Beyond Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Diverse Thoughts on Religion

New working paper. Title above, link, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu:  https://www.academia.edu/166252443/Beyond_Wittgensteins_Ladder_Diverse_Thoughts_on_Religion

Abstract: First, a record of thoughts and incidents in the author’s life which span a field of religious application and inquiry. Then a series of dialogs with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, which probe the limits of human thought and experience, asserting a metaphorical correspondence between a succinct assertion of Christian doctrine and a statement about man’s place in the cosmos from Neil deGrasse Tyson and deriving theological assertions therefrom, and a look at the continuum between belief and disbelief eventuating in idea that the Silicon Valley conception of A.I. is idolatrous.

Contents

Introduction: Am I becoming religious? It feels weird to think so. 2
Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? 5
What Cannot Be Spoken 18
From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson 21
Effing the ineffable 25
From Atheism to Idolatry 32    

Introduction: Am I becoming religious? It feels weird to think so.

The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

If, a decade ago, you’d told me that one day I would attend church services regularly, I’d have said, “No way.” If you’d asked me that a year ago, my answer would have been the same. Yet here I am, attending All Saints Episcopal in Hoboken. It’s only been three months, but that’s already more than I’ve attended a church service the entire time from my early teens up through the end of last year – the Sunday Experience (pp. 7 ff.) at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s doesn’t count since that didn’t happen in a church, not so important, and was not grounded in any religious doctrine, more to the point. I’ve just recently posted comments in a discussion of Christianity at the Brainstorms online community. And then we have the articles making up the rest of this document, at article posted to 3 Quarks Daily, “Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?” and several posts from my New Savanna blog.

To be honest, just earlier today I felt twinges of uncertainty at the possibility that people might think of me as being religious? Really? Nor have I ever been one of those people who presents themselves as spiritual, but not conventionally religious. I just haven’t thought of myself in those terms, though I must admit that I’d recently been flirting with the idea that I’m a secular mystic. That never seemed quite right to me, but it wasn’t quite wrong either.

Why did I decide to start attending All Saints? I decided that I needed to meet people, to be among others in a way that isn’t, for example, a bowling league, a reading group, a musical group, or a neighborhood association. I am I looking for, you know, fellowship?

When I’m sitting there in the nave of All Saints I do wonder what others might think of me. I don’t participate in all the standing and sitting that an Episcopal service entails, nor do I recite the Nicene Creed, nor take communion (on Easter, with larger than usual attendance, I noticed another person, a woman, who didn’t take communion). But no one has said anything. I do think such things while sitting there. But I also think about how old these stories are, these Biblical stories, and how remarkable it is that some many people over the years have organized themselves around these stories. And just WHAT do the others here actually believe? I suspect the range is wide.

That’s one thing. But there’s something else, something that I’ve only just realized in the last week or so. There’s AI, artificial intelligence. Oh, I’ve known about AI most of my adult life and I’ve done research in a kindred discipline, computational linguistics. I’m currently engaged in research about LLMs (large language models) and have blogging a lot about AI and LLMs since the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. I’m even working on a general-audience book about it: Play: How to Stay Human in the A.I. Revolution. But I’ve only just now realized that that is probably what’s behind my interest in matters religious.

It’s clear that A.I. poses profound philosophical problems and will force us to restructure our entire ontology. That effort is drawing me into religious waters. For it seems to me that the view of A.I. that dominates Silicon Valley is idolatrous, as I bring up later in this document (pp. 37 ff.). Or consider this passage from a doctrinal note by Pope Francis:

105. However, the presumption of substituting God for an artifact of human making is idolatry, a practice Scripture explicitly warns against (e.g., Ex. 20:4; 32:1-5; 34:17). Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work.

I’m not at all sure that I want to endorse those words – in some sense I’m pretty sure that I do not – but something like that in a way that I cannot now specify, that seems plausible to me.

I suppose, then, that this is where I am, between those words of the Pope and a need for fellowship. Where I’ll do, I won’t know until I move along.

* * * * *

Here’s what’s in the rest of this document. Except for the illustrations, the first of these pieces is completely mine. The rest involve a dialog with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot.

Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? – Incidents, thoughts, vignettes, events from my life, from age six to yesterday, all somehow bearing on religious belief and experience.

What Cannot Be Spoken – Comments about Wittgenstein’s framing of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson – The possibility of constructing a theological argument spanning the conceptual distance between a cosmological belief I entertained as a young child and an observation Neil deGrasse Tyson made about man’s position in the cosmos.

Effing the ineffable – About the many ways the world exceeds human language and experience. As Claude observes: “The mystic, the philosopher of language, and the cosmologist end up at adjacent campsites, each having climbed a different face of the same mountain. None of them can quite describe the view.”

From Atheism to Idolatry – In a way, this is about the boundaries of religious discourse. It also suggests that Silicon Valley doctrine about artificial intelligence is idolatrous.

Is Laufey jazz? [cultural hybridization]

YouTube:

Laufey is the world's most famous living jazz musician (according to Spotify streams). What does that mean for jazz?

A very interesting and well-informed post about cultural hybridization.

The City and the River

Our (grim) yuppy legacy [the triumph of Homo economicus]

Dylan Gottlieb, How Yuppies Changed America, NYTimes, May 4, 2026.

So much of what we take for granted today — from our meritocratic rat race to our gentrified neighborhoods to our culture of overwork, fitness training and foodie obsession — was born in the yuppie-made 1980s. In that moment, they fashioned a bargain that we are still living with: An increasingly diverse professional class signed up for a life of hard-won affluence, at the cost of deep inequality for everyone else.

Yuppies were called into being by the forces that were remaking the economy in the 1980s. After the Carter and Reagan administrations loosened the regulations governing Wall Street, finance began to generate a greater share of profits than manufacturing or services. Investment banks and law firms now shaped the fates of the corporations they had once served. As America hitched its fortunes to finance, those banks and firms began to chop up, spin off, merge, offshore or otherwise squeeze short-term value out of the nation’s legacy corporations. But to do it, they needed legions of employees to handle the grunt work: the proofreading, drafting and document review that kept the takeover machinery in motion.

o find those employees, recruiters flooded the campuses of America’s elite universities. In 1976, less than 5 percent of surveyed seniors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School were headed to Wall Street for investment banking. By 1987, it was one in three. At Yale, 40 percent of the entire graduating class of 1986 applied to work at the investment bank First Boston.

High-level grunt work:

Once they were hired, aspiring yuppies were expected to work more hours, often on smaller and less intellectually demanding piecework. They were also given less meaningful training, all for narrower chances of promotion to partner. As the professional world was beginning to diversify, it became an increasingly miserable place to work. This was no accident: The legal and financial bosses who were commanding these diverse armies of young professionals sought to extract maximum value out of their labor.

This early wave of yuppies contains the origins of our present-day meritocratic competition, which turned college admissions into something akin to “The Hunger Games.”

Grunt work all the time in everything:

On the job, newly minted yuppies were also sold a particular story: Upward mobility was open to anyone with the right degree and the right work ethic. [...]

That dogged pursuit of the strenuous life extended from the workplace into yuppies’ leisure time. They developed a passion for road races like the New York City Marathon. This wasn’t the casual jogging that countercultural types had embraced in the late 1960s. It was distance running, and it required the same self-control and long-range planning that characterized yuppie careers. [...

The yuppies also helped forge our modern foodie culture: one that required wealth but also the cosmopolitanism to know that, say, balsamic vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes and Manchego cheese were foods worth savoring.]

They consumed the Democratic Party:

Yuppies also redrew our political map. They helped to shift the Democratic Party away from the unions, Black Americans and urban bosses of the New Deal coalition and toward the interests of metropolitan professionals. During the 1980s, a new generation of politicians and donors — people like Gary Hart, Chuck Schumer and Bruce Wasserstein — remade liberalism for the postindustrial era. The meritocratic ethos of the trading floor, they reasoned, should govern society at large. Innovation, not regulation or redistribution, would drive growth. And the sclerotic regulatory state was only hampering it. What was needed instead was a nimbler government that oversaw a technology-heavy economy, with yuppies at the vanguard.

