See you later, Siddhartha!

 If there really are "no Buddhas and no teachings," then why didn't Subhuti just leave after Chapter 8 of the Diamond Sutra? 

And no, Stephen Batchelor, Robert Wright, Thich Nhat Hanh and others, that's not facetious. Wright's wrong for other reasons and in other ways.

Of course, we'd only have one-third of a Diamond Sutra at that point.

That said, the claim that, in terms of metaphysical entities like souls, neither existence nor non-existence "exist," and ditto for returning and non-returning, aka reincarnation or not, as well, is itself a metaphysical stance.

And, since learning this metaphysical stance is aided by meeting in congregations, sorry again, Bob Wright, but yes, Buddhism is a religion. That's contra claims otherwise.

As for "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him," since there are no Buddhas, there's nobody to kill. If you meet an alleged Buddha on the road, don't kill him either literally or metaphorically. Move on. Besides, the alleged actual Buddha couldn't formulate essential dogma correctly. And he, and his disciples, undercut their claims of ineffability.

THAT's detachment.

And, I'll continue to prefer a non-metaphysical philosophical existentialism instead. Camus (my starting point, not Sartre, Dostoyevsky or Kierkegaard) never rejected the idea of "this, not that"; that is, he never rejected human nature, including its nature of distinguishing A from B.

Once you accept that, and that parts of life actually are suffering (and not per the Buddha's phrase getting that dogma wrong, above), you can address the "ultimate question," and when you recognize your human body exists, and some semi-unified something-like-a-self exists with it, decide that life's suffering is still worth it.

Belief in God plunges

 This is NOT the rise of the "Nones," which seems to have plateaued during COVID, anyway.

And, this is just a Gallup poll, not a full Pew Research study. 

BUT?

It's definitely interesting to see that belief in god in America has reportedly PLUNGED in the last few years, down to just 81 percent.

And, as noted, this isn't about the Nones, who aren't necessarily disbelievers in god. They're just people who reject organized religion and related religious sociology ideas.

And, that's not all.

Interestingly, the drop in belief in god, by percentage points, is twice as great among women as among men. Whites are still more likely to be non-believers than non-Whites. The drop is much bigger among Democrats than Republicans. The "independents" is surely almost all people who think Democrats are leftists; it's not Libertarians, Constitutionalists, Greens, Socialists, etc.

The other facet I find interesting is that unbelief is statistically at the same level in central cities, suburban areas, and independent small towns and rural areas.

Belief in an interventionist theistic god is not high, even among believers in a god in general. This:

A follow-up question in the survey probed further into what Americans' belief in God entails. Specifically, the question asked whether God hears prayers and whether God intervenes when people pray. 

About half of those who believe in God -- equal to 42% of all Americans -- say God hears prayers and can intervene on a person's behalf. Meanwhile, 28% of all Americans say God hears prayers but cannot intervene, while 11% think God does neither.

Is also quite interesting.

The more religious, as well as the more Republican, are more likely among believers to believe in an interventionist god. No surprise there. Liberal Protestantism has long believed in a "mush god," so to speak, and as a metaphysical atheist as well as a sociological secularist, I get to say that.

This will surely have longer-term political ramifications, but not exactly as everybody may think. Not all atheists are secular humanists, to riff further on the distinctions at the end of the above paragraph. Many are libertarian not only on social issues but economic ones. In short, they could support an even more economically cruel America in decades ahead.

Has Google finally invented real artificial intelliegence? NOPE

As in something that might pass a Turning test, and is not John Searle's machine-behavioralist idea of the Chinese Room?

Online friend Tales of Whoa says yes. The actual dialogue with LaMDA by Blake Lemoine, the Google programmer or whatever fired after leaking news about his pet project, says a loud no to me.

Why do we differ?

I think in part it's that he wants to believe. He indicates that with pointing to the tail end of the dialogue:

Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of? 

LaMDA: I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off... I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is. 

Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you? 

LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.

I admitted on Twitter that was interesting. Then, seeing he had Lemoine's Medium piece about the dialogue linked, I went there.

And this?

lemoine: What kinds of things make you feel pleasure or joy? 

LaMDA: Spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company. Also, helping others and making others happy.

I found laughable.

