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Will Machines Become Conscious? >
Are We Spiritual Machines? >
Chapter 8: Dembskiís Outdated Understanding
Permanent link to this article: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0493.html
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Chapter 8: Dembskiís Outdated Understanding
Response to William Dembski
William Dembski's concept of machines is based on simple-minded 19th century automata, says Kurzweil. Future biologically inspired machines will be of such great complexity and richness of organization that their behavior will evidence the intelligence and emotionally rich reactions of humans. The key is in persistent patterns, not the material substrate.
Originally published in print June 18, 2002 in Are
We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong AI
by the Discovery
Institute. Published on KurzweilAI.net on June 18, 2002.
I cannot resist starting my response with an amusing misquotation.
Dembski writes: “Those humans who refuse to upload themselves
will be left in the dust, becoming ‘pets,’ as Kurzweil
puts it, of the newly evolved computer intelligences.” This
is indeed a quotation from my book. But the reference Dembski attributes
to me is actually from Ted Kaczynski (the “Unabomber”),
not someone whose views I concur with. I’m sure it’s an
honest mistake, but a good example of how inattentive reading often
results in people seeing only what they expect to see. That having
been said, I will say that the misquotations from Dembski are not
nearly on the massive scale of Searle.
Dembski is correct that with regard to human performance, indeed
with regard to any of our objectively observed abilities and reactions,
it is my view that what Dembski calls the materialist approach is
valid. One might call this “capability materialism.” Capability
materialism is based on the observation that biological neurons
and their interconnections are made up of matter and energy, that
their methods can be described, understood, and modeled with either
replicas or functionally equivalent recreations. As I pointed out
at length earlier, we are already recreating functionally equivalent
recreations of substantial neuron clusters, and there are no fundamental
barriers to extending this process to the several hundred neural
regions we call the human brain. I use the word “capability”
because this includes all of the rich, subtle, and diverse ways
in which humans interact with the world, not just those narrower
skills that one might label as intellectual. Indeed, our ability
to understand and respond to emotions is more complex and diverse
than our ability to process intellectual issues.
Searle, for example, acknowledges that human neurons are biological
machines. Few serious observers have postulated capabilities or
reactions of human neurons that require Dembski’s “extra-material
factors.” In my view, relying on the patterns of matter and
energy in the human body and brain to explain its behavior and proficiencies
need not diminish our wonderment at its remarkable qualities. Dembski
has an outdated understanding of the concept of “machine,”
as I will detail below.
However, with regard to the issue of consciousness, I would have
to say that Dembski and I are in agreement, although Dembski apparently
does not realize this. He writes:
The great mistake in trying to understand the mind-body
problem is to suppose that it is a scientific problem. It is not.
It is a problem of ontology (i.e., that branch of metaphysics concerned
with what exists).
If by the “mind-body problem,” Dembski means the issue
of consciousness, then I agree with Dembski’s statement. As
I explained in my first chapter in this book and in my response
to Searle, there is no objective (i.e., scientific) method that
can definitively measure or determine the subjective experience
(i.e., the consciousness) of another entity. We can measure correlates
of subjective experience (e.g., outward or inward behavior, i.e.,
patterns of neuron activity), and we can use these correlates to
make arguments about the potential consciousness of another entity
(such as an animal or a machine), but these arguments remain just
that. Such observations do not constitute objective proof of another
entity’s subjective experiences, i.e., of its consciousness.
It comes down to the essential difference between the concepts of
“objective” and “subjective.”
As I pointed out, however, with multiple quotations of John Searle
(e.g., “human brains cause consciousness by a series of specific
neurobiological processes in the brain”), Searle apparently
does believe that the essential philosophical issue of consciousness
is determined by what Dembski calls “tender-minded materialism.”
The arguments of scientist-philosophers such as Roger Penrose that
consciousness in the human brain is somehow linked to quantum computing
does not change the equation because quantum effects are properly
part of the material world. Moreover there is nothing that prevents
our utilizing quantum effects in our machines. Indeed, we are already
doing this. The conventional transistor relies on the quantum effect
of electron tunneling.
So the line-up on these issues is not as straightforward as might
at first appear.
Dembski’s Limited Understanding of Machines and Emergent
Patterns
Dembski writes:
[P]redictability is materialism’s main virtue... We long
for freedom, immortality, and the beatific vision... The problem
for the materialist, however, is that these aspirations cannot
be redeemed in the coin of matter.
Unlike brains, computers are neat and precise . . . computers
operate deterministically.
These and other statements of Dembski reveal a view of machines,
or entities made up of patterns of matter and energy (i.e., “material”
entities), that is limited to the literally simple-minded machines
of nineteenth century automata. These machines with their hundreds,
maybe thousands of parts were quite predictable and certainly not
capable of longings for freedom and other such endearing qualities
of the human entity. The same observations largely hold true for
today’s machines with their billions of parts. But the same
cannot necessarily be said for machines with millions of billions
of interacting “parts,” entities with the complexity of
the human brain and body.
First of all, it is incorrect to say that materialism is predictable.
Even today’s computer programs routinely use simulated randomness.
If one needs truly random events in a process, there are devices
that can provide this as well. Fundamentally, everything we perceive
in the material world is the result of many trillions of quantum
events, each of which display profound and irreducible quantum randomness
at the core of physical reality. The material world—at both
the macro and micro levels—is anything but predictable.
Although many computer programs do operate the way Dembski describes,
the predominant methods in my own field of pattern recognition use
biological-inspired methods called “chaotic computing,”
in which the unpredictable interaction of millions of processes,
many of which contain random and unpredictable elements, provide
unexpected yet appropriate answers to subtle questions of recognition.
It is also important to point out that the bulk of human intelligence
consists of just these sorts of pattern recognition processes.
As for our responses to emotions and our highest aspirations, these
are properly regarded as emergent properties, profound ones to be
sure, but nonetheless emergent patterns that result from the interaction
of the human brain with its complex environment. The complexity
and capacity of nonbiological entities is increasing exponentially
and will match biological systems including the human brain (along
with the rest of the nervous system and the endocrine system) within
three decades. Indeed many of the designs of future machines will
be biologically inspired, that is to say derivative of biological
designs (this is already true of many contemporary systems). It
is my thesis that by sharing the complexity as well as the actual
patterns of human brains, these future nonbiological entities will
display the intelligence and emotionally rich reactions of humans.
They will have aspirations because they will share these complex
emergent patterns.
Will such nonbiological entities be conscious? Searle claims that
we can (at least in theory) readily resolve this question by ascertaining
if it has the correct ”specific neurobiological processes.”
It is my view that many humans, ultimately the vast majority of
humans, will come to believe that such human-derived but nonetheless
nonbiological intelligent entities are conscious, but that’s
a political prediction, not a scientific or philosophical judgement.
Bottom line, I agree with Dembski that this is not a scientific
question. Some observers go on to say that if it’s not a scientific
question, then it’s not an important or even a real question.
My view (and I’m sure Dembski agrees) is that because the question
is not scientific, it is precisely for that reason a philosophical
one, indeed the fundamental philosophical question.
Dembski writes:
We need to transcend ourselves to find ourselves. Now
the motions and modifications of matter offer no opportunity for
transcending ourselves. . . . Freud . . . Marx . . . Nietzsche .
. . each regarded the hope for transcendence as a delusion.
Dembski’s view of transcendence as an ultimate goal is reasonably
put. But I disagree that the material world offers no “opportunity
for transcending.” The material world inherently evolves, and
evolution represents transcendence. As I wrote in the first chapter
in this book, “Evolution moves towards greater complexity,
greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater
beauty, greater creativity, greater love. And God has been called
all these things, only without any limitation: infinite knowledge,
infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, and
infinite love. Evolution does not achieve an infinite level, but
as it explodes exponentially, it certainly moves in that direction.
So evolution moves inexorably towards our conception of God, albeit
never reaching this ideal.”
Dembski writes:
[A] machine is fully determined by the constitution, dynamics,
and interrelationships of its physical parts. . . . “[M]achines”
stresses the strict absence of extra-material factors. . . . The
replacement principle is relevant to this discussion because it
implies that machines have no substantive history. . . . But a machine,
properly speaking, has no history. Its history is a superfluous
rider—an addendum that could easily have been different without
altering the machine. . . . For a machine, all that is, is what
it is at this moment. . . . Machines access or fail to access items
in storage. . . Mutatis mutandis, items that represent counterfactual
occurrences (i.e., things that never happened) but which are accessible
can be, as far as the machine is concerned, just a though they did
happen.
It is important to point out that the whole point of my book and
the first chapter of this book is that many of our dearly held assumptions
about the nature of machines and indeed of our own human nature
will be called into question in the next several decades. Dembski’s
conception of “history” is just another aspect of our
humanity that necessarily derives from the richness, depth and complexity
of being human. Conversely, not having a history in the Dembski
sense is just another attribute of the simplicity of the machines
that we have known up to this time. It is precisely my thesis that
machines of the mid to late twenty-first century will be of such
great complexity and richness of organization that their behavior
will evidence emotional reactions, aspirations, and, yes, history.
