The Closing of the Scientific Mind
01.01.14 - 12:00 AM | David Gelernter
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-closing-of-the-scientific-mind/
The huge cultural authority science has acquired
over the past century imposes large duties on
every scientist. Scientists have acquired the
power to impress and intimidate every time they
open their mouths, and it is their
responsibility to keep this power in mind no
matter what they say or do. Too many have
forgotten their obligation to approach with due
respect the scholarly, artistic, religious, humanistic work
that has always been mankind’s main spiritual
support. Scientists are (on average) no more
likely to understand this work than the man in
the street is to understand quantum physics. But
science used to know enough to approach
cautiously and admire from outside, and to build
its own work on a deep belief in human dignity.
No longer.
Today science and the “philosophy of mind”—its
thoughtful assistant, which is sometimes smarter
than the boss—are threatening Western culture
with the exact opposite of humanism. Call it
roboticism. Man
is the measure of all things, Protagoras
said. Today we add, and computers
are the measure of all men.
Many scientists are proud of having booted man
off his throne at the center of the universe and
reduced him to just one more creature—an
especially annoying one—in the great
intergalactic zoo. That is their right. But when
scientists use this locker-room braggadocio to
belittle the human viewpoint, to belittle human
life and values and virtues and civilization and
moral, spiritual, and religious discoveries,
which is all we human beings possess or ever
will, they have outrun their own empiricism.
They are abusing their cultural standing.
Science has become an international bully.
Nowhere is its bullying more outrageous than in
its assault on the phenomenon known as subjectivity.
Your subjective, conscious experience is just as
real as the tree outside your window or the
photons striking your retina—even though you
alone feel it. Many philosophers and scientists
today tend to dismiss the subjective and focus
wholly on an objective, third-person reality—a
reality that would be just the same if men had
no minds. They treat subjective reality as a
footnote, or they ignore it, or they announce
that, actually, it doesn’t even exist.
If scientists were rat-catchers, it wouldn’t
matter. But right now, their views are
threatening all sorts of intellectual and
spiritual fields. The present problem originated
at the intersection of artificial intelligence
and philosophy of mind—in the question of what
consciousness and mental states are all about,
how they work, and what it would mean for a
robot to have them. It has roots that stretch
back to the behaviorism of the early 20th
century, but the advent of computing lit the
fuse of an intellectual crisis that blasted off
in the 1960s and has been gaining altitude ever
since.
The modern “mind fields” encompass artificial
intelligence, cognitive psychology, and
philosophy of mind. Researchers in these fields
are profoundly split, and the chaos was on
display in the ugliness occasioned by the
publication of Thomas Nagel’s Mind
& Cosmos in
2012. Nagel is an eminent philosopher and
professor at NYU. In Mind & Cosmos, he
shows with terse, meticulous thoroughness why
mainstream thought on the workings of the mind
is intellectually bankrupt. He explains why
Darwinian evolution is insufficient to explain
the emergence of consciousness—the capacity to
feel or experience the world. He then offers his
own ideas on consciousness, which are
speculative, incomplete, tentative, and
provocative—in the tradition of science and philosophy.
Nagel was immediately set on and (symbolically)
beaten to death by all the leading punks,
bullies, and hangers-on of the philosophical
underworld. Attacking Darwin is the sin against
the Holy Ghost that pious scientists are taught
never to forgive. Even worse, Nagel is an
atheist unwilling to express sufficient hatred
of religion to satisfy other atheists. There is
nothing religious about Nagel’s speculations; he
believes that science has not come far enough to
explain consciousness and that it must press on.
He believes that Darwin is not sufficient.
The intelligentsia was so furious that it formed
a lynch mob. In May 2013, the Chronicle
of Higher Education ran
a piece called “Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong.”
