Conclude Playground, commence Goldstein's 36 Arguments thru Argument IX (check the Appendix for the briefer version).
- What are your concluding thoughts about Playground? Did anything in the concluding sections surprise you? Do you have a response to any of the Discussion Questions in the Reading Group Guide at the end of the book? Do you think the future (or the present, for that matter) will resemble any of the stories in Playground any significant regard? Has the novel changed the way you think about any of the issues it raises?
- Do you have any thoughts about any of the first nine arguments in Goldstein's 36 Arguments for the Existence of God? (See the Appendix, starting on p. 347).
- Have you read anything else by Goldstein? She has a Substack... Her latest book is a work of nonfiction, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. Do you think the religious impulse is related to what she calls "mattering"? What do you think ultimately matters? What do you think is the relevance of philosophical arguments for or against the existence of a god or gods to the religious experience and faith of typical believers?
- Note that Goldstein's 36 arguments pertain to the conception of god as a supernatural creator being, an "agent that had [our] welfare at heart" (as Powers put it) and is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent. Is that your conception of god? Or do you have an alternative definition?
- Any comment on the Ezra Klein podcast with Michael Pollan discussing consciousness (below)? Does their conversation have any bearing on how you think about AI? Do you agree with Klein that machines might someday become conscious, or with Pollan that their disembodied state makes that highly unlikely? Will a significant percentage of people in the future "worship" computers, whether they become conscious or not?
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