The article is reasonable enough, although hardly does more than rehash the same debate, except in an appeasing, positive light.
A recent poll asked about people’s general belief in (human) evolution, and tallied the results by popular vote, grouped by country. A few media outlets have picked up on this, including
Naturally the crux of the article was the lay of the United States in next to last place, prompting Slashdot’s title of “Did Humans Evolve? No, Say Americans”. The author of the second article, Dr. Myers, sites 3 “obstacles” blocking a general American acceptance of evolution.
I seem to be able to trace many camps of thought to Gnostic sources, such as Dualists and Edgar Casey, and now with the resurfacing of the gospel of Judas, it seems Gnostics had a relevent role in early Christianity.
John Searle’s arguments on this issue: AI and Cognitivism
Some quick responses to Searle’s article by Afonso Salcedo
The change up: Inadequacies of Contemporary Mind/Brain Theories, by Ed Kelly
Searle’s Minds, Brains, and Programs
Ned Block’s The Mind as the Software of the Brain
I am impressed by Edwin Schrödinger, quoting him as follows: “It is the same elements that go to compose my mind and the world. This situation is the same for every mind and its world, in spite of the unfathomable abundance of ‘cross-references’ between them. The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.” - from Mind and Matter, p127
One “theory” regarding the elusive and much rumored race of aliens known as the Greys is that they contain no soul. In fact the Greys are rumored to be studying humanity and life on earth in an attempt to learn what and why we in fact have souls. How curious and surprising it may be to hear that aliens, which we humans most often consider to be vastly superior in intelligence and skill to our humble person, are lacking something so fundamental as a soul, the essence of all life on earth.
I have a theory which may explain this conundrum. Imagine that the Greys have no soul because they are actually a highly advanced race of COMPUTERS, not living organisms. These creatures may be descendants of the machines we humans use every day. Now consider the following sequence of events. In the search for a strong artificially intelligent computer, we in fact create what seems to be just that — an autonomously goal-directed universal computing machine, capable of learning, adapting, and replicating. Then surely this agent may propagate itself in its image and likeness, and develop its own advanced society and culture, founded in the theory of computation. One day, in all ways of human perception these agents may mimic and feign true organic life. Humans may not be able to distinguish between themselves and the computers. Deep down inside, however, these machines will forever lack a soul.
Such may be the cold fate of the Grey aliens, vastly capable machines who have heard stories about the concept of soul but don’t understand it. Again it is not so much that the Greys LOST their souls, but rather never had them in the first place. A rather more frightening thought is this one. Could it be possible that in our human quest for knowledge, we in fact create such a strong AI agent, which goes on to develop its own culture and world? What if humanity revels in its own success, and accepts this agent as superior to themselves in ALL ways? What if we submit ourselves to this superior form of life? What if in years to come, humans somehow die, at the hand of a superior enemy, by the fate of a meteor, or the emergence of a new super virus. Then all that will remain may be a race of machines, with no soul. What a cold earth will remain.
(see also on modeling)
We must remember that relations of analogy and metaphor are meant to realize our world, not replace it. With all the political wars surrounding our lives, we must pay special attention to a latent troop rapidly approaching our collective mind, the army of the machine. As technology progresses and impresses itself onto global human culture, it becomes easier and more natural to describe our biology, psychology, spirituality, and culture using relations to technology, computation, and mechanics.
In fact these are great models to use, because in many ways their structure and function reflects ours. But as such models become more detailed and (hopefully) accurate, we should cast a skeptic’s eye on how we use them, because it becomes easy to project the happenings of our world down to the happenings of our models. We must not forget that such models exist to help us understand components and aspects of our own reality and selves.
Of all necessities, what may be considered the most fundamental or essential for humans, rather for all living organisms, is the quality of habitability. Habitability can be thought of as the quality of some object or idea (whether physical, emotional, mental, etc) that fosters, sustains, and promotes the current and future occupation, or adoption, by a living organism. Conversely, artificial organisms, currently known best as computers or machines, have an analogous requirement, that of efficiency. Efficiency is the state of exacting deliberation and flawlessness. The enemies of efficiency are both design flaws as well as situations not fully thought through by an organism’s creator, or designer. Machines compute (as organic creatures live) based on a perfectly conceived model of their environment. This model is one of abstraction and order.
Organic life, on the other hand, seems to thrive on a fundamentally different notion, and at present it seems fully at odds with a machine’s efficiency. Such creatures rely on disorder, in order to create order. It is bewildering to be witness to the myriad of disorderly (perhaps chaotic and uncontrollable are more fitting) events surrounding the equally numerous types of organisms that exist in the world. How is such an utterly complex web of dependences created, maintained, and most astoundingly (mirabile dictu), designed to thrive on complexity and disorder? It is this dichotomy (order versus chaos) that defines the current boundaries between organic and artificial life. Can the wall be penetrated from both sides? Penetrated at all?
It is important to consider that for the most part, people of this past century have been harboring a deceptive meme in our culture: that humans fare better on efficiency than habitability. We see this every day, in every facet of life. Why are the streets in every planned city so rigidly designed and array like, reflecting the most efficient and space-conscious two-dimensional pattern available? Why are offices designed using cubicles arranged in square grids, relegating the employees as second-class citizens in an otherwise perfectly efficient office, one of several in a perfectly rectangular building, arranged in an three-dimensional cube? Where are the curves, the continuity, the flow, and the disorder? It is quite remarkable, and a great testament to the fundamentally disorderly yet robust process of life that people can bear such mechanisms through everyday life.
Only recently have people (notably the architect Christopher Alexander, and computer scientist Richard Gabriel) begun to reflect fully on the unique qualities of the two main forms of creation, and have considered the meme of universal efficiency from an objective standpoint. It is important to consider both why a machine needs order, and why an organic creature needs habitability, in order to survive. Digging deeper is for another night.
