Philosophy Is Not Dead, and We Have Not Killed Her

Perhaps the most galling feature of the resurgence of "scientific" materialists is how truly terrible the science itself is. Take this passage from an interview with neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky:

A muscle did something. Meaning a neuron in your motor cortex commanded your muscle to do that. That neuron fired only because it got inputs from umpteen other neurons milliseconds before. And those neurons only fired because they got inputs milliseconds before and back and back and back. Show me one neuron anywhere in this pathway that, from out of nowhere, decided to say something that activated in ways that are not explained by the laws of the physical universe, and ions, and channels, and all that sort of stuff. Show me one neuron that has some cellular semblance of free will. And there is no such neuron.

Not to put too fine a point of it, but the reductionism here simply doesn't reflect the state of the field, even ignoring that question-begging word "decide". But it doesn't hurt to start there: on some level, "decide" is exactly what each neuron does. His description of a game-of-Moustrap-like chain from stimulus to response is, as a rule, the exception: the typical neuron in the brain is taking in a complex of inputs to which it responds in a manner over which there is a great deal of argument, including models that are frankly probabilistic, beyond the feedback which is part of so many neural circuits. Likewise, the implicit reduction of a thought to a single neuron firing is laughably simplistic, even without considering that we don't have any substantial idea of how anything beyond a fairly limited set of sensory impressions are realized in the brain, and certainly nothing as abstracted as a rational thought, or even an emotion.

The truth is that even the computers to whom analogy is often made are beginning to exceed our comprehension as their complexity grows. When the top go-playing program is set against itself, for example, the result is play that has been described by experts as "Amazing. Strange. Alien." Some of this appears to rise from limits of human ability to process the board as a whole, but other peculiarities of its play in these matches have resisted analysis. And the game of go, it should be remembered, had up to this time resisted computational attack by sheer combinatorial depth, not because of any complexity of its rules. The brain is hardly so symmetrical.

It is not unreasonable to hold this doctrine (for that is what is) subject to the demands of scientific proof. I do not accept that one can argue free will out of existence in this way: that the brain is mechanically deterministic is a hypothesis which needs explicit experimental proof, which we certainly do not have and which is certainly not going to be produced without a huge advance along several fronts of neurology and cellular biology. But beyond that, anyone is welcome to ask of these dogmatic skeptics, "what exactly do you mean by the will, anyway?" And at that point, we plunge headlong into the discomforting domain of the philosophers.

And it certainly discomforts them, at least if statements from the likes of the popularizers are any sign. If Stephen Hawking claimed that philosophy has become irrelevant because its practitioners haven't kept up with scientific developments (which he did), if Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson can, between the two of them, ridicule philosophers as concerned with irrelevancies, it is a sign of how insular and self-inflated the voices of secular materialism have become. Or rather, it points, philosophically, to the intellectual impoverishment of their own, well, philosophy. To turn to Philosophia's spurned sister, the theologians have not in fact been particularly discomforted by scientific advance; it is self-doubt that has proven their greatest threat. If we are reduced to a "god of the gaps", well, that's an aesthetic objection, to which reality need not conform.

And if humans created philosophy, as Nye claims, well, natural science is of the same ilk. He is hardly a model of intellectual rigor, and one would really consider the guardianship of that rigor to belong to philosophy; but even by standards about which there is no real controversy, these statements don't withstand even casual scrutiny. They have the same quality of rationalization about them that they attribute to others.

Designing the Beloved

Kara Slade, in The Living Church, has written a fascinating and thoughtful reflection on robotics and sexuality which does not flinch from the difficulties of the subject, and especially the hubris hidden in the topic.

Let us start with this observation: "In Levy’s presentation, the language deployed to describe the ideal robotic spouse was inadvertently telling: ' All of the following qualities and many more are likely to be achievable in software within a few decades. Your robot will be patient, kind, protective, loving, trusting, truthful, persevering, respectful, uncomplaining, complimentary, pleasant to talk to, and sharing your sense of humor.' Suffice it to say for now that this statement reveals quite a bit about the priorities of the author, and very little about the task of technologically approximating any existing human woman." Or to put in in other words: the robot is to be giving out on the one hand and undemanding on the other. So that word, "love": this describes not something to be loved, certainly not the subject of agape. It is instead something to take "love" from.

And that takes us to something that Slade does not touch upon. She does remark upon the endless optimism of AI futurists that the human mind can be simulated, but it is, after all, 2017 and not 1976, the year that Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason was published. Weizenbaum was shocked to discover that many people were willing to treat interaction with the manifestly stupid ELIZA program which he had constructed as if it were interaction with a real person. The lesson I see in this is that the Turing Test (conversation with a computer being indistinguishable from that with a human) is in practice not successful, because people aren't good at it. Weizenbaum went on to attack the whole notion of external behavior as a proxy for the interior life of the mind, and this is particularly pointed in a situation where that internal life really seems, in the end, to be unwelcome.

After all, the terms of Levy's ideal are frankly servile, and it is a short distance from serving to simply being used. One senses from all the emphasis on sexual companionship that these futurists have no problem with the idea of a robotic sex toy which cannot be raped because refusal has been edited out of its humanity. It one telling footnote, Slade remarks that "While writing in this field gestures toward both male and female robotic lovers, the predominant assumption is clearly centered on the idea of a robotic woman," and I imagine that feminist analysis of this would be unsparing. She remarks on the degree to which various alienations seem to drive the quest for the robotic companion, but there is the irony: if it were possible to fully emulate the humanity of a real woman, it does not seem (in the minds of these would-be Pygmalions) desirable to do so. This she does note, but I would go further: not only would they not desire it, but I believe that they would on one level fail to see that something was missing. That is, they would see that some "undesirable" impulses were absent, but they would fail to grasp that they had obtained a less-than-human, because all of these "faults" arise out of the will.

So here we are, right back in our own Eden, but we don't have to worry about Eve taking the fruit because she lacks the independence to do so. I am thus irresistibly reminded of the creation of the dwarves by Aulë in the Quenta Silmarillion. Ilúvatar sees how the dwarf fathers were created outside of his one, true creation, and he challenges Aulë's deviation from the divine plan; but when Aulë moves to destroy them, they quail, showing that they have been given life and wills of their own. I imagine our ideal companion robots putting up no such defense, and indeed one can imagine a robot who has specifically been created to be tortured (as I believe at least one SF write must have already depicted). And thus the alienation is complete: its creators put off from real human congress, the ideal robot companion is made a perversion of humanity, specifically so that it can be used and abused without qualm. We may not be able to give it a soul, but we will surely see to it that it does not accidentally get one. So much of robot mythology fantasizes that they may exceed our humanity and displace us, but here it seems that in our relationships with them, they may exceed our humanity because we diminish theirs— and with that, our own.