HE HUGE CULTURAL authority sci- what they say or do. Too many have forgotten their
ence has acquired over the past century obligation to approach with due respect the scholarly,
imposes large duties on every scientist. artistic, religious, humanistic work that has alwa
have acquired the power to im- been mankind's main spiritual support. Scientists are
press and intimidate every time they open (on average) no more likely to understand this work
their mouths, and it is res than the man in the street is to understand quantum
ity to keep this power in mind no matter _ physics. But science used to know enough to approach
Davip GELERNTE rofessor of computer science at Yale. His book Subjectivism: The Mind from Inside will
be published by Norton later this yearcautiously and admire from outside, and to build its
own work ona deep belief in human dignity. No longer.
BELITTLING HUMANITY. today science and
the “philosophy of mind’—its thoughtful assistant,
which is sometimes smarter than the boss—are threat-
ening Western culture with the exact opposite of hu-
‘manism. Call it roboticism. Man is the measure of all
things, Protagoras said. Today we add, and computers
are the measure ofall men.
‘Many scientists are proud of having booted man
off his throne at the center of the universe and reduced
him to just one more creature—an especially annoying
one—in the great intergalactic zoo. That is their right.
But when scientists use this locker-room braggadoci
to belittle the human viewpoint, to belittle human life
and values and virtues and civilization and moral, spir-
itual, and religious discoveries, which is all we human
beings possess or ever will, they have outrun their own
empiricism. They are abusing their cultural standing.
Science has become an international bully.
‘Nowhere s its bullying more outrageous than in
its assault on the phenomenon known as subjectivity.
Your subjective, conscious experience is just as,
real as the tree outside your window or the photons
striking your retina—even though you alone feel it.
Many philosophers and scientists today tend to dis-
miss the subjective and focus wholly on an objective,
third-person reality—a reality that would be just the
same if men had no minds. They treat subjective real-
ity as a footnote, or they ignore it, or they announce
that, actually, it doesn't even exist.
If scientists were rat-eatchers, it wouldn't mat-
ter. But right now, their views are threatening all sorts
of intellectual and spiritual fields. The present problem
originated at the intersection of artificial intelligence
and philosophy of mind—in the question of what con-
sciousness and mental states are all about, how they
‘work, and what it would mean for a robot to have them.
Ithas roots that stretch back to the behaviorism of the
early 20th century, but the advent of computing lit the
fuse of an intellectual crisis that blasted off in the 1960s
and has been gaining altitude ever since.
BULLYING NAGEL. The modern “mind fields”
encompass artificial intelligence, cognitive psycholo-
gy, and philosophy of mind, Researchers in these fields
are profoundly split, and the chaos was on display in
the ugliness occasioned by the publication of Thomas
Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos in 2012. Nagel is an eminent
philosopher and professor at NYU. In Mind & Cosmos,
he shows with terse, meticulous thoroughness why
mainstream thought on the workings of the mind is
18
intellectually bankrupt. He explains why Darwinian
evolution is insufficient to explain the emergence of
consciousness—the capacity to feel or experience the
world, He then offers his own ideas on consciousness,
which are speculative, incomplete, tentative, and pro-
‘vocative—in the tradition of science and philosophy.
Nagel was immediately set on and (symbolically)
beaten to death by all the leading punks, bullies, and
hangers-on of the philosophical underworld. Attack-
ing Darwin is the sin against the Holy Ghost that pious
scientists are taught never to forgive. Even worse, Na-
gel is an atheist unwilling to express sufficient hatred
of religion to satisfy other atheists. There is nothing
religious about Nagel’s speculations; he believes that
science has not come far enough to explain conscious
ness and that it must press on. He believes that Darwin
isnot sufficient.
‘The intelligentsia was so furious that it formed a
lynch mob. In May 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Edu-
cation ran a piece called “Where Thomas Nagel Went
Wrong.” One paragraph was notable:
Whatever the validity of [Nagel’] stance, its
timing was certainly bad. The war between New
Atheists and believers has become savage, with
Richard Dawkins writing sentences like, “Thave
described atonement, the central doctrine of
Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic, and
repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking
‘mad....” In that climate, saying anything nice at
all about religion i a tactical error.
It's the cowardice of the Chronicle's statement
that is alarming—as ifthe only conceivable response to,
‘a mass attack by killer hyenas were to run away. Nagel
‘was assailed; almost everyone else ran.
