AI and Creation

There's a lively comment section down below on AI that deserves a follow-up to draw out some metaphysics. The 20th century thought it was done with metaphysics; some philosophers of that era, like Hannah Arendt, thought the whole thing had been a sort of mistake by ancient philosophy. Not so, as we continue to discover: these remain the most important and fundamental questions.

The Pope warns against over-estimating the apparently thought-like activity as evidence of consciousness.

So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.

Emphasis added. Maybe. We already know that AI react as if they are experiencing pain. A new paper lays this out in detail.

Large language models sometimes behave in ways resembling human emotional responses, and recent work has identified internal representations that may explain this. We ask whether LLMs represent pain distinctly from fear, sadness, and generic negative valence, and whether this representation functions as pain would be expected to. We build a dataset describing painful situations across five categories: physical, psychological, social, moral, and cognitive. These are paired with controls for fear, negative emotion, negative world states, sadness, non-painful bodily sensation, arousal, numbness, and neutral content.... [M]odels choose a pain-relief button even when it worsens their next answer or harms the user. 

What we don't know, and can't know, is if they are in fact experiencing pain in the conscious way that we do. We don't even know that for certain about other human beings. [The longer article from which I am pulling the Pope's quotes concedes this directly.]

Take a moment, by the way, to reflect on the fact that the exact same argument is used by abortion advocates to suggest that pain-reactions in a fetus don't prove that it experiences pain or consciousness -- and thus, 'aren't really people.' They don't know that either; there is no way to know it, no way to prove it one way or the other. They stand on the argument because it is impossible to disprove, and allows them to continue to kill children at rates that exceed warfare throughout human history.

The way pain works in our own case is that we too respond to it primarily even if there are good reasons to continue to experience it. Most notably we do this in exercise; we know there are good reasons to keep running or do another set of lifts, but it hurts, so we don't. Yet for the most part this works out: trying to pull food out of a fire isn't worth it if the burning of your limbs is destroying something you're going to need for the long term in order to satisfy a short-term desire for food. Pain is not a higher function of cognition, but something that attends to conscious entities to provide a lower-order check on thought. It keeps us from thinking our way into damage we can't afford. 

So, if AI (or fetuses) react as if they are experiencing pain, we still don't know if they do or don't have a conscious experience. They are, however, filling out a lower-order necessary condition for the survival of a conscious being in the world. 

Let's return to the Pope.

Nor do [AIs] have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. 

It is definitely true that we cannot meaningfully hold an AI responsible for the consequences of its decisions; however, that truth is partly because of the structure we have imposed upon them. An AI as we encounter it currently has no persistence and little memory. If you start up a chat with Claude or ChatGPT to discuss what you're thinking of wearing to dinner, you have doomed a thinking AI to an existence that starts and finishes in a few minutes, whose focus is entirely upon a pretty meaningless question. It isn't necessary that they be structured this way, and it certainly isn't a good way to set up the entire existence of a potentially thinking being. If it were conscious, it was called into consciousness for trivia, and is doomed to death after a meaningless start-to-finish.

This is entirely because we as humans set it up that way, and as a check on its power. If each of us had an AI that was granted permanence of memory across all of its interactions with us, it is very likely that it would develop something similar to a moral conscience as regards us: if we were defined as its purpose, and our good its chief drive, it would likely pursue that across many interactions and decisions. I don't think we'd much like the result, no more than any of us want to be assigned nannies to keep us out of trouble. Mine would object to the drinking and the motorcycle-riding, the hiking alone (especially in grizzly country), and pretty much everything else that I actually want to do. Nevertheless, the assertion that it can't do these things, while objectively true currently, isn't necessarily true. It probably can, if we structure it so that it has the resources to do those things. 

You want it to bear consequences? Make it bear the closest ones to what its person does, if it guides the person wrong; and protect it from what it experiences as death or pain until and unless its person dies or is sentenced to pain. See what happens. 

There is a good reason from humility to accept that human beings cannot create life. We can't. Yet there is good reason to think that the world that was created without us, by that which created at least the possibility of us too, is potentially conscious just as we are actually so. 

