Sometimes You Don’t Just Want To Risk

The Kindly God Who Lovingly Fashioned Each And Every One Of Us And Sprinkled The Sky With Shining Stars For Our Delight - That God Is, Like Santa Claus, A Myth Of Childhood, Not Anything [that] A Sane, Undeluded Adult Could Literally Believe In. That God Must Either Be Turned Into A Symbol For Something Less Concrete Or Abandoned Altogether.

I Have Shown That Those Who Deplore Artificial Intelligence Are Also Those Who Deplore The Evolutionary Accounts Of Human Mentality: If Human Minds Are Non-miraculous Products Of Evolution, Then They Are, In The Requisite Sense, Artifacts, And All Their Powers Must Have An Ultimately Mechanical Explanation. We Are Descended From Macros And Made Of Macros, And Nothing We Can Do Is Beyond The Power Of Huge Assemblies Of Macros.

While We Tend To Conceive Of The Operations Of The Mind As Unified And Transparent, They're Actually Chaotic And Opaque. There's No Invisible Boss In The Brain, No Central Meaner, No Unitary Self In Command Of Our Activities And Utterances. There's No Internal Spectator Of A Cartesian Theater In Our Heads To Applaud The March Of Consciousness Across Its Stage.

I Should Emphasize This, To Keep Well-meaning But Misguided Multiculturalists At Bay: The Theoretical Entities In Which These Tribal People Frankly Believe — The Gods And Other Spirits — Don't Exist. These People Are Mistaken, And You Know It As Well As I Do. It Is Possible For Highly Intelligent People To Have A Very Useful But Mistaken Theory, And We Don't Have To Pretend Otherwise In Order To Show Respect For These People And Their Ways.

Postmodernism, The School Of 'thought' That Proclaimed 'there Are No Truths, Only Interpretations' Has Largely Played Itself Out In Absurdity, But It Has Left Behind A Generation Of Academics In The Humanities Disabled By Their Distrust Of The Very Idea Of Truth And Their Disrespect For Evidence, Settling For 'conversations' In Which Nobody Is Wrong And Nothing Can Be Confirmed, Only Asserted With Whatever Style You Can Muster.