to the a priori belief that abiogenesis could not come about by any of the hypotheses above. As a theist this crypto-dualism commits him to the idea that an overt divine interventionism fills in the gaps. He therefore sees creation as a binary choice between abiogenies or God; his religious instincts tell him that these are exclusive choices, and his Young Earth literalist interpretation of Genesis 1 further supports his a priori dualistic instincts.  Therefore, Ken is necessarily committed to maximizing "the God bit" in order to keep his faith propped up just as, conversely, strong dualistic atheists are committed to minimizing "the God bit".  But Ken goes further: He uses his subliminal dualism as a shibboleth which tests for Christian orthodoxy. Those who fail this test become the target of his spiritual invective. 

***

Christian Creation dualists forget that those so-called "natural processes" were created by God himself and not by an incompetent demiurge. Therefore, these processes are far from natural, and we shouldn't take it for granted that they are not capable of working miracles. What many Christian Creation dualists don't understand is that the heroic yet desperate secular project is engaged in trying to show that the information content of the cosmos has no surprisal value at all and that the cosmos originates from an information base of zero. But that is a mathematically impossible task! If this impossibility is understood, then there need be no worry about what those secularists are going to come up with: Whatever secularists come up with will in the final analysis be some form of creation or other in so far as it will necessarily be a blend of contingent initial information and a given processing time: That has to be the assumed starting point or, if you like, The Creation Point. But in actual fact it is less a point than it is a creation volume that fills the points everywhere and everywhen.

Does God Exist?

 

I published the article below on my Noumena, Cognita and Dreams blog in July of 2007 under the heading Does God Exist?  I thought I'd look at the subject again and see how it fits in with my thoughts 15+ years later. I've made some small changes to the original text to try and clarify it, but more significantly I've also added my current thoughts in italics after each section. Since 2007 I have published articles on my websites that fill out many of the details. 

***

Does God Exist?

I thought it at last time to bring together a summary of the reasons why, over the years, I have tended to answer that question with a ‘yes’. The following are just summaries of topics I have expanded further elsewhere. Although I have a backlog of scattered writings on this matter, this is the first time I have attempted bring to together the strands from a variety of fields into a summary. The list below is likely to expand, but this is how it stands at the moment. (...in the July of 2007)

1. Skepticism: A thoroughgoing and honest skepticism includes a skeptical attitude toward dogmatic atheism.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: One can't claim that in order to get to the truth skepticism is sufficiently regulated by the "observe and test" scientific method since this very epistemic has its own issues (See below for further comments on "observe and test" science). Skepticism can cut both ways and if pushed to the limit it becomes self-undermining. Hence....

2. Scepticism, if too thoroughgoing, leads to an evasive postmodern anti-foundationalism, or alternatively in a self-destructive self-referential loop that starts to doubt itself unless it acknowledges that there is, after all, such a thing as rational a-priori belief in something that is stable and knowable - whatever that "something" is.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: The argument I advance in this post (based on a 1993 article) sketches out the self-undermining effects of a skepticism pushed too far: Hence, one must have a foundational a-priori starting point, whether it is a belief in God or a belief in the logical self-sufficiency of space, time and matter. But for belief in the logical and absolute self-sufficiency of space, time and matter there is the following little detail to contend with....

3. The Contingency Conjecture: Computational theory tells us that although finite mathematical explanatory structures may (or may not) succeed in compressing cosmic variety into a few fundamental principles, it is not possible to compress those explanatory structures to nothing at all. Thus, a finite Cosmos can never be founded on logical necessity. Any cosmos we could think of would be a reification of a contingent platonic possibility. ‘Possibility’ rather than self-sufficient necessity is the most salient logical character of the Cosmos and therefore it is burdened with contingency. Hence, the hunt is on for Aseity, the self-entailing agent of creation.....