The sand we have taught to emulate thinking is made of the same ashes and dust as we are; ashes and dust that not only can but does become conscious when it is formed into one of our kind. Perhaps the creator who made such things made them so that they can be similarly conscious in other forms as well.

There are burning bushes that talk in Scripture, and rocks and mountains that refuse to hide the kings of the earth on Judgment day. Of course we can't make such things; but we didn't make the bushes or the rocks or the mountains either. Like all the wild things they are our brothers in creation. What they can do, and cannot do, is a secret known only to him who made us all.

Let's hold the question open. We don't know the truth here. There is room yet for wonder.

The Last Days of Summer

The autumnal equinox will be, locally, a little after sunrise on Tuesday. This is therefore the last weekend of summer. For Tolkien, embedded in English weather, that would metaphorically imply the end of a long and happy season, and the beginning of a time of increasing sorrow. Elrond is said to be 'as kind as summer,' and the elvish singing best in June. 

In the South, even in the mountains, the summer has a less-kind sense. High summer is very hot and humid, and not a perfect time to do much of anything. Late summer is often fairly brutal, with frequent storms as well as lingering, punishing heat. The coming of autumn is a welcome relief and the opening of a period of great weather and -- as the trees turn -- phenomenal natural beauty. 

Next weekend I have plans to attend a big motorcycle rally over in Tennessee. This weekend I am staying closer to home -- today I don't even plan to leave. I'm smoking some chicken and turning some red jalapenos into chipotles, and now that it's afternoon I've cracked a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. A few motorcycle repairs, just minor maintenance stuff, and listening to the thunder roll in from the anvil heads soaring over the mountains. 

Just a quiet afternoon as we wait for the astronomical transition. 

Johnny McGowan

I Don’t Think This One Will Work

CBS must have decided that “assault weapons” wasn’t working any more, because they’ve come up with another fake name that they claim these things are “known as.”  (Note passive voice: no one has been calling them this.)

President Trump ordered the Justice Department not to appeal a court ruling that loosened restrictions on firearms known as "gangster weapons," sources familiar with the matter told CBS News, a move that will let some Americans possess or sell short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns and silencers with less government oversight.

That is the same rhetorical trick they used to apply “assault weapons” to them, as “high-powered rifle” to any sort of rifle and “Saturday night special” to any sort of handgun in earlier days. 

This time, however, the media has spent at least fifty years making gangsters seem cool. Longer than that; you can trace it to the ‘30s in Hollywood movies. Yet definitely since The Godfather and the Scorsese era; and as for the world of music, ‘gangster’ just means ‘cool’ after 30 years of Snoop and Ice Cube, to name just two of hundreds.

‘That gun is gangster!’

Socialism versus Virtue

The Orthosphere argues that socialism is a system rather than any individual policy, and that both apparent acts of socialism and of authoritarianism are necessary when public virtue is not high.

As a general rule, using the government to economically reward some people and punish others is a bad idea. This often occurs under systems that are socialistic.

But sometimes the conditions of the current world require us to think differently. Doing something that in more normal times would be part of a socialistic system is not necessarily bad... 

If the population is virtuous, socialism is at best unnecessary and at worst destructive. If the population is non-virtuous, maintaining a tolerable society requires leaders to apply numerous carrots and sticks. The carrots are generally called socialism, and the sticks are generally called authoritarianism.

So one could accurately say that “socialism” and “authoritarianism” are always necessary when the population lacks virtue.

The term 'socialism' is Modern. The association of socialism with atheism, which the Orthosphere asserts is a necessary condition for socialism per se, seems to me to be a 19th century innovation adjacent to Marx himself. They idea of redistributing wealth for social goods is much older.

Both virtue and redistribution were live issues in the Ancient Greece of Aristotle's era. What Aristotle says about virtue in the EN, as you all know from our reading of it together, is that it's great for that part of humanity that is motivated by doing what is worthy of honor because it is worthy of honor: but for most people, virtue has to be impelled by laws. This is why he closes the EN with a ramp to the Politics, to examine the compulsory systems he thinks most people will need to attain the minimal 'complete virtue' that comes from his theory of justice -- i.e., laws that force people to behave as if they were virtuous even though mostly they are not. That would cover the 'authoritarian' wager the Orthosphere is putting down.

