In Michelangelo’s famous painting of the Creation of Adam, the background in which God sits is a stylized human brain with all of its connected parts. He reaches across an abyss to impart life to His latest creation by touching him. It would be wrong for an engineer to attempt an interpretation of this, but it does seem clear that the painter was happy to let God live in his head. People attempting to understand human consciousness could do a lot worse than start their quest with this painting.
Intuition
For some reason, people who work in underground mining love to talk about their near misses. In one such conversation at a mine in Canada, a couple of surveyors shared a story with a group of us about having a smoke break in a drilling sublevel. The noise of a drill bit in a hole carries quite far in rock and a drill that is working several hundred meters away can sound very close. For this reason they thought nothing of the soft tat-tat-tat in the rock. One surveyor suddenly stood up and instructed his partner to do the same. His partner asked why and he said, “I have a bad feeling.” No sooner did his partner stand up but the drill steel broke through the floor right where they had been sitting. Everyone’s sphincters instinctively tightened and we all said, “Ooooo”.
I had a similar experience working underground at a mine in Australia. My shift boss told me to direct a water hose on a muckpile that was “held up” in order to lubricate it and have it break free. The muckpile was rock that had been dumped into a large hole that would direct the rock down to a loading pocket six hundred feet further down. He told me that, for obvious reasons, under no circumstances was I to cross the chain fence and stand on the muck pile. After half an hour with no action, I thought that if I could get some water onto the back side of the muck pile I could get the project underway. After standing on top of the muckpile spraying down the back side for about five minutes, I got a very bad feeling and quickly returned to the proper side of the chain. When I turned around to start spraying water again, the muck pile was gone. It had disappeared down the hole with no sound. I don’t remember if it tightened or loosened my sphincters.
I suppose everyone knows of someone whose decision to not get on an airplane or take part in some event saved their life. They had a “feeling” and so decided to not participate. Where does this intuition come from?
Psychological and physiological effects
I have a friend whose main blood vessels into his brain became blocked. He was diagnosed following a kaleidoscopic sequence of microstrokes and spent weeks in the hospital getting things sorted out. As it turned out, due to his good general health, his body had created bypasses around the blockages to keep his brain working. How did that happen? We can do a lot of arm waving about enzyme function and T-cells but, in the end, we are left with a couple of conclusions;
We don’t know what caused the brain to start the new construction.
There is not enough time available for evolution to randomly mutate such a brain because the probability of that occurring is essentially zero.
Leonardo da Vinci, in his Vitruvian Man, identified that our arms and legs, depending upon their position, make a square or circle. Others have wondered about the processes that cause such symmetry in the first place. Why doesn’t one arm grow faster and finish longer than the other? What tells my bones to stop growing?
What about pain control? People have had painless, major surgery under hypnosis without the benefit of anaesthesia. Or how about the placebo effect? Some have been cured of dangerous diseases after taking sugar pills thinking they were miracle pills. Although disputed, some studies suggest that more than fifty percent of healing is from the placebo effect. It is incontrovertible that shamans have caused the death of other human beings simply by suggesting that they will die.
Indeterminacy
The Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle stipulates that we cannot measure the properties of quantum particles because the act of measuring changes those properties. Similarly, the Observer Effect only allows stochastic or probabilistic estimates of the location of such particles because the observation itself changes the system in which they move. But this is very odd because we are made of these indeterminate particles yet we can be located accurately in space. This paradox was best articulated by Erwin Schrodinger and his Cat. When does a quantum particle resolve from a quasi state to a defined reality? No one seems to know. If humans are conscious and made up of indeterminate particles, is consciousness related to this indeterminacy? And if it is, are machines indeterminate in the same way?
Indeterminacy and intuition are things that have no explanation so far as I know, and they seem to be constructs of consciousness. So, if we are to believe that machines will achieve consciousness, will all of these things become observable in the newly conscious wires and silicon encased in plastic? Will machines develop intuition? If I understand him correctly, Dr. Roger Penrose believes that indeterminacy is resolved at the synapses. Will machines resolve their indeterminacy at the junction of the wires? Will they repair themselves even when they are unaware that they need to be repaired? Will one machine kill another machine by shaking a bone at him/it?
I don’t have answers, only questions. And one thought for consideration.
Is there a graphical user interface of consciousness accessible by worldview?
Some argue that our bodies are mechanistic and that a lot of predictable electro-chemical-physical stuff happens at the cellular and synaptic level. But what if there is a psycho-spiritual grid that overlays all of this in a way that is indeterminate and can’t be measured or located but is very much “there”. And what if we access that grid through a set of instructions that are based on our worldview? I am just spit balling here. Nobel laureate Max Planck had some interesting comments about this,
“As a man who has devoted his life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atoms together… we must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.
Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized worldview.”
As with Dr. Bostrom’s Trilemma, the issue is one of order and not of substance.
In previous posts I have shown a worldview chart (2011 data) that demonstrates that not all worldviews are the same because not every worldview represents reality accurately. My argument is that worldviews which promote personal freedom will result in higher creativity and higher gross domestic product per capita.
This argument is predicated on the notion that all humans are created in the image of God which makes us equal and free to be creative - to the extent that we give such freedom to one another.
We are constantly enjoined to follow the science and I argue that by removing the spiritual attributes of life under the sun we have lost the thread of that which we are to follow. The concept of science and a rational, scientific method was developed only in the Christian West because Science is the daughter of Faith. Those who argue otherwise either don’t know science or need to learn a bit more history - says me. But I am not alone. This is what mathematician Alfred North Whitehead had to say,
“The greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement was the inexpugnable belief that… there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind… it must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality.”
In one of the great ironies of our day, Dr. Stephen Hawking made the entirely philosophical observation that philosophy is dead having been overtaken by science. Francis Schaeffer predicted that science dies the day that God is epistemologically killed. He also noted that, absent God, we are all totalitarians. Remember that the next time someone tells you to “follow the science”.
The fact that Science is in trouble was addressed in a recent study published in Nature,
“Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.”
“Slowing rates of disruption” means that the advancement of science and technology is in danger of grinding to a halt. There are lots of reasons for this according to Eugyppius,
Or perhaps Dr. Shaeffer was right. Perhaps science is dying.
Artificial intelligence in all its forms, absent a humble recognition of Planck’s intelligent Mind, has enormous potential to speed the death of Science and create social disruption. What AI will never create, however, is a conscious machine. That is reserved for the realm of God - who is not dying, epistemologically or otherwise.