Hello inequality my old friend:

The rise of the yuppie was not without its costs. The upper echelons of our society became more inclusive in terms of race, ethnicity and gender — but only for those who ran a gantlet of educational and professional challenges on their way to the top. By admitting women and members of racial minorities, the new yuppie elite helped obscure the skyrocketing economic inequality that would soon become a central fact of American life. Since the 1980s, upwardly mobile yuppies have left blue-collar, pink-collar and less-educated service workers further and further behind.

Resentment sets in:

After decades sitting atop this brutal hierarchy, yuppies and their arrogance bred new resentments. In the 2010s, a brand of populist conservatism opposed nearly every tenet of the yuppie dream, from racial and gender diversity to educational meritocracy to frictionless finance and globalization to gourmet culture and the very idea of urban living itself.

This response was unsurprising given the real harm done by Wall Street firms to blue-collar America. But the wounds were as much psychic as they were economic. Racial grievance gave the movement its power. So did geographic and class-based resentment of the cosmopolitan elite that yuppies embodied. After all, locally rich but less educated white people — owners of car dealerships and construction companies across the South and Midwest — were among the fiercest populist conservatives.

And this set the stage for Donald Trump.

Today, the class of people once known as yuppies are both everywhere and under threat. The Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion and affirmative action might damage the recruiting pipeline that has conveyed women and members of racial minorities into the professions. Employers will have to rely on more informal and more discriminatory forms of hiring: personal connections, nepotism and cultural “fit,” all of which tend to favor the privileged. Our professional class may shrink, welcoming only the sons and daughters of the already rich. [...]

What’s more, the rollout of A.I. threatens to decimate entry-level professionals [...] Even a moderately secure upper-middle-class lifestyle might soon be out of reach.

The upshot:

Yuppies were the first class of young people to be drawn into the sweatshop of the meritocracy. Now is the time to rethink the bargain they made, which offered diversification and affluence at the cost of exploitation and broader inequality. If history teaches anything, it is that if a class can be made, it can also be unmade.

There's more at the link.

Here come the sun

The White House endorses research on psychedelics

Andrew Jacobs, A Long, Strange Trip: How the G.O.P. Came to Embrace Psychedelic Drugs, NYTimes, May 3, 2026.

Mindbending may be just the word to describe the Oval Office ceremony on April 18, when President Trump ordered federal agencies to speed up research into the potential therapeutic uses of illegal psychedelic compounds like LSD, peyote and MDMA.

Here was a law-and-order Republican and lifelong teetotaler championing the hallucinogenic substances that a previous Republican president, Richard Nixon, had condemned as “public enemy No. 1.” [...]

Mr. Trump’s bold efforts to soften the federal government’s stance on certain illegal drugs have been head-spinning — last month, the Justice Department, at the president’s behest, loosened restrictions on medical marijuana, too.

But experts in the field are not entirely surprised.

They note a steady easing of public opposition to psychedelics in recent years, much of it shaped by research that has chipped away at the stigma by demonstrating the drugs’ potential to treat intractable mental health conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and substance abuse.

There's much more at the link.

Perhaps AI won’t suck up all the jobs

Ezra Klein, Why the A.I. Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.

Economists, I’ve found, are quite skeptical that mass joblessness is on the horizon. In “What Will Be Scarce?,” Alex Imas, an economist at the University of Chicago, tries to clarify the mistake most A.I. discourse, in his view, makes. “The answer to any question about the future economics of advanced A.I. begins with identifying what becomes scarce,” Imas writes.

For most of human history, calories were scarce. Our energy went into finding or growing food. Agriculture steadily made food more plentiful and goods became scarce. Then goods were scarce; hand-me-down clothes were common and tools were expensive. Innovations in technology and manufacturing made goods cheaper. Then, technical knowledge became scarce: Doctors, lawyers and software engineers are paid high salaries because of the rarity of what they know. The fear is that A.I. will make knowledge plentiful; that it will turn the fruits of learning into a commodity as surely as manufacturing turned clothing into a commodity and industrial agriculture made strawberries commonplace.

But something is always scarce. People are looking at the economy as it exists and asking which tasks A.I. can do; they should be asking which jobs people won’t want A.I. doing, or which services A.I. will make us want more of.

