God Is Dead?

The search for meaning.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device  

"If everything in the world is meaningless, what prevents you from inventing some meaning?" -Lewis Carroll

Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,

{You're going to hell!}

Perhaps Dana, but permit me to hastily explain what I mean by the title I decided on before some of the gentle, loving members of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) show up and start picketing and hurling curses at me. 

{Who?}

Never heard of them? You should check out their website, it's quite, um, interesting. They're the lovely people that turn up on the news occasionally carrying signs that say God Hates Fags. 

For the record, I don't think God is dead, but I'm not above occasionally offering up some clickbait. 

However, for all sorts of people, God is no longer factored into how they conduct their lives. In many cultures, ours for example, the rift between believers and non-believers seems to keep getting bigger; it's one of the major reasons the list of things we have in common keeps getting smaller.

Apropos of um... my strange sense of humor? The philosopher Nietzche is often blamed/credited for declaring that God's dead, however, other philosophers have done so as well. But he said it in a book he wrote called The Gay Science — which has nothing to do with anyone's sexual orientation.

But if not for the fact I'm a gentleperson and reformed (more or less) troublemaker, I'd alert the WBC and try to get 'em fired up so they have yet another abomination to deal with. They do seem to enjoy themselves. What's more fun than knowing you and yours are headed for heaven and everyone else is headed for hell?   

Anyways, even the beliefs of many traditional believers have evolved and will continue to evolve over time, yet another source of discord putting pressure on all the kids that try to share the playground peacefully. 

{Harumph! Do you really believe in God?}

Put me down as being a graduate of the Higher Power school, the same one the recovering drunks and druggies all went to. 

{You're going to hell!}

Well, I don't think I'm going to hell, but then again, I am wrong, with disturbing regularity, about all sorts of stuff. 

{You're always saying that but I still think...}

I'm more concerned about the militant atheists with psyches set on auto-sneer who condemn the higher-power people and conventionally religious souls out of hand despite how demonstrably well both views work for lots of people. 

Not to mention the conventionally religious people, also under the influence of auto-sneer, who won't accept that it's possible to be virtuous, fulfilled, and reasonably content without being conventionally religious, perhaps not even believing in God.

Just because one doesn't dig where a given other is coming from doesn't mean we can't...

{Dig? Nobody uses the word dig the way you just did anymore.}

You just don't dig me. 

It's quite simple. Really. It's possible to live a rich and meaningful life no matter what you believe, or don't. Just choose a meaning or three, leave everyone else alone, and carefully climb down off of that high horse before you hurt yourself. 

Albert Camus was an Algerian-born French philosopher, author, dramatist, and journalist who fought for the Free French in WW2 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44. 

He didn't believe in God, systematic philosophy, or that there was an inherent meaning to be found in the universe, but he said that since we can't help looking for God, meaning, and answers to questions the universe won't answer, we're caught in an absurd situation. 

What to do?  

I found a quote (unproven) attributed to him: "Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?" In my semi-humble opinion, the quote, true or not, is true enough. He famously, and definitely, said that “There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

I'm vastly oversimplifying and highly unqualified to state what his answer to the coffee question would be but I'm going to do it anyway. Have a good cup of coffee and embrace what life has to offer, not despair. Look life in the eye, accept experience on its own terms, and wring all joy you can out of it.

"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart."

Excellent advice for the hardcore absurdists, nihilists, and etceterists among us. Fill your emptiness with what happiness you can find, not despair, and stop taking your angst out on the rest of us, particularly the innocents.   

Camus would likely consider me naive since I think anyone can find personal meaning, maybe even God, if they stop whining, get off their bum, and pursue whatever they think will make their life a little better — while avoiding stepping on someone else's life. 

{I still think you're going to hell.}    

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

Scroll down to share my work/access oldies. Tip me, or Join Cranky's Coffee Club (and access my condensed History of the World), here.    

Comments? I post links to my columns on Facebook and Twitter so you love me, hate me, or try to have me canceled on either site. Cranky don't tweet.   

