The Mind and the Machine

What It Means to Be Human and Why It Matters

Matthew T. Dickerson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781498203845
• eBook ISBN: 9781498203852
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Are humans just complex biochemical machines, mere physical parts of a causally closed materialist universe? Are we approaching the so-called "Singularity" when human consciousness can (and will) be downloaded into computers? Or is there more to the human person--something that might be known as soul or spirit? As this book makes clear, the answers to these questions have profound implications to topics such as heroism, creativity, ecology, and the possibility of reason and science. In exploring this important topic, Dickerson engages the ideas of some well-known twentieth- and twenty-first-century espousers of physicalism, including philosopher Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained), biologist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), futurist-engineer Raymond Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines), psychologist B. F. Skinner (Beyond Freedom and Dignity), and mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell (Why I Am Not a Christian). Through a careful reading of their works, Dickerson not only provides a five-fold critique of physicalism, but also offers a Christian alternative in the form of "integrative dualism, " which affirms the existence of both a physical and spiritual reality without diminishing the goodness or importance of either, and acknowledges that humans are spiritual as well as bodily persons.

Part 1 •

Implications of a Human Machine

1

Ghosts, Machines, and the Nature of Light

In the year 2000, inventor, author, and self-proclaimed “futurist” Ray Kurzweil published a book with the interesting title, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. As noted in the introduction, Kurzweil’s books have been praised by numerous critics, and his ideas have been lauded both by popular media (from The Wall Street Journal to the New York Times) and by many leading intellectuals. The Singularity Is Near, a 2005 sequel (or updated version) of The Age of Spiritual Machines, was a New York Times best seller and was also listed in the Times as the thirteenth most-blogged-about book of 2005. Kurzweil has been given thirteen honorary doctorates and has received awards from three US presidents.1 Even the numerous critics who disagree with his ideas (a list that includes many respected thinkers and writers) have taken those ideas seriously enough to respond in print.

Although The Age of Spiritual Machines was ostensibly about the tremendous advances made in the field of computing in the twentieth century, with confident predictions about more advances to come in the twenty-first century, the book was also about humanness—what it has meant to be human, and what humanity might look like by the end of the new century.

Among the fundamental ideas behind Kurzweil’s predictions is the philosophy of physicalism.2 He accepts the premise that human beings are really programmed devices consisting exclusively of physical matter. We are computers, as it were, though admittedly complex biochemical ones. Indeed, we are astronomically more complex than any nineteenth-century mechanical device that we may associate with the word machine, and so old connotations of the word machine would do us injustice. We are profoundly more complex in our “circuitry” than even the most advanced computer of our own day. Still, Kurzweil argues, although our brains and bodies are made of biological matter rather than digital circuits (and so we don’t look like the computers that sit on the top of your desk or lap, or in the palm of your hand), we are nonetheless automated machines, or simply automata. Since we are made of physical material only, we are fully explainable in terms of that physical stuff: molecules, atomic particles, and subatomic particles. Thus, just as the behavior of a computer is entirely determined by the set of computer programs it is running, so also are all the behaviors of humans determined by the “programs” loaded into the biochemical computers we call our brains. Although there may be disagreement among physicalists about how much of the programming is genetic and how much is societal conditioning, the assumption is that there is some program controlling or determining everything. In common parlance, we may debate whether we are programmed by our innate “nature” or by our societal “nurture,” but we are understood to be programmed somehow. And this underlying assumption is not often questioned.

This view expressed by Kurzweil is widespread,3 evident not only in the writings of academics, but also in popular culture. I am not suggesting here that books and films portray humans by and large as “robotic” in the more deprecatory sense of the word: unemotional, wooden, unresponsive, unexpressive, or impassive. Readers born prior to 1970 may remember the old-fashioned robots in early science fiction films: “Robby the Robot” from the Forbidden Planet (1956), or B-9, “The Robot,” from the 1965–1968 television series Lost in Space. Of course humans are not made out to be robots like these—or if a character is portrayed like this, it is meant to be an indication that there is something significantly wrong with the character.4 Rather it is the portrayal of robots (or artificial intelligences) capable of behaving like, speaking like, and perhaps even looking like humans. Consider again the following icons of our popular culture: The Terminator (along with several sequels and television spin-offs), with its humanoid robots from the future who come back to our present either to save or destroy humanity; The Matrix depicting Agent Smith as capable of human intelligence, expression, will, and emotion; the new Battlestar Galactica television series with its humanoid and “spiritual” Cylons (in contrast to the 1978 Battlestar Galactica series, whose Cylons looked more like B-9); the Harrison Ford film Blade Runner, inspired by the Philip K. Dick novel with the telling title Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; and the film A.I., based on Isaac Asimov’s writings. These and a host of other examples have brought into our day-to-day lives the notion that computers can behave just like humans. And if a programmable computing device is indistinguishable from a human, it stands to reason that humans can also be understood as programmable computing devices.

