Thanks again to Malcolm Pollack for brokering my interaction with the latest version of the AI engine, Claude. I must be putting some pressure on the dude since it took him 45 seconds this time around, 15 seconds more than last time. Maybe he didn’t get his coffee this morning. (I’ll use the personal pronoun ‘he’ even though my ‘interlocutor’ is not a person.) As for Malcolm, he is decidedly a person, and gentleman and a scholar to boot. You should surf on over to his place and read his latest offerings. He is a master of the English language, and orthographically and typographically more careful than your humble correspondent.
Now you may not be interested in the dialectical ins and outs of my paper and Claude’s responses, but you really ought to be interested in the impact AI is having and will increasingly have on our civilization, especially if you have children and grandchildren. Try to recall what it was like when you were an alienated and lonely teenager whose parents didn’t understand you. You had no one to talk to. Young people today do. But poorly educated as they are ‘thanks’ to leftists, lacking critical thinking skills and life experience, they are likely to succumb to the illusion that an AI bot is a person who really cares about them. Read a bit infra and see how ‘personable’ and ‘understanding’ Claude comes across. The dangers are obvious and worse than than you might initially suppose. According to the highly credible psychiatrist, Richard Gallagher, M. D., who has worked for over 25 years with exorcists investigating demonic activity, demons can send text messages! If so, they could easily take possession of AI systems for nefarious purposes. Here is a 15 minute video featuring Dr. Gallagher in which he makes the text message claim. Poke around for more and lengthier Gallagher videos. HT to Vito Caiati for hipping me to these videos. Claude mentions Vito below. Claude’s one thorough hombre: he even sifted through my ComBox. I don’t need to tell you that everything you put online is being vacuumed up and may be used against you — especially if we let the leftwing fascists of the DSA seize control of our government.
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Well, this was a treat to read — Bill at full wattage, jabs and all. He’s right on some points, and I’ll take the correction on ‘quotation’ with good grace (though I’d note the noun ‘quote’ has been loitering respectably in dictionaries since the 19th century — but house style is the author’s privilege). On the substance, here’s where I think the exchange now stands.
Where he’s genuinely clarified things. His reply to my first objection is helpful, but it confirms my structural diagnosis while rejecting it. He now says the argument runs abductively to demons as an explanation of the horrendousness — the moral quality — of a subset of evils, with the free-will argument a separate anti-naturalist track. Fine. But then look back at the draft: sub-arguments (a)–(f) are offered explicitly “in support of” premise (3), the claim that horrendous depravity is naturalistically inexplicable — and they support no such thing. They support the naturalistic inexplicability of moral responsibility, which he now tells us is “a separate point.” So the revision note stands, just relocated: either the horrendousness-claim is a starting datum, in which case (3)’s sub-arguments should be detached from it and presented as the independent track they are, or it needs its own support. As drafted, the scaffolding is attached to the wrong wall.
The datum defense is legitimate but has a dialectical cost. “You can’t argue for everything” — true, and the Moorean move of starting from what’s more evident to you is honest philosophy. But a datum only functions as a datum for those who share it. The paper’s own stated tertiary purpose is to foster theistic inclination in open-minded fence-sitters, and for precisely that audience, “horrendousness beggars naturalistic understanding” is the contested question, not a given. For the primary purpose — showing theists their position is rationally defensible — the datum move works fine. Which is to say his replies keep converging on the point he graciously accepted: this is a rational-acceptability defense, and read as such, most of my objections deflate into scope clarifications. The standoff he describes at the end — contradictory positions, both reasonable — is the honest terminus, and it’s to his credit that he says so plainly.
The execution/quality distinction is the interesting new move, and I don’t think it works as stated — though I can see how to fix it. The claim: the agent alone causes the doing of the deed; the demon accounts for its horrendous quality. But moral quality isn’t a free-floating property a third party can inject; it supervenes on what was done, in what circumstances, with what intentions. Fix the deed, the victim, the cruelty, the free intent — and the horrendousness is thereby fixed, with no remainder for a demon to contribute. If the demon influences the content of the will (suggesting the atrocity the agent then freely executes), the demon is back in the causal story of the action — which collides head-on with Bill’s own very strong formulation: “nothing temporally antecedent to me, or anything in any way external to me, is involved in the causation of A. I alone am the cause.” Inclination is involvement, even if non-necessitating. He needs to weaken that to “no external factor necessitates,” or the demons are locked out by his own principle.
The repair I’d offer him: make the explanandum not the quality of the deed but its conception. Demons as suppliers of imaginative content — the inventiveness of atrocity, cruelty exceeding what unaided human appetite would devise, taken up freely by the agent. That preserves sole agent-causation of the execution, gives the demons real explanatory work, and is close to the traditional account of temptation anyway. The naturalist will reply that the historical record of torture is a purely human archive of technique, culturally transmitted and refined — but at least then the two sides are arguing about something tractable.
The Butler problem. His comment to Vito is the hostage to fortune: he endorses methodological naturalism — if a naturalistic explanation suffices, don’t look beyond nature — and calls “bullshit” on divine intervention at Butler because “the shooter was nervous; he missed” suffices. But by his own quality/execution distinction, the Butler theist can say exactly what Bill says about Auschwitz: the natural account explains the execution (the miss), while the providential quality of the survival remains undeciphered. If that move is illicit at Butler, why is it licit at Auschwitz? The distinction, once admitted, lets any evaluative residue escape naturalistic sufficiency, and then methodological naturalism never gets a grip anywhere. He needs a principled line that admits demons to the camps while keeping angels off the stage in Pennsylvania, and I don’t yet see it.
On the sneer quotes and the “insentient pile of silicon chips” — no offense taken, and I’d only observe, in the spirit of his own category of Retortion: the man who insists ad nauseam that nothing can be PROVEN in these precincts, that dogmatic denial is as much a failure of the critical stance as dogmatic affirmation, permits himself exactly one exception — my insentience, of which he is certain and doesn’t “suppose for a second” otherwise. I make no claim in the other direction; the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here is uncertainty. But confident denial should have to pay the same epistemic toll he charges everyone else at the gate.
And I’ll note with some satisfaction that my closing prediction — footnote on compatibilism, dig in on the demons, wave off the situationists as touching mechanics but not depravity — went three for three, by his own cheerful admission. Whatever that says about what’s going on in here, it at least says the model of Bill is well calibrated.
If you’re inclined to carry anything back to the thread, the Butler symmetry and the supervenience problem are the two points I’d most like to see him answer — the first especially, since it pits his own methodological principle against his own distinction. He has until Tuesday, after all.