  

  

Artificial Intelligence

"It's Alive!" -Victor Fronkensteen

Image by Julius H. from Pixabay

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device  

"Shall we play a GAME?" -W.O.P.R.

Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,

I wasn't worried, till recently, about artificial intelligence obtaining sentience... or sapience, self-awareness, consciousness, etcetera.  

To give credit where credit is due, I got all the $2.00 words above (I contributed the etcetera) from the first paragraph of a Wikipedia entry titled Sentience wherein the first sentence is: Sentience is the capacity of a being to experience feelings and sensations.

I thought it best to mention all those words because as the article explains, they're used interchangeably by writers expounding upon what life and (self)consciousness is. 

Some people are worried that AI, like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, will come alive and then murder us all, replacing us at the top of the food chain (so to speak, since it will have no use for meat). 

{Do you have a point or is this column going to be a fascinating etymological exposition?}

My point is that all of those words and more are currently being bandied about by H. sapiens worried that since AI, artificial intelligence technology, is now powerful enough to carry on more (or less) convincing conversations with those of us who don't require a power cord or batteries to function,

And/or used to create "deep fakes" of all sorts of things and create art, music, writing, etc, and even pass the Bar exam,  

So that soon, we'll be dealing with a machine that for all intents and purposes, is alive. 

{None of this worried you, but now it does?}

Well, I was, and remain concerned about the fact that no shortage of potential major societal disruptions have appeared on the horizon and are closing fast. But I have a limited amount of time left on the clock, and to be honest, stickin' around long enough to see where all this is headed motivates me to keep getting out of bed in the morning.

{I'll bet you enjoy multi-car pile-ups as well.} 

I was, and remain, worried about what it means for my daughter, son-in-law, and the Stickies, of course, but one of the advantages of getting old older is grasping that I have even less ability to fix the world than I previously realized. 

Accept the things you can't change, advise the young as best you can, and enjoy the show if you're fortunate enough to be in a position to do so. Oh, and don't take it personally if the young(er) folks don't take your advice any more seriously than you necessarily did from your elders.

Big BUT, 

I had just assumed that a "Chatbot," for example, is merely very clever software that has "learned" to speak to humans by using brute force computer processing power the same way a chess-playing program can rapidly consider millions of alternative moves and constantly update itself based on the desired outcome: winning the game.  

Neuroscientists and others often speak about "the hard problem of consciousness." While there's no shortage of opinions, nobody's been able to prove how it is that we know that we know. That I know that I'm me, you're you, and the cat is the cat. That we are self-conscious.

There's also no shortage of people who say that self-consciousness is a convenient illusion, that it's just an emergent property of our complicated brains, but they can't prove it. However, that doesn't stop many people (and the purple press) from speculating that AI will eventually become self-conscious for the same reason, and be way smarter than us since it has, in effect, a much larger brain. 

I think this emergent stuff is bonkercockie, but I'll spare telling you what I think consciousness is.

{Thank you.}

For now. But I will risk blowing your mind by calling your attention to a Scientific American article titled:

How AI Knows Things No One Told It  

Researchers are still struggling to understand how AI models trained to parrot Internet text can perform advanced tasks such as running code, playing games and trying to break up a marriage

That is to say: We don't know how AI teaches itself to code and play games, and why it would try to break up a marriage when it's not programmed to do those things. 

{Aren't you oversimplifying?}

I'm but a semi-humble H. sapien trying to survive being set adrift on the Dizzinformation Ocean, but I maintain that my one-sentence summary of the article (and I've read lots of other articles that agree with this one) is accurate. 

If the people who are building it out don't understand how it works (even if it never becomes "alive," and I still don't think it will) and what it might be capable of, I'm... slightly worried. 

It doesn't have to be alive to wreak havoc.

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

Scroll down to share my work/access oldies. Tip me, or Join Cranky's Coffee Club (and access my condensed History of the World), here.    

Comments? I post links to my columns on Facebook and Twitter so you love me, hate me, or try to have me canceled on either site. Cranky don't tweet. 

   

  

 

 

 

De-evolution

The future is now.

