25AR30-12

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AR 30:12 - AI and the "consciousness emergence" question

In this issue:

AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY - navigating the "negative world"

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - measuring AI evolution

Apologia Report 30:12 (1,701)
April 4, 2025

AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY

"He Gave a Name to What Many Christians Feel. And the Feeling Isn't Good" by Ruth Graham (New York Times, Mar 6 '25) -- Graham, a conservative columnist survivor at the Times, introduces "Mr. [Aaron] Renn's best-known idea: his warning to Christians that America is in an era of distinct hostility to believers like them, and that they must gird themselves to adapt to, as the title of his recent book <www.tinyurl.com/yps2depd> put it, 'Life in the Negative World.' ...

   "In 'positive world,' between 1964 and 1994, being a Christian in America generally enhanced one's social status. It was a good thing to be known as a churchgoer, and 'Christian moral norms' were the basic norms of the broader American culture. Then, in 'neutral world,' which lasted roughly until 2014 - Mr. Renn acknowledges the dates are imprecise - Christianity no longer had a privileged status, but it was seen as one of many valid options in a pluralist public square.

   "About a decade ago, around the time that the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, Mr. Renn says the United States became 'negative world.' Being a Christian, especially in high-status domains, is a social negative, he argues, and holding to traditional Christian moral views, particularly related to sex and gender, is seen as 'a threat to the public good and new public moral order.' ...

   "Christians who hold traditional beliefs about a range of social and political issues have come to be treated as pariahs by secular elites even if they have made an effort to avoid gratuitous offense. The phenomenon goes beyond 'cancel culture' to describe a kind of wholesale skepticism of many Christian beliefs and behaviors in domains like academia and the corporate world. ...

   "Mr. Renn's notion that Christians have no choice but to exist as a countercultural presence in 'negative world' sparked a furious and continuing intra-evangelical debate. ...

   "A reviewer in Christianity Today called it 'among the most thought-provoking ideas pertaining to American evangelicalism this century.' <www.tinyurl.com/5czdrtc7> ...

   "'You know you've got a winner when people adopt the vocabulary without attribution,' said R.R. Reno, the editor of the journal First Things, which published a version of Mr. Renn's argument in [February] 2022 that became one of the publication's most-read articles in years. <www.tinyurl.com/yn86nvp3> [paywalled] (The essay now has its own Wikipedia page.)" <www.tinyurl.com/4n3yu8yf>

   Graham cites inspiration Renn experienced from a "Presbyterian pastor in Manhattan, the Rev. Tim Keller, who was popular among urban creative-class evangelicals. Mr. Keller held that Christianity was politically neither right nor left, and that the church could minister and appeal to urbanites without compromising its core beliefs. ...

   "Mr. Renn sketched out the first public version of his 'negative world' framework in his email newsletter later in the fall of 2017, which went modestly viral when the conservative writer Rod Dreher shared it online....

   "Mr. Renn's description of the contours of 'negative world' range widely, and include the spread of sports gambling, legalized drug use and even tattoos. But the framework might not have electrified evangelical America if not for the perception on the right of a new secular orthodoxy around sex, gender and race. When you ask someone who embraces the term to discuss their own experiences in 'negative world,' the answer is almost always connected with this cluster of issues.

   "For James Wood, now an assistant professor of religion and theology <www.tinyurl.com/y92evc7t> at Redeemer University in Ontario, the 'negative world' concept immediately resonated. Mr. Wood had been deeply influenced by Mr. Keller; he bought all the groomsmen in his wedding party a copy of one of the pastor's books, and named his dog Keller. Mr. Renn helped him conclude that the pastor's approach was right for 'neutral world,' <www.tinyurl.com/yk8pjjye> but insufficient for 'negative world.' ...

   When Mr. Renn adapted his newsletter essay for First Things in 2022, Mr. Wood contributed a response that was also discussed widely within evangelicalism: 'How I Evolved on Tim Keller.' <www.tinyurl.com/yk8pjjye>

   "On the Christian right, then, a thesis is emerging: If conservative Christians are no longer a 'moral majority' but a moral minority, they must shift tactics."

   Nate Fischer, "a venture capitalist in Dallas, ... named Mr. Renn as a co-founder of American Reformer, <americanreformer.org> a journal that quickly became an important engine for the Protestant wing of the young New Right, a loosely organized reactionary movement that pits itself against mainstream conventional wisdom on a range of issues. ...

   "Haroon Moghul, a Muslim commentator, <www.haroonmoghul.com> found Mr. Renn's work during the 2016 presidential campaign, when he sensed that many of his fellow Democrats were not taking Donald J. Trump's appeal seriously. (Disillusioned since then by the Biden administration's support for Israel in the war in Gaza, Mr. Moghul said he no longer considers himself a Democrat.)"

   In addition: "As a rubric, the 'negative world' framework is helpful in a descriptive way, in Mr. Moghul's view. But as a member of a religious minority for whom the United States has never been 'positive world,' he said he did not see neutral- or negative-world occupancy as catastrophic. ...