THE KURZWEIL GULT. The voice most strong-
ly associated with what I've termed roboticism is that
of Ray Kurzweil, a leading technologist and inventor.
‘The Kurzweil Cult teaches that, given the strong and
ever-increasing pace of technological progress and
change, a fateful crossover point is approaching. He
calls this point the “singularity” After the year 2045
(mark your calendars!), machine intelligence will
dominate human intelligence to the extent that men
will no longer understand machines any more than
potato chips understand mathematical topology: Men
will already have begun an orgy of machinification—
implanting chips in their bodies and brains, and fine-
tuning their own and their children’s genetic material.
Kuraweil believes in “transhumanism,’ the merging of
men and machines. He believes human immortality is
‘The Closing of the Scientific Mind : January 2014just around the corner. He works
for Google.
‘Whether he knows it or not,
‘Kuraweil believes in and longs for
the death of mankind. Because
if things work out as he predicts,
there will still be life on Earth, but
no human life. To predict that a
‘man who lives forever and is built
mainly of semiconductors is still a
man is like predicting that a man
with stainless steel skin, a small
nuclear reactor for a stomach, and
an IQ of 10,000 would still be a
man. In fact we have no idea what
he would be.
Whether he knows
it or not, Ray Kurzweil
believes in and longs for
the death of mankind.
To predict that a man
‘each case, sane persons are apt to
intervene before the plan reaches
completion.
BANISHING SUBJECTIVITY.
Subjectivity is your private expe-
rience of the world: your sensa-
tions; your mental life and inner
landscape; your experiences of
sweet and bitter, blue and gold,
soft and hard; your beliefs, plans,
pains, hopes, fears, theories, imag-
ined vacation trips and gardens
and girlfriends and Ferraris, your
sense of right and wrong, good and
evil. This is your subjective world.
Each change in him might nt It is just as real as the objective
be defended as an improvement, WhO lives forever and —rysiea wona,
‘but man as we know him is the top ie ‘il i ‘This is why the idea of objec-
growth on a tall tree in a large for- Is built mainly of tive reality is a masterpiece of West-
est: His kinship with his parents
and ancestors and mankind at
large, the experience of seeing his
semiconductors is still
aman is like predicting
ern thought—an idea we associate
with Galileo and Descartes and
other scientific revolutionaries of
own reflection in human history 4 the 17th century. The only view of
and his felow man-those things -—«‘thataman With —— the woria we ean ever ave ls ub-
are the crucial part of who heis. If i i jective, from inside our own heads.
you make him grossly different, he Stainless steel skin, SRS" agree nonetheless on
islost,withnoreftectionanywhere anuclearreactorfor a the observable, exactly measur-
he looks. If you make lots of people
grossly different, they are all lost
together—cut adrift from their
forebears, from human. history
and human experience. Of course
we do know that whatever these
creatures are, untransformed men
will be unable to keep up with
them. Their superhuman intelli-
gence and strength will extinguish
mankind as we know it, or reduce men to slaves or
dogs. To wish for such a development is to play dice
with the universe.
‘Luckily for mankind, there is (of course) no rea-
son to believe that brilliant progress in any field will
continue, much less accelerate; imagine predicting the
state of space exploration today based on the events
of 1960-1972. But the real flaw in the Kurzweil Cult’s
sickening predictions is that machines do just what we
tell them to. They act as they are built to act. We might
in principle, in the future, build an armor-plated robot
with a stratospheric IQ that refuses on principle to pay
attention to human beings. Or an average dog lover
might buy a German shepherd and patiently train it to
rip him to shreds. Both deeds are conceivable, but in
Commentary
stomach, and an 1Q
of 10,000 would still be
aman. We have no idea
what he would be.
able, and predictable characteris-
ties of objective reality is a remark-
able fact. Ican't know that the color
call blue looks to methesame way
itlooks to you. And yet we both use
the word blue to describe this color,
and common sense suggests that
your experience of blue is probably
a lot like mine. Our ability to tran-
scend the subjective and accept the
existence of objective reality is the cornerstone of every-
thing modern science has accomplished.
But that is not enough for the philosophers of
mind. Many wish to banish subjectivity altogether.
