Where Myths Belong

A reply to Lawrence M Krauss’s “Treating Myths as Science.”

Lawrence Krauss is correct that the beliefs of Christianity and indigenous peoples should not be taught in school science classes. He is right that this risks depriving students of the scientific literacy they need. But that is only half the problem. Students may be denied not only their scientific heritage but also refused what is arguably an even greater gift: the opportunity to appreciate the profound understandings of the human condition that are embodied in the myths and stories of human cultures.  

To treat these stories as failed proto-science, placing Genesis or the creation stories of so many peoples alongside geology and biology, is to measure them by a completely inapt standard. It is to miss their point almost entirely. No one thinks we should do this with Aesop’s fables or Grimm’s fairy tales or Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, which, in their own distinctive and admittedly more self-conscious ways, are in the mythopoeic tradition of ancient cultures. Someone who, brandishing a science textbook, said, “Dear Mr Kipling, let me explain to you how the camel actually got its hump” would merely display the banality of his mind. Chesterton once remarked that myth is the one art form the modern world has now almost wholly lost. Educational practices like this will not help it recover. The inevitable consequence of putting it in the same classroom as science is invidious comparison, a collision in which science is bound to prevail, such is the juggernaut of modernity. 

An example might help show what is at stake. A possibly apocryphal academic legend has it that a philosopher once gave a seminar paper on the present topic which included the following example from the beliefs of a pre-modern culture. People would carry about with them a jealously guarded stick. If they lost the stick they—and their family and wider social group—would fall into a state of deep distress and lamentation. The stick represented an individual’s soul, and damage to it or the loss of it symbolised the contingency and vulnerability of human life. Some academics present pooh pooed the practice as displaying the ignorance of a people unenlightened by science. We moderns are not as backward as that! (Unfortunately Professor Krauss’s own talk of “indigenous religious nonsense” reflects the same attitude.) After listening patiently to these opinions, the philosopher did something very odd. He invited everyone present to lay their bare hands on the table. Then he pointed to the rings on their fingers and asked, “What on Earth are you doing carrying those chunks of rock around with you everywhere you go? And why do you—or your wife—become so distressed if you lose them?” He was of course making the point that a wedding ring—or a photo of a loved one carried in your wallet—could carry something like the profound significance the so-called “primitive” man attributed to his soul-stick. This man did not necessarily attribute supernormal powers to his stick any more than we would attach such powers to a diamond. He knows that at one level his stick is no different from any other random stick, apart from the fact that it has—like the diamond—been invested with sacramental meaning in a ceremony. Just as the diamond ring symbolises the importance of a marriage, so the stick symbolises the significance of a life. The cases are not perfectly analogous and in particular the modern world makes a sharper distinction between the literal and the symbolic, and between fact and value, than the pre-modern world. And of course the stick practice is very alien to us; but then our ring practice is very alien to them. Perhaps with a bit of good will though each could learn to appreciate the other. But this will not happen if both are summarily dismissed in the name of science. 

If wedding rings seems too distant from religion then take the example of prayer. Social scientists have studied the efficacy of praying for other people who are ill. The results have not been encouraging. On an approach that assumes this efficacy to be the whole point of the prayer the conclusion would be drawn that prayer is a dismal superstition. That is precisely the conclusion that classifying prayer as an outdated rival to science encourages. But it only debases our understanding of prayer. The conclusion we should draw is that prayer is not a species of medical technology. The supplicant does indeed ask that the ill person be healed, but this does not mean he must be thinking that there is some sort of causal chain going from him to God and then from God to the cancer cells in the ill person’s body. No doubt believers often do think that, but hopefully the image does not much affect their practice. That practice should be submission to God: “thy will be done,” meaning we receive all the gifts, or the afflictions, of life in a humble and contrite spirit, the antithesis of treating everything as something to manipulate in service of a desired outcome. As the philosopher Jonathan Lear points out, this is the mistake Oedipus makes: the impiety of treating the oracle as a lever to pull, in his case treating it as an intelligence asset, “a hot tip from a well-placed source.” In the Christian case, the bottom line of prayer is that we trust in God—a trust consistent with any outcome in this world—and not in our own resources, including our ability to influence others. Of course one might not sympathise with this attitude to life, but we should be clear what the difference actually is between one who sympathises and one who do not (who prefers a stance of rugged self-sufficiency say). Another philosopher, Peter Winch, said it was more like the difference between someone who can see the beauty in a certain style of music and someone who cannot. But what it is not like is a difference between two competing scientific hypotheses. Unfortunately that is exactly the assumption we make when we scientifically test the efficacy of prayer. It should make no more sense to us than asking for the dates of the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime, as if it were an historic period like the Middle Ages. To contest the assumption is not to say people have to take up prayer. It is to say that we should not gratuitously limit their understanding of the options by foisting a ruinously blinkered conception on them, especially on young people, and calling it education. This is less like “decolonising the curriculum” and more like a new iteration of European imperialism: myth and religion can acquire respectability only by association with Western science.

