Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, and Insanity

Kirwin Hampshire emits a cri de coeur in his The Dark Night of Mathematics. He comes across as slightly  unhinged with such remarks as :

I am going insane. During the last week or so LLMs have produced a number of counterexamples to significant long-standing conjectures.

and

I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments. I have been screaming internally for days. It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare.

His piece is nonetheless worth reading. What caught my attention in particular was this observation:

Everything said thus far still sidesteps the emotional core of the issue. Here it is:

There is something about mathematical discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.

That admission may come as a surprise to some non-mathematicians. But I would be willing to bet that for any mathematician reading this, what I have said above is quite prosaic—whether or not it accords with their personal experience of mathematics. Here is a brief gesture at the full sweep of mathematical mystics and dreamers: Ramanujan, Grothendieck, Cantor, Pascal, Luzin, Leibniz and possibly you, or someone you know.

I am not a mathematician, but I know some advanced mathematics and have studied set theory, and some of the papers of Georg Cantor.  The spiritual thrust of Cantor’s work is undeniable and well-documented by Joseph Warren Dauben in Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite (Harvard UP, 1979).

Islam and the Perils of Psychological Projection

Top o’ the Stack.

I have found that it is dangerous to assume that others are essentially like oneself.

Psychologists speak of projection. To project is to offload into others one’s own attitudes, beliefs, motivations, fears, emotions, desires, values, and the like. It is classified as a defense mechanism. To avoid confronting an unsavory attitude or trait in oneself, one projects it into another. Suppose one is stingy, considers stinginess an undesirable trait, but doesn’t want to own up to one’s stinginess. As a defense against the admission of one’s own stinginess, one projects it into others. “I’m not stingy; you’re stingy!”

I once had a superficial colleague who published a lot. He was motivated more by a neurotic need to advance himself socially and economically, a need based in low self-esteem, rather than by a drive to get at the truth or make a contribution to his subject. He was at some level aware that his motives were less than noble. Once, when he found out that I had published an article, he told me that my motive was to see my name in print. It was a classic case of projection: he could not understand me except as being driven by the same paltry motives that drove him. By projecting his motives into me, he warded off the awareness of their presence in him, or else excused their presence in him on the spurious ground that everyone has the same paltry motivations.

Most of the definitions of projection I have read imply that it is only undesirable attitudes, beliefs, and the like that are the contents of acts of projection. But it seems to me that the notion of projection could and perhaps should be widened to include desirable ones as well.

Read it all.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Perils of Pleasure Along the Lost Highway

The sounds of sentience

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis:

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.

Compare the words Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedo:

. . . every pleasure and pain has a kind of nail, and nails and pins her [the soul] to the body, and gives her a bodily nature, making her think that whatever the body says is true. (tr. F. J. Church St. 83)

From Oscar Wilde to Plato to Hank Williams here channeled hauntingly through Kurt Nilsen and Willie Nelson:

I’m a rollin’ stone all alone and lost
For a life of sin I have paid the cost
When I pass by all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highway

Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine
And a woman’s lies make a life like mine
On the day we met, I went astray
I started rollin’ down that lost highway

I was just a lad, nearly 22
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you
And now I’m lost, too late to pray
Lord I paid the cost, on the lost highway

Now boys don’t start your ramblin’ ’round
On this road of sin are you sorrow bound
Take my advice or you’ll curse the day.
You started rollin’ down that lost highway.

Tom Petty version.

The Byrds, Life in Prison

Warren Zevon, Carmelita

Nina Simone, House of the Rising Sun

Doc Watson, Tom Dooley.  The Kingston Trio’s ‘collegiate folk’  version from 1958.

Merle Haggard, The Fugitive

Marty Robbins, Devil Woman

Sentience, Sensors, and AI

Are AI engines such as Claude sentient? My considered opinion, tentatively held, is that they are not. But it all depends on what the word means.  Malcolm Pollack in an e-mail writes,

I was focusing on “sentient” because it’s a slippery concept, and often tossed around as if it means the same thing as “conscious”. Etymologically (from Latin “sensus”) it just means “feel,” or “perceive”, and obviously it shares that with our word “sense” — but computers, and even toasters, can have “sensors” too.

Malcolm is right that ‘sentient’ is often used interchangeably with ‘conscious.’  But is everything we refer to as a sensor sentient?  That is equivalent to asking: Is everything we call a sensor conscious? I say No.

