The Generative AI Problem

2014-01-25

I saw this video today and had some thoughts about it I wanted to share with the world. So first, here's the video:

You can tell Dr. Dawkins is more of a theologist and less of a scientist. While I believe his campaign to rid humanity of traditional religious belief in a god or gods good and just, he does indeed go about it the same way the religious go about instilling those beliefs in the first place. If someone can be convinced that there are one or more gods out there who simply exist and have always existed and created our universe and so on, then they can be convinced that it is not true.

The natural sciences (the study of our perceivable reality) can only go so far in teaching us about ourselves, but as philosophers and mathematicians have told us, we are limited by the fact that we exist in our universe, and therefore cannot perceive reality as a whole, rather, can only see shadows and repercussions. The classical example is to look at your own eye. We need a mirror, an imperfect tool for reflecting light, in order to see our own eyes. The light reflects off our eye, then into the mirror, then back into our eye. Physicists have understood that much of the light information is lost along this path, and therefore we will never have a 100% complete picture of the truth; and philosophers have stated that this measurable effect begs the question, “is anything truly real?”

Without going too deep into that right now, I just wanted to say that belief in science is very similar to belief in a god/gods: once you believe in it, you can use its inherent methods to prove its existence and validity.