What Would C. S. Lewis Have Thought of AI? | Hacker News Reader

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

chroniclesmagazine.org

10 pointsRickJWagner11 comments

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")

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Men have souls.

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

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.

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.

A minor correction: Catholic doesn't necessarily mean Roman Catholic. The rest is all truth, but allow me to explain because I'm stretching language and taking an unspoken unconventional stance. I never lump Anglicans in with the rest of the reformation movement. As much as I've seen, they're no more distant with the Catholic church than the Eastern Catholic church I grew up in, they're just distant on a very different axis (that I don't happen to find any more or less significant). On the other hand, I see about as much familiarity in Calvinism or Lutherans or Evangelicals as I do in Mormons. The grouping just feels non-descriptive to me, so I don't really use it. I would consider the evangelical low churches, and baptist churches, to be protestant though.

I know of course what you mean, and I know that's not the Church's official stance. I thought I'd just clarify on why I called him Catholic.

I would hesitate to call him Anglo-Catholic either. In some ways he was High Church but in other ways Low Church. In his writings, you don't see much of a plea for "bells and smells" Christianity.

Anglicanism is a broad church for sure. While some factions are close to the Roman church, others are very low Protestant. There are certainly Calvinists in Anglicanism, and Methodism sprung out of the Protestant end (and the Salvation Army from it, I think). Many groups such as Baptists, Methodists and Quakers came out of Anglicanism rather than directly from Roman Catholicism (as Presbyterianism did).

Anglicanism has tried to be all things to all people. It is even more varied today. You could put this down to its early history, trying to combine the Lollard and Puritan heritage with those who wanted more Catholic worship. The Book of Common Prayer tried to synthesise these elements with varying success.

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