The False Dichotomy Between Theism and Naturalism: Why Ardent Atheists and Theists are Wasting People's Time

I want to discuss what I think is a false dichotomy between religion and science, or more correctly between theism and naturalism. It is a basic working assumption of 10s of thousands of Internet debaters along these fault lines that there is a fundamental choice that must be made between believing in a world where magical stuff happens and a world that must be conceived of as having no possibilities for such. I am using the term magic here as a shorthand for anything that breaks laws of nature i.e. of what we learn from physics and the other sciences. I could use the term “supernatural” but that term is problematic for reasons I can’t get into here.  Another term I like to avoid is “miraculous,” since it can be defined in ways that it can either encompass the operation of laws of nature or not.

It is a strange confluence that most of the ardent religious and most of the ardent atheistic naturalists agree on the following fundamental claim: The world either has magical elements or it does not. The bulk of religious people assert that it does, so they are able to assert their theism. The atheists assert that it does not, so they reject religion and assert the non-existence of gods or God.

This seems a false dichotomy.  As the longstanding tradition of diverse forms of so called "Deism" makes clear, it is possible for this world to be one in which no magic occurs, but that an ultimate source of it is some form of eternal agency.  Or it might be possible that there is no ultimate agency behind it, but that the world, despite originating in a purely non-agent eternal source, such as say chaotic matter, is still capable of manifesting mind-bending alterations and exceptions to the operations of laws of nature. The recent fictional portrayals of movie multiverses illustrate visions of such.

With all these possibilities on the table one must consider the question this way:

1. Reality (all possible worlds) is founded in a natural non-agent eternal source such as random matter.
2. Reality (all possible worlds) is founded in an eternal agent (or agencies) source.
3. The question of the manifestation of magical elements cannot, as a simple empirical matter, decide the issue of the existence of an eternal agency as the proposed ultimate source of reality.

So, the debate is not just about the existence of an eternal agent at the source of reality. The debate must also encompass the possibilities for “the magical” and to be real and its significance. But many on both sides seem committed to the belief that the mere presence of the magical can determine the judgement on the question of gods or God without major argument about why this dichotomy must be accepted. 

Radical breaches or inexplicable aspects of the operation of natural laws are compatible with either possibility being true. Indeed, there is a growing recognition of this possibility in popular culture.  There are untold numbers of people who are skeptical about or even outright hostile towards the God of traditional theism, who still none-the-less believe in all kinds of wonderous possibilities, such as UFOs, ESP, telekinesis, alternate universes, or more humble “spiritual” conceits such as that “love conquers all,” or that there is someone out that they are fated to love, or that moral obligations can transcend the brute realities of the exercise of power and so on.  As the saying goes “The truth is out there.”

And yet untold oceans of ink and digital bits are wasted trying to argue the issue based on this supposed unavoidable choice. But if one rejects the dichotomy and believes instead that the question of the existence of God or gods cannot be decided by empirical evidence or counter evidence for the existence of magical elements of reality, this opens a whole new issue. Can one avoid agnosticism about the issue of naturalism?  Regardless of arguments about the issue of God one must also resolve the independent question of naturalism, which is:

Can knowledge be obtained to decide the issue of whether reality can involve breaches to laws of nature?

One might be tempted to call this “the problem of miracles,” as many philosophers and theologians have traditionally done, but clearly it can include a host of other less traditionally religiously specific topics.  The problem of explaining the "everyday miracles" of human consciousness, the experience of meaning, free will and the power of moral obligation, and the possibilities of our speculations about alternate dimensions or universes, apparent evidence for fine tuning, the emergence of life from dead matter, and its very definition, etc. Theists have been accused of resting their faith irrationally on a “God of the Gaps”, which is to say, to feel entitled to believe in God as possible explanation for aspects of nature not yet fully explained.  But it is just as much a problem to believe in hoped for future naturalistic explanations of everyday phenomenon like these, which have so far avoided such.

In the meantime, people can speculate on such issues.  And to the extent that their reasoning about matters of practical ethics and sense of self-worth depend on it, utilize their best judgements about such matters.  Such philosophizing is an inescapable aspect of the human condition.  In the absence of the resolution of metaphysical and epistemological conundrums like those of naturalism or theism or their perceived conflict, people must make their best judgments and be prepared to defend those judgements based on their practical implications for themselves and others. 

In short, most theists are magical thinkers, but many atheists seem merely to be magical thinkers who have been disappointed. For example they both expect that the miraculous events portrayed in scriptures must actually have occurred just as they are presented if they are to be adjudged useful or "true," or meaningful and in doing so are unable to draw more subtle insights or to appreciate the beauty of these unique and often profound narratives. Both camps are wooden literalists, who miss the mundane miracle of scriptures, which is that they emerge through contingent processes of human imagination and reasoning working through immensely complex interactions of communities grappling with the implications of their metaphysical judgements through time. They are wonderous because they emerge from such natural processes, not despite of those origins. And that we today are also able to join in those discourses simply adds to the wonder.

