A Language Model Trained with Populscience

Since this blog has almost 550 posts, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find the information you're looking for, my friend Manuel Márquez suggested allowing readers to ask questions to a Language Model (LLM) trained with the blog's content. I thought it was an excellent idea, so I used Google's NotebookLM tool, and you can use it from now on.

One of the features this product offers is the automatic generation of blog posts. To test it, as an experiment, I requested it to generate one, without specifying a particular topic. Of course, I’ll go on writing my posts without the help of the LLM. Before publishing it here, I corrected it manually, because there were many references to my name (which I removed), and also some curious errors, such as making its title 5 Keys to the Universe, 'AI,' and Evolution and then dividing the text into six points. The following is the resulting post, which summarizes the content of this blog in just two pages:

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6 Keys to the Universe, 'AI,' and Evolution

1. The False Separation Between Laboratory and Faith. It is a popular belief that science has "killed" God, relegating faith to the corner of outdated mythologies. Scientific discoveries not only do not contradict faith, but they provide clues that make the theistic explanation of the cosmos far more plausible than blind chance.

2. "Fine-Tuning": The multiverse is more philosophy than science. Modern science has observed that the physical constants of the universe are "fine-tuned." If the force of gravity or the charge of the electron varied by a certain percentage, the cosmos would be a barren wasteland. Faced with this unsettling reality, many atheist scientists have turned to the "multiverse" as a philosophical lifeline: if infinite universes exist, sooner or later one would appear where life is possible by sheer statistical chance. But the multiverse is not science, it’s rather an agnostic refuge. Being unobservable and irrefutable by definition, it belongs to the realm of philosophy. Faced with the speculation of infinite invisible worlds, the option of a Designer seems more economical and logical.

The fact that God made the universe makes this universe more probable. [...] Belief in the existence of God makes our universe more likely, because this is exactly the universe that God would have created.

3. The Myth of Strong “AI”: Why Will a Machine Never Have “Common Sense”? Faced with gurus like Ray Kurzweil and the “Singularity”—the idea that humanity will create a machine-god, the Antichrist of ideas—computability imposes insurmountable barriers. Turing deflates the expectations of transhumanism:

•         The Impossibility of Asimov’s Laws: It is mathematically proven that the First Law of Robotics (“a robot may not injure a human being”) is impossible to implement. Reducing it to the Turing halting problem, it is computationally impossible to predict, in general, whether an action (or inaction) by a superintelligent AI will cause long-term harm.

•         Syntax vs. Semantics: Machines manipulate signs (syntax), but they do not understand meanings (semantics). Following John Searle, an AI can perfectly simulate feelings, but "simulating" is not "having" consciousness.

•         Lack of Intentionality: Consciousness is not a byproduct of data complexity. Without intentionality, the machine remains a tool, not a subject.

4. The "Fifth Level": Where evolution is headed. Life is organized into levels of complexity where altruism is key to survival. The leap from the lower to the higher level occurs when individuals unite to form a superorganism: from nucleic acids to multicellular beings. In this process, "cellular selfishness" is equivalent to cancer, while the health of the whole demands the surrender of the parts. But what separates us from the rest of creation? The chimpanzee is like water at 99.99 °C; it displays "vapors" of intelligence and tools. However, humankind has crossed the critical point of 100 °C, producing a phase change toward the "vapor" of self-awareness.

Humans study chimpanzees; chimpanzees do not study humans.

A new leap will lead to the Fifth Level: a superorganism identified with Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point.

5. The Trap of Scientism: When scientists engage in bad philosophy. Stephen Hawking claimed that "philosophy is dead," and then dedicates entire chapters to proposing purely philosophical theories. Many modern atheists make glaring semantic errors:

•         Nothing vs. Void: When Hawking or Krauss say that the universe arises from "nothing," they are actually referring to the quantum vacuum, which possesses space, time, and energy. Absolute "Nothingness" does not exist; the vacuum is "something" that requires a cause.

•         Limits of the method: Science studies matter. God, by definition, is immaterial. To claim that science can "prove" His non-existence is like trying to measure the weight of a feeling with a kitchen scale.

6. Chance vs. Pseudo-chance: The Designer's invisible signature. Chaitin's Theorem demonstrates that randomness is undecidable. Mathematically, it is impossible (in general) to distinguish whether a set of data is the result of blind chance or an extremely complex pseudo-random algorithm. This means that science, due to its own limitations, can never rule out the possibility that evolution is actually a "script" or algorithm designed by an Intelligence. What we perceive as chance could be the invisible signature of a Designer who uses randomness as a tool of creation. Design and chance are, in the eyes of the laboratory, indistinguishable.

