Latest / Catholic Spirit Radio / Being Catholic #375: Unveiling AI: The Mind vs. Machine Debate

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Being Catholic #375: Unveiling AI: The Mind vs. Machine Debate · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston, and you're listening to Being Catholic right here
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We're going to have a great show for you today. I'm here with my wife, Lynn.
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Again, that's 309-807-2427.
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And we're going to talk a little bit more about AI today.
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I want to read a couple of responses to the article that we read last week by Thomas Fowler.
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And I think they will give us a little bit broader picture of AI and some input
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from some other people, one an engineer and other people who are pretty up on this kind of thing.
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And we will also talk a little bit also about the scientific presumption,
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and it is a presumption, that everything is material.
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And we'll talk a little bit about how the fact is that the human mind is not
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material and how that affects AI.
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And before we start, I'll turn this over to my wife, Lynn, and see what she has to say.
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I know there's so many things to pray for that are going on in our society right now.
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There's a possibility that there has been a signal put out to assassinate The
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President of the United States, that sounds pretty dire,
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but it is a possibility, and it's just that our society seems to be degenerating
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in certain respects, and so pray for it.
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Pray for the fact that we will regain our Christian conscience and outlook,
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and that our society will take a different turn.
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But I'll turn it over to my wife
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Lynn and let her talk maybe a little bit about things along that line.
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Hello out there. Glad to have me back with you this week.
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We need to pray, talk about prayer. We need to pray for our new Pope, Pope Leo XIV.
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He's given some indications that he would like to see some mystique,
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mystery, reintroduced back into the Western Mass.
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We've lost that since Vatican II, and he seems to be,
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in favor of that. He really is encouraging to the Eastern Rite churches to maintain
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what they have practiced and been given and the mystery of the Mass.
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And I hope and pray that he continues with that. I think we have lost an awful lot.
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The other thing we need to pray for is all those that were injured, killed,
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and so forth, to the destruction of homes with the storms the last few days in the Midwest.
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It's been horrific in some areas. I think the last count was 21 or so around St.
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Louis area, if I'm not mistaken, in Missouri and Kentucky, London,
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Kentucky, got hit pretty hard too.
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And then we had the dust storms here.
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Unusual. You know, you think of the desert area for dust storms.
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But here, we got hit with it here.
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The corn isn't high enough yet, or the beans, to make that wind lay down a little
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bit and not affect so much.
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And then there were probably people out there planting and still working in
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the ground yet, too, in that closet. Yeah, pulling it all up, yeah.
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Yeah. But, uh,
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Do you have anything further, Len? Not really. Just need a lot of prayers,
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and for our president, too, in our Congress and the peace in the world.
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I will say you have to give our president a lot of credit. He's trying to solve things peacefully.
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Whether he's going to be allowed to do that, who knows?
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And as far as the Pope talking about restoring mystery or the mystique,
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and that's what he means when we talk about mystery.
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He doesn't mean, in a sense, it's something that is puzzling that we don't know the answer to.
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He means the non-material Christian explanation of things and of the universe.
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And this is what I'm going to talk about to a certain extent today,
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The fact that a religious, a properly religious point of view,
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such as a Christian point of view, is the only rational,
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sane way of looking at the world.
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It supports rationality, that supports science, that supports our whole exploration
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and understanding of the universe. A lot of this with this attempt to explain
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everything from a material point of view has degenerated.
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Secularism always degenerates into irrationality, superstition,
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and basically taking everything that they take strictly on faith alone without
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the ability to prove any of it at all from any rational point of view.
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And this is what I'm going to talk a little bit about today. will support.
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And of course, I will probably be referring to by the end of the program,
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hopefully if I get there, the book The Last Superstition by Edward Fazer.
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And that's an extremely good book. It explains the fact that.
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A religious point of view is the only rational point of view of looking at the universe.
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And the last superstition is referring to the fact of those people who simply
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try to explain everything from a materialist point of view,
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thinking that somehow or another science points in that direction or that supports science.
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And of course, it's totally impossible. There's nothing more hilarious than
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trying to or watching someone try to explain the operation of the mind,
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not just the brain, but of the mind from a materialist point of view. And it's not possible.
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Nobody's ever done it. And the fact is that it
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very rapidly degenerates down into an
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explanation that is chaotic and
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incoherent and contradictory and simply unable to do it for people who are actually
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using causes to explain why there are no causes and people who have a purpose
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of trying to explain the fact that there's no purpose.
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And there's nothing more hilarious
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than to watch someone doing things like this and it not working out.
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And in the long run, what a lot of these people say is sort of they take a just you wait stance.
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Just you wait. You know, someday we will be able to explain the mind in totally materialist terms.
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How will we be able to do this? Well, they don't say, but someday it'll happen.