One paragraph was notable:
Whatever the validity of [Nagel’s] stance,
its timing was certainly bad. The war
between New Atheists and believers has
become savage, with Richard Dawkins writing
sentences like, “I have described atonement,
the central doctrine of Christianity, as
vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent. We
should also dismiss it as barking mad….” In
that climate, saying anything nice at all
about religion is a tactical error.
It’s the cowardice of the Chronicle’s
statement that is alarming—as if the only
conceivable response to a mass attack by killer
hyenas were to run away. Nagel was assailed;
almost everyone else ran.
The voice most strongly associated with what
I’ve termed roboticism is that of Ray Kurzweil,
a leading technologist and inventor. The
Kurzweil Cult teaches that, given the strong and
ever-increasing pace of technological progress
and change, a fateful crossover point is
approaching. He calls this point the
“singularity.” After the year 2045 (mark your
calendars!), machine intelligence will dominate
human intelligence to the extent that men will
no longer understand machines any more than
potato chips understand mathematical topology.
Men will already have begun an orgy of
machinification—implanting chips in their bodies
and brains, and fine-tuning their own and their
children’s genetic material. Kurzweil believes
in “transhumanism,” the merging of men and
machines. He believes human immortality is just
around the corner. He works for Google.
Whether he knows it or not, Kurzweil believes in
and longs for the death of mankind. Because if
things work out as he predicts, there will still
be life on Earth, but no human life. To predict
that a man who lives forever and is built mainly
of semiconductors is still a man is like
predicting that a man with stainless steel skin,
a small nuclear reactor for a stomach, and an IQ
of 10,000 would still be a man. In fact we have
no idea what he would be.
Each change in him might be defended as an
improvement, but man as we know him is the top
growth on a tall tree in a large forest: His
kinship with his parents and ancestors and
mankind at large, the experience of seeing his
own reflection in human history and his fellow
man—those things are the crucial part of who he
is. If you make him grossly different, he is
lost, with no reflection anywhere he looks. If
you make lots of
people grossly different, they are all lost
together—cut adrift from their forebears, from
human history and human experience. Of course we
do know that whatever these creatures are,
untransformed men will be unable to keep up with
them. Their superhuman intelligence and strength
will extinguish mankind as we know it, or reduce
men to slaves or dogs. To wish for such a
development is to play dice with the universe.
Luckily for mankind, there is (of course) no
reason to believe that brilliant progress in any
field will continue, much less accelerate;
imagine predicting the state of space
exploration today based on the events of
1960–1972. But the real flaw in the Kurzweil
Cult’s sickening predictions is that machines do
just what we tell them to. They act as they are
built to act. We might in principle, in the
future, build an armor-plated robot with a
stratospheric IQ that refuses on principle to
pay attention to human beings. Or an
average dog lover might buy a German shepherd
and patiently train it to rip him to shreds.
Both deeds are conceivable, but in each case,
sane persons are apt to intervene before the
plan reaches completion.
Subjectivity is your private experience of the
world: your sensations; your mental life and
inner landscape; your experiences of sweet and
bitter, blue and gold, soft and hard; your
beliefs, plans, pains, hopes, fears, theories,
imagined vacation trips and gardens and
girlfriends and Ferraris, your sense of right
and wrong, good and evil. This is your
subjective world. It is just as real as the
objective physical world.
This is why the idea of objective reality is a
masterpiece of Western thought—an idea we
associate with Galileo and Descartes and other
scientific revolutionaries of the 17th century.
The only view of the world we can ever have is
subjective, from inside our own heads. That we
can agree nonetheless on the observable, exactly
measurable, and predictable characteristics of
objective reality is a remarkable fact. I can’t
know that the color I call blue looks to me the
same way it looks to you.
And yet we both use the word blue to
describe this color, and common sense suggests
that your experience of blue is probably a lot
like mine. Our ability to transcend the
subjective and accept the existence of objective
reality is the cornerstone of everything modern
science has accomplished.