Here is a poetic finding from econometrics: As the rich get richer, they want more from other humans, not less. They “shift their spending toward goods and services where the human element, the experience or the social meaning matters more,” Imas writes. They seek out clothing with a story, food with a provenance, doctors who make house calls, therapists who make them feel seen, tutors who know their children and personal trainers who work around their injuries. This, Imas says, is “the relational sector” of the economy, and it will explode. Instead of so many human beings working with computers, they will work with other human beings.

There's more at the link.

Three Hoboken views

Presiding over a declining America, Trump hastens the descent

Two from today's (May 3, 2026) New York Times. First, China is on the rise and ready to move beyond America. Then we have the decline of the American empire.

China Rising

Jacob Dreyer, Trump Is Coming to a China That Has Moved On, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.

Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader, once said: “If China wants to be rich and strong, it needs America.” But this isn’t the same country that once looked to a U.S. president’s visit as a moment of global validation. It is a country where the realization has dawned that it may have learned all it can from America and has begun to chart its own course.

This was bound to happen as China grew stronger and richer. But Mr. Trump has accelerated this shift. China’s people have watched with a mix of fascination and revulsion as the president — through his abortive tariff wars, the war with Iran and callow allegiance to financial markets — has completed America’s transformation from a model to emulate to a troublesome distraction to be managed. With sinking approval ratings and potential losses awaiting in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump will arrive in Beijing a more diminished figure in Chinese eyes than perhaps any visiting U.S. president. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

This matters, both for the visit itself and for the future of the relationship between the two countries. China’s leaders, aware of Mr. Trump’s weakness and perfidy, are unlikely to strike any meaningful bargains with him. His actions strengthen China’s Communist-ruled system at home by making it look superior by comparison.

Many Chinese people increasingly view the United States less as the lodestar it once was and more as a cautionary tale. Popular sentiment in China is of course state-managed, but it resonates because it mirrors what the Chinese see for themselves. I hear it in daily conversations: Chinese friends who return from America with tales of homelessness, dilapidation and political rancor, which contrast sharply with China’s clean and safe cities, gleaming infrastructure and political stability.

After a couple of paragraphs acknowledging that many Chinese “worry that China isn’t ready to fill [America’s] shoes” in the world and acknowledging that “China, after all, has its own problems,” Dreyer moves on:

Still, there is a clear sense about the need to move past America. Mr. Trump will be gone in two years, but Mr. Xi can rule for as long as he wants and has laid out ambitious plans that are likely to survive him. Those plans include a China that is at the center of new types of energy, the use of data and technologies like artificial intelligence for urban management, the delivery of public services, cheaper health care and better access to education. Chinese people also see that the world is increasingly open to adopting Chinese technology, products, investment and other solutions, maybe even its governance ideas.

There's more at the link.

An Empire in Decline

Christopher Caldwell, America Is Officially an Empire in Decline, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.

The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.

A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”

Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”

And yet here we are, ankle-deep in a Middle Eastern quagmire, one that Trump himself laid the groundwork for when he withdrew from Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka JCPOA) in his first term. After two paragraphs in which Caldwell sketches out how Netanyahu suckered Trump into this quagmire, Caldwell has a paragraph in which he sketches out a parallel “with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent.” He concludes:

Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right.

Suckered again.

Eleventh Street flower beds, Hoboken

Social learning for food among cockatoos

Kate Golembiewski, What’s Safe to Eat? Birds of a Feather Learn Together, NYTimes, May 2, 2026.

By watching their peers, dolphins learn to capture fish in empty conch shells, then ferry the shells up to the water’s surface in order to eat. Octopuses can master experimental tasks by watching their tankmates in the laboratory. Crows follow the cues of others in their flock to attack specific humans who have harassed fellow crows in the past.

Scientists call it “social learning,” and it essentially means monkey see, monkey do, an adage that turns out to apply to many animals beyond just primates. Now, a study of Australia’s sulfur-crested cockatoos shows that the birds employ social learning to understand whether unfamiliar foods are safe to eat.

