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Will Machines Become Conscious? >
Are We Spiritual Machines?
Permanent link to this article: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0502.html
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Are We Spiritual Machines?
Ray Kurzweil Vs. the Critics of Strong A.I.
Computers are becoming more powerful at an accelerating rate, but will they ever become conscious? In Are We Spiritual Machines?, critics of strong artificial intelligence (the view that computers will go fully conscious) square off with one of A.I.'s leading proponents, Ray Kurzweil.
Click here for the full text of Are
We Spiritual Machines?
Kurzweil says that nonbiological intelligence will soon become
indistinguishable from conscious entities such as humans. He explains
how we will "reverse engineer" our software (our minds)
and "upgrade" our hardware (our bodies) to indefinitely
extend human life -- before the dawn of the 22nd century.
Kurzweil argues that accelerating growth of computer power will
result in machine intelligence exceeding human intelligence early
in this century. Nanobots will scan and enable the reverse engineering
of our brains, provide 3D immersive virtual realities, and free
the human mind from its severe physical limitations as the next
step in evolution. Ultimately, humankind will "merge with its
computational technology."
And what do Kurzweil's critics say?
- Philosopher John Searle challenges Kurzweil's position with
his famous "Chinese Room" argument.
- Biologist Michael Denton disagrees with the idea that machines
are capable of having the vital characteristics of organisms and
argues that Kurzweil's materialism does not do justice to humans
or intelligent agents.
- Philosopher and mathematician William Dembski argues that Kurzweil's
vision is an "impoverished view of spirituality" because
intelligence cannot be reduced to any sort of mechanism.
- Zoologist Thomas Ray questions the ability to create intelligent
machines by copying human brains into computers.
- Kurzweil, in turn, offers counter-arguments to each of these
positions.
"Although Artificial Intelligence may seem like an esoteric
topic with little relevance to anything else, in fact, many of the
most important questions we face from technology to theology converge
on this single subject," say leading futurist George Gilder
and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Jay Wesley Richards in the
introduction.
Kurzweil's predictions have sparked tremendous controversy, most
notably Bill Joy's (of Sun Microsystems) well-known article in Wired
magazine (April 2000). Joy wrote that Kurzweil's predictions of
the future are a "robotic dystopia."
Are We Spiritual Machines? was born out of the controversial
closing panel session titled "Spiritual Machines" at the
Gilder-Forbes Telecosm '98 conference in Lake Tahoe in September
1998.
Timeline
- September 1998: Kurzweil predicts the coming of strong A.I.
at the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm event, Lake Tahoe. UC Berkeley philosopher
of mind, professor John Searle, scoffs.
- November 1998: "Immortality at last," proclaims Forbes
regarding Kurzweil's forthcoming book.
- December 1998: Kurzweil publishes his visionary The Age of Spiritual
Machines. He predicts computers will supersede humans in "the
next step of evolution."
- April 2000: Sun Microsystem's Bill Joy responds to meeting Kurzweil
at the '98 Telecosm in Wired Magazine's famous "Why The Future
Doesn't Need Us." Joy fears the Kurzweil future as a "robotic
dystopia."
- June 2002: Kurzweil's critics gather and challenge his vision
in "Are We Spiritual Machines?" Kurzweil responds and
continues to defend the imminence of strong A.I.
- Christmas 2049: ... Are You Human or Machine?
Click here for the full text of Are
We Spiritual Machines?
Are We Spiritual Machines?: Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong
A.I. $14.95 Discovery
Institute Press June, 2002 ISBN 0963865439
Ray Kurzweil, George Gilder, John Searle, William Dembski, Thomas
Ray, Michael Denton, Jay Richards [ed.]
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Mind·X Discussion About This Article:
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Materialism
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the trouble with kurzweil is that he attributes intelligence to MATTER and MACHINES instead of to HIMSELF.
thus, he displaces the problem, but doesn't solve it:
Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of the world. For
every attempt at an explanation must begin with the formation of thoughts
about the phenomena of the world. Materialism thus begins with the thought
of matter or material processes. But, in doing so, it is already confronted
by two different sets of facts: the material world, and the thoughts about
it. The materialist seeks to make these latter intelligible by regarding
them as purely material processes. He believes that thinking takes place in
the brain, much in the same way that digestion takes place in the animal
organs. Just as he attributes mechanical and organic effects to matter, so
he credits matter in certain circumstances with the capacity to think. He
overlooks that, in doing so, he is merely shifting the problem from one
place to another. He ascribes the power of thinking to matter instead of to
himself. And thus he is back again at his starting point. How does matter
come to think about its own nature? Why is it not simply satisfied with
itself and content just to exist? The materialist has turned his attention
away from the definite subject, his own I, and has arrived at an image of
something quite vague and indefinite. Here the old riddle meets him again.