Conclusion: Toward the Omega Point and Orthogonal Time

The vision of this blog culminates in an optimistic and bold perspective on the end of times. It introduces the concept of "orthogonal time": an axis perpendicular to our linear chronology. From this perspective, the moment of death is not a wait in an endless line, but rather the entrance to a dimension where the Roman centurion, the medieval monk, and the 21st-century programmer arrive at the Omega Point in the same "instant."

Science has not closed the door to God; it has simply begun to glimpse the astonishing complexity of the mechanism.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Anniversaries and Organization: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

The Use of “AI” Tools

The second entry for the word tool in the Merrian-Webster dictionary states:

Something… used in performing an operation or necessary in the practice of a vocation or profession

Since the origin of the genus Homo, human beings have used tools, which together with skeletons or fossilized bone fragments are one of the main sources of information about our ancestors. Monofacial and bifacial pebble tools seem primitive today, but during human prehistory they served as weapons and tools and surely helped us survive.

Information technology, which has developed significantly during the last century, has provided us with many useful tools. Throughout the 21st century, these tools have become increasingly “intelligent,” tackling tasks that until very recently could only be performed by humans. But when using them, we should keep in mind some very general ideas, which should always be applied, but not always are:

The Kingdoms of Cladistics

In the previous post, I discussed cladistics, the new way of classifying living things based on their position in the tree of life, and mentioned some of the difficulties that arise when trying to adapt the previous classification system, based on the taxonomic tree and Linnaeus's classic categories—kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species—to cladistics.

There are more difficulties. For example, let's consider the concept of kingdom, Linnaeus's highest taxonomic category. Traditionally, living things were divided into two kingdoms: animals and plants. These two kingdoms were clearly separate, with very different characteristics. Thus, animals were defined as organic beings that live, feel, and move by their own impulse, while the plant kingdom were beings that live but do not feel and do not move. It was acknowledged that these definitions were imperfect, because there were exceptions, such as sponges, which barely move but are animals, and some plants, like mimosas, which seem to sense certain stimuli and move in response.

Cladistics: A new classification of living beings

Tree of life
https://evogeneao.s3.amazonaws.com/
images/content/es/tree-of-life_2000.png

In 1735, the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) created the binomial system of biological nomenclature still in use today, and a classification system for living things that is becoming obsolete. This system used at first seven successive categories: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. The last two categories are used to name the species. Thus, according to Linnaeus's classification, the human species belongs to the animal kingdom, the phylum Chordata, the class Mammalia, the order Primates, the family Hominidae, the genus Homo, and the species sapiens. Its scientific name, according to Linnaeus's binomial system, is therefore Homo sapiens.

Time Travel and Christ’s Crucifixion

Christ crucified, wood carving
by Manuel Alfonseca Santana

If time travel were possible, the greatest incentive for travelers would be to witness firsthand famous events of the past, such as the assassination of Julius Caesar and many others. The fact that we have no record of the presence of strangers in any of these cases is a significant argument against the feasibility of time travel.

There is no doubt that one of these events, perhaps the most famous of all, would be the Crucifixion of Christ. If time travel were possible, there should have been an avalanche of visitors from future times at Golgotha ​​to witness the most important event in the history of humankind.

In fact, this idea has been used in science fiction literature. In a novella titled There Will Be Time, Poul Anderson has his protagonist travel to Jerusalem on the day of the Crucifixion to witness Christ's death. Upon arriving, he discovers a large crowd, almost all of whom are time travelers.

Quantum Conscience or Conscient Quantum?

The second hard problem of modern science is the origin of consciousness or the problem of free will. This post focuses on the relation of this problem with quantum mechanics. As an example of the difficulty of the matter, I begin by including two famous quotes from renowned scientists:

·         J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds (1927): The universe [of quantum theory] is, not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

·         James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (1930): The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

Natural and artificial intelligence

As we saw in the previous post, the book Free Agents by Kevin Mitchell deals with the origins of human consciousness and free will. In a brief epilogue, the book addresses the topic of strong artificial intelligence—the real kind, which doesn't yet exist—and formulates some hypotheses about the possibility of its becoming feasible.

It emphasizes that one of the most active branches of research in AI, especially in recent years, is the field of artificial neural networks, which has led to advances such as Large Language Models (LLMs). It compares these neural networks in our programs with those that exist in our brains and in the brains of many animals more or less similar to us. It says that we are witnessing impressive advances in fields such as image recognition, text prediction, speech recognition, and language translation, based on the use of deep learning, remotely inspired on the architecture of the cerebral cortex.