In more forested areas of the cockatoos’ native range in Australia, New Guinea, and Indonesia, these mohawked parrots eat plant roots, seeds, fruits and insect larvae. But the birds have learned to thrive in urban environments. “They’re everywhere in Sydney,” said Julia Penndorf, a behavioral ecologist and lead author of the study in PLOS Biology, who encountered the birds as a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra.

In urban areas, the birds have expanded their diets to include nonnative plants and nuts, including almonds and sunflower seeds people offer to them, and they can be seen prying the lids off garbage bins in order to forage.

“The big issue with urban birds is, they kind of eat everything,” Dr. Penndorf, who now works at the University of Exeter, said. This expanded diet is high-risk, high-reward: the birds have more options for food, but there’s always a chance that strange new snacks might be poisonous.

Dr. Penndorf and her colleagues wondered if the highly intelligent cockatoos might owe their varied urban diets, and, in turn, their takeover of the city of Sydney, to social learning.

The rest of the article discusses an ingenious experiment by which Penndorf and her colleagues verified that cockatoos could learn what foods to eat from one another,

Elon's lawyers are not allowed to invoke AI Doom in his lawsuit against OpenAI

Yesterday, a federal judge barred Elon Musk's lawyers from arguing that AI could threaten humanity in his lawsuit against OpenAI.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit focused on developing AI safely. But our recent @NewYorker investigation documented how some researchers at the… pic.twitter.com/3XGB2ohjth

— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) May 1, 2026

Tulip on 11th Street

Interesting action at Academia.edu

Here’s four successive months:

January 2026:

It’s relatively constant, with a peak at 49 and three troughs at 10.

February 2026:

There’s a rising trend through the month with the peak above 60 hits at the end of the month and one just below that four days earlier.

Now March 2026:

It’s pretty much up and down, but there’s an early peak above 70 and things seem fairly steady for the last week and a half. A low dips down to 10.

April 2026:

It seems fairly high on the whole. Three peaks above 60 distributed over the month, with a trough at 21 and a later one at 22-23.

Throughout this period I’ve been in the 99.5 percentile. How long before I break 99.9?

Why Do I Like Veronica Mars? [Media Notes 178]

I watched the series when it first aired back in 2004-2005 and liked. It seemed a bit like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not with the mythology and such, but in underlying sensibility. We have a teenaged girl undertaking an adult role in the world. Buffy had to save it, Veronica merely solved mysteries, first of all the mystery of her best friend’s murder & her mother’s disappearance, which, I suppose, are cosmic enough.

Here’s how Wikipedia describes the show:

Veronica Mars is an American teen neo-noir mystery drama television series created by screenwriter Rob Thomas. The series is set in the fictional town of Neptune, California, and stars Kristen Bell as the eponymous character. The series premiered on September 22, 2004, during television network UPN's final two years, and ended on May 22, 2007, after a season on UPN's successor, The CW, airing for three seasons total. [...]

The character Veronica Mars is a student who progresses from high school to college while moonlighting as a private investigator under the tutelage of her detective father. In each episode, Veronica solves a different stand-alone case while working to solve a more complex mystery. The first two seasons of the series each had a season-long mystery arc, introduced in the first episode of the season and solved in the season finale. The third season took a different format, focusing on smaller mystery arcs that would last several episodes.

That’s a start.

Neptune is a small town not far from the Mexican border. It’s got a rich side and a middle class to poor side. Both sides meet in high school, where they clash. Veronica’s middle class; her murdered best friend was rich. So that’s part of the tension and the vibe, Veronica shuttling between the two. Her boy friends are from the rich side. Her running buddies, not so much. One of them is a Hispanic head of a biker gang. It’s an interesting mix.

I supposed I could say that Kristen Bell sparkles as Veronica, but I’m sure Veronica would cringe at the word “sparkles,” probably Kristen too. Heck, I cringe at it as well, but there it is. Enrico Colantoni plays her father with deadpan cool. You may have seen him as Mathesar in Galaxy Quest. Come to think of it, Veronica Mars has Galaxy Quest undertones. Overtones?

You get the idea.

Friday Fotos: Messages written in shells

Mum’s the word.

I see you.

One if by land, two if by sea.

Does not compute.

Just talking trash.