Like Krauss, I welcome the teaching of mythical world views in subjects like anthropology, history, and comparative religion. Here, I hope they can find a place and that Chesterton was too pessimistic. The continuing popularity of authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling suggest it is not so easy to tear the romance of myth from out of the human soul. 

—Andrew Gleeson

AI’s ‘Sentience’ Isn’t The Issue

A reply to Peter L. Levin’s “AI Is Not About To Become Sentient.”

Peter L. Levin is right on the metaphysics: today’s AI systems are not minds, and usefulness is not consciousness. But sentience is no longer the question doing the most work. The more consequential question is what follows when non-sentient systems become capable enough to alter the organisation of knowledge work.

Too much public commentary still relies on stale encounters with chatbots from six or twelve months ago. That is increasingly misleading. Capabilities are moving quickly, and the practical difference between novice and disciplined use is no longer trivial. One person asks for a summary and gets polished mush. Another supplies context, defines the objective, breaks the task into stages, tests the answer against source material, and gets something genuinely useful. That is not consciousness. It is leverage.

The old “autocomplete” label now conceals as much as it reveals. It is still true in one sense, but it can distract from the question that matters: not what these systems are in some philosophical register, but what they can already do in institutional settings when used well. In contract review, coding, research synthesis, drafting, and analysis, the gap between casual and practised use is becoming a real difference in productivity and judgement.

So yes, AI is not about to wake up. But that is beside the point. A tool does not need an inner life to change the terms of competition, redistribute skill, or reward those who learn to use it early. The argument worth having now is not whether the machine feels. It is who will learn to use non-sentient systems well, and what happens to everyone else when organisations begin to reorganise around that fact.

—Dylan A Mordaunt

The Other Creation Myths

A reply to Lawrence M Krauss’s “Treating Myths as Science.”

It’s amazing to me that the academics who support including mythology and folk science in a college science curriculum don’t see the parallels between those types of knowledge and their European counterparts.

The Bible, the Koran, and the Torah also have creation stories and histories that are not taught as truth at colleges, but as important framers of a people’s existence both morally and historically. And European cultures also have their own observation-based systems of knowledge of natural remedies, ideas about how to stay healthy, and so forth; sometimes but not always foreshadowing the development of more verifiable ideas about the effects of various plants.

Neither indigenous nor European folk medicine (or creation stories) should be taught in a science curriculum, though they have their place in other areas of study.

—Jane Beckett

Trump Doesn’t Have an Edifice Complex

A reply to Timothy Devinney’s “The Edifice Complex.”

Prof. Timothy Devinney’s article, “The Edifice Complex” (26 March) left a great deal to be desired. It so poorly explains the Trump Administration’s proposals for a White House ballroom and a Washington, D.C. triumphal arch, as well as the Kennedy Center renovation, that I had to look up all three projects elsewhere.

The ballroom is to replace a tent—rather unprepossessing and hard to secure—that has to be raised, at a cost of one million dollars each time, whenever a diplomatic dinner has more than 200 guests.  The triumphal arch, to be built in a currently empty traffic circle, is to celebrate this year’s 250th anniversary of American independence: not the Presidency of Donald Trump, as a reader of the article could easily be misled. The Kennedy Center renovation is to carry out long-deferred maintenance and security upgrades.

—Taras Wolansky