I think part of the reason that we are even having to have the conversation about whether humanity is something special in the universe is because we have narrowed our experiences so much through what christians used to call sin (the real kind, not the kind fundamentalists use to beat people over the head) or what we might today call pleasure overload.
Our experiences have become stale, one note. We seek only what gives us pleasure in every moment and avoid any other sensation simultaneously missing out on a kaleidoscope of feeling and life. We think emotions are like primary colors. Anger, excitement, sadness, contentment. We forgot that feeling is abiut much more than that. That the poets, the composers, the painters of yesteryears, in a word the artists - were using their mediums to communicate those marvelously complex and seeminly underscribable emotions.
Today everything is thought. We are abused by rationality. Modern art has to be thought instead of felt. From this perspective we are doubtful of the specialness of us and no wonder. We need the entirety of human experience for our uniqueness in God’s eyes to be apparent enough as to not need rational justification.
>"Today everything is thought. We are abused by rationality." 100% this. We're also misled by our obsession with being smart and rational into thinking that if we can understand the mechanisms underlying things, we understand the things themselves. As the Flobots' cautionary anthem about hubris Handlebars observes, "I can take apart the remote control/And I can *almost* put it back together." (Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLUX0y4EptA ) But just because we can break something into pieces doesn't mean that we understand something that can only be experienced as a whole.
Such a good point. The materialist types are so impressed with themselves and their ability to manipulate their immediate reality that they forget how truly limited their reach is. We also seem to have equated subjective with unreal. Just because an experiencr its subjective doesnt make it less real just makes it unmeasurable.
If sin is missing the mark, we humans certainly have dreadfully poor aim apart from reliance on relationship with God. There is God, and we are not him.
And I like your observation that we think of emotions as “primary colors” when, fact, emotions such as anger often are secondary responses to much deeper experiences.
An example of how human invention misses the mark is the way people are addicted to staring at screens or placing Apple goggles on their faces rather than experiencing the real humans or activities in front of them. Sigh.
I can't wait to hear the answer to this last question, because it is a problem I have been wrestling with for years. Flight from the perversity of these monstrosities feels right, but I keep grinding against the rock of the virtue of prudence and using our tools wisely, uncomfortable as that can sometimes be.
Safe travels, Spencer. I hope you find all that you're looking for and more on your trip. And thank you both again for this beautiful conversation! I'm going to start praying for the Klavan family.
Moreso lately, I wonder where we’re all headed, careening at top speed like Thelma and Louise towards that cliff and ultimate destruction. Yet, I try not to ponder the imaginable evils that might be awaiting the human race on this and other subjects by reminding myself, often with the help of others, that there is God and He has a plan. I’ve witnessed it’s playing out and been a benefactor of it countless blessed times in my life. That is one reason why a familiar Scripture comes to mind now, Joseph speaking to his resentful brothers in Genesis 50:20, “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.”
Few phrases in the Bible fill me with more hope than the phrase, “But God…”
The AI, brain implants, and similar things that will be developed are just tools that leverage our human abilities. They are not good or evil of themselves, but they amplify the good or evil that we as humans can do.
Like the old saying “ guns don’t kill people, husbands that come home early kill people!” Every technology that has come along has been feared for the harm it can do. But in the right hands, technology can do incredible good.
Unfortunately, it seems as if more and more people are interested in using technology in ways that can do damage to fellow humans, and a larger number of fellow humans. Most of the time it is not used to intentionally harm others, but there are so many unintended consequences we cannot imagine with the new technologies.
Just like taking guns away from citizens will not stop violence like some people think it will, and the solution there is taking away the bad guys, not taking away their tool. Bad guys are going to have these stronger and stronger tools to be able to do more and more harm either intentionally or unintentionally.
We’ve read the Good Book, we know “the next to the last chapter” is pretty rough, but it turns out good in the end! We are hurdling towards Biblical prophecy, make sure you are ready and do not be deceived.