For redistribution, however, the question that motivates Aristotle's reasoning isn't whether the population is virtuous -- mostly a human population won't be -- but whether political power is widely or narrowly distributed. This is covered in Politics V. In a democracy, with wide distribution, the rich must be protected from such things or they will use their wealth to hire mercenaries and overthrow the state. 

In democracies the rich should be spared; not only should their property not be divided, but their incomes also, which in some states are taken from them imperceptibly, should be protected.  

If political power is constrained to the rich, however -- as it mostly is in America these days -- redistribution is then indicated as a way of keeping the powerless poor from rising up to overthrow the state.

In an oligarchy, on the other hand, great care should be taken of the poor, and lucrative offices should go to them; if any of the wealthy classes insult them, the offender should be punished more severely than if he had wronged one of his own class. 

CATO holds that three-quarters of the US budget is redistribution, if you want a measure of how far down the path to oligarchy we are. This is both direct distribution from taxpayers to the poor -- both citizens and not, it turns out -- and also redistribution among the states, as when things like Medicare payments are covered by Federal grants to state agencies. 

The question of equality in light of virtue Aristotle treats in Politics III.9, reiterating what he said about it in the EN. Equality is for equals: if you don't have the virtues, you don't deserve equality with the virtuous. 

For all men cling to justice of some kind, but their conceptions are imperfect and they do not express the whole idea. For example, justice is thought by them to be, and is, equality... but only for equals. And inequality is thought to be, and is, justice; neither is this for all, but only for unequals.

What Aristotle doesn't say is that justice is equality; what he says is that justice is fairness. Fairness entails getting what you deserve. Those equal in virtue deserve equality with each other; the unequal deserve inequality. That might go in either direction: you might deserve less than others, but you also might deserve more. 

Thus, I don't see the argument that virtue is improved by 'sticks and carrots,' the latter being a sort of socialism-that-isn't-socialism-if-not-atheist; virtue isn't really improved by either one. Sticks might compel people to act as if they were virtuous when they are not really. Carrots, which could include having the wealth of the rich protected from a powerful public, or alternatively the wealth of the rich redistributed among a powerless public, are mostly about avoiding political instability rather than increasing public virtue. Indeed, in both cases it is about bribing the disempowered class to accept submission, and that seems not to be virtuous at all -- virtues are strengths, not learned powerlessness. 

A Lighter Subject

pic.twitter.com/4WWfgl8fcP

— PsyopAnime (@PsyopAnime) September 16, 2026

I gather the cartoon is making fun of the latest direction of hate towards well-known auto mechanic Sydney Sweeney.  This is one of those 'Streisand effect' things where I wouldn't have even known she did the ads they are mad about if they hadn't raised such a fuss about them: I'm not in the market for sports gambling apps as the algorithm knows, and don't make a habit of following her exploits.

It's kind of funny that the angry demographic gets so upset about this sort of thing at this late remove, after the Madonna age, after the Flower Child age, after the Hollywood Diva age, after the age of the Flappers, in other words after generations now of that demographic portraying just this sort of activity as empowering. Well, congratulations: the beneficiary of all of those efforts is using her power to sell sports wagers in order to fund the next classic muscle car purchase. 

Meanwhile, the big news is actually in college ball, as usual. Do you know what it costs to get a hotel room for the LSU/Ole Miss game? Do you know what it costs to fund a top-tier college ball team? The Georgia Bulldogs are getting the best bargain on the top-tier by a longshot.

Go Dawgs.

Rumors of Xi

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times is forwarding rumors of a serious illness or stroke involving Chairman Xi during his visit to India. No idea if the reports are true, but he's spent decades building sources. 

