Is Joe Schmid right on Catholic miracles?

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The conversion (or more correctly, reversion) of former agnostic Joe Schmid to Catholicism last month was motivated principally by what Schmid views as overwhelming evidence for the occurrence of miracles which, he argues, vindicate Catholic doctrinal claims. Now, Schmid readily acknowledges that miracle claims won’t impress an avowed naturalist – which is why he created a seven-hour video presenting a cumulative case for theism, thereby establishing at least the possibility of miraculous events occurring. In this post, I won’t be discussing Schmid’s case for theism, which I view as a theological curate’s egg: good in parts (and bad in others). Instead, I’ll be focusing on the miracles Schmid cites to bolster his case for Catholicism. Can they prove his case, and how well do they stack up? Because I was raised in the faith Schmid has returned to, I’ve done a lot of research on the miracles he discusses, and I’ve put together some good links which readers may find helpful.

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What should a President’s goal be?

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What exactly do Americans want the President to be efficacious at? More generally, what overall goal or goals do we want the President and the whole government to aim for?

1)        Maximize mean/median happiness

2)        Maximize mean/median wealth

3)        Minimize wealth disparity

4)        Maximize freedom from government coercion

5)        Maximize freedom from private coercion

6)        Maximize protection from domestic and foreign threats

If maximization or minimization of something is the goal, do we want to maximize that something for:

1)        the current U.S. population

2)        the U.S population 25/50/100 years from now

3)        current American citizens

4)        the current heritage-American population

5)        me

My choice would be to maximize median happiness for the US population 50 years from now. I think focusing on a long-term goal would encourage positive expectations and reduce voters’ selfishness in choosing who to vote for.

Any thoughts?

Lerchner’s odd paper on AI consciousness

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Alexander Lerchner, a researcher at Google’s DeepMind division, posted a preprint article a couple of months ago titled “The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness”, in which he makes the strong claim that computationally based AI will never be conscious. Here’s the abstract:
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Dawkins thinks Claude is conscious

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Richard Dawkins is making waves with an essay in which he claims that Claude, the LLM developed by Anthropic, is conscious. I personally doubt it, but I think the topic merits a thread. The essay is behind a paywall, but I’ve paid the $3 to access it. That gets you a three-month introductory subscription to Unherd magazine, which hosts the essay, with the option to cancel before they start charging the $7 monthly fee.

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Is Trumpism a flavour of fascism (and is it useful to call it that)?

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First, a disclaimer. I am not seeking to insult or label people. My goal is to start a dialogue about a development that deeply concerns me. This development is not US-specific, but is occurring in Russia, Israel, Europe and undoubtedly other countries as well. However, since the US seems to be drawing a lot of attention lately, it seems logical to focus on the Trump administration.

Let’s start with the question in the title. During a previous discussion with TSZ-residents dazz and Erik, I initially resisted the “fascism” label for the Trump adminstration. In my opinion, that label is often applied too eagerly and I wanted to preserve the term for movements that objectively fit the term. The fascists from beginning of the 20th century were militarist and resorted to violence, for example through paramilitary forces such as the infamous Sturmabteilung in Germany. This is way more radical than their modern far-right counterparts, such as the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) or the French Rassemblement National, which mostly seek political influence through democratic and parliamentary means. But what then makes a political party or movement a fascist one? The characteristics of fascism I had to memorize for history class in high school were:

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The ‘just one more god’ argument

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In a YouTube short (Ricky Gervais Debunked) posted by Alex O’Connor, he criticizes Ricky Gervais’s use, on Stephen Colbert’s show, of what I call the ‘just one more god’ argument. Gervais is an atheist and Colbert is a Catholic. The idea is that humanity has posited thousands of gods, all but one of which Colbert rejects. Gervais rejects all of the gods that Colbert rejects but adds just one more: the Catholic God in which Colbert believes.
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How Go The Crusades?

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It’s hard to avoid the religious aspect of the current war, and its roots in thousand-year disputes over how best to suck up to the deity at the heart of it all. The deity who, for a chuckle, put vast quantities of petroleum under the Middle Eastern lands, added geographical pinch points and political instability, and seeded three fightin’ religions that are basically fairly minor variations on each other. What a guy!

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Simplistic thinking about presidential efficacy

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Presidents are often blindly praised (or claim credit for themselves) when good things happen during their terms. They’re also often blindly criticized by their opponents and the public when things go wrong. Presidents do have a big impact, of course, and it’s fair to credit or blame them for the things they actually do. However, it’s perverse to blame or credit them for things they had little or no influence over.