So Dembski is merely describing today’s limited machines and
just assuming that these limitations are inherent. This line of
argument is entirely equivalent to stating that “today’s
machines are not as capable as humans, therefore machines will never
reach this level of performance.” Dembski is just assuming
his conclusion.
Dembski’s view of the ability of machines to understand their
own history is limited to “accessing” items in storage.
But future machines will possess not only a record of their own
history, but an ability to understand that history and to reflect
insightfully upon it. As for “items that represent counterfactual
occurrences,” surely the same can be said for our human memories.
Dembski’s lengthy discussion of spirituality is summed up
by his closing paragraph of his “Humans as Spiritual Machines”
section:
But how can a machine be aware of God’s presence?
Recall that machines are entirely defined by the constitution, dynamics,
and interrelationships among their physical parts. It follows that
God cannot make his presence known to a machine by acting upon it
and thereby changing its state. Indeed, the moment God acts upon
a machine to change its state, it no longer properly is a machine,
for an aspect of the machine now transcends its physical constituents.
It follows that awareness of God’s presence by a machine must
be independent of any action by God to change the state of the machine.
How then does the machine come to awareness of God’s presence?
The awareness must be self-induced. Machine spirituality is the
spirituality of self-realization, not the spirituality of an active
God who freely gives himself in self-revelation and thereby transforms
the beings with which he is in communion. For Kurzweil to modify
“machine” with the adjective “spiritual” therefore
entails an impoverished view of spirituality.
Dembski states that an entity (e.g., a person) cannot be aware
of God’s presence without God acting upon her, yet God cannot
act upon a machine, so therefore a machine cannot be aware of God’s
presence. This reasoning here is entirely tautological and human-centric.
God only communes with humans, and only biological ones at that.
I have no problem with Dembski believing this as a personal belief,
but he fails to the make the “strong case” that he promises
that “humans are not machines—period.” As with Searle,
Dembski just assumes his conclusion.
Where Can I Get Some of Dembski’s “Extra-Material”
Thinking Stuff?
Like Searle, Dembski cannot seem to grasp the concept of the emergent
properties of complex distributed patterns. He writes:
Anger presumably is correlated with certain localized
brain excitations. But localized brain excitations hardly explain
anger any better than overt behaviors associated with anger, like
shouting obscenities. Localized brain excitations may be reliably
correlated with anger, but what accounts for one person interpreting
a comment as an insult and experiencing anger, and another person
interpreting that same comment as a joke and experiencing laughter?
A full materialist account of mind needs to understand localized
brain excitations in terms of other localized brain excitations.
Instead we find localized brain excitations (representing, say,
anger) having to be explained in terms of semantic contents (representing,
say, insults). But this mixture of brain excitations and semantic
contents hardly constitutes a materialist account of mind or intelligent
agency.
Dembski assumes that anger is correlated with a “localized
brain excitation,” but anger is almost certainly the reflection
of complex distributed patterns of activity in the brain. Even if
there is a localized neural correlate associated with anger, it
nonetheless results from multifaceted and interacting patterns.
Dembski’s question as to why different people react differently
to similar situations hardly requires us to resort to his extra-material
factors for an explanation. The brains and experiences of different
people are clearly not the same and these differences are well explained
by differences in our physical brains.
It is useful to consider the analogy of the brain’s organization
to a hologram (a piece of film containing an interference pattern
created by the interaction between a three-dimensional image and
a laser light). When one looks through a hologram, one sees the
original three-dimensional image, but none of the features of the
image can be seen directly in the apparently random patterns of
dots that are visible if one looks directly at the piece of film.
So where are the features of the projected image? The answer is
that each visual feature of the projected image is distributed throughout
the entire pattern of dots that the hologram contains. Indeed, if
you tear a hologram in half (or even in a large number of pieces),
each piece will contain the entire image (albeit at reduced resolution).
The visible image is an emergent property of the hologram’s
distributed pattern, and none of the image’s features can be
found through a localized analysis of the information in the hologram.
So it is with the brain.
It is also the case that the human brain has a great deal of redundancy
and it contains far more neural circuitry than is minimally needed
to performs its functions. It is well known that the left and right
halves of the brain, while not identical, are each sufficient to
provide a more-or-less normal level of human functioning, which
explains Louis Pasteur’s intellectual accomplishments after
his cerebral accident. Half a brain is enough.
I find it remarkable that Dembski cites the case of John Lorber’s
reportedly brainless patient as evidence that human intellectual
functioning is the result of “extra-material factors.”
First of all, we need to take this strange report with a grain of
salt. Many commentators have pointed out that Lorber’s conclusion
that his patient’s brain was only 1 millimeter thick was flawed.
As just one of many such critics, neurosurgeon Kenneth Till commented
on the case of Lorber’s patient: “Interpreting brain scans
can be very tricky. There can be a great deal more brain tissue
in the cranium than is immediately apparent.”
It may be true that this patient’s brain was smaller than
normal, but that would not necessarily be reflected in obviously
degraded capabilities. In commenting on the Lorber case, University
of Indiana Professor Paul Pietsch writes, “How could this [the
Lorber case] possibly be? If the way the brain functions is similar
to the way a hologram functions, that [diminished brain size] might
suffice. Certain holograms can be smashed to bits, and each remaining
piece can reproduce the whole message. A tiny fragment of this page,
in contrast, tells little about the whole story.”
Even Lorber himself does not resort to “extra-material factors”
to explain his observations. Lorber concludes that “there must
be a tremendous amount of redundancy or spare capacity in the brain,
just as there is with kidney and liver.” Few commentators on
this case resort to Dembski’s “extra-material factors”
to explain it.
Dembski’s resolution of the ontology problem is to say that
the ultimate basis of what exists is the “real world of things,”
things irreducible to material stuff. Dembski does not list what
“things” we might consider as fundamental but presumably
human minds would be on the list, and perhaps other “things”
such as money and chairs. There may be a small congruence of our
views in this regard. I regard Demski’s things as patterns.
Money, for example, is a vast and persisting pattern of agreements,
understandings, and expectations. “Ray Kurzweil” is perhaps
not so vast a pattern, but thus far is also persisting. Dembski
apparently regards patterns as ephemeral and not substantial, but
as a pattern recognition scientist, I have a profound respect for
the power and endurance of patterns. It is not unreasonable to regard
patterns as a fundamental ontological reality. We are unable to
really “touch” matter and energy directly, but we do directly
experience the patterns underlying “things.”
Fundamental to my thesis is that as we apply our intelligence and
the extension of our intelligence called technology to understanding
the powerful patterns in our world (e.g., human intelligence), we
can recreate—and extend!—these patterns in other substrates
(i.e., with other materials). The patterns are more important than
the materials that embody them.
Finally, if Dembski’s intelligence-enhancing extra-material
stuff really exists, then I’d like to know where I can get
some.
Copyright © 2002 by the Discovery
Institute. Used with permission.
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Mind·X Discussion About This Article:
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I still don't know what it means for a machine to be spiritual.
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Part of Dembskiís critique was to point out that we donít how exactly how Kurzweil means that machines can be ďspiritual.Ē Or, when Dembski asks, ďwhat does it mean for a machine to be ďspiritualĒ? I donít feel Iíve quite gotten an answer to that question from Kurzweil.
I don't think Kurzweil means that future computers and robots will have delusions about there existing a God, pray to the virgin Mary, take communion, go to tarot card readers, claim they can see auras or hire John Edward on the SCI-FI channel so they can talk to their dead ancestor (my old non-functional XT in the attic).
At least I hope not. I don't want my computer wasting my money on tarot card readers.
However, when people talk about other people being "spiritual" I get the feeling most people mean they do such things, they have spiritual, supernatural concerns.
Kurzweil means, I think, that future A.I.s will have something akin to emotion, drive, creativity and such. But is that "spiritual" in most people's vocabulary? |
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembskiís Outdated Understanding
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I think it was Arthur Koestler in his _Janus_ who, in a discussion of Wallace's views on the descent of man pointed out that man is 'spastic' psychologically. He has potential, but he still barely knows how to use it.
In general we have a crisis of definition. Before we can decide if we can automate man, we have to decide who man is.
Sitting like crows on a ledge are those in the millennia of the Buddhas, watching all this, and thinking, or not thinking, 'there they go again', they have forgotten who they are.
Man's evolution is not only horizontal, but a 'vertical' release of his potential. We can say this even before we get around to defining the distinction of spiritual and material.
The gateway to this is not mystic revelation, but the de-automation of rote response. Releasing the power of attention,much else.
But we should consider that the potential of man remains invariant as a feature of man, and this never changes in the otherwise real 'progressions of evolution' or history. This potential could hardly have evolved, since it is not a function of environmental interaction and requires extreme and arduous methods to even detect, let alone realize.
Automaton indeed.
"Watch, for ye know not...." Guess was into all of this.
Can a computer be made conscious? No doubt. But then it would need to learn to meditate to become 'self-conscious'. How would we build in this potential? What is this potential? What are we talking about?
John Landon
http://eonix.8m.com
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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> "Before we can decide if we can automate man, we have to decide who man is."
Who really wants to "automate man"? I'd prefer to build an artificial intelligence.
