Magnifica Humanitas

 Pope Leo XIV recently released the encyclical letter, Magnifica humanitas. It explicitly positions itself as a sequel to Pope Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, but is also, I think, a deliberate sequel to Pope Francis's Infinita dignitas. Unfortunately, it has a lot of the problems that seem endemic to Church documents these days -- the things that suggest that perhaps it should have been thought through a bit more carefully. The claim that Nehemiah "did not impose solutions from above" is baffling; Nehemiah spends a significant part of the book giving orders, rebuking nobles and officials, and appointing people to be in charge. It is true that he works to reforge the community identity of the Israelites, and it is true that the Israelites respond well to his plans, which seems to be what is primarily in view, and I very much like the appeal to Nehemiah (who provides a good example of a laity-driven approach to reform), but the characterization of Nehemiah's work seems oddly selective.This is a recurring problem, as, again, has been common in Church documents recently.* Some people have noted that the writing, ironically, has a lot of stylistic similarities with results of AI programs, probably not because AI was used but because AI also tends to slide into this vaguely inspirational now-this-now-that committee-speak, of which Church officials have been the masters for years now.

Nonetheless, the encyclical is a nice summary of the social teaching of the Church. And contrary to the way it is sometimes being presented, it is largely positive about AI research, and just lays down exactly the sort of moral principles for such research that one would expect it to give. As some have noted, it doesn't even call for a ban of autonomous weapons systems -- it just insists that they "must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms" (section 197). This is remarkably weak.

What seems to be the intended point -- it could be clearer, but a number of things converge on this interpretation -- is that matters like the ethics of AI research require a significant amount of initiative on the part of the laity in general, distinct from any direct interference by the clergy; it thus reiterates the general principles that the laity need to keep in mind when dealing with any matter, like AI research, that can affect our understanding of human dignity. Read in that light, it does this very well. I just wish we were out of the era of throw-everything-in-somehow document-writing.

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* One of the more interesting ones here is when it says that "the 'just war' theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated" (section 192), but all the things it explicitly rejects are common modern modifications of the traditional just-war view, while it repeatedly says things that have commonly been said in traditional versions of just war theory. (For instance, one might think that it was proposing a pacifist approach, but then it goes on to give, sections 197-200, a discussion of how military decisions in war should be made, which explicitly appeals to principles of just war theory!)

Two Poem Drafts

 Nightfall

The evening, creeping now
on shower-watered fields,
builds in depth; the sun bows;
wonderfully to night it yields.

I sit alone in shadowed room,
still as stone, and wait
as fate is woven on the loom
with gloom; and there I ruminate.

The outer black, a sheet
like doubt, now covers all
and falls the night, complete,
against all light a wall.

The clouds are hiding stars,
the wide world is hid away,
yet night neither hides nor mars
the glory of light of day.

A dawn will come, will burn,
upturn the rule of shade,
and I will coolly yearn
and sigh for hope remade.

Connection

On page unmarked I mark a line;
I draw it straight and true
from mine to yours and yours to mine,
made even, as is due.

In silent air I draw a word
to reach through time and space
and on your ear alight, thus heard
with harmony and grace.

By light I speak, from eye to eye,
with glistening tear and hue;
to make a circuit, photons fly
between my heart and you.

I fold the world and make it small
to hold us both in bound;
within this O, I compass all:
here infinity is found.

The Power of Ideas

 It is the business of education to wait upon Pentecost. Unhappily, there is something about educational syllabuses, and especially about examination papers, which seems to be rather out of harmony with Pentecostal manifestations. The Energy of Ideas does not seem to descend into the receptive mind with quite that rush of cloven fire which we ought to expect. Possibly there is something lacking in our Idea of education; possibly something inhibiting has happened to the Energy. But Pentecost will happen, whether within or without official education. From some quarter or other, the Power will descend, to flame or to smolder until it is ready to issue in a new revelation. We need not suppose that, because the mind of the reader is inert to Plato, it will therefore be inert to Nietzsche or Karl Marx. Failing those, it may respond to Wilhelmina Stitch or to Hollywood. No incarnate Idea is altogether devoid of Power; if the Idea is feeble, the Energy is dispersed, and the Power dim, the indwelling spirit will be dim, dispersed and feeble -- but such as it is, so its response will be and such will be its manifestation in the world. 

[Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, HarperCollins (New York: 1987) pp. 112-113.]

Be Skillful Money-Changers

 The Mosaic philosophy is accordingly divided into four parts — into the historic, and that which is specially called the legislative, which two properly belong to an ethical treatise; and the third, that which relates to sacrifice, which belongs to physical science; and the fourth, above all, the department of theology, vision, which Plato predicates of the truly great mysteries. And this species Aristotle calls metaphysics. Dialectics, according to Plato, is, as he says in The Statesman, a science devoted to the discovery of the explanation of things. And it is to be acquired by the wise man, not for the sake of saying or doing anything of what we find among men (as the dialecticians, who occupy themselves in sophistry, do), but to be able to say and do, as far as possible, what is pleasing to God. But the true dialectic, being philosophy mixed with truth, by examining things, and testing forces and powers, gradually ascends in relation to the most excellent essence of all, and essays to go beyond to the God of the universe, professing not the knowledge of mortal affairs, but the science of things divine and heavenly; in accordance with which follows a suitable course of practice with respect to words and deeds, even in human affairs. Rightly, therefore, the Scripture, in its desire to make us such dialecticians, exhorts us: Be skilful money-changers rejecting some things, but retaining what is good.

[St. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 1.28]

'Be skil(l)ful money-changers' is a saying commonly attributed to Jesus by the Church Fathers, although it's an agraphon, i.e., something not attributed to Him in the Gospels; it was particularly popular among the Alexandrian Church Fathers, who use it in different kinds of contexts as an exhortation to distinguish the true from the counterfeit.

Memory, Composition, Improvisation

Ben Laude has a nice breakdown of a famous scene from the movie Amadeus:

 

Memory, composition, and improvisation is a good way to look at talent, because they are the elements of excellence in every intellectual and cultural field.

Dashed Off XVIII

 the Church as model of both consecrated virginity and matrimony

Spirit by its nature is attracted to sign as meaning-bearing.

We make trade-offs not merely with quantitative assessments but also with judgments of quality, and the latter kind of trade-off assessment has features not found in the former.

It is a fact that some way sof playing poker are cheating in the context of the game being played; therefore there are moral facts.

Communication always begins with having-in-common.

Loves tend toward uniqueness, and the deeper they are, the more in them is unique.

Most words can be used of the potential as well as the actual.

Lk 24:51 (Christ taken up into heaven) // Lk 24:52-53 (Disciples going to Jerusalem and staying in the Temple)
-- the disciples do on earth what symbolically corresponds to what Christ does in the Ascension

The Ascension and Session are the culminations and completions of Incarnation.

Every advance in one's education consists in recognizing how what one had learned is a shadow of what one is learning.

'postulates of respect for the individual'

The modality of coming to know is not separate from the object of knowing.

We know there are molecules composing tables because there are tables that are necessarily composite, and study of the components brings us the molecules (and atoms &c.).

the sensible matter of matrimony as consenting presentation

That one can *model* discovered solutions as optimizations does not imply that optimizing is the best *strategy* for finding such solutions.

It follows from Malebranche's account of the passions that they should only be followed to the extent that doing so preserves society and our body.

Communication begins before we actually communicate.

What we usually call evidence is something we project to exist in a 'steady and general point of view', the open field of the publicly accessible.

One reason a school needs to support high-achieving students as much as possible is that such students are part of the support system for lower-achieving students.

You learn how to comprehend what you read by reading lots of things like it.

Coolness is a form of novelty.

Our ability to refer to fictional entities in pretense and make-believe is itself a metaphysical mystery.