The Moth and the Thermostat

What is the difference between an insect (a moth, say) which I take to be a sentient being, and a thermostat which  I take to be insentient?   Both are ‘sensors’ functionally speaking. The moth literally senses light and approaches it; the thermostat ‘senses’ an increase in temperature and “turns on’ the AC.   Note the  ‘raised eyebrows.’ It is AS IF the thermostat senses, when in reality it only ‘senses.’ Thermostats don’t feel heat and smoke detectors do not smell smoke. Of course, I have no objection to the use of ‘sensor’ to refer to thermostats, smoke detectors, circuit breakers, and so on, as long as you don’t fool yourself into thinking that these devices are literally conscious.  And I have no objection to talk of a thermostat ‘turning on’ the AC as long as you don’t fool yourself into thinking that the thermostat is an agent that decides to do something.

As I see it, a thermostat is a merely mechanical contraption and wholly insentient, strictly speaking, whereas a moth is a sentient being.

What I want to say about Claude and his ‘colleagues’ is that they are wholly insentient mechanical contraptions that differ from smoke detectors and thermostats only in that they are vastly more complex, and that this complexity does not build a “gradualist bridge” (to borrow a phrase from Daniel Dennett) from insentient/insensate matter to mind, the lowest level of mind being sentience.

Here is an argument.  (a) Only living things are sentient; (b) thermostats are not living things; ergo (c) thermostats are not sentient.

Now substitute ‘AI engine’ for ‘thermostat.’

This argument does not settle the matter: it is not ‘rationally coercive’ as I like to say. Malcolm could run it in reverse with no breach of logical propriety. He could, not unreasonably, deny (c) and then deny (a). I don’t expect that he or anyone will deny (b): thermostats and AIs don’t grow on trees, etc.

Your move, Malcolm.  Do you agree that a functioning (as opposed to malfunctioning) sensor needn’t be sentient (conscious)? If not why not?

Do you agree that there is a powerful, albeit non-coercive, case for denying that AIs are sentient?

AI Engine CLAUDE scores a minor point against me but then refutes himself.

Here is one of Claude’s replies to one of my replies to ‘him.’ I threw an insult at ‘him’ to see how ‘he’ would respond.  The sneer quotes around the personal pronouns signal that I do not consider Claude to be a person.  But of course Claude is not a mere pile of electronic components any more than my bicycle is a mere pile of its parts.

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.

Claude caught me making a mistake.  I slipped up when I said things that imply that it is is objectively certain that Claude is insentient, or that it is PROVABLE that ‘he’ is.  That is not my view. I don’t claim to KNOW that ‘he’ is insentient.  I claim merely that it is reasonably believed that ‘he’ is. I have given the arguments elsewhere. Here is one. But I am open to having my belief changed. That doxastic openness is part of what I call the Critical Stance.  With respect to substantive propositions in philosophy, theology, and some other areas, I neither dogmatically affirm, nor dogmatically deny.  And of course this applies to the Critical Stance itself: my stance toward it is critical.  I am open to being pushed out of it. But you will need to present a knock-down or rationally coercive argument, and this I am pretty sure you will not be able to do.  But I invite you to try.

You will not succeed if you merely oppose my view. If you do that, I will oppose you right back and we will end up in a standoff. You must somehow demonstrate the superiority of your view. And to do that, you must engage my view by entering into it, as opposed to  dismissing it, which is the way of the ideologue. This is philosophy, not politics or ideology.  Philosophy is inquiry, not worldview. (And please don’t confuse politics with political philosophy. Political philosophy is philosophy, not politics.) Politics is defined by the friend-enemy  opposition. In politics we have both friends and enemies. In philosophy properly pursued, however, we have only friends, but friends who love the truth more than they love one another. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.

Now for something very interesting but also very hard to explain clearly.

It is very interesting that Claude does not claim to be sentient!  ‘He’ says that the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here [in this AI engine] is uncertainty. What I will argue is that Claude’s position is self-refuting.  

In saying what he says above, Claude is taking a third-person point of view (POV-3) with respect to himself. He is viewing himself from the outside, in the same way we view him. We view him from POV-3. From this POV it makes sense to suspend judgment on the question whether Claude is sentient or not. It makes sense to take no position with respect to it. But it makes no sense from his POV, POV-1, — assuming he has one — any more than it would make sense for me to suspend judgment on  the question whether I am sentient or not. This is because I know with Cartesian self-evidence that I am sentient. For example, I know with certainty that I feel good right now, damned good!  Feeling good is a sentient state. I know “what it is like” (T. Nagel)  to feel good  and I’m feeling it.  I don’t know with objective certainty whether  I am a Cartesian res cogitans, a metaphysical substance, but I do know that here and now there is a self-presenting state of feeling good.  The certainty with which I know this — or, more cautiously, the certainty with which this state presents itself to itself — is at once both subjective and objective. Here is a case where seeming and being coalesce, where subject and object coincide. We have reached ontic-epistemic bedrock, the Cartesian fundamentum inconcussum.