So, there is a significant practical conclusion that can be drawn from consideration of the issue of the supposed forced choice between naturalism and theism. First, in the absence of resolution to such high metaphysical matters people have a more potentially achievable epistemological obligation of discussing the ethical, self-identity and practical benefits of their decision-making drawing on their working assumptions about these matters. So, exploring the psychological and sociological impacts of metaphysical postulates on the functioning of specific communities, whole societies and individuals is a practical intellectual imperative. Exploring the empirical benefits and harms of religious belief and practice or their rejection for individuals, religious groups and the academy, therefore, should have much greater priority than debates intended to decide the matter of the existence of God.

Second, the fact that people inclined towards naturalism believe that their work is done if the  possibilities of magic are put in doubt reveals that many of them simply assume that all deities by definition must be inclined towards magic and disinclined from creating naturalistic worlds. It is only by holding this assumption that they can draw the conclusion that evidence for the absence of magic allows them to proceed directly to the conclusion that no ultimate agency exists.  Otherwise, they would have to notice their obligation to provide an explanation for why the absence of magic necessarily implies the non-existence of an ultimate agent. This is what I call the real core question of theism:

Is there an obvious reason for a God not to make worlds like those naturalists might expect could emerge from purely natural (i.e. material) processes like the operation of chaotic matter?

The belief that gods or God would never make such worlds seems to be a mere assumption on the part of most naturalists, which again, they seem strangely to share with a substantial body of their theistic opponents.

So if the presence or absence of magic in reality cannot decide the matter of the existence of God, and since an apparent majority of theists and their naturalistic opponents share the belief that no creator gods or God would ever make naturalistic worlds, they may be wasting everyone's time with fruitless arguments that also distract from the discussion of two more critical metaphysical matters.  I wish the people debating the supposed conflict between naturalism and theism who flood my internet feeds, would move along.

AI Hype is a Distraction

I’ve been asked to speak on the social implications of AI, which I take to mean its ethical and political implications.  I suspect that I got this invitation because I teach a course on the Philosophy of Technology for which I have written a textbook (plug plug).  But I also suspect that I got it in part because I teach a course called “Minds: Natural and Artificial”, which focuses on the topic of “The Philosophy of Mind” and more particularly the issue called “the hard problem”, which considers the mysterious phenomenon of consciousness.  I won’t bore you with details, but I will note that the term AI often invokes in people’s minds issues of consciousness and the nature of mind and awareness.  One of the authors we read is Hubert Dreyfus who wrote a famous and contentious book called “What Computers Can’t Do” in which he argues that computers will never be able to manifest consciousness.  In the class I approach the “hard problem” as an open philosophical question.  It is a very fraught issue in which there is plenty of opportunity for debate.  I mention these points only because the question of whether computers can think often lurks in the background of discussions of “AI” and adds most of the frisson surrounding the term in people’s minds.

Many people associate AI with images like that of commander Data in a Star Fleet courtroom defending his right to be recognized as a person, or the robot from the movie iRobot pleading with Will Smith’s character to recognize the plight of his people at the hands of an exploitive humanity.  I mention my course and the “hard problem” because outside the context of a classroom, in more practical settings like this one, I feel obliged to speak more frankly about the prospects of machine intelligence.  I agree with Dreyfus that there are certain things that computers can’t do and that it is extremely unlikely that they will ever manifest a level thinking that would allow them to be considered independently creative or conscious.

Another issue I feel obliged to deal with is the issue of my technical grasp of the topic.  As a professor in the Arts and Humanities it might be easy to assume that I am somewhat out of my depth when it comes to a highly technical subject like artificial intelligence.  Computers are black boxes for most people, and philosophers might be considered about as far from the nuts-and-bolts of software engineering as you can possibly get.  I will just mention that I have been an active computer programmer, largely as a hobby, but in the past working on academic projects, for over 40 years.  I have written tens of thousands of lines of code over the years, including programs using what are typically described as AI techniques.  I would direct you to my Internet Archive collection of early 8-bit programs and my Github repository and pages to check my bona fides. (jggames.github.io and https://archive.org/details/AI8-bitBASICprograms)

So, on the issue of computer intelligence and creativity, I would qualify my prior opening remarks by stating that I think computer software, as has been well demonstrated over the past half century, can be a great aid to human creativity. For example, Eric Topol's 2013 book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, illustrates some useful possibilities for developing software to take up the load of medical diagnosis and better information management desperately needed in public health systems.  And Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, give a wonderful rundown on the economic positives of new tech.  But what these recent improvements in medicine and commerce illustrate is that what we are really concerned with is a much narrower definition of intelligence.  Computers can indeed “think” in the much more modest sense of carrying out tasks formerly carried out only in human brains. They have been doing so since at least the Antikythera mechanism built by the ancient Greeks to calculate astronomical events and the timing of the Olympic games, and ancient Chinese abacuses. There is nothing new about machines doing intellectual tasks except perhaps the recent substantial increases in the pace of change that is to be expected in a society at the apogee of a bonanza of cheap high intensity energy like that provided by fossil fuels over the last two centuries.

