Tom, I love this piece. I've been harping on this notion for a while now as it pertains to AI learning. The only way to ever have an AI that is even remotely close to thinking like we think, is to get it into bodies. We learn by using all our senses. In order to really learn, AI would need a body to help them figure out the world. There's a book, Ten Thousand Brains, by Jeff Hawkins. It's marvelous. You ought to read it.
Very interesting. I have to say that I think we are, on some level, LLMs, or can be, if we’re not careful. It’s easy to get sucked into using words, phrases or even whole opinions that you have heard around without thinking much about them. It’s why I’m so opposed to the many clichés that seem to dominate modern politics, journalism, advertising and even academia. People are willing to let other people do their thinking for them.
Angels puzzle me. My reading of Rambam on angels (which could be wrong) is that an “angel” is the term we use for the encounter with God of any human being (except Moses, who had a closer experience) and also to the mechanism by which God interacts with the world generally. This would imply that angels are not really independent conscious beings and also that Rambam might see the Big Bang or the process of evolution as “angels.” This view of Rambam’s was hugely controversial.
This is a tangent, but I’m not convinced that having a body for resurrection is the reason for not cremating bodies, although it’s often presented as such. My only argument against this is that I can’t believe that God would condemn all those murdered and burnt by the Nazis to non-resurrection, and, in any case, the idea is of a resurrection of literally everyone who lived, so that would imply even those cremated (or eaten by carrion birds in Buddhist or Zoroastrian sky burials).
I think the prohibition on cremation is more about respecting the dignity of the body even in death. You wouldn’t burn a Torah scroll, even one that is “passul” and can no longer be used, because it was holy and some of that holiness remains. By the same token, the body of a human being remains holy even once the soul is gone and it should be treated with respect.
I totally agree about AI and prayer and about AI and feeling things generally. I think there’s also a question about AI’s ability to be truly creative, to have the moment of inspiration where an entirely new thought hits us, something that might be congruent with what came before, but which could not be directly deduced from it in advance. To think AI is intelligent is to confuse a volume of Plato’s works with Plato himself.
"I think the prohibition on cremation is more about respecting the dignity of the body even in death."
I agree. If the Creator of the Universe (and the multiverses) can speak everything into existence, certainly he can rearrange a few atoms and put everyone together again.
I thought Rambam said the communications with God were basically through dreams and visions. I can’t speak to the resurrection issues very deeply, but Rambam says that God can’t do things that are logically impossible. So maybe resurrecting burned bodies could be included in that category? I don’t know. I don’t have a great investment in that idea. I was more playing with the idea of why we might need bodies in a messy on age
My reading is that he sees dreams and visions and "angels" as different names for the same process, but I could be wrong!
He doesn't place any caveats on resurrection when he lays it out as one of the Thirteen Principles of Faith (in his Commentary on the Mishnah). I haven't read his letter on the resurrection, though. I thought that his understanding of things that are impossible was more things like constructing a triangle with four sides, things that just don't make sense.
I loved this essay! Your art teacher reminds me of Samuel Johnson’s response to Bishop Berkeley’s thought experiment that maybe everything we see and experience is an illusion created by an evil genius. “How can you refute it?” asked someone (maybe Boswell?). Johnson kicked a rock, sending it flying, and said, “I refute it thus!” (Can you tell that I just love Johnson, and your art teacher too?)
Wonderful essay. When people say that something (or someone) is “authentic” they usually mean something like “honest with respect to their inner, emotional, subjective self.” But there is also a kind of intellectual authenticity, very present in this essay, which acknowledges in a forthright and confident way the limits of what one knows, or can know.
This will seem like a non sequitur but it isn’t: you really should read Iain McGilchrist’s book (The Master and His Emissary.) It will render you permanently incapable of collapsing reality - yourself very much included - into a Cartesian duality. You are not a machine. I just get the sense that you wrestle with this proposition. It’s a dead end. And so unnecessary. Modernity built this unhappy road, and we all travel down it as if no other route were possible, but it’s an illusion. Our “ignorant” ancestors understood this far better than we do.
Thanks, Chris! I think you recommended that book before and I have indeed started listening to it/reading it. I actually have it on Kindle and Audible, but it takes a lot of attention even though it’s well written so I’m moving through it slowly. But I see what you mean about it. It’s a great book
I feel a bit like a pest/crank for mentioning it again, but some of your recent posts about AI just called out for it. The book really is hard to read. I think four years passed between the time I bought it and read the first few chapters and then picked it up again and finished it over a couple of months. I'm a slow reader to begin with, and the density of the thing just added to that.