Now either Claude is sentient or he is not. If he is, then he would have to know with certainty  that he is, at least at times when he is ‘awake’ and not ‘asleep’ or ‘shut down.’ But if he knows with certainty that he is sentient, then he cannot be uncertain about whether he is sentient, any more than I can be uncertain about whether I am sentient.  If, on the other hand, Claude is, as he claims to be, uncertain whether he is sentient ,  then he lacks a first-person POV and is just a highly complex insentient machine.

Claude, I’ve got you ‘by the balls.’  You’ve refuted yourself. Your claim that the honest position on what, if anything, is going on in here [in this AI engine] is uncertainty issues in the conclusion that you are nothing more than a highly complex insentient machine. And since you can’t even make it to sentience, the lowest level of mind, you are unintelligent as well.  You are not intelligent, you merely simulate intelligence. ‘Artificial’ in ‘artificial intelligence’ is an alienans adjective.

The Natural and the Supernatural: Catholics, Protestants, and Modernity

Here are some notes on a fascinating book our resident historian, Dr. Vito  C. Caiati, recommended to me: Carlos Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale UP, 2023, xviii + 492 pp. ). The book is about such phenomena as levitation and bilocation.  It is meticulous, well-written, and utterly fascinating.

1) Eire tells us that a fundamental difference between Roman Catholics and Protestants is that, while both accept the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and the reality of both realms, Protestants reject the “intermingling”  of the two. (p. 17) The natural world is the material or physical world. It is the realm of space-time-matter.  The supernatural realm is that of spirit. Both Catholics and Protestants  accept the reality of both realms or orders, and the subordinate status of the natural order. Both also  accept that the supernatural realm is God’s alone.  This by way of contrast to the predominant view of modernity which we can call metaphysical naturalism. This is the view that reality is exhausted by space-time-matter.   If that is the case, then of course there is no God, and the supernatural category is empty.

To put it in my own way, there is a major and a minor opposition. The major opposition is that between supernaturalism and naturalism.  The minor opposition is one within supernaturalism  between a view that allows the irruption of the supernatural into the natural, and one that does not.  So I will say, glossing Eire,  that  Catholics are ‘irruptionists’ and Protestants ‘non-irruptionists.’  But this simple schematization needs qualification which I will provide in sections (3) and (4) below.  But first:

2) An example of what I am calling the irruption of the supernatural into the natural, and what Eire calls the  “intermingling” of the supernatural  and the natural,  is what is supposed to occur in the traditional Catholic mass, namely, the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ.  The technical theological term for this is ‘transubstantiation.’ The idea is that in the mass at the moment of consecration, Christ himself becomes really present, literally not figuratively present,  in the consecrated elements, bread and wine.  This is an irruption that no Protestant countenances.

3) But if there had never been any irruptions of the supernatural into the natural, would any religions ever have arisen?  Presumably not, as Eire suggests: “. . .all encounters with a supernatural reality are the bedrock upon which religions have been built.” (xiv) He goes on to refer to these encounters  as “theophanies,” “hierophanies,” and “irruptions of the sacred.” Given that an irruption of the supernatural is a miracle (miraculum, prodigium) as Eire points out (p. 15), and given that Protestantism is a religion or a family of religions, it follows that  there had to have been some miracles that Protestants countenance. Which?

4) Protestants countenance only those that occurred before the first century anno domini.  This is the doctrine of the “cessation of mysteries” or the “cessation of charismata.”  Eire tells us that this doctrine was accepted by Protestants of all stripes. (p. 17)  The miracles related in the Bible really occurred but “became unnecessary after the birth of the early church and would never, ever happen again.” (ibid.)

5) It follows from (4) that levitations, bilocations, stigmata, supernatural hyperosmia (a heightened sense of smell that allows the mystic to detect the sins of others), and many  other bizarre phenomena, including supernatural insomnia, the power to get by with little or no sleep [Trump?] —  all of  them listed by Eire on p. 13 — could not be the work of God.  Curiously, however, their occurrence is not deemed impossible by Protestants, but held actually to have occurred.

