Random Signals #3

I want to end the year with some thoughts that are thoughtlessly incoherent. It’s been a good year, but challenges always ensue. I am arriving at an age where time is more of an essence (existentially) while being held by the timelessness of it all. Gratitude has been a key contemplation.

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I came across a recent article with Camille Paglia that affirms the same conclusion as Jonah Goldberg did in his stellar book: we need to feel our way back to go forward! 

Paglia says, “From my perspective as an atheist as well as a career college teacher, secular humanism has been a disastrous failure. Too many young people raised in affluent liberal homes are arriving at elite colleges and universities with skittish, unformed personalities and shockingly narrow views of human existence, confined to inflammatory and divisive identity politics. … I contend that every educated person should be conversant with the sacred texts, rituals, and symbol systems of the great world religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Islam — and that true global understanding is impossible without such knowledge. Not least, the juxtaposition of historically evolving spiritual codes tutors the young in ethical reasoning and the creation of meaning. Right now, the campus religion remains nihilist, meaning-destroying post-structuralism, whose pilfering god, the one-note Foucault, had near-zero scholarly knowledge of anything before or beyond the European Enlightenment. (His sparse writing on classical antiquity is risible.) Out with the false idols and in with the true!” (emphasis mine)

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I would add that comparative religious study would not go far enough. It does nothing in regards to Godlessness and decadence. We need to go deep, along with the breadth. And that means honing in on a path with intellectual rigor and open hearted imagination. As well as augmenting it with spiritual practices that would align one’s disposition with one’s belief. Good Metaphysics + Deep Mysticism = Reason + Faith = Truth + Beauty => Virtue + Love.

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As the year ends, I also want to note some favorite cultural artifacts. I really like these songs from Middle Kids, Mitski, Beirut, and Wye Oak. They are delightful to my ears.

I have also been augmenting my interest in indie music with an attempt to cultivate more knowledge around classical music. This podcast from Dacia Clay has been quite helpful.

In regards to film, this year has been less stellar than prior ones. First Reformed sticks with me because I got to see it at the Boston IFFB with director Paul Schrader in-house. It's also a compelling meditation on the roads that faith can make us rise and fall.

Roma is a masterpiece! It is a beautiful experience to see in a theater despite the Netflix release. My favorite film in quite some time.

I finally saw the classic It's a Wonderful Life. Shame on me.

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On the matter of gratitude, I have many things that come to heart: some of the thoughtful people on the “intellectual dark web”, the eternal presence of Joe and Bobo, David Thomas, the friends in my life that endure with their passions, the mistakes I make, the God-man that still affects us 2,000+ years later, Gagdad Bob, the online Bishop, my landlord, the lady who laughs and loves, Journey Home, the people who I see on the streets who God loves through me, the comedy of it all and those who nail it, film buffs, Jonesy Jukebox, Fulton Sheen, Ric Drasin, Brother David, meditations with Amy, Jeff, and John, the stars away from the city, the books that continue to inspire me, what remains when I go.

Google Verses Gödel

George Gilder is once again on to something beyond the typical monoculture thinking with super-AI technologists. He knows his Gödel, who claimed “every logical system necessarily depends on propositions that cannot be proved within the system.”

Yes, we can't escape metaphysics no matter how we try to deny ourselves in the process. And that's exactly what the materialist-techie types do. They believe “the human mind consists of electrical and chemical components that are unintelligent in themselves”; however, “By using their own minds and consciousness to deny the significance of consciousness in minds, they refute themselves.”

'But you can’t prove consciousness is immaterial', they may say.

Sure, but Gödel already demonstrated that mathematical statements can be true but unprovable. So why deny yourself some Truth too?

This is always the problem with super-AI proponents: they sell up their machines while selling themselves short; when the measure of AI should be the human mind. (Gilder notes: the human mind is “low-power, distributed globally, low-latency in proximity to its environment, inexorably bounded in time and space, and creative in the image of its creator.”)