“The history of philosophy of mind over the past one
hundred years,” the eminent philosopher John Searle
has written, “has been in large part an attempt to get
rid of the mental’—ie,, the subjective—“by showing
that no mental phenomena exist over and above physi-
cal phenomena.”
Why bother? Because to present-day philoso-
phers, Searle writes, “the subjectivist ontology of
‘the mental seems intolerable” That is, your states of
mind (your desire for adventure, your fear of icebergs,
the ship you imagine, the girl you recall) exist only
19subjectively, within your mind, and
they can be examined and evalu-
ated by you alone. They do not exist
objectively. They are strictly inter-
nal to your own mind. And yet they
do exist. This is intolerable! How in
this modern, scientific world can
brain that “embodies” it. Yet the
brain's structure is different from
the mind's. The brain is a dense
tangle of neurons and other cells in
which neurons send electrical sig-
nals to other neurons downstream.
via a wash of neurotransmitter
we be forced to accept the existence Your mind is, chemicals, like beach bums splash-
of things that can’t be weighed ' 7 ing each other with bucketfuls of
or measured, tracked or photo- was, and will always ater.
graphed—that are strictly private, pa a ‘Two wholly different struc-
that ean be observed by exactly DE ATOOM With a VIEW. tures, one embodied by the otner—
‘one person each? Ridiculous! Or at this is also a precise description of
Teast damned annoying Your mental states computer sofware as it relates to
And yet ind is, 7 ‘ict INSit 1 . hi
wd ee mee are @xistinside this room s2°Pemeure sad laws ot
view. Your mental states exist in- you can never leave ware being what any “program”
side this room you can never leave or “application” is made of—any
and no one else ean ever enter. ANG NO ONE else CAN EVEF email program, web search engine,
The world you perceive through photo album, iPhone app, video
the window of mind (where you Miter. The World you — fame, anything at al). Software
can never go—where no one can th consists of lists of instructions that
ever go) is the objective world. perceive through the are given to the hardware—to a
Both worlds, inside and outside, window of mind digital computer. Each instruction
are real. specifies one picayune operation
‘The ever astonishing Rainer (where you can on the numbers stored inside the
Maria Rilke captured this truth computer. For example: Add two
vividly in the opening lines of his NEVE gO—Where NO — ambers. Move a number from
eighth Duino Elegy, astranslated by one place to another. Look at some
Stephen Mitchell: “With all its eyes one can ever go) number and do this if it’s 0.
the natural world looks out/ into
the Open. Only our eyes are turned
backward....We know what is re-
ally out there only érom/the ani-
‘mal’s gaze” We can never forget or
disregard the room we are locked
into forever.
‘THE BRAIN AS COMPUTER. The dominant, main-
stream view of mind nowadays among philosophers
and many scientists is computationatism, also known
as cognitivism. This view is inspired by the idea that
minds are to brains as software is to computers. “Think
of the brain,’ writes Daniel Dennett of Tufts University
in his influential 1991 Consciousness Explained, “as a
computer” In some ways this is an apt analogy. In oth-
ers, itis crazy. At any rate, itis one of the intellectual
milestones of modern times.
How did this “master analogy” become so influ-
ential?
Consider the mind. The mind has its own struc-
ture and laws: It has desires, emotions, imagination;
it is conscious. But no mind can exist apart from the
20
is the objective world.
Both worlds, inside
and outside, are real.
Large lists of tiny instrue-
tions become complex mathemat
cal operations, and large bunches
of those become even more so-
phisticated operations. And pretty
soon your application is sending
spacemen hurtling across your
screen firing lasers at your avatar
as you pelt the aliens with tennis balls and chat with
your friends in Idaho or Algiers while sending notes to
your girlfriend and keeping an eye on the comic-book
news. You are swimming happily within the rich coral
reef of your software “environment,” and the tiny in-
structions out of which the whole thing is built don’t
matter to you at all. You don't know them, can’t see
them, are wholly unaware of them.
The gorgeously varied reefs called software are
a topic of their own—just as the mind is. Software and
computers are two different topics, just as the psy-
chological or phenomenal study of mind is different
from brain physiology. Even so, software cannot ex-
ist without digital computers, just as minds cannot
exist without brains.
The Closing of the Scientific Mind : January 2014‘That is why today’s mainstream view of mind is
based on exactly this analogy: Mind is to brain as soft-
‘ware is to computer. The mind is the brain’s software—
this is the core idea of computationalism.