In brief, I see the term AI more as a contemporary buzz term, spurred by recent improvements in language recognition software in combination with advancements in visual and auditory generative programs made possible by access to vast amounts of data generated by the Internet. The recent tendency to use the term AI with its exciting connections to the “hard problem” is no doubt a convenient tool for anyone connected with the need to raise investment capital required in free market economies. But as a coder I really can’t see the term as anything more than a fund-raising or talent recruiting trick aimed at spurring on new projects dreamed up by software engineers. 

I am not alone in holding such views.  As Linus Torvalds, inventor of the Linux operating system put it in a recent interview, it represents a bunch of people "with their hands out" and another hype-cycle like crypto or "cloud native."  Others have written books about AI viewed primarily as a marketing device.  I will just mention Katie Crawford’s well-received “Atlas of AI” and Merideth Broussard’s Artificial Unintelligence.  Yuval Noah Harari has a fascinating chapter in his book Homo Deus on the new religions of Silicon Valley and what he calls “Data Religion.”  I would more observe that the real computer revolution occurred long before ChatGPT in the final four decades of the last century, when the application of mundane computer software and automation equipment de-industrialized our society and shrank the blue-collar sector from just over 35 percent of employment to something closer to 10 or 15 percent.  As economists and historians of deindustrialization have observed, most of that process did not result from the offshoring jobs but processes of automation carried on within our society.

If anything, offshoring occurred late in the process, the last decade or so, largely to help deindustrialized workers maintain their buying power.  Ten-dollar T-shirts from Asia have helped maintain family incomes that would have otherwise noticeably shrunk over the last decades.  The vast increases in productivity in the industrial sector was achieved as result of trillions of dollars of investment.  But trillions were also spent in the final four decades of the last century in the service sector as well, with almost no measurable increase in productivity measured, until recently.  As American economist Robert Solo famously quipped in 1987 “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

Through that period of deindustrialization people did not go on about the potential impacts of “artificial labour.”  The term “automation” was sufficient.  Since that time economists have been waiting for the shoe to drop in the service sector.  But employment just kept growing and growing in that sector, without significant attendant productivity growth, despite vast investments in computerization.  The result has possibly been the creation of a vast array of what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” in his provocative book of that title.  Sometimes I am inclined to think that AI is simply a term preferred by white collar workers, me included, who feel somewhat threatened by the impending true application of automation to our bloated sector.  It grants the process the higher level of cache that we feel our work deserves compared to that of our blue-collar fellows.  Which brings us to the first major moral issue regarding AI, which is the issue of technological unemployment.

It is an open question whether technological development can or will eventually lead to an acute crisis of employment rather than the wage stagnation and heightening itinerancy with which we are familiar.  This is an empirical issue and still to some extent a future issue.  We have been able to keep many people employed, or occupied with education, early retirement or social supports, although anyone familiar with the various drug and mental health epidemics will tell you about the limits of such efforts.  Recent studies aside suggesting that we might finally be seeing a decoupling of productivity growth from levels of employment growth, there is a robust philosophical and ethical debate going on about whether the work that we do have and can expect to have will be of an edifying nature, regardless of whether enough of the resulting wealth can be appropriately shared.  Some people argue for a guaranteed annual income or other wealth distributing schemes.  I would simply note that such proposals do not grapple with the more fundamental issue of the quality and meaningfulness of work.  Figuring out how to make such judgements and how to best ensure that human beings can have enough opportunity to apply themselves to meaningful tasks is a critical question that continues to vex regardless of proposals regarding the sharing of wealth.

In a somewhat related vein, there is the fundamental question raised by authors like Crawford, of the relation of AI to the more general environmental crisis.  It is a connection that is often overlooked, but it is a highly relevant observation to make, as she does in her book, that computers and electronics are high energy and resource intensive activities, both in their infrastructural requirements and typical applications.  One need only note that in the early 2000s the improvements made in Great Britain in terms of increases in energy efficiency achieved through intensive public actions and investments motivated global treaty obligations, were entirely offset by increases in energy requirements needed for the infrastructure of the digital revolution. Crawford’s exploration of the vast air-conditioned server farms needed to host our cat videos, not to mention the now vastly expanding AI infrastructures, is sobering.  But as Crawford also points out the infrastructure of AI is tightly interwoven with activities still primarily focused on exploiting natural resources, as has been the hallmark of commercial activity since the industrial revolution.  Nothing so far in the empirical data robustly indicates that AI represents a radical shift from this pattern of consumption. But the human species must collectively consider sustainable alternatives to this economic model as was well illustrated by MIT’s original 1972 Limits to Growth model and its recent updates in 1992, 2012 and 2022.

Finally, there are specific ethical issues related to the development of AI tools themselves and their application for specific purposes.  First, the development of Large Language Models and visual and auditory generative techniques have been highly dependent on access to vast amounts of human generated training data used to apply to the various “machine-learning” methods required to develop such applications.  These processes raise many issues regarding the use of “our” data to benefit other people’s commercial purposes. These include issues about copyright, intellectual property rights and privacy.  More broadly the incentive of big data companies to gain access to our information create many potential moral hazards regarding the farming of users for their information.  Since we are currently in the very midst of such processes of development it is easy to overstate the challenges and the difficulties of finding reasonable administrate and legal solutions.

