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While it's a fair criticism, just because someone doesn't believe in a god doesn't mean the religious hardware in their brain has been turned off. It's still th

While it's a fair criticism, just because someone doesn't believe in a god doesn't mean the religious hardware in their brain has been turned off. It's still there and operational - I don't think it's a surprise that this hardware's attention would then be automatically tuned to a different topic. I think you can also see this in the intensification of political discussion, which has a similar intensity to religious discussions 100-200+ years ago (i.e. Protestant reformation). Indicating that this "religious hardware" has shifted domains to the realm of politics. I believe this shift can also be seen through the intense actions and rhetoric we saw in the mid-20th century. You can also look at all of these new age "religions" (spiritualism, horoscopes, etc.) as that religious hardware searching for something to operate on in the absence of traditional religion.

svieira 1y ago
Which then leads you to the question "who installed the hardware"?
- cootsnuck 1y ago
  No, that lead you to that question. It leads me to the question, "Is it really 'religious hardware' or the same ol' 'make meaning out of patterns' hardware we've had for millenia that has allowed us to make shared language, make social constructs, mutually believe legal fictions that hold together massive societies, etc.?"
  - jffhn 1y ago
    Or: the hardware that generates beliefs about how things should be - whether based on religious or ideological dogma -, as opposed to science which is not prescriptive and can only describe how things are.
  - yubblegum 1y ago
    Your entire outlook is based on an assumption. The assumption that 'emergence of meaning' is a 2nd order epiphenomena of an organic structure. The 1st order epiphenomena in your view is of course consciousness itself. None of these assumptions can be proven, yet like the ancients looking at the sky and seeing a moving sun but missing a larger bit of the big picture you now have a 'theory of mind' that satisfies your rational impluses given a poor diet of facts and knowledge. But hey, once you manage to 'get into orbit' you get access to more facts and then the old 'installed hardware' theory of yours starts breaking down. The rational position regarding these matters is to admit "we do not have sufficient information and knowledge to make conclusive determinations based on reason alone". Who knows, one day Humanity may make it to the orbit and realize the 'simple and self apparent idea' of "everything revoles around the Earth" is false.
    - dmbche 1y ago
      I've enjoyed reading the books of Peter Watts (Blindsight, free on their backlog, sci-fi), on seemingly this subject
      - yubblegum 1y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) (will check it out. thanks!)
  - ryandv 1y ago
    > It leads me to the question, "Is it really 'religious hardware' or the same ol' 'make meaning out of patterns' hardware They are the same thing. Call it "religion" or "meaning making," both activities can be subsumed by the more encompassing concept and less-loaded term of "psycho-technology," [0] or non-physical tools for the mind. Language is such a psycho-technology, as are social constructs such as law; legal fictions are given memorable names and personified into "religious" figures, such as Libra from astrology or Themis/Lady Justice from Greek mythology. Ancient shamans and priests were proto-wetware engineers, designing software for your brain and providing tools for making meaning out of the world. In modern day we now have psychologists, "social commentators" (for lack of a better term and interpreted as broadly as possible), and, yes, software engineers, amongst other disciplines, playing a similar role. [0] https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-1-introduction/ https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-1-introduction/
buu700 1y ago
I agree that modern hyper-online moralist progressivism and QAnonism are just fresh coats of paint on religion, but that isn't similar to AI. AI isn't a worldview; it's an extremely powerful tool which some people happen to be stronger at using than others, like computers or fighter jets. For people who empirically observe that they've been successful at extracting massive amounts of value from the tool, it's easy to predict a future in which aggregate economic output in their field by those who are similarly successful will dwarf that of those who aren't. For others, it's understandable that their mismatched experience would lead to skepticism of the former group, if not outright comfort in the idea that such productivity claims are dishonest or delusional. And then of course there are certainly those who are actually lying or deluded about fitting in the former group. Every major technology or other popular thing has some subset of its fandom which goes too far in promotion of the thing to a degree that borders on evangelical (operating systems, text editors, video game consoles, TV shows, diets, companies, etc.), but that really has nothing to do with the thing itself. Speaking for myself, anecdotally, I've recently been able to deliver a product end-to-end on a timeline and level of quality/completeness/maturity that would have been totally impossible just a few years ago. The fact that something has been brought into existence in substantially less time and at orders of magnitude lower cost than would have been required a few years ago is an undeniable observation of the reality in front of me, not theological dogma. It is, however, a much more cognitively intense way to build a product — with AI performing all the menial labor parts of development, you're boxed into focusing on the complex parts in a far more concentrated time period than would otherwise be required. In other words, you no longer get the "break" of manually coding out all the things you've decided need to be done and making every single granular decision involved. You're working at a higher level of abstraction and your written output for prompting is far more information-dense than code. The skills required are also a superset of those required for manual development; you could be the strongest pre-LLM programmer in the world, but if you're lacking in areas like human language/communication, project/product management, the ability to build an intuition for "AI psychology", or thinking outside the box in how you use your tools, adapting to AI is going to be a struggle. It's like an industry full of mechanics building artisan vehicles by hand suddenly finding themselves foisted with budgets to design and implement assembly lines; they still need to know how to build cars, but the nature of the job has now fundamentally changed, so it's unsurprising that many or even most who'd signed up for the original job would fail to excel in the new job and rationalize that by deciding the old ways are the best. It's not fair, and it's not anyone's fault, but it's important for us all to be honest and clear-eyed about what's really happening here. Society as a whole will ultimately enjoy some degree of greater abundance of resources, but in the process a lot of people are going to lose income and find hard-won skills devalued. The next generation's version of coal miners being told to "learn to code" will be coders being told to "learn to pilot AI".
uncircle 1y ago
> While it's a fair criticism, just because someone doesn't believe in a god doesn't mean the religious hardware in their brain has been turned off. Max Stirner said that after the Enlightenment and the growth of liberalism, which is still very much in vogue to this day, all we’ve done is replace the idea of God with the idea of Man. The object might be different, but it is still the unshakable belief in an idealised and subjective truth, with its own rituals and ministers i.e a religion. I guess the Silicon Valley hyper-technological optimism of the past years is yet another shift from Man to religious belief in the Machine.

