.
As Ray Kurzweil sees it, in 2029—when most of us will still be
alive—$1000 will buy the computing capacity of one thousand human
brains. Computers will routinely read all human literature and will claim
to be conscious—a claim most people will accept. There will be direct
communication along neural pathways between computers and brains. And
virtual sex between physically separated human partners—old hat by
this time—will face competition from computer agents serving as lovers.
In The Age of Spiritual Machines Kurzweil presents all this and
much more as if it were merely the sober extrapolation of readily identifiable
trends. Nor is he reluctant to run out the extrapolation as far as his
fancy can carry it. By next century's end, he tells us, a single computer-based
intelligence will be more powerful than all flesh-limited intelligence
combined, and those humans who do not at least employ digital neural implants
in their brains will be "unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues
with those who do." But most people will have given up the flesh altogether,
downloading their minds into software and manifesting themselves in various
physical forms at will by means of "instantly reconfigurable nanobot swarms."
A remarkable thing about Kurzweil's book is the reception it has received.
One reviewer after another has accorded it the dignity implied in taking
its predictions seriously—often pointing, for justification, to Kurzweil's
predictive successes in his earlier work, The Age of Intelligent Machines.
Such a response would have been unthinkable just two or three decades
ago. Clearly something is changing—fast. A reasonable assumption
is that our rapidly increasing exposure to computers is altering our response
to the kind of vision Kurzweil presents, making it more and more persuasive.
A Mind without Distinction
Another remarkable thing about this book is the author's apparent unawareness
of any distinction between his strictly technical predictions—regarding,
for example, the speed and computational power of tomorrow's hardware—and
other predictions involving claims about life and consciousness. For Kurzweil,
greater computational power translates directly into greater mental power,
a translation he effects without undue worry about long-standing and fundamental
philosophical problems.
When Kurzweil does venture beyond his preferred technical milieu, the
results are not always pretty. As Diane Proudfoot writes in a Science
review, Kurzweil is not much of a historian or philosopher, and his blunders
in those fields inspire "little confidence in his imaginings about the
future" (Apr. 30, 1999). So also John Searle, who finds in Kurzweil's
book "a series of conceptual confusions" (New York Review, Apr.
8, 1999).
But it would be a mistake to dismiss The Age of Spiritual Machines
too casually. The fact that Kurzweil no longer finds it necessary to distinguish
between the functioning of a technical mechanism and his own mental activity—and
that a large readership is more and more prepared to follow him in this
conflation—is terribly significant for our future.
Certainly we can narrow our conception of our own minds. We can
focus on the machine-like characteristics of the devices that have so
thoroughly fascinated us during the past several centuries. But this is
not merely a narrowing of certain concepts; through the accumulating mental
habits affected by these concepts, it becomes a narrowing of the mind
itself.
In other words, the way we think about our minds both reflects and in
turn redefines what our minds are. Every way of thinking about the mind
has a self-fulfilling aspect; after all, the thinking about the
mind is, at the same time, an activity of the mind. My own suspicion
is that half way through the twenty-first century many people will find
it only reasonable to say, "See—Kurzweil was right." Having more
and more restricted their own thinking to the abstractions that can be
handled like mechanisms, they will happily adapt themselves to Kurzweil's
robotic world.
Changing Our Minds
The mind is almost pure potential. You need only look around at a Bach or
Mozart, a Picasso or Monet, a Joan of Arc or Helen Keller, an Einstein or
Feynman, to get some sense for what has already been achieved—an overall
achievement that must remain largely unfathomable to any one of us. That's
a lot of unexplored potential for us to move around in! Nor is there any
reason to foreclose the untold additional potentials that no individual
has yet stepped into. We have no grounds for setting limits upon what the
human mind can make of itself.
But the complementary truth is that we can also shrink our capacities
without limit. And this points to something that Kurzweil has not reckoned
with: getting at the truth of the human mind is less a matter of correct
analysis at a particular historical moment—let alone merely technical
analysis—than it is a matter of the path of consciousness we set
out upon. The mind's discovery of itself will necessarily reflect what
it has been doing up to, at the moment of, and in the very act of, its
self-discovery.
Kurzweil, brilliant software engineer that he is, catches himself in
the act of computing. That is not surprising, nor is it an entirely false
revelation. But it is a truth that becomes seriously distorted in the
absence of any exploration of the paths largely ignored during these several
hundred years of our fascination with mechanisms. Each of these paths
not taken represents a possibility of self-discovery yet to be glimpsed.
In pursuing a participative science, The Nature Institute seeks to do
its part in opening up paths along which the mind can discover itself
in new ways. It is one thing to find a shadow of our own interior processes
reflected back to us from our machines. What is reflected in this way
is what we have previously stamped upon the machines—but, as it were,
stamped from without, through the "external" articulation of the
machine's parts. Having abstracted certain elements of structure from
our customary thoughts, we impress those elements upon the machine.
But quite other revelations are in store when we turn to the plant or
animal. What we meet here is not only a reflection of our mechanistic
habits of thought. If we have been able to develop a thinking appropriate
to the organism, then we begin to grasp the idea that works sovereignly
from within the organism as the living, organizing principle of
its own being. And in shaping our minds to that living idea, we make it
at that moment our idea as well. That is, we consciously raise
our own thinking above the level of mechanism to the level of the living
organism.
That, at least, is the testimony of those who today pursue what Craig
Holdrege calls "whole-organism biology," and of Goethe and Rudolf Steiner
before them. We are, of course, free to opt against such a path of knowing.
But in refusing the path we are not in a good position to say what might
have been discovered along it.
Original source: In Context (Fall, 1999, pp. 10-11); copyright
1999 by The Nature Institute
Steve Talbott :: Where Shall the Mind Look for Itself?