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It's pretty much like someone saying, someday we will be able to explain why
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two and two can actually equal 23.
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But just you wait, one of these days it'll happen. I can't explain how it will,
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but someday if we wait long enough, it'll happen.
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Yes, of course, it'll happen if we wait long enough, you know.
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Sure, if you wait till your dad gets home to get punished, it's long after.
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You know, and so will pigs fly and so forth and other things along those lines.
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But the fact is, that what they're asserting is totally irrational,
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and what they're trying to do is a fool's errand, impossibility.
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And I think we'll get a little bit at this today when we talk a little bit more about AI.
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So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read from a couple of responses to the
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article that I read last week. I read that article by Thomas Fowler that AI
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doesn't know what it's doing.
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And there were a couple of letters here in the more recent First Things magazine,
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and it's the June-July issue of First Things, June-July 25, and it's just in the letters section.
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And these letters here are addressed to Thomas Fowler and they're making comments
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on his article that AI doesn't know what it's doing.
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So I'll read from those and we'll talk a little bit about them.
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And Amy and me will read a little bit from The Last Superstition showing that
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this attempt to explain the mind in terms of.
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Materialism and in fact actually trying to explain how the world and the universe
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operates from a material, from a strictly materialistic point of view,
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is a fool's error and, you know, it's an exercise in futility.
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But here's an article by, I mean, a letter from an Erica Anderson and she's
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talking, or rather, I'm sorry, it's not Erica Anderson, it's a letter from Carl D.
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Stephan at Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas, commenting on the AI article that we read last time.
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It says, the AI disappointment.
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In AI doesn't know what it's doing, Thomas Fowler rightly criticizes the hype
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and panic-tinged discourse that has portrayed artificial intelligence in both
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apocalyptic and techno-utopic ways.
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In other words, in ways that are doomsday ways and also in utopian ways is what he was addressing.
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Some people are all hyper over how utopian AI is going to be and how it will
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solve all kinds of problems that it really won't solve.
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And other people, of course, are worried that AI will be a doomsday machine
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that will take over the earth or destroy the earth or destroy people and so
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on. So from one extreme to the other.
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He also points out that AI stems from a nominalist paradigm that has no concept
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of abstract entities. And that's true.
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Nominalism is the idea that there are no such things as universals.
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It's the idea that we can have a concept of it.
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We can have a tree. We can look at a particular tree, an oak tree or a maple
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tree or some other type of tree, a big tree, a tall tree, a short tree,
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that there are individual things,
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material things, But the idea of trees or tree-ness is simply something that
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the human mind makes up and it only exists, it doesn't really exist at all.
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And of course, if you try to explain things in terms of not using universals
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such as trees and other abstractions, you can't even talk.
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And universals will creep into your speech no matter what you do.
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And if you try to assert that these kind of things, treeness and so forth and
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triangularity, they only exist as concepts in our minds.
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It means that if all the human minds went out of existence, that somehow the
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concept of trees or the abstraction of triangularity would go out of existence.
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And that doesn't make any sense either.
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And so the only way to explain these things is they must exist in actually a
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mind because it's a mind that thinks of these things.
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And if they still exist after the human mind goes out of existence,
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the logical conclusion is there must be some kind of mind in the universe in which they do exist.
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Or else they exist in some kind of a place we don't know about,
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such as Plato's third realm, whatever that may be.
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But it goes on here. It says, he also points out that, but for an essay,
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rather, I'm sorry, that traces the roots of AI, the homium empiricism.
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Fowler uses the curiously empirical evidence to describe its limitations.
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And what he's saying here is that Fowler is describing AI in terms of empirical
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explanations and material things.
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And he uses these actually to describe its limitations. He's sort of going around
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in a circle. And Fowler would admit this.
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What he's saying really is that all the arguments against Holm and so forth
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exist, but in effect, in his article, which was a short article relative to
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what you could go on about AI,
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he simply didn't have time to insert the Aristotelian explanation that he certainly understands.
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And so if he's going around in a circle, it's just because he's leaving something
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taken for granted out, and that's all.
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And when it refers to Holm, and that's H-U-M-E, spelled David Holm,
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H-U-M-E, was a 18th century philosopher,
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Scottish philosopher, who tried to assert that the brain operates solely on
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a material point of view, explanation,
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and tried to explain basic principles and so forth strictly in terms of materialism,
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and it really doesn't work.
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It has led today to all kinds of philosophical errors in our thinking.
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He goes on, he says, he uses the critical issue to be decided if computers cannot
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duplicate human minds as the empirically observed premise of an argument that
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concludes that humans are not material only and or that human functions cannot
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be relegated to algorithms.
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And the guy is saying, in effect, he concludes this sort of in a circular way.
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He does in that article because he leaves out the whole explanation against
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Holmes, which would not be possible to get into that article.
