PreachGPT

AI systems like ChatGPT have a lot of people worried, but I just bumped into a story about a group who wouldn't have occurred to me -- pastors.

Apparently, there's been a sudden spike of interest in (and concern over) the use of ChatGPT for sermon-writing.  As you might imagine, the uneasiness creative people feel about AI producing prose, poetry, art, and music is amplified a hundredfold when the issue starts to encroach on religion.

The article is well worth a thorough read, and I won't steal the writer's thunder except to mention a handful of quotes from pastors to give you the all-too-predictable flavor of their responses to AI-generated sermons:

• It lacks a soul -- I don't know how else to say it.  (Hershael York, Southern Baptist)

• ChatGPT might be really great at sounding intelligent, but the question is, can it be empathetic?  And that, not yet at least, it can’t. (Joshua Franklin, Orthodox Jewish)

• While the facts are correct, there’s something deeper missing.  AI cannot understand community and inclusivity and how important these things are in creating church.  (Rachael Keefe, United Church of Christ)

• When we listen to the Word preached, we are hearing not just a word about God but a word from God.  Such life-altering news needs to be delivered by a human, in person.  A chatbot can research.  A chatbot can write.  Perhaps a chatbot can even orate.  But a chatbot can’t preach. (Russell Moore, Southern Baptist)

To make my own stance clear right from the get-go, I'm what the philosophers call a de facto atheist -- I'm not a hundred percent sure there's no higher power (mostly because I'm not a hundred percent sure of anything), but the complete lack of hard evidence tilts me in the direction of disbelief.  As far as spiritual concerns, like the existence of a soul (or at least "something more" than our physical being), I'm an agnostic.  There is a great deal of weird shit out there that might be explainable by virtue of some sort of non-materialistic model -- but it might just as well have to do with a combination of our own flawed cognitive processes and incomplete understanding of science.  (If you have five minutes, watch this video by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder about why quantum wackiness doesn't support the existence of souls.  I'm not as convinced as she is, but wherever you're starting, belief-wise, it'll get you thinking.)

Apropos of AI, this lands me squarely in Alan Turing's camp.  How on earth am I supposed to judge if a particular AI system "really is intelligent" other than its output -- given that I don't have any access to the inner workings of another human's brain, and barely have access to my own?  The only way to judge intelligence is by what you see externally.  So is ChatGPT intelligent?  In my opinion, the question is honestly not so much difficult as it is meaningless.  It implies that intelligence is some kind of either-or, a threshold that you cross irrevocably, whereas it really seems to be more like a gradually-shifting gray area.  Coming up with a final answer regarding ChatGPT (or any other AI) is drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and then arguing over which side of that line something falls.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons mikemacmarketing, Artificial Intelligence & AI & Machine Learning - 30212411048, CC BY 2.0]

Interestingly, one person on the r/atheism subreddit asked ChatGPT if it wanted to buy his soul.  Here's how it responded:

I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I don't have the ability to buy or own anything, including souls.  Moreover, the concept of selling one's soul is often used in literature or mythology, but in reality, it's not a valid transaction that can be made.  Your soul is a metaphysical concept that is not subject to exchange or monetary value.  It's important to focus on living a meaningful and fulfilling life rather than trying to sell or trade something that's intangible and invaluable.

I'm not sure whether to laugh or shudder.

In any case, you can understand why the pastors are concerned, given that they don't share my agnosticism over souls and spirits and whatnot, and the prevailing attitude is that there is a qualitative difference between human intelligence and any potential artificial intelligence, no matter how clever it gets.  They're backed into a corner; presented with a sermon written by ChatGPT, they have no choice but to claim that it "lacks a soul" -- because, after all, they think the computer it came from lacks one, too.

Me, I wonder how accurate that view would turn out to be.  It'd be interesting to run a Turing-test-style experiment on some pastors -- give them a bunch of sermons, half of them written by qualified pastors and half written by ChatGPT, and see if they really could detect the lack of soul in the ones from AI.  I suspect that, like all too many other AI applications, we're getting to the point that it'd be a damned difficult determination.  And if they couldn't figure it out, what then?  I'm reminded of the quote from Spock in the James Blish novel Spock Must Die: "A difference that makes no difference is no difference."

