Reflections
on the zombie-scientist problem.
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.
Bullying Nagel.
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 Kurzweil Cult.
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.
Banishing Subjectivity.
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 Brain as Computer.
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.
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.
Besmirching consciousness.
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 program on 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.
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.
The Body and the Mind.
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.
Functionalism.
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?
The Zombie Argument.
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.
The Iron Rod.
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.
The Closing of the Scientific Mind.
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.
No other creature has a best self.
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,
individualistworldview. 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.