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And this guy recognizes this as his letter goes on.
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He says, this chain of reasoning depends on the validity of the very issue to
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be decided, namely, can AI duplicate human minds?
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And, of course, Fowler is asserting that it can't. And the reason that it can't is it can't.
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It's material and human minds are not material. Human minds can think in terms
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of non-material abstractions, and if your computer's so-called mind,
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which it really doesn't have, cannot.
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No matter how sophisticated it becomes, it is operating on electronic principles.
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It's operating on electrons and their parts and particles.
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And all of those things are material. And all of those things operate according
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to certain physical laws.
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And those things cannot take into consideration things that are not material
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because they themselves are material.
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If our minds were that way, there's no way we could abstract anything out.
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Fowler is no doubt aware of a line of philosophical reasoning traceable to Aquinas
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and Aristotle that shows that a distinct part of the human mind,
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the intellect, must be a non-material entity.
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And certainly, yes, he is. And the man is giving him credit for that.
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He's saying that Fowler is making these assumptions based on his knowledge of
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Aquinas and his knowledge of Aristotle and how they explained the universe and the mind,
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and that their explanation and their conclusion that there must be a universal
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mind that is a God is more scientific and reasonable and sound,
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and it's a better argument and so forth than the explanation that everything
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in the universe can be explained by material forces, that it really can't be.
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And so the man here is and giving him credit saying, he knows all this.
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He just didn't get it in there. And no, he didn't. And so the argument could
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sound a little bit circular, even though that it's not.
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We're going to take a break and stop here. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Music.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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We're talking about the AI and Thomas Fowler's article that I talked about last
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week, that AI doesn't know what it's doing,
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that AI is not self-aware and AI will never become self-aware,
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and that AI can't think like human beings can think, that AI cannot deal with
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abstractions as human beings can deal with abstractions because AI is strictly
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material, and the human mind,
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unlike the brain, is not strictly material.
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The human mind deals with non-material things such as universals,
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numbers, propositions, and so forth, none of which exist in the real world,
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but at the same time has to exist somewhere.
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They exist in our minds, but even if our minds were not of existence.
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Certain things would not go out of existence.
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They would still be there waiting to be discovered. In other words,
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we don't invent propositions, we don't invent numbers, we don't invent universals
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such as the idea of triangularity and so forth. We discover these things.
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And so they're there to be discovered somewhere.
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Regardless of whether the human mind is even around. And when the human mind
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comes into existence, those things are still there waiting to be discovered,
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and they are discovered.
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We don't have a legislature or something that comes along and says,
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we're going to declare that a triangle is a three-sided figure, you know.
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With closed straight lines, and that its angles add up to 180 degrees,
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and that the Pythagorean theorem states that the sum of the two sides of a triangle,
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of a right triangle are equal to the hypotenuse of the right triangle.
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We don't make up these things. We discover that they're there.
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We don't invent them. And so they do exist, but they're not material.
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You can't reach out, touch, smell, or anything else.
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And they exist. Well, then where do they exist? They can't exist in the real world.
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As we know, there's no such thing as a perfect triangle, even though our minds can conceive of it.
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In the real world, we have all different kinds of triangles made out of all
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kinds of different things.
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You can have wooden ones, plastic ones, glass ones, any kind of triangle you
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wish, different colors with different size lines and so forth.
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You can have some drawn very sloppily and some drawn very carefully,
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but none of them in the real world, if you blew them up big enough, would be perfect.
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There would always be squiggles and jerks and little notches and so forth,
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or maybe the angles would not add up to exactly 180 degrees and so on.
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Nevertheless, Plus, our mind can conceive of perfect triangles and so forth,
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but not just the triangles. We don't just think of a triangle in our minds.
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We discover the idea of the essence of triangularity.
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We understand that how triangles work and that there's 180 degrees in every triangle and so on.
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And these are abstract things that don't exist materially, and yet the mind
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can grasp them. But, of course, AI can't.
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So it goes on, he says, part of the human mind that forms abstract concepts
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performs something that neither computers nor any other purely material entity can do.
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And this is the problem why computers will not become like a human mind,
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because computers operate on a material basis, and you can't change that.
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And material does not have intentionality in the same way that the human mind has intentionality.
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The human mind has will. It can intend to do something before it does it.
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It can change its mind as it goes along.
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It can deal with something that it has never, ever dealt with before.
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It can put things together in abstract ways.
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It can understand, for example, that if it looks at a lot of different individual
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triangles, there's something in common with each of them besides just the fact
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that they have three straight sides and so forth.
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They have triangularity. That is, they add up to a perfect 180 degrees,
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that the sides are exactly straight, and that there's a theorem that can be
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applied to right triangles, that is, triangles that are drawn with a 90-degree angle,
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that those triangles will always have sides that are, when they're squared,
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are equal to the square of the hypotenuse.