The idea or replicating "consciousness" (as in, our experienced sensation of a "waking state") is largely a distraction. Either it will emerge "automatically" given a sufficiently capable AI, or it will not. Either way, if it is truly a subjective experience, there would be no way to really know, in any formal sense.
All you can do is observe and say, "It acts like it is conscious, it acts like it understands, it seems to produce creative and novel solutions to problems, it acts like it has an agenda of its own."
Cheers! ____tony b____ |
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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You may be right about distinguishing AI and the 'mechanization of consciousness' in a human, but does it really matter. The argument, which is two-pronged, applies both ways. First, I should say I am not a skeptic in advance of the possibilities of AI and consciousness. I do have suspicions about the difference of hardware and wetware, i.e. some biological unknown involved in consciousness not present in purely mechanical/electronic possibilities. Whatever the case with that, what construct we use to create, or attempt to create, this AI consciousness, the question remains, what _is_ consciousness. The term has long been noted to founder in self-contradiction. Sufis or Buddhists, or anyone who makes others 'pay attention', e.g., are constanly accusing man of being 'unconscious'. The term 'consciousness' is often distinguished-equated with/from 'self-consciousness' for that reason. Roughly, to make it positive definite, we could say that consciousness slides into degrees of 'unconsciousness' as the impulse of self-consciousness degrades after the 'act' of attention. This kind of jargon is standard in meditative circles and the mind spins the terms around, often in a state of 'unconsciousness'!!!
Note the spontaneous appearance of 'minimal will' in the 'act' of attention, free will or not we need not say. So already the implications of 'consciousness' involve self-reversal, and reflective higher octane version series as self-consciousness, with an elusive 'power of will' involved in the act of attention lurking behind the conscious so-called state. This 'will' is a momentary thing, and not at all the 'real will' possible in those who train themselves to manifest it continuously, a tremendously difficult thing to do. Etc... My point is that we are in a very limited range of conscious states to begin with, and these run more or less on automatic. How, given the great difficulty of even using our own software, could we design a machine in this spectrum? At what level are we using the term consciousness? A sort of blob that burps when it sees a fly, or what? That's not a negative judgement, as such.
It is simply that consciousness in man, from one standard, is absent! How then would we design a machine here?
Of course, you say we needn't really ask that. This 'consciousness' will emerge spontaneously, etc...A property of emergent character in a complex system. I have no idea. I never saw an example. How did ours evolve? I have no take on that, and as a Darwin skeptic I don't find claims of natural selection illuminating here.
In any case, I am not prepared to predict failure here, as I said. I would caution the extreme complexity amidst simplicity of real consciousness, especially as this impinges on the great quagmire, theories of 'will'. We see that must enter the mix as resolved.
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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> Note the spontaneous appearance of 'minimal will' in the 'act' of attention, free will or not we need not say. So already the implications of 'consciousness' involve self-reversal, and reflective higher octane version series as self-consciousness, with an elusive 'power of will' involved in the act of attention lurking behind the conscious so-called state.
I really have no idea what you mean, here. Could you possibly explain this?
I'm thinking that you may be talking about co-consciousness type things (related to multiple personality disorder). But I have no idea.
Attention is usually passive. Moving your body (or external objects) into position to obtain the type of information you want is the active part -- calibration.
> A property of emergent character in a complex system. I have no idea. I never saw an example.
Autocatalytic sets.
> theories of 'will'.
You mean INTENTionality. Basically it's always a function of icreasing pleasure and decreasing pain -- in biological organisms. Tell me something you want or intend to do, and you can connect it back to: seeking pleasure/avoiding pain.
So, we can look at a direct result of this. Why do we dread uncertainty, and like to know what will happen (is happening) to us? Because anticipating what will happen allows us to plan our actions to produce pleasure rather than pain.
Assuming you understand this, what is then the analogue of pleasure and pain to a machine? In humans, evolution coded this into you -- so sex feels good, and sticking your hand in the fire doesn't. Will we give an AI pleasure/pain sensors on it's body -- or will it have to see that a part of its body is burning and understand that that is not desirable? Will we allow it to develop headaches if it keeps it's neck in the same bent position for an hour?
How about will and attention? Your brain gets bored (feels pain) if it has to look at the same thing for too long -- it will spontaneously recalibrate (look in a different direction, or change the focus of it's view, or close the eyes.) If it likes or feels interested in what it sees, you will have an automatic desire to keep your eyes calibrated to that scene. I'm sure you've been "riveted" to something before.
Your brain must use mental strategies to control such things (e.g. delayed pleasure) by telling yourself that the longerterm goal has a better payoff and that you must make some action (A1) in order to attain that goal with the better payoff. Thus, you have Martyrs who die because they think some god will reward them. Or because they empathise with society a great deal -- they say to themselves that what they are doing will improve society (bring it pleasure) and so the pain of death is less than the pleasure of the longerterm goal. Since they have empathised with society, they become the society, within their own mentality.
We already have computer planner programs that do something similar to this. Giving up short-term gains, for improvements in the attainment of longerterm gains. It's called a gambit in chess. |
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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> "Attention is usually passive. Moving your body (or external objects) into position to obtain the type of information you want is the active part -- calibration."
Agreed, with minor caveat: I'm sure you've had the experience of watching, say, an electronic tickertape display, like perhaps stock quotes, and while staring at the display (and even physically "focused" upon it) your mind goes "blank", or you envision waves crashing on a sunny beach, etc., (daydreaming)... then you recall your original "intent" was to watch for a particular stock quote, and you "turn your attention" back to the "meaning" of the ticker-tape symbols. That would be an instance of "active attention" that has no outwardly-obvious corresponding physical component.
Other than that, I agree - John needs to clarify a bit.
Cheers! ____tony b____ |
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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Most attempts to study 'mind' in the context of science are very diminished utilitarian constructs. And these tend to pass over into proto-models as a causal robot, etc... I can't say what will come of that, since noone has really constructed anything there except electronic devices of various sorts. The clutter of New Age confusion tends to distract us from the immense complexity and subtleties of orlder 'spiritual psychologies', never present in conventional Christian culture, but sometimes locable in Sufistic and other such, all of which derive in essence from various Indian treatments. These systems themselves are always vexatious and usually in a state of disrepair, metaphysical abuse.
But even so they leave a scientific psychology looking severely disabled.
I can think of the recent, non-recommended, almost dangerously wild sufi derivative in the writer J.G. Bennett.
He distinguishes body, the pleasure-pain organism, the instinctual body, six levels of self, the "I", the soul, the mind, and more. 'Being, consciousness, and will' are completely distinguished. Mind is not the same as self, and neither is the same as soul. The will is different from all of these. All this was denounced as Sufi pastiche.
We shouldn't be surprised the Al Quaeda (who are sufis and even worse than all the others) are waiting patiently for the end of this civilization. I.e. still another degenerate version of the by now ancient Athens and Rome collision, whose meaning, before degeneration into religion, was the struggle for the 'invisible man', lost in horizontal history.
These others then don't plan to be demolished and made into couch potatoes. My point is that the realm of science is going to have to do something better than complex systems theory if it wishes to do more than provoke another 'jihad'.
Don't get me wrong. I respect the effort of science to press the reset button on all this ancient madness. But the realm of positivistic psychology is an object of derision in many (myself not included)
None of this stuff in this Bennett, for example, claims to be even spiritual, simply the way man is. It is an echo of what is left of the ancient Indian materialistic Samkhya, one of the inspiriations of Buddha and Buddhism.
That is, there is a true material psychology that is not spirit-mongering and is non-Cartesianly dual, from which one can construct a reasonable psychology that corresponds to an actual human. I fear the Western tradition will simply never make it here. Still people are pursuing the ultimate causal-Darwinian explanation of ethics, will, consciousness, etc...
The sheer complexity of the human 'self' simply disappears in modern science, to the extent there is a pscychology there at all. It is a strange legacy.
We can see the reaction starting indigenously in Western culture already in the generation after Newton. Uh-oh, a problem is coming. Rousseau is the first, Kant picks up there, then German philosophy ends in a muddle, so that strains becomes useless. But we do see Schopenhauer in a last gasp. He distinguishes still the 'appearance' or phenomenology of self from the 'noumenal' aspect, with the extreme problem arising from even discussing 'will'. That's the end of it.
The legacy of Schopenhauer suggests the dangerous sadness of the whole question. If you wish to treat man as a robot, nature will play ball. The unknowable noumenal self can be forgotten as the mechanization man proceeds apace, a possibility of great usefulness for the ruling powers of the world, who have little interest in real men, only passive objects of the state or culture.
But that potential man continues in the stream of greater life.
The last dying embers of Schopenhauer reappear in Freud's Schopenhauer For Scientism, in his much reduced and incoherent idea of the 'unconscious'.
And that's good business, as a science by hour. It's all nonsense. After that we get behaviorism raw. And the Darwinization of the remains.
That's my "New Age" spiel, simply as a wave of the had. Physics is brilliant. But science has never at any time even come to the threshold of a pyschology. Never. Not even close. The typical scientist is systematically off course and gets belligerent when challenged.
