Doubt & Questioning a Contradiction to Faith?

[Dr. Shades]

So, we’re taking A.I.-generated texts seriously enough to start threads on now?

Yes indeed. Why not?

Because there’s literally no thought behind it.

[huckelberry]

I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I think all religions can benefit from a moderating trend. Catholics aren’t burning heretics anymore. Muslims, by and large, aren’t massacring infidels. Mormons should some day stop excommunicating doubters and critics.

But DCP often pushes back on this, and I think he’s also correct. If you don’t believe the prophets are genuine, if you don’t think the Book of Mormon is real history, if you don’t believe literally then what are you doing in his church? Are you just there to subtly undermine the true believer’s hard fought worldview? A world view they think is as objectively true as anything in their lives is true?

It’s a difficult thing to navigate. It has the power to transform the religion for the better but also to bring down those who want the church to stay how it is now. Why should their church have to change to suit the more progressive views of others? Is that fair to them? And in their worldview it’s a path to apostasy that they must oppose at all costs.

drumdude, I think you have made a good focus for the problem here. I think the LDS system of belief is a bit more fragile than some others. It rests to a significant degree on the special authority of a few people which creates authority for what they have taught. Of course any religious group is going to have limits on what can fit. If you believe Jesus was a fake prophet you do not really fit in a Christian church.

Still I am struck with the wide variety which happens within the Catholic church. I guess not always happily or comfortably but there nonetheless.

[drumdude]

I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I think all religions can benefit from a moderating trend. Catholics aren’t burning heretics anymore. Muslims, by and large, aren’t massacring infidels. Mormons should some day stop excommunicating doubters and critics.

But DCP often pushes back on this, and I think he’s also correct. If you don’t believe the prophets are genuine, if you don’t think the Book of Mormon is real history, if you don’t believe literally then what are you doing in his church? Are you just there to subtly undermine the true believer’s hard fought worldview? A world view they think is as objectively true as anything in their lives is true?

It’s a difficult thing to navigate. It has the power to transform the religion for the better but also to bring down those who want the church to stay how it is now. Why should their church have to change to suit the more progressive views of others? Is that fair to them? And in their worldview it’s a path to apostasy that they must oppose at all costs.

drumdude, I think you have made a good focus for the problem here. I think the LDS system of belief is a bit more fragile than some others. It rests to a significant degree on the special authority of a few people which creates authority for what they have taught. Of course any religious group is going to have limits on what can fit. If you believe Jesus was a fake prophet you do not really fit in a Christian church.

Still I am struck with the wide variety which happens within the Catholic church. I guess not always happily or comfortably but there nonetheless.

At the end of the day, if God doesn’t allow good people into heaven based solely on one’s position around doctrinal squabbles, is he really the God we think he is?

I expect most believers believe in a fairly lax God, and that none of this stuff actually matters in the end. Just be a good person and hope for the best. A legalistic God might as well be the devil.

[Philo Sofee]

Yes indeed. Why not?

Because there’s literally no thought behind it.

It's not about thought, it's about analyzing the logic of arguments and evidence.

[Dr. Shades]

Because there’s literally no thought behind it.

It's not about thought, it's about analyzing the logic of arguments and evidence.

So, you're content with a computer program spoon-feeding the logic of arguments and evidence to you?

[Physics Guy]

This A.I. sounds like a well oiled assemblage of common observations gleaned from a large bunch of sources. I may not really want to know how many opinions were reviewed to mulch into this one summary.

I realize a very large part of any humans’ statements about subjects of interest are like that. However, there is with a human source a particular experiential vantage point. And maybe some particular thoughts, maybe.

This is how I currently feel about the chatbot AIs. They are impressively fluent, at least mostly, but if they are artificial intelligences, they are not artificially geniuses. Their products might earn a B grade from a generous grader; you'd have to be really harsh not to give them a C. They're not going to get A's, though. They waffle and ramble, saying the kinds of things that people say about the subject without showing the confident grasp that it takes to cut right to the key point, say it clearly, and stop.

It's early days, but I'm not sure these large language model AIs are ever going to get so much better than this, because saying a bunch of the kinds of things that people say about a topic is exactly—literally, exactly—what these things are designed to do. The reason these chatbots suddenly became a thing was that people deliberately started training chatbots just to parrot the kinds of things people say about things, rather than making any effort at all to build any kind of understanding or insight into the algorithms.

The fact that this works as well as it does is still big news, all right. It may well change the world a lot within just the next few years. I don't think it's going to do that because it's the advent of superhuman artificial intelligence, though. It's the advent of quick and easy superficial rehashing.

That's not a dismissal. Superficial rehashing can be useful. A lot of the time, it's all we do, anyway. Now we can do all that stuff very much faster and more easily. And most A.I.-generated texts will be indistinguishable from most human-generated texts.

I suspect that it will still be a long time before AIs can match the most cogent and insightful human texts, though. I don't think that the current LLM strategy is even aiming towards those kinds of texts. Those texts are by definition not the kind of thing that people generally say about things. They are instead precisely the kind of things that nobody says, until somebody does.

[Philo Sofee]

It's not about thought, it's about analyzing the logic of arguments and evidence.

So, you're content with a computer program spoon-feeding the logic of arguments and evidence to you?

[Physics Guy]

Why not?

I don't wash all my clothes or my dishes by hand, and I don't cook over an open fire that I've kindled by rubbing sticks together. Why should I make all my own article summaries the hard way?

[Bret Ripley]

All intelligence is artificial. Except yours, of course. Yours is the real deal, surely.

[Bret Ripley]

So is this a simulation? I'll keep my parents and sisters but everything else goes!

I'm sorry, I don't believe we've been properly introduc *poof*