Many of our assertions are parts of testimonial claims; higher-order reflection may classify those chains in different ways, but that does not affect those assertions as assertions, just as linked in systems with other assertions.

pretending to assert vs asserting what one pretends

We make believe in order to think through.

To say that we refer or assert in a game does not fundamentally affect any questions about reference or assertion.

Walton's discussion of fictional entities captures the whole problem with his project: saying "it is fictional that" or "in a game of make believe" reclassifies parts of the problem but doesn't actually answer any of the questions he seems to assume it does. (He seems, in fact, to be smuggling in loose, colloquial tones into a technical account that doesn't obviously require them -- e.g., on his account, something that is make-believe may also actually be the case outside the game, but he regularly borrows on our tendency to take 'make belive' as a marker for the *not real*. On his account, saying we fictionally refer can't give the conclusion that we don't actually refer, but he treats it as if it does whenever it is convenient for him to do so.

When people ask, "What is the value of X?", there is often no such thing as 'the value' but many very different values.

LLM behavior is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a blending of a huge number of people who talk too much.

"The affirmative proposition is prior to and better known than the negative (since affirmation explains denial just as being is prior to non-being)." Aristotle Met 996b

Strategy is a fundamentally analytic field.

symbolic habitus in the imagination

books as quasi-friends of pleasure
pets as quasi-friends of pleasure

the illocutionary force of what is said on the stage vs the illocutionary force of the stage-play

Cinema is in many ways a four-dimensional art; it requires use of space and time in visual storytelling.

"What then stops us from calling happy (eudaimona) the one who is active in accoradance with complete virtue, sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some arbitrary duration but over a complete life?" Aristotle NE 1101a

The human state, like the human life, exists both by nature and by artifice.

Without the good of family and of civil society, no individual good can reliably exist.

All names admit of both nonfictional and fictional uses.
-- this is a specification of transperspectival and perspectival uses

"A safe fairy-land is untrue to all worlds." JRR Tolkien

The Chinese translation of The Lord of the Rings (which includes Silmarillion and Hobbit)
Mojie ("Magic/Demon Ring")
(1) Jingling baozuan ("The Elves' Jewels")
(2) Huobite ren ("The Hobbit Person")
(3) Mojie zaizian ("The Magic Ring Reappears")
(4) Shuangl-a qibing ("The Surprise Attack of the Two Towers")
(5) Wangzhe wudi ("The King is Invincible")
jingling = spiritual/refined/skilled mind/soul/spirit/sprite (hence 'Elf')

To live morally is to be living before the tribunals of conscience and God.

the technical infinity of humanity

We all begin to pray before we know what to pray.

allegory as tending toward a virtue ethics

The species-function of an institution is not the same as its society-function or its intrinsic function.

A game in game theory consists in
(1) a set of logical objects (agents/players)
(2) mapped to multiple elements in sets of choices
(3) so that the set of such elements is modeled by a maximizing function.

In most of what we care about we don't know what to maximize or optimize.

Any result that can be reached by natural selection can in principle be reached by intellectual intention.

There are usually very many coordination devices for solving any given coordination problem, and they are selected in general on the basis of things having little to do with the coordination problem itself.

A man trapped alone on a desert island would still form institutions (home, names, designated gathering areas, latrine-areas, gardens, pets, or what have you, depending on the situation). If joined by someone who refused to recognize these, the result would be an obviously recognizable form of institutional conflict.

Beore you can have an institution of driving on a given side of the road, one must already have the institutions of driving and of roads. Roads presuppose institutionalized forms of travel and transport. These in turn presuppose other institutions (militaries, king's messnegers, postal services, merchant trade, or whatever else).

Every Bayesian seems in practice to have a different Bayesianism.

Before every coordination problem is the selection of which coordination problem to have.

Either some moral principles are necessary or we live in a universe that favors some moral principles over others.

principles of administrative design
(1) facilitated compliance
(2) easy return to compliance
(3) penalty for continued noncompliance commensurate with severity of problem created by noncompliance

Large-scale problems are often solved by degrading the solutions to other problems.

