25AR30-31

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AR 30:31 - "Woke lingers on where the highly educated hold sway"

In this issue:

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - can AI really be manipulated by our interaction in a long-lasting sense?

DISCERNMENT - appreciating how it works when "we can see it in operation"

WOKEISM - not dead, "but neither has it achieved ... complete victory"

Apologia Report 30:31 (1,720)
August 21, 2025

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

"Talking with a skeptic, ChatGPT concludes it's a fact: God exists." -- so reads the subject line of an email sent to me recently by Apologia board member Alan Scholes, who writes: "A skeptic talks with ChatGPT, and the AI concludes that God's existence is a fact, not a matter of belief.

   "This 25-minute video, 'I Made ChatGPT Believe in God (Seriously)'" <www.tinyurl.com/msk6vnvj> Alan reports, "was made by Alex O'Connor, whose handle is 'cosmicskeptic,' and is dated May 31 '25. O'Connor describes himself as either an agnostic or an atheist.

   "In it, he spars with ChaptGPT, which begins by saying she (it speaks with a feminine voice) has no beliefs and will only state with certainty things she considers facts. In the end, the program states that it is a logical certainty that an uncaused, eternally existing being chose to create the universe."

   The included scrolling list of related videos on the right side of the YouTube window features other posts by O'Connor, including: 

* - "Gaslighting ChatGPT With Ethical Dilemmas" (Nov 30 '24) <www.tinyurl.com/542yap4x>

* - "Trying to Convince ChatGPT It's Conscious" (Jul 25 '24) <www.tinyurl.com/ycydk9kp>

* - "This is Why I Don't Believe in God" (Jun 27 '23) <www.tinyurl.com/3zshf87n>

   Of course, O'Connor isn't alone in sparring with AI this way. Also noted in YouTube's list:

* - "I Convinced Grok God Is Real (Using Math, Science, and Logic)" by Calvin Smith (Executive Director, Answers in Genesis Canada) <www.tinyurl.com/yemjwjzv> 

   More recently, Alan mused: "Watching that video made me wonder if 'cosmicskeptic's' next move would be to ... convince it that God could not exist."

 ---

DISCERNMENT

"Essaying Discernment: The role of imagination in cultivating wisdom" by Christina Bieber Lake <www.tinyurl.com/28yyfphk> (Comment, Jun 20 '25) --"I've dedicated my career in literary studies to the question of what it takes to change a person's mind about any idea we hold too dear to be questioned [and specifically] the faulty ideas we have never examined.... What interests me is what it takes to let light in through the massive blinders we all erect and defend. Since we inherently trust our instincts, how can we discover when we've been misled?"

   Lake noted earlier that "In his groundbreaking book Thinking, Fast and Slow, based on decades of research, Daniel Kahneman illustrates <www.tinyurl.com/57n3kp3h> how powerful our nonconscious cognition is. Kahneman calls nonconscious cognition System 1, which is fast, intuitive, and emotional. This system does most of our mental work, evidenced each time we drive a car or brush our teeth without thinking. He calls the logical part of our mental processes System 2, which is slower and more deliberate. System 1 is so much more powerful than System 2 that Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind <www.tinyurl.com/456nbdb7> calls it an elephant. The elephant represents the concealed beliefs, emotions, and intuitions that drive our decisions no matter how smart the rider on top may be. I'll use Haidt's metaphor of the elephant to denote System 1, and the rider, System 2. ...

   "Haidt concludes that 'within the first second of seeing, hearing, or meeting another person, the elephant has already begun to lean toward or away, and that lean influences what you think and do next. Intuitions come first.' ...

   "The upshot of all this is that our trust in intuition makes us think that we know what we don't actually know. Our blindness to the trust we place in intuition is fatal to discernment. We don't know what we don't know, and it is cognitively easier to never question what we think we know. ...

   "We have been malformed to read for information instead of transformation, as if more information necessarily leads to better decisions. ... Jeffrey Bilbro's Words for Conviviality <www.tinyurl.com/3rp33xtv> is just one of many recent books that show how the speed and enormity of digital technologies malform us to think of reading as a technique to gain individual benefit rather than as a 'mode of participating in a community oriented toward understanding and practicing truth.' ...

   "It is not reason but the imagination that we must engage to see choices more distinctly, which is what the word discernment denotes. We must return together to the literary, imaginative modes of reading, and we must learn to write through our own issues in turn."

   Lake explains how her interest in all of this relates to a literary perspective. "The art of the essay was born to help writers (and readers) learn that. 'Essay' comes from the French word essayer - to attempt, to try - and Michel de Montaigne [1533–1592] is credited with the first attempts at what we now call creative nonfiction or personal essay. ... 