But that is not enough for the philosophers of
mind. Many wish to banish subjectivity
altogether. “The history of philosophy of mind
over the past one hundred years,” the eminent
philosopher John Searle has written, “has been
in large part an attempt to get rid of the
mental”—i.e., the subjective—“by showing that no
mental phenomena exist over and above physical
phenomena.”
Why bother? Because to present-day philosophers,
Searle writes, “the subjectivist ontology of the
mental seems intolerable.” That is, your states
of mind (your desire for adventure, your fear of
icebergs, the ship you imagine, the girl you
recall) exist only subjectively, within your
mind, and they can be examined and evaluated by
you alone. They do not exist objectively. They
are strictly internal to your own mind. And yet
they do exist.
This is intolerable! How in this modern,
scientific world can we be forced to accept the
existence of things that can’t be weighed or
measured, tracked or photographed—that are
strictly private, that can be observed by
exactly one person each? Ridiculous! Or at
least, damned annoying.
And yet your mind is, was, and will always be a
room with a view. Your mental states exist
inside this room you can never leave and no one
else can ever enter. The world you perceive
through the window of mind (where you can never
go—where no
one can
ever go) is the objective world. Both worlds,
inside and outside, are real.
The ever astonishing Rainer Maria Rilke captured
this truth vividly in the opening lines of his
eighth Duino Elegy, as translated by Stephen
Mitchell: “With all its eyes the natural world
looks out/into the Open. Only our eyes
are turned backward….We know what is really out
there only from/the animal’s gaze.” We can never
forget or disregard the room we are locked into
forever.
The dominant, mainstream view of mind nowadays
among philosophers and many scientists is computationalism,
also known as cognitivism.
This view is inspired by the idea that minds are
to brains as software is to computers. “Think of
the brain,” writes Daniel Dennett of Tufts
University in his influential 1991 Consciousness
Explained, “as
a computer.” In some ways this is an apt
analogy. In others, it is crazy. At any rate, it
is one of the intellectual milestones of modern
times.
How did this “master analogy” become so
influential?
Consider the mind. The mind has its own
structure and laws: It has desires, emotions,
imagination; it is conscious. But no mind can
exist apart from the brain that “embodies” it.
Yet the brain’s structure is different from the
mind’s. The brain is a dense tangle of neurons
and other cells in which neurons send electrical
signals to other neurons downstream via a wash
of neurotransmitter chemicals, like beach bums
splashing each other with bucketfuls of water.
Two wholly different structures, one embodied by
the other—this is also a precise description of
computer software as it relates to computer
hardware. Software has its own structure and
laws (software being what any “program” or
“application” is made of—any email program, web
search engine, photo album, iPhone app, video
game, anything at all). Software consists
of lists of instructions that are given to the
hardware—to a digital computer. Each instruction
specifies one picayune operation on the numbers
stored inside the computer. For example: Add two
numbers. Move a number from one place to
another. Look at some number and do this if
it’s 0.
Large lists of tiny instructions become complex
mathematical operations, and large bunches of those become
even more sophisticated operations. And pretty
soon your application is sending spacemen
hurtling across your screen firing lasers at
your avatar as you pelt the aliens with tennis
balls and chat with your friends in Idaho or
Algiers while sending notes to your girlfriend
and keeping an eye on the comic-book news. You
are swimming happily within the rich coral reef
of your software “environment,” and the tiny
instructions out of which the whole thing is
built don’t matter to you at all. You don’t know
them, can’t see them, are wholly unaware of
them.
The gorgeously varied reefs called software are
a topic of their own—just as the mind is.
Software and computers are two different topics,
just as the psychological or phenomenal study of
mind is different from brain physiology. Even
so, software cannot exist without digital
computers, just as minds cannot
exist without brains.
That is why today’s mainstream view of mind is
based on exactly this analogy: Mind is to brain
as software is to computer. The mind is the
brain’s software—this is the core idea of
computationalism.