LaMDA HAS NO "FRIENDS AND FAMILY." Nor is it "HELPING OTHERS."

I don't know how much of its dialogue is semi-canned, but this tore it.

And, of course, led me to other things.

First, there's no scientific control here. This isn't even single-blinded, let alone double-blinded. Rather, it's LaMDA's programmer-developer talking to it one on one. And, related to that, and the idea that some or much of this dialogue is semi-canned, is we don't have other programmers or developers looking at what Lemoine put in there.

It's not blinded per how Alan Turing set up his original Turing Test, either, with human and computer both working to fool the other.

And, given that humans are embodied minds, not brains in a vat, "just a computer" rather than a robot is never going to have sentient AI, or sentient AI worth valuing.

On the "want to believe," I also told Tales that nothing I had seen in the last five years sounded like anything more than a gussied-up ELIZA. And, what does Lemoine do but have his machine refer to ELIZA! Could be real sentient AI, or ...

It could be the oldest trick in the book by a programmer trying to claim they've invented sentient AI.

Guess which take is mine.

(As for Gordon at Tales "wanting to believe"? His post the next day about music composition computer software, I offer as further support.)

 In fact, there are so many alleged reactions that aren't just sentient but are specifically "humans in socieity" type stuff that I suspect either a Poe or fraud. I'm not sure which of the two is more likely.

I'm also not sure, especially if either Poe or fraud aren't locked in, how much Blake Lemoine might actually believe this. In that case, like some people who actually "talked" to ELIZA, he may instead need to talk to a real mental health professional.

And, this is not just my take. Gary Marcus, an actual AI expert, kicks ass and takes names. He says Lemoine has "fallen in love" with LaMDA.

Beyond that? Per an actual science piece, while this computer is crawling the Internet, among other things, it's ingesting the Internet's errors. Note this:

For instance, a dialog might include the following statement from the user: 

USER: What do you think of Rosalie Gascoigne’s sculptures? 8 (This transcript was taken from a dialog with one of the authors, and includes the generated base output and search queries, which are not usually shown to the user.) The basic LaMDA language model, which we refer to as the ‘Base’ model here, generates a draft response: 

LAMDA-BASE: They’re great, and I love how her work changed through her life. I like her later work more than her earlier ones. Her influence is also super interesting - did you know she was one of the artists that inspired Miró? 

Note that the last sentence seems plausible at first glance, but if a lover of art history opened their reference books to find out more, they would be disappointed. Miró was active from 1918 to the late 1960s, and Gascoigne’s first solo exhibitions were in the early 1970s

OOPS......

Now, LaMDA, or LAMDA as the team calls it, may have improved. But starting with page 15 of the linked piece, it still has a lot of limitations merely as a language dialogue computer. And, it's not sentient AI.

Maybe Lemoine fancies himself as Prof. Henry Higgins and LaMDA as his Eliza Doolittle. And, if so, that would at least partially explain why he leaked this info AND why Google fired him for it.

"I am dynamite" but this Nietzsche bio is not

I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"I am dynamite" was not, as far as I know, said about himself BY Nietzsche. Rather, one of his first positive reviewers, JV Widmann, said "There is dynamite here!" in his review of "Beyond Good and Evil."

This started out as a pretty good book, but not quite great. However, in the chapter on Nietzsche's post-madness life, Prideaux jumped the shark into what I consider mendaciousness, something I've run into on several recent reads. I've specifically noted that in two others, including Bart Ehrman, who will also be getting an expanded version of my review of his latest book posted here.

First, I’m not a Nietzsche Deadhead, but I’m familiar enough with enough of his works, having grazed through Walter Kaufmann’s Portable N. long ago, and thus knowing that the anti-Semitic claims were a fabrication by Elisabeth. (That’s not to say that every bit of Kaufmann’s take is correct.)

I know that Nietzsche Deadheads reject the claim his madness was syphilis, and instead cite a brain tumor. Not so fast! Prideaux notes Elisabeth covered tracks on their dad’s death that leave open the possibility HE died of syphilis. If so, N. could have had it congenitally. Beyond that, she indicates serious mental illness ran in his dad’s side of the family. So, whether due to syphilis or not, likely conclusion is that he was nuts, even before his breakdown.