A second example relating to application simply involves the possibilities of the new tools to facilitate new kinds of malfeasance, that we might be insensitive to simply because of the novelty of the activities attending the new tools.  This is an abiding issue of technological change. Are the newfangled automobiles love hotels on wheels for teenagers?  Is selling bootleg video tapes theft? Is hacking a kind of trespassing?  Is texting while driving recklessness?  And, of course, most recently, is not properly attributing material produced by machine a form of fraud?

A somewhat novel type of issue regarding AI development and application can be described by the term “the alignment problem” coined by Brian Christian in his book of the same title.  Since AI programing techniques like “machine-learning” apply the kind of programing techniques that coders at one time simply called “self-modifying code,” which we were told by our teachers represented the “ultimate” in programmer laziness and warned to absolutely avoid at all costs, means the resulting software has the unavoidable quality of a black box.  Unlike traditional algorithmic or heuristic methods, contemporary programmers don’t have a good grasp of how their system operate and will continue to operate in novel conditions.  This raises many issues about the handing over of tasks normally requiring human judgement to machines.  There are now famous instances of what used to simply be called “expert systems” manifesting hidden biases often resulting from tendencies buried deeply in the human created training data, but sometimes simply from the imponderables of the programing methods as such.

One specific example of an issue regarding the application of AI is the issue of robotic forms of warfare.  The questions of whether machines should be handed even greater levels of discretion regarding the exercise of lethal judgment on our behalf is a very challenging ethical question, although I would note that such issues have been around since poison gas and delayed action munitions.  So, I don’t think these types of questions are really an issue specific to what we are now calling AI.

I would to put most of these specific issues of development and use in the “scare the horses” category.  As in the case of the early automobile when people didn’t know how we would manage issues like maintenance, traffic flow and driving etiquette, these now largely forgotten vitriolic debates were quickly resolved.  But as the case of automobile would also suggest we might well have done a better job of looking at infrastructural issues, like what would happen with all the exhaust fumes coming out of vehicles and how their operating requirements would influence us in re-shaping our cities.  So, I would tend to weigh the issues of energy and resource use more highly.

It is a simple reality of physics that the development of AI to the degree being predicated by its main advocates will require vast increases in access to energy, both for running computer systems supporting AI processing, but also soon, for creating and storing the vast amounts of artificially created training data that will be needed.  The proposed levels of advances in machine learning will require much more data than even our prodigious current Net use could ever supply.  But the gurus of AI, when asked about these more mundane energy issues, quickly flip into modes of magical thinking, speaking about fusion and mining asteroids, and the like.

So, we cannot escape the preeminent technological issue of our age regarding energy.  And the complex systems of our energy systems raise many possible cases of whether there are some technological activities that simply should not be done, or as the Latins so concisely put it: ab esse ad posse non valet consequentia (just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be)  Considering whether there are limits to the creation and application of technologies are not as deeply considered questions as they should be, although I would note the positive signs that this may be changing illustrated by Canada’s leading role in the international treaty banning landmines and recent efforts to limit single use plastics.

Finally, although the word “technology” is one of the most prominent terms of our age, the definition of this concept turns out to be a highly contested philosophical topic.  The fact that such a key term could be so philosophically confused and misunderstood stands itself as the main moral failing of our age.  As Marshall McLuhan so sagely put it, “the medium is the message.”  Interpreting the meaning of technology as such is the preeminent moral challenge of our time.

Bibliography

Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care (2013)

Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI (2021)

Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence (2019)

Gerrie, James. A Plea for the Preservation of Early BASIC Game Programs Canadian Journal of

            Media Studies/Revue Canadienne d'études des médias,18(1) 2022, pp. 90-113.

Gerrie, James. "Software Preservation Insights on the Power of BASIC" in Game Science. Digital

            Humanities for Games and Gaming. (Disk Book). Melanie Fritsch, Stefan Höltgen,

            Torsten Roeder, Editors. Weimar: PolyPlay 2023.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

Christian, Brian. The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values (2020)

Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus (2015)

Is political polarization in democratic societies a result of civilizational collapse?

I generally try to avoid succumbing to the temptations to catastrophize that I am prone to these days, but the United Nations recently reported that the earth is "well outside the safe operating space for humanity."  As reported in the Guardian "The assessment, which was published in the journal Science Advances and was based on 2,000 studies, indicated that several planetary boundaries were passed long ago." These boundaries include categories like biosphere integrity, land use, climate change, fresh water, nitrogen and phosphorus flows, synthetic pollution, and ocean acidification. The scientists suggest that 6 of 9 major boundaries have already been surpassed and the others soon will be.

(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/13/earth-well-outside-safe-operating-space-for-humanity-scientists-find and  https://youtu.be/X-FJvzgrM00?si=JDCyILh3YhvcRx0L)

And of course our society continues to struggle with growing social crises such as the opioid epidemic, which according to the Lancet has killed over 30,000 Canadians since 2016, the Covid-19 pandemic, mental health crises of various sorts, such as anxiety, loneliness and depression, all amidst a declining health system. There is also the housing crisis, increasing family debt, stagnant family incomes for over 4 decades, the ongoing impacts of automation leading to deindustrialization, not to mention the nebulous oncoming threats of "AI."