The deontic power to buy, pay, and close debts may usually involve money, but it doesn't actually require money (favors or force may close a debt even more effectively than funds).

Either 'purchasing power' already presupposes money or the power to invade and occupy is a form of purchasing power.

Philosophical naturalists are in general only aspirationally so.

Promises are not necessarily forward-looking; we also promise that we have done or are doing something.

strongly actual: necessary things
properly actual: substances & accidents existing in the world
weakly actual: ficta and rational beings

The inevitability of inquiry grounds the postulate of intelligible order as inevitable, the necessity of inquiry to moral life grounds the postulate of intelligible order as obligatory.

If A is angry at B and as a result says, "No, have nothing more to do with me; you do not exist," the "you do not exist" concerns status as object rather than status as thing.

'Bad company' arguments are arguments a pari.

The existence conditions for fictional objects qua objects are the same as for any other objects; the differences between fictional and nonfictional objects are causal, not objective.

Most of the philosophical difficulties asosciated with fictional objects are not conclusive to fictional objects.

If I say of an erratic friend, "Which A will we meet tonight? Every day, a different A," I am distinguishing A objectively and not really.

fictional characters and practice opponents in arguing and fighting
-- this is one of the stronger analogies for a make-believe account

the use of make-believe in philosophical argument (e.g., imagining an opponent or a conversation)

prefix realism -- the prefix would in fact just be the domain indicator

artistic idea --> objective artifact --> external artifact

ampliated vs nonampliated existence games

purely figurative uses of 'fictional'

If I'm puzzled about "There is a center of gravity here," it is  pointless to try to answer questions about what it is for a center of gravity to be here by saying, "Ah, what this really means is, *metaphorically* there is a center of gravity here." Adding 'metaphorically' has not addressed any questions I am asking. All it has done is given limited information about how the *statement* relates to other statements. Likewise, if I say, "In a game of make-believe, there is a center of gravity here," this answers no questions about it unless I am asking how the statement relates to other statements, and even then very incomplete information (e.g., which of the many possible games of make-believe)?

fictional characters // words

"If we admit a certain kind of entity, we cannot but admit all the other kinds of entities that figure in the identity conditions of an entity of that kind. Yet we admit fictional works. So, we cannot but admit fictional objects as well, insofar as the latter entities figure in the identity conditions of the former entities." Alberto Voltolini
"Insofar as i) fictional objects are necessary identity conditions for fictional works and ii) the latter allegedly exist, then of course fictional works are logically sufficient for the existence of fictional objects; hence again, fictional objects exist as well."

To say that fictional objects don't exist is to say that they are neither primary beings nor secondary beings.

general powers of trusteeship (incident to the office of trustee) vs special powers (arising from special authorization and direction of the settlor)
-- special powers cna be mere naked powers (discretion of trustee) or powers in the nature of a trust (obligatory)

Swinburne's kinds of religious experience
(1) public object
--- (1a) through ordinary sensory object
--- (1b) through unuusal sensory object
(2) private object
--- (2a) through typical spiritual sensations
--- (2b) through atypical spiritual sensations
--- (2c) without any sensations

A means is potential to what acts for an end.

Every argument against God's existence is a defective part of an argument for God's existence, namely, the argument whereby it is shown to be wrong.

To be a person is to be a potential classifier; to live as a person is to be an actual classifier.

We often begin an inquiry into something by fictionalizing it.

(1) Necessarily, some propositions are not both true and false.
(2) Therefore there are reasons why some propositions are true or false but not both.
(3) The collection of all such reasons is called reality.
(4) Therefore, necessarily, there is some reality.

counterintuitive vs praeterintuitive

Aristotle's Metaphysics Lambda is an argument that thinking must be a principle of the universal heavens and of nature; that is, that change (kinesis) presupposes thought (noesis).

laws of nature --> intelligible order --> divine intellect

The universe is as if it were designed to produce stars.

The Bible makes very clear, in both the Old and the New Testaments, that there was prophetic revelation that did not contribute to Scripture, that not all prophets were concerned with public revelation.