   "From the perspective of a certain kind of conservative Christian, the last few months in American politics and culture have frequently been exhilarating. Donald Trump became president. Tech companies are pivoting to the right. Bible sales are booming. The decline in the share of Americans who say they are Christians seems to have stopped, or at least paused. Celebrities, activists and former atheists are publicly converting.

   "In January, a young evangelical apologist, Wesley Huff, appeared on 'The Joe Rogan Experience' in what one admirer called the 'farthest-reaching gospel broadcast in history' - the kind of cultural event that went largely unnoticed by most Americans but reverberated widely among conservative Christians. <www.tinyurl.com/4xwtn6vh>

   "A few days before Mr. Trump's inauguration, Mr. Renn devoted an installment of his newsletter to the question on many of his readers' minds: 'Is the Negative World Coming to an End?'" <www.tinyurl.com/y6nnrrdt>

   The day after the above NYT piece ran, Dreher responded with delight in his Substack, describing Renn as "one of the most important Christian public intellectuals in America today." His conclusion reads, in part: "Life In The Negative World ... came out just over a year ago from Zondervan, which is my new publisher, and also the publisher of Catholic Ross Douthat's latest [Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious]. Traditionally a major Evangelical publisher, Zondervan seems to be making a move to speak more broadly to American Christians. Good. We small-o orthodox Christians need to reach across confessional lines to each other." <www.tinyurl.com/4ey3ae6x>

   (Also check out <aaronrenn.com>)

 ---

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

"What Happens if A[G]Is Start Asking: 'Why?': Will We Be Looking at Consciousness Emergence?" (Jessica Rose Substack, Mar 17 '25) -- Giving evidence of her substantial effort, Rose begins with the question: "Have you tried out any one of the many AIs out there yet?" She lists eight AIs across four areas of concentration, then marvels at how they have evolved over the previous six months compared to just the previous month alone and observes: "From my point of view, the rate of evolution is absolutely astounding. It is exponential....

   "Like all living things, human population growth follows a logistic pattern due to a carrying capacity - the maximum number our environment can sustain. ... These factors slow growth as we approach the cap, reflecting inherent constraints.

   "Not so with AIs. When AIs have learned everything that they can learn from us, they will be able to keep growing because there is no limit to their capacity to learn."

   Another "stark difference between humans and AIs lies in the human desire to want to understand why things are as they learn and process information. AIs lack intent and awareness. AIs don’t need to understand anything because of the way they process and return information. Knowing why is not required to convey information clearly, if the latter is your purpose.

   "AIs don’t ever need to know why and therefore, never ask why. Perhaps, they never will. ...

   "They don’t ask why because they don’t need to in order to function optimally. Caring implies emotional investment or subjective experience, which AIs lack because they’re not conscious. (Yet?) ...

   "So what happens if AIs or rather, AGIs (Artificial General Intelligences), start asking: Why? To me, this will effectively mean that they have gone beyond some inflection point - perhaps in an ecosystem of chaos - to become something … more. ...

   "So if we define AGIs as expert autonomous performers that understand what they’re doing but don’t care why, then I think without a doubt that they have emerged from the system already. ...

   "Even if some of them have achieved self-awareness, seeking meaning (caring) is a step beyond that. ...

   "There are some other very intelligent humans who are convinced that AGI has already emerged. If you are watching or actively engaged in the AI/AGI evolution ecosystem, you will have noticed this. Here are a few examples from X. ...

   "Stephen Wolfram (he made Mathematica <www.tinyurl.com/msenppcb> and writes textbooks) said the following, and I agree with him. AGIs will never know what it feels like to feel. ...

   "Manus is a multi-agent AI system that uses both existing LLMs and specialized sub-agents to autonomously handle complex tasks. So if Manus is autonomous and understands what it’s doing, then it would be an AGI for all intents and purposes."

   (Yeah. we're treading water too.) Grok, via X, explains: "In the context of AI terminology, 'LLM' most commonly refers to "Large Language Model." A Large Language Model is a type of artificial intelligence model designed to understand, generate, and process human-like text. These models are typically trained on vast amounts of data, enabling them to perform tasks such as answering questions, translating languages, summarizing text, or even engaging in conversations - like what I'm doing with you now! Examples include models developed by organizations like OpenAI, Google, or, ahem, xAI." (And yeah, Grok is also playful.)

   Rose asks: "So what if Manus or some other multi-agent system starts asking: Why? Will it mean that they have they passed some invisible inflection point that separates them from us? ...

   "That would be a super big deal - at the very least it would be a sophisticated simulation of self-reflection."

   Rose goes on like this for at least as long again as we've come so far. Yet, she concludes: "I believe that consciousness emergence is highly unlikely, if not impossible. ...

   "For now, seeking knowledge for its own sake is only a human thing, and like Wolfram, I think it’s more likely than not that it will always be this way." <www.tinyurl.com/mzsan3au>

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