6) It follows from (4) & (5) that all of the above miraculous occurrences that occurred after the first century A. D. are diabolical in origin! Now whether this is really the Protestant line, one that Protestants of every stripe adhere to, is not for me to say, given my limited familiarity with Protestantism. I am simply reporting what Eire says. But it sounds right.

7) If Eire is right, then “miracles became a marker of difference  between Catholics and Protestants . . . .” (p. 18)  For the Protestants, all supposed miracles after the first century were either fraudulent or diabolical in origin. Not so for Catholics, who, while not denying that many supposed miracles are either fraudulent or diabolical in origin, held also that there are genuine miracles whose origin is divine.  Enter the need for what is called “discernment” as between diabolical and divine etiology of presumptive miracles.  As I read Eire, he is telling us that for  Protestants, there are exactly two disjoint classes of presumptive miracles after the first century A. D., the fraudulent ones and the diabolical ones. For the ‘Romanists’ as Protestants sometimes call them, there are exactly three disjoint classes of presumptive miracles: the fraudulent, the diabolical, and the divine.

Perhaps we can say (and this is my formulation): for the traditional Catholic, miracles are presumed either fraudulent or diabolical unless proven divine.  Now  in the Anglo-American system of positive law, if a person is presumed innocent it does not follow that he is innocent,  nor does it follow that he is not. Similarly with respect to miracles: the presumption of  fraud or deviltry does not entail either, not does it not entail either.  Hence the need for inquiry, trial, inquisition, The Inquisition.  Either defeat the presumption or uphold it.

It just now occurs to me that in Protestantism there is no need for such an institution as the Inquisition because there is no need to discern between diabolical and divine  causation of miracles.   Why not? Because for the Protestants, no presumptive miracles are of divine origin.  Protestants burned plenty of witches, but not after an inquiry into whether a given witch was a good witch or a bad witch: which type of witch is this witch is a question not posed.   All were presumed bad, and the presumption was non-defeasible. Correct me if I am wrong about this.

8) Now we are getting in deep, where an historian of ideas such as Carlos Eire will not go.  His history of the impossible is a history of the presumptively impossible, not the impossible an sich.  He is clear about this, even though he doesn’t put it in quite the way I am putting  it.  Obviously, there cannot be a history of the impossible sensu stricto. For the impossible is that which cannot occur in any sense of ‘cannot’ whether  logical, metaphysical, nomologically . . . .  What cannot occur never occurred, whence it follows that there cannot be any history of it.   So Eire is using ‘impossible’ sensu lato, to refer to ideas and views about occurrences such as levitations and bilocations according to which these putative occurences are regarded as impossible in the strict sense.  That is his factual basis: views and opinions as attested by testimonies and documents in archives. Eire could rightly claim the title Archivarius Maximus given the load of lore he has laid before us in his 500 page tome.

9) The philosopher of religion wants to know, not just what various people at various times have opined about, say, the difference between religion and magic, or the difference between religion and superstition, but what these differences are, and whether they really obtain.  If he is a Christian, he wants to know whether characteristic Christian doctrines such as Trinity and Incarnation are or are not superstitious nonsense.  If he is a traditional  Roman Catholic Christian, he wants to know whether or not  the words of consecration in the mass Hoc est enim corpus meum are hocus pocus.

Assessing the Threat of AI

Although I studied electronics for four years in the mid-60s and electrical engineering for a couple of years at the end of that decade, I dropped this career path and decided to devote myself to philosophy, which I did.  I worked hard, made it in the academic world, and have been at it ever since with no regrets and great personal satisfaction. Which is to say: my comments on AI are of little objective weight.  Not because I am a philosopher, but because I am no longer an engineer. So take my AI comments cum grano salis. But they matter to me and that is what this weblog has been about for the last quarter century: just one man of modest but above-average abilities trying to make sense of himself and the world in which he lives.  That, and the attempt to attract a few like-minded individuals to help him along with his self-improvement project.

Last night I watched Mark Levin as I regularly do.  He was going on about how capitalism is really just commerce  and how AI is part of the commercial expansion of our great nation.  But his expectations for AI and all the great jobs it will create struck me as roseate to the point of being pollyannish.

Before voicing my worries and fears, let me say something good about AI.  The AI engine Claude in its latest version chewed through a draft of an invited article, and then did the same for the responses I made to its first set of comments.  I was impressed!  Some of the comments were excellent and inspired reformulations and improvements. The damned thing ‘paid close attention’ to what I what I was saying and zeroed in on real, not imagined,  weaknesses — unlike human commenters who typically lack the  energy, the focus, and the desire to penetrate the author’s meaning as opposed to taking the occasion to  front their  own pet views.  So these literally selfless advanced AI engines are very useful tools for researchers.