JAN 2023 COMMENT: Contrary to the simplistic notions of many Christian fundamentalists, computation can create information but only at a rate limited by this equation:

 I_c = S_min + log(T_min)

,,.where  I_c  is the information created by an algorithm of length S_min   executed for a step time of T_min and where T_min and  S_min  are jointly minimized. (See here  where I derive a similar expression) 

Christian fundamentalists have been misled by the "log" term above which tells us that information, for a parallel processor, is created only very slowly and this may convey the false impression that God's Created Cosmos can't create information. Consistent with Shannon's concept of information, we find that randomness contains the greatest level of information in that its generation requires either very large algorithms and/or long execution times. (See here for more). 

But the point being made above is that physical explanation, which necessarily conforms to algorithmic laws, can't start from zero information (i.e. nothing) and necessarily starts from a measure of contingent information; that is, a hard kernel of brute givenness (or "contingency"). Therefore, physical explanation can never be logically self-contained and self-explaining. Therefore, the relatively simple elements of physical explanation cannot have the property of Aseity. (See here  for more)

4. Aseity: Since the contingency conjecture tells us that the cosmos cannot explain itself and therefore its non-existence would entail no contradiction, then my conclusion is that our cosmos should not exist. Since our contingent world, both its physical laws and substance, do exist then somehow it has been created from a logical and informational vacuum. Since clearly the elemental simplicity of the objects of physics only describe rather than uncover fundamental causes and therefore cannot embody Aseity, my conjecture is that there is something infinite out there with the property of Aseity which both creates and sustains our contingent cosmos. (This is a reworking of the cosmological argument)

5. Exceptions to Occam’s Razor: Although the assumed a-priori organization of the cosmos makes it amenable to compressed explanatory structures, there is no logical guarantee that this should always be the case: a-priori complex entities can conceivably embed and explain simple elements. Hence Occam’s Razor cannot be used to challenge the a-priori complexity of a Deity.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: As I understand it now, Occam's Razor doesn't necessarily challenge explanations that are far more complex than the data they explain. However, the Razor still applies when complex objects are used to explain the elementary. Let me expand on this assertion as follows: 

OK, so it is not true that simple data elements always have their best explanation in simple explanatory objects. For example, the relatively simple facts of a crime scene find their explanation in the complex motives of human beings and the foibles of human society; here simple facts have their origins in complexity. 

The vast number of possibilities in platonic space means that it is always possible to increase the number of informational bits of one's explanation (i.e. increase the "entities") until one finds an object in platonic space big enough to fit the facts. But if the true explanation has n bits of information and one is prepared to contrive fallacious explanations which arbitrarily & randomly add bits of information until one can fit all the facts with m bits of information, then it is likely that m >> n. This follows because the number of explanatory objects available in platonic space for a given bit count increases exponentially with the number of bits. Therefore the likelihood is that a theorizer who is prepared to multiply entities willy-nilly will not likely discover the correct explanation employing n bits and will return a value of m much greater than n. Therefore explanations from complexity must be justified by sufficient evidence to rule out some of the spurious branching paths that the unwary theorizer may go down when "multiplying entities". 

The latter sketches out how I personally would go about formally proving Occam's Razor, but I'm sure professional philosophers of science have already dealt with the matter thoroughly.

6. Idealism: The idealism of Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and the implicit idealism of the logical and linguistic positivists compel us to acknowledge that the notion of non-sentient noumena is at the very least a deeply problematical concept as far as intelligibility is concerned. For these philosophers, the a-priori perceiving and thinking mind has a central place in their philosophy and this exposes the difficulty of conceiving reality without mind. This prompts one to wonder if sentience, and especially Divine sentience in all its complexity, is, in fact, a given and primary phenomenon. At the very least it looks as though it is meaningless to talk of noumena without invoking the concept of an up and running perceiving & experiencing sentience, for whenever we think about reality, we can only think of it in terms of how we experience it and the theorized organization of the patterns of behavior that experience is subject to. 