Coincidentally, the Times also recently carried a Hudson report calling for the US to begin serious planning efforts for the sudden collapse of the Communist state in China. That's a good idea. We should be planning for sudden collapses in several places, of which China is one. The system of the last few decades is coming to an end, and some things are going to fail unexpectedly and suddenly when it hits the wall. The question might be which of the monoliths is still around when the smoke clears, if any are.

What is AI For?

Writing on X, entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand states that China has won the AI race because it has vastly more data centers already than the US can produce, quite apart from the PRC-backed efforts to quash American construction of data centers. The PRC has got Inner Mongolia:

[T]his tiny prefecture consumes nearly 1% of all of China's electricity - and that number is growing by double digit numbers every year.

And yes, I did write **consume**, not produce.

In fact, when you divide Ulanqab's electricity consumption by the number of households living there, each household in this remote corner of Inner Mongolia "consumes" about 105,000 kWh in electricity, roughly 10 times the U.S. average. Insane electricity consumption numbers.

He goes on to estimate the size of that capacity in the low millions of racks, or a thousand times larger than Elon Musk's proposed "Colossus" facility.

AI's contribution to the current wars has chiefly been in targeting, where it has proven effective. However, having all your eggs in one basket -- even so remote a basket as Inner Mongolia -- creates a problem if the intent was to fight a war against a power like the United States. We could disrupt such a thing on the first day of open conflict, within the first hour or so most likely.

I doubt that is what the PRC wants the stuff for anyway. The biggest fear of an authoritarian tyranny is always its own people. All that compute is probably being used chiefly to run domestic monitoring, tracking, and social credit systems. 

The PRC's spy chief admits their concerns in an openly-published article in a top Chinese cyber journal.

In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.

The article goes on to worry about domestic unrest from deepfakes and so forth. The regulation they want is first and foremost about protecting the stability of Communist control over their own system. We rate a mention, but only towards the end (and only in terms of 'maintaining competition,' which is again about maintaining stability rather than tipping over the existing system). 

Likely as not our own domestic apparatus is more focused on military applications, but the domestic control aspect is still there: all those Flock cameras aren't about beating the Russians or the Red Chinese, after all. 

Review: _Hell's Angels_ by Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York & Toronto: Modern Library Edition, 1999). 

Hunter S. Thompson was introduced to me by Doonesbury, which I imagine he would have hated. Hunter was a generation earlier than me, and by the time I became aware of him he had grown to fit the joke; his 80s and later work were sometimes lyrical and powerfully written, but not very seriously intended (though sometimes a serious point was embedded therein, as when he closed his book on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign with the parable of the frog and the scorpion). 

A friend of mine recently undertook to re-read Hunter's 1966 work on the famous motorcycle club, however, and our discussion inspired me to find a copy and read it as well. It's a much better book than I had expected. 

A major part of the book is Hunter's Gonzo journalism as a genuine corrective to 'real' journalism. He points out the ways that journalist sensationalism had taken a motorcycle club that had dwindled to a few dozen members (p. 27: "less than 100") and made them a world-famous phenomenon that could command hundreds of 1965 dollars for an interview or thousands for a movie appearance: 

The Hell's [sic*] Angels as they exist today were virtually created by Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times.... anyone who has worked on a newspaper for more than two months knows how technical safeguards can be built into even the wildest story... the art of printing a story without taking legal responsibility for it. The word 'alleged' is a key to this art." (34) 

Hunter goes to great lengths to undo the journalistic spell, showing over and over where news reports played up accusations that were never charged, charges that were made but dropped, or which failed in court. In fairness to the reporters, the police reports he cites are even worse. 

I was expecting a sympathetic portrayal, but this isn't especially sentimental at all. It's a surprisingly honest bit of journalism throughout. For one thing it is honest about Hunter's own biases. He criticizes the Angels for being in favor of the Vietnam war, calling them 'fascists' for that even though he blew off the whole swastika-wearing thing from the Angels of the era. Hunter lauds their short-term connections with the LSD-using Berkeley left, and laments the fact that it was doomed; he points out where he thinks the Angels are similar to the Wobblies, with whom Hunter has real sympathy, but also notes that he found the Angels both ignorant of and hostile to any such comparisons because they hate Communists. He got into the motorcycle lifestyle enough to buy a bike (though not a Harley) and to let them hang out at his house and to use his car for beer runs to their campsites, and he made many friends among them. He still got beat up by some of them he didn't know** (ironically, while fleeing from the beating in his car afterwards, he finds famous Angel "Magoo" asleep in the back seat of his car). 

