The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (88 page)

Although many computer programs do operate the way Dembski describes, the predominant techniques in my own field of pattern recognition use biology-inspired chaotic-computing methods. In these systems the unpredictable interaction of millions of processes, many of which contain random and unpredictable elements, provide unexpected yet appropriate answers to subtle questions of recognition. The bulk of human intelligence consists of just these sorts of pattern-recognition processes.

As for our responses to emotions and our highest aspirations, these are properly regarded as emergent properties—profound ones to be sure but nonetheless emergent patterns that result from the interaction of the human brain with its complex environment. The complexity and capacity of nonbio-logical entities is increasing exponentially and will match biological systems including the human brain (along with the rest of the nervous system and the endocrine system) within a couple of decades. Indeed, many of the designs of future machines will be biologically inspired—that is, derivative of biological designs. (This is already true of many contemporary systems.) It is my thesis that by sharing the complexity as well as the actual patterns of human brains, these future nonbiological entities will display the intelligence and emotionally rich reactions (such as “aspirations”) of humans.

Will such a nonbiological entity be conscious? Searle claims that we can (at least in theory) readily resolve this question by ascertaining if it has the correct “specific neurobiological processes.” It is my view that many humans, ultimately the vast majority of humans, will come to believe that such human-derived but nonetheless nonbiological intelligent entities are conscious, but that’s a political and psychological prediction, not a scientific or philosophical judgment. My bottom line: I agree with Dembski that this is not a scientific question, because it cannot be resolved through objective observation. Some observers say that if it’s not a scientific question, it’s not an important or even a real question. My view (and I’m sure Dembski agrees) is that precisely because the question is not scientific, it is a philosophical one—indeed, the fundamental philosophical question.

Dembski writes: “We need to transcend ourselves to find ourselves. Now the motions and modifications of matter offer no opportunity for transcending ourselves. . . . Freud . . . Marx . . . Nietzsche, . . . each regarded the hope for transcendence as a delusion.” This view of transcendence as an ultimate goal is reasonably stated. But I disagree that the material world offers no “opportunity
for transcending.” The material world inherently evolves, and each stage transcends the stage before it. As I discussed in
chapter 7
, evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, greater love. And God has been called all these things, only without any limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, and infinite love. Evolution does not achieve an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably toward our conception of God, albeit never reaching this ideal.

Dembski continues:

A machine is fully determined by the constitution, dynamics, and interrelationships of its physical parts. . . . “[M]achines” stresses the strict absence of extra-material factors. . . . The replacement principle is relevant to this discussion because it implies that machines have no substantive history. . . . But a machine, properly speaking, has no history. Its history is a superfluous rider—an addendum that could easily have been different without altering the machine. . . . For a machine, all that is is what it is at this moment. . . . Machines access or fail to access items in storage. . . . Mutatis mutandis, items that represent counterfactual occurrences (i.e., things that never happened) but which are accessible can be, as far as the machine is concerned, just as though they did happen.

It need hardly be stressed that the whole point of this book is that many of our dearly held assumptions about the nature of machines and indeed of our own human nature will be called into question in the next several decades. Dembski’s conception of “history” is just another aspect of our humanity that necessarily derives from the richness, depth, and complexity of being human. Conversely, not having a history in the Dembski sense is just another attribute of the simplicity of the machines that we have known up to this time. It is precisely my thesis that machines of the 2030s and beyond will be of such great complexity and richness of organization that their behavior will evidence emotional reactions, aspirations, and, yes, history. So Dembski is merely describing today’s limited machines and just assuming that these limitations are inherent, a line of argument equivalent to stating that “today’s machines are not as capable as humans, therefore machines will never reach this level of performance.” Dembski is just assuming his conclusion.

Dembski’s view of the ability of machines to understand their own history
is limited to their “accessing” items in storage. Future machines, however, will possess not only a record of their own history but an ability to understand that history and to reflect insightfully upon it. As for “items that represent counterfactual occurrences,” surely the same can be said for our human memories.

Dembski’s lengthy discussion of spirituality is summed up thus:

But how can a machine be aware of God’s presence? Recall that machines are entirely defined by the constitution, dynamics, and interrelationships among their physical parts. It follows that God cannot make his presence known to a machine by acting upon it and thereby changing its state. Indeed, the moment God acts upon a machine to change its state, it no longer properly is a machine, for an aspect of the machine now transcends its physical constituents. It follows that awareness of God’s presence by a machine must be independent of any action by God to change the state of the machine. How then does the machine come to awareness of God’s presence? The awareness must be self-induced. Machine spirituality is the spirituality of self-realization, not the spirituality of an active God who freely gives himself in self-revelation and thereby transforms the beings with which he is in communion. For Kurzweil to modify “machine” with the adjective “spiritual” therefore entails an impoverished view of spirituality.

Dembski states that an entity (for example, a person) cannot be aware of God’s presence without God’s acting upon her, yet God cannot act upon a machine, so therefore a machine cannot be aware of God’s presence. Such reasoning is entirely tautological and humancentric. God communes only with humans, and only biological ones at that. I have no problem with Dembski’s subscribing to this as a personal belief, but he fails to make the “strong case” that he promises, that “humans are not machines—period.” As with Searle, Dembski just assumes his conclusion.