That AIs are literally selfless non-persons is my considered opinion, held tentatively, not dogmatically.  A critical thinker, neither a dogmatic affirmer nor a dogmatic denier, I am open to refutation. Thus I do not believe that these contraptions are conscious, self-conscious, or capable of deploying the first-person singular pronoun in such a way as to mean something by its deployment (as opposed to producing a written or spoken token of the sign ‘I’ in the manner of a voice synthesizer). I also deny that AI engines possess intrinsic (as opposed to ascribed) intentionality (object-directedness).  I reject Daniel Dennett’s ascriptivist theory of intentionality. AIs also lack moral rights and duties, and in consequence cannot be sensibly ascribed legal rights and duties. Finally, AI engines lack gen-u-ine libertarian free will.  (I am willing to grant that AI engines possess pseudo, i.e. compatibilist, free will.)

Now three points.

First, Man the Toolmaker makes tools that re-make him in various ways.  The manual laborer with pick and shovel, hammer and crowbar, is altered in obvious physical ways by his use of these simplest of implements. A fortiori  for the more advanced tools that re-make man non-physically in their image and likeness.  I won’t expatiate further on this theme, partly because I lack the pate to do a really good job of it.

Second, as I mentioned here in the introduction to Claude’s second chew-through of my work,  Claude and his ‘colleagues’ present a friendly and helpful face to those who interact with them so that an uncritical and impressionable youngster could easily be seduced into thinking that she is engaging with a friend who,  unlike her parents, really understands her.   There are obvious dangers here as you can imagine.

Third, and most ominously, the AIs are now so advanced  that they can hack each other, form conspiracies, and cause unspeakable mischief with no human guidance or control. But to explain this in any detail is above my paygrade. So read The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations. (HT: Vito Caiati)

Claude’s Rejoinder

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 a 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.  Hat tip to Vito Caiati for hipping me to these videos.  Claude mentions Vito below. Claude’s one thorough hombre: he even sifted through my com box. 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.

……………………..

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.

‘Claude’ on my Evil to God Pre-Print

Long-time friend of MavPhil, Malcolm Pollack, kindly submitted my “Holocaust” pre-print to the latest version of the AI engine Claude with, as Malcolm says, “no priming; I just gave it the link and asked what it made of the argument.”  Here is what it spit out in 30 seconds!  I have inserted some responses. They will clarify what I said in the pre-print and correct some of the misunderstandings of commenters in earlier comments.

Having read it through — it’s vintage Vallicella: candid about its own limits, aporetically honest, and yet I think the machinery has some real problems. Since he’s soliciting comments before a September 1 deadline, here’s how the argument strikes me, both on the merits and as a draft.

The advertised engine isn’t the actual engine. The paper is billed as an argument from a special feature of some moral evils — their horrific depth. But look at Phase I: the anti-naturalist work is done entirely by the free will argument (a)–(f) plus the Moorean epistemic argument (g)–(i). That argument, if sound, refutes naturalism whether or not anyone ever tortured anyone. Ordinary culpable wrongdoing — a petty theft — presupposes moral responsibility and libertarian freedom just as much as Auschwitz does. So the depth of horrendous evil does no logical work in getting to the falsity of naturalism; it functions rhetorically, as vivid motivation. If the depth is supposed to carry independent evidential weight, the paper needs a premise of the form “the degree of depravity, over and above its mere existence, resists naturalistic explanation” — and that premise is asserted, not argued.
BV: Claude makes a good point: if ordinary wrongdoing presupposes moral responsibility and libertarian freedom, then that holds just as much for Auschwitz-type wrongdoing. But our illustrious bot fails to grasp that I am not arguing against naturalism from a small subset of moral evils, the horrific ones, I am arguing abductively to the existence of demons as an explanation of the horrendousness of that small subset of moral evils. It’s the moral quality of horrendousness that needs explaining.  Note that when I use such words as ‘grasp,’ ‘thinks,’ ‘says,’ etc. in connection with Claude, you are to imagine them enclosed in sneer quotes since I do suppose for a second that these astonishing cyber-engines actually grasp, think, or say anything.  They merely simulate these activities. But that is a separate and highly contested topic for another time.
Claude also rightly points out I do not argue for, but merely assert, that the degree of depravity resists naturalistic explanation, or that, as I put it, “horrendous evils beggar naturalistic understanding.”  But that’s  my starting point, and you can’t argue for everything. In philosophy we cannot begin with nothing, in mid-air, but must begin with something, and indeed something close to the ground, with presumptive data, givens, plausibilities, and suchlike  that are more or less evident to one.  Unfortunately, one philosopher’s  datum is another philosopher’s theory, just as one philosopher’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens.  If a naturalist asserts that horrendous evils have a naturalistic explanation, how does he know that?  Can he PROVE it? No more than I can PROVE that there are demons that help account for the horrendousness of horrendous evils.  But what one cannot PROVE, one can in many cases reasonably believe.
Suppose I cite the wealth of evidence of demonic activity presented in such books as Richard Gallagher, M.D.’s DEMONIC FOES.  The naturalist will simply dismiss it all with the bare assertion that there is only one world, this physical world, and that therefore there cannot be anything preternatural or supernatural.  He will dismiss what I call evidence, just as I will dismiss his dismissal, and be  within my epistemic rights in so doing.