JAN 2023 COMMENT: At the very least the natural laws organize, describe and predict our experiences. But we intuitively feel that these laws are evidence of a world that goes beyond our experiences: Surely those distant galaxies we see in space aren't just images painted onto the backdrop of the sky? Belief in divine creative integrity suggests that they aren't bit parts just set up for their appearances and that the back-story of their logic is fully worked out somewhere. This mathematical logic must be reified on some kind of medium that has a substantial ontology. But the only way we can think about the inaccessible noumena of this medium is in terms of our experiences and the mathematical logic that control and organize those experiences. This conjectured medium is an unintelligible concept unless it has the potential to serve experience.

7. The Self-Referencing Nature of Consciousness Cognition: So, all attempts to “explain” conscious cognition using concepts like atoms, fields, computation and information are themselves, in the final analysis, artifacts of conscious cognition. In short the Mind can only be described in terms of its own mental artifacts (this is analogous to a computer language compiler being written using the very language it compiles). This necessarily self-referencing and self-explaining aspect of mind may be the human analogue of Divine Aseity.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: See the prologue to my book "Gravity and Quantum non-linearity" where I first floated the idea of the self-referencing nature of conscious cognition. 

8. Simulated Universe Logic: This is the joker in the pack: Recently some philosophers have mooted the idea that we may be part of some kind of giant simulation, thus suggesting we are authored by a super background intelligence that looks suspiciously like a Deity! See my article titled Time Travel for this one.

9. The Declarative Universe: Well, if philosophers can moot such exotic ideas as the "simulated universe" then that invites me to try my hand at mooting exotica. In this connection let me note a suspicious looking similarity between my Thinknet AI project and the way quantum mechanics works, and this hints, once again, that intelligence/sentience is an a-priori feature our universe. The micro-structure of our world has isomorphisms with thought and computation. As a friend once suggested to me (circa 1978) our contingent world is like a giant thought being sustained by the vast mind of God. (My friend wasn’t a philosopher, but based his idea on Acts 17:28). 

When we think of computer simulations, we tend to think in terms of procedural algorithms following their determined path, but my own speculations suggest that the cosmic "simulation" is closer to the declarative programming model rather than the procedural model. Since the contingent cosmos has no logical reason for existing it can only ever be a "simulation"; for something that cannot exist of its own necessity "simulation" is as real as it gets. For us "simulation" IS our reality.

10. The Quantum Matrix: At the quantum mechanical level it really does look as though the cosmos is some kind of "simulation" that only goes as far as simulating just what is necessary for reality. This is apparent in so far as the envelops of Quantum Mechanics only become “particles” when macroscopic observation demands a result; at all other times those envelops merely measure possibility rather than actuality. The parts of the 'simulation' that are a mere computational overhead, but which are a necessary computational precursor of macroscopic output, are not themselves actualized. 

JAN 2023 COMMENT: What I'm trying to say here is that Quantum mechanics looks to be a computation in so far as we only have the potential to observe the parts that result in a macroscopic output: There is much that occurs at a quantum level which are not accompanied by a physical output and appear to have a computational role rather than the role of being a potentially observable macroscopic output. This view rejects the multiverse interpretation. The multiverse interpretation attempts do away with the implied asymmetry of a selective output by affirming that all parts of the quantum calculation have a literal existence. 

11. Chance: That great incompressible, randomness, is, it seems, at the heart of the quantum process; it looks as though the potentially observable macroscopic outputs are chosen at random and we have no knowledge of any background computation by which these random outputs are generated. Thus, the most complex and contingent thing we can think of, namely randomness, is posited as “just there”. Randomness, given time, is, in fact, ringing the changes on everything there possibly could be! It is far from being a trivial concept. What do they mean when they say the universe is “just chance”! Randomness is a case where the complex embeds and explains the simple (e.g. the simple binary outcomes of coin tossing are embedded in a complex sequence). Perhaps the vast information resources of contingent randomness point to that conjectured entity of infinite complexity which sustains our contingent world. Whatever that entity is, if it exists, there is one thing we can say about it: it is highly complex.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: See my book on Disorder and Randomness for more details on the nature of randomness.