(Klaas Van Egmond, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289977166_Sustainable_Civilization)

And yet in the face of such crises we also find our society increasingly politically polarized and riven by "divisiveness" (https://youtu.be/vRV_6XQrMoI?si=DFHGerT7NLkjtZGk), which undercuts our ability to respond effectively through democratic institutions. My talk today is a speculation about the root causes of this divisiveness, which concludes with some political recommendations for addressing it that goes against the grain of the suggestions made by many contemporary commentators.

Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt and their recent New York Times bestselling book Tyranny of the Minority have garnered some prominence and can serve as an example of one mainstream view. They blame American political institutions, which they see as skewed by the founding fathers too heavily against preventing tyrannies of the majority and too little against the obstructive powers of minorities. But as Zack Beauchamp argues in a review of their book, there are other countries with “crises with root causes strikingly similar to America’s, such as Israel and Hungary," not to mention other global examples such as the Philippines, Brazil Argentina, Bolivia, Slovakia and Poland, which work against an American exceptionalist explanation. But then again, Beauchamp proceeds to argue for his own explanation of growing extremism as based in “entrenched racial hierarchies” and their weakening place in American society.  It is unclear how this hypothesis applies to Israel and Hungary and other global examples.

(https://www.vox.com/23873476/america-democracy-authoritarianism-tyranny-minority-levitsky-ziblatt)

My alternate hypothesis about the root causes of polarization grows out of the work of anthropologist Joseph Tainter and his theory of civilizational collapse and the elaboration of that theory by political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon.  According to Tainter, societies collapse when they reach a point of cultural/technological development where the energy available to the system is no longer sufficient to respond to the major social and environmental problems thrown up by that system. (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse)

In other words, as Homer Dixon describes the process, major problems arise as by-products of the current technological system taken as a whole, which that system is fundamentally energy deficient to address. Of course, major new sources of energy or efficiencies can allow for such problems to be addressed. But if the ingenuity required to open up such sources or to provide the needed efficiencies is unavailable or practically out of reach then a society will be unable to respond with new levels of complexity and will face what he calls an "ingenuity gap." He is doubtful that currently proposed new sources of energy and proposed efficiencies will be able to provide the new levels of required energy.

The inevitable result is some kind of contraction of the civilization in terms of complexity (i.e. its level of progress). Dixon argues that such contraction need not be catastrophic. There can be strategic walk-back of certain aspects of the technological system that can set the stage for future growth, but often civilizational collapse results where the unravelling of complexity takes the form of a cascading collapse of interconnected aspects of complexity triggered by "energy overshoot."  The system needs to rise to new levels of complexity in response to consequences of its current operation but can't.

As such failure unfolds major derivative crises occur (environmental and social) that are the more obvious manifestation of the more fundamental lack of energy. Such crises as symptoms of collapse are identifiable by their intransigence.  They are obvious, but the solutions are not, because there is fundamentally a lack of extra energy.  So, they will go unaddressed.  Lip service might be able to be paid to solving them, overblown panaceas can be floated, promises can be made, but in real situations of civilizational collapse nothing substantial will be able to be done because the society has maxed-out its energy budget supporting its existing level of technological complexity.

For Tainter and Homer-Dixon energy is the "master resource" because it cannot simply be skirted around by way of technological development in general, only developments that expand access to energy sources will address the crises. In other words, technology itself is not an energy source.  It is only a facilitator of access to energy resources in nature. It is those resources that determine all technological possibilities, including those of accessing new energy resources.  This aspect of the dynamic is known as the concept of EROI or Energy Return on Investment. It is ultimately this ratio that determines the amount of progress possible for society.  In brief, all civilizational collapses are just energy crises masquerading as an array of more manifest crises.

In situations of energy overshoot, one would expect that democratic leaders would have an especially hard time of it. In times of excess energy, which has been our experience for the last 200 years, societies can always simply add new forms of complexity, typically in the form of new public services, if new problems arise.  Politicians can simply propose these new forms of complexity to get elected because there is unused energy available to the system. They might still lie for selfish or strategic reasons and make promises they know they can't keep, but this will not be a necessity.

But once overshoot begins to take hold (I think of this as us collectively riding down right side of "Hubbert's Peak" (aka the "Peak Oil" curve represented as a giant roller coaster) and if ingenuity gaps manifest themselves, it will become increasingly tempting for politicians to become mendacious.  Barring some kind of major energy revolution providing new high EROI sources of energy to replace the high EROI oil and coal that have fueled progress for the last 200 years, solutions will be limited to strategic compromises of existing aspects of progress, which will inevitably alienate some existing constituency.  Since easy solutions that simply involve adding complexity will be increasingly less available, there will be an acute increase in the level of leadership skill needed to fashion political consensuses. Whether from necessity or fecklessness or both, the temptation will be for leaders to oversell panaceas, reach for desperate and extreme solutions, focus on issues where non-energy intensive moral victories can be achieved (possibly as a kind of distraction), or use nefarious rhetorical tricks to maintain themselves in power.