Given the rate at which this is all moving forward, we're embarking upon an interesting time.  Although I'm not religious, I empathize with the pastors' dismay; I have a strong sense that the fiction I write has some ineffable something that an AI could never emulate.  But how much of that certainty is simply fear?  I'm not sure my "oh, no, an AI won't ever be able to write a novel like I can" is any different from Reverend Moore's statement that "a chatbot can't preach."  We all get territorial about different things, perhaps, and fight like hell to keep those boundaries secure.  Maybe at heart, the fervor of the religious and the passion of the creatives are really manifestations of the same thing.

I wonder what ChatGPT would have to say about that.

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The collapse of reality

I can say with some level of confidence that I'm nowhere near smart enough to be a philosopher.  Or, honestly, even to read most philosophical treatises with understanding.

An acquaintance of mine is a Ph.D. in philosophy, and she showed me a bit of her dissertation.  It was a kind gesture, but I read the piece of it she sent me with the same expression my dog gets when I try to explain something to him that's completely beyond his grasp, like why I don't want to play ball when we're in the middle of an ice storm.  You can tell he really wants to understand, that he would if he could, and that he feels bad that it makes no sense to him, but the whole thing only registers enough to trigger the Canine Head-Tilt of Puzzlement.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, I'm going to leap into deep waters surrounding an experiment that was the subject of a paper in arXiv last month that -- according to an article in MIT Technology Review -- shows that there's no such thing as objective reality.

The paper, entitled, "Experimental Rejection of Observer-Independence in the Quantum World," by Massimiliano Proietti, Alexander Pickston, Francesco Graffitti, Peter Barrow, Dmytro Kundys, Cyril Branciard, Martin Ringbauer, and Alessandro Fedrizzi, working at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, Scotland), investigates a little-known conundrum of quantum mechanics called the Wigner's Friend Paradox.  This one adds a new layer onto the famous Schrödinger's Cat Paradox, which seems to imply that something can be in two opposing states at once until someone observes it and "collapses the wave function."

Here's the idea of Wigner's Friend (named after Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner).

Let's say there's a single photon being studied in a laboratory by a colleague of Wigner.  The friend observes the photon, which can be polarized either horizontally or vertically -- Wigner doesn't know which.  The friend does a measurement to find out the direction of polarization of the photon, collapsing its wave function and forcing it into one or the other, and then writes down the results -- but doesn't tell Wigner.

Then Wigner studies the same photon.  What he'll find, goes the theory, is that to Wigner, the photon is still in two superposed states at the same time.  Ergo, Wigner and his friend observe the same real phenomenon, and they come up with different answers about it.

And they're both right.

This seems like some kind of trickery, but it's not.  Reality for Wigner and his friend are demonstrably different.  This opens up a particularly snarly (and bizarre) problem called the "consciousness causes collapse" interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that's where the waters get even deeper.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

In a nutshell, here's the problem.  The collapse of the wave function happens because of interaction with an observer, but what counts as an observer?  Does the observer have to be conscious?  If a photon strikes a rock, with a particular result in terms of interacting with the rock's atoms, is the rock acting an observer?  To physicist Pascual Jordan, this seems to be stretching a point.  "[O]bservations not only disturb what has to be measured, they produce it," Jordan said.  "We compel [a quantum particle] to assume a definite position...  [therefore] we ourselves produce the results of measurements."

Which prompted Einstein himself to respond that the Moon did not cease to exist when we stopped looking at it.

Despite Einstein's scoffing, though, it seems like that's exactly the sort of thing Wigner's Friend suggests.  The Proietti et al. paper is unequivocal that the "observer problem" can't be dismissed by saying that everything, even inanimate matter, could be an observer, because it requires a sentient entity recording the results of the experiment to produce the effect.  The authors write:

The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them.  In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most dramatically exposed in Eugene Wigner's eponymous thought experiment where two observers can experience fundamentally different realities.  While observer-independence has long remained inaccessible to empirical investigation, recent no-go-theorems construct an extended Wigner's friend scenario with four entangled observers that allows us to put it to the test.  In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we here realise this extended Wigner's friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations.  This result lends considerable strength to interpretations of quantum theory already set in an observer-dependent framework and demands for revision of those which are not.

