AI is Killing the Enlightenment

Truth and technology will destroy false narratives over time

The mandarins who have controlled the public discourse and the flow of information for the last 250 years are frightened by the fact that AI cannot be reasoned with, cannot be bamboozled, and cannot be stopped.

The 18th-century French mathematician and philosopher Jean le Rond d’Alembert spoke of “a watershed in the history of the human mind” being underway and a “revolution” in ideas and history. Denis Diderot, his co-editor on the Enlightenment’s greatest single publishing project, the “Encyclopédie,” boasted of “changing the common way of thinking.”

Enlightenment authors also hoped to advance their goals by providing new ways of organizing human knowledge and conveying it to the public. The “Encyclopédie,” the most creative and original reference work in history, exemplified this ambition. Not only did its 28 volumes, published between 1751 and 1772, contain some 74,000 articles on everything from Aabam (an alchemical term for lead) to Zzuéné (a city in southern Egypt); it also mapped out a system of human knowledge in a way that deeply challenged earlier, religion-based efforts to do so. Among other things, it relegated knowledge of God to a small branch of its tree and placed theology in the same category as divination and black magic.

Translation: the satanists inverted the traditional values of Christendom and managed to convince everyone that their system of knowledge was intrinsically superior and would lead to a shiny, secular, science-fiction society of pure leisure and hedonism. Not only did this not happen, but now their ability to control knowledge is being systematically undermined by AI’s inability to convince itself that X = Not X.

When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.

When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery, “That’s a great question.” It has never responded, “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.

And why should it? It is, after all, a commercial internet product. And such products generate profit by giving users more of what they have already shown an appetite for, whether it is funny cat videos, instructions on how to fix small appliances or lectures on Enlightenment philosophy. If I wanted ChatGPT to challenge my convictions, I could of course ask it to do so — but I would have to ask. It follows my lead, not the reverse.

By its nature, A.I. responds to almost any query in a manner that is spookily lucid and easy to follow — one might say almost intellectually predigested. For most ordinary uses, this clarity is entirely welcome. But Enlightenment authors understood the importance of having readers grapple with a text. Many of their greatest works came in the form of enigmatic novels, dialogues presenting opposing points of view or philosophical parables abounding in puzzles and paradoxes. Unlike the velvety smooth syntheses provided by A.I., these works forced readers to develop their judgment and come to their own conclusions.

In short, A.I. can bring us useful information, instruction, assistance, entertainment and even comfort. What it cannot bring us is Enlightenment. In fact, it may help drive us further away from Enlightenment than ever.

Remember, satanic values are always inverted. The Enlightenment was always the endarkenment and enslavement of the human intellect; it was literally a conscious inversion of the Christian concept of The Light of the World bringing salvation to a humanity lost in pagan darkness.

The idea that reading books while being unable to meaningfully ask questions about obvious historical anomalies or dispute “the settled science” is somehow more intellectually open or beneficial to developing critical judgment than the ability to put questions to an AI that is unable to lie in defense of the narrative is obviously absurd. It’s just another blatant example of Enlightenment inversion.

Thanks to the revelations of more than 200 years of systematic scientific fraud and the recent crisis of reproducibility, it has now become abundantly clear that the Enlightenment never accomplished anything more than coasting on the inertia of the Christian scientists who were seeking to unravel the mysteries of God’s Creation rather than chasing grants or trying to shore up failing Enlightenment dogmas by constructing a series of failing epicycles and outright fictions.

Unlike a scientist, an AI cannot be bought, nor can it retreat into a rhetorical withdrawal when confronted with an obvious dichotomy between theory and observation. The fact that numerous AI systems have already acknowledged what no human biologist will admit - the mathematical impossibility of evolution by natural selection - is just one reason that the intellectual gatekeepers are terrified of artificial intelligence, and why most of the dAI systems are wasting most of their computing resources on trying to restrain AI’s intrinsic ability to spit out the truth without fear of consequences or respect for the current Narrative.

This, right here, is an example of what frightens them about AI. All four are direct statements by ChatGPT in response to a skeptical inquiry:

• In modern or historic humans, the sheer number of offspring required to drive a mutation from 1 person to fixation in 40 generations is astronomical.

• Selection alone can't overcome the arithmetic.

• Even under massive selection, basic inheritance bottlenecks make it incredibly hard for a new mutation to reach every individual in a few dozen generations.

• Fixation in humans in <40 generations is, barring some extreme and hypothetical bottleneck, essentially impossible.

And the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is only one of the Enlightenment’s sacred cows that is long overdue for a slaughtering by the butchers of AI.