My CMS The View from a New City

Our empty nester’s dinner group was declared to be at an end last night because the members are all too old and feeble to bear the burden of hosting the event.

I just saw a Youtube comment from a Nobel winning scientist saying we don’t understand what is going on in the cells of the human body. “We know more about interstellar space than we do about the workings of the human cell.”

I just read some lines of poetry by Brenda Shaughnessy that reminded me of a lesson I learned while serving as Bishop.

Here is the poetry:
Who was I kidding? Even in my private diary
I performed myself to an audience of one, no one.

A stock character playing to an empty house,
though I’d no theater experience at all.

I lied outright, wrote daydreams as if true,
was all knowing and exquisite, simultaneously

the worst person ever to have lived. Adolescence
is all absolutes: if bad, one must be the very worst

to avoid being mistaken for average.
To be ordinary was just being invisible,

and surely slow naked death by ants hurts less that that.

Here is the lesson:
Contrary to the opinion of many, especially young people, sin does not damn you. Sin is something to be overcome. Refusing to repent is what damns. Sin is a universal human experience. It is what you do about it that matters.

More poetry by James Thompson:

Once in a saintly passion I cried with desperate grief,”O Lord, my heart is black with guile,Of sinners I am chief.”Then stooped my guardian angel And whispered from behind,”Vanity, my little man,You’re nothing of the kind.”

In my old age I am of the opinion that it is not necessarily bad to be average. God has a plan for all his children.

Long ago I liked a Bing Crosby song that had this line in the lyrics:

Would you like to swing on a star, carry moon beams home in a jar, and be better off than you are, or would you rather be a fish.

This line came to me when I was thinking about the term “click bait.” The “fake news” created by Hollywood and social media is designed to grab your attention and make its creators money. The truthfulness of the content is of little or no concern.

Do we seek for the truth, or are we merely fish who take the bait.

Matthew 7:

13 ¶ Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

14 Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

This morning I spent 10 seconds living in the moment. I had one sock on and the other in hand. Ten seconds later I put on the other sock. In that time I was perfectly still, and aware.

I am sorry to say this was a unique experience for me.

We met a man and his wife at the grocery store today. Old like me. Later we were third behind him at the checkout. He only had one jar of mayonnaise in his cart. But it took him so long to get the card reader to process his credit card that we ended up moving to another line. Old like me.

I want to start this post with a boast: the last time I went to Disneyland, the thing I enjoyed the most was watching the people.

My uncle Dwight used to say that artists see things that we ordinary mortals never do. I just read a book that illustrates the truth of that comment: How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. The author is an artist and a professor. Her object is to help us take control of our attention. But reading the book is like watching a smart person think.

Extending the thesis of Ms. Odell’s book: The housewife and mother who pays attention to the sometimes dependent, but infinitely potential souls she is fortunate enough to be given stewardship over is more blessed than billionaires.

Here is a little video that I find wonderfully attractive. There are others much like it. They are created by AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cViibwlHLE

I think this illustrates an issue with AI. It is great at creating text and video that are appealing to humans. That is because AI is trained using data created by humans and is great at selecting the text (token) that is most likely from a subset of data already preferred by humans.

The issue illustrated by the video is that it is creating a world that never was and never will be. Things that human beings do, say and prefer are not necessarily and sometimes not even remotely true.

The coming depression may turn out to be a blessing: The air may be cleaner from lack of traffic and people’s focus may shift. Consider the following quote from Thomas Carlyle:
Full of religion, or at least of religiosity, as our Friend has since exhibited himself, he hides not that, in those days, he was wholly irreligious: “Doubt had darkened into Unbelief,” says he; “shade after shade goes grimly over your soul, till you have the fixed, starless, Tartarean black.” To such readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man’s life, and happily discovered, in contradiction to much Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, speculative and practical, that Soul is not synonymous with Stomach; who understand, therefore, in our Friend’s words, “that, for man’s well-being, Faith is properly the one thing needful; how, with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and without it, Worldlings puke up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury”: to such it will be clear that, for a pure moral nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything.

Take a look at this as to why AI cannot reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx_hzF960GE