The best funk band: early Earth, Wind and Fire (before 1976 when they lost themselves into disco). Their funk was harmonically rich and rhythmically complex: A blend of jazz, soul, funk and R&B. Listen to their live double record Gratitude (1975).
"if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding, [...] his conception of the "soul" is just his attempt at understanding metabolism without any solid physics or chemistry. [...] up until very recently the one last bastion of unexplained behavior where the religious could justify their belief in the soul was the intellect."
Not an expert on Aquinas but as a theologian he should have had to go no further than the opening book of the Bible, Genesis 1:26,27, where God says:
"Let Us (plural) create Man in Our (plural) Image. [...] And in His Image He created Them, Male and Female."
Indeed, that defines Man, Male and Female: Image bearers of God. How? Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit -- therefore, God is a Trinity, a Father, Son, Spirit perfectly loving relationship.
"AI is a direct assault on this final motto, as it is concrete evidence that many of the "intellectual" outputs of the soul could, at least in principle, have a naturalistic explanation. (There was plenty of evidence of the intellect being fully naturalistic prior to AI, but it wasn't the kind of irrefutable "here's a fully natural thing that does the thing you said natural things couldn't do" evidence)."
I can't see how "AI is a direct assault on this motto". Man's actions are most often far from rational, and unexplainable from an intellectual point of view. Rather, Man's intentions greatly exceed that of naturalist animals, both positive in doing good, and negative in doing evil. It all points to a fundamental difference between Man (who has a Soul) and Animal (who hasn't). The Soul is the seat of Man's passions, and it's a hard thing to control -- impossible even.
FYI: The Old (or Skew) Jan Cathedral in Delft, Netherlands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oude_Kerk_(Delft)) is off by slightly less than 2 meters. As it was built adjacent to a canal, and pile-driving technology didn't exists in the 14th century, it was built on layers of wood and cow skins that started rotting already during its building phase, causing the tower to lean from the get go -- curiously, its four pinnacle towers are straight up. The church houses Holland's biggest bell (the Bourdon at 9 metric ton) which, to reduce vibration and further leaning, is only rung at special occasions re the royal Orange family (births and deaths). Holland's painter Johannes Vermeer also used to be buried there -- because of excessive bad small all graves were cleared late 19th century and dumped in a mass grave some place nobody knows. To the satisfying of many a tourist, an impressive grave-like commemoration stone for Vermeer was installed some years ago.
I'm afraid you're overlooking the fact that, since AI scales linearly with constraints and exponentially with compute, the importance of knowledge (i.e. constraints) dominates over data (i.e. compute) for AI to be useful.
Not sure what you're talking about, what does it mean to say that it scales "exponentially with compute"? You're talking about scaling laws? In what sense are they "linearly with knowledge"?
"... science tells us that we are incidental, accidental."
And nonetheless, every second, when not sleeping, the author is trying hard to make sense (... notice how close to "science") of his actual space and time. Throughout the ages, most prominent scientists have managed to do this, with great success, knowing that the universe, and themselves as a part of it, were the opposite of incidental or accidental: they believed their existence had a Reason.
Where it's nowadays standard practice in science to conceive of time as the dimension along which events are tagged, I would suggest the opposite: process, as a sequence of events, induces time. But also in the modern conception, time is derived from atomic events produced by a nuclear source. So, fundamentally the two conceptions are the same, but the process conception allows for greater freedom in what the underlying process may entail.