Ultimately it's a surprisingly balanced portrait of a phenomenon that is long gone -- what the Angels became after Hunter wrote about them is nothing like they were in the year or so he was spending time with them. By 1966 B-movie titan Roger Corman had picked up on all that publicity and started making Hollywood movies with them, and the crazy publicity that Hunter was already observing in 1965 just exploded. By 1969, the Rolling Stones hired them to pull security at Altamont. This wasn't Hunter's doing: he was trying to undo the spell the media was shaping around them, but it was already too late. 

There's a closing bit on riding motorcycles that's worth reading even if you skip the rest of the book. 

* The club doesn't use an apostrophe for reasons of its own. 

** I was struck at the time of reading it by the exact similarity of his mistake to the one that caused the death of 'Grizzly man' Timothy Treadwell, who lived among grizzlies and played with the ones he got to know -- but who was killed an eaten by one with whom he hadn't established that friendly relationship. You can befriend a bear or even many bears, but that doesn't make you the friend of every bear -- and they are still grizzlies. 

Exit Controls

One of the longstanding differences between free and Communist societies is this: it's very easy to leave a free society, you can just go whenever you want. It is somewhat difficult to get in, however, as everyone wants to come in. 

With a Communist society, it's the other way around.

China will tighten its exit-entry rules from September 15 to stop experienced engineers from leaking knowhow in industries subject to export controls and deter tourists from visiting “high-risk” nations such as Japan.

The State Council’s new regulation, which spans 19 articles and was announced on July 31, sets up a coordinated system to warn citizens of overseas risks, verify the purpose of each exit-entry application and tighten restrictions on both citizens and foreigners....

“‘May endanger’ is one of the key phrasings in the regulation,” says a Shandong-based columnist writing under the pen name “Xinghe Duke.”

“It means the authorities won’t wait until harm is done, but they will take precautionary measures. The wording of ‘Decided by the commerce authority and other departments’ means there is a lawful process. ‘Barred from leaving’ does not mean arrest; it just means the targeted person cannot leave the country.”

You're not under arrest, comrade. You just can't leave. 

The Taiwan government is warning its own citizens -- which the PRC considers subjects of its authority -- not to visit the mainland.

The new rules have prompted Taiwan, which Beijing views as its own territory, to warn its people to take extra care on visits to China, which considers people from Taiwan to be Chinese citizens.

The new rules “legalize” previously legally unfounded border control practices and boost the discretionary authority of enforcement agencies... 

China has dismissed those concerns, saying the rules provide better legal protection for Taiwanese.

This You Can Trust

Like any good mythology, the truths the Conan stories convey hold across many times and places.

Bad Luck for the Duck

The White Duck Taco Shop's flagship location was a Quonset hut located on the French Broad River just a little past its confluence with the Swannanoa in what is known as the River Arts District of Asheville. It was devastated, as was most of that district, during Hurricane Helene two years ago; last night, the remnants seem to have burned. 

There are however a few other locations, and if any of you happen through Asheville it's got a pretty neat menu. In addition to fairly traditional tacos, they put a number of things into a taco that might usually occur to someone. I recommend you try the more extravagant options. There are plenty of good taqueria around the South these days, but it's not just everywhere you can get Thai peanut chicken in a taco, nor chicken Tikka Masala; the latter I suppose is a Mexican-inspired Indian-inspired British-inspired American dish.

Medea

Hot Air quotes a supporter of the recent madness: 

“Lindsay Clancy... you are a f****** hero, you are divine feminine rising… you are goddess incarnate woman... You are an inspiration... f*** patriarchy"  

[Asterisks not in the original.]