Having said that, I got something so valuable and permanent from McGilchrist I can hardly overstate its value to me: I have seen the place from which enchantment, the spiritual, the sacred, the transcendent arise. There is a side to existence which reductive materialism cannot see. Not "doesn't see" - cannot see. I'm not talking about New Age fantasy. The dominant intellectual framing of our era (ratcheting slowly but steadily for maybe the past five centuries towards a totalizing nihilism) actively suppresses the most real knowledge we have about ourselves and each other because it simply cannot be formulated in the terms which analytic perception understands.
I no longer belong to any community or practice of faith. And I rarely pray. However before I read McGilchrist (and to give credit: listened to some astonishing JP lectures on the book of Genesis) I never prayed. Dover Beach seemed to me the final word on the sea of faith and the land of dreams: gone forever. I have compassion for the despair in which modern people live. They say things like "I wish I could believe." They feel that a landscape devoid of every sacred thing is their unavoidable lot. But this oppressive claim on all of existence is like a magician's trick. It depends on the powerful and quite necessary ability of consciousness to disassemble the world. Once you see how it's done that trick loses its power to negate the spirit. McGilchrist shows us how the trick works.
There is a lot to unpack there. Particularly at the end with regard to religion. But I’ll let you know how I make out with Gilchrist. I don’t find him particularly hard. It just requires a lot of attention which I don’t always have to give especially in these days of phone distraction….
I am Greek Orthodox and 83. We are also supposed to pray with the whole body as well. My prayer life has deteriorated and it has troubled me. Your marvelous article has shown me the way back and I will start today. Thank you, Thomas.
You told a story a while back about someone telling you that interlinear is only for learning, not prayer. I don’t know if you remember. But I thought it was so funny. That typical intellectual condescension with little to no substance. I could imagine someone saying it.
Uhm, "interlinear" is not some sort of pomo term. It's a literal description of how the prayer book is printed with the translation interposed between lines of Hebrew. Or maybe you were making a joke I didn't get?
As disruptive dialogues are dissected words with interchangeability are utilized often such as genocide and apartheid specifically to these times I'm wishing to apply interlinear in a gibberish way to disrupt the constructs that the anti-israel anti-civilizationalist crowd wish to purport upon Humanity, TBH did not know that it was a legitimate term and appreciate the education
We learned that angels do have some version of free will. They exist so close to G-d and have such a clear perception of good and evil as to render their ability to do evil almost meaningless. But you do have an example of angels not listening to G-d. I cannot think of it right now.
I feel like it had to do with in the Creation, the tree not making its bark taste like the fruit.
I asked someone else and they thought that it was in Kings II about the angel Gabriel not killing someone he was supposed to. I will figure it out and let you know.
Very much enjoyed this piece! Especially the mention of angels in Judaic tradition, which feels under-discussed to me. It also feels like good timing too, since I'm doing Free Will on Stranger Worlds this month. This week's introductory piece was a bit of a cheat (I did the other two books in the trilogy but struggled to find a home for this one), but the other three are tightly connected and revolve around Descartes, as will become clear. They should be of particular interest to religious folks, although they have something to offer anyone who has considered the alleged problem of free will.
Regarding your commentary here, I have something to offer that may or many not be helpful. As you may know, part of my academic background is in AI. I'd like to defend the name 'Large Language Model' (much more accurate than 'Artificial Intelligence'!) and provide a metaphor for trying to understand what they are, and why they work (and seem 'intelligent').
Imagine that every conversation that ever took place could be mapped onto a landscape. It's a multi-dimensional landscape, to be sure - those conversations go in all directions! - and it has many more dimensions than those we're familiar with, but it's a landscape, with valleys and troughs, and so forth. Large Language Models are maps for that landscape of conversation. Because they have to pretend exactness (they're machines, after all), they are far more exacting and limited than the real landscape they model, but like most maps they are still 'good enough' for getting around. Armed with this map (the Large Language Model), we can imagine dropping ourselves at any point on the map, and 'roll downhill' in a predicable way.
That's pretty much what a Large Language Model is. A multidimensional map (model) of previous discussions (language). It is because there are so many previous discussions (large) fed into the map that it can seem 'intelligent'. But it is the humans who had the conversations that had authentic intelligence - at least some of the time! The LLM can just roll a ball downhill from whatever starting point you feed it (the prompt), reverse-engineering the responses to questions by simply 'following the landscape of the language'.
Stay wonderful!
Chris.
PS: Writing this, I remembered that I touched upon Descartes before at Stranger Worlds (he's hard to avoid, given my themes!) while discussing the cyberpunk novelist and mathematician Rudy Rucker:
Tom, I love this piece. I've been harping on this notion for a while now as it pertains to AI learning. The only way to ever have an AI that is even remotely close to thinking like we think, is to get it into bodies. We learn by using all our senses. In order to really learn, AI would need a body to help them figure out the world. There's a book, Ten Thousand Brains, by Jeff Hawkins. It's marvelous. You ought to read it.
C.S. Lewis wrote about this very thing in *That Hideous Strength,* the third in his science fiction series. Worth reading!