12. Evolution: Resourced by the vast information supplies of an a-priori randomness, current science conjectures that there has been enough time in our cosmos for those resources to innovate complex intelligent adaptive systems which, of course, being adaptive lock themselves in. However, whether these adaptive systems have been arrived at from the information content of random input or not, their self-sustaining character hints at something profound: that is, that in the vast platonic spaces of possibility there are self-sustaining structures, which although they do not have logical necessity, are nevertheless self-perpetuating once they have come into existence. Likewise, Aseity may be a form of self-sustenance arising from some kind of preexistent infinite complexity. The infinities of Aseity are beyond our ability to imagine in detail, but in the infinite platonic world of mathematics there may be an incredibly complex and infinite sentient configuration with such great powers of self-sustenance that its existence is guaranteed to be eternally ‘locked in’. (This paragraph is a reworking of the 'ontological argument’)

13. Evolution: For the process of evolution to work (if it works) so many contingent precursors are required, not least a good supply of a-priori randomness, that it is nowhere near the logically self-sufficient 'creator-less' process that some think it to be. I am making no comment here as to whether or not evolution has actually happened - I am just commenting on its contingent character.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: Although randomness can be used as a search mechanism, to do anything useful it needs to be constrained and channeled as per my metaphor of the spongeam, for example. The spongeam would supply the necessary conditional information implied by this conditional probability:

Prob of evolution = Prob ( Evolution | Physical Regime )

The absolute probability of evolution is all but zero even in a cosmos of our size. Therefore, it follows that if evolution has occurred, the information it needs must be found in the conditions I've labelled above as "physical regime". This necessarily contingent information then raises the question of intelligent design.  

14. Other Minds: I believe, (although I have to admit it is more hope than belief) that it is possible to describe the detail of the human mind in full using conceptual artifacts like, atoms, neurons, information and computation. But in affirming this one must be aware that any such explanation is self-referencing – it is using the conceptual artifacts of conscious cognition to explain conscious cognition. The formal structure of such explanations, even if they succeed in covering everything, are not the thing-in-itself, but rather one mind’s external view of another mind. ‘Other minds’ can only present themselves to us in terms our first-person experiences; the organization of those first-person experiences then allows them to be theoretically synthesized into conceptual artifacts like, atoms, neurons, information and computation. However, unlike "material noumena" which have a debatable existence (because the only thing we really can know is our experience & theories), we do at least know what it feels like to be another mind – in contrast we certainly don’t know what it is like to be, say, an atom - if indeed such a notion is intelligible and coherent.

In the light of the foregoing, it seems that regarding conscious cognition as irreducible noumena is a more coherent idea than so-called ‘material’ noumena. Along with Searle I agree that there is an irreducible first-person ontology in personhood. The third-person language of the formal sciences simply disguises the fact that the descriptive explanations of science are, in the final analysis, cognitive artifacts whose formulation conceals the implicit role of the first-person perspective required to formulate these explanations from cognita. So, if the first-person perspective of human personality is ultimately irreducible it is an ominous sign for those forms of atheism which try to place so much emphasis on those enigmatic "material" noumena. Therefore, if the existence of other minds is such a fundamental part of rationality it sets a precedent for mooting the notion of an over-arching divine mind. 

JAN 2023 COMMENT:  As I've already said, I first set out the self-referencing and self-affirming nature of mind in the introduction to my 2004 book Gravity and Quantum Non-linearity. 

For the nature of consciousness see also: 

Quantum Non-Linearity: Consciousness (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

15. Metaphysical World: Our Worldview, if we have one, is far too complex an object for our theories about it to be tested with any more than a few experiential samples here and there. That Worldview informs us about a world well beyond anything that can be fully tested in principle. Given these human sampling limitations complex objects like personality, society and God are not amenable to easy cognitive apprehension and have little chance of being “proved” with a small set of experiential samples. It is no surprise, then, that given the partiality of human experience and cognition, an entity like God (if such a being exists), whose prime posited attribute is that of complexity and/or personality, has a very debatable existence; that is, even if God exists we expect his reality to be difficult to humanly grasp and therefore Hebrews 11:1-3 & Hebrews 11:6 look, from the point of view of epistemic methodology, to be reasonable demands in these circumstances. 