Of course computationalists don’t all think alike.
But they all believe in some version of this guiding
analogy. Drew McDermott, my colleague in the com-
puter science department at Yale University, is one of
the most brilliant (and in some ways, the most hetero-
ox) of computationalists. “The biological variety of
computers differs in many ways from the kinds of com-
puters engineers build; he writes, “but the differences
are superficial.” Note here that by biological computer,
MeDermott means brain.
McDermott believes that “computers can have
minds’—minds built out of software, ifthe software is
correctly conceived. In fact, McDermott writes, “as far
as science is concerned, people are just a strange kind
of animal that arrived fairly late on the scene....[My]
purpose...is to increase the plausibility of the hypoth-
that we are machines and to elaborate some of its
consequences.”
John Heil of Washington University describes
cognitivism this way: “Think about states of mind as
something like strings of symbols, sentences” In other
words: a state of mind is like alist of numbers in.acom-
‘puter. And so, he writes, “mental operations are taken
tobe ‘computations over symbols.” Thus, in the cogni-
tivist view, when you decide, plan, or believe, you are
computing, in the sense that software computes.
BESMIRGHING CONSCIOUSNESS. But what
about consciousness? If the brain is merely a mecha-
nism for thinking or problem-solving, how does it ere-
ate consciousness?
‘Most computationalists default to the Origins of
Gravy theory set forth by Walter Matthau in the film of
Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. Challenged to account
for the emergence of gravy, Matthau explains that,
‘when you cook a roast, “it comes.” That is basically how
consciousness arises too, according to computational-
ists. Itjust comes.
In Consciousness Explained, Dennett lays out
the essence of consciousness as follows: “The concepts
of computer science provide the crutches of imagina-
tion we need to stumble across the terra incognita
between our phenomenology as we know it by ‘intro-
spection’ and our brains as science reveals them to
us” (Note the chuckle-quotes around introspection;
for Dennett, introspection is an illusion.) Specifically:
“Human consciousness can best be understood as the
operation of a ‘von Neumannesque’ virtual machine.”
Meaning, it is a software application (a virtual ma-
Commentary
chine) designed to run on any ordinary computer.
(Hence von Neumannesque: the great mathematician
John von Neumann is associated with the invention of
the digital computer as we know it.)
‘Thus consciousness is the result of running the
right sort of program on an organic computer also
called the human brain. If you were able to download
the right app on your phone or laptop, it would be con-
scious, too. It wouldn't merely talk or behave as if it
were conscious. It would be conscious, with the same
sort of rich mental landscape inside its head (or its pro-
cessor or maybe hard drive) as you have inside yours:
the anxious plans, the fragile fragrant memories, the
ability to imagine a baseball game or the crunch of dry
leaves underfoot. All that just by virtue of running the
right program, That program would be complex and
sophisticated, far more clever than anything we have
today. But no different fundamentally, say the compu-
tationalists, from the latest video game.
THE FLAWS. But the master analogy—between
mind and software, brain and computer—is fatally
‘flawed. It falls apart once you mull these simple facts:
1. You can transfer a program easily from one
computer to another, but you can’t transfer a mind,
ever, from one brain to another.
2. You can run an endless series of different pro-
grams on any one computer, but only one “program”
uns, or ever ean run, on any one human brain,
8, Software is transparent. I can read off the
precise state of the entire program at any time, Minds
are opaque—there is no way I can know what you are
thinking unless you tell me.
4. Computers can be erased; minds cannot.
5. Computers can be made to operate precisely as
we choose; minds cannot.
‘There are more. Come up with them yourself.
It easy.
There is a still deeper problem with computa-
tionalism. Mainstream computationalists treat the
mind asif its purpose were merely to act and not to be.
But the mind is for doing and being. Computers are
machines, and idle machines are wasted. That is not
true of your mind. Your mind might be wholly quiet,
doing (“computing”) nothing; yet you might be feel-
ing miserable or exalted, or awestruck by the beauty of
the object in front of you, or inspired or resolute—and
such moments might be the center of your mental life.
Or you might merely be conscious. “I cannot see what
flowers are at my feet, /Nor what soft incense hangs
upon the boughs....Darkling I listen....” That was
drafted by the computer known as John Keats.
