Multivac

I’ve already got down to looking at our collective existence in a very small way, however I haven’t spent any time at all on the interesting question of what is life, and the more interesting question of what is human. I’m going to jump into the second question as the first is not very interesting from a philosophical point of view. We know that bacteria are alive, but are not entirely sure about all viruses, so what? These are evolutionarily far enough away from human that it doesn’t impact on how we view the universe. Actually right now I’m all bunged up with a nasty bacterial cold that I think grew from a mild viral infection, so I’m not entirely sure if the last statement is correct. These tiny life/non-life forms are pissing me off and jaundicing my outlook on life more than usual.

Of course we know what is to be human, a quick glance and we can tell, can’t we? We’re those bipedal mammals with big heads and bigger egos. The differences between the racial groups exist, but by any reputable definitions of a species we are just one. We arose in Africa comparatively recently, not more than two hundred thousand years ago…small groups of individuals left via the Middle East in one or two episodes of migration and from there spread across the globe. The visible racial differences are no more and no less than adaptation to local conditions by the process of natural selection and perhaps by inbreeding due to small numbers within populations groups. Had groups of humans stayed small and isolated from each other for much longer than was the case, we might well have developed into separate species. Fact is this didn’t happen…we are one species by any definition of the term.

Are we in any way special, compared to say goats, cockroaches, or any other animal? Though there may well be other creatures elsewhere in the Universe that would qualify as human in terms of my definition, we are the only humans that we happen to know of at this particular point in time. Obviously the bipedal part isn’t terribly important in the definition, we may be the only placental mammals that habitually walk on two legs, but the humble chicken that makes it into the Sunday roasts is also bipedal. We are homo sapiens sapiens, a subspecies and only surviving species of homo sapiens. We can call ourselves human because of the sapiens part of our scientific name, meaning wise. I’ve always thought this to be ironic as I see so little wisdom around, nonetheless though we might not be terribly wise, we are at least smarter than any other creatures; we have a lot of computing power between our ears.

 Humanness rests on achieving a state of awareness. Awareness is a little difficult to define, though most of us know what is meant by it. It is the ability to contemplate your own position within the cosmos, not necessarily to understand that position, but to be able to contemplate it. It is to be aware of the thoughts in your head, and the thoughts of others. It is something beyond mere intelligence, although I strongly suspect that it flows from intelligence, perhaps an inevitable side effect that occurs when intelligence goes beyond a certain point. Awareness is the quality that allows us to appreciate the abstract, to know what art is, and to be able to recognise beauty, purely for what it is. Without awareness we would not have religion, because religion stems primarily from being aware of yourself within the cosmos. To be human must be to achieve genuine awareness, at least as aware as we are. The dividing line between human and non-human is not a clean line in evolutionary terms (nothing is) although here on Earth we draw it easily because it seems to us that no creatures exist that straddle it. I’ll leave this for now, but I am not sure that the other great apes do not achieve a level of awareness greater than what we credit them with.

The definition of what qualifies as human must also be pinned to a species rather than to individuals. I am the last person that would advocate some sort of test based on I.Q. to determine the relative humanness of one individual versus another. That sort of eugenics is worse than racial prejudice and could potentially have even more horrific consequences. An entire species is either human or it isn’t, including all those unfortunates born with a very low intelligence or with a medical condition that prevents awareness, or have lost brain function due to accident or disease. The test is sufficient intelligence and the ability to achieve awareness, within the average member of a species.

In his book, The Human Story, Robin Dunbar[i] illustrates the concept of intentionality. Intentionality is the mind states of believing, thinking, wanting, desiring, intending and hoping i.e. a state of awareness of the content of our owns mind and the minds of those we are interacting with, this is known as ‘Theory of Mind’. It is a handy test of the degree of ‘awareness’ that a creature might be capable of, and surely awareness is a question of degree. It is thought that true awareness requires at least the ability to operate above two levels of intentionality. Humans can typically go up to four or five, some of us can reach six, but very few go as high as seven.

Intentionality is something we come across on a daily basis, but don’t really recognise it unless we give it some thought. It is how we view our own thought process in conjunction with that of others. It is how we operate vis-à-vis our fellow humans.