svieira 1y ago

Which then leads you to the question "who installed the hardware"?

cootsnuck 1y ago
No, that lead you to that question. It leads me to the question, "Is it really 'religious hardware' or the same ol' 'make meaning out of patterns' hardware we've had for millenia that has allowed us to make shared language, make social constructs, mutually believe legal fictions that hold together massive societies, etc.?"
- jffhn 1y ago
  Or: the hardware that generates beliefs about how things should be - whether based on religious or ideological dogma -, as opposed to science which is not prescriptive and can only describe how things are.
- yubblegum 1y ago
  Your entire outlook is based on an assumption. The assumption that 'emergence of meaning' is a 2nd order epiphenomena of an organic structure. The 1st order epiphenomena in your view is of course consciousness itself. None of these assumptions can be proven, yet like the ancients looking at the sky and seeing a moving sun but missing a larger bit of the big picture you now have a 'theory of mind' that satisfies your rational impluses given a poor diet of facts and knowledge. But hey, once you manage to 'get into orbit' you get access to more facts and then the old 'installed hardware' theory of yours starts breaking down. The rational position regarding these matters is to admit "we do not have sufficient information and knowledge to make conclusive determinations based on reason alone". Who knows, one day Humanity may make it to the orbit and realize the 'simple and self apparent idea' of "everything revoles around the Earth" is false.
  - dmbche 1y ago
    I've enjoyed reading the books of Peter Watts (Blindsight, free on their backlog, sci-fi), on seemingly this subject
    - yubblegum 1y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) (will check it out. thanks!)
- ryandv 1y ago
  > It leads me to the question, "Is it really 'religious hardware' or the same ol' 'make meaning out of patterns' hardware They are the same thing. Call it "religion" or "meaning making," both activities can be subsumed by the more encompassing concept and less-loaded term of "psycho-technology," [0] or non-physical tools for the mind. Language is such a psycho-technology, as are social constructs such as law; legal fictions are given memorable names and personified into "religious" figures, such as Libra from astrology or Themis/Lady Justice from Greek mythology. Ancient shamans and priests were proto-wetware engineers, designing software for your brain and providing tools for making meaning out of the world. In modern day we now have psychologists, "social commentators" (for lack of a better term and interpreted as broadly as possible), and, yes, software engineers, amongst other disciplines, playing a similar role. [0] https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-1-introduction/ https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-1-introduction/