Of course computationalists don’t all think
alike. But they all believe in some version of
this guiding analogy. Drew McDermott, my
colleague in the computer science department at
Yale University, is one of the most brilliant
(and in some ways, the most heterodox) of
computationalists. “The biological variety of
computers differs in many ways from the kinds of
computers engineers build,” he writes, “but the
differences are superficial.” Note here that by biological
computer, McDermott means brain.
McDermott believes that “computers can have
minds”—minds built out of software, if the
software is correctly conceived. In fact,
McDermott writes, “as far as science is
concerned, people are just a strange kind of
animal that arrived fairly late on the
scene….[My] purpose…is to increase the
plausibility of the hypothesis that we are
machines and to elaborate some of its
consequences.”
John Heil of Washington University describes
cognitivism this way: “Think about states of
mind as something like strings of symbols,
sentences.” In other words: a state
of mind is
like a list
of numbers in a computer. And so, he writes,
“mental operations are taken to be ‘computations
over symbols.’” Thus, in the cognitivist view,
when you decide, plan, or believe, you are computing, in
the sense that software computes.
But what about consciousness? If the brain is
merely a mechanism for thinking or
problem-solving, how does it create consciousness?
Most computationalists default to the Origins of
Gravy theory set forth by Walter Matthau in the
film of Neil Simon’s The
Odd Couple. Challenged to account for the
emergence of gravy, Matthau explains that, when
you cook a roast, “it comes.” That is
basically how consciousness arises too,
according to computationalists. It just comes.
In Consciousness
Explained, Dennett
lays out the essence of consciousness as
follows: “The concepts of computer science
provide the crutches of imagination we need to
stumble across the terra incognita between our
phenomenology as we know it by ‘introspection’
and our brains as science reveals them to us.”
(Note the chuckle-quotes around introspection;
for Dennett, introspection is an illusion.)
Specifically: “Human consciousness can best be
understood as the operation of a ‘von
Neumannesque’ virtual machine.” Meaning, it is a
software application (a virtual
machine) designed to run on any ordinary
computer. (Hence von
Neumannesque: the great mathematician John
von Neumann is associated with the invention of
the digital computer as we know it.)
Thus consciousness is the result of running
the right sort of programon an organic
computer also
called the human brain. If you were able to
download the right app on your phone or laptop,
it would be conscious, too. It wouldn’t merely talk or behave as
if it were conscious. It would be conscious,
with the same sort of rich mental landscape
inside its head (or its processor or maybe hard
drive) as you have inside yours: the anxious
plans, the fragile fragrant memories, the
ability to imagine a baseball game or the crunch
of dry leaves underfoot. All that just by
virtue of running the right program. That
program would be complex and sophisticated, far
more clever than anything we have today. But no
different fundamentally, say the
computationalists, from the latest video game.
The Flaws of comparing mind and software
But the master analogy—between mind and
software, brain and computer—is fatally flawed.
It falls apart once you mull these simple facts:
1. You can transfer a program easily from one
computer to another, but you can’t transfer a
mind, ever, from one brain to another.
2. You can run an endless series of different
programs on any one computer, but only one “program”
runs, or ever can run, on any one human brain.
3. Software is transparent. I can read off the
precise state of the entire program at any time.
Minds are opaque—there is no way I can know what
you are thinking unless you tell me.
4. Computers can be erased; minds cannot.
5. Computers can be made to operate precisely as
we choose; minds cannot.
There are more. Come up with them yourself. It’s
easy.
There is a still deeper problem with
computationalism. Mainstream computationalists
treat the mind as if its purpose were merely to
act and not to be.
But the mind is for doing and being.
Computers are machines, and idle machines are
wasted. That is not true of your mind. Your mind
might be wholly quiet, doing (“computing”)
nothing; yet you might be feeling miserable or
exalted, or awestruck by the beauty of the
object in front of you, or inspired or
resolute—and such moments might be the center of
your mental life. Or you might merely be conscious.