Dunbar gives the following example of 6 levels of intentionality. It is a simple example, but notice how you start to lose track after four or five and need to concentrate quite hard to follow:

 Peter believes (1) that Jane thinks (2) that Sally wants (3) Peter to suppose (4) that Jane intends (5) Sally to believe (6) that her ball is under the cushion.

It’s a lot easier if you only go to say three:

Peter believes (1) that Jane thinks (2) that Sally believes (3) her ball is under the cushion.

 It’s like a game of bluff, but consider your typical social interaction, you’ll recognise this process going on. This sort of mind reading is an essential part of human behaviour. I don’t think that we could function in almost any social interaction without it. Certain medical conditions, like autism impairs an individual’s ability to handle theory of mind, which severely limits those individuals from normal social interaction.

Whereas theory of mind, by itself is not awareness, clearly it goes hand in hand with awareness. One cannot contemplate your position within the cosmos unless you can be aware of your own state of mind and how that state of mind influences and is influences by the world around you. Take religion for example, to be able to imagine an unseen parallel existence, peopled by gods and demigods that interact with us and our world is an excellent example of theory of mind… what is prayer other than an attempt to influence the mind of God?

I’m going with homo sapiens sapiens as the only intelligent and aware creatures that exist on Earth today, that can be called human, all other contenders have gone extinct due to luck and inability to compete with us. The big question is, will we continue to be the only creatures that meet the definition of humanness.

The film Bicentennial Man based on the novel The Positronic Man, co-written by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, explores this theme very well. The story is about a robot that due to some quality error in its manufacture has genuine originality, feels emotions and is as fully aware of itself and its thoughts as any human being is. Robin Williams plays the part of the robot, Andrew Martins, who is portrayed as a really nice chap and eventually empowered with considerable wisdom, as you’d expect from a sapient being that has managed to live for two hundred years.

It’s a good story, well told and well presented on film. In my view this is also not an impossible scenario in the relatively near future, if humanness is indeed a function of processing power. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months, has so far been shown to be largely correct. This effectively means that available computing power, on any given standard, doubles every two years. Hence though the current ability of artificial intelligence may not yet be close to ours, it increases exponentially. Who knows quite how close we are to creating real AI.

 If we do manage to create real AI, will we have created something that can be considered as ‘human’ in terms of my definition?

Roger Penrose discusses four viewpoints in his book Shadows of the Mind[ii]:

·         All thinking is computation, including feelings of awareness

·         Awareness is a feature of the brain’s physical action; whereas any physical action can be simulated computationally, such simulation does not evoke awareness.

·         Appropriate physical action of the brain evokes awareness, but this action cannot be simulated computationally.

·         Awareness cannot be explained by physical, computational or in any other scientific terms.

Personally I don’t quite follow the second argument as it seems to harbour a contradiction; nonetheless, the main question is whether or not our awareness (our humanness) is a result of our brainpower or some other metaphysical means. If awareness is simply computing and if it is, can it be authentically recreated in a mechanism other than the human brain? The question posed by the film Bicentennial Man is deciding between the 1^st and 3^rd points of view. Andrew the robot indeed fulfilled the definition of human long before the closing moments of the film when he was legally declared to be so.

The concept of a human soul lies in the last viewpoint, essentially that humanness or true awareness can only be God given.

I don’t claim to have a definitive answer; I do, however, believe that we are a product of what happens in the space between our ears. If we mess with that, either by introducing chemicals into our system or physically, we become changed, this is fact. Most of us have some experience of this, knowing someone whose personality has been altered by addiction or accident. This seems to me to indicate that who we are is driven by the physical, rather than by some other mysterious agency. If the first viewpoint turns out to be true, then the definition of what is human must encompass all creatures that qualify, including computers if one day they achieve this capacity.

Of course computers have long since outstripped humans in terms of computational speed; that’s what they are good at, one calculation after another at a pace that makes us look utterly pedestrian. What humans are good at is processing many bits of data at the same time, i.e. parallel processing ….perhaps therein lays awareness. Perhaps humanness results at some point where sufficient parallel processing is coupled with the ability to recall experiences. According to Ray Kurtzweil[iii] computers will likely reach our level of processing power at about the year 2020. He bases this on Moore’s law; personally I think that a significant slowing down of Moore’s law is inevitable due to the law of diminishing returns, but it shows no signs of slowing down just yet. Kurtzweil envisages a merging of human and machine, even at a thought processing level, as a distinct possibility. This may sound like science fiction, but some science fiction has an odd way of becoming real science and real technology.