I'm one moment a luddite, the next a modern, seeking discernment. I love your elevation of the word "good" ("but I suspect the better path lies through a good use"), a simple everyday word filled with gravitas and redemption, perhaps the same potential held in our gadgets? Maybe the patented test is that beauty is in the "eye" of the beholder. I just read a post suggesting that in order to follow Matthew 6:22, we need a good eye - God's perspective. I'm off to think about how I can have a "good" eye... “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light” (Matthew 6:22)
Good one! I think it’s all about time. How you keep your heart and keep your mind, but fly above the craziness. We don’t count in the world except to those that love us. And that’s OK.
This is SO up my own personal spiritual/mental alley right now, especially having just had my brain scrambled by (finally) watching Villeneuve’s 2021 “Dune.” Sure appreciate you fellows letting us in on your musings. At least it helps me think that maybe I’m not the only crazy one.
How can you journey towards something that is already you? The ONLY reasons for the tanackh, the prophets, Jesus' setting aside his infinity to become a man, and the apostles is, the Image of God. In other words, each of us is a person solely because God is persons. Persons have attributes that non-persons don't possess.
If we are not significant beings (aka persons because we are copies of God) would God have bothered with us? He redeemed the Images of God who exercise the power of choice and embrace the Messiah rather than cattle or jungle cats. We are more than flesh. We are great beings created in the Image of God.
Jungle cats remind me that Spencer wants to contemplate something on a rock in a rainy jungle. I encourage his contemplation of what God sees when he looks at Spencer.
We not only need to be rescued and redeemed. We need to be reconciled and restored to that image God expresses in each of us.
This also reminds me of Drew’s reasoning about how each person develops in time toward the fulfillment of who the person is. I’m probably far from doing justice to Drew’s argument.
I think part of the reason that we are even having to have the conversation about whether humanity is something special in the universe is because we have narrowed our experiences so much through what christians used to call sin (the real kind, not the kind fundamentalists use to beat people over the head) or what we might today call pleasure overload.
Our experiences have become stale, one note. We seek only what gives us pleasure in every moment and avoid any other sensation simultaneously missing out on a kaleidoscope of feeling and life. We think emotions are like primary colors. Anger, excitement, sadness, contentment. We forgot that feeling is abiut much more than that. That the poets, the composers, the painters of yesteryears, in a word the artists - were using their mediums to communicate those marvelously complex and seeminly underscribable emotions.
Today everything is thought. We are abused by rationality. Modern art has to be thought instead of felt. From this perspective we are doubtful of the specialness of us and no wonder. We need the entirety of human experience for our uniqueness in God’s eyes to be apparent enough as to not need rational justification.
>"Today everything is thought. We are abused by rationality." 100% this. We're also misled by our obsession with being smart and rational into thinking that if we can understand the mechanisms underlying things, we understand the things themselves. As the Flobots' cautionary anthem about hubris Handlebars observes, "I can take apart the remote control/And I can *almost* put it back together." (Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLUX0y4EptA ) But just because we can break something into pieces doesn't mean that we understand something that can only be experienced as a whole.
Such a good point. The materialist types are so impressed with themselves and their ability to manipulate their immediate reality that they forget how truly limited their reach is. We also seem to have equated subjective with unreal. Just because an experiencr its subjective doesnt make it less real just makes it unmeasurable.
I just stumbled on this and I remembered this comment and thought I might share. Check iut Roger Scruton’s Why Beauty Matters :)
If sin is missing the mark, we humans certainly have dreadfully poor aim apart from reliance on relationship with God. There is God, and we are not him.
And I like your observation that we think of emotions as “primary colors” when, fact, emotions such as anger often are secondary responses to much deeper experiences.
An example of how human invention misses the mark is the way people are addicted to staring at screens or placing Apple goggles on their faces rather than experiencing the real humans or activities in front of them. Sigh.
I promise I’ll spellcheck when my kids are a bit older.
No...say no to the thought control of spell check....I, unlike a bot, can still understand what you meant by "abuit," my human friend! :)
Haha the ultimate ‘are you a robot test’ :))
I can't wait to hear the answer to this last question, because it is a problem I have been wrestling with for years. Flight from the perversity of these monstrosities feels right, but I keep grinding against the rock of the virtue of prudence and using our tools wisely, uncomfortable as that can sometimes be.