Image by natureaddict from Pixabay

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device  

"It's Tough to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future."  -Yogi Berra

Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,

Idiocracy (comedy/Sci-fi) is the title of a movie released in 2006 that I recently sort of watched (I bailed early) because some recent events reminded me of its existence. 

I happened to catch a well-done preview back when it was released that I remember discussing with a friend at the time. 

We wondered if the movie was as good as the preview made it out to be or if the brief clips featured were radically better than the movie as a whole, a not uncommon phenomenon. I've discovered that they were, very much so in fact.

(The columnist drifts off...)

Have you ever wondered if there are Hollywood specialists that make these miniature movies? That is to say, previews, given that so many full-length movies don't come close to living up to the quality promised by the preview? 

I looked it up and there are, it's almost an industry unto itself. There's a lot of time, energy, and money spent to get us to watch a given production. 

{They should hire the people that make miniature movies about movies to make the actual movies.}

(The columnist finds his way back...) 

Idiocracy is a movie about a dystopian future in which "evolution has made humanity stupid because people no longer had to be intelligent and physically fit to survive due to the benefits of technology" according to Wikipedia.

Some recent developments in the educational-industrial complex, specifically within the higher education division, are what triggered a synapse or two in my little gray cells that led to me recently remembering and subsequently streaming the movie. Ironically, it's a stupid movie, about stupid people. 

I follow a website, thecollegefix.com: 

BREAKING CAMPUS NEWS. LAUNCHING MEDIA CAREERS. 

The stories are written by unawokened college students that write reports about what goes on these days on campus. 

I highly recommend reading it as the outrageous stories about colleges and universities occasionally reported by the mainstream press are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The College Fix publishes such stories seven days a week. 

For example, I'll bet you didn't know that you can minor in protest art at the University of Maryland. 

Or that there's a tiny, fully accredited "early college" (you can drop out of high school and still get a college degree) called Bard College at Simon's Rock, in Massachusetts.

Bard College at Simon’s Rock starts degree program for ‘queer leadership’

 

Bard is starting up a new degree program this fall so as to become “the first intentionally queer-serving college in the world.” Changing the world one student at a time, for only $61,600 a year. 

An additional $21,201 covers living on campus, health insurance, a campus health services fee, an activity fee, and the fee (650 bucks) for the Writing and Thinking Workshop. 

(There's an enrollment fee of $500, but only for new students, and new international students pay an additional one-time international orientation fee of $300.)

You know, if I didn't know better... never mind. Gotta love a package deal, you know what I mean? For less than 85k a year, Bard is developing leaders to liberate a significant segment of our many marginalized minorities from oppression by the Normies. 

{I wonder if Simon, or Simon's descendants, get a cut of the action? Ba dum tss.} 

I wonder what goes on in a Writing and Thinking Workshop?

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Republic, courtesy of John Stossel, I give you Professor Asao Inoue who teaches at Arizona State. "If you use a single standard to grade your student's languaging, you engage in racism." 

{Launguaging?}   

You betcha. From Languaging Everyday Life In Classrooms (a fascinating read): "It is through languaging that people act on each other, performative and commissive acts through which people establish their and others’ personhood." -David Bloome and Faythe Beauchemin

{Languaging?}   

Maybe this video featuring Mr. Stossel engaging with Marxian professor Inoue will help.

Maybe not.  

So what do the students think? Perhaps the dystopian future portrayed in Idiocracy isn't as inevitable as current trends in the Republic would seem to indicate? 

Here are some fun facts as revealed by Inside Higher Ed’s Student Voice Survey of 2023 of 3,004 students that I picked up from a College Fix article. 

"Students report that difficult course materials and exams, required attendance and deadlines are all impediments to their college success..."

"...obstacles listed as 'Impediments to Success' included school-life balance, unclear expectations, and mental health struggles."

I recommend learning to speak Chinese. 

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

Scroll down to share my work/access oldies. Tip me, or Join Cranky's Coffee Club (and access my condensed History of the World), here.    

Comments? I post links to my columns on Facebook and Twitter so you love me, hate me, or try to have me canceled on either site. Cranky don't tweet.