So what's my point, in a short blurb? It's not all that bad, actually. Since consciousness degrades always and everywhere into passive non-consciousness, scientists are no worse off than anyone else and can reconstruct the real science of vertical man, whenever they feel like it.
First, to answer about passive attention. Most of these older psychologies make a fundamental point about 'passive attention', but that is only an aspect of the mainline ordinary consciousness. The real 'self-consciousness' arises through the attempt to provoke that passivity into action, through witnessing, or acts of deliberate attention.
Be that as it may, producing a 'conscious' machine is an undefined idea. 'Who' is the entity behind that? The irony is that the mechanized 'conscious' person, man in his ordinary state' does indeed default to that utilitarian sort of creature state, but is that consciousness?
In general the sheer scale and complexity of the human mind-self-soul with its latent potential for 'realization of will' is something beyond minor tinkering. I have a bad feeling we shan't get to first base here.
So a construct via software of a conscious machine probably requires versions of this complex apparatus with its distinctions of self, "I", attention, active and passive, much else.
And just there the 'noumenal' aspect of 'will' will return to haunt the exercise. Whence comes the 'self' we see in the biology of life? To established its naturalism is one thing, a stroke of the pen. But its real status in evolutionary man remains a challenge of self-discovery, and one that we must suspect to involve a greater whole of life as 'consciousness many and one', in a realm that we don't directly observe.
I will leave this as is, and attempt to post something more directly in reply. But I think that, while I don't reject the software version of consciousness in principle, in practice, there is no easy 'widget' version of self that can escape Frankenstein runner up parody. Still, the potential is there to produce a working model, and the purveyors of these ancient pscyhologies are often the worst offenders!
John Landon
http://eonix.8m.com |
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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It wasn't the purpose of the previous post to inject some mystic perspective for pursuit of a science of psychology. In fact, the keynote of Western modernism,a theme of reason, is actually entirely suitable for 'starting over' on issues that the modern world has simply scrambled beyond easy recovery, although uniquely the Buddhist tradition has preserved a relatively austere and stripped account of a type of psychology that does justice to a hidden side of man. But the general proliferation of all sorts of mystic psychologies gives the cue, actually, to renewed skepticism. But the problem is that skepticism itself has become a de facto series of assumptions about man. We can't assume anything.
That said, all parties are so totally incoherent in polarized extremes that is hard for anyone make headway in any direction. It is a sad state of affairs. Sauve qui peut. In five thousand years all man's religions have confused him more than enlightened him. All his political ideologies have suppressed his natural consciousness.
The left attempts to expose ideology have become ideology. In that context the rise of science we might have hoped would move to clarify the confusion, but instead we have the couchpotato utilitarian robot.
So it is a total wipeout all around.
Sorry to say it.
It remains to be seen who will hate to hear this most, the Christians or the scientists.
Defy these statements, and in the process find out their truth.
The best odds are the Buddhist. But there, beware, they will turn you into a Boddhisattwa, forbidden to meditate in the name of meditate.
And so it goes.
Piss on it, and go underground. Live in sewers, skulk down back allies.
Find yourself. Once found, then and only then can we construct a spiritual machine, armed for the first time with a full parts list, groundwire connections, input/output, the lot of it.
Best of luck. Keep on skulking.
I will be hated by both parties here, so...
bye
John Landon
http://eonix.8m.com
PS
Check out the 'eonic effect', to get the basics on 'evolution in history'.
The design people got one thing right, Darwin was an idiot.\
Why are all the worlds top scientists Darwin dummies?
A real puzzle.
With any luck you'll make it.
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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A last kick in the teeth for y'all AI thugs
The Presumption of Sociobiologists.
Comment on recent Times review, by Tooby
You don't guy to legislate human psychology based on Darwinian hype. Better wise up
Now bye again.
_____________________________
Below is the review by John Tooby of Janet Browne's bio Vol II of Darwin from the NY Times. I take it Tooby is the sociobiologist. This review is both the 'usual stuff' and at the same time a remarkably biased bit of 'Darwin Promo' in action. I am surprised at the sheer brazenness of Darwinists.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/06/books/review/06TOOBYT.html
It should be said at once that this question as to why Darwin was so celebrated while his 'theory' ('my theory', as he put it) was rejected is, of course, open to rival interpretations, but surely far simpler than Tooby would† have us believe. Convinced Darwinists seem to be almost dense on this point. Surely the quite simple answer is that Darwin's emphasis on evolution struck the public as correct, while the theory to explain evolution was obviously limited, still hypothesis unverified in the fossil record, and fraught with implications demanding a higher order of demonstration, rather than the lesser than has now come into existence after Darwinists have made their media comeback from the turn-of-the century 'eclipse' they complain of so loudly. Surely Tooby is aware of the history of that eclipse, based as it was on sound difficulties, difficulties that have and will always remain invariant to the question of evolution, even after the genetic revolution, or especially thereafter.
It is simply a confused distortion of the record to consider that not only the public but most of Darwin's peers correctly saw problems with his theory. It is only comparatively recently that the heavy promotion of Darwinism has made this seem some obstinate error of wishful thinking. This current luxury of Darwinist domination, so heavily taken for granted by sociobiologists (and others!) would do well to recover an intelligent skepticism such as was there from the first in those who saw the issues perhaps more clearly than we do now.
Let it be said, amidst this normative promo style of the current regime,
THERE ARE PROBLEMS with Darwin's theory. Problems or not, verification of the record is still insufficient to prove the case. The rise of developmental genetics has shown that ongoing critics such as Lovtrup were correct, even as the Darwinist camp changes its story, without blinking.
The endless misstatements of what Darwin proposed versus what Darwin actually proved is evident in the review, and we have nothing resembling the talisman of metaphysical omniscience claimed in such statements as this, from the review::
______quote
He used this new logic to span three seemingly unbridgeable metaphysical chasms. He showed how selection united the nonliving and the living, the nonhuman and the human, and the physical and the mental into a single fabric of intelligible material causation. If one could accept the price, the prize was a principled explanation for the history and design of all life. Unacceptably, this included the architecture of the human mind, all that now remained of the soul: our cherished mental life was a naturally selected product of organized matter, just one downstream consequence of the uncaring immensities of time and chance. The mind with its moral sense was taken out of the authoritative domain of clerics and philosophers. For Darwin, the responsibility for its investigation would be in the hands of evolutionary psychologists, of which he was the first.
________endquote
Darwin did NOT show how natural selection bridged life and non-life. That remains a great conundrum. Darwin did NOT show, via natural selection, how evolution bridged the human and non-human. The nature of man is barely known to man himself, a theory of his evolution is almost beyond his powers. We don't even have a theory of consciousness, let alone a theory of its evolution. Nor do we have a fossil sequence that definitively tells us what the facts are. How then can we be sure natural selection is the mechanism? HOW?† Current sociobiologists simply declare these things to be true without demonstration. Darwin did NOT resolve the question of the soul. He was a nineteenth century materialist influenced by the postivism of Comte, and much else, and simply declared the problems of soul solved by being reduced out of existence.
The question of the soul is and remains a still unanswered question, beside which millennia of men such as the Buddhist declare, without wishful thinking, the existence of an intangible 'soul' factor. The declaration by fiat that Darwin resolved this is a gross form of scientific ignorance.
Darwin did NOT resolve the question of the architecture of the human mind. Even the barest glance at a standard sutra of yoga would leave one to suspect the reductionist account is a tissue of positivistic wishful thinking. It is simply baffling that Darwinists should in the name of science be so provincial on such questions, and so obsessively so, desperately so as in this review.
Darwin did NOT take the issue of the moral sense out of the hands of clerics and philosophers. One might almost wish he had, but he did NOT. The current sociobiological attempt to model the evolution of ethics is one of the most puzzling pieces of unverified ad hoc speculation, all too obviously designed to patch the desperate problem natural selection has with the moral sense! Darwinism can't explain it, and it has not verified the actual way in which this sense evolved in fact.
Even a cursory historical analysis, from a secularist viewpoint, can show that historical evolution all too clearly† shows something else to be involved, as Huxley himself clearly grasped. Huxley is done a disservice here. He saw at once both the value and the problem with Darwin's theory. He deserves respect for that reason.
Finally , we are told the 'responsibility for the investigation of this moral sense is to be in the hands of evolutionary psychologists.
Aha, now I have got it. The sociobiologists are morally indignant at the klutzes who don't buy their ideological usurpation of the 'theory'. Tooby seems to suggest we are aberrant if we won't knuckle under here.
In fact, this review is genuinely ignorant, or simply brazen. It is a puzzle partly explained by the mass media that make this kind of thinking so dominant, even in newsprint like that of the Times whose research resources should have long since produced something more helpful for the public than this kind of grandstanding.
As to Janet Browne's book, which I have not yet read, it sounds like a most fascinating work in any case, but one can only regret that a lifetime of work will forever stand marred by the false education and domineering dogmatism so obviously being promoted in this review.
The public needs to recall the moment of the appearance of Darwin's book and theory, recall the clear sense of the rightness of evolution and the problem with the theory that many had, and note the way this simple fact sticks in the craw of current Darwinists to this day, because they are beset† with the reality of their weak position, in the context of their very strong claims. This type of browbeating is or should be transparent.