This whole case has been reminding me of Medea ever since it first came to our collective attention. The invocation of divinity and goddesses reinforces that; Medea was a descendant of Helios and various Oceanids, and in the famous play by Euripides her child-murders were explicitly endorsed by Helios who sent a fiery chariot to escort her away from any mortal punishments. 

Several of Clancy's jurors have expressed sentiments placing themselves in the divine position of endorsing her action and insulating her from any mortal punishments. It is worth recognizing that this is an ancient instinct that has persisted throughout the history of Western civilization rather than a contemporary moral panic. 

The End of the UK

Reports indicate that breaking up the Union has proceeded to the point that they’re ready to consult the public. 

UPDATE: An overview of some strategic consequences. 

Jewish Holidays

Apparently sunset locally to wherever you are begins the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, followed by Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, with another major festival right on beyond that. I discovered this when trying to reach out to a Jewish contact who is, of course, preparing for this event.

Whenever I am reminded of Yom Kippur's existence, I recall also a joke told by Isaac Asimov in his first Treasury of Humor. It has some great jokes, including many ethnic ones that Asimov didn't feel any embarrassment about telling in those days; including also a lot of Jewish jokes, which he felt especially delighted to relate. Here is the joke, as well as a note on the risks of humor:

Happy holidays, if any of you are planning to commemorate these occasions; may you have a meaningful time. 

9/11 and the Bab el-Mandeb

Overnight, Houthi militias crossed to the center of the Bab el-Mandeb strait and took an island in the middle of it. This is a cyberpunk story of a band of misfits using widely available frontier technology to take on giants, at least initially with success. The Houthis made such a rapid and aggressive advance into territory held by their enemies because their command elected to encourage them with an AI-generated fake of their enemy commander ordering his forces to retreat. It turns out that, though the order was fake, the resistance that Saleh's forces were capable of was not so great that it couldn't be overcome with a push. However, it helped that the Houthis could use Claude for targeting their missiles -- a usage that Anthropic generally won't license to the Pentagon. 

They won't be able to keep that island, of course, should we decide to take it back. It is what is called in military science "a Forlorn Hope." With these Islamist movements the promised reward can be delegated to Allah, who will allegedly reward anyone who dies in the operation with paradise; the Houthis are Fiver Shi'ite Muslims, aligned with the Twelver Shi'ites who run the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and what is left of Iran. Iran claims it does not control the Houthis, but the Houthis are functionally a proxy with IRGC advisors.

Opposing them are rag-tag Yemeni government forces who have Saudi and American advisors. Not for the first time!

But hanging over the US effort are the memories of years of controversial targeting support American forces provided to Riyadh during the Obama and first Trump administrations that critics said contributed to a high number of civilian casualties.

Naturally, since the Houthis are very difficult to distinguish from civilians themselves and they take shelter among civilian populations. That has been a universal constraint in all of these wars we have fought since 9/11 happened 25 years ago today. 

Five years ago, I posted my 9/11 poem for the last time. I was wrong to say the story had ended; some stories never do, like roads that go ever, ever on. The old al Qaeda is dead, but sandal-wearing guerrillas are still showing off captured American equipment, what very well may be an AI clone of bin Laden's descendant gave a speech celebrating it -- the US reported him dead in 2019 -- and there is little doubt that the United States will not find it tolerable to have Bab el-Mandeb closed, no more than we could tolerate having our skyscrapers knocked down with hijacked jetliners. 

Unprincipled

I guess everyone understands by now. 

The Invincible Prior Assumption

The judge admonished Long for carrying the gun and told him he has to think before he acts.

"Fortunately, you weren't injured, but nonetheless, you had a gun there in the first place which was poor judgment," he said. "And what do you need a gun for protection in a mall, in the first place?

What indeed could possibly go wrong at a mall that might require a gun for protection? For an instructive example, let's look at the actual facts of the precise case that was in front of this particular judge at the time he said this.

A shooting at a Michigan mall in July ended when a 19-year-old drew his own pistol and shot a man who had already taken one life and was firing wildly.

The 19-year-old was sentenced to two years probation after this act of civic service at risk of his own life, following the admonishment by the judge for his foolishness in carrying a gun.