Straw God, Steel God

A brief prologue: what does it really mean to believe a thing? What kinds of things can be believed? Is there a difference between belief and assent, or between belief and (say) tending to express a claim? If belief is a matter of an attitude toward a possible world, then it’s (perhaps) impossible to believe a self-contradictory proposition, including a necessarily false one, including the negations of mathematical truths. But it doesn’t really feel right to say that it’s impossible to believe that P=NP (assuming it’s false). Certainly one can assent to or tend to express the claim that P=NP, in either case. Is it possible to believe complete nonsense; can I believe “Nobbo dif daf phlongo” (without it having any further meaning)? Arguably I can assent to it or tend to claim it (or at least tend to assert it, or utter it with an assertive attitude?), but can I believe it? All interesting questions.

So anyway, I continue to binge various YouTube atheists responding to Christian fundamentalist apologists, and I’m really not sure why. Biblical inerrancy and literalism are just silly; there are about five arguments (Pascal’s wager, objective morality, “creation implies a creator”, supposedly-fulfilled prophecies, fine-tuning, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few), and there are very strong counterarguments to all of them. The material that’s supposedly the infallible word of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being is very obviously a bunch of stories and poems and things put together over centuries by a bunch of different people and groups and political processes, that exist in various variants and contradict each other in various ways just as one would expect of such a compendium. If it weren’t that lots of people believe, or purport to believe (see prologue), this stuff, and use it to justify political and social positions that are to various degrees odious, no one would bother responding to it, any more than anyone responds to the claim that Charlotte’s Web is literally true (some pig!). It would be a straw man, if only there weren’t lots of people asserting it.

(And yeah, it’s not just Christianity; many religions have holy books where it’s obviously silly to take the material as literally true. But Christianity is the one that causes the most trouble around me.)

On the other hand, I believe that most Christians, or at least a significant fraction, aren’t fundamentalist Bible literalists, and therefore believe, well, something else. And it occurred to me to wonder just what they do believe, that’s reasonable or arguable or not obviously false or void, but that still makes them Christians in some reasonable sense of the term, and whether I could write down some of the possibilities. To “steelman” Christianity, if you will, in various ways, and see what comes out.

One possibility, which I’ll call I dunno secular Christianity is something like say the Jefferson Bible: the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was a wise person who taught worthwhile stuff, and we should pay attention to it, and read (at least the non-supernatural) writings by and about him, and take him seriously, and perhaps even venerate him for some meaning of that word (but probably as a person rather than something else), maybe have holidays about his birth and death and all that, and so on.

This is fine; a discussion with this sort of Christian would be calm and rational and likely interesting; there is no fundamental disagreement. On the other hand many Christians wouldn’t count it as Christianity, since that is so often tied into questions like “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?” and “Do you believe that he died and then rose again on the third day?”, which this notion of secular Christianity in its most obvious interpretation doesn’t particularly encompass.

I think it’s more common for a Christian to be in something I’ll call mysterian Christianity, which emphasizes faith, and believing in God and Jesus and the Bible without knowing and without worrying too much about exactly what it all literally means. In my model of the world, your typical believer who goes to church every Sunday but doesn’t post apologetics videos on YouTube is like this. They believe that the Bible is true, literally, or “seriously” as the JWs put it, or whatever, and if the things that it says don’t seem to make rational sense right now, that’s fine, we humans are very limited in our understanding, and it will be clarified in time, and in the meantime we should pray and do what seems right and/or what Father O’Malley advises. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

A discussion with this sort of Christian would be relatively short and simple, I think, as long as one didn’t get obnoxious by asking them how they’re justified in believing something they don’t even understand. The answer is presumably something like “I’ve been touched by the Holy Spirit, and you haven’t, and that’s it; maybe some day you will be too!”, and there’s not much further that one can go politely from there.

What else do we have? I’d like a rational (re)construction of some sort of mystic Christianity, in which one accepts Jesus as one’s personal savior, and he died and rose again on the third day to atone for our sins and all, but also doesn’t make silly truth-claims and doesn’t lead to any odious political or social attitudes. This would have to involve lots of symbols and metaphors, or in the more exalted sense lots of reality-as-metaphor, where we say that Jesus of Nazareth was (and is) both one with God and also the Son of God, and probably that each of us is also one with God (and with Jesus) and also the Son of God, and that each of us (throughout life, throughout the day, in every moment) dies and then rises again, that by our own (perhaps constant) deaths we pay (God and ourselves) atonement for our sins, where simply being an ensouled embodied entity inherently constitutes sin, except when we take salvation into ourselves through Christ’s, which is to say our own, sacrifice of himself, which is to say ourselves, and we must accept Christ (which is to say, the cosmos) as our personal (because everything is personal) savior.

