Mocking Christianity

[Ihatepcos]

I am so sick of people thinking it's okay to ridicule Catholicism and Christianity. This is especially apparent on Mumsnet. Every time there's a thread about religion I can't even read the replies because they're so awful.

The same doesn't seem to apply to the Muslim, Jewish, Hindu faiths etc.

If you don't believe in God that is your choice. But purposely mocking someone's faith and calling it a load of bullshit (and worse) is just not acceptable. So many people turn to faith to help them through extremely tough times in life and you are mocking the only thing that is keeping them going.

Now that is interesting- I mean purely on a quantitative basis I presume the computer would pick the one person, but then it would factor in the psychological impact of killing one person you know v 5 people you don’t, then measure the impact on society of the worth of each individual and the impact on the death of each person both on a family friend and societal level. The

There is no right or wrong answer to the trolley question. Merely one which conforms with arbitrary set of values.

Evolution similarly has no right or wrong direction beyond species that become extinct or not.

It’s very interesting and sadly Floridi ( who was at Oxford) has returned to Italy.

I think it could work in one of two ways. I imagine that he saw it as a process that could be employed by academics to input the perspective s that were getting lost or needed to be treated with more delicacy that have been really ramped up.

I suspect though it could be used in a different way - that qualitative evaluations are made in house in terms of agendas or criteria that may not be in the public interest. Ethics could be used in this way if we are not careful.

it is easy to see how some ethical issues are presently dealt with in the real world and how the philosophical groundwork that leads to the ethical outcomes could be plotted in but it would have to be kept transparent and on the basis of socially acceptable values.

Sometimes ethics in AI seems to be more about the data that is selected in the first place. I think we need to map contextual data with realistic goals before we get a true sense of future outcomes.

I’m struggling with Floridi myself 🤪😩 so perhaps someone else can explain it better but I think his premise was that we need to identify the moral/ ethical issues that sit behind a phenomenon and map the intellectual framework ( with all its different views) and effectively design the algorithm to counterbalance some aspects that normally overtake the subtleties.

That was really clumsily expressed @OMG12 my apologies

True "AI" will be capable of lying, of course.

Chidi knows that - but it's much more fun to see it played out for real.

Everyone hates moral philosophers

Thank you it’s all so complex isn’t it? I guess it’s only ever going to be as good as it’s inputs, tbh I’m prob too stupid to fully understand AI beyond trying (and failing to get it to draw a picture of my imagination 😂)

@SerendipityJane i wonder if AI can deal with arbitrary values my initial thought would be no but tbh I found my VIC20 too complex😂. Are arbitrary decisions part of what makes us human and maintains diversity. I wonder if AO can deal with paradoxes which I think often underlies ethical decision making?

Is AI limited to black and white thinking? That seems to be the way humans are being pushed. Whilst it has its value in survival, the increasing nuance needs, as Kevin Dutton says, a dimmer switch

I sometimes wonder if we are becoming as much like computers as they are becoming like us.

AI not AO (who are good with washing machines not sure about paradoxes)

@OMG12

Have you seen The Good Place on Netflix?

It's an interesting take on moral philosophy

Is AI limited to black and white thinking?

If "AI" is developed by humans then surely it is itself a natural process ? After all humans are merely a collection of molecules that themselves are governed by universal laws. Maybe "AI" is simply part of a species evolution ? After all humans long ago outsourced digestion to cooking (in order to develop our brains). So the distinction between "artificial" and "natural" is already a bit murky.

That seems to be the way humans are being pushed. Whilst it has its value in survival, the increasing nuance needs, as Kevin Dutton says, a dimmer switch

Maybe the current amplified yes/not good/bad in/out us/them shift is itself part of evolution and a response to shrinking resources and expanding needs ?

It's already patently obvious that in a land of SEO, "AI" has severe limitations. And as several "AI" experts have pointedly told me, the "AI" I would like to see isn't going to happen on Googles watch. Because the very first thing I would ask for is a search result "without the crap". Only "the crap" is how Google make money.

No I’m going to take a look -thanks for the recommendation

my Perspective is that humans are more than a collection of molecules, governed by universal laws -(yes -although I suspect we would disagree on the breadth and content of some of those).

Would an ISIS member share the same ethics as a nun?

I like your analogy of outsourcing digestion , but are ethics as mechanistic as digestion?

I guess the simple tasks are great to outsource to AI, maybe we should keep the complex stuff for humans.

I guess the simple tasks are great to outsource to AI, maybe we should keep the complex stuff for humans.

It's only 2023. What will "we" think in 3023 ? Bearing in mind our current round of western civilisation is arguably less than two millennia old. Only yesterday, watching "Digging for Britain" the fact that people returned to Isla over several millennia was mentioned.

I wonder if AI will aid or inhibit evolution within the human species? Possibly both? One things for sure civilisation will be fairly unrecognisable

One things for sure civilisation will be fairly unrecognisable

Or not ? Not only can we totally recognise the Roman empire (for example) we still have a lot of it's precepts. Merchants were complaining about the state of the roads in Britain in the 1st century AD. Not only totally recognisable, but still unfixed. And the Pharaohs collected taxes for their vanity projects. And I have little doubt that a few hours around Stonehenge as it was being built would not be quite the shock you would imagine.

It irritates me when people try to portray our ancestors as a different species. From the Palaeolithic to today the only evolution has been in fashion sense.

Ha, not humans but the society in which we live.

And maybe the part of us that’s not a collection of molecules 😀

Ha, not humans but the society in which we live.

But it is humans. Without some form of society, our species is a goner. It takes a village to raise a baby to adolescence. Our biological evolution is as much down to society as it is to opposing thumbs

in Terms of change our society has changed a lot more than us (as physical beings) so what has changed most sine the Stone Age?

Maybe we’re the AI experiment of another civilisation? Maybe we need to consider the failings and successes of humanity when designing AI to make sure it doesn’t make the same mistakes and replicates the best of us.

@OMG12

thats given me a horrible thought.

Maybe another civilisation has taken a look at us and said what a bloody mess, how do we start to organise this?

Lets use a computer to tidy things up. Put it all on a spreadsheet and then we hand that out to the relevant departments

Maybe we are an experiment and the Vogons have been tasked with destroying it?

www.simulation-argument.com/simulation

I agree OP there is a lot of negativity to religions. mN central should really be stamping out this ‘xenophobic’ content before it gets posted!
it’s irritating that people can just have an opinion without mocking each others religions

mN central should really be stamping out this ‘xenophobic’ content before it gets posted!

How can they do anything about it before it's posted?

I was intrigued at a Brian Cox show years ago that he quite happily debated the simulation discussion seriously. Which has also happened on at least one "Monkey Cage" I've heard.

Ultimately if we are in a simulation, we may never know it. But if we are in a simulation, maybe "woo" is simply parts of the program crashing or acting in an indeterminate or undefined way. Maybe "ghosts" are simply memory locations that weren't cleared properly.

An amusing thought is that some of the oddities noticed by scientists are simply parts of the simulation the designers hadn't quite gotten round to. And when we notice them, they fix them just to fuck with our minds. Maybe there really was cold fusion - until our overseers spotted their mistake and fixed it.

I know - by the rules of this simulation at least - that it's entirely possible to ask questions that can't be answered. And that can be shown mathematically. If anyone wants to propose gods existence, that's where I would start.