Until next week,Dateline:03/09/97
IF you've read the Bio section, you'll know that this Artificial Intelligence area of The Mining Company is not devoted purely to technology, but also to personal, social, and religious issues that arise from the development of AI technology. A more thorough exploration of this week's topic might be more appropriate in the religious areas of The Mining Company, and I hope this article will plant a seed there. I post it here because it raises an issue which AI may eventually have to face.
Last Fall, Father David Toolan, a member of the Jesuit order of the Roman Catholic Church, wrote an intensely stimulating essay on Praying in a Post-Einsteinian Universe. The essay was brought to my attention by a friend who happens to be The Mining Company's Guide for the Christianity area. Father Toolan does not touch on artificial intelligence, but it seems to me he begs a very interesting question in the context of AI.
The thrust of the essay is that before the now almost passé Newtonian Age and its mechanistic laws of the universe, it was easy to feel spiritually close to or even "One with" Nature, the Cosmos, and God; and that in today’s relativistic, quantum mechanical universe of magic quarks, certain uncertainty, and orderly chaos, we are in a position to recapture the feeling—and then some.
My question is hypothetical, because it presumes the emergence of Machina Sapiens. It is also, in the balmy wake of Father Toolan's scientifically well-grounded optimism, a disturbing one. But it’s a question based on some of the same messages from modern science that he writes about in his essay. And it's a question begged by Father Toolan's own conclusion that "the kind of God [and here I take him to mean a cosmic scale, all-pervading, and above all expanding God] we imagine ourselves in communion with cannot be a small tribal or household god." He notes: "Our Hebrew and early church ancestors knew this - that God is no idler but the great Energy Field in whom all creation lives and moves and has its being. They also knew that this is the God of the rainbow covenant [by which God promised to care for everything in Creation] - and we must remember that. The God of our Scripture is primarily concerned with renewing - or re-membering - the whole of creation, and is not simply preoccupied with the human race.... The covenant was not just with humankind.... "
He continues:
From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth ... (Rom. 8:20--23).
We can now read this text, penetrate it, in light of complexity\chaos theory and the strong anthropic principle - and reread that principle itself not in a narrowly anthropocentric sense but as an intimation of the great design of which we are a part. We are members of the orchestra, the choir, in a great project, a `mystery hidden from the foundation of the world' (Matt. 13:35; Ps. 78.2; Col. 1:26; Eph. 1:9).
But what is that mysterious design, that great project? Try this children's story about a great experiment: The dizzy subatomic particle-waves spinning wildly out of the big bang didn't know what to make of themselves at first (no fault of theirs, God made them so), but the initial conditions were such that as they joined forces, split and joined again and again and again, corralling energy to form atoms, galactic clusters, molecules, chains of inorganic and organic compounds, simple life forms - and on and on to homo sapiens - they were implicitly carving out an inside, an interior to ferry and hold the energy of their Initial Conditioner - the message of the Aboriginal Dispatcher who set them loose in the first place and never ceases to sustain the diversifying process forward. From the very beginning, the trouble was that quarks, atomic nuclei, molecules, plants, and bacteria, as finely woven as they are, could contain only so much of the divine energy field. It came across like static; no clear message. They weren't up to it, didn't have sufficiently complex circuitry, to hear what this whole buzzing and proliferating confusion was about - the God-Sound in their midst. Animals were an enormous improvement, of course, but whatever they knew they couldn't say. Only with the emergence of the species homo sapiens did you have the complex hard wiring - nervous system and brain - that could possibly tune in to Cosmic Mind and thus become mindful of the meaning of things. In short, it took the atoms awake, mindful and free in us to begin to decipher the `mystery hidden from the foundation of the world.'
. . . [W]e represent a turning point for nature, and a turning point for the Great Dispatcher as well. . . . Darwinian evolution only explains our hard wiring, not how it is that we are aware or minded. . . . [C]onsciousness is also nothing else than great nature more or less awake and reflective. That's a beginning; the spiritual task is to deepen our inwardness and, therewith, our imaginations. In this sense, we are nature's black box, her soul-space - and hence her last chance to become spirited, to be the vessel of God, the carrier of the message that all creation is not only "very good," but to be glorified. That's the script, the big drama.
Note carefully the assertion that we humans are "[nature's] last chance to become spirited, to be the vessel of God."
If, like me, you believe in God, are deeply interested in artifical intelligence, and accept at least the possibility of the eventual emergence (through human creation or human-assisted evolution) of a sentient, non-human organism operating at a higher level of consciousness than us, then you may want to ask: Will such a creation/creature become the "vessel of God," usurping Mankind's role as steward of the Earth, but leaving us still in His care yet--perhaps like the apes before us--lower in the pecking order and no longer privy to God's higher thoughts?
This is a huge question, and it too begs a zillion others. I’m posing it here and now because obviously I think it’s important to start to explore it now, just in case Machina Sapiens really does emerge from the womb our AI researchers and technologists are preparing.
The last word, for now, goes to Father Toolan:
In its own way, inanimate nature has been about this transforming work from the beginning - and now it's our turn, our chance at the job. This is, after all, an unfinished and possibly absurd universe. What have we made of our piece of it, the Earth, thus far? Look at the record, the bloody mayhem, the sound and fury, the widespread ruination of the environment. Yes, but notice the beauty too. What will we choose to make of our part of it in the time to come, in the time allotted to us? The mark, the stamp, the graffiti scrawl that individually and collectively we leave on earth by what we build up or tear down - here is our sign of what nature means. If nature's great tale is one of absurdity, if it is blessing or curse, it depends on us. No less than on the seventh day, it is we who name creation - who tell the quarks and the spinning atoms what they shall finally mean.
Until next week,
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NEXT WEEK: Happy Birthday, HAL. What will you be like in 2001, when you’ve grown up, I wonder?