The bot will generate “personalized AI-driven insights” based on a user’s biometric and health data, doling out information and reminders to help them improve their behavior.
If the bot were unbiased, one has to wonder at what point suicide would be a realistic option.
I just asked ChatGPT about it now and got the number for a prevention lifeline… which in the forseeable future will be staffed with more bots
Thanks, Mark. I am no scientist, but I don’t see the second law being challenged by living organisms. Our constant intake of energy sources and complex digestive systems seem consistent with it.
That’s true. Told you I wasn’t a science guy.
In the common illustration, it’s a card game where you can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t leave the game.
We living things are order from disorder, definite blips albeit temporary against the irresistible march of disorder.
Yes – we are actually very good at increasing disorder!
Well said. Individually as blips that is true but collectively as life we are part of something much greater. Life as such shows no sign of winding down or tiring of the card game. Thinking of life as a mechanism to be figured out with physics over estimates our intelligence and underestimates life as a whole.
This reminds me of a quote from my new favorite online personality, Anton Petrov
all we can tell for sure is life on earth is definitely special and it definitely evolved in a lot of different complex ways but I guess more importantly, it also had so many chances to basically get nowhere yet somehow, for some reasons we had these periods of biodiversity that lasted for millions of years
Have just begun reading “The Narrow Path - How the Subversive Way of Jesus Satisfies Our Souls” by Rich Villodas. It’s about the Sermon on the Mount.
I’ve already encountered an unpleasant challenge - but one I need to hear: embedded in this quote from the book.
Peacemakers are those who work for right relationships at the expense of their comfort. We don’t usually choose this route, nor do we understand what it really means. Jesus does not say, “Blessed are the peacekeepers.” What’s the difference between peacekeeping and peacemaking?
Here’s the distinction. Peacekeeping tries not to rock the boat, avoids conflict, and is superficial. It ensures that no one gets upset. That’s not real peace. When, out of fear, we avoid conflict and appease people, we are false peacemakers.
And a little later…
Here’s the thing with peacekeeping: sooner or later, it brings chaos—not peace—into your life. Peacemaking is quite different. Peacemakers don’t avoid conflict; in fact, sometimes peacemaking creates it. We see this with Jesus. As the epitome of love, he wasn’t always nice—at least not in the way modern people visualize niceness.
Villodas, Rich. The Narrow Path: How the Subversive Way of Jesus Satisfies Our Souls (p. 29). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Ouch. Something this conflict-avoiding Anabaptist hopes to work on.
Yes, the idea of peacemaking being active and not just passive is something we Anabaptists often forget. The need to sometimes step into conflict and to confront issues. But also, of having the vision and wisdom to see underlying grievances and inequities among people, and to take steps to “make things right” long before things blow up into physical conflict. How can I (sacrificially?) reduce inequities among those around me and actively diffuse hostility now?
That observation was once made about U.N. peacekeeping forces, in US News & World Report IIRC, back in the 1980s, with the observation that in many situations all those forces really accomplish is keep the opponents preparing for the moment the UN flag is gone. It also noted that in one case the primary result of the presence of troops under the UN banner was that both sides came to hate the UN more than they hated each other, which resulted in the two sides (unofficially) talking and coming to see they could live next to each other in peace if that was what it would take to get the UN to leave.
Like when as a lifeguard I would literally step between two people who were starting to fight – and told them they had two choices: they could be expelled from the pool for a month, or they could sit down and listen to me.
Somehow I never got punched when I did that, though one guy pulled his fist back and glared at me for a couple of seconds.
Once the dispute had to do with a girl. I told them maybe I should call her over and get her view – both of them freaked out at that and said, “Okay, we’ll be good!” Then she came stomping over and demanded to know what I’d said to them!
More musings on the meaning of “God” from McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things:
I can easily understand someone saying ‘I can see why we need to go beyond what science can tell us. Very few people now believe that science can answer all our questions. And you have already suggested that metaphysics and science when properly understood sustain one another in different ways. But why bring God into it? God is no more an explanation of how things came about than the ground of Being. Where, after all, does God come from? We are still as ignorant. Theology gets us no further than philosophy.’ I am sympathetic, particularly because the weight of history attached to the word makes it hazardous to invoke the word God. It is perfectly true that invoking God does not explain anything. But, importantly, that is not its purpose. The recognition of God is not an answer to a question: it is to fully understand the question itself. In this spirit Wittgenstein wrote: ‘To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.’ And he continued: ‘To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.’44 The point of invoking God is to ensure that we do not lose sight of the deepest of life’s enigmas. ‘When we speak of God’, writes theologian Herbert McCabe, ‘we do not clear up a puzzle; we draw attention to a mystery.’45 When the word disappears from our vocabulary, we don’t abolish that mystery; we just cease to recognise that it is there. We no longer know what it is we do not know. There is nothing shameful in not knowing: the human mind is inevitably characterised by its ignorance more than by its limited understanding. But the deeper ignorance is when we choose to put out of mind what it is we do not know, and pretend to know what we never can.