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And we can abstract that. A computer can't do that. And we could call that the
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Pythagorean theorem, because Pythagoras was the one that first stated it,
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although probably people saw it before that.
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Computers don't see those things. So it goes on here, it says,
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the detailed argument for this contention that the human mind is more than material,
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can be found at length in Michael Agras' highly readable book, The Immortal in You.
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And Michael Agras also has written another book that I've used on his program
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in the past, and that's called Who Designed the Designer?
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And the question, of course, doesn't imply that someone did design the design.
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In other words, he is answering a lot of atheists and a lot of materialists
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who try to assert that everything has a,
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you know, that the Aristotelian teaches that everything has a cause and therefore what caused God.
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That is, therefore, who or what designed the designer.
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And Agras here is not conceding to their argument that this is the case.
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But Argras is here explaining why it's not necessary to think that something
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caused God, that why God has to be the first cause,
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that everything else in our material universe has to have an explanation of
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how it came into existence.
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In other words, anything that has potential has to have something outside of
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itself that activates that potential.
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But at some point, that regress has to stop.
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You have to have an unchanged change. In other words, if you have a situation
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in which you see a number of freight cars passing you on the track and someone asks you,
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maybe your child says, daddy, what's their mommy?
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What's pulling those freight cars? And you say, well, the freight car in front
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of the one is pulling it and the freight car in front of that is pulling it
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and the freight car in front of that is pulling it.
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In other words, you are giving a child, if you did that, something that really
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isn't an explanation. It seems to be, but a freight car has no power to pull anything.
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And so at some point in the chain, there has to be something that does have
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the power, that doesn't need to be activated as the freight cars need to be activated.
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The chain can't go on forever with just one car pulling another.
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And a cause and effect thing can't go on in a circle such as A caused B.
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B caused C, and C caused A.
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That doesn't work that way. In effect, you're saying that B and C come into
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existence before A, and then they cause A, and then A causes them.
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You're just going around in circles.
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And so, Agras here is saying there is some point at which that regress has to
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stop, And there has to be something that is purely actual, that doesn't need
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any actualizing, that doesn't have any potential whatsoever,
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that all potential in it is fulfilled, that it contains everything there is
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to be contained in the universe and maybe more.
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And this is what we consider to be God, some kind of a mind and so forth that
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I'll get into a little bit more.
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But the point is that that's what Agros is talking about in Who Designed the Designer.
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He's answering that accusation often given by materialists and atheists.
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Okay, if everything has a cause, whose cause is God? But the fact is that people
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like Aristotle and Aquinas did not say that everything has a cause.
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They said somewhere in a chain of causation, there has to be something that
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starts it that doesn't have a cause. And it has always been here.
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And so, you know.
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He goes on here, he says, The detailed argument for this contention can be found
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at length in Michael Ogros' highly readable book, The Immortal in You,
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and in somewhat more technical form in an article,
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Artificial Intelligence and Its Natural Limits, that Geola, Klima,
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and I published in 2021 in AI and Society.
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So he's saying that we, although in that article that Thomas Fowler wrote,
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He didn't have time to get into it, that they, these two,
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have published a lengthy article on artificial intelligence in which they do
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address the idea of material and immateriality, that they do show,
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like Michael Igros did and others, that the mind is not material,
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that the mind has to be something other than material.
28:09
And he goes on, he says, starting from the immateriality of the human intellect,
28:15
one can derive many of Fowler's conclusions about the limitations of AI with
28:19
greater assurance. And you certainly can.
28:22
But you have to posit the fact that the mind, unlike AI, is immaterial.
28:29
It can grasp immaterial things. It can grasp things that don't really exist
28:33
in a material world, such as universals and such as propositions and such as numbers.
28:38
Those things don't really exist in our regular material world,
28:42
but they do exist somewhere because they're in our minds.
28:45
And we also know that if our minds were not of existence, these things are still
28:49
there waiting to be discovered.
28:51
Because if a mind came back into existence, a human mind, those things would
28:56
be waiting there for it to discover.
28:57
We don't invent them. We don't make them up. We suddenly look into the universe
29:02
and see, aha, there's such a thing as triangles and triangularity and so on.
29:08
The true hazards of AI lie not in some sci-fi apocalyptic takeover,
29:14
but in careless application of AI systems to situations that require human conceptual
29:20
insight and judgment, and in our willingness to conform our human lives to machine-like
29:25
standards of behavior. So this is what he's saying.
29:28
If there's any apocalyptic dangers in AI,
29:33
it's not because somehow they can become intelligent in the same way that humans
29:39
can and decide to take over the whole world and maybe kill us all off and so
29:43
forth with all of these dire scenarios that a lot of people talking about AI
29:48
paint for us. It's not any of those things.