The question of what is meant by humanness may not entirely be as academic as it may at first appear. We may soon have to make room for a much smarter, hopefully wiser creatures than ourselves in the definition. Perhaps these creatures will understand the meaning of existence better than we can.

Of course this makes the definition of life that I dismissed in the first paragraph a much more interesting philosophical question.     

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[i] The Human Story, by Robin Dunbar, published by Faber and Fabar

[ii] Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, at page 12 in paperback version published by Vintage Science.

[iii] Ray Kurtzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, published by Penguin

The Meaning Inside

I had an e-mail from an old friend on the subject of this blog. She indicated that this is not really the type of blog that she would follow; she prefers to be doing things rather than thinking about the meaning of existence. She is of course 100% correct; spending your time building the content of your life is exactly what the meaning of existence is about. This lady is a very interesting person and one of those people that it is always great to be around. She is kind and generous, not only in a material sense, but with her time and attention. The span of her interests and experience is such that I have always thought of her as a really well rounded person. I always had the notion that she knows why she is here, the rest falls into place, at least on a practical level.

Partly the reason I’m doing this is to find some of this purpose for myself, this is not only about contemplation, but is about doing. I am doing the research and am doing the writing. Ultimately the Universe may yield up its laws to us and we may get to understand how things are the way they are, but nothing in this endeavour is likely to answer the question of why they are. People will seek that answer within themselves, or outside of themselves. My friend, I believe, has an answer. The fact that she doesn’t feel a need to think about it tells me she knows why she is here. Moreover she has found that reason within the ambit of her own existence. 

When people seek the answers outside of their own existence things can become a bit tricky especially when we start to allow other people to provide this answer. The obvious culprit is religion, but this is not the only one. Hitler told the German people that they were there to dominate the world, too many of them believed him and we all know where that went. That’s a well known example, but by no means an isolated example. Stalinism, Maoism... pretty much all of the isms have existed only because one group of people are able to tell another group what their purpose for existence is and the second group are stupid enough to accept it as truth. I say stupid enough, but really it is sufficiently indoctrinated or in some cases intellectually lazy enough.

Lest you think that capitalism is not guilty of this, think again. The indoctrination may be couched as something else, but capitalism has convinced nearly the entire population of the world that our primary reason for existence is to feed it so that it can continue to grow. We believe that we must consume more and more.... and to pay for this consumption we must be more and more productive in the work place.  If growth stumbles even for a few months a calamity is upon us, people lose their livelihoods because we are in a recession. We define our existence in terms of what we earn, own and spend and the commercial media tells us what this should be. I call our global economy ‘the beast’ as that is what it has become. Like someone that has raised a lion from a cub in their home, at some point it will cease to be their lion, rather they become its people...the global economy may be considered an invention of humans, but we have lost all control over it, it controls us.

Religion is however probably the most dangerous because it tells us directly what the purpose for existence is. This would be fine if there was any sense or uniformity in the message from God to us as conveyed by religion. The fact that we have Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhist, Hindu’s and God knows what else and each of these are subdivided into sects and each sect believes that it and only it has true knowledge of the mind (or at least the instructions) of God. That religion has got things so spectacularly wrong in so many things – Galileo was right and the Church was wrong, one example amongst many – and that the pronouncements of religion has had (and continues to have) such horrible consequences, makes me particularly concerned. A few well known examples - the Inquisition, the Northern Ireland conflict, the partition of India, the suppression of women in Muslim countries and the events of 9-11. If you think I am being unfair to religion, remember that Muslim suicide bombers are martyrs in their own eyes carrying out the will of Allah, and paradise compete with bevies of virgins and free passes for their families awaits them on the other side of the explosion. It’s idiotic of course, but it is their reality. 

