Notes on Artificial Certainty: AI, Faith, and What We Think We Know - But Was It Only Hearsay?
My recent post on the O'Hara Principle got me thinking about human forms of certainty and artificiality.
Persuasion.
Advertising.
Those examples are obvious.
The kind of messaging that's streaming with promises about the kind of life we might like to live.
Buy this car and you'll have adventures!
Drink this drink and you'll have lots of friends!
Have three of these for breakfast and you'll be superhuman!
Then there's the kind that feels a bit more — uncomfortable, shall we say.
If you don't like this, sorry. It's happening!
I'm actually the best person!
That's my seat, get out!
And then we've got the part that verges onto the territory I often write about.
Jesus is the answer, now what's the question?
Let me tell you what the Bible ACTUALLY means here.
(Oof. Reminds me of a preacher once who told us all to get out a pen and start crossing out things and replacing it with his words. I didn't.)
Or maybe certainty that sounds like —
I'm not sick. Absolutely not. No, no. That symptom you see is not a symptom at all. Don't be negative.
Or there again —
Miracles do not happen these days, if ever. Nothing you say will convince me they do. That's just common sense.
And so many more.
I'm not taking aim at anyone here, I'm just raising a few thoughts to get our brains and imagination firing around this topic.
Have you ever been the parent of young children?
Then you know. That's where things really hit home.
You take them to church, let's say, and all the while you're wondering — what are they picking up from all this — because a lot of what happens there (dynamics, politics, history, background rumblings) can be extremely complicated in ways that are impossible to explain in words…
So I remember thinking, quite often,
My goodness. These two young humans are looking at me and listening to me like I'm worth trusting. But there's a lot in the world I don't know if I can trust myself.
I used to hedge my bets a lot and ask them what they thought instead.
Probably the kind of thing that's frowned on in parenting handbooks.
But with my closest conversations I need to be honest, not pretend.
Again, just thoughts.
When you think about it — and I think we all should more — almost certainly no one we see around us was around 120 years ago.
I could have said 150 or 250, but my grandmother was born 121 years ago, so that makes 120 interesting to me.
I knew Nanny when she was in her 60s and 70s. Back then she would tell me all sorts of stories of her childhood.
(In my book project Stay With Me I talk a lot about Nanny.)
That means I actually have a direct (indirect?) human connection with the world 121 years ago.
But it's hearsay.
From one generation to another.
Yes, Nanny told me vivid stories.
Perhaps others remember them, and could even vouch for them. At the same time even my mother and brothers might even take issue with the very thing I'm sure I remember.
Ah, you're imagining that, they could all argue. Potentially.
And I could say, "But she was my blood relation! It's a true story!"
And they might say, "Well, I don't remember that, and she was my blood relation too!"
And in the end, there's nothing much we can do about this kind of disagreement, apart from —
trust?
reframe?
ban faulty memories?
exaggeration?
and conflicting ideas?
Sterilised lab conditions.
(Have you seen Downsizing, with Matt Damon…?)
And as we know, it's the discrepancies that mark out real witness statements. The tiny differences. Not the exact patterns without any deviation or tweak in perspective.
Anyway. My real point is this. We're ALL depending on hearsay aren't we.
How did you learn history?
Teachers? Parents? Books? Films?
Hearsay.
And how about Geography?
You may have travelled almost everywhere on the map, but you haven't travelled LITERALLY EVERYWHERE!
Yet we use the map to connect the dots and see what's what and where's where.
Hearsay.
And what languages do you speak?
Are you absolutely sure that's actually the language they speak there?
(I remember learning French and German for years without having been there. And then being told that actually people in countries who use those languages don't speak like we learned at all.
What was the point of that then?
Loads of point. Semantics and discourse analysis…)
But you get my drift.
And then there's Kierkegaard.
Objective and Subjective.
And faith.
But these are notes and placeholders.
So moving on for now…
One of the very big questions of the day is artificial intelligence.
Q. Where does AI get its knowledge?
A. From a very large bucket of what other people have been saying and writing and making and doing.
Gossip soup.
Life put out to dry rack until it's mere data.
Yes, okay, with a generous helping of statistical optimisation.
Patterns traced and expectations reinforced.
And a sprinkling of salt and pepper, but still — more like an instant Pot Noodle than the rich and vivid experiences tasted all humans over 5 minutes old (or less) have already seen in a lifetime.
And plenty of flattening. Oh, so much flattening.
If you don't know what flattening is, then just imagine taking a photograph, describing it in words of one syllable, and then throwing away the photograph saying it's not needed now you have the words.
Interesting, when you think about it, isn't it.
Because, this, ladies and gentlemen, is the way of things.
Systems at scale work better with the words than the photos anyway.
Tick boxes that are much easier to pack away and shelve than the kind of associative conversation (guilty!) that goes on a bit and doesn't stay on topic — ha, like the draft…
I wrote on SpicyGingerBiscuits…
and whether to rename my router…
You know, the more human kind.
So I think of all this as a kind of diagnostic lens.
After all, the ingredients of that gossip soup are not random possibilities, they are, in a sense, the waste product and remains of all our living and interacting.
They, kind of, tell us what we're made of.
What was it Jesus said? It's not what goes into a person that makes them unclean. It's what comes out.
Well, that's really brought home to us now, isn't it — now that we're being formed and facilitated by the outpouring of all that came before.
Repurposed, processed, flattened, and reshaped like uniform flat-packed tables and bookcases.
Easy to put together. Easy to fall apart.
Cheap to replace. Almost disposable.
If faith is reduced like that — to flattened artificial certainty, then — is it faith?
Called to be witnesses.
But if our 'witness' is artificial certainty packaged through persuasive proselytising rather than overflowing flux and fluency, is it faith?
And hey. I don't say any of this to criticise. I'm thinking aloud.
Through a magnifying glass.
With the label-maker settings on reverse
I believe —
(yes, based on family hearsay, and my experiments with the upshot of what I've been hearing all my life, and how it's working out for me)
…I truly believe that where we say that faith is NOT about
donning a pristine suit of armour and clenching our teeth.
Nor, filling our pockets with tracts we didn't write and haven't read, but someone told us we should.
I believe witness is more like saying,
"When I bring my vulnerability and questions to
[this living interaction]
it has had THIS* impact."
And *THIS, I reckon,
has more to do
with our own
breath and being
than the official
but empty
words themselves.
What else can we be certain of, without it being artificial?
So much more to say.
Beyond words, or certainty.