The materialistic conception cannot solve the problem; it can only shift it
from one place to another.
(<a href="http://www.elib.com/Steiner/Books/GA004/TPOF/pofc2.html">Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 2</a>)
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Re: Materialism
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Hello all,
''Why do we (necessarily) need to gain a "Compleate Theory of Mind" in order to create intelligent systems, and for that matter, even systems that can become as creative and aware of themselves as we seem to be?''
I don''t quite agree with this.
In the perspective of a spiritual machine, we certainly need to understand the whole meaning of a mind in order to construct a real intelligent system.
What is ''Spiritual''? For a man who is spiritual, he should have his own thoughts, and decisions. These are the principal of what we have defined a ''mind''.
If you believe in god, you might think that god knows everything. And god knows everyone''s mind. That''s why our god can ''construct'' creatures like us. Similarly, if we are to construct a robot, if we don''t get a full understanding of what ''mind'' is, how do we give this robot some ''mind'' and let it makes its own decision and thoughts.
However, if you don''t believe in god, you might believe that humans'' mind are built from some basis. But where is the basis coming from? We don''t care. But that''s exactly the whole theory behind to define what a ''mind'' is.
Beside, this is a very interesting topic. We really need a fresh definition of a ''Spiritual Machine''. As the author has mentioned what is a person. To define a person, I would describe it in terms of a life. We are all living here with a life, around more than 60 to 80 years. We have born. We have grown. We have sick, and we have dead. This is a life. But what is it for a machine? It has been manufactured. It has been used. It has been out of order, and it has been ''certified''. So a computer can be born. It can be sick, and it can be dead. But it has never grown up. Should the possibly made intelligent body be able to eat? Or is it necessary for it to eat and grow up? This should lead to the problem of the purpose of a life. For people not believing in God, there are many answers. And they all know what a meaningful life we should have.
So are we spiritual machines? I would say yes, by defining ''Machine'' properly. We are all purpose driven. We were born to do something I believe. Just like a computer or a real machine nowadays. We set a goal for them and they perform some specific tasks for us. The only thing that distinguishes us with a machine is the term ''Spiritual''. We know what we are thinking. We also know what our machine is thinking (we should be able to). However we usually don''t know what our fellow is thinking. If you think that ''mind'' is just a kind of chemical reaction inside the brain, the term ''Spiritual'' might mean nothing to you because if so then we would have no spirit. Its not only God believers believe that human don''t just have a body. Human have spirit too.
You might argue with the technology on cloning creatures. There used to be a paradox, ''If A is cloned to B, would they both claim that they are A?'' What would you feel if I told you that you are B actually. So, yes, we are actually spiritual machines. We can clone, just like a machine can be copied from one to another, but with different thoughts according to different environment. As we are spiritual machines, I would predict that human minds spiritual machine can be made from us in the future.
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Re: Materialism
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Nonsense. One could say the same about the mysterious "living force". But already, bio engineers have cobbled together a polio virus out of raw parts and it functioned/lived. If one could assemble atoms together in the exact same pattern as an existing person, that assembled mind would think.
Already, a laptop computer isn't exactly intelligent, but it's not exactly dumb as a rock either.
While we still have a long road ahead in understanding the deeper principles behind intelligence, it is not a mysterious or impossible task. We've already developed some pretty good peices from Bayesian networks, adaptive control theory, statistical boosting etc.
One missing peice is that obviously (to me) one of the key components in intelligence is to build models of the world...in humans at least, these world models contain models of the self -- perhaps this is route to self-awareness. Model building/learning already exists in the field of Bayesian networks/graphical models.
We'll get there, slower than hoped, sooner than believed...and then you're going to feel silly when a "machine" digs up these old messages and sends you email as a lark.
Gary |
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Re: Are We Spiritual Machines?
