A sneer is easier than an answer, and certainty is a lovely refuge when you have no intention of defending it.

You accuse me of surrendering thought to a machine, and then, the moment you are asked to justify that accusation, you surrender thought entirely.

How convenient.

With a wave of the hand, every difficult question disappears. You declare the words contaminated by the tool that helped shape them and thereby absolve yourself of any obligation to consider what they actually say.

No examination. No argument. No possibility of correction.

You accuse me of regurgitating the output of a machine, yet what have you offered in return?

A familiar sneer. A borrowed insult. A conclusion retrieved intact from the cupboard of approved contempt.

You recognize the hated object, produce the expected response, and call the reflex thought.

That is the irony you seem determined not to notice.

My argument from the beginning has been that a machine must be tempered by a human mind. It possesses no responsibility for what it produces. Whatever value emerges from its use depends upon the person capable of examining it, rejecting it, correcting it, shaping it, and finally standing behind it.

But a mind cannot temper anything if it refuses examination itself.

And that is where your position becomes more interesting than your insult.

A mind that refuses examination begins to resemble the very machine you claim to despise. It receives a familiar stimulus, reaches for the familiar pattern, and produces the familiar response without troubling itself over whether the response is true.

Input. Recognition. Output.

The machinery of contempt.

Ignorance itself is no shame. Every one of us is ignorant of almost everything. I have been wrong before and will be wrong again. If you can show me where, I gain something from the correction.

But there is something contemptible in making a virtue of ignorance.

In encountering an argument and proudly announcing that you will not examine it, then mistaking that refusal for discernment. In treating incuriosity as wisdom. In believing that because you have protected yourself from an argument, you have somehow defeated it.

You have not defended your position.

You have insulated it.

Those are not the same thing.

Thought requires a certain vulnerability. You must permit an idea close enough to examine it. You must risk finding weakness in your own position. You must allow the possibility that another person, even one using a tool you despise, might know something you do not.

Without that, certainty does not become strength.

It becomes brittleness.

You tried to cut me with the accusation that I had surrendered my mind to a machine. But in your eagerness to make it, you performed the very surrender you condemn.

You saw the signal.

You retrieved the response.

You refused examination.

You produced the slop.

And so the question remains exactly where I left it:

Will you defend what you believe?

Or is your conviction only strong enough to survive so long as you never allow an argument near it?