Currently reading: A Sand County Almanac and Other Writings On Ecology And Conservation by Aldo Leopold. Re: Leopold’s “land ethic” and his emphasis on the “biotic community,” I think: I just don’t know how to convince people who care only about money to care even a little bit about anything else. 📚
So how do we understand an intelligence radically different from our own? The same way we understand this phenomenon in dogs: ethology. Ethologists, who study animal behavior, have confronted this problem for decades. They begin with behavior, guided by the core principle that similar behaviors can arise from very different minds.
Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen argued that understanding behavior requires asking four core questions: What mechanisms produce it? How does it develop? What purpose does it serve? How does it compare across species? Those questions translate well to AI. What computations produce an agent’s behavior? How have changes in its training shaped that behavior over time? What is the behavior designed to accomplish? And how does it compare with that of other forms of intelligence?
In the end, I do not think Christianity will go the same way as Europe’s pre-Christian religions. Even if you don’t believe it is sustained by divine promises and by God’s grace, Christianity is conceptually resilient to a high degree, and its Scriptures ensure it can hardly slip from memory in the same way as an oral tradition. Furthermore, Christianity will remain strong for as long as there is no convincing alternative, and the current resurgence of interest in it is partly down to the failure of secularism and humanism to establish themselves as alternatives with sufficient cultural, emotional and psychological heft. Our concern should not be directed, therefore, at Christianity’s survival; rather, we should be concerned about the quality of any Christianity that survives in the context of the collapse of the institutional churches, which have traditionally guided believers.
A brilliant concise survey of this vital territory.
If you’re in the Chicago area, there will be performances this weekend at Wheaton College of The Cook-Off, a small comic opera composed by my friend and former colleague Shawn Okpebholo. It’ll be wonderful music in a lovely space.
When I posted this I felt a great weight lifting.
Everybody is talking about Elizabeth Dias’s long report in the NYT on Anthropic and religious scholars, and rightly so. It’s brilliant. Elizabeth (like her Times colleague Ruth Graham) was my student back in the day, so of course I would like to take credit for the excellence of her work … but I can’t. I think she just had one class from me. But still: liberal-arts education FTW!
Adam Nayman’s review of Digger mentions more than thirty — more than thirty — other movies, along with a few TV shows. This hyper-referential style of reviewing was pioneered by Pitchfork in its record reviews, and has now spread everywhere: it’s a giant tumor on online writing. There are whole generations of critics today who can’t describe what they have seen or heard, but only analogize to other things they have seen and heard. It ain’t helpful.
Some have asked, so: I still have no answers to my questions about the non-appearance of the hardcover of my Sayers biography and the flaws in the Kindle version. No answers, no idea when I’ll get answers, no idea when the book will be available. I assume that eventually people will be able to buy the book, but whether that will be next week, next month, or next year I can’t guess. The only person at OUP who has responded seems to believe that my chief concern is that I haven’t received my author’s copies. I corrected this assumption, but there’s been no response since. At the moment I’m still holding to my theory.
This Changes Nothing
That world-transforming, world-shattering, world-saving technology/person/event? The one that “changes everything”? It changes nothing. You're still you, and the same challenges confront you that have always confronted humanity and will always confront humanity. Every week you give yourself a new reason why you now don't have to think about loving your neighbor as yourself, turning the other cheek, doing justly and loving mercy and walking humbly with your God. It’s a crisis! It’s Flight 93! But come on: you're kidding yourself. Everything important is what it was, and wherever you go, there you are. Hey, I get it: All you want is to get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride. But it ain't happening. The ride never ends ... until you do.
Finished reading: John Muir: Nature Writings (LOA #92) by John Muir 📚
The poor bit of measured time was soon spent, and while the saddles were being adjusted I again urged Emerson to stay. “You are yourself a sequoia,” I said. “Stop and get acquainted with your big brethren.” But he was past his prime, and was now as a child in the hands of his affectionate but sadly civilized friends, who seemed as full of old-fashioned conformity as of bold intellectual independence. It was the afternoon of the day and the afternoon of his life, and his course was now westward down all the mountains into the sunset. The party mounted and rode away in wondrous contentment, apparently, tracing the trail through ceanothus and dogwood bushes, around the bases of the big trees, up the slope of the sequoia basin, and over the divide. I followed to the edge of the grove. Emerson lingered in the rear of the train, and when he reached the top of the ridge, after all the rest of the party were over and out of sight, he turned his horse, took off his hat and waved me a last good-by. I felt lonely, so sure had I been that Emerson of all men would be the quickest to see the mountains and sing them. Gazing awhile on the spot where he vanished, I sauntered back into the heart of the grove, made a bed of sequoia plumes and ferns by the side of a stream, gathered a store of firewood, and then walked about until sundown. The birds, robins, thrushes, warblers, etc., that had kept out of sight, came about me, now that all was quiet, and made cheer. After sundown I built a great fire, and as usual had it all to myself. And though lonesome for the first time in these forests, I quickly took heart again, — the trees had not gone to Boston, nor the birds; and as I sat by the fire, Emerson was still with me in spirit, though I never again saw him in the flesh.