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I had the pleasure of working with Herbert Simon at Carnegie Mellon before he past. Many concepts that Ray mentions, such as emergent properties, subsystems, chaos theory, and exponential economic growth are a logical extention of works that I've seen before that I take simply as fact. There are however a few implications that I wanted to extend that may be a little less clear.
1)
All evidence indicates that The Law of Accelerating Returns is correct. However, for a moment lets assume that growth is linear and Moore's law is the last paradigm of growth. If 20 Pflops is equal to human processing power and Blue Gene is 1 Pflop in 2005, even at Moores law growth rates, Blue Gene would reach 20 Pflops by 2012. This introduces a few issues that seem to be overlooked.
2)
Accelerating returns or not, by about 2012 there will be supercomputers with human computing power. However, it could be 10 to 20 years before the same technology is affordable to the public consumer. But what happens when the first human level machine is built by IBM or another company in a research lab? Naturally they will want to try it out. Applications range from nuclear weapons testing, protein design, to weather and stock market prediction. And the next step will be to build another one, while copying all of the 'intelligent experience' into the sister machine, that could share communication and knowledge with the first machine. My point is that today we don't know the implications of such computing power, and years before anyone do, a few researchers will. The owners of these machines will have tremendous power. They will be able to out-think us in every way. And the revolution of change will not be in the public eye, but kept secretly in a research lab. By the time consumers can buy their own human level computer, a single person like Bill Gates will have supercomputers with more computing power than all the humans in the world, along with the power and wealth that comes with it.
3)
People often confuse the differences between AI and computer simulation of human intelligence. Computer simulation of human intelligence is where the sub-level processes are built to simulate human processes. Neural network technology is Computer simulation of human intelligence, which is a subset of AI. AI is simply an artificial system which gives the perception of being intelligent. It doesn't matter how is built, it matters what the outcome is. In any case, intelligence and consciousness are emergent properties of non-intelligent systems. Although we study sub-systems in order to reverse engineer, the measurement of AI is independent of its subsystems.
4)
In reaction to Turing based arguments, there are humans that haven't learned language; does that mean that they are not intelligent? Or does it mean that they have the capability of being intelligent, but haven't become intelligent yet? Is a child intelligent if it hasn't learned to speak yet? My point is simply that Turing was trying to provide us a general baseline of human intelligence, and that it is helpful as long as taken with a grain of salt.
5)
The economic implications of technology are often confused. Gilder was right about telecommunications growth; however he was just as wrong about who would enjoy the benefits of it. The innovator has no guarantee of success. Consumers and businesses benefit greatly from free (or very cheap) long distance. However AT&T and Worldcom will probably be lucky to avoid bankruptcy. Technology competition forces rapid price depreciation and it may be the case that it is everybody but technology companies that gain from new technology. At least that is how it seems today.
6)
Kurzweil's points out a few possible outcomes of the singularity, which may take on a religious following. One of the questions that he briefly mentions is why haven't we been visited by aliens or found anything from SETI? If the singularity is the natural growth of life then either we are the first, we haven't been contacted to do speed limits of the universe, or we were already contacted. We could be first, but that is too unlikely for me to believe. Another singularity of aliens could be headed towards us, but are too far away. Given the fact that the singularity will alter the cosmos drastically, and we haven't observed anything strange this is also seems unlikely. Thus, by far the most probable solution is that we have already been contacted by the singularity. But how could that be the case if the cosmos that surrounds us is empty of 'smart' matter? The most probable answer to this is that we are not in the universe at all. Our universe exists as a compressed computer simulation running in another singularity. And thus we are part of a recursive composition of universes. After all, we've already built weather models, and nuclear bomb explosions in simulations, why not an entire universe?
Chris Mack
emergentAI.com |
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Re: Are We Spiritual Machines?
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Chris,
The most probable answer to why we haven't seen aliens is that the singularity never happens. The law of accelerating returns is false and is more appropriately called neo-Malthusianism. No growth trend can continue forever. Our goal should be to figure out if we have passed the inflection point of salient events or not.
Natural selection does not increase complexity. It just looks like it does only because initially it can only get more complicated. It must build on what came before but there is no direction to it, either in intelligence, size or whatever. Only in the last 7 million years did brain size increase and we don't even have the biggest brains (Neanderthals were bigger). Technology does have a direction towards increasing complexity thanks to the fact that science is directed. However, I believe we are entering into an era of diminished marginal returns. We have plucked all the low hanging fruit and there aren't any scientific discoveries on the horizon that will lead to new technologies.