29:51
It will be the belief that they can do things that they aren't unable to do.
29:55
We might put them in charge of our whole grid or electrical system and so forth,
30:00
and it might be that they're not up to the task.
30:02
And also, he's saying that human beings in wanting to give away their responsibility,
30:09
especially their religious responsibilities, the idea of understanding the universe
30:14
in religious terms, in non-material terms.
30:18
Human beings want to seem to give
30:19
that up and somehow or another not to be responsible along those lines.
30:24
If we do this, that's what could be very, very dangerous.
30:28
And so that's written by Carl G. Stephan, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.
30:35
So they're agreeing with Thomas Fowler here and saying that we also have an
30:40
explanation that goes further.
30:42
Well, Fowler's aware of that, and he does have an explanation.
30:45
I read it in Touchstone Magazine that goes further as well, but it's a lot longer
30:51
article and it's not as easy to grasp and understand. So he's just being.
30:57
Brief in the article he had and didn't have time to get into all those things like I'm doing now.
31:02
But here's another letter I'm referring to the same thing, Thomas Fowler's article.
31:08
It says, Kudos to Thomas Fowler for exposing the truth about AI,
31:13
both its limitations and its dangers.
31:16
As a fellow engineer with a 37-year career in providing professional services
31:21
in the design and construction industry,
31:24
I've learned firsthand about the overpromise of new technologies versus their
31:30
reality and people's naivete in believing in no limits.
31:34
This is again in believing that AI can do things really that it can't do.
31:39
Frustrations from new technology have been a thing for years.
31:43
Some recent disasters can be attributed to software and not just human error.
31:49
Would it be human error to put too much trust in our creations?
31:53
Well, I don't know if it's human error in the sense of misusing or building into a material thing,
32:00
something that could be a glitch or mistaken, but it certainly is a human error
32:05
in our thinking to put too much trust in some of the machines and so forth that
32:10
we create and expect that somehow or another they will take over responsibility
32:14
from us and let us avoid responsibilities that we have to have.
32:19
It's odd that the hype for AI seems to run counter to the current trend of reducing
32:25
technology in our lives.
32:27
And I guess there may be a trend that's going on now that maybe I'm not so much
32:32
aware of, of the attempt to reduce technology in our lives and be less technical.
32:37
And certainly, depending on AI to do some of the things people think that it
32:42
can do would be depending too much on technology and hoping that technology
32:48
can do for us what it really can't do.
32:51
If the hype bears fruit, then the errors will become more numerous and disastrous.
32:55
In other words, if people continue to believe in the hype and they do things
33:00
based on the idea that AI can do things that it really can't do,
33:05
then we will have a lot of problems and maybe some disasters.
33:10
It says, then as we continue down the same path, technology apologists will
33:15
claim that the mistakes were just bugs that need fixing.
33:18
In other words, people who want to believe that AI can do things they can't
33:23
do will say, oh, well, we can fix it.
33:25
You know, instead of understanding, you have to address the philosophical situation
33:30
in the first place that the mind doesn't operate on algorithms.
33:35
And we don't operate on material things alone.
33:39
That the mind is capable of operating in an entirely different way and understanding
33:44
and knowing entirely different ways than a computer can.
33:48
The machine is limited to the material forces. The mind is not. And if.
33:55
Again, like I say, if people think that the mind can be explained materially,
34:00
they're on a fool's errand because a lot of people have tried,
34:03
and all you do is degenerate into just hilarious contradictions,
34:08
trying to show why there are causes that cause things not to be a cause or why
34:15
there are purposes that show that there's no purposes, and so forth.
34:21
Total contradictions.
34:23
And this guy goes on. He says, I'm not blind to the many benefits of these new
34:27
technological advances, but sometimes the juice just isn't worth the squeeze.
34:32
And yes, hubris is human error.
34:35
And he's talking about sometimes, I mean, we have to consider this,
34:39
as Thomas Fowler said also, will AI pay off in costs?
34:45
In other words, will the cost benefits be favorable?
34:49
It's going to use a tremendous amount of electricity. So if it does pay off,
34:54
we're going to have to find ways to generate that electricity,
34:57
and we're certainly not going to do it by all the idiocies of depending on so-called green energy.
35:03
The wind and solar panels and so forth are not going to produce the amount of
35:08
electricity and energy we're going to need in the future to operate our technological civilization.
35:14
And certainly, AI can be a tool. I would guess. I don't think that it will be
35:19
abandoned at all entirely.
35:21
Nevertheless, it isn't going to be what a lot of people think it's going to be.
35:25
It isn't going to be some kind of savior, and it isn't going to be some kind
35:28
of disaster either, unless you put AI in charge of things that it's not able to handle.