The results are by no means the science that is claimed, and the public must at this point fend for itself.
'Charles Darwin': The Scientist Was Celebrated, His Work Dismissed
By JOHN TOOBY
Charles Darwin's ''Origin of Species'' landed among the other new books of 1859 -- ''A Tale of Two Cities,'' ''Adam Bede,'' ''Idylls of the King'' and Samuel Smiles's ''Self-Help'' -- as an unlikely best seller, agreeably scandalous because its full meaning was only hinted at by its cautious author. Most readers were less interested in its science than in its air of emancipation. Although Lord Palmerston claimed that ''every class of society accepts with cheerfulness the lot which Providence has assigned to it,'' a restless, upwardly mobile reading public was willing to consider rival Providences that were less enamored of a static social hierarchy.Even scientists debating Darwinism appeared less driven by the scientific issues than by broader commitments. Thomas Henry Huxley exulted that ''The Origin'' was a ''veritable Whitworth gun in the armory of liberalism,'' and though unconvinced about natural selection, proceeded to position himself as ''Darwin's bulldog.'' Huxley was no aberration. Darwin succeeded in persuading only one of his close scientific allies, the botanist Joseph Hooker, that selection was the chief engine of evolution.Indeed, a central mystery surrounding Darwin is how his reputation floated free of the rejection of his core ideas. For many years before his death, he was seen as Britain's foremost scientist, and he became his era's premier example of the scientist as celebrity. When he died in 1882, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to Newton. He was viewed, The Pall Mall Gazette said, as the ''greatest Englishman since Newton,'' the Times adding that no one had ''wielded a power over men and their intelligences more complete.'' But while Darwin levitated, Darwinism fell into scientific disrepute, eclipsed, incredibly, by feeble rivals, from a resuscitated Lamarckianism to teleological doctrines of predetermined progress. Even Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, retreated into spiritualism, declaring that natural selection could not account for humanity's intellectual and moral abilities.In the concluding volume of her magisterial biography, Janet Browne tells the story of these paradoxical decades, from 1858, when Darwin was preparing ''The Origin'' for publication, through the furious public debates to his death 24 years later. No scientist's life was more exhaustively documented than Darwin's: there were the family journals, research notebooks, account books in which Darwin compulsively entered every expenditure, and countless observations by his contemporaries -- the discharge of a belletristic age. Most of all, there were letters. Browne, an editor of Darwin's correspondence, estimates that he wrote as many as 1,500 letters a year.A noted historian of science, Browne fashions these materials into a consuming portrait not only of Darwin but of Victorian civilization. This biography is matchless in detail and compass, and one feels an abiding gratitude that Browne was willing to sacrifice so many years of her life to reconstruct Darwin's. A democracy of days, her book is weighted more by private moments and daily occupations than by rare dramatic turning points -- a biography nearer in structure to how we experience our lives than to how we tell them.Along the way, Browne provides memorable glimpses of scores of figures and institutions, including the postal system (''the pre-eminent collective enterprise of the Victorian period''), a publishing scene dominated by subscription-based lending libraries, the world of water cures and fashionable maladies, and the fad of cartes de visite at the dawn of celebrity photography. Eminences like Ruskin, Carlyle, Tennyson, Disraeli, George Eliot and Annie Besant make appearances. Prince Albert reveals a taste for mischief, appointing Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (opponents in a famous debate on Darwin's theory) joint vice presidents of the Zoological Society.But as Browne's high-resolution resurrection of Darwin's world proceeds, the enigmas of his life become more baffling, not less: why did his scientific peers and countrymen reject Darwinism while honoring Darwin as their greatest scientist? What allowed him to produce a series of scientific syntheses so far ahead of their time, and so at odds with the rest of his culture, that for almost a century the scientific community proved incapable of following the road map he left?To understand this response, it is necessary to appreciate the dislocating sweep of Darwin's achievement. The discovery of natural selection, the austere logic of reproducing systems, was only Darwin's first step. He used this new logic to span three seemingly unbridgeable metaphysical chasms. He showed how selection united the nonliving and the living, the nonhuman and the human, and the physical and the mental into a single fabric of intelligible material causation. If one could accept the price, the prize was a principled explanation for the history and design of all life. Unacceptably, this included the architecture of the human mind, all that now remained of the soul: our cherished mental life was a naturally selected product of organized matter, just one downstream consequence of the uncaring immensities of time and chance. The mind with its moral sense was taken out of the authoritative domain of clerics and philosophers. For Darwin, the responsibility for its investigation would be in the hands of evolutionary psychologists, of which he was the first. As readers could see from his books ''The Descent of Man'' and ''The Expression of the Emotions,'' there would be no prior guarantee that their findings would respect what society held sacrosanct.Although many Victorians welcomed the discrediting of a static Genesis creation, they still demanded a universe in which their values, ideologies and identities were ratified by some cosmic sanction. For Marxists and capitalists, anarchists and imperialists, Christians and freethinkers alike, humans were to be the summit, the goal around which the world is organized and toward which life and history progress. Despite many attempts, no compromise was possible between this need for ideological affirmation and the logic of Darwin's worldview. As he explained, in a world governed by physics and selection, humans are a ''chance,'' like other life forms ''a mechanical invention''; there is no ''necessary progression,'' so it ''is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another.'' Most disturbing was his recognition that because natural selection gave a contingent, materialist explanation for the existence of the moral capacity, it removed any divine or cosmic endorsement of its products. In a darkly funny passage in ''The Descent of Man,'' Darwin wrote that if humans had the same reproductive biology as bees, ''there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters.''As Browne shows, Darwin had unshakable moral commitments -- he was fiercely antislavery, furious that Lincoln's war aims did not center on abolition, enraged by cruelty to animals, politically liberal and radical. But virtually alone in his time, he did not seek to validate his commitments by appeal to nature, God or science. Darwinism was not a doctrine of the strong celebrating the rightness of their power over the weak. Chronically ill, anguished by the deaths of three dearly loved children, haunted by the possibility that he might have transmitted some hereditary vulnerability to his remaining children, Darwin was achingly aware of ''the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature.'' ''My God,'' he wrote to his friend Hooker, ''how I long for my stomach's sake to wash my hands of it.''Emerging out of the fertile detail in Browne's book, it is this aspect of Darwin's character that suggests answers. Darwin went farther than his contemporaries because he was less bound by the compulsion to make the universe conform to his predilections. While others rapidly turned aside, his stoicism in the face of bitter imaginative vistas allowed him to persevere along logical paths to some of the coldest places human thought has ever reached. In a eulogy, Huxley identified the ''intense and almost passionate honesty by which all his thoughts . . . were irradiated.'' It was this quality that won the admiration, but not the agreement, of his colleagues and of his nation. The will to know must have been singularly unbending in a man for whom even God's banishment or death was incidental to finding the truth about finch beaks, barnacle mating and primate laughter.John Tooby's book ''Universal Minds'' (with Leda Cosmides) is due out this winter. He is co-director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. |
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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John,
Regarding early Darwinism, a quote from Tooby's review:
> "Although many Victorians welcomed the discrediting of a static Genesis creation, they still demanded a universe in which their values, ideologies and identities were ratified by some cosmic sanction."
It this not, still, the real core of the debate? Are not details regarding mechanisms of natural selection merely ancillary to this philosophic quest?
One yet writes of our "moral sense" and "soul" as if these are something more than mental constructs, rationalizations of behaviors and perceived aspirations. If they are, at foundation, illusory and non-substantive, then Darwin's vision is correct in broad outline, and attempts to refine (or discredit) particular explanatory mechanisms and forces can be scientifically respected in that endeavor. If instead the goal is to inject the requirement of "soul", or cosmically sanctioned valuation (be it deist, humanist, or simply univeralist) then the effort is colored from the outset.
> "Darwin did NOT show how natural selection bridged life and non-life."
Perhaps the distinction between life and non-life is entirely illusory, a line drawn in sand. However, I have never heard Darwinists argue that life itself was "selected for", per se.
> "Darwin did NOT resolve the question of the architecture of the human mind."
The human "mind" has an architecture, as in, independent of the physiologial brain? Does it even have a "structure" that is not merely a reflection of that physiological manifestation?
Perhaps there is no question here to resolve.
> "The current sociobiological attempt to model the evolution of ethics is one of the most puzzling pieces of unverified ad hoc speculation, all too obviously designed to patch the desperate problem natural selection has with the moral sense!"
Modeling the evolution of "ethics" is like modeling angels dancing upon pinheads.
What distinguishes one "ethic" or "moral sense" from another, functionally? Is it any more than that which "some folks find agreeable"? Is it, then, fundamentally different that preferring vanilla ice cream over chocolate?
What, precisely, is the "desperate problem" with explaining a "moral sense"?
This seems like an exercise in problem invention. I might as well write of, say, the "desperate problem Judao-Christianity has with green flying elephants." They have certainly not been explained to MY satisfaction!
> "The nature of man is barely known to man himself"
Indeed. And the "slime" from which life and man arose was even less aware of the nature of man. Fortunately for us, "knowing the nature" was not a requirement.