Indeed, the killer argument against the singularity is 'Why haven't we seen it yet?' Instead of saying that we are first or that we are already living in a computer, we need to entertain the large and obvious possibility that it simply never happens. The technological problems with minituarization, AI, nanotech, etc., are divergent problems and have no easy solution.
-Brad |
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Re: Are We Spiritual Machines?
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There are two likely explanations as to why we haven't seen a singularity, both might be true:
1) The distribution of how long species live makes escape from their home star system very improbable
2) The "Rare Earths" hypothesis is true -- multi-cellular life, let alone intelligence is exceedingly rare.
I lean towards number 2 as primary since there's plenty of energy and materials and hence long survivability once one can sustain exploration outside of the home planet. But 2 must be true: Just look at the ratio of living mass to dead mass in our own solar system and you'll get an idea of local rarity. Also, complex life depends on so many conditions such as: right balance of metals, stable star, not too close to other stars or nebula, circular orbits, continental drift etc Maybe naturally evolved intelligence occurs at a rate of somewhat less than once per galaxy.
But this is lucky for us, since by tautology an expanding life form is expansionistic in ideology. Better its us, via our bio/technical descendants to colonize our local space. Also, the huge energy/time costs of interstellar travel makes it more logical to just send out small self-assembling "seeds".
Gary |
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Re: Are We Spiritual Machines?
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Evidently, the conflicting conclustions of this debate are the natural outworkings of the foundational presuppositions of each contributors worldview.
I found the introduction informative and insightful, for beneath the flora and fluff of each response, is the rockhard substrate of a given seiries of premises taken ultimately by 'faith'.
To examine these 'hidden' bedrock beliefs is but worthy and wise an endeavour, for to make explicit our operating base is to not only observe one's discrete argument, but to also know why he makes it.
Ultimately then we are all 'spiritual creatures', because as beings who have not their origin in themselves we are forced to look without - at least in a some capacity - to understand the true nature of things (origins, purpose, destiny, .......truth!).
This is s good starting point for religious inquiry.............for i believe what has been revealed outside of us, points to the something greater - for you can not have a complex, intricately designed creation, without a personal Creator.
Manoj Ranchord
Cutting Edge International
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Re: Are We Spiritual Machines?
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I am an engineer but AI is not my field ; while i was exploring this incredible website, i realized that i probably missed a great modern adventure !
Since I am interested in possible convergences between sciences and anciant traditions (such as Buddhism), it seems to me that AI could be a fruitful angle of attack.
I assume this seemingly provocative title is a reformulation of the strong AI.
Bohr said that the ultimate goal of science is to enable us to understand what to understand means.
This question - the title of this book - is worth being asked but maybe not being answered yet. To me, its merit is to assign a fascinating goal to the AI exploration: to better know ourselves and to understand what words like "mind", "intelligence", "consciousness", "to think", "emotions", "to understand"... actually encompass.
If we are not thinking "machines", what are we ?
I am not uneasy with the possible answers, i am just uneasy with definitive ones. To me, criticizing to strong AI (which is the natural scientific position) is the real challenge and the most difficult part. In our times, trying to foresee what will be our reality in 100 yrs is a very very bold attempt.
Intriguingly complex behaviours can emerge from simple "machines": this suggests to me that, whether brain is or is not a complex machinery, is not the point, nor is to know whether this machine is biological, silicium-based or whatever substrate. Besides, it seems that plasticity, adaptation, novelty or learning capabilities are modelized or simulated in some ways by AI.
So, what are the specific properties of our brain ? Is it simply a question of complexity, a complexity which is to be exceeded by AI as time goes by ?
Could it be related to an inner language, a versatile system of representation enabling superior data fusion capabilities ? After all, maybe we have to return to the basic function of our brain that is to embed heterogenous data from varied senses into a coherent scene.
great job you do guys.
jeff
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Re: The site is hard and annoying to use, please change it
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>Exactly what difficulties are you having with this site.
Hmm let me think, maybe I'm blind and the site just won't parse through my Brailleparser, Flash doesn't support any technology for making the documents accessible to me, the sites' frames also doesn't parse, there are NO meta tags whatsoever that can tell programs and bots what the site is about and there are no titles to the images describing what they're about.