Like Searle, Dembski cannot seem to grasp the concept of the emergent properties of complex distributed patterns. He writes:

Anger presumably is correlated with certain localized brain excitations. But localized brain excitations hardly explain anger any better than overt behaviors associated with anger, like shouting obscenities. Localized brain excitations may be reliably correlated with anger, but what accounts for one person interpreting a comment as an insult and experiencing anger, and another person interpreting that same comment as a
joke and experiencing laughter? A full materialist account of mind needs to understand localized brain excitations in terms of other localized brain excitations. Instead we find localized brain excitations (representing, say, anger) having to be explained in terms of semantic contents (representing, say, insults). But this mixture of brain excitations and semantic contents hardly constitutes a materialist account of mind or intelligent agency.

Dembski assumes that anger is correlated with a “localized brain excitation,” but anger is almost certainly the reflection of complex distributed patterns of activity in the brain. Even if there is a localized neural correlate associated with anger, it nonetheless results from multifaceted and interacting patterns. Dembski’s question as to why different people react differently to similar situations hardly requires us to resort to his extramaterial factors for an explanation. The brains and experiences of different people are clearly not the same, and these differences are well explained by differences in their physical brains resulting from varying genes and experiences.

Dembski’s resolution of the ontological problem is that the ultimate basis of what exists is what he calls the “real world of things” that are not reducible to material stuff. Dembski does not list what “things” we might consider as fundamental, but presumably human minds would be on the list, as might be other things, such as money and chairs. There may be a small congruence of our views in this regard. I regard Dembski’s “things” as patterns. Money, for example, is a vast and persisting pattern of agreements, understandings, and expectations. “Ray Kurzweil” is perhaps not so vast a pattern but thus far is also persisting. Dembski apparently regards patterns as ephemeral and not substantial, but I have a profound respect for the power and endurance of patterns. It is not unreasonable to regard patterns as a fundamental ontological reality. We are unable to really touch matter and energy directly, but we do directly experience the patterns underlying Dembski’s “things.” Fundamental to this thesis is that as we apply our intelligence, and the extension of our intelligence called technology, to understanding the powerful patterns in our world (for example, human intelligence), we can re-create—and extend!—these patterns in other substrates. The patterns are more important than the materials that embody them.

Finally, if Dembski’s intelligence-enhancing extramaterial stuff really exists, then I’d like to know where I can get some.

The Criticism from Holism

Another common criticism says the following: machines are organized as rigidly structured hierarchies of modules, whereas biology is based on holistically organized elements in which every element affects every other. The unique capabilities of biology (such as human intelligence) can result only from this type of holistic design. Furthermore, only biological systems can use this design principle.

Michael Denton, a biologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, points out the apparent differences between the design principles of biological entities and those of the machines he has known. Denton eloquently describes organisms as “self-organizing, . . . self-referential, . . . self-replicating, . . . reciprocal, . . . self-formative, and . . . holistic.”
⁴⁵
He then makes the unsupported leap—a leap of faith, one might say—that such organic forms can be created only through biological processes and that such forms are “immutable, . . . impenetrable, and . . . fundamental” realities of existence.

I do share Denton’s “awestruck” sense of “wonderment” at the beauty, intricacy, strangeness, and interrelatedness of organic systems, ranging from the “eerie other-worldly . . . impression” left by asymmetric protein shapes to the extraordinary complexity of higher-order organs such as the human brain. Further, I agree with Denton that biological design represents a profound set of principles. However, it is precisely my thesis, which neither Denton nor other critics from the holistic school acknowledge or respond to, that machines (that is, entities derivative of human-directed design) can access—and already are using—these same principles. This has been the thrust of my own work and represents the wave of the future. Emulating the ideas of nature is the most effective way to harness the enormous powers that future technology will make available.

Biological systems are not completely holistic, and contemporary machines are not completely modular; both exist on a continuum. We can identify units of functionality in natural systems even at the molecular level, and discernible mechanisms of action are even more evident at the higher level of organs and brain regions. The process of understanding the functionality and information transformations performed in specific brain regions is well under way, as we discussed in
chapter 4
.

It is misleading to suggest that every aspect of the human brain interacts with every other aspect and that it is therefore impossible to understand its methods. Researchers have already identified and modeled the transformations of information in several dozen of its regions. Conversely there are numerous
examples of contemporary machines that were not designed in a modular fashion, and in which many of the design aspects are deeply interconnected, such as the examples of genetic algorithms described in
chapter 5
. Denton writes:

Today almost all professional biologists have adopted the mechanistic/reductionist approach and assume that the basic parts of an organism (like the cogs of a watch) are the primary essential things, that a living organism (like a watch) is no more than the sum of its parts, and that it is the parts that determine the properties of the whole and that (like a watch) a complete description of all the properties of an organism may be had by characterizing its parts in isolation.

Denton, too, is ignoring here the ability of complex processes to exhibit emergent properties that go beyond “its parts in isolation.” He appears to recognize this potential in nature when he writes: “In a very real sense organic forms . . . represent genuinely emergent realities.” However, it is hardly necessary to resort to Denton’s “vitalistic model” to explain emergent realities. Emergent properties derive from the power of patterns, and nothing restricts patterns and their emergent properties to natural systems.