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Meritocracy and (un)fairness

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A short two-minute video of Yale law professor Daniel Markovits discussing meritocracy:

Why rich kids always win at life

One of the complaints against DEI in admissions and hiring is that it’s unfair to otherwise qualified people whose “slots are taken” by DEI hires. The argument is that meritocracy is fair, or at least fairer than DEI. Markovits’s point, with which I agree, is that even a pure meritocracy is unfair because it doesn’t reward intrinsic talent and effort — it rewards intrinsic talent plus effort plus ‘investment’, by which Markovits means educational investment.

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AI image generation via diffusion models

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I’ve been experimenting with AI image generation and learning how it works under the hood, and it strikes me as being worthy of an OP. Writing about it will solidify my understanding, and I figure I might as well share what I’ve learned with others. I’ll start with a high-level view and then fill in the details as the thread progresses.

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Rickabaugh and Moreland defend substance dualism

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The (non)existence of an immaterial soul or mind has been a longtime philosophical interest of mine. I’ve done several OPs on the subject at TSZ, so when I ran across the book The Substance of Consciousness — A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism, I knew I’d want to take a closer look.

The authors are Brandon Rickabaugh and J.P. Moreland. Rickabaugh is unfamiliar to me. He’s a self-described “public philosopher” and a former professor of philosophy at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Moreland is someone whose views I’ve criticized in past threads. He’s currently a professor of philosophy at Biola University in southern California (formerly known as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), an evangelical institution.

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The “stable genius” thread

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The Untruth Social thread focuses on the dishonesty of Trump and his administration, and the Trump and mental illness thread covers his psychopathology, but I think we also need a thread focusing on his stupidity.

No better place to start than with the 2018 Twitter quote that inspired the OP title:

Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star, to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!

That quote is its own best refutation, because no one who was truly a stable genius would be stupid enough to say that he was “a very stable genius” and “like, really smart.” Trump is neither, and this thread will soon be full of examples proving it.

Dr. Justin Mooney and Dr. Luis Oliveira discuss the question: if God exists, is everything permitted?

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The phrase, “Without God … everything is permitted” (also translated as “Without God … all things are lawful”) is uttered by Ivan in Book XI, chapter IV of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, although what he meant by it is a matter for debate. Recently, however, Dr. Luis Oliveira has published a paper titled, “God and gratuitous evil: Between the rock and the hard place” (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 94 (2023): 317 – 345), in which he presents a powerful argument for a mirror image of Ivan Karamazov’s blanket assertion, and in so doing, raises a new problem of evil, which he amicably discusses with Dr. Justin Mooney in the 90-minute video displayed above, which was created as a “Majesty of Reason” podcast hosted by philosopher Joe Schmid. I was impressed by the irenic tone of the dialogue between the two guests, Dr. Mooney and Dr. Oliveira.

Dr. Oliveira’s argument rests on two premises, which he calls “Reasons” and “Symmetry” (bolding is mine – VJT):

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AI: The question that really matters

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I find the logic of keiths’s recent post, Is AI really intelligent?, refreshingly persuasive. I was particularly impressed by his examples showing that the AI assistant Claude (I presume he’s referring to either version 3.7 or version 4) possesses an “extended thinking” or “thinking mode” capability that allows users to view the model’s reasoning process in a dedicated “Thinking” section or window in the user interface. Keiths referred to this capability as a “thought process window.” He even cited AI thought processes showing that AIs are able to reflect on their condition and understand their own limitations. I think it’s fair to describe something which not only generates output that typically requires intelligence, but also does so as a result of a reasoning process, as intelligent.

Nevertheless, I have to say I disagree with keiths’s argument addressed to Erik: “If you want to argue that machines aren’t and never can be intelligent, then you need to explain how human machines managed to do the impossible and become intelligent themselves.” For one thing, keiths’s definition of a machine as something “made up of physical parts operating according to physical law” is far too broad: a rock would qualify as a machine, under this definition. And while human body parts can be viewed as machines, the human brain differs in many important respects from a computer.

For me, however, the question that really matters is: will AI ever be capable of AGI? That is, will AI ever be able to apply its intelligence to solve any intellectual task a human being can? Personally, I doubt it, for two reasons.
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Untruth Social

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Dishonesty is the defining characteristics of Trump and his administration, and lies are a daily occurrence. While there are far too many lies to track, I thought a thread dedicated to the worst and most notable lies would be useful. There’s a lot of material to choose from.

(I could have tapped into a rich vein of lies simply by linking to Trump’s Truth Social account — hence the OP title.) 

Is AI really intelligent?

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I think a thread on this topic will be interesting. My own position is that AI is intelligent, and that’s for a very simple reason: it can do things that require intelligence. That sounds circular, and in one sense it is. In another sense it isn’t. It’s a way of saying that we don’t have to examine the internal workings of a system to decide that it’s intelligent. Behavior alone is sufficient to make that determination. Intelligence is as intelligence does.

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