35:35
And yes, hubris is a human error, and he's talking here about hubris,
35:40
and that is hubris breeds nemesis.
35:43
That is, egoism and pride goeth before a fall. In other words,
35:47
they themselves actually cause the very thing that will destroy that hubris,
35:55
that egotism and egotistical behavior.
35:58
And if people don't watch it and make sure that they curb their exaggerations.
36:04
And then Thomas Fowler here replies, so at this point here, we're going to stop and take a break.
36:10
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Music.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
38:44
We're back from our break And we're continuing to talk a little bit about AI
38:48
and specifically the fact that the AI operates on a material basis and the human
38:54
mind does not operate on a material basis.
38:57
And again, I'll refer you to a book by Edward Fazer, The Last Superstition.
39:03
And that is a very, very good philosophical, that is metaphysical explanation
39:08
of why it's not possible for the human mind to operate strictly and only on a material basis.
39:16
And this idea that somehow or another, someday we will be able to explain everything
39:21
in terms of materialism is a pipe dream.
39:24
And it isn't going to happen. any more than two and two is going to be shown
39:29
equal 23, or that two and two is going to be shown even equal five.
39:34
There are certain things that aren't going to happen, and that's one of them
39:37
that's not going to happen because there simply isn't any explanation along
39:42
those lines, and they become absolutely irrational.
39:46
Non-religious explanations become totally irrational, and only a solid religious
39:51
explanation like Christianity actually looks at, understands,
39:57
and is able to understand.
40:00
Profess the universe in rational and reasonable terms and explain it.
40:06
And the fact that we have deviated from it for 300 years with this idea of science
40:12
somehow or another trying to cut off the idea that there are purposes in the world,
40:17
and even Darwinism, which actually has arrived through DNA,
40:23
had the very idea of purpose, still trying
40:26
to cut off the idea of design and
40:29
purpose and so forth in the world has led to a lot of what is going on in our
40:35
thinking today in our actually degeneration from a Christian society into a
40:40
pagan society and degenerating back into all kinds of superstitions and so forth,
40:46
such as transgender and unworkable solutions to human problems and a society
40:53
that is becoming crueler and harsher and actually did it beginning to break
40:59
down and not work anywhere near as well.
41:01
And the understanding that it was the whole Western civilization that arrived
41:08
at science and other things, and it did that not because or in spite of, rather, religion,
41:14
but because of it and because of the very Christian principles.
41:17
It took a while, and it went up and down. It didn't do it all smoothly,
41:20
but it did happen, and it seems like we're deviating from that.
41:25
Anyhow, Thomas Fowler replies, Thank you to Professor Carl Steffen.
41:30
I do not dispute what he says, which is very valuable,
41:33
meaning that he understands that his explanation in the article goes a little
41:39
bit in a circle because he left out the whole Aristotelian explanation of how
41:44
the universe and how the mind operates on the basis of immaterial forces as well as material.
41:50
He says,
42:20
wanted to believe along with him to simply take as some kind of a brilliant analysis.
42:26
I mean, Holm came to the idea that there's no such thing as cause and effect.
42:30
That, in fact, if you throw a brick at a window, the throwing of the brick and
42:34
the breaking of the window are two separate events and that you can't prove
42:39
that one causes the other.
42:40
But, of course, anybody that talks about a situation like this,
42:45
that is a brick breaking a window, doesn't look at it as two separate events.
42:49
They don't look at windows, glass being shattered as somehow or another a brick
42:55
being thrown and then the glass shattering.
42:57
I mean, actually, you can throw bricks all day. And if they don't hit the window,
43:01
the glass won't shatter.
43:02
But the fact is, is that the cause and effect explanation is that as the glass
43:08
pushes into the window, the glass shatters.
43:11
Or you can say, as the glass shatters, the brick pushes into the window.
43:16
In other words, they are one simultaneous event.
43:18
And the brick, in effect, does cause the glass to shatter.
43:22
Or you can say the glass shatters because it's caused by the brick hitting it,
43:26
however you want to explain it.
43:27
But the events are simultaneous. Holm tries to separate all these things and
43:31
then pretend that there isn't any connection between the two.
43:36
And this is plain pure pretense and pure assumption simply because you don't
43:44
want to show that there are such things as causes effect in a world and that
43:49
there are final explanations.
43:50
You don't want to show, for example, that the purpose of the eyes are foreseen.
43:56
Now, you want to explain that everything is in flux and things don't have any
44:01
real cause. They're just happenstance.
44:03
And if they happen to do certain things, they cause the organism to live and
44:08
therefore the organism produces more organisms and so on.
44:11
And we can get rid of all these causes and effects and purposes,
44:14
except you really can't. You couldn't get through the day.
