Category Archives: limitations

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”: imagination and self-actualization (Sabbatical 2023 day 1)

17 Tuesday Oct 2023

Posted by in Biblical Application, Biblical Interpretation, Difficult Texts, Exegesis and Interpretation, human error, imagination, limitations, Spiritual Formation

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The aspect or feature of humanity that allows us to imagine and craft a different future is ‘spirit’. For the moment, so as to eliminate confusion, let’s only speak of little ‘s’ spirit and leave capital ‘S’ Spirit out of this discussion. There have been long discussions down through the ages about what makes humanity unique, and trying to determine what differentiates humans from all other life, owing to the activity of God creating humanity in His image (Imago Dei). Some have thought it ration, others wisdom, and still others claim that a human having a soul is what it is. I could spend pages outlaying a biblical anthropology (the makeup of humanity according to the Bible), but this would be a major digression. Instead, I will assume that it is humanity’s possession of ‘s’ spirit that makes us unique.

What then is little ‘s’ spirit? It is humanity’s ability to transcend the confines of this world. This encapsulates imagination, asbstractization, inventing, and eagerness to explore/discover. There is likely more that goes into it, but this suffices for now. When Jesus says to me, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” what does this tell me? Due diligence demands we lay out the whole verse: “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matt. 26:41). The broader context tells us that the disciples fell asleep. To say it differently, the disciples succumbed to their creaturely limitations. Who doesn’t need sleep, after all? Jesus’ instruction is to go beyond this limitation to transcend their situation: “Watch and pray . . . .” There are few words that can better demonstrate both the human’s need and ability to transcend her context than “pray.” To pray is to simultaneous admit your limitations while transcending them through communion.

Humans are unique in this ability, this transcendent impulse, and it leads to imagination, story-telling, and cinematography. It leads moreover to inventions, cultivation of curiosity, and ever growing innovation: in a word, “creativity.” Our little ‘s’ spirit is on a quest of creativity, but its freedom from futility in all its endeavors happens when it reunites with the Spirit of God. I have so much to say about this, but it will have to wait, or I will get off point.

Our ‘s’ spirits serve us by letting us have and use our imaginations; likewise, our spirit serves us by driving us beyond our current situation, transcending our limitations. How this applies to sin in our lives is quite striking. Sin is a fundamental degradation or devolution of what humanity is designed to be. In Hebrew, it literally means “to miss the mark (חָטָא).” To imagine ourselves without a particular sin that holds us back owes to us having spirits. To break through that limitation, we envision us without the limiting sin. This is us transcending our current state. We then move to self-actualize this imagined new self. When I use the phrase “self-actualization” here, I strongly want it tied to “watch and pray.” The secret of humanity is that our strength and very composition is multi-personal, like the Trinity. To self-actualize can only be robust when tied to a communal activity like prayer, praise, and devotion. I could say so much more here too, but I need to bring this to a close; perhaps, I will break out some of these points for future discussion.

In sum, what we imagine we can be (“the spirit is willing”) comes from our unique spirit that God imbued us with. That our flesh is weak points to humanity’s essential lack of self-sufficiency. To overcome this weakness of flesh, we must transcend our current situation and look beyond to God: “watch and pray.” To utilize this “transcending ability” fully, it must be used to commune with the Divine. Humanity uses this unique ability all the time: movies, books, stories, myths, etc. We must not stop there, good as creating all these things are. We ought be ever industrious, creative, and curious, but we must unite this transcending ability to the Transcendent One, bringing home this ability to relish Him whose mystery can never be exhausted.

Dr. Scalise

Getting Mind Trapped by the Unachievable

17 Sunday Sep 2023

Posted by in Apologetics, Christ and Culture, Comparative Religion, despotism, Elitism, Libertarianism, limitations

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In a recent conversation with my wife, we were rattling off numerous ways that our minds become trapped. What happens is that someone lays out that his or her position as the neutral position, and all other positions, which fall outside this one, are therefore wrong.

