Don’t ask me… https://www.newschannel5.com/plus/issues-of-faith/is-life-from-the-universe-gods-plan
“At the end of his 1895 address “Is Life Worth Living?,” the pragmatist philosopher William James tells his audience to take a leap of faith: we may never be certain that our lives have a meaning, but maybe they do. Why not take a chance on this “maybe”? Day in and day out, we take more mundane leaps of faith. For example, I promise to meet a friend at her apartment; while I may be killed on the highway on my way there, I may not, either. I hope to see her later, and that hope animates my choice to get on the road. Why not adopt a similar faith in life’s worthwhileness? I used to balk at the idea of a leap of faith. I sided with Albert Camus over Søren Kierkegaard, whom he mercilessly critiques in the first part of the Myth of Sisyphus. For Camus, Kierkegaard recognizes the absurdity of the human condition— “the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.” Yet, Kierkegaard, by calling on us to take a leap of faith, eliminates the absurd. In contrast, Camus says, “Being able to remain on the dizzying crest—that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge.” Instead of the leap of faith, Camus proposes a different image: Sisyphus rolling the boulder endlessly up a hill, only to see it fall back down. Camus advocates grit over faith. Plant your feet firmly on the ground, disregard all hope of a future reward, and keep at it...” https://open.substack.com/pub/celineleboeuf/p/leaps-of-faith?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios
…Perhaps this is why A.I.-enabled cheating does not seem to be a problem at Deep Springs. At other schools, students can tell themselves that they are, at worst, only cheating themselves. Students at Deep Springs learn to see themselves not as consumers of a degree (an individual good), but as creators of an education (a collective good). It’s important, too, that when second-year Deep Springers, as they’re known, make decisions about admissions and the curriculum, they know they are shaping a school that will exist when they are no longer there.
Deep Springs is unique, but it isn’t singular. Berea College is a selective four-year liberal arts school in Kentucky, one of 10 federally recognized work colleges in the United States. Founded in 1855 by abolitionists, it was the South’s first interracial, coed college. Today, its 1,500 undergraduates pay no tuition, and as at Deep Springs, they all work a campus job — at least 10 hours a week. At Berea, they receive pay to put toward housing and living expenses...
“…I think A.I. is a false mirror,” said Drew Lichtenberg, the dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. “It reflects back answers to black-or-white questions, but it does little to help explain the human experience the way art or philosophy can.”
He said he was shocked that students last semester were hungry for difficult plays and philosophical readings with no clear answers. “They were particularly into Kant and his ‘Analytic of the Sublime,’ Nietzsche and existential nausea, Camus and the myth of Sisyphus,” he said, adding that the cool reason of A.I. comprehends, but the seething imagination of art apprehends...”