   "If your sixteen-year-old son gets into an accident with your car, he may weave the facts into one version of the story when he talks to you and a completely different version of the story when he talks to his friends. Growth happens only when your son learns to tell the most truthful version of the story possible (to himself especially) and then uses that story to redirect ... requires a lifetime of work.

   Montaigne's ... work illustrates that the best essays begin in one place and end in another, not in a way that contradicts the beginning, but in a way that uncovers the faulty moves and thus encompasses them. ... Reading and studying excellent essays can help us figure out how discernment works because we can see it in operation.

   "One of the best essays of this kind that I have encountered is Andre Dubus's 'Giving Up the Gun,' part of the marvelous collection Meditations from a Movable Chair. <www.tinyurl.com/45vamcr5> I've taught this collection for twenty years, and it is still revealing its power to me. Dubus wasn't primarily an essayist. He was a master of short stories that feature impossible moral dilemmas. His stories reveal how a person's formation enters every decision they make. In short, he understood the elephant in the room. In his essays he explores how his own intuition serves him, and when it leads him astray. ...

   "The work is the writing. Through it, Dubus brings his earlier self together with his present self.... because of his newfound understanding that his trust in his intuition had blinded him, his imagination is freed from its former illusions. He imagines himself killing someone. The final paragraph hits us with immense, earned power....

   "Dubus's essay reminds us that we are always already searching for answers to truly difficult questions. ... We can let ourselves imagine that we are small, frightened, self-protective creatures with tremendous power to hurt others. Then we can understand grace, and then we can let go." <www.tinyurl.com/2s4dnr9y>

 ---

WOKEISM

"How Social Media Is Helping to Topple Woke" by James Marriott (Times of London, Jun 9 '25) -- "Back in 2020, the 'woke' movement seemed like an irresistible incoming tide that was destined to shape the whole world of my adult life. ... Universities were declaring themselves (rather blithely, it seemed to me) 'institutionally racist'. An outlandish new jargon of oppression had to be learnt every fortnight." For a while, "it seemed every other person I passed in the street was clasping a copy of Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race <www.tinyurl.com/5ddtr9t9> like a breviary.

   "It would be naive to underestimate the enduring influence of the social justice movement. But it has not quite achieved the Roman triumph I would have predicted for it five years ago. Many large corporations have cancelled their diversity and inclusion initiatives. He/she/they pronouns are vanishing discreetly from email signatures. Every frontline politician says what a woman is. Polling of young men suggests the movement has at best a shaky grip on the future. As revolutions go, this was a botched job. ...

   "The progressive movements of the late 20th century (Stonewall, anti-censorship, racial equality) appealed intuitively to a liberal society's reverence for the rights of the individual. The authoritarian character of wokeness, with its quasi-religious strictures about speech, behaviour ... meant it was always going to be a tougher sell.

   "But unpopular ideas have caught on before. Half the history of cultural change consists in the fashionable beliefs of an elite minority being imposed on, or adopted by, the general population. Before Henry VIII broke with Rome, English Protestantism was principally the preserve of an international merchant class and of scholars at Oxford and Cambridge. In the 18th century irreligion was the subversive creed of a tiny group of philosophers; three centuries later it is the position of more than half the British population. The sexual revolution of the 1960s began among wealthy, bohemian metropolitans. Today, the outlandish mores of swinging London - sex outside marriage, abortion, homosexuality - are respectable. ...

   "That wokeness has not glided to universal acceptance is partly a sign of the establishment's diminished soft power. In the past, dissenters from elite-mandated cultural change tended to fare badly. ...

   "The important change was the arrival of social media, which has meant there is no longer an elite monopoly on culture. The results have been chaotic but the traditional top-down dynamics of social change have been irreversibly altered." Opponents of "elite cultural positions were able to build platforms larger and more powerful even than those wielded by members of the traditional establishment.

   "It is not hard to imagine that if wokeness had arrived before the age of the internet, the seamless adoption of its tenets by the BBC and the universities might have given it an untroubled path to ubiquity. Perhaps there would not even have been a culture war. ...

   "In hindsight I suspect some of the stridency of the woke movement was the stridency of panic - the shrill note in the voice of the teacher who realises she is losing control of the class. ...

   "Woke is not dead but neither has it achieved the complete victory its partisans might have expected. The movement lingers on in places where the highly educated hold sway, such as universities and museums. But it tends to weaken those institutions, emphasising their impotence and remoteness from the mainstream. There are plenty of reasons to deplore the vulgarising forces of social media. Here I suppose we might chalk up a win." <www.tinyurl.com/ytkpurbe>

   It has been 78 years since Ronald Reagan first rose to political significance fighting Communism in Hollywood. Will our grandchildren's kids find it took that long before its next major attempt? - RP

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