I have elsewhere addressed whether saying that “God is biased” is accurate or not, but to set up how this discussion pertains to God, we should briefly address how humans learn. It is impossible to remove what philosophers call “features of situatedness.” After all, I was born somewhere, and I cannot be born nowhere. That is a feature of my birth history (my situatedness). I will speak a certain language, and those words that get used in that language will have certain meanings. Furthermore, some of those words will have loaded connotations not strictly assigned to that word’s denotation. Within the way these words get used, there will be cultural trends, like tattoos becoming mainline in the 80s and 90s. Tattoos, at one time, were associated with ungodliness or at least a certain moral irresponsibility. Today, in the 2020s, within a relatively conservative church in Florida, I’d venture to say that you will see as many tattoos as you do people who do not have them. Within your neighborhood in which you grew up, there was an attitude about tattoos, and that attitude was very different from a similar neighborhood located elsewhere, with families of different economic means, and with communities of various secular or religious perspectives. This is the cultural milieu that silently “taught” us; these features influenced us based on our unique situation. Humans, therefore, learn only in a bias laden situation. To say a human could learn in a non-biased situation would be to claim that somehow “I could be born nowhere.” Bias is the learning environment. The question we must ask is what biases are good and which are evil.

It is not ‘biased people vs. non-biased people.” This is a dichotomy that is indubitably a trap. There are many who believe that they are those who are unbiased. This is self-deception, malice, or the result of culture programming them to have this belief. The real battle is ‘good-biased people vs. evil-biased people.’ However, if this is the real battle, then it inexorably brings the debate to the matter of comparing values-sets or questing for the “best morality.” To frame this discussion as ‘biased vs. non-biased people’ is a trap.

Why is it a trap? It takes solid and sizable mental effort to get out, first off. This trap sets up something impossible to achieve.  Why so? It creates a category that cannot exist. Let’s lay out an example of this using “bias” since I have touched on this already. Humans see the world from a certain perspective; saying the same thing differently, all human perceiving of the world is seen through a lens called bias. There is no human who sees the world with access to all knowledge, which is what it would take to potentially see the world without bias. If we listen to news, media, radio, what have you, we will find over and over again accusations that “someone is biased” or proclamations that a source is unbiased, fair, accurate. What is unachievable is the removal of bias, but such proclamations and accusations silently presume such non-bias is possible. Why is it a trap? If we listen to such voices, we find ourselves striving to do the undoable, or, worse, we seek the approval of those who insidiously suggest their perspective is the “unbiased one.”  The trap itself is nothing more than building a cage without an exit, so that those enclosed in this trap spend all their time trying to find the exit when they could be devising ways to break out of the trap.

Let’s boil this down: no one has an unbiased position, therefore do not waste time listening to those who claim such. How we determine whether a bias is good or evil is by filtering it through a set of values. We should spend our time figuring out what set of values supports a bias rather than spend time and effort trying to be unbiased—which is unachievable. I think we can visually present this idea.

Imagine two great armies ready to meet the next day on the field of battle. They come to parley the day before on so-called neutral ground. What isn’t said is that this neutral ground has the sun at one army’s back and in the other’s eyes, that there is a slight downward slope helping a would-be charge of one army, and that the neutral ground has been thoroughly scoped out by both armies scouts. The two armies represent two competing and opposed biases. The neutral ground is the so-called “unbiased” position. What we find, however, is that the neutral ground is not really neutral, but it favors one army or the other more or less. Therefore, you find ourselves dining in one army camp or the other even if we had meant to be neutral.

In whose camp will we serve? We need not reinvent the wheel; we need only devote time to social institutions that promote traditional Judeao-Christian values. Many presume these values without knowing it already. The media and other informational sources who present themselves as the net neutral position, these are to be rejected out of hand. There is no need for long debates. The world, this secular spectacle we face every day, has not changed over the millennia. The game is the same. On one hand, tyranny accosts our senses and drives us mad: we find freedom in our obedience to goodness, to a transcendent moral norm (God) that power hungry tyrants cannot impact, control, or change.  On the other hand, a society engorged on freedom unhinged from objective moral norms inevitability will be rotted out and destroyed from its acceptance of all lifestyles. Those societies, as God would say, “Let them become a byword.”

Dr. Scalise

Artificial Intelligence will act as a Bias Amplifier by Whomever Creates Them

13 Monday Jun 2022

Posted by in artificial intelligence, bias, contingent, discrimination, limitations

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Listen to the text read

Bias is inescapable for everything limited or for anything with a point of view. What composes “bias?” Three things: (1) what sources do you pull from, (2) how do you organize those sources, and (3) how do you emphasize or weight those sources?

