Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagPeter Biles

travelers-together-around-the-campfire-enjoying-the-fresh-air-near-the-tent-under-the-milky-way-in-the-evening-silhouettes-of-two-adventurous-people-camping-in-the-mountains-under-the-starry-sky-stockpack-adobe-stock
Travelers together around the campfire, enjoying the fresh air near the tent under the Milky Way in the evening. Silhouettes of two adventurous people camping in the mountains under the starry sky.
Type
post
Author
Peter Biles
Date
August 13, 2023
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture
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Literature and Personal Consciousness: Why AI Can’t Speak to You

AI can never intend meaning like a human author can
Peter Biles
August 13, 2023
7
Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture

One of the biggest contentions in the current debate over OpenAI’s new Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT is its purported ability to create a story, to speak and communicate narrative like a human storyteller. If you ask ChatGPT to write an Edgar Allen Poe-esque story, it will generate something spooky, gothic, and darkly poetic. Ask it to write a Shakespearean sonnet, and out comes a fourteen-lined poem about nature and romance. Need a horror thriller like The Shining or It by Stephen King? You got it. For all its scary impressiveness, and the guarantee that the technology will only get better, the chatbot extraordinaire fails and will always fail to tell a story. In fact, it can’t be expected to generate meaningful art and literature Read More ›

colorful-stained-glass-stockpack-adobe-stock
colorful stained glass
Type
post
Author
Peter Biles
Date
July 16, 2023
Categorized
Religion, Technology
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Consider Laying Your Phone at the Altar

What if we actually did start eliminating smartphone use in our most important social institutions?
Peter Biles
July 16, 2023
2
Religion, Technology

If you’re a churchgoing person, do you check your phone during the sermon? Do you even bring it with you? Or when you’re having dinner with your spouse or a group of friends, is the draw to glance at the smartphone an almost irresistible temptation? It is for me. I’ve struggled with phone addiction since I was first introduced to my first smartphone at the age of seventeen, which I realize is way older than the average age kids get online today. But what would it look like to have social spaces totally free of these persistently distracting and disruptive technologies? A new article by Jake Meador at the online journal Mere Orthodoxy asked this question. He poses it hypothetically, Read More ›

the-beam-of-light-in-the-path-of-the-magic-forest-stockpack-adobe-stock
The beam of light in the path of the magic forest
Type
post
Author
Peter Biles
Date
May 28, 2023
Categorized
Philosophy, Religion
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The Rational Magicians

Can real meaning be experienced in a godless world? The postrationalists are trying
Peter Biles
May 28, 2023
4
Philosophy, Religion

In the era of scientific enlightenment, progress, and technological sophistication, “magic” might be the last word one might use to describe the activity of modern Western culture. We live in an age of reason, not superstition. Right? The old world of myth, mystery, and religion is holed away in museums and cathedrals; these are relics of an admirable but outdated generation. After Reason In a fascinating new article from The New Atlantis, writer Tara Isabella Burton writes about the “postrationalists,” an Internet subculture disillusioned with the technocratic rationalism of Silicon Valley and in search of a sense of the mystical and divine. “Reason,” or the modern conception of it, has left the postrationalists disappointed. Neither, however, are they flocking to Read More ›

woman reading book
a woman is reading a book and holding coffee
Type
post
Author
News
Date
March 17, 2023
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture
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ChatGPT and Personal Consciousness

AI vs. the human voice in literature and the arts
News
March 17, 2023
2
Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture

This week, Peter Biles, Writer & Editor for Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, wrote a piece for Salvo on ChatGPT and the uniqueness of the human voice in literature and the arts. Biles cites Christina Bieber Lake, professor of English at Wheaton College, from her book Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism. Bieber Lake pushes back against the reductionistic worldview of Darwinistic materialism, appealing to the personal nature of the human being and the relationships we share together. Since a computer fails to practice personal consciousness, it also fails to create meaningful literature, which always involves two persons––one person speaking to another. Biles also cites Robert J. Marks’s essential book on the topic Read More ›