Last night we watched the movie M3gan. I felt like I had seen most of it already because the guy in the row ahead of me on the plane back from Rome was watching it, and I saw most of it, just without the audio. I was actually trying not to watch TV on the plane, but his screen was right in my line of sight between two of the seats in front of me, so...
Anyway, it's not a great movie, but I do have to admit I love any story where the robot is the villain. It's a classic cautionary tale about science gone too far to the place where the human creator(s) cannot control their creation. In part, there's a built-in assumption that creation will always rebel against Creator, which of course is a metaphor for the fall and the human condition. But beyond that, it's also part of this new wave of AI speculation - how far can AI go? To what extent will AI replace people in relationship with us? Stuff like that. I won't spoil it, but you can guess from the trailers that the results are disastrous. And I love that, because as you have no doubt figured out by now, I don't trust robots.
But more than that, I don't really believe that true AI will ever exist - in fact I believe it could never exist because it would require a computer to be self-aware and get to the point where it could make decisions based on its own existence. I think it's like time travel - great for science fiction, but impossible in any future. Whether I'm right or wrong about that, though, the point is that I'm becoming more and more convinced that in certain contexts "artificial" is synonymous with "false." We live in a world that is constantly and increasingly "trading the truth for a lie" to quote St. Paul, and I think that the forces of evil would just love for us to trade true intelligence (wisdom) for artificial intelligence, which at the end of the day is nothing other than a false intelligence, that is, a lie.
And the biggest part of the problem is that we also live in a world where people are increasingly being convinced that they should believe what science tells them over what divine revelation tells them - that's nothing new, but my point is that people are already confusing "what science tells them" with what robots tell them, and people won't be able to tell the difference between what they're told by a non-human glorified search engine (garbage in-garbage out, remember?) and what they're told by actual human scientists, let alone what God has revealed to us. So we are experiencing, right before our eyes, the corruption of the very concept of truth. Again, I guess that's nothing new, but the increase is exponential - with all the enthusiasm over AI, much of our culture is not just walking in that direction, they are running after it.
On a side note, one of my guilty pleasures is those "fail" videos on YouTube. My favorite ones are the drone crashes and the ones where someone playing a VR game accidentally smashes their big screen TV. I laugh so hard. Anyhoo... I think I need to watch I Robot again...
Here's a short (about a minute) video I took going around the Holy Column in the church of Santa Prassede. This is the column that Jesus was tied to when he was scourged by Pontius Pilate. They don't always have the barrier down, so you usually don't get to see it from all the way around. I wanted to get video of the whole thing all the way around because I ran across a note in an ancient document that said that those who made a pilgrimage (at that time to the Holy Land, since it was still in Jerusalem) could visit the Holy Column, and could see marks left from the hands of Jesus where he gripped it as he was being whipped. I assume that this is pious legend, but I figured since the column has that dark & light marble, maybe there's a place where the dark parts look like hands. I did not see it, but if you do, let me know!
I mentioned in The Journey that I wrote a song based on Isaiah 2, which is one of my favorite OT passages:
In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest mountain, and raised above the hills.
All nations shall stream toward it. Many peoples shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the Lord’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, That he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.” For from Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations, and set terms for many peoples.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again. House of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
I hope you like the song!
My voice was still recovering from a bad cold, so not sounding my best, but this was a great conversation about pilgrimage, for the Jubilee year - more of this coming in other interviews! (FYI, I think I was the third of three guests that day, so you will have to fast forward to find me)
It seems that one way or another we need to talk about different kinds, or different levels of heresy. What I have been calling heresy vs. heterodoxy, others call heresy on fundamental doctrines vs. heresy on less fundamental doctrines. In other words, Heresy with a capital H (over fundamental doctrines like the Trinity and christology) are the kinds of heresies that move one outside the boundaries of what Christianity is, and that's because the very definition of Christianity is defined according to these fundamental doctrines. To refuse to sign the Creed at the Council of Nicaea in 325, or the Council of Constantinople in 381 - and indeed to reject any of the contents of the Creed today - means that a person is NOT a Christian.
So are the non-chalcedonians, such as the miaphysites (including St. Gregory of Narek, and today's Coptic Christians) - are they heretics? Well, like it is with a lot of things, that depends on your definition of heresy. If you include in your definition of ...
As promised, I thought that this would be a good discussion starter here in the community - this is from a conversation I had with my producer at Catholic Culture, around the podcast episodes on St. Gregory of Narek. If you've listened to the first episode on St. Gregory, you know that he is the first and only Doctor of the Church who was not Catholic! What are we to make of this? How do we explain it? Well, it was within the context of me trying to explain it that two really fundamental questions came up, and had to be hashed out between me and my producer. The first question - and this was surprising, given that we had a whole series on The Heresies - the first question is: What is a heresy? And how you answer that has serious implications for the second question, which is: What is the Universal Church? And that has serious implications for ecumenical dialogue, not to mention how we think about our fellow Christians who are not Catholic. So let's take the first question first (and here's ...