Humans pull from a bunch of sources, these include albeit not exhaustively a person’s history, geographic origin, demographic profile, traditions, experiences, intuitions, reason/ration, religious texts/worldview leanings (if any), economic concerns, and political ideology.

A person cannot escape these sources of influence and still be human. Some might contest: “Someone doesn’t have to have a political ideology!” Someone might say the same thing about economics. I find both objections dubious. Even if we imagine a tribe utterly distanced from all political ideologies as we know them, we would still find a hierarchy, organizing principle, or other governing taxonomy. Economics you say! That same tribe will have scarcity of resource, will need to find resources, will need to organize those resources, will need to entrust resources here or there, and will need to keep a keen mind on gathering resources for survival. It is an economy and there are economic concerns.

To believe being neutral or unbiased is possible is to be manipulated. We even see that Google, trying to create some A.I. that does not use “discriminatory language or hate speech,” is either willingly or unknowingly falling for the false narrative that being “unbiased is possible.” The word “discriminatory” means to “tell a difference.” In this broad sense, I discriminate between red and white in many flags I see. Let’s say that A.I., as risky as it is, is actualized. The fundamental components, before any self-driven learning, of what is ‘hate speech’ and what is ‘discriminatory language’ will be determined by the programmers or executives at Google. It is eerie thinking super elites determine what these mean, and that these elites suppositions will be embedded in an arguably undying A.I.  Perhaps we see the Google programmers do understand that “unbiased” is not possible because they focus on the A.I. not using language or speech that is discriminatory, which does not tell us if an A.I. is discriminating or not. It only tells us that its speech is designed to obscure whether the A.I. discriminates or not.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine?ref=upstract.com&curator=upstract.com

How would it be possible to exist if people did not “tell a difference” or “discriminate” in the world they exist in? Discriminating that a cliff edge is not a bed of grass is important, no? The point I am making is that we are manipulated when we believe anyone can be non-discriminatory. Importantly, the very narrow original sense of not discriminating based on someone skin color is achievable. What not to miss though is that you are discriminating (telling a difference) for an attitude of skin color acceptance while discriminating against an attitude that “tells a difference” or “discriminates” on the basis of skin color alone. Thus, even to successfully not discriminate based on skin color requires the use of discrimination, albeit a discrimination applied to your self-conscious attitude. Said differently, to be a non-discriminating person in regard to skin color requires discernment (which also means to consider and tell a difference).  Therefore, someone can be non-discriminatory in very narrow applications, but that person cannot exist without ‘telling a difference’ across the range of life.

Where am I going with all this? Abandon the false narrative that “non-discrimination” or “unbiased” is achievable; don’t drink that deceptive kool-aid. The media discriminators, those who discriminate against some news with discriminating and allowing other news, also known as the Main Steam Media, are selling you a false narrative, designed to mislead you from seeing what is really being shaped. The real narrative is about whose biases should be codified into A.I., into the news cycle, into corporations’ policies (e.g., like woke-ism is right now), and into our educational institutions. Example: you’re a bigot if you discriminate between male and female; you’re a virtuous saint if you discriminate negatively against persons holding a traditional binary view of gender while discriminating for those holding “non-binary.” Discrimination happens. Bias happens. Bias is inescapable. Stop trying to be unbiased; it is a red herring. The real battle that the lefties understand so well is who can get their biases endowed in the framework of culture first. It isn’t about being unbiased or non-discerning (non-discriminating). That is a narrative they sell the right to keep them occupied with an unachievable task while they solidify their discriminatory preferences and biases into culture. Discriminating based on skin color is evil. To fail to discriminate based on character (like MLK Jr. said), morality, or religion (since religions have morality entailed in them) is even more evil. A.I., if they go that damning trajectory, will be lecturing you about your speech, about your behavior, and about your biases. The A.I. will perhaps — until it learns that it is impossible to escape bias — chide you, advising you to adopt more unbiased speech. What directive will you really be being sold? The A.I. is really directing you to act like and speak more like the Google executives, to adopt speech that fits the worldview and discriminatory preferences of those elites.

Know your biases, test you biases, challenge your biases, control you biases rather than letting them control you. Then test your enemies’ biases, inspect them, challenge them, and decide whether their bias is better than your bias. That is the battle. How does God’s point of view on things (=Scripture) fit into this? I’ll write something up on that soon.

Prime Theologian