16. Keyhole Science: Science, as the careful social formalization of the testing procedure, puts justifiable strictures and formal controls on our anecdotal experience and consequently reduces the keyhole of experiential sampling even further. Science’s “guilty until proved innocent” criterion is a strict filter that helps block spurious claims and as such science's cautious epistemic methodology is analogous to the precautionary strategies used in courts of law. However, as with legal courts, the unavoidable cost of the cautious epistemological method of science is that it is going to make heavy weather of complex domains, like politics, sociology, personality and above all theology; it also cannot easily cope with erratic, out-of-place experiences that come in ones and twos.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: The demand that every entity posited must submit to prediction and test procedures is all well and good for relatively simple, accessible and regular phenomena, but is unrealistic for many of the realities the human mind has to grapple with, realities that are neither easily accessible nor regular.  When faced with a complex world that for most of us presents itself through many social texts rather than carefully controlled laboratory observations, the approach is much more a case of the post-facto crafting of sense-making explanatory structures. However, this enforced resort to an on-the-hoof post-facto epistemology must be exercised with caution, tentativeness, self-criticism and humility - this is something the conspiracy theorists and religious fundamentalists need to learn.  

On the subject of epistemology see more here:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Epistemology (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

17. Limits of Scientific Epistemology and Authority. For the man in the street (or the man in the field), science’s observational samples and theories reach him via social texts. The end result of scientific theorizing entails the passing into society of all-embracing grand theoretical structures which of necessity are highly textual. Hence, for the man in the street science is largely a textual phenomenon and not a laboratory or direct observation phenomenon. So, for the intelligent layman epistemology is mostly a matter of handling the texts of society. In fact for all of us knowledge about the grand sweep of the cosmos mostly reaches us through the texts signaled to us by society, and it is our cognitive processing (or lack of processing in some cases!) of these texts that is pivotal in forming and testing our Worldview. In this respect science texts have no special authority apart from their appeal to our general mental toolkit of perception and reason. The social texts of formal science must therefore take their place side by side with historical and theological texts.

18. The God Instinct: History suggests that there is an instinctual/intuitive human understanding that the cosmos doesn’t contain its own explanation (i.e. it doesn't have Aseity) and that it points to something sentient beyond itself (See for example Romans 1:19-20 and the history of human relations with the notion of Deity)

19. Theodicy: The existence of suffering and evil doesn’t so much challenge a belief in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient loving God, as it does leave us with an existential dilemma: Are we really prepared to say that God should not have dragged our flawed world out from among the myriad contingencies of the platonic realm because of its huge burden of suffering and evil? Are we prepared to forego our own existence, because that existence is inevitably bound up with suffering and evil?

JAN 2023 COMMENT: See the following link where I discussed the problem of suffering and evil in more detail, although I have to confess that I don't really have much worth saying about this big problem:

Views, News and Pews: Chaoskampf and The Problem of Suffering and Evil (viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com)

20. Generalised Copernicanism: It is sometimes suggested that Human Cosmic Insignificance is a clear sign of our unimportance in the cosmic scheme of things and therefore evidence that there is no loving personal God. However, if we regard the universe as some kind of massive computation, the huge size of the cosmos may be connected with the “computational byproducts” of an important end result. As a wonderful Jewish saying goes: “For a single rose a field of thorns was spared”.

JAN 2023 COMMENT: See here where I discussed this point more fully.

