My experiences with the occult began when, as a preteen, I experienced the wonders of the Ouija Board. My brother and I were plumbing the depths of the unseen world looking for answers to the mysteries of life. A question that I remember asking was “What is the name of my brother’s girlfriend?” Mystery is where it is to be found and enquiring minds wanted to know. The tension I felt was a bit like that of Ralphie as he sat locked in the bathroom decoding the message from Little Orphan Annie.
Our message was rather more enigmatic. “That would be telling” came our letter-by-letter response from the Great Beyond. Now this may seem trivial but there is no way that I would have come up with that response and my fingers were feather light on the table. I doubt my teen-aged brother had the wit for such a Delphic response and I hadn’t noticed any pushing from his side of the table so how to explain the Ouija Board? It was like it had a mind of its own.
In his book, The Gene: an intimate history, Dr. Siddhartha Mukerjee recounts the story of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger who suffered from a rare metabolic disorder. Although able to manage the condition with medications, he volunteered for a gene therapy trial to alter his DNA and recover the ability to metabolize ammonia in his liver. He died shortly after receiving the modified virus carrier of intense inflammatory response and multiple organ failure. Four days after receiving the shot, he was declared brain dead, and his family sued.
How are these stories related? In the first story my brother and I attempted to marshal the forces of the occult to solve a trivial problem. In the second, some very smart people attempted to marshal the forces of “science” to solve a non-trivial problem. This post leans more to the second situation and is about artificial intelligence and the Rumsfeld dictum,
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
If life is about the management of risk, then we need to pay particular attention to the unknown unknowns. My brother and I certainly did not and nor did the doctors who gave the fateful shot to Jesse Gelsinger. Artificial intelligence (AI) and its handmaid, machine consciousness and the Singularity, are solidly within the realm of unknown unknowns but you would never know it based on the certainty in how it is presented.
According to the fans of AI, post-2050 we will be living directly connected to a computer with our mind stored in the cloud having just used the collective hivemind to save the world from climatic catastrophe. Not only that, but we will live forever which is a nice add-on. According to those who are not fans of AI, scientists don’t know what consciousness is much less how to harness it with machines. The changes in climate were never going to be catastrophic and so we don’t need machines to save us and thank goodness we won’t live forever. For most people who fall in between these extremes, the response is usually “meh… “
I am fascinated by the discussion and haven’t a clue what 2050 will bring. I am pretty sure I won’t be around to fret over whatever happens, so I don’t really have a dog in the fight. In case you are interested, here are some preliminary thoughts on the topic.
One of the first people to record his deep thoughts about human consciousness was Rene Descartes who famously gave us, “I think, therefore I am.” Or if you want to impress at the cocktail party, “Cogito, ergo sum.” This is a very profound insight, and it took Rene several years of never getting out of bed to arrive at it. It also gained him access to the best salons of 16th Century Europe when he finally got out of his pyjamas. The problem with his insight is he didn’t bother to define “think”. And herein lies the problem. What is thinking?
Is your Roomba thinking when it whirs and spins before choosing a direction for its next dash across the floor? Are its sweeping paths chosen by a predetermined algorithm or does it live stochastically with every move being random? You don’t have to watch such a machine too long before you are thinking, “Just choose a direction!”
If you search the internet for information on thinking and consciousness you will find a decades worth of TED talks and other videos and articles to occupy your time. From a standing start in the 1960s everyone is now researching the meaning of these words. I conclude that there are two foundational scientific camps studying the realm of human consciousness (and many subcamps).
There are the evolutionary utilitarians who think that activities at the nerve synapses are electrochemical and so highly deterministic. Like most things in physics, the passage of information along the nervous system superhighway follows rules and so is predictable and controllable. In this camp, complex thinking is the sum of the synaptic information transfers and so any large-scale transfer of complex information will lead to a state of consciousness. Therefore, as computers increase in speed and ability to transfer vast amounts of complex information, they will become conscious. This is the underlying tenet of the Great Singularity espoused by Ray Kurzweil. His prediction of when this Singularity will be achieved is based on the exponential speed of technology development. His discussion of this technology development alone justifies the price of his books.