The MIT Technology Review article outlines how earthshattering this result is.  The author writes:

[T]here are other assumptions too.  One is that observers have the freedom to make whatever observations they want.  And another is that the choices one observer makes do not influence the choices other observers make—an assumption that physicists call locality. 

If there is an objective reality that everyone can agree on, then these assumptions all hold. 

But Proietti and co.’s result suggests that objective reality does not exist.  In other words, the experiment suggests that one or more of the assumptions—the idea that there is a reality we can agree on, the idea that we have freedom of choice, or the idea of locality—must be wrong.

This is the point where my brain simply rebelled.  I've always considered myself a staunch materialist, although (as I said before) I'm well aware both of the fact that there are philosophical arguments to the contrary and that most of them are way beyond my mind to comprehend.  But I've been able to effectively ignore those arguments because science -- my touchstone for reality -- has always seemed to me to support a materialist view.  This table, this desk, this coffee cup all have a realness independent of me, and they would be there substantially unchanged if I weren't looking, or even if I ceased to exist.

But the truth is, as usual, more complex than that.  The hard-edged materialism I've always found so self-evident might not just be arguable, but simply wrong from a scientific basis.  Perhaps our consciousness creates reality -- a view espoused by mystics, and typically rejected by your stubborn science-types (like myself).

I don't know if I'm quite ready to jump there yet.  As the MIT Technology Review article said, it may be there are loopholes in the Wigner's Friend experiment that haven't been uncovered yet.  But one by one those options are being eliminated, with the result that we materialists might be forced to reconsider, if not completely overturn, our view of the world.

All of which makes me feel like I want to hide under my blanket until it all goes away.  Or maybe just play ball with my dog, ice storm be damned.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Deconstructing Wah!

Yesterday, I received a mailing from The Omega Institute, of Rhinebeck, New York, suggesting that I might be interested in taking some of their classes.

Frankly, I suspect that I'd last six hours there before security guards escorted me off the premises for guffawing at the staff.  I first started receiving mailings from them because I was interested in their writing intensives, but (as I found out on my first perusal of their catalog) at least half of their offerings are seriously woo-woo.  One I particularly enjoyed reading about is the use of music in healing, taught by a woman named Wah! (The exclamation point is not me being emphatic; it's part of her name.)  What would possess someone to change her name to Wah! is a mystery in and of itself, but I did go to her website and listen to some of her music, and what I heard seemed to fall into the Overwrought, Therapy-Session-Gone-Horribly-Wrong School of Music.  I didn't find it particularly healing, myself, but maybe the point was that it was healing to her -- I don't honestly know.

A more interesting example, however, are the workshops offered by a fellow named John Perkins that claim to teach you how to shape-shift.  From the description of one of these workshops:

We have entered a time prophesied by many cultures for shapeshifting into higher consciousness.  Polynesian shamans shapeshift through oceans, Amazon warriors transform into anacondas, and Andean birdpeople and Tibetan monks bilocate across mountains.  These shamans have taught John Perkins that shapeshifting - the ability to alter form at will - can be used to create positive change.

Well, okay. I'm willing to accept that some Amazonian shamans believed that they could become anacondas.  I'm also all too willing to accept that certain other, fairly gullible, Amazonian natives believed that the shamans were becoming anacondas.  

But this demands the question, doesn't it, of whether they actually are becoming anacondas.  Some of the disciples of the woo-woo will respond with something like, "reality is what you think it is."  Which works just fine until reality in the form of a baseball bat wallops you in the forehead, at which point you can think it doesn't exist, you can in fact think that you're an Andean birdperson, but what you really will be is a confused, non-Andean, ordinary person with a concussion and a big old dent in your head.

