6 ms·

What Would C. S. Lewis Have Thought of AI?

10 points by RickJWagner 4mo ago

nephihaha 4mo ago
The answer can be found in "the Abolition of Man" and "That Hideous Strength". C.S. Lewis would have hated the AI mockeries of him on YouTube. There are several channels which dispense AI slop with his name attached to it.
- nlavezzo 4mo ago
  Yes, That Hideous Strength despite being written probably 60 years ago seems dead on as a criticism of many of the things being pushed today.
liggitt 4mo ago
I've always thought this Lewis quote was particularly apt: "But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet." (Mr. Beaver, on the White Witch, from "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe")
moomin 4mo ago
I love CS Lewis. I don’t massively love his name being invoked by a bunch of people intent on ripping the chest out of America.
- jfengel 4mo ago
  I don't especially love Lewis. His fiction is fine, but I find his theology badly overrated. At best it's pop theology, not scholarly, and even even as pop theology I find it shallow. Ironically, I find his friend Tolkien's Catholic theology more thoughtfully expressed in fiction that Lewis' is in nonfiction.
- nephihaha 4mo ago
  Lewis had very little to do with that. He was a Protestant Irishman who found a home in England. His main connection to the USA is his wife who was from a very left wing background when she was younger, pretty much Communist in fact. I don't think Lewis would have had much truck with either of the two main political currents in the States. He was conservative (small "c") himself but not in much like the American sense.
hackingonempty 4mo ago
> Men have souls. Is it not a lie to assert something is true when you do not actually know it to be true?
- ux266478 4mo ago
  Generally we restrict the notion of lying to mean willful assertions that are known to be false. But there are other problems here. We tend to divide knowledge into the categories of a posteriori (that is which justified belief through observation and experience) and a priori (that which is justified belief through structural consequence, or without experience). C.S. Lewis being a Catholic is making an assertion on an a priori facet of knowledge. Anything is true provided you take the right postulates. You should always keep that in mind, as well as the fact that presuppositional critique on good faith belief is an uninteresting game of semantic bickering, and as a baseline itself requires epistemic certainty. Or rather, "you can't assert that because we don't know" isn't really a valid attack here. You might not know, because that lack of knowledge is entailed by your world model. C.S. Lewis knows because it is entailed by his world model.
  - nephihaha 4mo ago
    C.S. Lewis was never Roman Catholic. He was a Protestant Ulsterman from Belfast in what is now Northern Ireland. Catholics and Protestants were (and still are) at loggerheads there. He became agnostic for some years and then joined the Church of England (Anglicans/Episcopalians.) J.R.R. Tolkien was devoutly RC and a friend of Lewis', but Lewis probably could never bring himself to be RC due to his family background. Lewis did, however, also take a lot of inspiration from pre-Reformation literature.
    - ux266478 4mo ago
      A minor correction: Catholic doesn't necessarily mean Roman Catholic. The rest is all truth, but allow me to explain because I'm stretching language and taking an unspoken unconventional stance. I never lump Anglicans in with the rest of the reformation movement. As much as I've seen, they're no more distant with the Catholic church than the Eastern Catholic church I grew up in, they're just distant on a very different axis (that I don't happen to find any more or less significant). On the other hand, I see about as much familiarity in Calvinism or Lutherans or Evangelicals as I do in Mormons. The grouping just feels non-descriptive to me, so I don't really use it. I would consider the evangelical low churches, and baptist churches, to be protestant though. I know of course what you mean, and I know that's not the Church's official stance. I thought I'd just clarify on why I called him Catholic.

10 points by RickJWagner 4mo ago

The answer can be found in "the Abolition of Man" and "That Hideous Strength". C.S. Lewis would have hated the AI mockeries of him on YouTube. There are several channels which dispense AI slop with his name attached to it.

nlavezzo 4mo ago
Yes, That Hideous Strength despite being written probably 60 years ago seems dead on as a criticism of many of the things being pushed today.

liggitt 4mo ago

I've always thought this Lewis quote was particularly apt: "But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet." (Mr. Beaver, on the White Witch, from "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe")

moomin 4mo ago

I love CS Lewis. I don’t massively love his name being invoked by a bunch of people intent on ripping the chest out of America.

jfengel 4mo ago
I don't especially love Lewis. His fiction is fine, but I find his theology badly overrated. At best it's pop theology, not scholarly, and even even as pop theology I find it shallow. Ironically, I find his friend Tolkien's Catholic theology more thoughtfully expressed in fiction that Lewis' is in nonfiction.
nephihaha 4mo ago
Lewis had very little to do with that. He was a Protestant Irishman who found a home in England. His main connection to the USA is his wife who was from a very left wing background when she was younger, pretty much Communist in fact. I don't think Lewis would have had much truck with either of the two main political currents in the States. He was conservative (small "c") himself but not in much like the American sense.

hackingonempty 4mo ago

> Men have souls. Is it not a lie to assert something is true when you do not actually know it to be true?

ux266478 4mo ago
Generally we restrict the notion of lying to mean willful assertions that are known to be false. But there are other problems here. We tend to divide knowledge into the categories of a posteriori (that is which justified belief through observation and experience) and a priori (that which is justified belief through structural consequence, or without experience). C.S. Lewis being a Catholic is making an assertion on an a priori facet of knowledge. Anything is true provided you take the right postulates. You should always keep that in mind, as well as the fact that presuppositional critique on good faith belief is an uninteresting game of semantic bickering, and as a baseline itself requires epistemic certainty. Or rather, "you can't assert that because we don't know" isn't really a valid attack here. You might not know, because that lack of knowledge is entailed by your world model. C.S. Lewis knows because it is entailed by his world model.
- nephihaha 4mo ago
  C.S. Lewis was never Roman Catholic. He was a Protestant Ulsterman from Belfast in what is now Northern Ireland. Catholics and Protestants were (and still are) at loggerheads there. He became agnostic for some years and then joined the Church of England (Anglicans/Episcopalians.) J.R.R. Tolkien was devoutly RC and a friend of Lewis', but Lewis probably could never bring himself to be RC due to his family background. Lewis did, however, also take a lot of inspiration from pre-Reformation literature.
  - ux266478 4mo ago
    A minor correction: Catholic doesn't necessarily mean Roman Catholic. The rest is all truth, but allow me to explain because I'm stretching language and taking an unspoken unconventional stance. I never lump Anglicans in with the rest of the reformation movement. As much as I've seen, they're no more distant with the Catholic church than the Eastern Catholic church I grew up in, they're just distant on a very different axis (that I don't happen to find any more or less significant). On the other hand, I see about as much familiarity in Calvinism or Lutherans or Evangelicals as I do in Mormons. The grouping just feels non-descriptive to me, so I don't really use it. I would consider the evangelical low churches, and baptist churches, to be protestant though. I know of course what you mean, and I know that's not the Church's official stance. I thought I'd just clarify on why I called him Catholic.