“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,/Nor
what soft incense hangs upon the
boughs….Darkling I listen….” That was drafted by
the computer known as John Keats.
Emotions in particular are not actions but
states of being. And emotions are central to
your mental life and can shape your behavior by
allowing you to compare alternatives to
determine which feels best. Jane Austen, Persuasion:
“He walked to the window to recollect himself,
and feel how he ought to behave.” Henry James, The
Ambassadors: The heroine tells the hero, “no
one feels so much as you. No—not any one.” She
means that no one is so precise, penetrating,
and sympathetic an observer.
Computationalists cannot account for emotion. It
fits as badly as consciousness into the
mind-as-software scheme.
And there is (at least) one more area of special
vulnerability in the computationalist worldview.
Computationalists believe that the mind is
embodied by the brain, and the brain is simply
an organic computer. But in fact, the mind is
embodied not by the brain but by the brain and the
body, intimately interleaved. Emotions are
mental states one feels physically; thus they
are states of mind and body simultaneously.
(Angry, happy, awestruck, relieved—these are
physical as well as mental states.) Sensations
are simultaneously mental and physical
phenomena. Wordsworth writes about his memories
of the River Wye: “I have owed to them/In hours
of weariness, sensations sweet,/Felt in the
blood, and felt along the heart/And passing even
into my purer mind…”
Where does the physical end and the mental
begin? The resonance between mental and bodily
states is a subtle but important aspect of mind.
Bodily sensations bring about mental states that
cause those sensations to change and, in turn,
the mental states to develop further. You are
embarrassed, and blush; feeling yourself blush,
your embarrassment increases. Your blush
deepens. “A smile of pleasure lit his face.
Conscious of that smile, [he] shook his head
disapprovingly at his own state.” (Tolstoy.) As
Dmitry Merezhkovsky writes brilliantly in his
classic Tolstoy study, “Certain feelings impel
us to corresponding movements, and, on the other
hand, certain habitual movements impel to the
corresponding mental states….Tolstoy, with
inimitable art, uses this convertible connection
between the internal and the external.”
All such mental phenomena depend on something
like a brain and
something like a body, or an accurate
reproduction or simulation of certain aspects of
the body. However hard or easy you rate the
problem of building such a reproduction,
computing has no wisdom to offer regarding the
construction of human-like bodies—even supposing
that it knows something about human-like minds.
I cite Keats or Rilke, Wordsworth, Tolstoy, Jane
Austen because these “subjective humanists” can
tell us, far more accurately than any scientist,
what things are like inside the sealed room of
the mind. When subjective humanism is recognized
(under some name or other) as a school of
thought in its own right, one of its
characteristics will be looking to great authors
for information about what the inside of the
mind is like.
To say the same thing differently: Computers are
information machines. They transform one batch
of information into another. Computationalists
often describe the mind as an “information
processor.” But feelings are not information!
Feelings are states of being. A feeling (mild
wistfulness, say, on a warm summer morning) has,
ordinarily, no information content at all. Wistful is
simply a way to be.
Let’s be more precise: We are conscious, and
consciousness has two aspects. To be conscious
of a thing is to be aware of it (know about it,
have information about it) and to experience it.
Taste sweetness; see turquoise; hear an
unresolved dissonance—each feels a
certain way. To experience is to be some
way, not to do some
thing.
The whole subjective field of emotions,
feelings, and consciousness fits poorly with the
ideology of computationalism, and with the
project of increasing “the plausibility of the
hypothesis that we are machines.”
Thomas Nagel: “All these theories seem
insufficient as analyses of the mental because they
leave out something essential.” (My
italics.) Namely? “The first-person, inner point
of view of the conscious subject: for example,
the way sugar tastes to you or the way red looks
or anger feels.” All other mental states (not
just sensations) are left out, too: beliefs and
desires, pleasures and pains, whims, suspicions,
longings, vague anxieties; the mental sights,
sounds, and emotions that accompany your reading
a novel or listening to music or daydreaming.