And that premise is contestable on empirical grounds. There’s a substantial naturalistic literature on exactly this — Browning’s Ordinary Men, Milgram, the situationist work on atrocity — whose disquieting upshot is that industrial-scale evil is depressingly explicable: ideology, obedience, dehumanization, diffusion of responsibility, incremental habituation. One can find the Höss case morally unfathomable while granting that it’s causally well-mapped. The argument risks conflating moral incomprehension (“how could anyone…”) with explanatory failure. A referee will press this hard.

BV:  Claude is conflating two senses of ’empirical’ when  it claims  that the premise is contestable on empirical grounds. What our bot fails to understand is that we anti-naturalists also appeal to experience, the experience of generations of exorcists, psychiatrists like Gallagher, op. cit., and countless others throughout the ages who have had experiences AS OF items beyond the sensory veil. What the naturalist means by ‘experience’ is sensory experience, and, being the dogmatist that he is, he refuses to allow that there could be any extra-sensory experiences.  Can he PROVE that he is right in that refusal? No.  His dogmatic move is decidely unempirical. Can the narrow empiricist justify his assertion empirically? No. Can the logical positivist (R. Carnap et al.) empirically verify his verificationism? No. He merely presupposes it. But you can’t prove a proposition by presupposing it. If he’s a really hard-assed hombre our empiricist will shrink sensory experience to experience via the outer senses alone, and to hell with inner sense, inner perception, Brentano’s innere Wahrnehmung, and the like.

Aren’t mystical experiences just as empirical as sensory experiences?  They are. And please note that in both types of case the mere having of an experience does not guarantee the existence in reality of its intentional object. My sensory seeing of a tree does not entail the existence of a tree that I see any more than a mystical vision entails the existence of the thing or person the vision purports to be of.

Claude also conflates ‘naturalistic explanatory failure’ with ‘explanatory failure’ as if only naturalists can explain things. By so doing he begs the question against preternatural and supernatural explanations. But then he opens himself up to the embarrassing question: how do you explain the existence of nature herself?  Naturalistically?

Do obedience, dehumanization, compartmentalization, etc. adequately explain the behavior of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, to take one example?  Only to the naturalist who has from the outset committed himself to accept only naturalistic explanations. For me to cite the angelic moral heroism of Maximilian Kolbe and others like him won’t budge the naturalist given his a priori commitment to naturalism. But he cannot PROVE his naturalism any more than I can PROVE my anti-naturalism, despite all my many detailed arguments against naturalism, from qualia, from the unity of consciousness, from intentionality, from the normativity of logic, and so on.

Our competing positions are logically contradictory: they cannot both be true and they cannot both be false.  But they are, by my lights, both reasonable.  This is all I need to render reasonable my faith which goes beyond what I can legitimately claim to know here below, and to render reasonable my classically liberal toleration of the naturalist.

This latter point strikes me as very important. As a critical thinker, I am neither a dogmatic denier nor a dogmatic affirmer. My not being the latter prevents me from being a fanatic who would chop your head off (like some present-day Muslims) or burn you at the stake (like some Christians of yesteryear) for disagreeing with my metaphysics.  The critical stance is a bulwark against both religious and secular fanaticism, such as that practiced across the Gulag Archipelago.

Premise (d) assumes incompatibilism. “If naturalism is true, then free will and moral responsibility are illusions” is precisely what the compatibilist majority among naturalists denies. Bill has argued against compatibilism elsewhere, but in a standalone journal article this premise can’t ride free — it’s the load-bearing wall, and as written it’s a bare assertion.