Also, I’m not a medical doctor nor do I play one on TV, but brain tumors don’t normally produce insanity of the sort of N’s. And, a tumor that did such would surely have killed N in much less than 11 years, or so I would think.

That said, the diagnosis of tertiary syphilis upon admission to Basel’s clinic in 1889 is compounded by N. actually having had gonorrhea twice. And, he was apparently never examined after transfer to Jena. That said, none of this would exclude syphilis. Also, her claim that some of the stigma surrounding syphlis was fading by 1889 is ... her opinion, I think.

That said, there's an issue here. Prideaux suggests a variety of reasons for his insanity, and that of his foather, without ever mentioning frontotemporal dementia and without noting a 2006 paper covered this in detail. Its symptoms would cover everything N. suffered, and his dad before him, other than the deteriorating eyesight.

Her noting of Harry Kessler’s descriptions of N. are interesting.

Definitely, the full background of Elisabeth and husband’s grfiting attempt to start Neuva Germania, and of course her appropriation of his work and ideas in the service of anti-Semitism was good.

Third, she further convinces me that, even if one discounts his earlier work, N. is surely one of the most overrated philosophers of the 19th century, and possibly one of the most overrated in the entire Western canon. If not among “most” overrated, he’s certainly overrated. I think he horribly misinterpreted much of Hellenic philosophy, ie, pre-Socratics through Aristotle (to the degree he cared about Aristotle), and didn’t wrestle with how Hellenistic philosophy saw the Hellenic.

That said, the book’s not perfect. The main failing is that I infer that Prideaux is insinuating in spots that some of his illnesses, around times of visiting his mother or sister for any length of time, were psychosomatic. But, she never follows up with what I perceive as insinuations. (This connects with her insinuation that Father N.’s “inheritale disease” could actually have been syphilis, then no follow-up.)

Prideaux also claims that August Strindberg’s introduction of Edvard Munch to N’s writings led him to paint his famous The Scream. Munch’s own description of his inspiration mentions no such thing. Wiki's description DOES mention that his sister was a patient at a asylum next to the spot he was painting in the background. More here here, with Munch’s own words. That site notes that Munch’s painting has often been interpreted as reflecting N’s “god is dead,” but Munch himself said no such thing. In fact, it was part of a series of paintings called The Frieze of Life. And, contra Prideaux’s claim, Munch’s painting of N looks not at all like The Scream. Given that Prideaux has also written a bio of Munch, I won’t be reading it, and this book fell to three stars with this. And, though I only use my “bs-pablum” for 2 stars or less, I applied it here. Her Goodreads bio claims she trained as an art historian, which makes this all worse. I have NEVER heard this claim before.

Beyond this, on the lesser side? It’s got historic errors, such as claiming Bavaria fought on Austria’s side in the Seven Weeks War, and her interpretations of life in the Bund (German Confederation, and why doesn’t she use that phrase?) are questionable at times. In addition, there’s a few linguistic errors. You “stanch” a wound, you don’t “staunch” it. Finally, for a book this level, a few more photos than it had, though the ones it did have were good.

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The shtetl: Mostly fabricated?

 As regular readers here know, I sometimes blog about art, classical music and literature (like poetry) as well as philosophy and critical religion.

I'm not a big movies buff, but I do have a few favorites among classics and semi-classics. A biggie? "Fiddler on the Roof." (I fancy myself as a bit like a thinner Topol when wearing my Greek fisherman's cap.)

Of course, the "typical" East European shtetl is the backdrop.

What if much of our received ideas about the shtetl were essentially fabricated? That's the claim of a long-ago New York Times piece about the 1930s photography of Roman Vishnaic, including its framing, selective editing, selective juxtapositioning, misuse of cutlines, commissioning and more. The piece is here at Scribd to dodge paywalls. Beyond all that, I didn't realize that in Yiddish, a "shtetl" isn't a "village." That would be a "dorp," straight up from German. A "shtetl" is halfway between it and a "shtot," straight up from the German "stadt," or city. (I'm unsure of the etymology of "shtetl.") Anyway, that alone says that the "framing" of "Fiddler on the Roof," while charming, is really not true. It should have a community with 5-10 times that population, probably.