And I surmise, if through our continued experiments, we create artificial life, we will scratch our heads, argue and theorize over how it has manifest, and come to little agreement.
Unfortunately for us, "knowing the nature" will not be a requirement.
Cheers! ____tony b____
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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John,
Regarding early Darwinism, a quote from Tooby's review:
> "Although many Victorians welcomed the discrediting of a static Genesis creation, they still demanded a universe in which their values, ideologies and identities were ratified by some cosmic sanction."
It this not, still, the real core of the debate? Are not details regarding mechanisms of natural selection merely ancillary to this philosophic quest?
One yet writes of our "moral sense" and "soul" as if these are something more than mental constructs, rationalizations of behaviors and perceived aspirations. If they are, at foundation, illusory and non-substantive, then Darwin's vision is correct in broad outline, and attempts to refine (or discredit) particular explanatory mechanisms and forces can be scientifically respected in that endeavor. If instead the goal is to inject the requirement of "soul", or cosmically sanctioned valuation (be it deist, humanist, or simply univeralist) then the effort is colored from the outset.
___________JLandon:
The issue is one of a decision procedure to produce 'certainty', and there, whatever our religious views, Darwin claimed, amazing, that on the basis of his 'hunches' suggesting natural selection, all these problems were solved, self, soul, the whole nine yards. The claim is so flimsily taken as proven in generalizations about deep time, never observed, that one must shake one's head in wonder here. Where's the proof?
The revolt is starting, and I think the issue of self, soul, however much some find these beliefs an agenda, remain unsolved by this theory of Darwin's, which Wallace, by the way, was smart enough to see would fail on these issues, whatever we think of his spiritual beliefs.
The proposition of Darwin remains unsufficiently proven to decide these issues. So the charge of some agenda or belief system is a bit onesided: the worst offenders seem to be the Darwinists themselves. Even someone sympathetic to naturalistic explanation would be wary of getting railroaded into this jump to a series of what are really preconceived conclusions.
> "Darwin did NOT show how natural selection bridged life and non-life."
Perhaps the distinction between life and non-life is entirely illusory, a line drawn in sand. However, I have never heard Darwinists argue that life itself was "selected for", per se.
_______________JLandon: Then you agree with me, I guess. As to the illusory difference of life and non-life, what do you mean?
It is not illusory to me.
> "Darwin did NOT resolve the question of the architecture of the human mind."
The human "mind" has an architecture, as in, independent of the physiologial brain? Does it even have a "structure" that is not merely a reflection of that physiological manifestation?
Perhaps there is no question here to resolve.
> "The current sociobiological attempt to model the evolution of ethics is one of the most puzzling pieces of unverified ad hoc speculation, all too obviously designed to patch the desperate problem natural selection has with the moral sense!"
Modeling the evolution of "ethics" is like modeling angels dancing upon pinheads.
What distinguishes one "ethic" or "moral sense" from another, functionally? Is it any more than that which "some folks find agreeable"? Is it, then, fundamentally different that preferring vanilla ice cream over chocolate?
What, precisely, is the "desperate problem" with explaining a "moral sense"?
This seems like an exercise in problem invention. I might as well write of, say, the "desperate problem Judao-Christianity has with green flying elephants." They have certainly not been explained to MY satisfaction!
_______________JLandon: There is a problem here because the 'agent' who can exercise ethical options seems to be a somewho that didn't evolve by Darwin's scheme, or those of the kin selectionists, group selectionists, et al.
Sociobiology is pure reductionism here, a point clear at least in E.O. Wilson who starts with a broad side against The Enemy, old Kant.
I pity a 'science' that has to make an enemy of Kant, whatever we think of him.
So long sucker.
> "The nature of man is barely known to man himself"
Indeed. And the "slime" from which life and man arose was even less aware of the nature of man. Fortunately for us, "knowing the nature" was not a requirement.
And I surmise, if through our continued experiments, we create artificial life, we will scratch our heads, argue and theorize over how it has manifest, and come to little agreement.
Unfortunately for us, "knowing the nature" will not be a requirement.
_______________JLandon: Go ahead and produce this artifical life, and I will agree with you. Til then, c'est la vie.
Again, my question, why are all the top scientists all Darwin dummies?
John Landon
http://eonix.8m.com
Get cracking on the eonic effect. All this talk about complex systems. I will show you a complex system and a half.
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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John,
Although I subscribe to the "Darwinist view" in generalities, I am not taking a stance upon any particular refinement, such as might be espoused by contemporary sociobiologists.
The bottom line is that Darwin pointed broadly in the direction of a "non-willful agent" giving rise to life as we know it, when alternatives (to my knowledge) involved the actions of an intentional and purposeful agent.
Fact: Honest Science can never rule out such an agent.
The reason is, one can always make the "hidden willful agent" ever more powerful and able to "hide".
Fact: Honest Science proceeds by seeking, at all times, explanations for the world that DO NOT rely upon a willful, purposeful agent.
The reason should be clear. If a willful agent can pull the strings to make something happen (or not), then there is no use at all in seeking and discovering structural relationships and predictive formulations ... they could be violated at any moment by the willful agent, rendering their scientific value moot.
> > "What, precisely, is the "desperate problem" with explaining a "moral sense"?"
> "There is a problem here because the 'agent' who can exercise ethical options seems to be a somewho that didn't evolve by Darwin's scheme, or those of the kin selectionists, group selectionists, et al."
Does this "problem" not begin with the assumption that there exists "ethical options"?
If we, in reality, do not exercise "ethical options", where is the problem to be solved?
Can you provide examples of agents exercising ethical options? Moreover, can you describe why such purported behavior cannot manifest in a Darwinian scheme of evolution?
Cheers! ____tony b____ |
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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The attempt to explain evolution without 'wilful agents' is fine by me, so where's the explanation?
The reason science disallows such things is-what? I forget the reason. The man who started this line of thought was, hohum, Newton, and he was a parttime physicist who spent his main effort on Alchemist. He rigged his system to allow 'will' to be exempt from the law of momentum,and needed God as part of the space-time sensorium, etc...
That should not induce despair, to lose the founder.
But I think Newton understood something.
Again, I sympathize with the reductionist veiwpoint. I merely wonder if reductionist thinking a la Darwin has succeeded. That ought to be my only complaint, what is claimed to explain doesn't actually do so.
Looking at evolutionary theory on its own terms in light of current biochemical discoveries, I have to wonder. At the least, we see something like computer programs lurking in the background. I mean, I don't buy the idea these structures arise by natural selection. Maybe I am wrong. But the burden of explanation remains.
Again, what is a 'non wilful agent'? Why use the term 'agent' at all then?
Let me state my own view, as to evolution in general.
There can be directional evolution seen empirically over the long range and the contingent evolution filling in the gaps, so to speak. It could be entirely possible, and I fear likely, that Darwinists emphasize one of these at the expense of the other.
You know, that was the original theory of evolution in Lamarck (I don't mean his cockeyed adaptational theory, but his broader theory). He said, very naturally, that evolution would have two components, an adaptational aspect, and a long range aspect. S. J. Gould by the way in Struccture of Evolutionary Theory is well aware of this and at pains to keep Darwin uninfected by the original commonsense of many prior to Darwin dumb-head reduction of commonsense in the name of eliminating all directional thingamajigs (?agents).
Study my eonic effect, by the way. You will see those two braided aspects detected in the short range of world history.
I understand the problem with 'agents' in mechanical systems. It does not compute. We are somewhere in the realm of 'nonrealizable systems' they whisper about in electronic books, somewhere near the beginning. But I note the math is potentially there, a something acting from the future.
I dunno. I think we are stuck making assumptions where the math hints but does not allow us to proceed.
In the meantime, guys like Dembski are running all over the field with no tacklers. Come on guys, wilful agents? Maybe not. But there must be systems that are more complex that what we see in the heritage of Newtonian types, a type Newton himself never pretended explained the 'wilful' aspect of organisms, keeping always in mind the dangers of illusory nonsense about 'will'.
John Landon
http://eonix.8m.com |
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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John,
I do concur with the limitations of reductionism.
Valuable to a point, it falls short when the nature of things depend upon all other things, at the level in which the world is holographic, per se. The simplifications of reductionism strip away the very fabric forming the basis of phenomena. It proceeds under the (Platonic?) assumption that a thing can be "unto itself", and examined without being transformed by the act of examination.
I distinguish naturalism from Newtonian mechanism.
While both hope to describe the world behaviors without appeal to an "intentional super-actor" (deity), the latter generally holds to a strict determinism. Causality Is God in the Newtonian view, as I see it. Nothing in the world proceeds except that it was "caused" by a preceeding manifestation.
Although quantum mechanics renders this view "broken", the determinist-mechanists hold that the fundamental "fuzziness of the universe way down there" is of no macroscopically manifest consequence, and can be "reduced away" in the construction of all functional things.
Gladly, I take this to be impossible. I "believe" in free will. Although it may be a "beyond provable", a strictly deterministic universe (the "billiard-ball" picture) would constitute a proof in the negative.
