I am quite disappointed that you left the conversation when we left your comfort zone, and only added a new article to your blog, I guess partly inspired by what you read from what I said. Please note the complicated statement, I wrote something else, and as always, I think the conflict is caused by the different definitions to the terms we use.
You define faith as "the illusion of security and certainty". This is what I call superstition, regardless of its source: a misunderstood religion, cult leader, political figure, or its most pathetic version: "science". Oh, My God (pun intended), how many times I have seen this "I believe in science" sentence, to which my obvious answer: "So then you know NOTHING about science or belief". :-)
My definition to faith is the mere acceptance that we cannot "know" or be certain of anything. All we have, including the greatest scientific achievements, are the result of better understanding of the truth, but as history shows, they will be flushed away by new findings, the sooner the better. Faith is a correct word to separate the things we "know": achieved by examining the available facts and deriving idea structures via thorough, checked deduction methods, verified by experiments and guarded by falsification criteria. Faith is the acceptance that even the strongest facts can be wrong at a later time, with better equipment and understanding. Faith is the completely conscious decision that it's OK in this way. Accepting that if you really want to achieve something new, you should be ready to sacrifice your whole life to something that is fundamentally wrong, and be totally honest about the whole path. There must be enough people doing this, to give our global community a chance to improve: to make the 99% failure necessary to have that 1% success.
You simply can't do this, if you are rational - and it is absolutely nonsense in a modern political or business environment, where only the winner counts. This takes faith - whatever the source is. And yes: your description of "reasonable hope" perfectly matches my definition of faith. And (I think quite ironically) it also matches to the following definition too: "To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see."
Yes, this is from that "outdated stuff people should believe without questions", the Bible, Hebrews 11:1. However, you are absolutely right: I have intentionally chosen the translation that matches our shared vision of faith, and there are other versions founding your skeptic approach to religion / or with my words, turning religion to superstition.
You also seem to assume that faith means "uncritically adopt the explanatory frameworks that our traditions offer us". Excuse me, this shows a quite shallow knowledge of the tradition you talk about. Please read some Chan Buddhist texts, or stories about the rabbis, Anthony de Mello, check the ancient Greeks, Lao-ce or the old Christian theologians. For example, did you know that the Buddhist monk training was quite similar to the Greek philosophers: they had organized dispute training sessions where they picked sides by chance - without predefined right and wrong? This is definitely not a training to "uncritically adopt" things, but simply to reason your own way out of the previous achievements. No religion could have survived if the top people were unable to apply and adapt the old and dusty statements to their actual problems (means: the rules must be coherent and flexible, the leaders must be wise and pragmatic). This is (as I mentioned earlier) quite perfect analogy to the biological evolution with ruthless fight for survival.
I think your noble aim: "define my own purpose as best as I can" is the best a (not only by age, but mentally) adult human being can set. My personal addition to this is that if you go far enough in this way, you will see that you are not alone, but others walked on this path, and the traces of the best ones are now respected as the foundations of religions. Most people don't understand a single word of their experiment, but it was translated to simpler, coherent pattern set that they can use. Or if you prefer the quite rational Confucius: "Guide the people by law, subdue them by punishment; they may shun crime, but will be void of shame. Guide them by example, subdue them by courtesy; they will learn shame, and come to be good." As only a few people have the ability to become a professional ballet dancer or excellent composer, only a few of us have the mental abilities to emerge coherent patters sets ("meme-structures"). The others should better play from the sheet music to avoid chaos...
I am faithful - but contrary to your assumption, this does not give me any certainty at all, neither do I require that from my faith. But I found faith the only way to train my human brain work reliably outside my comfort zone, deal with facts and consequences completely against its ultimate, wired goals.
To the contrary, it is irrational to assume a person can think beyond the defense protocols of his/her own thinking organ, the human brain, without a properly trained pattern set that resolves them. A bit technical definition of what earlier mind-scientists (philosophers, prophets) called "enlightened".
To summarize: my greatest concern about the current and popular "futurist manifestos" is that they sometimes talk about the fictional exponentially growing grey goo of nanobots, but seems to completely forget about the existing exponentially growing grey goo: the human brain.
They assume that we are able to think rationally. NO. A fully parallel, constantly changing network of literally billions of electric switches is absolutely not able to do so, only can get closer to it after years or decades of rigorous training, which seems to be forgotten in our "modern era".
They assume that the next step can be explained to "people". NO. If there is one thing sure about the next step, that it is really weird and completely unacceptable for "normal people" who can accept our current crash course, and anyone being popular with ideas about the future knows nothing about it.
They assume that AI has critical part in forming our future. NO. At least not more than our current mechanical engineering. We can create weapons to kill each other - or kill our whole civilization simply by creating giant factories that literally produce waste, and transportation infrastructure to cover the planet with it. We can also create smart IT tools to increase the separation among people until all our organized structures collapse.
Another Confucius quote, it seems to apply to our popular futurists (not to be accepted uncritically, but for thinking about):
Our future depends on this, thousands years old decision, on our individual votes. Religions, politicians, engineering, the internet age and AI only provide the scene around us.
February 24, 2015 at 10:22 am
Hi Lorand – Thank you for interesting post. It seems that you got the impression that I intended the post to which you responded (Good Reason For Hope) as a reply to you. I apologize if I inadvertently created that impression, but I was not intending it as a response to any other piece. I simply wanted to convey my view that, although religious teachings fail to adequately equip us for many of the dangers that face humans in the 21st century, there are alternative visions that offer hope. My remarks on the word “faith” are focused on the specific definition of the word “belief that is not based on proof”. I understand that there are several other common usages of the word, I recognize the ambiguities that result, and I acknowledge that I should have been clearer regarding which meaning I intended. My point specifically concerns that aspect of religious faith that accepts received tradition or teaching as inherently authoritative, regardless of how well it accords with current scientific knowledge.
February 25, 2015 at 10:44 pm
Yeah, my bad, I had a seemingly false impression that we have a communication. I my world that means that you reflect to my statements the same way as I reflect to yours (and do not leave without a word).
Now I understand that you only tried to spread your scientific wisdom to a dark person who thinks we have a few things to learn from people who created the world we live in – in order to leave a still habitable planet to our children. Even if that means spending more efforts on Fukushima or Ukraine – and less on LHC. By my opinion, if we don’t urgently and fundamentally change our course, the fairy-tale AI singularity (sorry, I have been working on this field for twenty years literally, not Mr Hawking, Mr. Musk, etc.) will be our last problem in 2020.
It seems we walk on a very different path and no chance to have a reasonable discussion. Thanks for your time, and best wishes. (This is how I used to quit.)
