Mysteries Still Unsolved
But the garlic bread was divine
Our book club discussed Michael Pollan’s A World Appears this month. As usual the conversation was lively, this time over lasagna as nourishing as the company. But I think we all ended up where we began.
Which is not to say that we heard no new thoughts. Our host Dave set the table with probing questions about consciousness, the breadth and depth of awareness, and, most interestingly, singularity. And we all shared answers that were universally unconvincing to each other. But I think that’s just what happens — absent proof on which we can agree, we stay where faith has led us already.
Which is also not to say that the discussion didn’t spark reflection. It’s just that in reflecting on the thoughts shared by my good friends I have become more resolute in the opinions I held when we began.
On the question of singularity, the core issue for me remains the difference between organic development and manufactured development: can something built from a binary model — ones and zeros — replicate a model developed organically over millennia through accident, by trial-and-many-errors, in many, many dimensions?
Our ravenously curious engineer John believes it’s not just possible but probable. That we cannot conceive of the scale of the machines to come, machines that will exceed by many fold both in speed and in volume anything that we can now imagine. If I heard him correctly, John believes that ultimately machines will replicate the path that has led us from single-cell organisms in the primordial soup to today’s complete human experience, and in so doing unlock — or at least stumble upon — the human spirit that has evaded capture to this point.
I do not doubt that machines will expose to us many, many things we mere mortals haven’t been able to grasp. That they will solve intractable problems that our minds have neither the data capacity nor the processing power to even consider. That they will one day create a human body and imbue it with a control system that will allow it to move like we do. That they’ll create organs and a brain that are structurally the same as ours. That these manufactured bodies will be more efficient than we are, with greater capacity for evaluating their environment and making decisions. That these bodies will be free of genetic defects, so they will last longer and work better. I have no problem accepting those assertions.
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I think we all know why there’s a drive to create these superior vessels. This is the tech bros’ manifestation of what’s terrified everyone from even before Epicurus: death. We all want to cheat death, and singularity is just the latest dodge.
So I agree that one day we will have new humans created separately from our typical reproductive process. But how will these new humans get the digital upload of an existing person? Can something that is digital at its source become something more than that? Can something that is programmed — even fuzzy logic purports to be logic — make a discontinuous leap? Imagine something that has not existed before?
Emotions are the area to which skeptics like me typically point. And for cause. Will machines, programmed from a base of logic, ever fully experience joy, anger, pride, grief anxiety? Will they exercise whim just to see what might happen? Will they invent things that might kill them? Will they develop self-restraint? Kindness? Will they set aside work to play a game?
Machines may be able some day to mimic us, perhaps even well enough to convince us, but exceptional mimicry is still insincere, still fake.
The one comment that I found most compelling was made by one of our men Jim — author, artist, and hell on two wheels — when he noted that our science can be wrong. Everything we believe that our science has taught us could be flawed. I would add with one-hundred-percent certainty that our science is also woefully incomplete. And I think it will always be thus. As long as the spark that infuses us with our humanity eludes us, we will never know why we are the way we are. John thought that the spark might be generated through the many repetitions the machines will run, but I remain unconvinced. I believe that the spark is beyond our ability to imagine it, let alone create it, even via uber-capable machines.
It might be vanity or it might be a failure of imagination — I can be both vain and pedestrian — but I believe our humanity is simply too complex for a machine to understand, even a machine with vastly more capability than we can know, and too organic for a machine to replicate. Anything created by a machine, no matter how superior in function, will be always less than we are.
I can offer no proof for my beliefs. I can’t tell you how we started, I can’t say where memories or self or consciousness come from or where they reside, if in fact they do reside somewhere. I have not experienced the greater universe that so many people who have altered their consciousness swear exists. I do not believe in omniscient or omnipotent gods, even as I believe there had to be something that kicked off the creation of our universe.
But even as I believe that a machine can replicate everything that we do, I believe even more strongly that a machine will never be able to replicate everything that we are.
It does make for diverting discussion though.