How could such important things be left out?
Because functionalism is today’s dominant view
among theorists of the mind, and functionalism
leaves them out. It leaves these dirty boots on
science’s back porch. Functionalism asks, “What
does it mean to be, for example, thirsty?”
The answer: Certain events (heat, hard work, not
drinking) cause the state of mind called thirst.
This state of mind, together with others, makes
you want
to do certain
things (like take a drink). Now you understand
what “I am thirsty” means. The mental(the
state of thirst) has not been written out of the
script, but it has-been
reduced to the merely physical and observable:
to the weather, and what you’ve been doing, and
what actions (take a drink) you plan
to do.
But this explanation is no good, because
“thirst” means, above all, that you feel thirsty.
It is a way of being. You have a particular
sensation. (That feeling, in turn, explains such
expressions as “I am thirsty for knowledge,”
although this “thirst” has nothing to do with
the heat outside.)
And yet you can see the seductive quality of
functionalism, and why it grew in prominence
along with computers. No one knows how a
computer can be made to feel anything, or
whether such a thing is even possible. But once
feeling and consciousness are eliminated,
creating a computer mind becomes much easier.
Nagel calls this view “a heroic triumph of
ideological theory over common sense.”
Some thinkers insist otherwise. Experiencing
sweetness or the fragrance of lavender or the
burn of anger is merely a biochemical matter,
they say. Certain neurons fire, certain
neurotransmitters squirt forth into the
inter-neuron gaps, other neurons fire and the
problem is solved: There is
your anger, lavender, sweetness.
There are two versions of this idea: Maybe brain
activity causes the
sensation of anger or sweetness or a belief or
desire; maybe, on the other hand, it just is the
sensation of anger or sweetness—sweetness is certain
brain events in the sense that water is H2O.
But how do those brain events bring about, or
translate into, subjective mental states? How is
this amazing trick done? What does it even mean,
precisely, to cross from the physical to the
mental realm?
Understanding subjective mental states
ultimately comes down to understanding
consciousness. And consciousness is even
trickier than it seems at first, because there
is a serious, thought-provoking argument that
purports to show us that consciousness is not
just mysterious but superfluous. It’s called the
Zombie Argument. It’s a thought experiment that
goes like this:
Imagine your best friend. You’ve know him for
years, have had a million discussions,
arguments, and deep conversations with him; you
know his opinions, preferences, habits, and
characteristic moods. Is it possible to suppose
(just suppose)
that he is in fact a zombie?
By zombie,
philosophers mean a creature who looks and
behaves just like a human being, but happens to
be unconscious. He does everything an ordinary
person does: walks and talks, eats and sleeps,
argues, shouts, drives his car, lies on the
beach. But there’s no one home: He (meaning it)
is actually a robot with a computer for a brain.
On the outside he looks like any human being:
This robot’s behavior and appearance
are wonderfully sophisticated.
No evidence makes you doubt that your best
friend is human, but suppose you did ask him:
Are you human? Are you conscious? The robot could be
programmed to answer no.
But it’s designed to seem human, so more likely
its software makes an answer such as, “Of course
I’m human, of course I’m
conscious!—talk about stupid questions. Are you conscious?
Are you human,
and not half-monkey? Jerk.”
So that’s a robot zombie. Now imagine a “human”
zombie, an organic zombie, a freak of nature: It
behaves just like you, just like the robot
zombie; it’s made of flesh and blood, but it’s
unconscious. Can you
imagine such a creature? Its brain would in fact
be just like a computer: a complex control
system that makes this creature speak and act
exactly like a man. But it feels nothing and is
conscious of nothing.
Many philosophers (on both sides of the argument
about software minds) can indeed imagine such a
creature. Which leads them to the next question:
What is consciousness for?
What does it accomplish? Put a real human and
the organic zombie side by side. Ask them any
questions you like. Follow them over the course
of a day or a year. Nothing reveals which one is
conscious. (They both claim to
be.) Both seem like ordinary humans.