This is to take the Bible as perhaps inerrant and literal, but noting that to the same extent we take Charlotte’s Web (and especially the Wind in the Willows) and the very sound of the wind in the trees as interrant and literal, which is something that we can do only (as far as I know) by acknowledging that all language, even all experience as refracted through language, as metaphorical, so that the most literal possible interpretation of any text or experience is still an interpretation rife with symbol and metaphor. Which is what mysticism is, in some (metaphorical) sense.

Is this all interesting and/or accurate? I’m not certain. I, obviously, don’t believe fundamentalist Christianity, because it’s facially silly, and I keep listening to people refuting its claims (probably just because it validates my existing attitude or whatever). Secular Christianity (as used above) is fine, and probably held by various Unitarians and so on, who may or may not (perhaps more often not, in these troubled times) call themselves Christians. Mysterian Christianity isn’t especially attractive to me, as I haven’t been appropriately touched by the Holy Spirit, and frankly I don’t think anyone else has either in the relevant sense, but arguing about it is very much like I think arguing with a solipsist; it’s too bad that people sometimes get odious behaviors from it. Mystic Christianity is fine, and is so to speak just a different way of saying something that I do believe (to the extent that “believe” applies here) but that I put in Buddhist or Ariadnite terms rather than Christian ones, because icky connotations or whatever.

Seems reasonable. :D

OpenAI: Where by “can” we mean “can’t”

Disclaimer: I work for Google, arguably a competitor of OpenAI; but these opinions are solely my own, and I don’t work in the AI area at Google or anything.

And I mean, oh come on!

So much AI “research” in these hype-heavy times is all bunk, and I suppose one shouldn’t expect OpenAI (“Open” heh heh) to be any different. But this pattern of:

1. Use an AI to try to do some interesting-sounding thing,
2. Evaluate how well it did by waving your hands around, or just by eyeballing it,
3. Declare victory,
4. Publish an “AI can do thing!!!!” paper that will get lots of media attention.

is just sooooo tiring. (See for instance the YouTuber in that prior post who showed their system producing a non-working tic-tac-toe game and saying “well, that worked!”.)

The one I’m facepalming about here was brought to my attention by my friend Steve, and omg: “Language models can explain neurons in language models“. They did sort of the obvious thing to try to get GPT-4 to make predictions about how a few selected “neurons” in GPT-2 behave for a few inputs. The key line for me in the paper is:

“Although the vast majority of our explanations score poorly, we believe we can now use ML techniques to further improve our ability to produce explanations.” 

— OpenAI

They say this because (they have been drinking too much of the Kool-Aid, and) they tried a few things to make the initial abysmal scores better, and those things made them slightly better, but still poor. They say in the (extremely brief) report that although it works badly now, it could be the case that doing it differently, or maybe doing more of it, might work better.

In any other field this would be laughed at (or politely desk-rejected with a “fantastic, please submit again once you find something that does actually work better”); but in the Wacky Wacky World of Large Language Models it goes on the website and gets cited in half a ton of headlines in the media.

And is it really honest to use “can” in a headline to mean “can, very very badly”? By that standard, I can predict the weather by flipping a coin. I didn’t say I could predict it accurately!

I suppose the LLM hype is better than the Crypto hype because fewer people are being bilked out of money (I guess?), but still…

1960s Psychodrama of Eldritch Suspense

So Midjourney has Yet Another New Version of their main engine, called “5.1”, and it’s very much like v5, except that it has more of a “house style” like 4.0 did, which can be turned off via “–style raw”. (There’s also “–stylize”, and one might think that ”–style raw” and say “–stylize 0” would do the same thing, but apparently not. It’s all magic.)

I have, as ever, been playing with it extensively (given that “relax mode” GPU time is free at my membership level, any time when the engine is not working for me is wasted, eh what?), and am now up somewhere over forty thousand images, most recently involving things like echidnas (apparently not “echidnae”; “is Sonic an Echidna?“) and many stills from non-existent movies. I will present here a number from a 1960s Psychodrama of Eldritch Suspense, because woot! (See also The Cult Hit of 1977.)

Brad and Laura are concerned

Dr. Martin and Miss Carter are also concerned.

Miss Carter appreciates Dr. Martin’s collection of exotic curios.

Patrons in the village pub are concerned. And not only about the ugly picture.

Mrs. Martin is perhaps too impressed by the obsidian statue.

“Joannie, what –” “Please, Go, Through, The, Door, Doctor, Martin”

“Praise, The, Tentacles” “Yes, The, Wonderful, Tentacles”

“Come, Back, Soon”

(I like how exactly one of the eight images I made came out in color.)