What Would C. S. Lewis Have Thought of AI?

What Would C. S. Lewis Have Thought of AI?(chroniclesmagazine.org)

10 points by RickJWagner 6 days ago | 11 comments

liggitt 6 days ago |

I've always thought this Lewis quote was particularly apt:

"But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet."

(Mr. Beaver, on the White Witch, from "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe")

moomin 6 days ago |

I love CS Lewis. I don’t massively love his name being invoked by a bunch of people intent on ripping the chest out of America.

jfengel 6 days ago | |

I don't especially love Lewis. His fiction is fine, but I find his theology badly overrated. At best it's pop theology, not scholarly, and even even as pop theology I find it shallow.

Ironically, I find his friend Tolkien's Catholic theology more thoughtfully expressed in fiction that Lewis' is in nonfiction.

nephihaha 6 days ago | |

Lewis had very little to do with that. He was a Protestant Irishman who found a home in England. His main connection to the USA is his wife who was from a very left wing background when she was younger, pretty much Communist in fact. I don't think Lewis would have had much truck with either of the two main political currents in the States. He was conservative (small "c") himself but not in much like the American sense.

nephihaha 6 days ago |

The answer can be found in "the Abolition of Man" and "That Hideous Strength".

C.S. Lewis would have hated the AI mockeries of him on YouTube. There are several channels which dispense AI slop with his name attached to it.

nlavezzo 6 days ago | |

Yes, That Hideous Strength despite being written probably 60 years ago seems dead on as a criticism of many of the things being pushed today.

hackingonempty 6 days ago |

> Men have souls.

Is it not a lie to assert something is true when you do not actually know it to be true?

ux266478 6 days ago | |

Generally we restrict the notion of lying to mean willful assertions that are known to be false. But there are other problems here. We tend to divide knowledge into the categories of a posteriori (that is which justified belief through observation and experience) and a priori (that which is justified belief through structural consequence, or without experience). C.S. Lewis being a Catholic is making an assertion on an a priori facet of knowledge.

Anything is true provided you take the right postulates. You should always keep that in mind, as well as the fact that presuppositional critique on good faith belief is an uninteresting game of semantic bickering, and as a baseline itself requires epistemic certainty. Or rather, "you can't assert that because we don't know" isn't really a valid attack here. You might not know, because that lack of knowledge is entailed by your world model. C.S. Lewis knows because it is entailed by his world model.

nephihaha 6 days ago | | |

C.S. Lewis was never Roman Catholic.

He was a Protestant Ulsterman from Belfast in what is now Northern Ireland. Catholics and Protestants were (and still are) at loggerheads there. He became agnostic for some years and then joined the Church of England (Anglicans/Episcopalians.)

J.R.R. Tolkien was devoutly RC and a friend of Lewis', but Lewis probably could never bring himself to be RC due to his family background. Lewis did, however, also take a lot of inspiration from pre-Reformation literature.