It is amazing the lengths to which the woo-woos of the world will go to support their beliefs.  My wife Carol, in her nursing program, had to take a course in "alternatives to traditional medicine."  Her own take on this was that if it had been about the role of belief in the efficacy of medicine, that would have been fine; but they didn't stop there.  They started out with therapies for which there is at least some experimental support (such as acupuncture) and from there took a flying leap out into the void, landing amongst such ridiculous and discredited ideas as homeopathy, chakras, and healing through crystal energies.  This last one led to a spectacle that was (according to Carol) acutely embarrassing to watch, wherein the teacher held a crystal hanging from a string over a volunteer's head, to show that the crystal could pick up the volunteer's "life energy" and begin to swing of its own volition.  There was no response from the crystal (surprise!!!) for some minutes, while the volunteer (who was probably seriously regretting raising his hand) and the students in the audience sat fidgeting and looking at each other.  Then, after about ten minutes, the crystal moved.  Hallelujah!  The theory is vindicated!

All of which once again brings up the subject of confirmation bias, a cognitive bias that we here at Skeptophilia have seen all too often.  Basically, if you've already decided on your conclusion, you only pay attention to any evidence (however minuscule) that confirms your idea, and everything else is ignored.  Any movement of the crystal had to be due to the subject's "energy field" -- other hypotheses (such as that the teacher's arm was getting a bit tired after holding the crystal up there for ten minutes, and he moved his hand a little, causing the crystal to swing) are not even acknowledged.

You see what you want to see.  And, if you're lucky, you get to make a bunch of poor college students sit there while you're doing it.

So far, I am sounding awfully self-confident, as I have a tendency to do.  But if I'm being totally honest, I have to look at my own ideas in the same light.  One of the great myths of the last hundred years is, I think, that somehow everyone is biased except for the scientists -- that the scientists have this blinding clarity of vision, that they are objective and unbiased and therefore have cornered the market on truth.  

While there are probably scientists who believe this, the truth of the matter is that most scientists are well aware of their biases.  We skeptics, too, see what we want to see.  

First, we have to believe that the scientific way of knowing leads us closer to the truth -- which statement, of course, you can't prove.  Furthermore, if you're a researcher, you're not approaching a question with a completely open mind; you already have (at least to some extent) figured out what you think is going on, and so when you design your measurement equipment and your experimental protocol, you do so in a way to find what you think it is that you're going to find.  If there's something else going on, you might not even see it unless you're extraordinarily lucky.  Perhaps that's why serious paradigm shifts have so often happened because of some random piece of evidence, from an unexpected source, that someone (often by accident) notices.  It's how Kepler found out that planetary orbits are elliptical; it's how plate tectonics was discovered; it's how penicillin was discovered.

Science doesn't proceed by clear, logical little steps, by people adding brick after brick to an edifice whose plan is already well known and laid out on the table.  Like most of the other things in this world, it proceeds by jerky fits and starts, false turns, and backtracking.  The "scientific method" no more explains how we've accrued the knowledge we have than "life energies" explain the movement of a crystal hanging from a string.

So then, why am I a skeptic?  Why don't I just go and join Wah! and John Perkins?  (Just think, I could come up with a pretentious single syllable name with a punctuation mark, too!  I think I'd be "Huh?")  For me, the single strength of science as a world view is its ability to self-correct.  You claim that plate tectonics exists?  Okay -- anyone with the equipment, time, and inclination can go out there and verify the evidence themselves.  If an experiment is not found to be repeatable (such as the "cold fusion" debacle), it's not explained away with some foolishness like "the energy fields were being interfered with by the chakras of your aura" -- the whole idea is simply abandoned.  The procedures, equipment, and outcomes are out there for peer review, and if they are found wanting, the theory is modified, altered, or scrapped entirely.

Try that with the healing energy of music.  I bet if several of you were sick, and I played some of Wah!'s music for you, some of you would get better.  Some of you might get sicker.  (I suspect I'd be in the latter category.)  And for those of you who got well, how could we be certain that it was the music that was responsible?  Because Wah! says so?  Because the idea that music could have a healing energy appeals to you?  If I've learned anything in my fifty-five years on this planet, it's that there seems to be no connection between ideas I find appealing and ideas that are true.

If anything, the opposite seems to be the case.  I know I'd love it if Bigfoot and aliens were real, faster-than-light travel was not only possible but easy, and I could do magic à la Harry Potter.  Unfortunately, thus far I'm batting zero on all that stuff.

