Discover the seen and unseen

What does it all look like in the light? The vision for Seen & Unseen.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

The IRAM 30-meter telescope under the night sky.

IRAM-gre, via Wikimedia Commons

As someone once said, everyone has an angle, so it's a fair enough question to ask what our angle is.

In 325 AD a conference of bishops, many of whom carried in their bodies the scars of persecution, met in a small town called Nicaea in what is now northern Turkey. They slowly hammered out a visionary statement that described what the early Christians believed - a whole new way of looking at the world based around the belief that God the Creator had entered the world in the person of a Jewish teacher, Jesus of Nazareth.

That document, commonly known as the Nicene Creed, is the one Creed that is accepted and used across the entire Christian Church, so it’s good enough for us.

Our conviction, however, is that this framework, rather than closing down thinking, opens up a much more expansive and energising space for thought and acting than secular visions can offer.

For example, the Nicene Creed also describes God as the maker of all things, 'seen and unseen', picking up a phrase St Paul had written three hundred years before. We thought that summed up pretty well what we're about - we're interested in the Seen - what we all know and talk about all the time - economics, politics, society, law, the arts, the planet and its future - but also the Unseen realities that make sense of the seen - the mysterious, the numinous, the reality of the spiritual realm, the kingdom of heaven.

This Christian framework is not one that can be simply tacked onto a secular mindset but is a different way of viewing the world. Therefore, our aim is not to debate with those who don't share our faith as to who can prove their case, but to do our best to describe the world as Christians (of many kinds and perspectives) see it. Our task on this website is not to answer simplistic questions with simplistic answers, but to ask ourselves and others: what do politics, economics, the arts, technology, biology, leisure, geography, housing - in other words everything - look like in the light of the coming of Jesus into the world. And if we can do that well, we can be both a window and mirror to the societies we live in.

We believe there is wisdom in the two thousand years of Christian reflection on what it means to be human, and what it means to be good - on God, nature, community, work, and everything else - wisdom that has been discarded too quickly in western societies. We also think that the rapid discarding of Christian faith, and the failure to replace it with any kind of convincing common story is a disaster for our culture, leaving it open to fragmentation and culture warfare. Not that we’re advocating a return to Christendom - the Church made too many mistakes for misty-eyed nostalgia about that. But we do think Christian faith has the intellectual and spiritual depth to help renew and revive cultures today. Whether it does or not is beyond our pay-grade. Our job is just to tell the story as best we can.

Christians think a great deal about their faith and the cultures in which they live. Yet much of that wisdom is locked up inside long books that few people read. We want to make that wisdom accessible to a much wider audience. So, what you'll find here is material that is thoughtful, accessible to non-specialists, the fruit of deep thinking both about the Christian tradition and contemporary life, and can help you not only think more clearly, but live a better life.  

We may critique ideas, but will try not to attack people. We want to be generous, curious, confident about the faith, open to criticism and new ideas, intelligent, accessible, and patient. We don't want to be competitive, aggressive, reactive, fearful, or closed-minded.

Read our articles. Listen to our podcasts. Expand your thinking. Feed and satisfy your curiosity. Discover a world that is greater, more full of meaning and sense than you ever imagined.  

Article

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Comment

21 June 2024

4 min read

It's our mistakes that make us human

What we learn distinguishes us from tech.

Silvianne Aspray

Silvianne Aspray is a theologian and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge.

A man staring at a laptop grimmaces and holds his hands to his head.

Francisco De Legarreta C. on Unsplash.

The distinction between technology and human beings has become blurry: AI seems to be able to listen, answer our questions, even respond to our feelings. It becomes increasingly easy to confuse machines with humans. In this situation, it is increasingly important to ask: What makes us human, in distinction from machines? There are many answers to this question, but for now I would like to focus on just one aspect of what I think is distinctively human: As human beings, we live and learn in time.

To be human means to be intrinsically temporal. We live in time and are oriented towards a future good. We are learning animals, and our learning is bound up with the taking of time. When we learn to know or to do something, we necessarily make mistakes, and we take practice. But keeping in view something we desire – a future good – we keep going.

Let’s take the example of language. We acquire language in community over time. Toddlers make all sorts of hilarious mistakes when they first try to talk, and it takes them a long time even to get single words right, let alone to try and form sentences. But they keep trying, and they eventually learn. The same goes with love: Knowing how to love our family or our neighbours near and far is not something we are good at instantly. It is not the sort of learning where you absorb a piece of information and then you ‘get’ it. No, we learn it over time, we imitate others, we practice and even when we have learned, in the abstract, what it is to be loving, we keep getting it wrong.

This, too, is part of what it means to be human: to make mistakes. Not the sort of mistakes machines make, when they classify some information wrongly, for instance, but the very human mistake of falling short of your own ideal. Of striving towards something you desire – happiness, in the broadest of terms – and yet falling short, in your actions, of that very goal. But there’s another very human thing right here: Human beings can also change. They – we – can have a change of heart, be transformed, and at some point in time, actually start to do the right thing – even against all the odds. Statistics of past behaviours, do not always correctly predict future outcomes. Part of being human means that we can be transformed.

Transformation sometimes comes suddenly, when an overwhelming, awe-inspiring experience changes somebody’s life as by a bolt of lightning. Much more commonly, though, such transformation takes time. Through taking up small practices, we can form new habits, gradually acquire virtue, and do the right thing more often than not. This is so human: We are anything but perfect. As Christians would say: We have a tendency to entangle ourselves in the mess of sin and guilt. But we also bear the image of the Holy One who made us, and by the grace and favour of that One, we are not forever stuck in the mess. We are redeemed: are given the strength to keep trying, despite the mistakes we make, and given the grace to acquire virtue and become better people over time. All of this to say that being human means to live in time, and to learn in time.

So, this is a real difference between human beings and machines: Human beings can, and do strive toward a future good.

Now compare this to the most complex of machines. We say that AI is able to “learn”. But what does it mean to learn, for AI? Machine learning is usually categorized into supervised learning, unsupervised and self-supervised learning. Supervised learning means that a model is trained for a specific task based on correctly labelled data. For instance, if a model is to predict whether a mammogram image contains a cancerous tumour, it is given many example images which are correctly classed as ‘contains cancer’ or ‘does not contain cancer’. That way, it is “taught” to recognise cancer in unlabelled mammograms. Unsupervised learning is different. Here, the system looks for patterns in the dataset it is given. It clusters and groups data without relying on predefined labels. Self-supervised learning uses both methods: Here, the system uses parts of the data itself as a kind of label – such as, for instance, predicting the upper half of an image from its lower half, or the next word in a given text. This is the predominant paradigm for how contemporary large-scale AI models “learn”.

In each case, AI’s learning is necessarily based on data sets. Learning happens with reference to pre-given data, and in that sense with reference to the past. It may look like such models can consider the future, and have future goals, but only insofar as they have picked up patterns in past data, which they use to predict future patterns – as if the future was nothing but a repetition of the past.

So this is a real difference between human beings and machines: Human beings can, and do strive toward a future good. Machines, by contrast, are always oriented towards the past of the data that was fed to them. Human beings are intrinsically temporal beings, whereas machines are defined by temporality only in a very limited sense: it takes time to upload data, and for the data to be processed, for instance. Time, for machines, is nothing but an extension of the past, whereas for human beings, it is an invitation to and the possibility for being transformed for the sake of a future good. We, human beings, are intrinsically temporal, living in time towards a future good – which machines do not.

In the face of new technologies we need a sharpened sense for the strange and awe-inspiring species that is the human race, and cultivate a new sense of wonder about humanity itself.