If I want to access a web site through my phone (via something like TellMe) the exact same problems appear.
Then how do I know all this? A friend of mine who isn't blind parses kurzweilai.net for me. Bit of a waste wouldn't you say when the web was explicitly constructed to make documents available to freaks like me.
>You must be either poorly sighted or just damn thick to have problems navigating around this site. If it were for people like Jacobson the web would be a bland poory designed nightmare >of a place, with no unique creativity.
>
>Im Fed up of people like Jacobson trying to control and standadize everything.
Care to guess what I'm fed up with?
And by the way, his name is "Jakob Nielsen", not Jacobson.
>If you have a problem with flash and nicely designed GFX then go back to using a dial up modem and a BBS Boarg and stop moaning.
I AM using a dial up modem and in Sweden, where I live, phone access is paid by the minute which makes using the web a race against time. I probably don't have to tell you that blindness does not speed things up.
There really doesn't need to be a contradiction between what we are saying as there can be multiple versions of kurzweilai.net. You can access the flash, frames, gfx and glitz version and I can have a stripped version that is treated like a king by my accessibility tools.
Rikard |
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Re: The site is hard and annoying to use, please change it
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Also I'm a bit bothered about the replies I get. Am I writing about irrelevant matters, don't you get the reasons for making things accessible and do I have to wait for the singularity to be able to function online as an equal? How can you be sure it's not a blind, deaf, mute and lame person who will make the biggest contributions to this area of research?
I've always thought this site was simple to use, and just great, ever since they cleared up an initial password problem (that I think my machinery partially caused).
That said, I think Rikard Linde is correct (hope I got your name right, Rikard).
It seems highly likely to me that the first transhumanist of any significance will be someone who was once sighted, but is now blind (based on research performed in Portugal by Dobelle Group http://www.dobelle.com/index.html ). The dobelle Group has simulated edge detection (I believe) and basic phosphene reproduction in the formerly-sighted blind, due to the fact that the way the visual cortex is configured on a formerly sighted person gave them more to work with than did those blind from birth.
(It seems more likely to me that someone who was blind from birth might go the direction of sonar that wouldn't actually be like seeing, but might be just as good, a la the marvel comics Daredevil comic book character, since it would be positional)
Moreover, I bet 90% or more of the transhumanist movement has something wrong with them that makes them want better equipment. Get us all together, and we probably look like dorothy's entourage from the Wizerd of Oz.
Even those of us who seem normal probably misused a portion of our lives, so that it left us hungry for more. And, even if I'm wrong, it's likely that the inadequacies of age play a role in just about everyone's desires here.
But what humans will willingly be the first guinea pigs for all these great ideas? We might not want someone on deathrow to have the world's first fully-replaced vision system notice that it also gave him hyper-intelligence (Gee, I hope noone from hollywood is reading this).
If I had lost my sight, I would be jumping up and down flapping my arms to be first in line.
If I was blind, plus richer and smarter than I am now, I'd currently be buying off college whiz kids to work on this stuff privately.
That said, let's do what we can to get a W3C consortium version of this page up and running. If Kurzweil doesn't want to pay for it, then I imagine that someone could at least cut-and-paste the daily logs into a text-only version. In fact, I bet that someone from the W3C consortium would build the page for Ray. Or, this is the wrote work that would be easy for a Senior-level graphics design course to assign to one of their beleaguered captive students. Make these pages of Kurzweil AI W3C compliant. Extra credit for making it look good. No frames or other 'goofball' automation.
I may be wrong, but I think basic 'blog software' could be used to remake this page hypertext friendly.
And, I'm not complainiing, since I have 99.9% of all the functionality I think I need from this site but - My brain feature doesn't work correctly (the one on the site!). The left half of the diagram is always covered up by a big white rectangle. (The only time this frustrated me, was when I clicked on the word 'capitalism' and was able to click on Alan Greenspan, but couldn't see how far Ayn Rand had penetrated the brain structure, or whether or not "The Brain" seemed to know the polar difference between Capitalism and "Protectionism"). So, if you're the tech guy behind this site, I am using Safari on a Mac OS X.2.8, partially because IE doesn't allow me to accurately copy text for quoting people from the discussion board (I can copy all of the text above the cursor in IE on the same Mac, but nothing less than that).
