So I’m fine with AI, because I don’t believe in it in the usual way it is interpreted, as machine consciousness. I don’t think that will happen, because brains and machines are very different things, and will end up always doing different things. The tendency to regard the brain as a machine should be easy to dodge by considering how we have successively considered it as a clock, a steam engine, a hologram, and now a computer; none of them are good analogies, not even our current favorites.So “artificial intelligence” really will come down to machine algorithms designed for human uses, and when we understand AI as that, we can begin to think about the algorithms and the uses, without getting into anything more metaphysical or fantastical. We will certain project personalities onto machines, we already do that, but it is a projection and we have to keep that in mind.
In my free time, I enjoy making things with rocks, doing patio jigsaw patterns in quartzite around my house (I have one patio where three stones that made an excellent map of California are in the middle of the patio, and have rays of rock extending out from it; and another that is a kind of rock whirlpool around a Japanese maple); I also am stacking and re-stacking a drywall lake front at my wife’s family place in Maine, made of glacial cobble so that every winter the bad work I do slumps back into the lake, while the good work holds longer.All this rock work, I realized, is like doing novels that I can actually see, which is why they give me such pleasure. My conclusion is that everyone should make things for the fun of it.
Teenagers can feel religious longings just as powerfully as they do romantic ones. There is nothing sinister in teens talking in the language of faith. Quite likely Koenig once had similar thoughts—about personal integrity, moral seriousness, responsibility in relationships—just in more abstract and secular (and I would say, less exact) terms.It’s hard to remember just how hysterical our teenage selves could sound. I realized this a few years back when I stumbled upon an old diary in which I talked about, yes, my faith and relationships. I hardly recognized the voice in those pages, but I also didn’t want to dismiss it. There was something in the passion of my teenage self that I needed to relearn.
Adnan may well be a murderer (the series leaves this fact unresolved). Whether or not he is, there is nothing murderous in his expression of the universal tension between old loyalties and new loves. Serial’s suggestion that talk of sin and the devil might be homicidal is pure prejudice.
the origin of the great errors
There can be no doubt that all the great errors which have overtaken the preaching and theology of the community in the course of its history have had their true origin, not so much in the studies of the well-known errorists and heretics who have merely blabbed them out, but rather in the secret inattention and neglect, the private drowsing and wandering and erring, of innumerable nameless Christians who were not prepared to regard the listening of the community to the Word as their own concern, who wanted privacy in their thinking, and who thus created the atmosphere in which heresy and error became possible and even inevitable in the community. Conversely, there can be no doubt that the revivals and quickenings continually granted to the preaching and theology of the community have had their basis, not so much in the bearers of the great names which have come down to us in Church history as representatives of these movements, but effectively, if secretly, in the community from which they sprang, by which they were surrounded and as the mouthpiece of which they spoke, and therefore again in the innumerable nameless Christians for whom the question of correct doctrine was a burning one which they tried to address to the right quarter, and who then quietly if inarticulately found and espoused the relevant new and better answers until someone was found to bring them to expression.
Is it true, this talk of a loving and good God, who is more than one of the friendly idols whose rise is so easy to account for, and whose dominion is so brief? What the people want to find out and thoroughly understand is, Is it true?
I have not been on a fascinating journey of self-discovery recently, and I would not like to share it with you. Thanks be to God, we have far better things to talk about.
Some common reasons they gave for not buying e-textbooks were that screens make their eyes tired, working on a computer makes them prone to distraction, and it’s easier to mark up a printed page than a digital one.
I also know that Messiah is among my favourite works to perform each year. How could this be? Why doesn’t this extreme familiarity (I have memorized the entire thing note for note) breed contempt?The academic answer is that Messiah is Handel at his most brilliant, a well-paced blend of aria and chorus that perfectly matches the arc of the Christian story, a liturgical calendar condensed into three hours.
But the real reason I and other singers love Messiah because we truly know it like no other work. Since it has become an annual Christmas tradition, most choristers have sung it in every venue, in every iteration, with every instrumentation and in every tempo, no matter how deranged or pseudo-experimental. And in that time they have come to know the strange miracle of Messiah: after years of the good and the bad and the ugly, there is always something new, something breathtaking, to be rediscovered in Handel’s writing and Charles Jennens’s libretto.