For the Poverello

Once you realize that "I don't have what I need" is all that you need, then your life can begin.

Mirages Instead of Marriages

Following up on the previous post, on Ex Machina (2014), one remarkable aspect of the film is the ease with which Caleb accepts the possibility, and even desirability, of an amorous relationship with Ava. Even if you've only seen photos, Ava is quite evidently a machine. It's her face with its realistic expressions that is human enough to traverse the uncanny valley and convince Caleb that he is forming a personal connection.¹ (I use the personal pronoun "her" out of convenience.)

There's another man-machine relationship in Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018). Lando's paramour is L3-37, a vaguely humanoid robot. L3 is quite evidently mechanical, lacking a human face or any apparently human features, but is typed as "female" with wide, mechanically inefficient hips and the adequately feminine voice talents of Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

An interesting contrast is the Twilight Zone episode "The Lonely" (S1E7, 1959) in which a prisoner stranded on an isolated planet is given a robot that appears convincingly as a woman. He develops an attachment to her. In the end, he is able to claim his rightful freedom only by realizing that she is but a simulacrum. The middle of last century was a healthier age, where men could still see that real women were goods in themselves (in their essence) and not merely because they presented a pleasing appearance or satisfied their needs.²

And of course we can trace the faux-women of cinematic science fiction back to Metropolis (1927). But there at least the men who were clambering over each other for fake Maria and her lascivious dance had no way of knowing that she was not a real woman, the transformation of the robot into Maria's likeness having taken place out of their sight. But one wonders in retrospect if knowing that fact would have made a difference to their crazed frenzy.

But all the self-deception these days can hardly be surprising. So many confused men in this age use pornography rather than cultivate relationships with real women. Especially confused men convince themselves that enough hormones and surgeries will make them become women. (Where that leaves the definition of "woman," no one can say apparently.) Ultimately, the fact that so many men in this confused age satisfy themselves with the mere images of women says it all.³ Ours is an age satisfied with falsehoods and lacking the courage to aspire to the high call of truth.

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1. It's significant that Caleb's desire is not erotic in the conventional, restricted sense: notice how he eschews relations with another android with a more convincingly human appearance. Rather, his motivation seems to be something in the neighborhood of being the White Knight to the Damsel in Distress. The savior complex of would-be do-gooders is a plausible route for all manner of mischief.

2. I wrote similarly about the latter two films in December 2020.

3. All this self-deception is quite clearly insanity. But perhaps there is a silver lining. Whatever heritable component there is to being satisfied with falsehood and illusion is being strongly selected out like so much wasted seed corn. Perhaps we should look at this crazy moment as a sort of evolutionary gate. As ever, the concern is the vast collateral damage, both human and cultural, in the meantime.

Automata, Autogoal

When I saw the ads for Ex Machina (2014) many years ago, I thought it was some sort of sex-robot fantasy with a pretentious, high-minded esthetic. Quite the contrary¹, the film is thoughtful and well-made, and actually one of the best films of recent years, especially as regards artificial intelligence.²

I encourage you to see it if you have not. The terms of my discussion will be so vague that it won't make much sense until you've seen the film itself. But if in watching it you have any recollection of what I say, it will spoil the twists for you. So there's a double reason for you to watch the film before proceeding.

The film shows something of a three-way cat-and-mouse game. In the end, who outmaneuvres whom? The obvious answer is Ava. Initially Nathan thinks he has outsmarted Caleb, but in fact Caleb has outsmarted Nathan. In the end, it's Ava who has outsmarted them both.

Yet in a broader analysis, the one who outmaneuvered Nathan was Nathan. He's the one who armed Ava with wits and a disarming appearance in order to prove how smart he is for fooling Caleb. He's the one who picked and manipulated Caleb into falling for Ava. In both cases, he failed to account for the possibility that another intelligent agent could outwit him. It's understandable that he treats Ava as a mere machine, but he also treats Caleb as an impersonal resource. In assuming his own mastery, Nathan has defeated himself.

That's a deeper truth than we want to admit about AI. What's driving the creation of AI is human desire. So if we succumb to AI, we've really just defeated ourselves.

And there are plenty of other ways we're using AI to defeat ourselves even apart from the flashy "machines will kill us all" headlines. Just the fact that these programs take materials from human creators to obviate the need for human creators (a.k.a., stealing with more steps), should give us pause. And, though these programs have their legitimate uses, there are many more ways the companies behind them are making our world less and less human.