Science has provided us with the understanding that the Universe (potentially many billions of other Universes as well) does not actually need a divine being to manage it or even to create it. Even life does not need a God to intervene, it can get going and evolve perfectly well without any Godly interference. Note that this is not the same as science saying that there is no God, merely that there is precious little that is not sufficiently understood about matter, energy and life that requires a God hypothesis to explain. There certainly is no concrete evidence that points to His existence. So where we have no evidence that God exists, evidence that if God did create the world he isn’t doing much to manage its affairs, contradictory and dangerous views on His intentions, people still insist that God provides the reason for existence...I don’t get it. 

It may be arrogant to think that we can establish the reason for existence, and who knows if this is possible beyond the sense of knowing this, as does my friend described in the first paragraph. Nonetheless I think that it is worthwhile to seek the meaning for existence ourselves. I think that in itself may provide some meaning, it is certainly better than accepting something wrapped up and packaged by someone else, be that religion, Hollywood, advertising, Manchester United or the Boy Scout movement. 

Happy 2011

Well I did write a Christmas blog, but once written I decided that it was just a little too cynical for the season, so it remains un-posted.

Welcome to 2011, let’s hope that we make it intact to the other side of this year. Of course there is nothing special about starting a year and nothing other than convention that prescribes the start of a year or the numbering of the years. I’m not a believer in any prophesied end of the world scenario, Mayan, Christian or otherwise. Don’t link my pessimism to any significance that the date may have. The feeling of pending doom is solidly rooted in the circumstances we find ourselves in. It may not be entirely be true to say that we just find ourselves in the predicament we are in. We had a lot to do with it, yet could we actually have followed any other path? This mess is our destiny; it is encoded in our genes.

• Just in case there is anyone out there that is not aware of what I’m talking about, a brief summary of a few of the very scary things that threaten our existence, or at the very least the end of modernity and a very large portion of the human population, is presented in the bullet points below. I could write screeds on the subject, but that is not what this blog is about.

•  The threat of nuclear holocaust has not gone away, I’m not sure that it has even diminished; it has merely taken on a new form. Nuclear technology sufficient to build an atomic bomb of the types dropped on Japan is not beyond the means of even small nations to acquire. Hence the likelihood of a terrorist (freedom fighters, call  them what you like) organization obtaining nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction increases each year.

• Our reliance on fossil fuels has put us on the horns of a few nasty dilemmas. The world economy and our ability to feed ourselves rests firmly on fossil fuels, the most critical one is oil, oil is running out. As soon as the global economy recovers and consumption increases, the markets overreact and the oil price will increase and the economy will collapse. This is the likely pattern until we break our dependency on oil. We seem to have neither the political will, nor the technology to do this effectively. Destroyed economies and bad behaviour by powerful nations to secure access to oil aggravates social unrest and increases the likelihood of nuclear war and/or implosion of social order.

• That same reliance has caused and is causing global climate change. We may have reached the point whereby feedback loops such as the release of methane from peat bogs due to higher temperature (there are several other feedback loops that could come into play|) could rapidly increase temperatures beyond even the gloomiest predictions. The result, economic collapse, starvation, and hence increased likelihood of nuclear war and/or implosion of social order

•  It has been said that we are at all times just four meals away from anarchy. Maybe that exaggerates it, but try not eating for 48 hours and you may agree that it is not many. Even without global climate change and the challenges that peak oil presents to the global food supply, we may well have reached the peak of the amount of food we can produce, the so called Green Revolution probably has reached the end of its run. Sure, right now there is more an imbalance in food distribution than a shortage, but population is growing faster than we can increase yields. When farmers farm to produce biofuel instead of food, the poor will starve and yes, this does mean (you guessed it), increased likelihood of nuclear war and/or implosion of social order

Ok, enough already. The point is we are not in “a good place”, to use psychology speak.

How we got here is not that difficult to describe. This is the tragic by-product of our species greatest achievement, the advent of modernity. We have achieved (at least in some parts of the world) modernity through technology and the harnessing of fossil fuels. We can live in central heated and air conditioned luxury, we can travel, we can feel safe in our homes, we have little worries about where the next meal comes from, we have developed concepts of justice and human rights, we have medicine that actually works and so much more. All of this rests squarely on technology and cheap abundant energy…fossil fuels. I am not overstating this, without machines and cheap energy we cannot even foster the social order needed to advance civil liberties. If human sweat is required to do the work, then serfdom and slavery is not far away.