As choices for addressing problems diminish, voters will become increasingly disenchanted and political apathy will increase.  Also, since little substantive difference in terms of addressing problems will manifest itself, the act of voting will increasingly become an exercise in random selection. If choosing one way or another makes little practical difference, there can be no actual rationale for choosing in one direction over another. Non-rational, essentially random features of human psychology, personality and circumstance aggregated across vast populations will become the deciding factors for how people select political parties. Political life will increasingly become an arbitrary exercise of "team picking", even as voters become splintered into ever finer and increasingly less-rational factions.  In democracies, which must ultimately always filter choices through majority parties or coalitions, the teams will tend towards the mean (50% going this way, 50% going that way). Such a process will likely involve much scapegoating, blame-laying and intensifying vilification and demonizing of the other team as a psychological relief-valve for the persistent failure of their growing concerns to be addressed.

In short, political polarization in democratic societies would likely be an effect of, and sign of, those societies being in a process of collapse.  Could such a process be happening to us?  Certainly not if we take the perspective of many commentators on polarization, who often suggest that polarization itself is a cause of potential social breakdown.  For example, Morgan Kelly, an author at the High Meadows Environmental Institute observes:

As social interactions and individual decisions isolate people into only a few intractable camps, the political system becomes incapable of addressing the range of issues — or formulating the variety of solutions — necessary for government to function and provide the services critical for society.

(https://environment.princeton.edu/news/like-a-natural-system-democracy-faces-collapse-as-polarization-leads-to-loss-of-diversity/)

In short, it is people's personal dispositions that create polarization, not wider forces affecting society that influence those dispositions.

However, in subsequent remarks Kelly points to other factors based in the new media as potential culprit for these negative personal dispositions. His comments, and those of many other popular commentators on the issue, raise the possibility of what Marshall McLuhan called, in the regrettable culturally insensitive terminology of his time, the "tribalizing" effects of new media or what theorists drawing on his work now call "narrowcast" media, such as the social media platforms with their tendency to create "echo chambering" in public discourse. McLuhan would also add that such media also, paradoxically, embody possibilities for increasing exposure to negative and critical viewpoints, which he described as "the global village" effect, which can lead to a disruption of the development of a sense of personal identity.  He observes that situations of the loss of identity either individually or in societies almost always result in violent responses. Such complex effects are real, but I would argue that they might only feed off and accentuate a process of polarization like that described above.

My reason for questioning the suggestion that the echo chambering effect is the primary cause of polarization is because this suggestion only explains increasing insensitivity and decreasing tolerance of public discourse, not the increasing sense deadlock and decreasing confidence in political life.  As reported by the Carnegie institute, several trends developing in democracies seem to characterize polarization in Both North America and Europe, such as:

1. popular confidence in political institutions has plummeted
2. U.S. and European voters are disenchanted with mainstream political parties
3. High levels of partisan polarization, especially in the US (https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/06/21/comparing-democratic-distress-in-united-states-and-europe-pub-76646)

The last point's connection to the prior two is somewhat baffling. Why, if confidence is so low in institutions and parties, would substantial numbers of voters be inclined to cling more ardently to parties?  Why would others choose to move to extreme groups rather than simply, as has always been the tendency in democracies, nudge dominant parties to take up new policies and transform them into mainstream policies?  Instead, we find societies increasingly split. For example, in the last Canadian election the victorious Liberals won 32.6 percent of the popular vote, whereas the Conservatives actually won the popular vote with 33.7 percent (https://www.sfu.ca/~aheard/elections/1867-present.html). It seems increasingly that elections hang on knife edges. In the U.S, Trump only pushed over the top because of the archaic state-elector system and recent elections in Israel required new levels of coalition building. There seems to be an increasing tendency in democracies for a lack of clear mandates.  Instead, slim minorities often determine major shifts in political direction, such as in Brexit. What can explain this phenomenon of oscillation around the middle?

If the effect of echo chambering was main cause of polarization, the effect would be to coarsen debate between existing party constituencies as they increasingly lose contact with each other. But this hypothesis alone does not explain the growing sense of gridlock. Indeed, if new media and their echo chambering effect decrease the awareness of other groups, we should expect that the effect would be to simply to solidify existing groups at the numbers that existed before their effects took hold. But what we seem to find instead is societies gravitating towards equally balanced fundamentally opposed pluralities.

Such a tendency for oscillation around the middle of the political spectrum might be what causes the sudden major flips on issues with only the narrowest of margins, as in Brexit, or the paradoxical victories parties who lack popular support, but who eke out victories due the arcane minutiae of electoral systems. This split at the middle of the spectrum does not seem widely discussed by commentators on polarization. Rather, the focus is on the vitriol and extremity of groupings making up the coalitions of left and right (https://youtu.be/x_Q9ynm2Rfg?si=j6_z83RbH2NJzby8).

As Kelly's comment exemplifies, commentators frequently point at personal tendencies of thought and communication as the main causes of polarization. In a TEDx talk titled "That Open Secret About Political Polarization" Jake Teeny points out, for example that surveys indicate there is an increasing tendency for people to report feeling reluctant to engage in discussions with political opponents because of an "expectation of being unheard." In response he presents some practical suggestions for overcoming and managing such feelings. 

