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Worlds Without End Blog

The Missing Links of Artificial Intelligence Posted at 3:26 AM by Jonathan McDonald

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As mentioned earlier, Robert J. Sawyer was in town on Wednesday and gave a talk at UT Dallas about the future of technology. Some of the responsible parties and I attended and listened to his thoughts on Artificial Intelligence, and how its inevitable emergence will affect the world. Sawyer pulled a lot of his thoughts explicitly from his WWW trilogy, and expounded on the philosophy behind his fictional speculations. In the midst of all this, he touched on evolution, ancient human history, the existence of God, and Hollywood’s ambivalent take on A.I. Sawyer’s talk was most interesting to me, however, because of his speculations on the roots and causes of consciousness and intelligence.

His take on consciousness was stereotypically deterministic and materialistic, which I’ve never found satisfying. For Sawyer, consciousness and self-awareness are simply the results of a certain level of complexity, and it is something that spontaneously occurs at a particular degree of brain development, as if life had hit a saturation point. Even though I am Catholic, the Church doesn’t have much doctrine about consciousness as such, and Catholic theologians who do talk about consciousness generally are repeating Aristotle through the middle-man of St. Thomas Aquinas. It is fitting, I suppose, that a religious body should be more concerned with things that are in the realm of divine revelation (like the immortality of the human soul), and less with speculations about the natural world (like the nature of consciousness).

One of the best books I’ve read on the nature of consciousness in all its different forms is E.F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed, originally published in 1977. Schumacher pulls a great deal from classical and medieval philosophy about the human mind, and spends a lot of time explaining the ancient idea of the Great Chain of Being. He thus divides the sensible world (i.e., the world that can be observed by the senses) into four, sharply divided areas: mineral, vegetable, animal and human. The higher levels contain all the powers and substances of the lower, but not the other way around. For instance, minerals are composed of matter, and that matter is dead and simply obeys the physical laws of the universe according to its particular composition; however, vegetation is composed of matter but is also alive, and has a life-principle that minerals do not have, which allows it to grow and care for its own being. Animals possess the powers of the two lower levels, as well as the powers of consciousness (in the sense of being aware of the world) and self-produced locomotion. Man, according to Schumacher, possesses all of these powers with the addition of self-awareness, the ability to think about one’s own thinking. Each level evinces an increase not only in power, but also in freedom: a gecko skittering about has more freedom of motion and choice than does the rock it’s skittering upon.

But intelligence really isn’t the same thing as consciousness or self-awareness. Even a flower has a certain level of intelligence in that it “knows” how to process minerals and water and sunlight to its own advantage, and on the cellular level it works almost programmatically to achieve its goals. In this sense, even an automated machine—which is composed of dead minerals—is intelligent, whether it be a train or a computer. Artificial Intelligence has been with us for a long time. What people really mean when they talk about A.I. is Artificial Self-Awareness (A.S.A.), which, if you’re following Schumacher’s levels, must in the case of computers skip all the way from "mineral" to "man." It is something that spontaneously assumes upon itself all the powers of life, consciousness and self-awareness without gradually moving through any stages in-between. Even if one accepts Sawyer’s thesis that human self-awareness was the result of a slow increase in complexity, it is still the increasing complexity of an already-living species. A.S.A. would seem to require the preexistence of a living computer, and then a conscious (aware) computer; only after these things could we expect self-awareness. In WWW: Wake, however, the computerized life-form that subsists in the Internet awakens fully-formed as an A.S.A. without any intermediate stages.

Where are the missing links?

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