Now, the behavior of any computer-controlled device in response to its input could, in theory, be known and predicted by somebody who knew and understood all the computer’s code. That’s what a computer program is: it is a set of rules and instructions specifying exactly what steps to take based on its data. So what if humans were also fully determined by our “programs”? Then the same thing that is true of computers would be true of us: every response we make to sensory input could be fully determined and known in advance if we had a complete knowledge and understanding of all the neural connections in our brains—what is often called the “wiring” of our brain, a phrase which itself suggest that we are computers. This would be true not only of our actual surroundings, but of any hypothetical surroundings we might invent. With enough study of the brain, we could know exactly how any given person would react under any circumstance, real or imagined.

Another way of stating the premise of physicalism is that mind = brain. It is the belief that the human mind ultimately reduces to the biological brain, with its physical set of neurons and their connections that reside as a complex collection of living cells inside our hard, protective skulls.

For Kurzweil and many others who hold this belief, it may be easy to also have faith in the future of computer technology and to see the popular science fiction examples mentioned earlier as somehow realistic. Think of all the incredible tasks we humans do with our minds, including not only the elaborate muscle control used by the concert pianist to play a great symphony, but also the memory employed to learn the symphony by heart. And, of course, these tasks would also include the human creativity to write that symphony in the first place. If our human minds are merely complex computers—if human mind is nothing more than human brain—then why couldn’t computers do the same things?

The answer is that there is no reason at all why they eventually could not. Kurzweil’s book makes reference to computers that are already composing music and producing paintings, and we know that the fastest computers can beat the best humans in most strategy games such as chess. If the physicalist assumption is correct, then once our understanding of the brain becomes more advanced and computers become complex and fast enough, computers should be able to do, think, and feel all the things humans do. And many physicalists tell us that they eventually will (even if it doesn’t happen quite as soon as Kurzweil optimistically predicts).

Indeed, since computers are getting faster and more powerful with each passing year, and also smaller and more portable, we should expect not only that computers will do the same tasks, but that they will eventually do them better and faster than humans. Take as witness the remarkable 1997 chess victory of the IBM chess-playing computer Deep Blue over the best human chess player in the world at that time, Garry Kasparov.

One of Kurzweil’s predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines is that by the end of the present century, we humans will have the ability to download our consciousness into a computer and thus live forever. Our thinking will even be improved by the addition of more and faster circuits. Our consciousness will continue in perpetuity, steadily evolving as data and as instructions in a computer. The computer will be conscious with our consciousness! Of course, the notions both of immortality and of better brains are widely appealing, and so Kurzweil’s ideas have moved beyond his books and into our popular imagination—including previously mentioned well-funded efforts by organizations like the Terasem Movement Foundation to bring this vision to pass. Though some people today are appalled by this vision of immortality, others are enthralled. It is the new eternal life—as long as the computer memory storing our consciousness doesn’t get erased and our backups don’t fail.

Yet a moment’s thought about Kurzweil’s basic premise—whether or not one agrees with it—shows that his book is actually mistitled.5 Kurzweil as physicalist doesn’t believe in the existence of spirit, and thus doesn’t (and can’t) believe in human spirit-uality. At least not in any meaningful sense of the word. The human has body but not spirit, and it is this belief that humans are entirely physical beings that leads to a belief that human consciousness may someday be fully portable to computer memory. Computers will be spiritual only in the same sense that humans are spiritual under a presupposition of physicalism.

What Kurzweil really means by spirituality is simply consciousness; he is promising an age of conscious machines. But the central idea of consciousness, in human terms, is generally self-consciousness, or self-awareness. Humans are self-aware. And, according to Kurzweil, someday computers will be programmed to be self-aware also, or human self-awareness will be transferred to computational devices. Thus, the subtitle of Kurzweil’s later book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, is a more accurate representation of his ideas.

Now Kurzweil, though he may be among a small number of people willing to predict the porting of human consciousness to computers in the twenty-first century, is far from alone in his beliefs about the h...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Why Any of This Matters
• PART 1: Implications of a Human Machine
• PART 2: The Spiritual Human
• Works Cited