Tainter and Homer-Dixon's analysis suggests a different explanation for why people might be having feelings of being unheard. They suggest that it could be the inherent intransigence of the problems in situations of energy overshoot and the encouragement such a situation creates for exploring desperate measures. Such desperation and the inevitable fruitlessness of addressing side-effects could be the cause of an increasing sense of frustration with political discourse, at least in democratic societies.

In contrast, as Homer-Dixon and the historian Ronald Wright explore in some detail, in authoritarian societies one might simply find increasing inequality between marginalized groups and elites as elites leverage their power and privilege to preserve and even expand their interests in the lead up to collapse. Wright in his Short History of Progress discuss actual empirical evidence of this, such as can be found in surveys of the bone density of skeletons of different classes in societies that have experienced collapse, such in meso-American societies like the Maya. Such inequality will undoubtedly also manifest in democratic societies, but conceivably to a lesser extent. Instead, polarization might be the primary political effect.

If Tainter, Homer-Dixon and Wright’s portrayal of civilizational collapse is accurate, societies experiencing it will need to focus their leadership expertise on addressing the root causes of this kind of situation. Priority must be put on seeking radically new energy sources, major new efficiencies in current usage and possibilities for walking-back non-essential aspects of so-called "progress," to allow for controlled forms of "collapse" in the meantime.

Attributing blame to who is being most intransigent will not be helpful.  Nor will seeking ways for ameliorating polarization directly, such as suggestions like that of Henry E. Brady of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy who recommends better "civics courses."  If polarization is largely a symptom of a largely unrecognized dynamics of collapse, viewing civics as a "giant killer" of the phenomenon might be a mere panacea, no matter the intrinsic value of such educational activity.  Instead, what will be critical will be civic activism focused on the fundamental energy and technological systems dynamics feeding collapse. Think of the case of the recent American government shutdown, where an ultra-conservative minority held a slim balance of power that allowed it to hold the operation of the entire U.S. government hostage. Many in both the right and left news media were happy to portray that minority as mere ignorant attention seekers. Far too few were inclined to look for deeper causes for why conservative people were increasingly behaving like political nihilists and anarchists.

So instead of seeking to lay blame we must unrelentingly demand of our political leaders to explain what they are doing to find new forms of energy, and energy efficiency and what existing technological system they think are not as vital as most believe. As a catch phase we would need "innovation and discrimination about innovation." Political leaders and our own political discourse must be judged in terms of these priorities, until civilizational collapse has been managed or fundamentally averted, if collapse is indeed occurring.

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank all those who provided feedback on my presentation of this piece at the Atlantic Regional Philosophical Annual Meeting in Charlottetown and especially Dr. Will Sweet and Dr. Pamela Courtney-Hall.

Is the Rhetoric of AI just a Cover for Big Tech?

The Guardian published an opinion piece recently:

Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science?

Does the advent of machine learning mean the classic methodology of hypothesise, predict and test has had its day?

by Laura Spinney

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/09/are-we-witnessing-the-dawn-of-post-theory-science

This piece by Spinney strikes me as sensationalism that is exploiting common anxieties and misperceptions about AI loosely connected with some legitimate concerns about the declining momentum of scientific progress ("The End of Science" a la Horgan and the challenges of "Big Science"). One remark in particular makes me question the author's judgement:

particularly a form of machine learning called neural networks, which learn from data without having to be fed explicit instructions.

The highlighted part is overstatement. All machine learning(including "neural networks") begins with basic assumptions and methods, and specific goals ("end points"). These starting methods just allow for their own refinement and alteration through the processing of large amounts of data, which the digital revolution has made available. This is simple feedback, which has been a part of programming from as far back as Ada Lovelace. But it is made so much more "sensational' when buzz words like "neural network" "AI" and machine learning are used instead of mundane programming terminology. 30 years ago, we used terms like "self-modifying code" for such mundane techniques of software development.

Pieces like this one indicate to me that there is something very strange at work in the lives of computer programmers and software companies today that has led them to develop this rhetoric about AI, machine learning and neural networks. I worry that the "sexing up" of software engineering in the face of the failure of real AI by these folks is being exploited by big IT to act as a cover for its activities of getting lots of people to buy into the inanities of our largely unregulated tech industry.

By even using the terms "AI" and "machine learning" instead of more accurate descriptors like "clever coding" or "data mining" automated programming", members of the public have already ceded the issue of whether these applications should be embraced or avoided, legally limited or left to users to guide completely by themselves.  Who can be apposed to the application of intelligence?  Who would want to limit "a learner".  The reality is that these terms are mere marketing hype which non-programmers should refuse to use.

Does the Trolley Problem Present a Reductio Ad Absurdum Argument Against Utilitarianism?

I have been thinking about the Trolley Problem and the Teselacta from Dr. Who. Typically trolley problems are viewed as thought experiments that highlight competing ways the predominant Utilitarian and Deontological theoretical traditions can go about deriving answers to moral conundrums. In other words, they're meant to provide a focal point for debate between these two traditions. But what I think they actually do is highlight the deficiencies of Utilitarianism.