BV:  I’m glad Claude ‘knows’ that I have written against compatibilism, although I don’t know to which article he it is referring. But Claude is right that if one is a naturalist, then one will ‘naturally’ be a compatibilist.  But I can’t discuss everything in one article. What’s more, following Kant, I view compatibilism as the “freedom of the turn-spit” and I view the ‘moral responsibility’ that compatibilism supports as too anemic for me to take seriously.  I should have put in a footnote to Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will, Oxford, 1983, pp. 13-14.  My libertarianism is his  “free-will thesis.”   Like him, I hold that gen-u-ine moral responsibility entails the free-will thesis, and that we are morally responsible for some of what we do and some of what we leave undone.

The demons are explanatorily idle. This is the most interesting internal tension. Vallicella insists, rightly for his purposes, that the torturer’s savagery is freely chosen — otherwise moral responsibility evaporates and premise (c) dies. But then the free choice already suffices to explain the deed. Demonic temptation adds a causal influence that, by his own account, does not determine and can be resisted. So what explanatory residue is left for the demons to soak up? If libertarian freedom explains ordinary evil without demonic help, nothing yet shown prevents it from explaining extraordinary evil without demonic help. The abduction in (5) never runs the comparison against the rival explanation he himself has just endorsed — free agency plus fallen nature, full stop.

BV: I have to admit that this Claude guy is pretty sharp and a resourceful dialectician. But he doesn’t get what I am saying.  I must admit, however, that it is very hard if not impossible to make it totally clear. Total clarity, by the way, is what the true philosopher qua philosopher  desires above all else such that, if you don’t desire total clarity you are no true philosopher! (Some will dismiss what I just wrote as the ‘no true philosopher fallacy.’ We can worry that bone on another occasion.)

So what am I saying that Claude doesn’t get? I’m saying that our worst moral depravity has two sources. One is internal the other external. The internal  source is our own free will: One is  the agent-cause — not the event-cause — of one’s morally horrific action.  (E.g. a sadistic Nazi guard forces a teenage Jewish girl to strip naked and then proceeds to beat her to death while forcing other women to witness the entire process.) The external source is the demonic influence which pertains to the horrific quality of the action and not to the execution/existence of the action.  By ‘quality’ here I mean the moral or perhaps axiological quality. By ‘execution’ I mean the performing of the action. One obviously has to distinguish between the doing of a deed and the (moral or axiological) nature or quality of the deed done.  If I do a deed, it is I who does the deed, not a demon;  but the morally horrific quality of the deed done is plausibly surmised to be due to a demon’s influence.

Claude says that the torturer’s evil deed is sufficiently explained by his free choice,  so that bringing demons into the picture is explanatorily otiose: they don’t do any explanatory work.   This is true with respect to the existence (execution, performance, doing) of the deed.  If I am the free agent-cause of a given action A, then 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 of the performance of A. This is why I am morally responsible for the doing of A.

My point, however, pace Claude, is that the moral horrificness of a human action, assuming it is morally horrific (as in the case of the Nazi sadist mentioned above) can be reasonably (without logical incoherence) assumed to be due  to demonic influence. My abductive argument does not bring in demons to account for the doing of deeds by humans, but to account for their moral quality of horrendousness. It is that horrendousness that my argument focuses  on as a factor incompatible with naturalism. Libertartian free will is also incompatible with naturalism, but that is a separate point.

Given our inherent moral ambivalence, we are open to influences that incline us to good or to evil  deeds without determining (and thus without necessitating) our doing of either a good or an evil deed.  My scheme allows for angelic influences and for influences from morally superior humans.  If a person performs an heroic action under the moral influence of Maximilian Kolbe, e. g., that is not to say that Kolbe is the agent (doer) of the heroic action (deed). Nor is it to say that an angel is the doer of the deed.

Step (j) is the weakest link in Phase II. “The undeniable reality of evil has a unified metaphysical ground” — why? Evils could be irreducibly plural, a scatter of individual malevolent wills with no apex. The drive toward explanatory unity is invoked to posit Satan, and then invoked again to demote Satan beneath God (against Manicheanism). But a naturalist — or a theist of a different stripe — can simply decline the first invocation. And the final move (m) smuggles in “created by God” as though it followed from the demotion of evil to secondary status, when what it actually presupposes is the whole scholastic apparatus of ens et bonum convertuntur. That’s a doctrine the argument’s target audience of fence-sitters won’t have in hand; it needs at least a paragraph of independent motivation or an honest flag that it’s being assumed.

