I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
Isaac Newton (1642–1727)
We are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Psalm 139:14
Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), playwright
A continual allegory – and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life.
John Keats (1795–1821), poet
I have never been able to believe that any system, no matter how seductive, can hold the ambiguities that are inherent in being a person in the world.
Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman
Information underrepresents reality.
Jaron Lanier
1 | In 1957, Julian Huxley coined the word transhumanism, the idea that we can use technology to transcend our bodies. For those of us who believe human beings are already transcended flesh, it would be hard to say what can be transcended, unless we are to become some kind of transcendence of transcendence.
I think in years to come we’ll be able to download our personalities onto computers and have them live on in virtual worlds after we die. Then our consciousness will survive death.
Kevin O’Regan
2 | The futurist Ray Kurzweil believes that before 2050 the brain will be copied and uploaded into a non-biological device.
3 | Gordon Bell, a Microsoft computer scientist, now in his seventies, records everything he can of his life. He wears a SenseCam camera around his neck in order to capture what his eyes are seeing. Every phone call is recorded, every piece of paper he reads is scanned into his computer.
4 | The physical world is ultimately reducible to yes or no answers. In 2001 Seth Lloyd, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, calculated the number of possible computations that have taken place in the universe since the Big Bang as 10120. In 2004 cosmologist Lawrence Krauss calculated that the universe had the same number of computations left to perform.1 But are human beings reducible to computers? The brain is dripping with information, but it seems that a self cannot be extracted from it that is made of bits of information. The self appears to be some kind of interaction of the body and the environment that gives information meaning.
5 | The Hubble telescope stared at a single spot in the sky for twenty-two days; except that it does not stare, it merely records information. Humans stare as they pore over the information that the telescope has collected, and make out of it what we call sense. The mind is not a camera. Seeing is not enough. There has to be thinking and meaning.
Seeing is not just about looking, but directing the mind’s attention to what is being looked at. Buddhists call it mindfulness, the act of being present and attentive. Our scientific instruments reveal what we might not otherwise see, but first a human being must see what has been recorded, and then interpret it.
6 | Paul Cézanne sometimes stared at a single apple for hours.
When Picasso had looked at a drawing or a print, I was surprised that anything was left on the paper, so absorbing was his gaze. He spoke little and seemed neither remote nor intimate – just completely there.
Leo Stein (1872–1947), art collector and critic, brother of Gertrude Stein
7 | One night in the 1950s, a night when the University of Chicago’s telescope was open to the public, one of the visitors told the astronomer on duty, Elliot Moore, that she could see a star in the Crab Nebula that was flashing. Moore told her that the star could not be flashing, and explained to her the difference between twinkling and flashing. The woman replied that she was a pilot, and knew about scintillation. She insisted that the star was flashing, not twinkling. Moore recalled the visitor (whose identity remains a mystery) years later. In 1968 it was discovered that there are pulsing stars near or coincident with the Crab Nebula, and that one of them – now called the Crab Pulsar – is at the heart of the nebula. The Crab Pulsar is a young neutron star left over from the explosion that we witness as the Crab Nebula, and which was first seen on earth in 1054. The Crab Pulsar pulses thirty times a second.
8 | The astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell spotted a regularity that no one else had spotted in an otherwise seemingly random radio signal from outer space.2 It proved to be the first evidence of quasars.3
9 | Whatever kind of machine we are as humans, we remain, for the moment at least, more complex than our best technologies. In our determination to prove that we are machines, we are ourselves in danger of becoming mere machines. When humans are animals we are mere animals, when we are robots we become things, and possibly mere things. As Alan Bennett once said, when we say that men die like flies that is exactly what they become, like flies. To save our humanity we can elevate ourselves or we can elevate the fly, or both. If we do not have it in us to elevate the human, we might elevate the machine, and with much the same effect. It seems likely that we will always be able to make better tools and find better analogies for what we are. If we believe that we can make better tools forever, it is not so big a step to believe that our understanding of what flesh is may be forever beyond our reach too.
A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and who each person might become.
Jaron Lanier
10 | The philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris says humans might eventually have to sacrifice themselves to a higher intelligence; presumably because intelligence somehow trumps being human. Why do we privilege intelligence among the qualities that make us human? What if we were able to make robots more loving, more moral, or more conscious than we are?4 What if we knew how to make robots more human than humans; if we but knew, of course, what being a human being entails. Losing to the chess computer Deep Blue in 1997 was maybe greater evidence of Gary Kasparov’s humanness than of Deep Blue’s intelligence. It is not clear, in any case, that we have got very far in our attempts to manufacture intelligence. AI (artificial intelligence) is more about finding ways to mimic intelligence than it is about creating it from scratch.
11 | We do not feel less ourselves for knowing we are merely atoms, so why should we feel lesser for being reduced to machines or to the scheming selfish entities of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology? There is always something missing in any reductive description, no matter how powerful it might be.
12 | Reductionism always looks like a fundamental description, because without the atom, gene, cell, neural circuit, body, population, there is nothing. Remove the midbrain and eye movement is not possible. Remove the oblongata and breathing is not possible. Remove the atoms and there is nothing.
There are some processes that seem to be irreducible. Blood clotting, for example. Remove various proteins involved in blood clotting and blood will still clot. Remove others and it will not. The process appears to be irreducibly complex and mysterious, at least for now; such examples are held up as hopeful evidence by transcendentalists. If this is the best they have, it is not enough.
13 | Tracing the universe back to the Big Bang is rather like tracing a river back to its source. There may be some highest patch of damp ground from which the river may be said to originate, but this is to ignore everything that pours into the river along the way. In the story of the evolving universe, what pours in is scientifically unpredictable transcendency, what scientists call emergence.5 Descriptions of a single molecule of water do not predict its possible states as ice, liquid and steam, let alone its myriad other properties. As the universe unfolds, so we need different kinds of description at different scales.6 The predictive powers of science working up from the bottom are restricted. We would predict very few features of this universe – not the arrival of human beings, certainly – if all we had to go on was particle physics.
The physical world can be approximately reduced to what appear to be laws of nature. But just because we can build the edifice of the universe on these laws, that does not make the laws more real than what emerges later. If human beings are a kind of illusion from the perspective of physics, the illusion is our reality. God, Nature, being human, are all forms of transcendency, or emergence, which is, I believe, not so much a spiritual statement as a logical one.
What is surely impossible is that a theoretical physicist, given unlimited computing power, should deduce from the laws of physics that a certain complex structure is aware of its own existence.
Brian Pippard, physicist
Moving from the sensory world to the internal world gets harder and harder. In physics ‘proof’ is in the measurement, i.e. the number of decimal places. Proof in biology doesn’t look like that.
From a conversation between a neuroscientist and the author
14 | What would an alien scientist make of a piano? It is a mechanical object, a percussion instrument. Sounds are made out of hammers striking strings. The sound can be modulated by how hard and how fast the keys are depressed. Given that the action of the piano is fixed, it might even be true that the only variable is the force with which the keys are struck. The piano is little more than a glockenspiel with pedals. Would it be possible to predict what a history of performance there is, or what the piano has evolved into? The interaction between machine and performer is the triumph of art and artistry over artifice. No student of the piano would get very far if she only considered the physical constraints of the instrument. It has to be approached with the human qualities of love, tenderness, fierceness, and so on, not merely controlled force and velocity.
The behaviour of high-level physical quantities consists of nothing but the behaviour of their low-level constituents with most of the details ignored.
David Deutsch