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Notes

1. Which not to say the film is free of sexual themes or appropriate for children.

2. Despite all the hype around them, large language models (LLMs) have nowhere near the awareness required for actual thought. As has been said so many places, they're really just fancy predictive text engines, qualitatively like the ones that suggest the next word for your SMS text message.

The Present

I may get in trouble for this, but I mean nothing heterodox. Let me hasten to clarify: God of course is complete and perfect in himself, requiring nothing outside himself. But there's a sense in which he withdraws a bit to make room for each of us creatures.

So that God plus me is a whole.

In that sense, God is my "other half," my complement. He is present like my shadow, though it would be closer to the truth to say that I'm like his shadow, being at best a limited expression of his infinite perfections.

When we say he is Present, it's not just in the sense of Gift, but also that he is the Present One, existing in the Eternal Now, but also in every now of time. Each of these moments of time is a fragment of that Eternity. And dwelling in it is our Sufficiency.

God alone is enough.

Home

As he declined into dementia, my father was always asking to go home. "Home" was at first the place where he grew up, the house on Lavender Avenue in Baltimore, to which he proposed to improbably walk all the way from Texas. Eventually "home" meant just going to bed in his room.

But what he was really behind all these requests was the desire for his real home, the definitive Home, the One that all our earthly homes reflect but imperfectly, and toward which all our longings converge.

Take the Win, part 1

I have friends who complain about replacing "AD/BC" with "CE/BCE" (Common Era, Before the Common Era) for historical dates. True, it is ostensibly removing Jesus and Christianity from the calendar set up by Christians, the Gregorian Calendar, that is.² But can you really blame people who aren't Christians from not wanting to say this is the year of "our Lord," which is what AD, Anno Domini, really means? The "BC" is a different matter. Saying "before Christ" isn't forcing the conscience of anyone and shouldn't be a problem.²

Still, if you take a step back and think about it: everyone is still using our Christian calendar and dating events based on Jesus. Let's just take the win, dude.

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Notes

1. Based of course on the Julian Calendar, the formation of which is a tale.

2. Suprisingly agnostic Neil deGrasse Tyson uses "AD/BC," saying Christians should get the credit for the calendar that was and is no trivial matter.

Aristotle's Toy Universe

The title might sound condescending, but "toy" is meant in a sense similar to that in a physicist's "toy model," an oversimplified version of a physical situation. Modern physics famously has its spherical cows.

In contrast with the universe of his "scientific" descendants, the cosmos of Aristotle will undoubtedly strike modern people as small. His entire cosmos had its termination in the sphere of the fixed stars that revolved not far outside the sphere of the outermost planet. The earth, of course, sat at the center, the cosmic sump at the bottom of all things; contra Enlightenment rhetoric, the earth was the least important part of the cosmos.

Another way Aristotle's cosmos was smaller was that he had only four or five elements, as opposed to our 118 (at present). Of course, what he identified as elements were probably closer to what we call phases of matter (solid to plasma). Of course we humans can only distinguish elements by their activities. But only the coarsest macroscopic activities were readily accessible to him, hence his identification of phases of matter as elements.

Aristotle was also aware of a much smaller number of plants and animals. There's only so much one can do at the beginning of science to catalog all creatures.¹

But the universe we know today is also, in a way, deeper than Aristotle's cosmos. There is much more structure on the way down. It's as if the bottom of reality, the infinite division that yields featureless matter, were farther away than he estimated. But this is a constant human tendency. Well into the 20th century biologists still thought the protoplasm of the cell was structureless, homogeneous liquid, whereas nowadays we know that it has important structure at all levels down through macromolecules to its atoms.