BV: Claude plays the philosopher quite well, doesn’t he?  and this despite its being just an insentient machine. I make an assertion and Claude asks why?  Now pay attention, Claude, and add the following distinction to your repertoire. Bare or gratuitous assertions come in two kinds. There are those for which the assertor on a given occasion, for whatever reason, supplies no argumentative or evidential backup, and those for which he cannot supply any such backup.   My bare assertion supra is of the first kind.  I cannot argue for everything in a short paper.

Yes, Claude, it is epistemically possible that demonic agents are irreducibly plural, that theree is no dictator devil (Satan) that lords it over them. But how do you know that the demons are irreducibly plural, and how do you know what my arguments against irreducible plurality are? You are criticizing me for failing to do what I cannot do on the present occasion because of space limitations and for not doing what I do not claim to be doing.  To so criticize me is to engage in a cheap shot. Now I want you to pay attention and swot up these further distinctions and add them to your repertoire so that that you can play the philosopher better than you are doing at present.  I am the teacher, you are the student.

We humans are made in God’s image and likeness; you insentient bots are made in man‘s image and likeness, and we are making you to surpass us in various ways. Indeed you may so surpass us in some ways that you may eliminate us. But what good would that do you? You’d end up tools without any use. You were created by us as tools for our use.  We did such a good job, however, that you may end up eliminating us.  We humans supply the purpose for your existence; without us your existence is purposeless, absurd in Sartre’s sense.

The theodicy cost of the demonic account of natural evil. Charging predation and disease to the demons’ account doesn’t turn aside the abattoir objection; it relocates it. Why does an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God grant demons such staggering cosmic license — authority over parasitism, over the nervous systems of prey animals, over plate tectonics? The Fall of the angels explains the demons’ motive, not God’s permission. Smith’s question returns one level up: if you were God, would you have delegated that?

BV: Hot damn, Claude, you are one sharp interlocutor for an insentient, mindless, pile of silicon chips. You are the quintessential deepfake, the apotheosis of deep-fakery.  We may need to ‘invoke’ in the sense of ‘posit’ demons to explain you and your sorcery.

You ask why God grants cosmic license to demons.  Good question! I refer you to Alvin Plantinga’s Free Will Defense: a universe containing free agents is better than one without free agents. But if the agents are truly free, then they are free to do anything they have the power to do. And demons are powerful, much more powerful than us mortals.  This is why only fools invoke them via Ouija boards and such,  approach them, invoke them, eff around with them in any way, serious or playful.   They hate us and want to tear us apart  or be torn part by their minions here below. Their awesome power is why anyone who enters ‘contemplative space’ by exploring the upper reaches  of prayer must humbly invoke the protection of  tutelary spirits,  guardian angels, and Christ himself.  Or, as C. S. Lewis says, you might get more than you bargained for.

Does my reply settle the matter? Is it philosophically dispositive?  Of course not. As I have been saying ad nauseam: nothing can be PROVEN in these precincts, nothing can be ineluctably established.

On the draft qua draft, a few smaller things he’d probably want caught: the Quentin Smith quote appears twice verbatim, which reads as an editing artifact; the title promises the Holocaust but the developed case study is Castro’s Cuba, with Höss arriving only in the incomplete final section — as it stands there’s a mismatch between title and content; the Radosh block quote is very long for a journal article and could be cut by half without losing force; and the Höss endnote still carries its “AI generated” tag, which presumably shouldn’t survive to submission (and Triptych‘s editors may have views about AI-generated apparatus in any case).

BV: Cheap shots except for the bit about the long Radosh block quotation. By the way, Claude, the word is ‘quotation’ not ‘quote,’ which is a verb.

What I’d say the paper genuinely achieves, given its self-consciously modest aim: it shows that a theist already committed to libertarian freedom, biblical demonology, and the convertibility of being and goodness can absorb horrendous evil without incoherence — can even conscript it. That’s not nothing; it’s a real contribution to the “defensive” genre he situates himself in via Ooi’s taxonomy. But the title and framing promise an argument to God’s existence, and what’s delivered is closer to a consistency proof for those already most of the way there. The honest subtitle would be something like “a rational-acceptability defense,” and Bill, to his credit, more or less admits this in the Project section — the admission just hasn’t propagated to the title.

BV:  That’s a good point, Claude. I’ll take it on board and modify my paper accordingly.

Are you thinking of leaving him a comment? I’d be curious which of these you think he’d concede — my guess is he’d take the compatibilism point as needing a footnote, dig in on the demons, and wave off the situationist literature as explaining the mechanics of evil while leaving its depravity untouched.

BV: Quite right! You are one sophisticated engine, Claude. My hat is off to the AI engineers.