I love that novel!
Very interesting. I have to say that I think we are, on some level, LLMs, or can be, if we’re not careful. It’s easy to get sucked into using words, phrases or even whole opinions that you have heard around without thinking much about them. It’s why I’m so opposed to the many clichés that seem to dominate modern politics, journalism, advertising and even academia. People are willing to let other people do their thinking for them.
Angels puzzle me. My reading of Rambam on angels (which could be wrong) is that an “angel” is the term we use for the encounter with God of any human being (except Moses, who had a closer experience) and also to the mechanism by which God interacts with the world generally. This would imply that angels are not really independent conscious beings and also that Rambam might see the Big Bang or the process of evolution as “angels.” This view of Rambam’s was hugely controversial.
This is a tangent, but I’m not convinced that having a body for resurrection is the reason for not cremating bodies, although it’s often presented as such. My only argument against this is that I can’t believe that God would condemn all those murdered and burnt by the Nazis to non-resurrection, and, in any case, the idea is of a resurrection of literally everyone who lived, so that would imply even those cremated (or eaten by carrion birds in Buddhist or Zoroastrian sky burials).
I think the prohibition on cremation is more about respecting the dignity of the body even in death. You wouldn’t burn a Torah scroll, even one that is “passul” and can no longer be used, because it was holy and some of that holiness remains. By the same token, the body of a human being remains holy even once the soul is gone and it should be treated with respect.
I totally agree about AI and prayer and about AI and feeling things generally. I think there’s also a question about AI’s ability to be truly creative, to have the moment of inspiration where an entirely new thought hits us, something that might be congruent with what came before, but which could not be directly deduced from it in advance. To think AI is intelligent is to confuse a volume of Plato’s works with Plato himself.
"I think the prohibition on cremation is more about respecting the dignity of the body even in death."
I agree. If the Creator of the Universe (and the multiverses) can speak everything into existence, certainly he can rearrange a few atoms and put everyone together again.
I thought Rambam said the communications with God were basically through dreams and visions. I can’t speak to the resurrection issues very deeply, but Rambam says that God can’t do things that are logically impossible. So maybe resurrecting burned bodies could be included in that category? I don’t know. I don’t have a great investment in that idea. I was more playing with the idea of why we might need bodies in a messy on age
My reading is that he sees dreams and visions and "angels" as different names for the same process, but I could be wrong!
He doesn't place any caveats on resurrection when he lays it out as one of the Thirteen Principles of Faith (in his Commentary on the Mishnah). I haven't read his letter on the resurrection, though. I thought that his understanding of things that are impossible was more things like constructing a triangle with four sides, things that just don't make sense.
I loved this essay! Your art teacher reminds me of Samuel Johnson’s response to Bishop Berkeley’s thought experiment that maybe everything we see and experience is an illusion created by an evil genius. “How can you refute it?” asked someone (maybe Boswell?). Johnson kicked a rock, sending it flying, and said, “I refute it thus!” (Can you tell that I just love Johnson, and your art teacher too?)
Wonderful essay. When people say that something (or someone) is “authentic” they usually mean something like “honest with respect to their inner, emotional, subjective self.” But there is also a kind of intellectual authenticity, very present in this essay, which acknowledges in a forthright and confident way the limits of what one knows, or can know.
This will seem like a non sequitur but it isn’t: you really should read Iain McGilchrist’s book (The Master and His Emissary.) It will render you permanently incapable of collapsing reality - yourself very much included - into a Cartesian duality. You are not a machine. I just get the sense that you wrestle with this proposition. It’s a dead end. And so unnecessary. Modernity built this unhappy road, and we all travel down it as if no other route were possible, but it’s an illusion. Our “ignorant” ancestors understood this far better than we do.
Thanks, Chris! I think you recommended that book before and I have indeed started listening to it/reading it. I actually have it on Kindle and Audible, but it takes a lot of attention even though it’s well written so I’m moving through it slowly. But I see what you mean about it. It’s a great book
I feel a bit like a pest/crank for mentioning it again, but some of your recent posts about AI just called out for it. The book really is hard to read. I think four years passed between the time I bought it and read the first few chapters and then picked it up again and finished it over a couple of months. I'm a slow reader to begin with, and the density of the thing just added to that.
Having said that, I got something so valuable and permanent from McGilchrist I can hardly overstate its value to me: I have seen the place from which enchantment, the spiritual, the sacred, the transcendent arise. There is a side to existence which reductive materialism cannot see. Not "doesn't see" - cannot see. I'm not talking about New Age fantasy. The dominant intellectual framing of our era (ratcheting slowly but steadily for maybe the past five centuries towards a totalizing nihilism) actively suppresses the most real knowledge we have about ourselves and each other because it simply cannot be formulated in the terms which analytic perception understands.