So why should
we humans be equipped with consciousness?
Darwinian theory explains that nature selects
the best creatures on wholly practical grounds,
based on survivable design and behavior. If
zombies and humans behave the same way all the
time, one group would be just as able to survive
as the other. So why would nature have taken the
trouble to invent an elaborate thing like
consciousness, when it could have got off
without it just as well?
Such questions have led the Australian
philosopher of mind David Chalmers to argue that
consciousness doesn’t “follow logically” from
the design of the universe as we know it
scientifically. Nothing stops us from imagining
a universe exactly like ours in every respect except
that consciousness does not exist.
Nagel believes that “our mental lives, including
our subjective experiences” are “strongly
connected with and probably strictly dependent
on physical events in our brains.” But—and this
is the key to understanding why his book posed
such a danger to the conventional wisdom in his
field—Nagel also believes that explaining
subjectivity and our conscious mental lives will
take nothing less than a new scientific
revolution. Ultimately, “conscious subjects and
their mental lives” are “not describable by the
physical sciences.” He awaits “major scientific
advances,” “the creation of new concepts” before
we can understand how consciousness works.
Physics and biology as we understand them today
don’t seem to have the answers.
On consciousness and subjectivity, science still
has elementary work to do. That work will be
done correctly only if researchers understand
what subjectivity is, and why it shares the
cosmos with objective reality.
Of course the deep and difficult problem of why
consciousness exists doesn’t hold for Jews and
Christians. Just as God anchors morality, God’s
is the viewpoint that knows you are conscious.
Knows and cares: Good and evil, sanctity and
sin, right and wrong presuppose consciousness.
When free will is understood, at last, as an
aspect of emotion and not behavior—we are free
just insofar as we feel free—it will also be
seen to depend on consciousness.
In her book Absence
of Mind, the
novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson writes
that the basic assumption in every variant of
“modern thought” is that “the experience and
testimony of the individual mind is to be
explained away, excluded from consideration.”
She tells an anecdote about an anecdote. Several
neurobiologists have written about an American
railway worker named Phineas Gage. In 1848, when
he was 25, an explosion drove an iron rod right
through his brain and out the other side. His
jaw was shattered and he lost an eye; but he
recovered and returned to work, behaving just as
he always had—except that now he had occasional
rude outbursts of swearing and blaspheming,
which (evidently) he had never had before.
Neurobiologists want to show that particular
personality traits (such as good manners) emerge
from particular regions of the brain. If a
region is destroyed, the corresponding piece of
personality is destroyed. Your mind is thus the
mere product of your genes and your brain. You have
nothing to do with it, because there is no
subjective, individual you. “You” are what
you say and do. Your inner mental world either
doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. In fact you might
be a zombie; that wouldn’t matter either.
Robinson asks: But what about the
actual man Gage? The neurobiologists say
nothing about the fact that “Gage was suddenly
disfigured and half blind, that he suffered
prolonged infections of the brain,” that his
most serious injuries were permanent. He was 25
years old and had no hope of recovery. Isn’t it
possible, she asks, that his outbursts of angry
swearing meant just what they usually mean—that
the man was enraged and suffering? When the
brain scientists tell this story, writes
Robinson, “there is no sense at all that [Gage]
was a human being who thought and felt, a man
with a singular and terrible fate.”
Man is only a computer if you ignore everything
that distinguishes him from a computer.
That science should face crises in the early
21st century is inevitable. Power corrupts, and
science today is the Catholic Church around the
start of the 16th century: used to having its
own way and dealing with heretics by
excommunication, not argument.
Science is caught up, also, in the same
educational breakdown that has brought so many
other proud fields low. Science needs reasoned
argument and constant skepticism and
open-mindedness. But our leading universities
have dedicated themselves to stamping them
out—at least in all political areas. We
routinely provide superb technical educations in
science, mathematics, and technology to
brilliant undergraduates and doctoral students.