buu700 1y ago

I agree that modern hyper-online moralist progressivism and QAnonism are just fresh coats of paint on religion, but that isn't similar to AI. AI isn't a worldview; it's an extremely powerful tool which some people happen to be stronger at using than others, like computers or fighter jets. For people who empirically observe that they've been successful at extracting massive amounts of value from the tool, it's easy to predict a future in which aggregate economic output in their field by those who are similarly successful will dwarf that of those who aren't. For others, it's understandable that their mismatched experience would lead to skepticism of the former group, if not outright comfort in the idea that such productivity claims are dishonest or delusional. And then of course there are certainly those who are actually lying or deluded about fitting in the former group. Every major technology or other popular thing has some subset of its fandom which goes too far in promotion of the thing to a degree that borders on evangelical (operating systems, text editors, video game consoles, TV shows, diets, companies, etc.), but that really has nothing to do with the thing itself. Speaking for myself, anecdotally, I've recently been able to deliver a product end-to-end on a timeline and level of quality/completeness/maturity that would have been totally impossible just a few years ago. The fact that something has been brought into existence in substantially less time and at orders of magnitude lower cost than would have been required a few years ago is an undeniable observation of the reality in front of me, not theological dogma. It is, however, a much more cognitively intense way to build a product — with AI performing all the menial labor parts of development, you're boxed into focusing on the complex parts in a far more concentrated time period than would otherwise be required. In other words, you no longer get the "break" of manually coding out all the things you've decided need to be done and making every single granular decision involved. You're working at a higher level of abstraction and your written output for prompting is far more information-dense than code. The skills required are also a superset of those required for manual development; you could be the strongest pre-LLM programmer in the world, but if you're lacking in areas like human language/communication, project/product management, the ability to build an intuition for "AI psychology", or thinking outside the box in how you use your tools, adapting to AI is going to be a struggle. It's like an industry full of mechanics building artisan vehicles by hand suddenly finding themselves foisted with budgets to design and implement assembly lines; they still need to know how to build cars, but the nature of the job has now fundamentally changed, so it's unsurprising that many or even most who'd signed up for the original job would fail to excel in the new job and rationalize that by deciding the old ways are the best. It's not fair, and it's not anyone's fault, but it's important for us all to be honest and clear-eyed about what's really happening here. Society as a whole will ultimately enjoy some degree of greater abundance of resources, but in the process a lot of people are going to lose income and find hard-won skills devalued. The next generation's version of coal miners being told to "learn to code" will be coders being told to "learn to pilot AI".

uncircle 1y ago

> While it's a fair criticism, just because someone doesn't believe in a god doesn't mean the religious hardware in their brain has been turned off. Max Stirner said that after the Enlightenment and the growth of liberalism, which is still very much in vogue to this day, all we’ve done is replace the idea of God with the idea of Man. The object might be different, but it is still the unshakable belief in an idealised and subjective truth, with its own rituals and ministers i.e a religion. I guess the Silicon Valley hyper-technological optimism of the past years is yet another shift from Man to religious belief in the Machine.