44:18
Biologists couldn't even do biology without assuming that things have functions
44:22
and purposes and everything else. And you can't even talk that way without taking
44:27
into consideration cause and effect.
44:29
So anyhow.
44:32
When compared to human knowing, these assumptions and limitations reveal that
44:37
AI is radically different and inferior.
44:39
As such, it will be unable to fulfill the ambitious goals and the din of unbridled
44:45
speculation about its takeover of jobs, society, and human civilization.
44:49
Although AI is a tool, and it could be disruptive.
44:54
I mean, it isn't going to displace human beings or something like some people
44:58
explain entirely. But certainly, it could do things and so forth where we have
45:04
people in charge, just like we have invented other machines that have taken
45:07
over people's jobs and so forth.
45:09
And there was disruptions in society. Actually, more work was actually provided
45:15
and caused by the changes.
45:16
But in the meantime, people were seriously, you know, affected.
45:20
And they can be affected negatively. And every society has to take this into
45:24
consideration that some of the things that are, you know, when cars came into
45:30
existence, of course, they put people with horses and so forth out of work.
45:34
And when tractors came into existence, horse farmers and so forth had to change.
45:38
And there have been a lot of disruptions by technology in our society.
45:42
And it certainly would be a little bit sort of imaginative to think that all
45:49
of this stuff could come into existence without any disruptions whatsoever and just smoothly.
45:54
It won't. There will be disruptions and so forth. And AI will be a tool and it will affect people.
46:00
All technological change does. But it won't be something that's a miracle.
46:04
And it won't be something that will replace human beings entirely.
46:08
It will cause probably other jobs in other areas, and it will cause a transition
46:14
in society that people will have to adapt to.
46:16
All of that is simply practical understanding.
46:20
Anyhow, he goes on to say, he says, My hope is that enough people in positions
46:24
of influence will come to realize what AI can and cannot do and make decisions accordingly.
46:31
I did not intend my words as a general philosophical investigation.
46:35
In other words, he understands that his article wasn't a complete philosophical investigation into AI,
46:43
and he understands what that investigation is, and he certainly could write
46:47
about it because he has, but not in that particular article.
46:51
That would be the subject of a much longer discussion, which,
46:55
in fact, I will cover in a book that I am currently writing on AI.
46:59
So when I say he's talked about that before, he has in longer articles.
47:03
But now, evidently, he's writing a book on AI to take into consideration the
47:08
fact that AI cannot operate on a non-material basis.
47:12
AI cannot deal with abstractions such as universals, numbers, and propositions.
47:18
That discussion, as Stephan notes, involves reasons why machines,
47:22
materialism in this context, can never become human, have souls,
47:27
or otherwise duplicate humans.
47:29
It's not going to do that. It's not going to have a soul. It's not going to
47:32
duplicate humans because those things are immaterial.
47:36
And AI is strictly material.
47:38
And thank you to Mr. Andrew Dimmick. I'm in complete agreement.
47:43
I have over 50 years of experience in the tech field and, like him,
47:48
have seen many hype cycles.
47:50
Most recently, there was virtual reality, which made a splash and was going
47:56
to transform many things.
47:58
You don't hear much about it anymore.
48:01
And that's true. And a lot of things that are supposed to be making a jar of
48:05
a splash are sort of unique and different.
48:08
And they cause a lot of attention for a while and they sort of fade back into
48:11
the woodwork. I don't think AI will.
48:13
I think AI is going to get better at operating certain types of systems,
48:19
materially operated systems that it can do. It's not going to take over things
48:25
that the human mind are needed for.
48:28
You don't hear much about it now. He talked about the virtual reality.
48:33
Then there was quantum computing, and I talked about that last week,
48:37
and that's quantum computers are able to actually do a quintillion calculations per second.
48:45
Did that make them anywhere near human intelligence? And the answer, no, it didn't.
48:49
In fact, here he points out that these quantum computers are very specialized
48:53
machines, and they're not as good for non-quantum computers for certain things.
49:00
But they thought that they would. Quantum computing was going to change everything,
49:05
though the pundits didn't seem to know anything about it. And they don't know a lot about AI either.
49:10
In fact, I was so dismayed by my own IT students' lack of knowledge of the different
49:15
types of computers, including quantum computers, that I wrote a book on the
49:19
subject, Computers, Computation, and the Limits of Computability.
49:24
So, you know, even the quantum computers have limits. They can't do what the human mind can do.
49:30
For reasons I further explore in the book, you don't hear much about quantum
49:34
computers these days either, because they're only good for certain specialized things.
49:39
And that's what he says. He says, they are only suitable for very specific applications.
49:45
In this, they are similar to AI.
49:48
Dimmick's point about the improper use of technology is well taken.