Safe travels, Spencer. I hope you find all that you're looking for and more on your trip. And thank you both again for this beautiful conversation! I'm going to start praying for the Klavan family.
Moreso lately, I wonder where we’re all headed, careening at top speed like Thelma and Louise towards that cliff and ultimate destruction. Yet, I try not to ponder the imaginable evils that might be awaiting the human race on this and other subjects by reminding myself, often with the help of others, that there is God and He has a plan. I’ve witnessed it’s playing out and been a benefactor of it countless blessed times in my life. That is one reason why a familiar Scripture comes to mind now, Joseph speaking to his resentful brothers in Genesis 50:20, “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.”
Few phrases in the Bible fill me with more hope than the phrase, “But God…”
Reply to DC Goodman
We not only need to be rescued and redeemed. We need to be reconciled and restored to that image of God.
This brings to mind That Hideous Strength, the third book in C. S. Lewis’ space trilogy.
Love the patented Klavan Humanity Test
The AI, brain implants, and similar things that will be developed are just tools that leverage our human abilities. They are not good or evil of themselves, but they amplify the good or evil that we as humans can do.
Like the old saying “ guns don’t kill people, husbands that come home early kill people!” Every technology that has come along has been feared for the harm it can do. But in the right hands, technology can do incredible good.
Unfortunately, it seems as if more and more people are interested in using technology in ways that can do damage to fellow humans, and a larger number of fellow humans. Most of the time it is not used to intentionally harm others, but there are so many unintended consequences we cannot imagine with the new technologies.
Just like taking guns away from citizens will not stop violence like some people think it will, and the solution there is taking away the bad guys, not taking away their tool. Bad guys are going to have these stronger and stronger tools to be able to do more and more harm either intentionally or unintentionally.
We’ve read the Good Book, we know “the next to the last chapter” is pretty rough, but it turns out good in the end! We are hurdling towards Biblical prophecy, make sure you are ready and do not be deceived.
I'm one moment a luddite, the next a modern, seeking discernment. I love your elevation of the word "good" ("but I suspect the better path lies through a good use"), a simple everyday word filled with gravitas and redemption, perhaps the same potential held in our gadgets? Maybe the patented test is that beauty is in the "eye" of the beholder. I just read a post suggesting that in order to follow Matthew 6:22, we need a good eye - God's perspective. I'm off to think about how I can have a "good" eye... “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light” (Matthew 6:22)
Good one! I think it’s all about time. How you keep your heart and keep your mind, but fly above the craziness. We don’t count in the world except to those that love us. And that’s OK.
This is SO up my own personal spiritual/mental alley right now, especially having just had my brain scrambled by (finally) watching Villeneuve’s 2021 “Dune.” Sure appreciate you fellows letting us in on your musings. At least it helps me think that maybe I’m not the only crazy one.
Reply to DC Goodman
We not only need to be rescued and redeemed. We need to be reconciled and restored to that image of God.
How can you journey towards something that is already you? The ONLY reasons for the tanackh, the prophets, Jesus' setting aside his infinity to become a man, and the apostles is, the Image of God. In other words, each of us is a person solely because God is persons. Persons have attributes that non-persons don't possess.
If we are not significant beings (aka persons because we are copies of God) would God have bothered with us? He redeemed the Images of God who exercise the power of choice and embrace the Messiah rather than cattle or jungle cats. We are more than flesh. We are great beings created in the Image of God.
Jungle cats remind me that Spencer wants to contemplate something on a rock in a rainy jungle. I encourage his contemplation of what God sees when he looks at Spencer.
We not only need to be rescued and redeemed. We need to be reconciled and restored to that image God expresses in each of us.
This also reminds me of Drew’s reasoning about how each person develops in time toward the fulfillment of who the person is. I’m probably far from doing justice to Drew’s argument.
We not only need to be rescued and redeemed. We need to be restored and reconciled.
We not only need to be rescued and redeemed. We need to be restored and reconciled.