Intellectual understanding infuses the social medium, descending thereby into the material world and transfiguring it.

Philosophy is a work of both discovery and invention; truth is sought in both ways, and most perfectly through their union.

Habitude XXXV

 It seems that original sin is not habitude. For original sin is lack of original justice, as Anselm says in the book on the virginal conception, and so original sin is a sort of privation. But privation is opposed to habitude. Therefore original sin is not habitude.

Further, actual sin has more of the notion of fault than original, inasmuch as it has more of the notion of the voluntary. But actual habitude of sin does not have the notion of fault; otherwise it would follow that a man sleeping, culpably sins. Thefore no original habitude has the notion of fault.

Further, in badness, act always precedes habitude, for bad habitude is never infused, but acquired. But original sin is not preceded by any act. Therefore original sin is not habitude.

But contrariwise is what Augustine says in the book on the baptism of infants, that due to original sin little children are capable of craving [concupiscibili], though they are not actually craving [concupiscentes]. But capability [habilitas] is called according to some habitude. Therefore original sin is habitude.

I reply that it must be said that, as was said above, habitude is twofold. One is that by which power is inclined to act, as kinds of knowledge [scientiae] and virtues are called habitudes. And in this way, original sin is not habitude. In another way, habitude is said to be a disposition of a nature composed of many things, according to which it has itself [se habet] either well or badly toward something, and especially according as the disposition has been turned as it were into nature, as is obvious from illness and health. And in this way original sin is habitude. For it is a sort of disordered [inordinata] disposition coming from the dissolution of that harmony in which the notion of original justice consisted, just as bodily illness is a sort of disordered [inordinata] disposition of body, according to which the equality in which the notion of health consists is dissolved. Whence original sin is called languor of nature.

To the first it must be said that, as illness of body has something of privation, inasmuch as equality of health is removed, and has something positive, to wit the humors themselves being disposed disorderedly [inordinata dispositos], so too original sin has privation of original justice, and with it disordered disposition [inordinatam dispositionem] of the parts of the soul. Whence it is not pure privation but a sort of corrupt habitude.

To the second it must be said that actual sin is a sort of disordering [inordinatio] of act, whereas original sin, since it is sin of nature, is a sort of disordered disposition [inordinata dispositio] of nature itself, which has the notion of fault inasmuch as it is derived from the first parent, as was said. Now this kind of disordered disposition of nature [inordinata dispositio naturae] has the notion of habitude, but disordered disposition of act [inordinata dipositio actus] does not have the notion of habitude. And because of this original sin is able to be habitude, but not actual sin.

To the third it must be said that that objection proceeds from the habitude by which power is inclined to act, but original sin is not such a habitude. Although even from original sin some inclination to disordered act [actum inordinatum] follows, not directly, but indirectly, to wit, through removal of the impediment [remotionem prohibentis], that is, original justice, which impeded disordered change [inordinatos motus], just as also from bodily illness there follows inclination to disordered bodily changes [motus corporales inordinatos]. Nor ought it to be said that original sin is infused habitude, nor acquired, save by the act of the first parent rather than the act of this person, but it is innate through defective origin.

[St. Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-1.82.1, my translation. The Latin is here, the Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

It's important to grasp that original sin is not sin in a strictly proper sense, i.e., in the sense that the person who has it has thereby sinned; rather, it is the sin of the whole human race, in the first parent as the head of the human race. In that parental sin, original justice, which protected from actual disorder, was lost, with the result that all descended human beings are disordered in their desires.

Besides the importance of original sin itself, one of the important points emphasized here is that the infused vs. acquired distinction is not exhaustive for habitudes; original sin is neither infused nor acquired by the person who has it, but is a result of a defective origination of the person, namely, being generated when original justice has been lost. This makes original sin a natural habitude like congenital illness rather than a rational habitude like science or virtue, although since it is a disordered state of our rational ability to organize our inclinations, disordered acts follow from it, which makes vice possible and, indeed, in the long run inevitable where there is nothing to counteract it.