Human Beings as Inferior Computers
Materialism is certainly the dominant view in science today. Ray Kurzweil's brilliant book The Singularity is Near (New York, Viking, 2005) is probably the newest and most extensive presentation of this metaphysical viewpoint. He explores in detail his vision of the future human-computer interface. His writing is lucid and enthralling.

On the future development of technology, my opinions are not soundly enough based to allow me to agree or disagree with Kurzweil's conceptualisation. However, on the relation of now or future relations between computers and consciousness, or on the possibility of machines evolving to something so like consciousness that the differences make no difference, I strongly feel he is in error.

He believes that the cosmos is so of-one-piece that all aspects of it operate according to the same rules: that the same laws govern all of it. This is an article of faith (I use the word advisedly) of modern science and I cannot argue that the laws of physics are or are not the same in Scotland and in the Magellenic Clouds. However, consciousness and computers are something else again. These two are in different universes of discourse and bear little relationship to each other, even though they frequently interact.

To paraphrase Gilbert Ryle, there is little relationship between 'She came home in a bad mood and a sedan chair' (except for the fact that they refer to the same person at the same time). The events referred to can certainly interact. The luxury of the sedan chair may have lightened her mood or the bad mood may have so upset her that she threw up all over the sedan chair. When she got home either could have gone on with or without the other. You cannot predict from the route of the sedan chair what the intensity of the bad mood will be or vice versa. Although with this bad mood she might have told the bearers to take the longest route, the shortest or the most scenic. And so forth. (The analogy with the 'mind-body' problem is obvious.)

The two universes of discourse used here are profoundly different in many ways. In the first (her body coming home in a sedan chair) events are, at least in theory, absolutely predictable. They are determined and if you know enough about a situation you know what will happen next. In the second (her consciousness coming home in a bad mood) events are unpredictable in principle. You can only tell why an event happened afterwards. To give a rather extreme example, the gender orientation of a particular adult male homosexual may be shown to be related to a childhood with a dominant mother and passive father. But if you have a child with the combination of parents there is no way of predicting what this adult gender orientation will be. In a well written theatre play there is no possible way of predicting what the end of the first act will be. It comes as a surprise. Later, when you look back, you can see that it was inevitable. In universes of discourse where the algorithms are MarkovianÑlike long divisionÑthe future is absolutely determined, the future can be predicted. In universes of discourse where they are non-Markovian - like in a good theatre script - their inevitability can only be seen afterwards, they cannot be predicted.

Kurzweil does not understand this. Entranced with his vision, he foretells that everything basically essential to human beings can be in the near future accomplished by computers. The important aspects of what it truly means to be human - love that changes the universe, compassion that tears the heart, rage that sears the soul, religious awe that reaches toward the heavens - he does not seem to realise that these are fundamentally different than anything in the mechanical world and cannot be accomplished by even the most superior computers. They exist in an entirely different universe of discourse.

We are told (p. 7) that future developments in computer technology will even transform our understanding of death. The ancient Greeks warned us of the danger of hubris. Kurzweil seems to have no idea of the fundamental differences between consciousness and machines. But they are profound. Machines react to events, humans to their interpretation of events, and since that interpretation is based on their information and attitudes and there is simply no way of predicting what information or attitudes people will have in the future ...

When Henry Ford married the automobile and the assembly line we could make some pretty good predictions about the future of personal transport possibilities - how the automobile would be likely to evolve. What we could not predict was that one way people would interpret this was that they could now easily take their behaviour away from the prying eyes of their neighbours. Ford's marriage of technological aspects revolutionised the sex habits of the Western world.

To give another minor example of the problem, no one could have predicted that the invention of the telephone would have led to the end of medical house calls. Before this, if a medical matter was so serious that it was worth your while to hitch up the mule and go to the physician's house at 2 a.m. it was so serious that the doctor had better go back to your house to take care of it. But if all you had to do was go to your wall and turn a crank and call the physician, people would gradually begin to call not only for real emergencies but also for hangnails. After a while doctors realised this and the end of the practice of house calls loomed in the distance.

These are minor examples. Any historian can list many more. None of this is new. But with the growing excitement of the wonderful possibilities of the computer we see again a futurology built on mechanical principles. (We have seen it before. The finest previous example was Marxism which felt it accurately predicted the next historical period. However, it failed to predict almost anything including such minor events as the rise of Fascism, the place where Communism would first take root, the Stalin era, the politics of the 1980s and 1990s in Eastern Europe, or that there were large areas of the Western world where the 'proletariat' did not identify themselves as workers and peasants, but as future and aspiring members of the middle class.)

Because of its failure to recognise that consciousness does not function on mechanical principles, the Science of Futurology has about as much validity as the Science of Phrenology or the Science of Astrology. Examining bumps on the head or the positions of the planets will not give you a more accurate vision of the future than the kind of historicism that Kurzweil represents, but it will not give you a less accurate vision either.

The Singularity is Near assumes that there is a direct translation of brain events to consciousness. It states that the mind-body problem is solved if one assumes a materialistic Monism - that conscious events are caused by brain events. (This is the popular view in the physical sciences at the moment.) That the two resemble each other (in Sir Arthur Eddington's phrase) about as much as a telephone number resembles a subscriber is ignored. (Also ignored is the problem that if one regards them as existing in the same universe of discourse there must be a method by means of which one affects the other and we have not the ghost of an idea how to deal with this one.)

To accept the popular wisdom of the moment without exploring its assumptions is a dangerous thing to do in science.

Kurzweil's Monism is disguised '... the bits of information which essentially is what we comprise.' (p. 5) Instead of the usual bits of matter and energy, we are now bits of information. Plus qua change...

Larry LeShan is a research psychologist who has worked in a wide variety of fields in the social sciences. His latest books are The Psychology of War and The Pattern of Evil: Myth, Social Perception and the Holocaust. For the past ten years he has been working on the relationship of consciousness and the cosmos, of Inscape and Landscape. He is speaking at Mystics and Scientists 30.