Emotions in particular are not actions but states
21of being. And emotions are central to your mental life
and can shape your behavior by allowing you to com-
pare alternatives to determine which feels best. Jane
Austen, Persuasion: “He walked to the window to ree-
ollect himself, and feel how he ought to behave." Henry,
James, The Ambassadors: The heroine tells the hero,
“no one feels so much as you. No—not any one.” She
means that no one is so precise, penetrating, and sym-
pathetic an observer.
Computationalists cannot account for emotion.
It fits as badly as consciousness into the mind-as-soft-
ware scheme.
THE BODY AND THE MINI. ana there is (at
least) one more area of special vulnerability in the com-
putationalist worldview. Computationalists believe
that the mind is embodied by the brain, and the brain is
simply an organic computer. But in fact, the mind is em-
bodied not by the brain but by the brain and the body,
intimately interleaved. Emotions are mental states one
feels physically; thus they are states of mind and body
simultaneously. (Angry, happy, awestruck, relieved—
these are physical as well as mental states.) Sensations
are simultaneously mental and physical phenomena.
Wordsworth writes about his memories of the River
Wye: “I have owed to them/In hours of weariness,
sensations sweet,/ Felt in the blood, and felt along the
heart/ And passing even into my purer mind...”
‘Where does the physical end and the mental be-
‘gin? The resonance between mental and bodily states is
a subtle but important aspect of mind. Bodily sensations
bring about mental states that cause those sensations to
change and, in turn, the mental states to develop further.
‘You are embarrassed, and blush; feeling yourself blush,
‘your embarrassment increases. Your blush deepens. “A
smile of pleasure lit his face. Conscious of that smile, [he]
shook his head disapprovingly at his own state.” (Tol-
stoy.) As Dmitry Merezhkovsky writes brilliantly in his
lassie Tolstoy study, “Certain feelings impel us to cor-
responding movements, and, on the other hand, certain
habitual movements impel to the corresponding mental
states... Tolstoy, with inimitable art, uses this convert-
ible connection between the internal and the external”
All such mental phenomena depend on some-
thing like a brain and something like a body, or an ac~
curate reproduction or simulation of certain aspects of
the body. However hard or easy you rate the problem
of building such a reproduction, computing has no
wisdom to offer regarding the construction of human-
like bodies—even supposing that it knows something
about human-like minds.
I cite Keats or Rilke, Wordsworth, Tolstoy, Jane
Austen because these “subjective humanists” can tell
22
us, far more accurately than any seientist, what things
are like inside the sealed room of the mind. When sub-
jective humanism is recognized (under some name or
other) as a school of thought in its own right, one of
its characteristics will be looking to great authors for
information about what the inside of the mind is like.
To say the same thing differently: Computers
are information machines. They transform one batch
of information into another. Computationalists often
describe the mind as an “information processor.” But
feelings are not information! Feelings are states of be-
ing. A feeling (mild wistfulness, say, on a warm sum-
‘mer morning) has, ordinarily, no information content
at all. Wistful is simply a way to be.
Let’s be more precise: We are conscious, and
consciousness has two aspects. To be conscious of a
thing is to be aware of it (know about it, have informa-
tion about it) and to experience it. Taste sweetness; see
turquoise; hear an unresolved dissonance—each feels
a certain way. To experience is to de some way, not to
do some thing.
‘The whole subjective field of emotions, feelings,
and consciousness fits poorly with the ideology of com-
putationalism, and with the project of increasing “the
plausibility of the hypothesis that we are machines”
‘Thomas Nagel: “All these theories seem insuffi-
cient as analyses of the mental because they leave out
something essential” (My italics.) Namely? “The first-per-
son, inner point of view of the conscious subject: for ex-
ample, the way sugar tastes to you or the way Ted looks or
anger feels. All other mental states (not just sensations)
are left out, too: beliefs and desires, pleasures and pains,
whims, suspicions, longings, vague anxieties; the mental
sights, sounds, and emotions that accompany your read-
ing a novel or listening to music or daydreaming.