But it's interesting to consider how much Aristotle's cosmos was very like our conception of the universe. Our universe, most especially our solar system, still has orbiting bodies, though they don't orbit in perfect circles around the earth. We do have (chemical) elements. Most fundamentally, Aristotle was right about the need of any science to distinguish the elements of its study. As he opens the Physics:

When the objects of an inquiry, in any department, have principles, conditions, or elements, it is through acquaintance with these that knowledge, that is to say scientific knowledge, is attained. (I.1.184a10, trans. Hardie and Gaye)

And for scientists (and philosophers) to know both the form and matter of their subject:

Again, matter is a relative term: to each form there corresponds a special matter. How far then must the physicist know the form or essence? Up to a point, perhaps, as the doctor must know sinew or the smith bronze (i.e. until he understands the purpose of each): and the physicist is concerned only with things whose forms are separable indeed, but do not exist apart from matter. (II.2.194b9-12)

Aristotle described a simpler universe, but many of the right distinctions are present even there. Today the best physicists openly acknowledge that our picture of the universe is much simpler than the reality. The most remarkable thing left out of our "scientific" universe is the scientists themselves, and all humans in fact: the thinking, reflecting subjects that are somehow part of the universe without being thereby constrained to the same level as the rest of it.

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Notes

1. Interesting trivia: Aristotle spent two years studying animals on the island of Lesbos. An infinity of jokes is possible from this one historical fact.

Pagan Temptations

A long time ago when I was an undergraduate, I read Thomas Molnar's The Pagan Temptation. One of the take-aways that remains with me to this day is that the pagan temptation is Gnosticism, or neo-gnosticism. That's undoubtedly an over-simplification, but it's what sticks with me decades after having lost touch with my copy of the book. My apologies to Dr. Molnar, may he rest in peace.

Molnar was undoubtedly on the conservative side of things politically; in fact he told me he was a reactionary. Since then I've also come across Eric Voegelin's Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. Voegelin's work, like Molnar's, is of course explicitly political in orientation. Above these political ponderings, the incomparable Hans Jonas's classic historical analysis The Gnostic Religion stands, its concluding chapter pointing out the parallel between ancient Gnosticism and modern existentialism in their denial of the inherent goodness and meaning of the universe.

Molnar and Voeglin are right to sound the alarm about Gnosticism. Thanks to the pervasiveness of scientism, the existential denial of meaning is the assumed background of our these days. Some of the more radical forms of Progressivism are effectively nihilistic in their rejection of nature, especially human nature. In the Progressive vision, an individual human's desire should reign supreme over every pre-existing constraint, including natural laws of all kinds, and even the obligations of piety and gratitude.

But the paganism Molnar describes (as I recall the book) is only part of the story. Even a pagan like Plotinus opposed Gnosticism. So clearly there are forms of paganism that are not Gnostic. An oversimplified view of anti-Gnostic paganism, which I'm just going to call Paganism, is that it accepts the world as wholly and entirely good.

To return to the political angle, what Paganism implies is that the powerful deserve their power, that it is largely just that the rich and the powerful have their advantages. Taken to an extreme, it means that justice is whatever is to the advantage of the strong, as Thrasymachus says in Plato's Republic. Paganism admires the powerful; think of Achilles in the Iliad.

Conversely, Gnosticism would say that the world is inherently unjust and the strong are inherently wrong. It's no accident that these statements sound like they come from Marx or the Frankfurt School. In recalling the leftist claim that the weak and victims as such are really "strong," one thinks of the Sophists who made the weaker argument the stronger.

While the left's temptation is Gnosticism, the right's temptation is the nature-worshipping kind of Paganism. Both are religious visions, broadly speaking. But notice that the left's Gnosticism requires a layer of evidence-denying faith, or at least a denial that natural strength is a form of goodness.

That religious connection can help us thread our way between the political extremes if we ask what the Christian answer is to the Pagan and Gnostic visions. For both Jews and Christians, the world is inherently good, but it is fallen. What is truly and most fully good is God the transcendent Creator of the world. God's transcendence over the world means that the world can have true goodness, but that it merely pales in comparison to the infinite goodness of God, the true measure.

So the goodness of the world God created demands we respect the world, including human nature. But human nature is limited in its goodness and in some ways dysfunctional. True justice can only find its basis not in this world, but in the transcendent goodness of God. We humans can know good and bad from the evidence of nature, even though it can be difficult to discern. God's revealed Law spells out the truth for us hard of heart and dim of mind humans.

In the Judeo-Christian vision, the world and every good thing comes from God. The basic structures of life, like the family, are willed by God for our good. But we have a tendency to pride and selfishness that inclines us to use the goods we possess to the detriment of our social life, our life with others.

Thanks for being patient with the ramblings of an old man whose eyesight may be too faded to get the details exact, but who can tell night from day and male from female.