First Blog

  Uncertainty is Certain G. Donald Allen 12/12/2024 1.       Introduction . This short essay is about uncertainty in people from both secular and nonsecular viewpoints. One point that will emerge is that randomly based uncertainty can be a driver for religious structure. Many groups facing uncertainty about their future are deeply religious or rely on faith as a source of comfort, resilience, and guidance. The intersection of uncertainty and religiosity often stems from the human need to find meaning, hope, and stability in the face of unpredictable or challenging circumstances. We first take up the connections of uncertainty to religion for the first real profession, farming, noting that hunting has many similar uncertainties. Below are groups that commonly lean on religious beliefs amidst uncertainty.   This short essay is a follow-up to a previous piece on certainty (https://used-ideas.blogspot.com/2024/12/certainty-is-also-emotion.html). U...

  Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) a new religion? I wouldn't go so fare as envisioning AI as a religion, but I would support a massive advance toward intellectual dependency, much like an addictive drug. Knowledge workers will be replaced; Medical diagnoses will first be within the "circuits" of machine learning (cf. ELIZA*). Teaching will become an AI learning App. And many more. Here is a litmus test for AI addiction, and in particular for tools like ChatGPT. When the colleges begin offering courses on how to use these tools, the dependency becomes revealed as firmly entrenched. *   ELIZA  is an early  natural language processing  computer program  created from 1964 to 1966  at the  MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by  Joseph Weizenbaum . It was amazingly successful. Patients were convinced they were talking to a real person. And that was 60 years ago.

  Interesting observations and facts about religions - a bullet lecture. ·         They can be accepted, understood, and believed at all intelligence levels. ·         They allow multiple interpretations. ·         They encourage decent relations between people. ·         They posit an answer to the most basic question, “Why we are?” ·         They offer all believers a pathway to eternal peace. ·         They require faith without physical evidence. ·         They allow and suggest miracles have a divine origin. ·         They need the advent of historical prophets. ·         They reject contemporary prophets. ·       ...

Ah, yes.   Causality.   We love it and hate it.   We seek it for resolution, but sometimes we don’t want to find it. ·         Advertising causes sales. ·         Fear causes flight or fight. ·         She dumped me because I flirt. ·         Vaccinations prevent disease. To my understanding, causality is fundamentally difficult or impossible to prove. It is a truth. Causality seems to be a consensus of experts, claimed by countless experiments and observations - sometimes by an authority. In centuries past, causality was the domain of religion, philosophy, and God. Permanent. Yet, today’s cause may become tomorrow’s fantasy. Now, causality is mostly an aspect of science. Rushing to causality is a modern consequence of ubiquitous models, each establishing, in part, a correlation or correspondence. Personal causality is...