Such is also the issue with Google. Gilder says, 

“The Google system of the world focuses on the material environment rather than on human consciousness, on artificial intelligence rather than human intelligence, on machine learning rather than on human learning, on relativistic search rather than on the search for truth, on copying rather than on creating, on launching human hierarchies in a flat universe rather than on empowering human beings in a hierarchical universe. It seeks singularities in machines rather than in human minds. The new system of the world must reverse these positions, exalting the singularities of creation: mind over matter, human consciousness over mechanism, real intelligence over mere algorithmic search, purposeful learning over mindless evolution, and truth over chance. A new system can open a heroic age of human accomplishment.”

In the book, Gilder believes the “new system of the world” will be blockchains. Unlike the Markov chains of disconnected probabilistic states that Google uses, blockchains use hashes to preserve history, enhance trust, and extend truth. We would own our information, instead of it being overly centralized with risk to security, privacy, and actual costs.

Blockchains will be the low-entropy carrier to our high-entropy creativity!

Gilder says, “The inevitable conclusion is that machines based on mathematical logic cannot exhaust the human domain; they can only expand it. Every new mechanism frees the human mind for more creative adventures and accomplishments.” The question is whether or not blockchain will be the new mechanism that frees us evermore going forward. 

In the end, I would rather place my bet on a technology that aligns with Gödel than one that tries to play God.

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful. — Jaron Lanier

Dr. Feelgood

This holiday season I do feel a bit more inclined to hand out alms. I don't have any delusions of grandeur that my actions do much good, but it does make me feel good.

Chögyam Trungpa coined the phrase “idiot compassion”; meaning, any compassionate act that enables the bad behavior of another. Like giving an addict money for food — when it will unlikely be used for those purposes. While the intention may be “compassionate”, the outcome will do little good for the well-being of the person. 

The general tendency is to give people what they want because we can't bear to see them suffer. Moreover, we do feel good about ourselves when we do it, and it helps deflect some of our own internal suffering. But this isn’t true compassion, or agape. There are mixed motivations involved, along with a lack of logic to see if the intentions are truly good.

These days everyone talks about compassion (along with tolerance) as though it’s the only virtue(s) that matter. But virtues always need to be balanced with other virtues, so they can be enacted in a way that is appropriate to the given circumstances.

Compassion also tends to work better in the microcosm than on the macrocosm. This is why political acts of compassion are so difficult. For example, if we opened our borders to everyone, would this eventually undermine the whole of a nation to benefit a few? The relationship between political ideals and cultural outcomes in a big, diverse society isn’t linear, therefore often leading to unintended consequences.  

(It should also be noted that compassion for the masses is often too abstract to be relatable. Recall Mother Teresa’s comment: “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” That's why human interest stories of the individual always move people more than state-sponsored statistics.)

But our idiot compassion has a bigger consideration beyond the fact we can’t always trust our feelings: we also need to trust in something Higher. 

William Wildblood makes the astute point on his blog: 

“When you no longer have the idea of God as the centrally organising fact of existence you have to replace it with something else. Today that something else is the abstract notion of humanity, and humanity, abstractly considered, is regarded as just one thing with no distinctions within it allowed. It is seen in purely material terms and so everything is equal. There is no better or worse except insofar as better corresponds to this idea and worse is what goes against it. Compassion is defined as treating all humans and their cultural achievements in the same way, and anything that resists this tyranny (which is what it is) becomes branded as hateful.”

A poster then followed up with this comment:

“As a young man I read Flannery O'Connor's comment that in the absence of faith, we rule by compassion, "...and compassion leads to the gas chamber." It puzzled me then and it was some years before I began to appreciate the crucial truth of the statement. By Faith, I think O'Connor meant trust in God and His Providence; by compassion, I think she meant the sentimentality that views suffering as absolutely undesirable and irredeemable. In a materialist view, suffering has no value and should be eliminated at any cost. ...But as suffering can be salutary, and as hierarchy is God's creation and, therefore, the condition of our existence, the leveling and numbness is doomed to failure and, ironically, will cause even more suffering.”

When compassion is conceived only materialistically and with no ordering principle, we are prone to cause enduring spiritual harm. Dr. Feelgood may help with some of the symptoms, but never find a cure.