I no longer belong to any community or practice of faith. And I rarely pray. However before I read McGilchrist (and to give credit: listened to some astonishing JP lectures on the book of Genesis) I never prayed. Dover Beach seemed to me the final word on the sea of faith and the land of dreams: gone forever. I have compassion for the despair in which modern people live. They say things like "I wish I could believe." They feel that a landscape devoid of every sacred thing is their unavoidable lot. But this oppressive claim on all of existence is like a magician's trick. It depends on the powerful and quite necessary ability of consciousness to disassemble the world. Once you see how it's done that trick loses its power to negate the spirit. McGilchrist shows us how the trick works.
There is a lot to unpack there. Particularly at the end with regard to religion. But I’ll let you know how I make out with Gilchrist. I don’t find him particularly hard. It just requires a lot of attention which I don’t always have to give especially in these days of phone distraction….
I am Greek Orthodox and 83. We are also supposed to pray with the whole body as well. My prayer life has deteriorated and it has troubled me. Your marvelous article has shown me the way back and I will start today. Thank you, Thomas.
Thank you!
This is one of your best essays.
Thanks!
https://substack.com/@danielgsaunders/note/c-114995784?r=2z8wkz&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
This whole idea is relevant.
You told a story a while back about someone telling you that interlinear is only for learning, not prayer. I don’t know if you remember. But I thought it was so funny. That typical intellectual condescension with little to no substance. I could imagine someone saying it.
Your interlinear construct is clearly holding you back 🤦🤷
another vapid code word to inject into disruptive trollery dialogue against the bumptious anti-civilizationalists infesting our planet.
Uhm, "interlinear" is not some sort of pomo term. It's a literal description of how the prayer book is printed with the translation interposed between lines of Hebrew. Or maybe you were making a joke I didn't get?
As disruptive dialogues are dissected words with interchangeability are utilized often such as genocide and apartheid specifically to these times I'm wishing to apply interlinear in a gibberish way to disrupt the constructs that the anti-israel anti-civilizationalist crowd wish to purport upon Humanity, TBH did not know that it was a legitimate term and appreciate the education
You will notice interlinear now that you had this conversation. I think.
It applies to a variety of thought patterns and analysis
Oh yeah, I almost brought that up again here.
I hope it wasn’t rude to bring it up. But it so encapsulates a certain personality.
No, of course not. Always happy to see your comments.
We learned that angels do have some version of free will. They exist so close to G-d and have such a clear perception of good and evil as to render their ability to do evil almost meaningless. But you do have an example of angels not listening to G-d. I cannot think of it right now.
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1055341/jewish/Can-Angels-Sin.htm This is on the topic, should you want to read it.
I feel like it had to do with in the Creation, the tree not making its bark taste like the fruit.
I asked someone else and they thought that it was in Kings II about the angel Gabriel not killing someone he was supposed to. I will figure it out and let you know.
Dear Thomas,
Very much enjoyed this piece! Especially the mention of angels in Judaic tradition, which feels under-discussed to me. It also feels like good timing too, since I'm doing Free Will on Stranger Worlds this month. This week's introductory piece was a bit of a cheat (I did the other two books in the trilogy but struggled to find a home for this one), but the other three are tightly connected and revolve around Descartes, as will become clear. They should be of particular interest to religious folks, although they have something to offer anyone who has considered the alleged problem of free will.
Regarding your commentary here, I have something to offer that may or many not be helpful. As you may know, part of my academic background is in AI. I'd like to defend the name 'Large Language Model' (much more accurate than 'Artificial Intelligence'!) and provide a metaphor for trying to understand what they are, and why they work (and seem 'intelligent').
Imagine that every conversation that ever took place could be mapped onto a landscape. It's a multi-dimensional landscape, to be sure - those conversations go in all directions! - and it has many more dimensions than those we're familiar with, but it's a landscape, with valleys and troughs, and so forth. Large Language Models are maps for that landscape of conversation. Because they have to pretend exactness (they're machines, after all), they are far more exacting and limited than the real landscape they model, but like most maps they are still 'good enough' for getting around. Armed with this map (the Large Language Model), we can imagine dropping ourselves at any point on the map, and 'roll downhill' in a predicable way.
That's pretty much what a Large Language Model is. A multidimensional map (model) of previous discussions (language). It is because there are so many previous discussions (large) fed into the map that it can seem 'intelligent'. But it is the humans who had the conversations that had authentic intelligence - at least some of the time! The LLM can just roll a ball downhill from whatever starting point you feed it (the prompt), reverse-engineering the responses to questions by simply 'following the landscape of the language'.
Stay wonderful!
Chris.
PS: Writing this, I remembered that I touched upon Descartes before at Stranger Worlds (he's hard to avoid, given my themes!) while discussing the cyberpunk novelist and mathematician Rudy Rucker:
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/the-mind-is-everywhere