The driving force behind this development is our very human need to out compete every other human. We are genetically coded to compete like this, we do it to ensure that our genes continue and if possible dominate in the gene pool. It is what all living organisms do; it is what evolution is all about. Gazelles get faster, peacocks grow pretty tails, and we got bigger brains. The truth is that the wealthier and more powerful a person is the better the chance that person has to propagate his or her genes. Ultimately wealth and power are the fruits of intellectual prowess. I’m not saying that rich people are all clever and poor people are dumb, but in most cases acquiring and keeping wealth and power is an intellectual exercise.  

The concept of humanity does not extend to any collective decision making. We all make decisions that primarily are aimed at benefitting ourselves and those that carry our genes. Historically this has led to many great things, it has led to modernity. The powerful mechanism of markets has harnessed our self-interest and created enormous wealth. It has also created over population, peak food, peak oil, global climate change and the horrors of modern war. We have overloaded the system and because we cannot take decisions for humanity (look at Kyoto and Copenhagen) we seem to be unable to reverse or even stop. The force that gave us the fantastic life we have, is the very same force that will screw us in the end, we’ll compete ourselves to death.

When a system overloads, unless there is a safety mechanism to gently release pressure, the result is catastrophic collapse of the system. Blow up a balloon to beyond its capacity and it pops, it does not release enough air to get back to equilibrium, it just bursts…catastrophic collapse. The systems we are overloading are complex beyond imagination. We don’t know if we are beyond capacity, we don’t know how or when collapse is going to happen. We do know if you look at the graph of any system that is impacted by human activity it hockey sticks up against time. A few examples, population, atmospheric concentration of carbon, extinction of species, food production, oil extraction.  Only a fool that insists on living in a fool’s paradise can believe that this can carry on. I see no release value, I see only catastrophic collapse.     

Ok, so what has this to do with the meaning of existence?  Perhaps nothing, perhaps everything.

 The thought has crossed my mind that we are living in an experiment, like we are just a fancy ant farm for some cosmic scientist that wants to see if we’ll eliminate ourselves. Perhaps all over the expanse of time and space within the Universe there are other worlds where some other biological configurations develop intelligent life and we are all test cases. Sadly, as things look at the moment we will be part of the statistic of “failed” with a note in the margin, “clever buggers, just never got the wisdom thing”. If Yahweh is indeed this cosmic scientist, at least his indifference to pain and suffering would be consistent with this option. Of course I don’t seriously believe this, but it does appeal to my sense of irony.

I don’t believe in any cosmic scientists, cruel Gods, or any other God that takes any interest in what is happening down here. Some people believe that we are living God’s grand plan; others have faith in technology to give us the means to buck the system. I think the evidence shows something different.  The Universe has immutable laws and thought we have discovered many of these, it is certain there remain many more. The laws of the Universe are couched in scientific language and describe how energy, matter and systems behave.  Our fate is governed  by these universal laws.

The first law of thermodynamics, the law of the conservation of energy that states that energy is finite and cannot be created or lost. It is in principle the same as the no free lunch rule, or you cannot take more than you give for a sustained length of time. History shows us that empires collapse when they consume more than they can produce. When the materials that sustain the economy run out the economy collapses. We live in a world that is in reality a single empire, the empire of capitalism and we are running out of the main components that sustain it, cheap energy, cheap raw materials and dependable climatic conditions.  The second law states that the entropy of an isolated macroscopic system cannot decrease. Our society has become an enormous, complicated system that demands the consumption of more and more energy merely to maintain overall entropy at a consistent level; we are running out of cheap energy. We are in a system that is chronically out of balance, the balloon has been blown up so tightly there is just no more slack to take up. 

I once thought that we could give meaning to human existence by changing our behaviour, that we could prevent catastrophic collapse, build a sustainable enlightened society. We could in this way become special. I no longer think so. We are just the results of our evolutionary past; we cannot, as a species, change the course of history. Just as any other species is subject to the laws of nature, so are we.  I see no evidence in the course of human history that points at any meaning as to why we exist. We exist because the laws of the Universe allow that we could come into being. We will cease to exist because the laws of the Universe dictate it.