The other camp takes a more Romantic, less utilitarian approach which posits that activity at the synapses occurs at the quantum level and, like Schroedinger’s Cat, any attempt to measure and predict it will change the result. Therefore, everything in thinking and consciousness is stochastic or random and patterns can only be determined in the aggregate. The most famous supporter of this line of thought is Sir Roger Penrose. He doesn’t believe in singularities, great or otherwise. In fact, listening to his videos leaves one with the distinct impression that, in his view, we are unlikely to understand very much of anything that happens at the synapses. His model of the human brain is nothing like Kurzweil’s metaphor of the computer. He might argue that the nascent models that are being developed today will be upgraded for a long time before anything close to an understanding of consciousness will be possible.
Apart from the science of consciousness being very interesting why should we lay people be interested in the debate? Fans of Klaus Schwab will know that the topic is of burning interest to he and the Davos crowd and much of their thinking is predicated on the discardability of human brains in favour of electro-mechanical or electro-chemical-mechanical brains. Why feed a bunch of dumb humans if the folks at the top can get Einstein from a machine? “You will own nothing and be happy!” remember? Besides, if you are an aging German with a desire to live forever, you want to move the Singularity along. Worst case would be to die just before the big event arrives. Yes, there is cryogenics but that sounds ghastly and what are the odds that someone “forgets” to thaw you out? How long do you think we plebians can stand in the way of a Schwab or Gates or Soros who pine for more rapid technology development? If it is important to them then it had better be important to me. Besides, I like good stock tips as well as the next person. Writer Joe Allen, who covers this topic in detail, rightly says,
“Imagine if Pharaoh could’ve flipped a switch on the Sphinx to make her utter riddles aloud, complete with glowing eyes and a robo-voice. Moses wouldn’t have escaped Egypt alive. Half the Israelites would have bowed in terror. The other half would’ve called their stockbrokers to invest immediately.”
There are also important ethical considerations attached to the human consciousness debate. If it turns out that the Roomba is capable of conscious thinking, then do we have the prior right to turn it off? It seems trivial but only if we take a low view of human consciousness and none of us do. Do you have the right to “turn me off” at will? If so, why all the hullaballoo about Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or any other sociopathic authoritarian tyrant? If we agree that I can turn off the conscious machine, then we must also agree that someone stronger than me can turn me off. There are many who might think it a grand idea to hit my kill switch but how many might be after you as well? See how quickly we destroy several Millenia of human development?
At this point in the debate, I am firmly in the camp of Dr. Penrose, and I worry about not knowing what we don’t know. Someone is going to get hurt in the rush to the Singularity and I have a strong wish that it not be me. I take the view that “to those that are pure all things are pure: but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure and even their mind and conscience is defiled.” When it comes to very deep philosophical issues such as the nature of information and human consciousness I tend towards a Biblical view. If we are made in the image of God, which I believe we are, then consciousness is a spiritual attribute that will need a spiritual as well as mechanistic explanation. Given that the Bible has a lot to say about conscience and consciousness it might be referenced more frequently in the debate. C.S. Lewis named this God-like artefact the “Tao” and noted that it is a universal attribute which is common to all humans across time and space. That makes it unique and suggests the possibility of a unique source. I am just spit-balling here and have no proof one way or the other. But it is a hypothesis that might be worth exploring.
Another interesting contextual attribute from the Bible is the concept of the Singularity. According to Kurzweil, the Singularity will occur when machines or man-machines achieve consciousness leading to a great gnosis or knowledge and ultimately to eternal life. It is a compelling notion and dream. But it is not unique. From the Biblical perspective it can be argued that his Singularity will be about 2,015 years too late to be unique. For isn’t this precisely what Jesus promised to those who would believe in Him? Great spiritual knowledge and eternal life? Either Dr. Kurzweil is late to the party, or he is intent on building a religion rather than a science.
If, like me, you think the past five years have been far more about the religion of secular humanism than science then this stuff bears watching.