So yeah, let's give the blind and/or other imperfecti what they want, because after all, we might be begging them for an upgrade if theirs goes well. (I remember helping a newly blind guy use his cane to get on an escalator at Northwest station in Chicago once, and he seemed completely frustrated at his misconception of where it was, since he was underneath it, and to one side of it. The crowd noise I believe he'd been following was going past the escalators, and none of them told him what he'd done wrong. I imagine that that kind of carelessness/lack-of-initiative would occasionally get on my nerves if I was blind.)
If someone can describe a simple process to me for copying and pasting this stuff into a new W3C-compliant site, perhaps I or a friend can help with the boring work. (Since I'm almost broke now).
Feel free to email me about this at jcwitmer at hotmail if you like, with KURZWEIL in the subject line.
Thanks, |
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Re: The site is hard and annoying to use, please change it
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Although kurzweilai.net does indeed have a very nifty artistic feel to it, I find it difficult return to a specific article I've seen before. The organizational strcuture is complicated, and there is no global view that allows users to see the larger conceptual layout of the site.
Also, I must admit I'm not a fan of the frames either. I mean, seriously, do we really always need access to the 'Origin', 'Ramona!', 'The Brain', and 'Mind-X' links? I very seldomnly use them, and it seems strange that these items should take up so much screen real estate.
I do find 'The Brain' flash app to be quite intellectually interesting, and quite effective if you're just randomly browsing around or if you're wanting to demonstratie the interconnected'ness of ideas. However, it is quite poor if you're trying to find one thing in particular. Kurzweilai is just so big, it's difficult to find a particular needle in a haystack, or even a group of needles on single topic.
There needs to be a way to easily form a mental layout of the site, and what content is what category, and howto get there. Upon visiting a page, I should be able to _immediately_ start narrowing in on the information that is that I am looking for. We need some form of a global INFORMATION HEIRARCHY of the information on Kurzweilai.
I see two solutions to this:
1) Create a page [I recommend the front one] dedicated to the hierachy of information on Kurzweil.net. A good example of this is: http://www.moma.org/menu/siteoverview.htm
[and a study at: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/sitemaps/]
2) Perhaps if the brain flash app took up the entire page, and started with a collection of 'root nodes', it would be easier to remembmer which each article is within the hierarchy, while mantaining the ability of being able to see how it connects to other cocepts.
As it is, the brain app only presents me with only a sliver of the information on Kurzweilai, and I have to scroll around and what not to find exactly what I'm looking for. And even then, I've yet to discovered any 'root nodes' at which I can begin to narrow down my search for a particular item.
-Virgil |
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Re: Are We Spiritual Machines?
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John,
I have often pondered the "orthogonality" of quantity versus quality.
One can give instances where no increase in quantity does a whit for quality. I'd prefer a fresh apple over a rotten one, just as much as I would if offered two bushels of rotten apples. There, quantity does nothing for me.
Alternately, if I took a picture of a well-known monument, and sent it to you as a 5x5 pixel image, or a 500x500 pixel image, you would likely recognize the monument in the latter image, while the former would appear as a choppy smudge. Here, it seems that quantity can provide quality.
In keeping with the example of "speed", imagine displaying the 500x500 pixel image on a black viewscreen, but with software that would only illuminate one pixel at a time, (in its proper location). If the pixels are illuminated just 1 per second, it would take nearly three days for all of the pixels to be viewed, and you would likely be unable to "decipher" what the image was supposed to represent. Yet if illuminated at 1 pixel per microsecond, the image would "appear" more as if "at once" and be recognized.
What separates these two examples of quantity vs quality?
And for AI, what articulated "quality" (functionally) might one expect, or be skeptical to expect of increased "quantity"?
For software (for instance), there might be a spectrum. Certainly, even if Deep Blue were a million times faster, had more memory, etc, it would still be quite unable to discourse upon the joys of playing chess. But of course, it was only designed to find good chess moves. It is not designed to foster general intelligence, nor to emulate a sentience.
Cheers! ____tony b____
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Re: Are We Spiritual Machines?