But if those same students have been taught
since kindergarten that you are not permitted to
question the doctrine of man-made global
warming, or the line that men and women are
interchangeable, or the multiculturalist idea
that all cultures and nations are equally good
(except for Western nations and cultures, which
are worse), how will they ever become
reasonable, skeptical scientists? They’ve been
reared on the idea that questioning official
doctrine is wrong, gauche, just unacceptable in
polite society. (And if you are president of
Harvard, it can get you fired.)
Beset by all this mold and fungus and
corruption, science has continued to produce
deep and brilliant work. Most scientists are
skeptical about their own fields and hold
their colleagues to rigorous standards. Recent
years have seen remarkable advances in
experimental and applied physics, planetary
exploration and astronomy, genetics, physiology,
synthetic materials, computing, and all sorts of
other areas.
But we do have problems, and the struggle of
subjective humanism against roboticism is one of
the most important.
The moral claims urged on man by Judeo-Christian
principles and his other religious and
philosophical traditions have nothing to do with
Earth’s being the center of the solar system or
having been created in six days, or with the
real or imagined absence of rational life
elsewhere in the universe. The best and deepest
moral laws we know tell us to revere human life
and, above all, to be human:
to treat all creatures, our fellow humans and
the world at large, humanely. To behave like a
human being (Yiddish: mensch)
is to realize our best selves.
This is the real danger of anti-subjectivism, in
an age where the collapse of religious education
among Western elites has already made a whole
generation morally wobbly. When scientists
casually toss our human-centered worldview in
the trash with the used coffee cups, they are
re-smashing the sacred tablets, not in blind
rage as Moses did, but in casual, ignorant
indifference to the fate of mankind.
A world that is intimidated by science and bored
sick with cynical, empty “postmodernism”
desperately needs a new subjectivist, humanist,
individualist worldview.
We need science and scholarship
and art and spiritual
life to be fully human. The last three are
withering, and almost no one understands the
first.
The Kurzweil Cult is attractive enough to
require opposition in a positive sense;
alternative futures must be clear. The cults
that oppose Kurzweilism are called Judaism and
Christianity. But they must and will evolve to
meet new dangers in new worlds. The central text
of Judeo-Christian religions in the
tech-threatened, Googleplectic West of the 21st
century might well be Deuteronomy 30:19: “I
summon today as your witnesses the heavens and
the earth: I have laid life and death before
you, the blessing and the curse; choose
life and live!—you are your children.”
The sanctity of life is
what we must affirm against Kurzweilism and the
nightmare of roboticism. Judaism has always
preferred the celebration and sanctification of this
life in this
world to
eschatological promises. My guess is that
21st-century Christian thought will move back
toward its father and become increasingly
Judaized, less focused on death and the
afterlife and more on life here today (although
my Christian friends will dislike my saying so).
Both religions will teach, as they always have,
the love of man for man—and that, over his
lifetime (as Wordsworth writes at the very end
of his masterpiece, The
Prelude), “the mind of man becomes/A
thousand times more beautiful than the earth/On
which he dwells.”
At first, roboticism was just an intellectual
school. Today it is a social disease. Some young
people want to
be robots (I’m serious); they eagerly await
electronic chips to be implanted in their brains
so they will be smarter and better informed than
anyone else (except for all their friends who
have had the same chips implanted). Or they want
to see the world through computer glasses that
superimpose messages on poor naked nature.
They are terrorist hostages in love with the
terrorists.
All our striving for what is good and just and
beautiful and sacred, for what gives meaning to
human life and makes us (as Scripture says)
“just a little lower than the angels,” and a
little better than rats and cats, is invisible
to the roboticist worldview. In the roboticist
future, we will become what we believe ourselves
to be: dogs with iPhones. The world needs a new
subjectivist humanism now—not
just scattered protests but a growing movement,
a cry from the heart.
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