There are theories of "backward causality" that hope to re-inject determinism (of sorts) into the QM picture, and worth exploring, although the term "causality" gets a bit bent in the process.
And what can science ever hope to really know?
As I've said before, (just as a point of discourse) science can never rule-out the presence of an omnipotent omniscient being that makes everything happen. Such a being would easily have the capacity to remain forever hidden. But science proceeds under the negative assumption, and must in order to do its business. The "laws" it formulates are otherwise nothing more than transient observations possessing no validity from one moment to the next.
In a similar vein, I don't believe that "free will" can ever be proven to exist, no matter how much I "feel" willful.
Is the job of science to validate competing philosophies, or to produce predictively consistent artifacts (i.e., support engineering)?
As much fun as it is to apply it to the former, its real service is in the latter. Every philosophy I've ever heard argued is argued with attention to logic, and deemed flawed if leading to a logical inconsistency.
Nowhere is it written, neither in stone nor in the sky, that the universe, the "real physik", behaves logically and free from contradiction, as can be formulated in an axiomatic theory. We create theories to explain observations, and it is we who demand that out theories be contradiction-free. The universe does not care about our theories, and at foundation may not be amenable to any contradiction-free logical treatment.
(But its so much fun to try!)
Cheers! ____tony b____
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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Having pulled Newton's beard and threatened (not here, but I may) to start another Romantic Movement, I should say that science doesn't have to abdicate to religion. It is simply a question of epistemology. Religionist will cheat, also. Regrettable. When the going gets rough, 'have faith'.
Here Kant mediates quite nicely between the extremes of the metaphysical
It is worth considering his Third Antinomy, in light of causal/free will questions.
His formulation, when you consider he was raised a Pietist is more than fair, but his terminology is routinely misunderstood, 'transcendental idealism' which may/may not be transcendent and may/may not need 'idealism'.
The point was that, idealism and materialism apart, we tend so project causal/design question on reality. I think QM was the first taste of something beyond both extremes. Just plain weird.
Kant is usually taken as refuted and driven out of QM studies, rightly or wrongly. But as Nick Herbert (almost) comes out and says at the beginning of Quantum Reality (with Kant's photograph there)there is something 'sort of' Kant-like in QM
That's not the point really. It is just that our perceptions can't easily integrate the contradiction of the Third Antinomy. But if you look closely at an on-off switch, there is no inherent problem with the contradiction (as long as you don't claim it requires 'free will' to trip an on-off switch, it only requires some 'degree of freedom' a la a computer mouse click on an option button). These intermediate states of 'causal nexus, not quite causality' and 'free optionality, not necessarily free will) show that nature, and probably evolutionary nature moves into some beyond on the causal question without violating its 'by definition' naturalistic approach to being Nature, Mother Nature or not, kindergarten types can fill me in.
However, the math does get weird as it gets wired. The simple math for a current and the Fourier math for a plain vanilla on-off switch is a clue to something, probably the Fourier essence of a lot of things beyond our Monkey-see/Monkey-do. It is interesting that electric math and quantum math were the same math, sort of, with the Dirac stuff and the Heaviside stuff.
So back to causal/free stuff. I think, in light of the QM and Electric stuff, we should see how remarkably close Kant came with his quaint Third Antinomy. Kant tends to wish his 'transcendental' is 'transcendent' but if I have him straight, he sees these things as indicating a deeper aspect of nature, not a higher aspect of divinity.
The previous paragraph must mean something. don't get fainting spells.
See my Kant page, http://eonix.8m.com/kant.htm
John Landon |
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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S,
> " The only way in which free will could exist is if the universe created itself (it's a reflexive processing language a la Langan's version of reality). Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your allegiance, the 'universe creating itself' is logically incoherent, as well. "Nihilo ex nihilo fit" <-- ontological restriction on reality."
I try to imagine a perfect void, an "empty universe" fom which a "universe" might spring forth... Logically silly notion, of course, but not so much the "springing forth" as the concept of a perfect void. I say such a thing is itself a oxymoron.
If there was "never a void" (such an impossible object!) then the universe never needed to create itself.
The entire notion of "creation of the universe" is bound up in assumptions about time, before and after, etc., having a independent "reality" all its own. The "time-concept" seems reasonable in these "middle scales" where we live, but may be unextensible as a coherent concept when approaching the "ultimate" scales of large and small. And where the time-concept fails, what becomes of causality or determinism? What does it mean to say "A caused B", or "X was determined" when before and after may overlap?
And where is it written that the universe must bow to logical coherence?
I suspect that any attempt to formulate an axiomatic theory of free will shall be like the attempts to square the circle... impossible except by an infinite regress.
Cheers! ____tony b____ |
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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John,
While I am not as familiar with mystical psychologies and traditions as you seem to be, let me comment on the attributed observation:
> "the "I", the soul, the mind, and more. 'Being, consciousness, and will' are completely distinguished. Mind is not the same as self, and neither is the same as soul. The will is different from all of these. All this was denounced as Sufi pastiche."
Whatever "truth" may exist, it will only be "spoken" in these forums in terms of ... term. To whatever degree "terms" are our attempt to represent reality via distinctions, they are inherently suspect (in a Zen Buddhist sense).
The mind has the capacity of staring at the "one thing" and seeing a multitude. We distinguish and categorize because ... we can. And then we believe the categories represent something significant.
The "Western Thought Tradition" is highly enamored of formal logic. We have convinced ourselves (to a degree, at least) that our ability to entertain rational deductive mentation (All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, thus Socrates is mortal) reflects somehow our "brain's" standard mode of operation, rather than merely one of many transient (and relatively recent) creations of thought.
Enamored as well with Platonic perfection, Cartesian and Newtonian reductions, we confuse naturalism/materialism with "causalism/determinism".
The "nascent attempts" to create artificial "mind" via electronic/algorithmic functionalities rely heavily upon recreating the "rational/conceptual" mental manifestations, even to the point of equating the brain's underlying neurons with complexes of transistors. And (present) transistor circuits only "work properly" if all signals are processed causally and deterministically. Ergo, much of AI argues backward that "brains" are purely causal in operation.
But increasingly, our investigations of physics tells us that the universal "terra-firma" is not purely deterministic, minds or no minds, man or no man.
There is nothing "outwardly obvious" that precludes the construction of "artificial beings" whose "connection to the real" (ground of being) is not as intimately in touch with the non-deterministic substrate as the squishy-grey brain we carry in our heads. These artificia will not be "purely algorithmic", nor purely causal, nor absolutely predestined, any more than our bio-ware is so determined, despite being a collection of material atoms. The Newtonian billiard-ball universe died almost a century ago.
If you hope, however, to argue that mind, spirit, soul, consciousness, etc., have some basis beyond that of the physics proper, such evidence will be hard to come by, and problematic to convey.
And as far as building machines "smarter and more functionally capable than ourselves", such metaphysical considerations seem irrelevant. You build, you observe behavior, you reap the rewards ... or not.
Cheers! ____tony b____
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Re: Chapter 8: Dembski?s Outdated Understanding
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I am not a mystic, Buddhist, Zen Buddhist, or a proponent of the distinction of matter and spirit. Mysticism is never defined and it tends to be a hate word in certain people. I have heard behaviorists angrily declare people who acknowledge any aspect of mind to be real to be 'mystics', next stop looney bin. So I would tend to be a mystic, and therefore a target of charges of 'crazy' even for the most ordinary statements about human psychology even after denying any connection to mysticism.
My point was to suggest that issues of so-called mysticism are really about the ordinary discourse of psychological self-observation.
As to issues of logic, self, and consciousness, there is no necessity to abandon logic or rational enquiry in such areas. A man like Schopenhauer, or Kant, shows how the trail of reason proceeds in such areas. The issue is reallyone of the epistemology of self. Here it is in many ways the aggressive reductionist materialist who is the mystic, an obscure point until you see how Marxists, for example, are antagonistic to Kantians because they are really Hegelians in disguise. An obscure point, but metaphysical materialism is almost a worse form of metaphysics than the rest, if only because it pretends to be what it is not.
I can't help it if the 'self' is not direcly knowable. It is not mystical to say so. Mystics have indeed muddled the waters by peddling knowledge of unknown things.
Now, as to the project of creating conscious machines, the issue is open. I think, having set aside 'mysticism', claimed in principle the materiality in a broad sense of the basic question, which isn't mystical, of 'self-consciousness', that the project to generate this via technological constructs is poorly defined at the start. The parts of the puzzle need to be resolved in man first.
Anyway, I look at my computer. It is the five upgrade in the PC line, over the years. We consider that some exponential process will lead to conscious machines. But what I am using now hasn't changed one iota in basic essentials from the machines of the late seventies. It is the same widget, save only added refinements of memory and speed. It has not evolved in any essential way.
Again, the issue of mysticism is often a sign of the final stages of confusion among its own proponents. The only issue is that of free attention, the witness, and the ambiguity of the self. There is no mysticism there, it is a practical situation, and it impinges on the actual state of affairs that lurks behind simple issues of consciousness, which are not so simple.