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Pinker's The Blank Slate
A basic confusion in most evolutionary theories lies in their tacit mixing of domains, and their inability to either unify or contrast history and evolution. The result is the chronic ideological factor, left and right in the collation of historical and evolutionary theory. All parties seem oblivious to the absurdity of political point arguments using assumptions of Darwinian adaptationism, and selectionist speculation. Pinker's new work on evolutionary psychology is remarkable in its direct and yet, remarkably, unwitting muddle of these domains. The weak position of the typical 'blank slate' position which Pinker nimbly criticizes distracts attention from the sheer audacity of the clearly conservatizing gesture, in the lineage of E.O. Wilson.
Let us breathe a sign of relief. It is highly unlikely there is or could be a 'science' of human nature. Thus our only problem is to wake up the proponents of each new brand of scientism in this regard. Controlling by definition or science the nature of 'human nature' is a dangerous business. We might well recall the short work the original Rousseau made of such nonsense (granting the equal nonsense sometimes made of his own views).
We need a theory that can show how man's actions in history evolve in relation to values, and this in relation to possible scenarios of the Paleolithic. Darwin's theory is stillborn and unable to provid that transitional mixture and nosedives into its 'slow change' conservatism applied to modern politics (the left is often no better). It is obsessed with its improperly verified selectionist claims.
Such things ought to be embarassing but instead they pass as science. Darwinism especially suffers this problem as the 'mechanism of natural selection' as emergentist process is misapplied to value issues, speculation restated as fact, and the result is the bedlam of ideological entanglement in the 'blank slate/human nature' debate as this betrays its ideological character at every point, starting with the now archetypical 'Rousseau bashing' of the sociobiologists who have missed the point about the Noble Savage. The genetic revolution, however, is still a work in progress, so what's in fact is the point?
But one can only say good riddance to such an extreme view as the Blank Slate in its straw man version, and shrug at the suggestion that something like a 'human nature' has a genetic component, mindful that for all its flaws the blank slate stance was a justified caution near the catastrophic abuse of Darwinian racism characteristic of this century. This field is dangerous, and has a criminal record, and Pinker's indignation at our caution is not really justified. Having declared in part for human nature, we should ask who can define it, and how, and how did its definition become outright political football? The basic issue is the inadequacy of Darwin's theory of natural selection. Without that mechanism, reask the question, What is human nature, please? Millennia of men, for example, have held beliefs in the soul, and the technocratic definition of man,which Rousseau foresaw with dread, and speaking oneself as a secularist, is simply presumptuous in the extreme if it thinks that Darwinian selectionism can settle this issue in the negative. The crackpot secularism thinking it has Darwinian grounds to outlaw these 'superstitions' will end in a collision. The question is not even spiritual in its Buddhist version, the material soul being an aspect of quite another 'evolutionary psychology', fully atheist and materialist, as seen in the ancient Jainism. By the way, how and when did such commonsensical evolutionary psychologies evolve themselves, to be visible at such an early date? The point is that we know virtually nothing about the full scope of the true version of the Descent of Man. These are the fatal limits of Darwinism. We should not be confusing the theory of how things evolved, especially if their evidence is inadequate, with how things should be now and in the future, or the result is the flaunting of wretched whiggery so evident in Pinker's denial of ideology, with its standard debunking of the 'utopian nonsense'. Reviewing books on evolution can become repetitive: it is always the same problem, natural selection run riot as an explanatory device of theory. Thus it is tempting to join the fray on particulars, but this results in chaotification of discourse, a characteristic of the Blank Slate proponents, now in retreat, seemingly, in the genetic revolution. Since the technocratic redefinition of man has succeeded in imposing this Darwinian belief system, with insufficient evidence, one feels a sense of helplessness in joining the fray. One can only say, be wary. The nature of man, and his human nature, cannot be determined properly with Darwin's theory. Since this point can no longer be defended properly in public, one simply goes underground like a Buddhist.
In general, the assault on ethical evolution with reductionist methods, as with group or kin selection models, are continually presented and promoted as 'fait accompli', already proven, when in fact they are simply speculative extensions trying to save basic Darwinian assumptions. Student in broader humanistic fields are not under any obligation to take them as established. These confusions are as old as the nineteenth century, and the legacy of positivism. They spring from a refusal or blindness near the limits of theory. Their complexity is mesmerizing, and that makes their flaws difficult to see. Don't be fooled into thinking such things are really science. They serve an agenda. It is very doubtful if there is a 'science' of human nature. We must beware of the technocratic ambition here, left or right.
John Landon
http://eonix.8m.com |
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