49:52
People often look to technology as a way to solve all of our problems,
49:57
and they seem to have all of this hope for AI, and they're going to be disappointed.
50:01
As Dimmick notes, it is important to place technology in the total context of
50:06
human life in order to properly evaluate it. In other words,
50:11
AI simply isn't going to do all of those things they expect it to do.
50:16
It isn't going to become intelligent like human beings.
50:20
And the fact that it can write articles that seem sensible and so forth is the
50:24
fact that its algorithms are fed into it, grammar and so forth,
50:29
and word choice are fed into it.
50:31
And if you follow these things from an algorithmic point of view,
50:36
you will churn out articles and so forth that sound as if they're very,
50:40
very human. But they're not.
50:42
And a lot of these articles are becoming full of more and more errors,
50:47
even mathematical errors.
50:49
Because even in mathematics and numbers, AI has a hard time to dealing with abstractions.
50:56
Because it can't do it in the same way as human beings.
50:59
So there you have it, and if you want to understand more,
51:04
I would suggest getting The Last Superstition and reading that book because
51:08
it explains the whole Aristotelian concept of the mind and the Aristotelian
51:13
concept of the proof for God,
51:16
the fact that it's very logical to prove that there is a God simply by using
51:22
one of his arguments, and that is the argument of the unchanged changer,
51:27
that you have a lot of chains of order in our society or in our world today
51:35
that are essential in a sense that if I had a stick in my hand and I was using a stick to move a stone,
51:45
you have my hand moving the stick and then the stone moving.
51:49
That's called an essential order. In other words, when my hand moves,
51:52
the six moves, and the stone moves, everything has happened simultaneously in the here and now.
51:57
I mean, a chain doesn't reach back into the past, and we could have longer and
52:02
longer chains than that.
52:02
I could go on and say my hand is the first cause, but I also could say that
52:07
my muscles in my arm are causing my hand to move, and there are neurons and
52:13
so forth and everything in my body that are causing my muscles to move and so on.
52:17
And you can trace things back. But the point is, is that no matter how far you
52:21
trace it back, at some point there has to be a first cause.
52:25
And those causes all have to be working at the same time.
52:29
In other words, when my neurons cause my muscles to move and my arm causes my
52:34
hand to move, then the stick moves and then the rock moves.
52:37
And that all has to be done simultaneously.
52:40
And nothing in that chain can be left out. If it is, the rock won't move.
52:44
But the rock does move. so we know that everything in the chain is working.
52:48
But the point is, is that you can't keep going back.
52:51
There has to be a first cause that starts everything else. And that first cause
52:57
can't need a cause outside of itself.
52:59
If it did, it wouldn't be a first cause. So there has to be something.
53:04
That actually is causing all of these things to operate simultaneously in the here and now.
53:10
And that something has to be pure actuality. It can't have a cause.
53:15
All of its potential has to be actualized. And if you start from that premise,
53:20
it's very rational to explain God.
53:22
And the only way you can really explain it is that somehow God is outside of
53:28
our own time and space because in our own time and space,
53:31
everything can be traced back to something that comes before it and something
53:36
that is actualizing it and something that is actualizing that.
53:39
And you keep on going back forever and you can't do that.
53:42
So there must be something outside our time and space that is operating in such
53:46
a way as to be a first cause to cause everything else to work.
53:51
And that first cause probably would be something like a mind because if we look
53:55
at universals and abstractions and so forth, They are things that exist in our
54:00
minds, and they seem like things that only can exist in a mind.
54:03
But if all of our minds went out of existence, those things would still exist.
54:07
And if they do, they have to exist somewhere.
54:10
And if they exist in a mind, then there has to be a mind that always exists.
54:14
That mind has to be actually outside of and not in our own time and space.
54:19
And that would be then the mind of God.
54:21
So you can make an argument along those lines very rationally and explain the
54:26
fact that the universe works on some kind of principles like that.
54:29
And our mind is close enough to it that we can get in touch with it because
54:33
we can actually understand those immaterial things that are working.
54:37
Whereas material things such as AI can't.
54:42
They can't operate like the human mind because they operate strictly in a material world.
54:49
At any rate, we're going to stop there and I think about as far as we can go with this explanation.
54:54
I hope you enjoyed it. I would hope that everybody would get the book,
54:59
The Last Superstition by Edward Fazer, and that's F-E-S-E-R.
55:02
And it was a very, very readable book that will give you an excellent explanation
55:07
of the fact that there are purposes in the world, final causes and so forth,
55:12
and that the mind works on an immaterial basis. So, St.
55:17
Michael, the archangel, defend us in
55:20
battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
55:24
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray.
55:27
And do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God,
55:31
thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.
55:37
Amen. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic
55:41
Spirit Radio. If you'd like to contact Bob, email bob at catholicspiritradio.com.
55:48
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