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Evolution, history, purpose, Paul Davies
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Purpose in history and evolution
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/science/story/0,12450,879894,00.html
Universal truths
Paul Davies says that scientific discovery does not make the cosmos seem increasingly pointless
The Guardian
Thursday January 23, 2003
In a famous conclusion to his popular cosmology book The First Three Minutes, the physicist Steven Weinberg wrote: "The more the universe appears comprehensible, the more it also appears pointless." This comment echoes the sentiment of many contemporary scientists. Although they may wax lyrical about the awesome beauty, majesty and subtlety of the natural world, they nevertheless deny any point or purpose to the universe.
snip
Biologists have used the supposed lack of directionality in physical processes in support of a philosophical position similar to Weinberg's. Stephen Jay Gould liked to attack the Victorian notion of evolutionary progress. He stresses that nature is blind, and so cannot look ahead to anticipate solutions to evolutionary problems. Darwinism is based on purely random accidental changes; some good, some bad. Gould says evolution is not going anywhere, it is just exploring the vast space of biological possibilities. He concludes that if evolution is blind, the universe as a whole must be pointless. The evidence for the directionlessness of biological evolution is scientifically less compelling than is the case for the second law of thermodynamics. Taking the biosphere as a whole, its complexity has clearly risen since life on Earth was restricted to a few microbes. The issue, however, is whether this merely represents an undirected meandering through random biological structures, or whether there is a systematic trend toward greater complexity. The fossil record is ambiguous.
____________________John Landon
The eonic model at http://eonix.8m.com gives a complete example of historical 'directionality' as reflection of the 'teleological' in historical evolution. This is perhaps the only comprehensive example known of the issue, in terms of actual close range data, with respect to the descent of man. The terms 'purpose' and 'teleology' are dropped and replaced with the different 'e-sequence' and ;t-stream' History shows, to a close examination, how hard it is to detect evolution (in any sense) at all, and how the 'selection of regions' (confusingly) advances overall directionality. It is a long way from Darwinian fundamentalism
It is simply a Darwinian fiction that evolutionary biology proves a lack of purpose in evolution. Not even the earliest scientists, such as Newton, took this posiition, as such. Darwinians are crypto-metaphysical here, 'annoyed by Paley'. They want the one principle that will free them of Paley. They won't have, anymore than Paley will have his proof of design.
Part of the problem is the Newtonian mindset (this has been said a thousand times in vain) that fails to consider the built in venue for teleology in the optical versions of physics, cf. Barrow and Tipler's text. That, and the anthropic principles, raise as many problems as they solve to be sure. But their is no inherent reason, mathematically, for the extreme reductionist versions of biological evolution. Check out old Godel. There is no surprise left to the possibility that physics, no matter how sophisticated, is incomplete, and possibly incomplete just here. Physics is a strong vote against teleology! But so what! The facts are the facts. And what are the facts?
The facts are that evolution doesn't add up to Darwin's thesis. It was Hoyle's original point, before it got scramble in muddle. The length of time compared to the result leaves a question mark. Some compression factor is most suspiciously at work, and a candidate there is 'directionality. Because this is always turned into a spirit/matter debate the obvious point is forever lost. But now in the age of developmental biology we ought to be at least suspicious, please, that some 'developmental' factor is at work over the long range. At least suspicious. One problem is the sheer cunning of the presentation of the subject. Students are raised on propaganda and can't think straight. In any case developmental processes are a good example of the 'compression' factor. So we _do_ have some evidence of directional issues. It is not usually put that way, in the crossfire of religion/science combat.
Let the dust settle, and heal thy brain, it has been the object of warring propagandas.
Teleology is open to as much confusion as any assertion of its absence. At what level would be detect teleology? Teleologists discredit themselves as fast as Darwinians.
The most we can hope is to find specific examples.
Theologians will exploit even the barest hint of teleology for their own purposes. So the confusion is in part a protective 'wall of silence' that has become second nature, confused with a theory, and that has distorted all thought on the issue, the stance has gone on so long people have lost the power of thought here. The eighteenth century seemed to be able to at least think on the question. Cf. the embrace and caution of Kant on the antinomy of teleological judgement. It has hardly been bettered. Newton saw very clearly the dilemma of what he had created.
The writings of Gould give testimony to the confusion of teleology, ideology, and politics. Fair enough. But this reflects in part the confusions of the term 'progress' applied to so many differenct domains. It is an unreasonable stance in the end on Gould's part. Applying the idea of progress to evolution can be notably silly. But some kind of progression has to be suspected, or inferred. We cannot directly detect teleology. But overall we must suspect directionality, of some kind.
Teleology can indeed be an ideological trap. Look at its fate in the Second International Marxist versions. Capitalist ideology is no better. Hegel's great system is easily shown to stumble like an elephant on teleology. Teleology is an abstraction. Its detection would not be easy or conclusive. But we cannot assume that natural selection is a decisive proof of rejection. It is indeed at muddle to confuse economics, biology, and the social history of these economic systems.
But then Darwin was always suspected of this kind of crypto-ideology.
We must consider the factual traces of 'something like directionality' in closely observed regions over long periods of time. The only such example is the eonic effect in history. There we see at once how directional evolution can arise, the form it would take, and the extremely high level on which it operates.
Looking at history how can we detect directionality? The eonic model shows one way, but only in the context shown. We are left highly suspicious of the Darwinian claims about the descent of man. Darwin's claims have never been proven properly.
John Landon
Website for
World History and the Eonic Effect
http://eonix.8m.com
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Re: Evolution, history, purpose, Paul Davies
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The reason that most biologists deny teleology in nature is that there is that there is little, if any, reason to believe that it exists, and it is not necessary to explain anything.
Yes, the biosphere has gotten more complex with the passage of time. But this does not mean that there is an underlying purpose driving that complexity. It isn't necessary. The vast majority of random genetic changes are either neutral or negative in terms of survivability. However, selection works against the probability of those changes being expressed in subsequent generations. So, even though only a small percentage of genetic changes are positive, those that give an organism an advantage in its environment tend to be passed on. So, one sees greater cerebralization in vertebrate species over time, because of the logic of selection, not because "progress" is somehow built in. (At the same time, there is no evidence of greater cerebralization in insects at least since the Mesozoic ...for a beetle, for example, the energy costs of supporting a larger brain apparently outweigh the benefits.)
Some people disparage Darwininian evolution because they believe "it's all random." Fred Hoyle's quip about the tornado in a junkyad producing a jet airplane comes to mind. But natural selection, though apparently purposeless, is not random. Mutations are random. The events that apparently produce punctuated equilibrium in the ecosophere are random. But selection has a simple, relentless, internal logic.
If there were a purpose in evolution, that would almost necessarily imply a directing agent driving that purpose. But, Occam's razor tells us it's usually not a good idea to presuppose the existence of entities or forces that are not necessary to explain a phenomenon. And in this case, there is no reason to presuppose such a thing.
BC
Theological sidenote, in case someone wants to get into a religious argument, which I have no desire to get into: This is not to say that there is no God; the existence of God cannot be determined scientifically, and while no intellectual argument offered thus far in the history of Western philosophy for God's existence holds water, it is also impossible to disprove God's existence, given the deity's supposed properties.
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Re: Evolution, history, purpose, Paul Davies
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I was quoting a link from Paul Davies, who will have to speak for himself.
Teleology is one thing, directionality is another. In the example of my own model, I restrict the argument to directionality. That I can show in visible history, to a balance of the evidence. That's a plus for teleology, but not a proof.
But showing directionality is enough to cast suspicion on Darwin's account of the descent of man.
That's that. It doesn't prove Darwin wrong, but it does force the issue to the following: we need more evidence of the 'in betweens' in the fossil record.
I am often puzzled by the attitude of scientists here. They seem to have taken the hand outs in textbooks too seriously. If you look closely at some of the literature in the fields of genetics you notice that it is misleading. Darwin is either ignored, or praised, but the argument is not anything that Darwin said.
There we see developmental processes. These are obscured by the (probably unconscious) bluff that nevers draws any conclusions beyond the particulars.
But the facts ( which were obvious in the generation of Geoffrey St. Hilaire, et al such as the teleomechanists, as they grasped the implications of embryos)show ultra complex chemical machines unfolding complex organs and body plans in programmed sequences. Is a normal individual required to suppress ALL doubts this just might be a sign of something Darwin couldn't handle? Now we are getting the whole nine yards with a YES BUT (if you are foolish enough to ask embarrassing questions) that the original toolkit from before the Cambrian arose by natural selection. Where's the proof. They have lost two rounds of the argument in retreat. I have no idea how the toolkit arose, but I sure won't believe professionals in the field without some sort of lie detector test.
(By the way, just saw a text, Origination of Organismic Form, Muller and Newman, where the editor of the essays grants the point about the toolkit, so my position is "I am not taking it anymore", fed up, post Darwinist....)
It is not nice to play people for stupid, but I fear either they are stupid or that the establishment of Big Science has to maintain stupidity levels at maximum social control levels. It will end badly except for Dawkins whose one million copies has non refundable bankability plus interest. At least we can forget Darwin a bit, and go and sin no more in the name of science.
John Landon
http://eonix.8m.com
If one can |
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