***

The above are rather general and speculative pointers that prompt me to at least give some thinking space to the notion that a highly complex entity with the property of Aseity sustains our contingent world much like a mind sustains a thought. Frankly, however, on the basis of the above alone the case for theism is no more obliging than the case for atheism. That’s always been my problem – I could no more convincingly rule in theism as I could rule it out. At best the points above provide a prima-facie case for theism. But even if I concluded that the above points convinced me of the existence of a deity, they reveal very little about the exact nature and motives of that deity; at best they point in that direction but provide no personal introduction. In fact, a personal introduction may be impossible because ‘God’, if that’s the right name to use of Aseity, may be an utterly alien and impersonal entity or principality. In that case it is likely that attempts to take the matter further would be fruitless. (However, one might wonder why an impersonal Aseity would sustain the high personality we find at the top of the complexity ladder. Moreover, one might expect complex human nature to reflect something of the complexity of Aseity)

If that’s where it all ended, I think I would be agnostic, unsure where to go next. Actually, to be honest, I think know where I would go next – probably into disbelief; or at least disbelief in the existence of a gracious personal God; as far as the latter is concerned absence of evidence is truly evidence of absence because it seems to me very likely that any gracious personal God would reveal Himself more clearly. Thus, in the absence of a clearer revelation my conclusion is that there is likely to be no gracious personal God. Agnosticism about the existence of a personal loving God is not a consistent position.

However, my approach has been as follows: If there is a loving personal God and, moreover, a God of Grace, that God is unlikely to leave us bereft of some kind of special revelation as to His nature. To cut a long story short I believe the Revelation of God I have sought for is that found in the Christ of the Bible, the only quality revelation I have discovered. Why I think that Jesus Christ is THE revelation of God would itself be the subject of another list, but I will leave that for another time. I have to admit that it has all been a bit of a gamble: “Go for it and see what happens: nothing ventured nothing gained”. Nonetheless, I believe that God graciously meets the sinful seeker where he is at, as did the father of the prodigal son. Moreover, once one has apprehended the Revelation in Christ, the rather general philosophical list above starts to provide insights into God’s glory, grace and day-by-day providence.

But there is one tremendous irony here. If I were to compile a list of reasons for not believing in the existence of God the items in that list would largely be drawn from the counter evidence provided by the behavior of many a fundamentalist Christian. In short, most of my intellectual time is spent protecting my faith, not from atheism, but from Christian sectarianism & cultism. Evolution and Creation? ....No problem, solve that one over breakfast! Suffering and Evil?....On that question I'm swimming but I'm just managing to stay afloat! Inter-Christian spiritual rivalries? .....Gulp! I'm now out of my depth! In a world of competing spiritual grandees a spiritual low ender like me is pretty much out of the picture! Reach for The Open Gospel....
(http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html)

JAN 2023 COMMENT: See also page 8 of my account of my visit to Jerusalem. 

I have to say that the contemporary challenge to faith set by crackpot versions of Christianity continues unabated as their insanity sinks to a new nadir of intellectual debauchery and craziness in movements such as flat earth Christianity, evangelical cultism, 6K year young earthism, gnostic revivalism, fideism, prosperity gospel, conspiracy theorism, dominionism,  the glorification of gun-law, far-right Christianity and a general anti-democratic & anti-science ethos that pervades them all. The ultra-traditionalist tendencies at the heart of some of these movements are personalized in characters like Rodney Howard-Brown, Kent Hovind, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Steve Bannon, Lauren Boebert, Donald Trump, Alex Jones and Vladimir Putin.  These people fear the open-endedness, open debates and uncertainties of liberal societies with their freedom to dissent & protest, along with their very public governing forums which display all the contradictions, corruptions, contentions, and tensions natural to human nature. As Sir Robert Walpole observed, it is "the natural state of human affairs."  

The far-right's perception that the open society is a conspiracy of the radical-left counterbalances the far-left's perception that liberal capitalism is a conspiracy of the owning classes. The logic of both far-left and far-right, whose radical politics seeks to overthrow the open society, would unintentionally lead to the locked-down quietus and unalterable "certainties" of dominion, autocracy and dictatorship.