The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.
I'm an atheist too. I grew up in the church, rejected it in my teens. The problem with organized religion was the "organized" part -- the centralized, inflexible human authority.
I'm increasingly convinced that spirituality is a vital part of the human experience and we should embrace it, not reject it. If you try to banish basic human impulses, they just resurface in worse, unexpected forms somewhere else.
We all need ways to find deep connection with other humans and the universe around us. We need basic moral principles to operate on. I think most atheists like myself have quietly found this or are in the process of finding this, but it's ok to say it out loud.
For me it means meditation, frugality, and strict guidelines on how I treat others. That's like a religion, I guess. But that's OK. I embrace it. By owning it and naming it, you have mastery over it.
Thanks for saying this. I have a similar situation: " I grew up in the church, rejected it in my teens."
I've come to conclude that the problem isn't "religion" in the abstract, it's that the current institutions are unhealthy and sometimes toxic. IE, it's easier to be an atheist, even in name only, when one realizes that the religion they participated in as a child has more problems than benefits.
I sometimes wonder how people like us could create institutions that replace religions, yet generally agree with our beliefs and needs.
---
BTW: I've seen plenty of toxic behavior from atheists too. Aggressive evangelizing ones' beliefs, (or lack thereof,) IMO is a toxic behavior.
This is an odd perspective to me. I'm an atheist because I don't find the truth claims of theistic religions convincing. Whether or not the centralized structure of modern religion is problematic is tangential to that
Centralized religious authority has prevented religions from evolving or being replaced by new ones. They haven't gracefully let go of their beliefs about the universe we now know are false.
> The problem with organized religion was the "organized" part
What on earth is "unorganized" religion? How is such a concept distinct from the concepts of "worldview" or "ideology"? When people use the term, I assume automatically they're referring to abrahamic faiths—especially in contrast to "atheism".
It just means a religion with a formal structure and leadership behind it. The term points to the institution and its influence, not the beliefs themselves. An unorganized religion is basically personal or informal practice without a central authority, like an individual or essentially a book club.
If the way you practice your religion is standardized by an authority across several churches, it is organized religion. For example:
Catholic sects and Mormons are organized faiths. They have manuals for the priests to follow and you can go to the same one elsewhere and get mostly the same experience. Some small churches localized to a city are also organized.
Islam sects in the Middle east are usually organized between Sunni and Shia. To my knowledge, Islam is not organized in the USA even though the Imam might align with a sect, because there is no authority they report to or strict standard for their patrons.
Most Protestant churches are unorganized, and non-denominational are almost always unorganized because they are one-offs.
This is my informal understanding; I am not a religious scholar
Does language around fusion reactors ("bringing power of the sun to Earth" and the like) cause similar associations? Those situations are close in other aspects too: we have a physical system (the sun, the brain), whose functionality we try to replicate technologically.
> Does language around fusion reactors ("bringing power of the sun to Earth" and the like) cause similar associations?
Yes. And the people talking about "bringing the power of the Sun to Earth" are usually either full of shit or expect so little from their audience that they are effectively talking shit (or are making clickbait, what's the same). (And yes, there's a lot of fraud around fusion too.)
The people doing actual work don't use phrases like that in normal conversation.
You don't even have to go as far as fusion reactors. Nuclear bombs are real, and we know they work.
But surely, anyone who's talking about atomic weapons must be invoking religious imagery and the old myths of divine retribution! They can't be talking about an actual technology capable of vaporizing cities and burning people into the walls as shadows - what a ridiculous, impossible notion would that be! "World War 3" is just a good old end-of-the-world myth, the kind of myth that exists in many religions, but given a new coat of paint.
And Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It's the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, now retold for the new age. You have to be a doomsday cultist to believe that something like this could actually happen!
Emmanuel Todd has been going on about "zombie" and "zero" religion in a way that is really resonating with me.
If I understand his idea correctly, these societies that were developed with a religious justification, and a huge religious component, are of course losing it in the scientific age. The first stage they go through is "zombie religion" where people don't pretend to believe in the religion any more, but still insist that they share all of its values, and often become even more fanatical in the functions that the old religion served. The second stage is "zero religion" where both the belief and the functions are gone, and all that's left is a religion shaped hole that is filled with nihilism: the strong preying on the weak, self-indulgence, and an elite retreat into often paranoid fantasy.
These stages are shaped by the particular religion that disappeared, so the Zero Catholicisms aren't the same as Zero Protestantisms aren't the same as the Zero Islams. Science, being about what works rather than why you should be doing anything, simply didn't fill up these holes that once held morality and justification. For him, it seems, the Western world is primarily in a moral crisis, and we're seeing it in the mental decay of an elite that doesn't have to justify itself to anyone, ever (after religion has died.)
Personally, I can also see this in the deep desire of some people to obey AI, but I can't see it being fruitful at all. "Because the AI said so" is not particularly inspiring or ecstatic. It's just an extension of middle-class materialistic money as grace and job as devotion, which is notoriously unfulfilling. Will AI help you succeed if it can't tell you what it means to succeed?
I've seen more religious language from AGI skeptics than believers. I kind of think AGI will happen on the basis of being able to think / process data like a human brain which I don't see as unlikely. The skeptics will say AGI is trying to build god and so not happening, but that's a strawman argument really.
The A.I. economic bubble is a mad scramble to ride the crest of a wave of stock-pumping expectations before the inevitable collapse and dump. Trillions of dollars of "value" from bloviating promises. It's worthy of a new chapter in Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. [1]
> religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion
Religions have of course come and gone throughout human history. The preceding deities, temples, and artwork are called mythology by people inside today's temples of fervour.
But let's be clear, disparate local tribal practices and beliefs are only formalised by a power structure for the masked purposes of the power structure.
What springs eternal is the maintenance of control in political and tribal hierarchies.
> A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes
The fact that our species exhibits astonishing credulity is illustrated throughout history to the present day, not just in religious activities but in every context of economic scams and demagoguery.
The thing about bubbles is that it's devilishly difficult to tell the difference between a total sham and a genuine regime shift while it's happening because the hype level is similar for both.
Sure, it certainly could be difficult. But this is often because of information assymetry — the purveyors are making big claims about the dragon in their garage. [1]
If your intuition told you that there ought to be some evidence for grand claims, you would be right to be suspicious of the continuing absence of suitable evidence.
People always create god, even if they claim not to believe in it. The rise of belief in conspiracy theories is a form of this (imagining an all powerful entity behind every random event), as is the belief in AGI. It's not a totalizing solution to all woes. It's just a way to convince oneself that the world is not random, and is therefore predictable, which makes us feel safer. That, after all, is what we are - prediction machines.
The existential dread from uncertainty is so easily exploited too, and the root cause for many of societies woes. I wonder what the antidote is, or if there is one.
It's just a scam, plain and simple. Some scams can go on for a very long time if you let the scammers run society.
Any technically superior solution needs to have a built in scam otherwise most followers will ignore it and the scammers won't have incentive to prosthelytize, e.g. rusts' safety scam.
