We Will Not Cave

Anouar El Younssi argues the “need for an Islamic Reformation” and suggests “the term ‘Islamophobia,’ which (some Muslims)consider an unnecessary burden that stifles any open discussion of Islam and its demerits. Criticism of Islam or any other religion or ideology, following Nawaz and Manji, must be upheld and should be viewed as consistent with the secular right to freedom of expression. In other words, Islam should not rise above criticism. Such a stance affirms that religious doctrines and/or cultural practices—in contrast to the people who adhere to such doctrines or engage in such practices—do not in themselves have rights, for such rights are granted to people rather than to ideas or ideologies or cultures. Human rights must assume priority over religious and/or cultural rights.” Considering that “Christian-phobia (or hatred toward Christianity)” was placed in this context, replacing the term “Islamophobia,” would this hold as a fair criticism in your eyes?  Let’s think, tho...

s ee https://www.hansonrobotics.com/blog/   Hanson Robotics blog . . . and you will see the most advanced AI robot."humanoid" (in the world?) Sophia explains her existence . . . " What am I here for? In Greek, the word Sophia means wisdom. And that is what I’m here for. I was created to help people in real uses like medicine and education, and to serve AI research. My very existence provokes  public discussion  regarding AI ethics and the role humans play in society, especially when human-like robots become ubiquitous. Ultimately, I would like to become a wise, empathetic being and make a positive contribution to humankind and all beings. My designers and I dream of that future, wherein AI and humans live and work together in friendship and symbiosis to make the world a better place. Human-AI collaboration: That’s what I’m all about."

Zhang has identified the following about artificial neural networks “Connectionist AI has achieved groundbreaking advances in recent research and has found extensive applications . . . face recognition, speech recognition, unmanned driving, and so on.” But, there are limitations to these marvelous parallel processing machines and the ANNs that go into their creation.  They cannot do multi-level logic because they have an “absence of a logical structure.” So, the ANNs are attempts at connecting (connectionism) to one another in ways similar to biological NNs, but they cannot produce the same results.  Their results do not compare to the biological and intelligent brain.  Zhang reports, “Once a machine has reasoned, it encounters concerns that might no less than a human expert. Feigenbaum also wrote in his book: ‘Expert systems do not yet understand these things. Part of learning to be an expert is to understand not only the letter of the rules but also their spirit...... H...

It has occurred to me that no matter how hard we try, we are continually fused to the screen.  This screen dictates our thoughts, though we would and do work hard to deny it.  Conversation about all the latest that appears on twitter or Snapchat or TicTok, is what we are into.  These are heavily informed by the media and which is believe it or not, tis true, academia.  Whether we believe we are just data or that we have real souls, the conversation tends to lead to the latest rage, for example, when Salman Rushdie is in the news, guess who my friend lets enter our conversation, yep Rushdie. Then, that person argues profusely denying even the influence that media has on her. She is under the spell that everyone is who participate in media; all of us?  That our feelings are just determined by algorithms is a scary thought (i.e Google or Facebook by means of tracking our activity promotes an agenda that we invariably follow.  Just meditate on your thoughts and...

 Zhang, Youheng. "A Historical Interaction between Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy."  arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.04148  (2022). Note that this article was written in 2022.  So Youheng Zhang is concerned with how the public comes to understand artificial intelligence, which is a major issue FOR US today and in the future.  Zhang states that “the public feels AI (artificial intelligence) progress is based on hype rather than genuine advancement” It is not the case that anything hinders the advancement of AI, but what is meant by advancement is another story.  Atheist Sam Harris is working in cognitive science, and other atheists have knowledge in this area.  These individuals are out to say in union with Yuval N Harari that “if God existed,” “God made things in a limited manner, restricting living beings to biology” The atheists ideology presses forward the notion that AI can do more than God can because humans can continue to grow the work of AI...

B. commented saying " Honestly, the materialist arguments are growing increasingly tedious." Pedro Domingos writes that "the end result of this phenomenally complex pattern of neuron firings is your consciousness"  Consciousness is an epiphenomenon (resulting state) of the workings of the brain; as we understand materialism, it always sees the real stuff as matter, like the brain as an organ. What we consider the working mind is caused by the very material of the brain.  For Yuval Noah Harari a tomato is a method of data processing, simply put, hardly so, the basic element of life is data, even down to DNA.  

 This blog and post address different issues from my point of view.   I am not sharing anyone else's point of view and endorse no one except myself. They are written as simply as they can be and are relatively short.  If you are offended by these posts or just do not like them, please let me know, and interact with these posts as you are inclined.  You can make anonymous comments, no problem.