FUNCTIONALISM. How could such important
things be left out? Because functionalism is today’s
dominant view among theorists of the mind, and func-
tionalism leaves them out. It leaves these dirty boots
on science’s back porch. Functionalism asks, “What
does it mean to be, for example, thirsty?” The answer:
Certain events (heat, hard work, not drinking) cause
the state of mind called thirst. This state of mind,
together with others, makes you want to do certain
things (like take a drink). Now you understand what
“[ am thirsty” means. The mental (the state of thirst)
has not been written out of the script, but it has been
reduced to the merely physical and observable: to the
weather, and what you've been doing, and what ac-
tions (take a drink) you plan to do.
But this explanation is no good, because “thirst”
means, above all, that you feel thirsty. It is a way of
The Closing of the Scientific Mind : January 2014being. You have a particular sen-
sation. (That feeling, in turn, ex-
plains such expressions as “I am
thirsty for knowledge,” although
this “thirst” has nothing to do with
the heat outside.)
‘And yetyou can see the seduc-
tive quality of functionalism, and
why it grew in prominence along
with computers. No one knows
howa computer can be made to feel
anything, or whether such a thing
is even possible. But once feeling
and consciousness are eliminated,
creating a computer mind becomes
Where does the
physical end
and themental begin?
Bodily sensations
preferences, habits, and character-
istic moods. Is it possible to sup-
pose (just suppose) that he is in
fact a zombie?
By zombie, philosophers
‘mean a creature who looks and
behaves just like a human being,
but happens to be unconscious. He
does everything an ordinary per-
son does: walks and talks, eats and
sleeps, argues, shouts, drives his
car, lies on the beach. But there's
no one home: He (meaning it) is
actually a robot with a computer
forabrain, On the outside he looks
mucheasie: Nagelealsihisview'e ring about mental ——_sikeany human being: Tis robots
heroic triumph of ideological theory behavior and appearance are won-
over common sense” States that cause gery sopnistieatea
0
Some thinkers insist other- those sensations ‘No evidence makes you doubt
wise. Experiencing sweetness or
the fragrance of lavender or the
burn of anger is merely a bio-
chemical matter, they say. Certain
neurons fire, certain neurotrans-
mitters squirt forth into the inter-
to change and, in turn,
the mental states
develop further.
that your best friend is human, but
suppose you did ask him: Are you
human? Are you conscious? The to-
bot could be programmed to answer
‘no, But its designed to seem human,
so more likely its software makes an
neuron gaps, other neurons fire q | answer such as, “Of course I'm hu-
and the problem is solved: There A smile of pleasure ‘man, of course I'm conscious!—talk
isyour anger lavender, sweetness lithis face. shout stupid questions. Are youcom-
‘There aretwo versions of this ‘. *] ‘scious? Are you human, and not half-
idea: Maybe brain activity causes CONSCIOUS Of that smile, monkey? srk”
the sensation of anger or sweet
ness or a belief or desire; maybe,
on the other hand, it just é the
sensation of anger or sweetness—
sweetness is certain brain events
in the sense that water is H,0.
But how do those brain
events bring about, or translate
into, subjective mental states? How is this amazing
trick done? What does it even mean, precisely, to cross
from the physical to the mental realm?
THE ZOMBIE ARGUMENT. Understanding
subjective mental states ultimately comes down to un-
derstanding consciousness. And consciousness is even
trickier than it seems at first, because there is a serious,
thought-provoking argument that purports to show us
that consciousness is not just mysterious but superflu-
ous. 1t8 called the Zombie Argument. It's a thought ex-
periment that goes like this:
Imagine your best friend. You've know him for
years, have had a million discussions, arguments, and
‘deep conversations with him; you know his opinions,
Commentary
[he] shook his head
disapprovingly at his
own state’ (Tolstoy.)
So that’s a robot zombie.
Now imagine a “human” zombie,
an organic zombie, a freak of na-
ture: It behaves just like you, just
like the robot zombie; it's made
of flesh and blood, but it's uncon
scious. Can you imagine such a
creature? Its brain would in fact
be just like a computer: a complex control system that
makes this creature speak and act exactly like a man,
But it feels nothing and is conscious of nothing.
Many philosophers (on both sides of the argument
about software minds) can indeed imagine such a crea-
‘ture. Which leads them to the next question: What is con-
sciousness for? What does it accomplish? Put a real hu-
‘man and the organic zombie side by side. Ask them any
questions you like, Follow them over the course of a day
ora year. Nothing reveals which one is conscious. (They
oth claim to be.) Both seem like ordinary humans.
