https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56097578-god-human-animal-machine
God, Human, Animal, Machine - a very interesting book discussing the parallels of technology and religion, of consciousness - from an atheist author who dropped out of bible school.
main ideas
the problem of consciousness
-
what differentiates human from machine?
- our metaphors for describing humanity and our cognitive processes have grown increasingly mechanical, to the concern of linguists
- We ‘process’ information, ‘retrieve’ memories, prescribing purely mechanical operations to the functions of our minds
- “Metaphors, after all, are not merely linguistic tools; they structure how we think about the world, and when an analogy becomes ubiquitous, it is impossible to think around it”
-
Descartes disenchanted the world, separating mind from matter
- the soul was believed to be the seat of consciousness
- [Descartes] believed “a humanoid automaton could never fool us, because it would clearly lack reason - an immaterial quality he believed stemmed from the soul”
- Only the soul was immaterial, “not in any way part of the material world”
- Thomas Nagel - “the view from nowhere” - conviction that to describe the world empirically, we put aside our subjective experiences
- this has led to the conclusion that because consciousness cannot be studied scientifically, it does not exist
- “the true trauma of disenchantment is that the world is devoid of intrinsic meaning”
-
Hume “argued against not only the existence of the soul but of the reality of the self”
-
The soul has become a dead metaphor
-
Consciousness and self-awareness is a first-person experience, which cannot be externally observed or studied - science requires a third-person perspective
-
Claude Shannon removed semantic meaning (non quantifiable) such that information became purely mathematical - the thinking mind was removed from the concept of information - even the terminology for describing computers (learn, reason, understand) is anthropomorphic
- “increasingly difficult to tell the difference between matter and form, medium and message, metaphor and reality”
-
Eliminativists claim consciousness does not exist
-
“This is the great paradox of modern reenchantment narratives: even the most mystical end up simply reiterating the fundamental problem of our disenchanted age: the inability to account for the mind.”
transhumanism and christianity
- “The Age of Spiritual Machines” - Kurzweil
- posthuman - transhumanism
- Kurzweil understands consciousness as a pattern of information
- draws interesting parallels between transhumanism and Christian prophecies, the promise of immortality
- “What makes transhumanism so compelling is that it promises to restore through science the transcendent—and essentially religious—hopes that science itself obliterated.”
- fundamentally, transhumanism asks the same questions as christianity: “What is soul’s relationship to the body? Will the Resurrection revive the entire human form, or just the spirit? Will we have our memories and our sense of self even in the afterlife?”
- “most early Christians held that body and soul were inseparable. When God raised the dead”
- Origen of Alexandria proposed the argument that the body is never the same throughout time - “the river is not a bad name for the body”
- this matter cannot be resurrected, but rather some essential pattern that characterizes the mortal flesh
- how can identity persist after death?
- what if technological visions are in fact the events that Christ prophesied?
- the dark side of transhumanism: belief that we are “inevitably going to be superseded by machines, and that the only way we can survive the Singularity is to become machines ourselves”
emergence, Network(s)
-
Teilhard: “In the future the network of human machines would give way to an “ ‘etherised’ universal consciousness” that would span the entire circumference of the globe”
- very much reminds me of serial experiments lain
-
beyond our physical selves, there is “a second self that is purely informational and immaterial, a data set of our clicks, purchases, and likes that lingers not in some transcendent nirvana but rather in the shadowy dossiers of third-party aggregators.”
parallels between biological systems and computing
-
“Deep in our DNA, she said, was the memory of a time when we were not separate from nature but part of it, though we had since lost our ability to perceive nonhuman forms of communication.”
-
“much of the current research on plant intelligence draws from distributed computing and the science of networks.”
-
“This subterranean system is so much like the internet—it is decentralized, reiterated, redundant—that ecologists have nicknamed it the “wood-wide web.”
-
“emergence: the idea that new structural properties and patterns can appear spontaneously in complex adaptive systems that are not present in its individual parts.”
-
Rodney Brooks
- “intelligence did not require a unified, knowing subject. He was convinced that these simple robot competencies would build on one another until they evolved something that looked very much like human intelligence. “Thought and consciousness will not need to be programmed in,” he wrote. “They will emerge.”
- “Intelligence is in the eye of the observer.”
-
“The discourse too often arrived at the strange conclusion that conceiving of the world, once again, as intelligent and alive would require renouncing those very qualities in ourselves.”
-
“Consciousness was not some substance in the brain but rather emerged from the complex relationships between the subject and the world.”
TODO
other notable quotes
-
“Even the suspicion that the world is ordered (…) speaks to this larger impulse to see human intention and human purpose in every last quirk of ‘creation’”
- “For centuries we said we were made in God’s image, when in truth we made him in ours”
-
“consciousness can be observed only from the inside”
-
we are hardwired “to see life everywhere we look”
-
Maimonides believed that “the image of God in humans was consciousness, or self-awareness: the ability to conceive of oneself as a self”
-
Tertullian of Carthage said “the rational element” was granted to us by “a rational God”
-
“interior experience was more important, and more reliable, than my actions in the world”
-
When Deep Blue won in chess against Garry Kasparov, Douglas Hofstadter, who once said chess was a creative activity like art, said “My God, I used to think chess required thought. Now I realize it doesn’t”
-
“Nietzsche said it best: we haven’t gotten rid of God because we still believe in grammar”
-
“What profit has anyone gained from their profound meditations?”
-
“Privacy was a modern fixation, and distinctly American” - people have always believed their lives were watched by God
-
“simulation of life”
-
“In his 1917 lecture Science as a Vocation, Weber writes that “science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?”
-
“how is it that the computer metaphor—an analogy that was expressly designed to avoid the notion of a metaphysical soul—has returned to us these ancient religious ideas about physical transcendence and the disembodied spirit?”
-
“Clement of Alexandria claimed that Christ had come to earth in mortal form “so that you might learn from a man how to become a god.”
-
humans “were now in a position to direct the course of their own evolution”
-
“how desperate we were to justify, even through the framework of materialism, our spiritual and transcendent worth as humans.”
-
transhumanism is another attempt to argue “that the soul is already so illusory that it will not be missed if it doesn’t survive the leap into the great digital beyond.”
-
Jaron Lanier: “If you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife,” Lanier writes, “to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive.” ”
- “In the end, transhumanism and other techno-utopian ideas have served to advance what Lanier calls an “antihuman approach to computation,” a digital climate in which “bits are presented as if they were alive, while humans are transient fragments.”
To look into
- Macy Conferences on Cybernetics
- Stewart
- Pierre Teilhard
- singularity university
- institude for ethics and emerging technologies
- world transhumanist association
- neuralink
- “Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”