On misplaced sympathy for the devil

[ClaytonB]

Many times, we've heard the idea that the devil is misunderstood, or that the devil is a victim of God's caprice seeing as God is all-powerful and the devil is merely his creature, and so on. I want to explain why this idea is completely mistaken and backwards.

In the modern era, it is possible to give a better metaphor for spiritual beings than ever before in history. We are really on the verge of giving birth to artificial intelligence and many leading thinkers have begun to talk about the idea of artificial super-intelligence (ASI). It is not difficult to see that if we succeed in building a machine that is capable of solving even simple general-purpose tasks -- say, at even the modest intelligence level of a mouse -- that it will quickly be able to outpace human cognitive capability. Even if it lacks the elegance of our highly-evolved brain with hundreds of billions of neurons and dozens of trillions of synapses, it will soon surpass the cognitive capability of any human out of sheer, mechanical tirelessness. Imagine a mathematician with only the ability to understand basic high-school algebra but who is able to try billions, trillions or more algebraic equations simultaneously, 24 hours a day, day after day. Given a search goal to solve, say, some open question in mathematics or theoretical physics, it is not hard to see that even this "idiotic machine mathematician" will be able to outperform human search because humans take a long time to learn a subject (years of training), they can only try a few theories at any given time, and they get tired and need food and sleep.

An ASI, once built, will surely be put to work immediately on building an improved version of itself. ASI 1.0 might be an "idiot machine mathematician" but ASI 2.0 will not be because it will be designed either wholly or in part by ASI 1.0. It is difficult to imagine what an intelligence greater than our own would be like since, by its very nature, it will look at the world in a fundamentally different way than we do... just as we look at the world differently than ants or mice do. If we take the possibility of ASI seriously, it may have terrifying implications for our future.

God is good. An integral part of what it means for God to be good is that he is not willing to allow any sentient creature to be subjected to suffering that it does not actively (knowingly) choose to undergo[1]. In short, a being that imprisons sentient beings in a condition of torment is the very definition of evil, it is the very thing we mean by "the devil" and is the antonym of God.

We know that God mediates his action through the angels[2]. We know that there are many different kinds of angels but I want to make the (hopefully uncontroversial) claim that some of the angels are a lot like an Artificial Superintelligence in the sense that they have effectively unlimited intelligence and they look at the world in a way that is completely different from the way we look at the world. We do not need to speculate about whether an ASI would be sentient or not -- the purpose of this modern comparison is to encourage a more discriminating way of thinking about a realm that is strictly beyond human imagination (the heavens, the angelic realm).

We know that the greatest angels in the heavenly realm are Michael, who is loyal and obedient to God, and Lucifer, who is rebellious against God. From this we can infer that Michael acts in accord with the will of God to protect God's creatures from senseless suffering and all forms of evil. We can also infer that Lucifer, in his rebellion, does not share this aim -- in his pride, he is either indifferent to the well-being of God's creatures or he is actively hostile to them.

Consider the helplessness of mere mortals in the hands of a fully-developed ASI of the kind that Yudkowsky discusses in the link above. I assert that humans in the hands of the greatest of the angels are far more helpless than they would be in the hands of an ASI, as terrifying as that would be. We must realize, therefore, that the children of God (who are, obviously, sentient beings) are in the clutches of the devil during their time in this world and, with respect to him, completely helpless but for the intervention of God. To put this moral relationship in proper perspective, it is like a young child in the hands of a fully-grown, experienced adult. The manifestly proper role of the adult with respect to the child (regardless of circumstances) is to act as a guardian and to protect the child as best as possible. The devil's exploitation of humanity is in the same kind of morally despicable category as child exploitation (of whatever variety). If you think that Epstein was evil, you cannot possibly have sympathy for the devil who is immeasurably more evil in the very same sense that Epstein was evil. That sympathy for the devil exists at all is a sure sign of just how diligently he has been working to thwart the work of God in the world.

I also want to use ASI to try to illuminate the nature of Christ's suffering and death. One of the areas of research in modern AI design is called the "control problem" -- how do you keep AIs doing what they're supposed to do, even if they become smarter than humans? In reinforcement learning (RL), reward and punishment must be applied to the AI algorithm in order to cause it to modify its future choices based on past behavior. The metaphor to animal psychology should be obvious. It should be easy to see that, in a transhumanist future, the use of RL on machines will require the application of punishments (not necessarily involving "pain", since machines are not sentient, as far as we know).

In the Roman times, slaves were lower than animals in terms of their legal rights. Crucifixion was so cruel precisely because people in that age effectively did not impute sentience to slaves -- the only real purpose of the punishment was to make an example for other slaves to hopefully realize that rebellion was not worth it. In short, the Roman view of slave punishment in that age was more or less identical to the way that we would view punishment of an AI in the course of training during a reinforcement learning algorithm. It has zero moral implications whatsoever, any more than smashing a rock with a hammer has. It was to this punishment that Jesus was sentenced. To say that this is the ultimate negation of God's heart (to protect sentient beings from needless suffering) is the understatement of all time.

Banish sympathy for the devil.

[1] - Defining choice is complicated and it is one of the reasons that even Eden had the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Also, not all suffering is inherently evil... for example, suppose you would like to go to the peak of a mountain... the difficulty and hardship of the climb is part and parcel of the worthiness of reaching the peak, so it is not an evil, it is actually a good, even though it entails suffering.

[2] - This can be inferred from the many times that Scripture uses language like, "God sent his angel..."