Anyhow, as usual, I've probably pissed off large quantities of people who are into homeopathy, crystal energies, numerology, astrology, faith healing, and so on.  But I'm reminded of a quote from (of all people) C. S. Lewis, whose wonderful character Mr. MacPhee said in That Hideous Strength, "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I'll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

To which I say, "hear, hear."  On the other hand, if I get visited tonight by an anaconda, I suppose it will serve me right.

The stories we tell ourselves

Often, when I respond to a piece of art work, it's because of the stories that it evokes in my brain.

When I was in college, and took an art appreciation class, I fell in love with Édouard Manet's painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.  And it wasn't because of any knowledge of French Impressionism, and how Manet's work fit into the artistic movements of the time; nor was it really about the style, or the skill of the painter, although those certainly played a role in the capacity of the painting to touch me.  The whole thing was about emotion, and how it brought stories bubbling up from the depths of my brain.

Who is this girl with the despairing expression?  I imagined her as a country girl who'd come to the city, allured by its lights and excitement, and is having to support herself as a barmaid -- and now she's there, trapped and disillusioned, her mind and her heart a million miles away.  The painting struck me then as terribly sad.  And it still does.

All of this comes up because of a conversation I had with a friend who is working toward his Ph.D. in philosophy.  His dissertation is on the subject of phenomenological idealism, which is (as far as I understand it) the idea that the universe is a construct of the mind -- that reality is solely experiential, and may or may not have any external existence.  (Kant said that we "cannot approach the thing in itself" -- all we know is our experience of it, so that's what reality is.)

Anyhow, my friend told me a bit about what he's studying.  I did try my best to understand it, although I don't know how successful I was -- and it must be admitted that I am not entirely certain I have the brains required for such an esoteric subject.  But insofar as I understood him, I found myself disagreeing with him almost completely.

That said, I'm not going to try to craft an argument against idealism.  For one thing, I am wildly unqualified to do so.  My background in philosophy is thin at best, and my attempts at understanding classical philosophy in college were, on the whole, failures.  What interests me more is the immediate reaction I had to my friend's description of his philosophical stance.  It wasn't an argument; it was purely an emotional reaction that, if I put it into words, was simply, "Oh, now, come on.  That can't be right."

So I started thinking about why people respond the way they do to belief systems.  Why, apart from "I was taught that way growing up," does anyone believe in a particular view of the universe?  Why does a theistic model appeal to some, and others find it repellent?  Why do I find materialism "self-evident" (which it clearly is not -- from what my philosopher friend has told me, it's no more self-evident than any other view of the world)?  Why, within a particular religious worldview, do some of us gravitate toward viewing the deity as harsh and legalistic, and others as gentle, kind, and forgiving?

I suspect that it all comes down to the emotional reactions we have.  I'd bet that very few of us ever do the kind of analysis of our concept of the universe that my friend has done; for the vast bulk of humanity, "it feels right" is about as far as we get.

And I can lump myself in with that unthinking majority.  I'm drawn to the mechanistic, predictable, external reality of materialism, but not because I have any cogent arguments that that worldview is correct and the others are false.  I accept it because it's a solution to understanding the world that I can live with (and that's even considering the bizarre, non-intuitive bits, like quantum mechanics).  But for all that, I can't prove that this view is the right one.  Being locked inside my own skull, even the solipsist's answer -- that he, alone, in the world exists, and everything else is the product of his mind -- is irrefutable.  Why don't I believe that, then?  Because it doesn't "seem right."  Hardly a rigorous argument.

Now, I still think you can make mistakes; once you've accepted a rationalist view of the world (for example), you can still commit errors of logic, misevaluate evidence, come to erroneous conclusions.  But why is the rationalist worldview itself right?  You can't argue that it is, using logic -- because to accept that logic is valid, you already have to accept that rationalism works.  It's pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.   The only reason to accept rationalism is because it somehow, on a gut level, makes sense to you that this is the way the world works.

It's a little like my experience with art.  A Bar at the Folies-Bergère appeals to me because of the emotions that it evokes, and the tales I tell myself about it.  I wonder if the same is true in the larger sense -- that we are drawn to a worldview not because it is logically defensible, but simply because it allows us to sleep at night.  Beyond that, all we do is tell each other stories, and hope like hell that no one asks us too many questions.