What Trolley problems reveal about Utilitarianism is that other factors besides happiness/utility are absolutely necessary for moral decision-making. In the problem's simplest form, choosing the death of five people or switching the track to kill one, a Utilitarian analysis, and I would argue, any kind of proper moral analysis should have one try to save the five. The truly interesting debates arise once one begins to add other factors, such as relationships with the other parties involved. In the empirical studies utilizing trolley scenarios people begin to substantially change their answers when other such factors enter in. And this makes sense if other things can also be considered good besides simple "happiness experiencing potential" of the sentient units possibly influenced by one's choices.

A more interesting variation of the trolley problem (this is where the Teselecta part comes in) might be to ask if the tracks had only one individual on each track: Hitler and Gandhi, both appearing through time vortexes immediately before their actual historical deaths. Your action of killing them would make no significant historical difference. Both will be killed and then swept back to their own time as dead bodies leaving the subsequent timeline intact. No further lives will be saved or influenced by the act. The train is hurtling towards Gandhi. Should you change the track and switch it to Hitler?  How should you make choices about such, as my son called them, "micro utilities?"

One might argue that the scenario is null-- One's choice will make no significant moral difference. Leave the train to run over Gandhi, and then let him be swept back in time to have the assassin's bullet hit his lifeless body and subsequent events unfold.  Or switch the track and play a role in "giving one" to Hitler just before he would have given one to himself with his pistol in the bunker. Since there are no significant differences in consequences for history, Utilitarianism might say there is no real moral issue at all. But how would one be able to reach such a conclusion?

If one could reduce suffering even by a tiny amount more, then the maximization of utility in the universe might only be achieved by putting Hitler out of his misery just a few moments earlier. Whereas, killing Gandhi who was conceivably feeling fine before the assassin's bullet felled him, might not be so effected by losing a few seconds of his general equanimity.  How could we weigh those few seconds against each other?  Is eliminating a few seconds of the undoubted anguish of Hitler in his last moments more weighty than shortening a few seconds good feeling of Gandhi basking in the praise of his supporters?  What if he happened to be worrying about something? Which tittle of utility should decide the matter?

And how does my own feeling factor in?  If I might feel good at giving one to Hitler, would this tip the balance?  Clearly it would be needed to be added to the scale.  But what if I experienced discomfort at being forced to make such a decision?  Having to think these potentially weighty matters through, especially under time pressure, might have its own displeasure attached to it.  I should certainly not let that displeasure rise to a level that I would tip the balance of the universe's utility in a lower direction than it might be otherwise. So perhaps I really should simply make an arbitrary decision to avoid such a possibility?  But what of possible regret?  Shouldn't be a problem.  Just try to make a reasonable estimate of the utility in the time allowed and choose (don't be a Chidi Anagonye).

When dealing with such minuscule amounts of possible utility/happiness, we are faced with a complex decision involving a possible return on investment of our moral unease and earnest concern.  Mere seconds at issue with the feelings of the subjects of our decision weighed against our own discomfort resulting from having to take our basic moral responsibility under Utilitarianism seriously.  If  situation were real, such reflections would likely be moot. Aristotle might be right that ethics in real life requires well established habits rather than complex accounting of consequences. It is only when the scenario is hypothetical that we can lavish time on trying to think such matters completely through.

But one thing we can't avoid is at least risking undergoing some uncompensated discomfort from undertaking our duties under Utilitarianism in order to provide the beginnings of an assessment of what the possible return on our own initial moral unease might be versus the possible utility that could be obtained from a possible moral decision. In other words, Utilitarianism demands such an initial investment of our own moral discomfort. We might, after having made such an investment, discern, as I suggest above, that maybe it is simply not worth my discomfort to intensively engage with a specific moral problem, but we can't be guaranteed that we might not overshoot before being able to make that judgement because we can't know what our assessment will turn up before we have undertaken it.  But if we discover that we have suffered more than any possible suffering that we could have prevented (when weighted against pleasure obtained), and then decide to cut our losses, this does not change the fact that Utilitarianism demands of us that we should have undertaken the initial assessment. We always must make such an initial investment of our possible moral discomfort REGARDLESS of the utility that might result.

In other words, seeking to maximize potential happiness cannot be the only criteria worth considering when when it comes to fulfilling our moral responsibilities. We would end up in a infinite regress otherwise.  Should I make the initial investment of moral discomfort to discern whether I should make the initial investment of moral discomfort?  Where could such processes of thought end?  Clearly, I need a principle: One has a prima facie duty to risk reducing the world's overall utility from what it otherwise might be to undertake a basic moral assessment of any situation possibly requiring moral assessment. And I should discern whether Utilitarianism is the right way to frame such questions, which will require undertaking even further risks of possible unrecoverable moral unease, unless I can simply assert that it is impossible in principle for Utilitarianism to be wrong. In other words we have a prima facie duty to engage in theoretical inquiry of a certain sort, regardless of possible maximization of utility. As Krishna say, you have a right your labours, but not the fruits of your labours.