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making sense of change
 
 
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The Borg or Borges?
« on: 2003-06-21 03:52:20 » |
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William Irwin Thompson
The Borg or Borges?
It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to
grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labour to subtract
it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of
consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural
nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation with the help of
the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the
humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the
robotics scientist. This atmospheric inversion from above to below, one
in which a sky turns into the smog of a thickened air, happened once
before in the world of knowledge, when Comtian positivism inspired a
functionalist approach to the study of the sacred. The social scientists
first said that in order to study the sacred, one had to study how it
functioned in society; then having contributed to the growth of their
own academic domain, they more confidently claimed that what humans
worshipped with the sacred was, in fact, their own society. There simply
was no such thing as God or the sacred, and so Schools of Divinity began
to be eclipsed by the elevation of the new towers of the office
buildings of the Social Sciences. Indeed, as I turn now away from my
computer screen, I can see outside my window the William James Building of Social Relations competing for domi-nance of the skyline with the Victorian brick Gothic of Harvard's Memorial Hall.
This clever move to eliminate the phenomenological reality of human
con-sciousness as a prelude to the growth of a new robotics industry is
a very successful scam, for it has helped enormously with the task of
fund-raising for costly moon shots, such as the Japanese government's
'Fifth Generation Computer Project' which promised to create an
autonomously thinking machine in the 1980s. No one seems to talk much
anymore about the failure of this project, but the gurus of A.I.
continue to prophesy - as Ray Kurzweil now does - that by 2030, humans
will be surpassed by machines in cultural evolution.
Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are now at a great
bifurcation in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis and Hans Moravec prophesy that we are at the end of the human era, and that 'nanobots' are about to be embedded in our bodies until our antique organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by a new silicon noosphere of networked computers . . .
Full text: http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/WI_Thompson.pdf
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