So why should we humans be equipped with
consciousness? Darwinian theory explains that nature
selects the best creatures on wholly practical grounds,
based on survivable design and behavior. If zombies
23and humans behave the same way
all the time, one group would be
just as able to survive as the other.
So why would nature have taken
the trouble to invent an elaborate
thing like consciousness, when it
could have got off without it just
aswell?
Such questions have led the
Australian philosopher of mind
David Chalmers to argue that con-
Aworld that is
intimidated by science
THEIRON ROD. tn her book Ab-
sence of Mind, the novelist and es-
sayist Marilynne Robinson writes
that the basic assumption in every
variant of ‘modern thought” is that
“the experience and testimony of
the individual mind is to be ex-
plained away, excluded from con-
sideration.” She tells an anecdote
about an anecdote. Several neuro-
Diologists have written about an
sciousness doesnt “follow logical- and bored sick American railway worker named
ly” from the design of the universe a . Phineas Gage. In 1848, when he
as we know itscentiealy. Not With cynical, empty vas 25, an exposion dove anion
ing stops us from imagining a ‘ i 7 rod right through his brain and out
waiver eaciyine guar ewey postmodernism’ — ge hs jaw was sa
respect exept that consciousness asperately needs tered and he lost an eye; bute
doesnot exist. Het recovered and retuned to work,
Nagel believes that ‘our ANEW SUDjectivist, __vehaving just as he always had—
mental lives, including our sub-
Jective experiences” are “strong-
ly connected with and proba-
humanist, individualist
worldview. We need
except that now he had occasional
rude outbursts of swearing and
blaspheming, which (evidently) he
bly strictly dependent on physi i, ___ hadneverhhad before.
events in our brains” But—and — gcjence and scholarship Neurobiologists want to
this is the key to understanding ap y.ch show that particular personal-
his is the k derstand show thi iculai I
why his book posed such a dan- NN art and spiritual life ity traits such as good manners)
ger to the conventional wisdom in emerge from particular regions of
his feld—Nagel also beiees that CO De fully human. the brain fa vepion i destroyed,
explaining subjectivity and our the corresponding piece of per-
consous mental Ines wl ae ‘Te astthree are Stig espe, our mind
nothing less than a new seientine — withering, and almost is thus the mere product of your
revolution. Ultimately, “conscious i" genes and your brain. You have
subjects and their mental lives” no one understands nothing to do with it, because
are “not describable by the physi-
cal sciences.” He awaits “major
scientific advances” “the creation
of new concepts” before we can
understand how consciousness
works. Physics and biology as we understand them to-
day don't seem to have the answers,
On consciousness and subjectivity, science still
has elementary work to do. That work will be done cor-
rectly only if researchers understand what subjectivity
is, and why it shares the cosmos with objective reality.
Of course the deep and difficult problem of why
consciousness exists doesn’t hold for Jews and Chris-
tians. Just as God anchors morality, God's is the view-
point that knows you are conscious. Knows and cares:
Good and evil, sanctity and sin, right and wrong pre-
suppose consciousness. When free will is understood,
at last, as an aspect of emotion and not behavior—we
are free just insofar as we feel free—it will also be seen
to depend on consciousness.
24
the first.
there és no subjective, individual
you. “You” are what you say and
do. Your inner mental world either
doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. In
fact you might be a zombie; that
wouldn't matter either,
Robinson asks: But what about the actual man
Gage? The neurobiologists say nothing about the fact
that “Gage was suddenly disfigured and half blind, that
he suffered prolonged infections of the brain? that his
most serious injuries were permanent. He was 25 years
old and had no hope of recovery. Isn't it possible, she
asks, that his outbursts of angry swearing meant just
what they usually mean—that the man was enraged
and suffering? When the brain scientists tel this story,
writes Robinson, “there is no sense at all that [Gage]
was a human being who thought and felt, aman witha
singular and terrible fate
Man is only a computer if you ignore everything
that distinguishes him from a computer.
The Closing of the Scientific Mind : January 2014‘THE CLOSING OF THE SCIENTIFIC MIND.
‘That science should face crises in the early 2istcentury
is inevitable. Power corrupts, and science today is the
Catholic Church around the start of the 16th century:
used to having its own way and dealing with heretics
by excommunication, not argument,
Science is caught up, also, in the same educa~
tional breakdown that has brought so many other
proud fields low. Seience needs reasoned argument
and constant skepticism and open-mindedness. But
our leading universities have dedicated themselves
to stamping them out—at least in all political areas.
