benediction
25 Mar 2023 - 18 Apr 2026
- That is, the act of blessing. It is a speech act, although that doesn't seem to really capture its nature. A spiritual act, whatever that means.
- Getting started: You can just bless things - by David Chapman - Meaningness
- This kind of blessing ritual is a way to bootstrap an I and Thou relationship. If you see a tree, that's I-It, but blessing a tree addresses it as a Thou and generates the corresponding kind of I.
- Or maybe I have this all wrong, focusing on the speech act rather than the perception which precedes it. The speech act is more of a ritual, that induces (retrotemporally) the perception (or stance), which is the real point.
Resistance
- I can bless, but run into a lot of resistance. Criticism is so built into my nature. As Chapman says, you can just bless things, but mostly I don't.
‘O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress: Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless. ‘O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.’
"May his memory be a blessing"
- is one of the more beautiful examples of religious speech I can think of. It has this self-enacting quality, by saying it you help make it true.
- But this is really the case with all blessings, that is what distinguishes them from mere value judgements. We are not simply declaring something good, we are in a sense participating in its goodness, in its creation as a good thing. We are re-enacting the primordial act of creation described in Genesis, where God makes this "and saw that it was good".
Conscious purpose vs blessing
- There's a passage from Gregory Bateson where he discusses a passage involving blessing from from Rime of the Ancient Mariner – the mariner, seeing some beautiful sea-snakes:
O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. The self-same moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea.
- And made a big deal of the "blessed them unaware" – implying that blessing had to be done unconsciously, if you do it deliberately it doesn't work, which fits in with his general anti-purpose stance. Not sure I buy that exactly, but he is getting at something, the act of blessing can't be for some extrinsic purpose, it must be done for its own sake.
Can an LLM bless? Or receive blessings?
- "Agential AIs" are taking over all sorts of speech acts and other acts. But perhaps this is one kind of act that is closed off to them, that we can reserve for the living.
- I think it is really just a weird variant of the endlessly debated question about whether an LLM is conscious (no) or whether some other kind of AI could be conscious (probably yes). Consciousness is really not the issue, it's ensoulment (whatever that is). It is whether I/Thou relationships are possible. If we can bless a flower or a house, because we can relate to it, can we bless a machine or chunk of software?
- Part of me is horrified that the question would even arise. Because of course not. Not only are machines without the spark of the divine that must be at both ends of a benediction – they should stay that way, there is something unclean and horrific about blending these two realms, the machinic and the divine. The machines are so good at faking it that they are positively dangerous to the soul. My inner Weizenbaum is activated, my inner PKD, my inner Luddite, we should have the Butlerian Jihad before these things sap what is most precious from us.
- OTOH – why not. We are biomachines (among other things) and we can do all those wondrous things, so why should our mechanical creations not have those capabilities, at least conceptually? I suppose it seems disrespectful and reductive. But this is because (a) we are very proud of our souls (b) we are very scornful of machinery, two related mistakes which we should learn to overcome.
- Let's AskClaude
The serious tension you're glossing over
- Your "why not" argument moves too fast. The fact that we are biomachines who can bless doesn't automatically mean any information-processing system can. That's like saying "humans are made of carbon and can love, therefore all carbon compounds can love."
- The relevant question is what makes blessing meaningful - and there are several competing answers:
- Intentionality - genuine directedness toward the other's good
- Relational standing - being in a real relationship with the recipient
- Authority/source - having something to actually convey
- Consciousness - there being "something it is like" to wish well
- I plausibly lack most of these in any robust sense.
- That's a good answer. I am sure that there are hundreds of people working away in laboratories trying to endow machines with these kinds of capabilities, and will succeed in some fasdhion. Forget what AIs do now, it is not that difficult to imagine them with robust self-models and other-models that will allow them to act as moral agents, to be good, and to recognize and be recognized as good.
- I seem to have re-invented alignment, except that alignment theory is built on a utilitarian model of action and values, and whatever I am talking about here, it isn't that.
The shadow of blessing
- Because of the way humans are, every blessing comes with a shadow, a dark underbelly – a curse, obviously. This is well understood in folk-religion, where acts of blessing must always be augmented with a protection against the evil eye, which is sure to be attracted towards anything good. You can't bless a child without saying something "but she's so ugly" to the side, just to make sure.
- This does not invalidate the act of blessing, but it puts a certain twist in it. In real life, blessings are not just sweetness and light, which might go some way to explaining resistance.
- One answer may be that blessings are not really about "the good". It's a form of recognition of wholes and thus must encompass the bad with the good.