Location 342
I felt it to. Sometimes it’s as simple as telling someone they have offended you. In some relationships it’s easy to wear the proverbial mask that everything is fine. But in your gut you know it ain’t fine and the space between the two of you isn’t clear.
God is indeed a mystery that is beyond our understanding. We can only know what God has revealed to us.
As long as God remains at the level of philosophical thinking, we are too far from God to learn much about Him. Learning happens daily when we live with Him, together with other Christians. That demands courage and will to step in front of God and ask that He will show that He is real. If it happens just for curiosity, I doubt there will come any answer. God turns to those who are willing to follow Him as the Lord of personal life if He shows He is.
I don’t doubt that personifying God has real value for people but our beliefs are not infinitely malleable. To try to embody such a belief for the sake of personal spiritual advancement would be wrong headed. My regard for God will likely always be philosophical in nature. But I see that as more genuine from my perspective.
Yet we must determine what God has revealed. For those not growing up with received answers a healthy dose of philosophy is required or else one just goes down the materialist drain with much of the rest of the population, including most atheists but also many believers IMO.
Here is another excerpt from my favorite philosopher’s book TMWT. The part I bolded goes to your last comment to me about philosophy alone not being enough. Apparently that sentiment finds expression from within philosophy as well. This quoted part comes from pp 1860-61:
That awe and wonder are the end as well as the beginning of philosophy is one reason why God may be a better name than just ‘the ground of Being’ for this creative mystery. A phrase like ‘the ground of Being’, too, may have its conventional cultural baggage - in this case its presumed dullness. …
So, providing we remain appropriately skeptical about language, we not only can use a term other than ground of Being, but, it seems to me, we must . Metaphysical argument can take us some of the way, but it deals only with the what, not the how. Even the rather abstract question ‘why should there be anything at all? Is not, after all, just an intellectual puzzle. It is a fundamental question - the fundamental question - for human beings; and we miss the point if we suppose it is a matter for abstract reasoning alone.
In a wonderful passage Schelling writes about how we should prepare ourselves for an understanding of any subject:
First and foremost, any explanation should do justice to what is to be explained, not devalue it, explain it ‘away’, diminish it or mutilate it, simply so as to make it easier to grasp. The question is not ‘what view must we adopt so as to explain the appearances in a way that accords neatly with some philosophy?’, but precisely the opposite: ‘what philosophy do we need if we are to measure up to our object, and be on a par with it?’ It is no how the phenomenon must be turned, twisted, skewed or stunted, if need be, so as to be explicable according to principles which we have already resolved never to go beyond. The question is ‘in what way must we broaden our thinking so as to get a hold on the phenomenon?’
…But he who refuses, for whatever reason, to broaden his thinking in this way should at least be honest enough to count the phenomenon amongst those things (which, when all is said and done, are for all of us plenty enough) that he does not understand; rather than drag it down and degrade it to the level of his own conceptions; and, if he is incapable of raising himself up to the level of the phenomenon, at least to stops short of holding forth about it in wholly inadequate terms.
I believe that in the necessary process of achieving a fit between our understanding and what there is to be known, our present materialist culture has disregarded Schelling’s advice, and contracted the scope of what exists. We are like someone who, having found a magnifying glass a revelation in dealing with pond life, insist on using it to gaze at the stars - and then solemnly declares that if people in the past had such a wonderful magnifying glass to look through, they’d have known that, on closer inspection, stars don’t actually exist at all.
This is getting repetitive. Why are you so compulsive about casting shade on what I share. I suggest you apply some caution toward your own reading.
Who started it is irrelevant. My problem with you is your posting of simplistic memes with a vague accusatory tone but with no willingness to address what was posted.
I suppose it could just have been a coincidence that you posted that same one again after this post of mine as you have before. Was that it or was it someone else’s post you felt you had to warm people to be careful with?
Another quote from “The Narrow Path” - this one to do with anger and rage. (Lord, please shepherd my own soul in this!)
In our society, anger is nurtured and rewarded. We are formed to see others as the root problems of society, justifying our anger toward them. Democrat? Raca. Republican? Raca. Immigrant? Raca. Gay person? Raca. Pro-life person? Raca. Atheist? Raca. Baptist? Raca.
On and on it goes. Here’s Jesus’s point: To carry and nurse the kind of anger that leads to raca is murder in God’s eyes. You don’t have to spill blood to kill life. To speak a mean-spirited, dehumanizing word subjects us to judgment and the power of hell. If you’ve ever experienced that level of hatred toward someone, while it can feel justified in the moment, you’re actually living in a kind of hell. Rage consumes us. Destroys us. Still, we don’t see the damage done to our lives. It’s hard not to think Jesus is exaggerating just a bit. In fact, it’s easy to deceive ourselves into thinking anger is a fruit of the Spirit. Beware of whitewashing toxic anger with slick names like “righteous indignation,” “standing up for truth,” or “telling it like it is.” If Jesus says it’s destructive, we must make every effort to rid our lives of it.
Villodas, Rich. The Narrow Path: How the Subversive Way of Jesus Satisfies Our Souls (pp. 67-68). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
I have occasionally wondered why so many people take terms from German and render them as blandly as possible into English.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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