The energy cost of AI

"In this domain, living organisms are unbeatable:  a human brain consumes about 25 watts.  By contrast, a computer possessing an equivalent power of information-processing consumes 25 megawatts, i.e. a million times more."

     Jean-David Fermanian & Isabelle Rak, "Démystifier l’Intelligence Artificielle," Communio:  revue catholique internationale 50, no. 5 =301 (septembre-octobre 2025):  27 (17-34).

Planck on the scientific virtue "akin to" faith

PLANCK:  ". . . The difficulty which organized religion finds in appealing to the people nowadays is that its appeal necessarily demands the believing spirit, or what is generally called Faith.  In an all-around state of scepticism this appeal receives only a poor response.  Hence you have a number of prophets offering substitute wares.

MURPHY:  "Do you think that science in this particular might be a substitute for religion?

PLANCK:  "Not to a sceptical state of mind; for science demands also the believing spirit.  Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrace to the gates of the temple of science are written the words:  Ye must have faith.  It is a quality which the scientists cannot dispense with. . . .
     ". . . As a matter of fact, Kepler is [on the contrary] a magnificent example of [this]. . . .  [W]hat rendered him so energetic and tireless and productive was the profound faith he had in his own science, not the belief that he could eventually arrive at an arithmetical synthesis of his astronomical observations, but rather the profound faith in the existence of a definite plan behind the whole of creation. . . .  Compare him with Tycho de Brahe.  Brahe had the same material under his hands as Kepler, and even better opportunities, but he remained only a researcher, because he did not have the same faith in the existence of the eternal laws of creation.  Brahe remained only a researcher; but Kepler was the creator of the new astronomy. . . .
     ". . . if we did not have faith but could solve every puzzle in life by an application of the human reason what an unbearable burden life would be.  We should have no art and no music and no wonderment.  And we should have no science; not only because science would thereby lose its chief attraction for its own followers—namely, the pursuit of the unknowable—but also because science would lose the cornerstone of its own structure, which is the direct perception by consciousness of the existence of external reality.  As Einstein has said, you could not be a scientist if you did not know that the external world existed in reality; but that knowledge is not gained by any process of reasoning.  It is a direct perception and therefore in its nature akin to what we call Faith.  It is a metaphysical belief.  Now that is something which the sceptic questions in regard to religion; but it is the same in regard to science.  However, there is this to be said in favour of theoretical physics, that it is a very active science and does make an appeal to the lay imagination.  In that way it may, to some extent, satisfy the metaphysical hunger which religion does not seem to be capable of satisfying nowadays.  But this would be entirely by stimulating the religious reaction indirectly.  Science as such can never really take the place of religion.  This is explained in the penultimate chapter of [Where is science going?]."

     Max Planck as interviewed by James Murphy in "Epilogue:  a socratic dialogue:  Interlocutors:  Einstein—Planck—Murphy," in Max Planck, Where is science going?, trans. & ed. James Murphy (London:  George Allen & Unwinn Ltd, 1933), 214-215, 218-219.

The rising sun as typus Christi

Iam noctis umbra linquitur,
polum caligo deserit,
typusque Christi, lucifer
diem sopitum suscitat.

     Stanza 2 of the anonymous 5th or 6th century hymn "Deus, qui caeli lumen es."  One hundred Latin hymns:  Ambrose to Aquinas, ed. Walsh & Husch, Dumbarton Oaks medieval library (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2012), 119 (118-121):

The shades of night are left behind,
the murk vanishes from the sky;
the light-bearer, symbol of Christ,
awakens now the slumbrous day. 

The Christian faith is "exceptionally rich"

"The 2,000-year old Western tradition, that of Christianity, provides, whether one believes in it or not, an exceptionally rich mythos – a term I use in its technical sense, making no judgment here of its truth or otherwise – for understanding the world and our relationship with it. It conceives a divine Other that is not indifferent or alien – like James Joyce’s God, refined out of existence and ‘paring his fingernails’ – but on the contrary engaged, vulnerable because of that engagement, and like the right hemisphere rather than the left, not resentful (as the Old Testament Yahweh often seemed) about the Faustian fallings away of its creation, but suffering alongside it. At the centre of this mythos are the images of incarnation, the coming together of matter and spirit, and of resurrection, the redemption of that relationship, as well as of a God that submits to suffer for that process. But any mythos that allows us to approach a spiritual Other, and gives us something other than material values to live by, is more valuable than one that dismisses the possibility of its existence."

     Iain McGilchrist, The master and his emissary:  the divided brain and the making of the western world, New expanded edition (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2019), 441-442.  But McGilchrist then moves on from the body and religion to art, or, more generally, beauty.

McGilchrist on theological liberalism

     "The Western Church has, in my view, been active in undermining itself. It no longer has the confidence to stick to its values, but instead joins the chorus of voices attributing material answers to spiritual problems. At the same time the liturgical reform movement, as always convinced that religious truths can be literally stated, has largely eroded and in some cases completely destroyed the power of metaphoric language and ritual to convey the numinous. Meanwhile there has been, as expected, a parallel movement towards the possible rehabilitation of religious practices as utility. Thus 15 minutes Zen meditation a day may make you a more effective money broker, or improve your blood pressure, or lower your cholesterol."

     Iain McGilchrist, The master and his emissary:  the divided brain and the making of the western world, New expanded edition (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2019), 441.  But see p. 316 for his comments on "the improbable doctrine of transubstantiation," which he treats as "the explicit analytical [(i.e. medieval scholastic)] left hemisphere attempt to untangle" the properly metaphorical "is" of the right, and thus does no more than mirror the parallel rejection of metaphor on the part of Protestant literalism (mere representationalism).

"Gotta serve somebody"

      "When we decide not to worship divinity, we do not stop worshipping:  we merely find something else less worthy to worship."

     Iain McGilchrist, The master and his emissary:  the divided brain and the making of the western world, New expanded edition (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2019), 441.

"Hall of mirrors"

     "If the right hemisphere delivers 'the Other' – experience of whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves – this is not the same as the world of concrete entities 'out there' (it is certainly more than that), but it does encompass most of what we would think of as actually existing things, at least before we come to think of them at all, as opposed to the concepts of them, the abstractions and constructions we inevitably make from them, in conscious reflection, which forms the contribution of the left hemisphere. But what if the left hemisphere were able to externalise and make concrete its own workings – so that the realm of actually existing things apart from the mind consisted to a large extent of its own projections? Then the ontological primacy of right-hemisphere experience would be outflanked, since it would be delivering – not 'the Other', but what was already the world as processed by the left hemisphere. It would make it hard, and perhaps in time impossible, for the right hemisphere to escape from the hall of mirrors, to reach out to something that was truly 'Other' than, beyond, the human mind.
     "In essence this was the [culminating] achievement of the Industrial Revolution."

     Iain McGilchrist, The master and his emissary:  the divided brain and the making of the Western world, new revised edition (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2019), 386.