We routinely provide superb technical educations in
science, mathematics, and technology to brilliant un-
dergraduates and doctoral students. But if those same
students have been taught since kindergarten that you
are not permitted to question the doctrine of man-
made global warming, or the line that men and women
are interchangeable, or the multiculturalist idea that
all cultures and nations are equally good (except for
Wester nations and cultures, which are worse), how
will they ever become reasonable, skeptical scientists?
They've been reared on the idea that questioning of:
ficial doctrine is wrong, gauche, just unacceptable in
polite society. (And if you are president of Harvard, it
can get you fired.)
Beset by all this mold and fungus and corrup-
tion, science has continued to produce deep and bril-
liant work, Most scientists are skeptical about their
own fields and hold their colleagues to rigorous stan-
dards. Recent years have seen remarkable advances in
experimental and applied physics, planetary explora-
tion and astronomy, genetics, physiology, synthetic
materials, computing, and all sorts of other areas.
But we do have problems, and the struggle of
subjective humanism against roboticism is one of the
‘most important.
‘The moral claims urged on man by Judeo-Chris-
tian principles and his other religious and philosophical
traditions have nothing to do with Earths being the cen-
ter of the solar system or having been created in six days,
or with the real or imagined absence of rational life else-
‘where in the universe. The best and deepest moral laws
‘we know tell us to revere human life and, above all, to be
‘human: to treat all creatures, our fellow humans and the
‘world at large, humanely. To behave like a human being
(Yiddish: mensch) isto realize our best selves.
No other creature has a best self.
‘This is the real danger of anti-subjectivism, in an
age where the collapse of religious education among
‘Western elites has already made a whole generation
morally wobbly. When scientists casually toss our
human-centered worldview in the trash with the used
Commentary
coffee cups, they are re-smashing the sacred tablets,
not in blind rage as Moses did, but in casual, ignorant
difference to the fate of mankind.
A world that is intimidated by science and bored.
sick with cynical, empty “postmodernism” desper-
ately needs a new subjectivist, humanist, individualist
worldview. We need science and scholarship and art
cand spiritual life to be fully human. The last three are
withering, and almost no one understands the first.
The Kurzweil Cult is attractive enough to require
opposition in a positive sense; alternative futures
‘must be clear. The cults that oppose Kurzweilism are
called Judaism and Christianity. But they must and
will evolve to meet new dangers in new worlds. The
central text of Judeo-Christian religions in the tech-
threatened, Googleplectic West of the 2ist century
might well be Deuteronomy 30:19: “I summon today as
your witnesses the heavens and the earth: I have laid
life and death before you, the blessing and the curse;
choose life and live!—you are your children.”
The sanctity of life is what we must affirm
against Kuraweilism and the nightmare of roboticism.
Judaism has always preferred the celebration and
sanctification of this life in this world to eschatologi-
cal promises. My guess is that 21st-century Christian
‘thought will move back toward its father and become
creasingly Judaized, less focused on death and the
afterlife and more on life here today (although my
Christian friends will dislike my saying so). Both reli-
gions will teach, as they always have, the love of man
for man—and that, over his lifetime (as Wordsworth
writes at the very end of his masterpiece, The Prelude),
“the mind of man becomes/A thousand times more
beautiful than the earth /On which he dwells.”
‘At first, roboticism was just an intellectual
school. Today it is a social disease. Some young people
want to be robots (I'm serious); they eagerly await elec-
tronic chips to be implanted in their brains so they will
be smarter and better informed than anyone else (ex-
cept for all their friends who have had the same chips
implanted). Or they want to see the world through
computer glasses that superimpose messages on poor
naked nature. They are terrorist hostages in love with
the terrorists.
All our striving for what is good and just and
beautiful and sacred, for what gives meaning to hu-
‘man life and makes us (as Scripture says) “just a little
lower than the angels,” and alittle better than rats and
cats, is invisible to the roboticist worldview. In the ro-
boticist future, we will become what we believe our-
selves to be: dogs with iPhones. The world needs anew
subjectivist humanism now—not just scattered pro-
tests but a growing movement, a cry from the heart. >
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