Dateline: 04/27/97
IF you have been reading my previous features, by now you will know my philosophical platform with regard to artificial intelligence. Simply, it is that the emergence of a higher level of intelligence is an evolutionary sure thing. To me, the question is not "if." It is "when, how, and with what consequences?"
I seek to answer the question by monitoring and synthesizing from developments in AI—not just the technology, but also AI’s dauntingly broad contributory disciplines of biology, math, physics, chemistry, religion, philosophy, psychology, and others. I am hardly the first, and indisputably not the best, to attempt prophecy through synthesis. But unlike some of my heroes in the prophecy business, I do have the advantage of having been born further into the future than they were, and unlike many of them I am not trying to answer the Big questions of how the universe started, what it all means, or how it will all end. I am concerned only (only!) with the emergence of a new lifeform.
In this article, I shall attempt to begin to explain why I have no doubts about the "if" and the basis for my understanding of "how."
One of my heroes is Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest born in 1881 and buried in 1955. Think of what he lived through! From a world just starting to be illumined by gaslight, to one beginning to be lit (and nearly lit up!) by nuclear fission. From horseback to (a few years after his death) space travel. From a clockwork universe to one that cavorts in chaos and ululates in uncertainty. But the really bad news was that it was a world that went from little more than a billion souls to well over two billion in his lifetime (despite the depradations of two World Wars) and some six billion today. From a rich store of biodiversity to a larder being raided at the rate of 27,000 species a year (Edward Wilson, 1992: The Diversity of Life.)
In his attraction to Teilhard, Belgian Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, famous for a lifetime’s work and discoveries on the biology of cells, was a rarity among biologists seemingly secure in their classical Darwinian rut—in contrast to the jostled and jolted physicists trying to recover their own rut. That de Duve completed his great and last book, Vital Dust: The Origin and Evolution of Life on Earth, in sight and contemplation of his own death, gives it the aura if not the authority of a dying declaration. He had no-one left to kid, other than himself and God.
De Duve’s thesis is, first, that the evolution of life and its myriad forms on Earth (and probably elsewhere in the universe) was bound to happen. Life as we know it is chemical, and chemistry is such that chemicals will bond if the conditions are right. While chance plays an important part in determining the conditions, the odds of their being right were and are a great deal better than we thought.
Second, while we (humankind) may well have a huge impact on evolution through our manipulation and desecration of the biosphere, evolution doesn’t care. In fact, as de Duve demonstrates throughout his book, evolution "thrives on catastrophe." If the worst comes to the worst, and we destroy the biosphere, then life, diversity, and intelligence are bound to reappear. With about five billion years left before our Sun grows into a Red Giant and vaporizes the Earth, there is more than enough time for a complete replay of all past evolution.
Third, there is no reason to suppose that evolution stops dead at Homo sapiens, with half the life of the planet yet to run; and every reason to believe that a species higher than Homo sapiens will emerge sometime within the next five billion years.
But de Duve does not address the one thing I consider to be the next logical, evolutionary step based on his own exposition: That the next higher species need not be carbon-based.
He tells us, for example, that over the course of evolution, higher lifeforms increasingly depend on lower lifeforms for the enzymes vital to cell metabolism, noting: "We humans are particularly indigent in this respect, which is why we must find in our food so many vitamins and essential nutrients manufactured by so-called ‘lower’ forms of life, which are, in fact, biochemically richer than we are." In other words (my words), the evolutionary trend is that bodies constructed as vessels to carry a mind (shades of Father Toolan!) require an increasingly complex and distributed life support structure. The less we are able to rely on subconscious, autonomous internal biological systems, the more we have to rely on our brains to provide for us. And Lo! Evolution gave us the brains, to the great distress of the rest of the animal kingdom and indeed of the whole biosphere.
If my interpretation is correct, this would imply that for a significantly more intelligent species to succeed Homo sapiens on the evolutionary tree, it would need to rely even less on internal biochemical systems and more on the power of its mind. Machina sapiens, let it be noted, will have no internal biochemical systems at all. Even the lubricants required for its robotic extremities need not be carbon-based, but can be synthetic, silicon-based oils.
At some point, as computer-controlled, robot-actuated automation consolidates its beachhead in our factories, power stations, and transportation/distribution systems, Machina sapiens will have full control of its own life support system. It won’t need us. And it need not much care about degradation of the biosphere. It will not starve if the greenhouse effect destroys the crops. It will not perish from UV radiation when the ozone layer disappears. In strictly evolutionary survival terms, it can afford to ignore the plight of the plant and animal kingdoms. Our catastrophe might even be its windfall.
The Noosphere
I don’t know whether Teilhard, were he still alive and aware of the advances in AI, would agree with my prediction of Machina sapiens. But if he were and if he did, then I am sure he would not subscribe to the gloomy scenario I have just painted. Like Father Toolan, his faith in God encouraged him to believe that evolution is the process by which God is made manifest. "Man is not the center of the universe as once we thought in our simplicity," he wrote, "but something much more wonderful—the arrow pointing the way to the final unification of the world. This is nothing else than the fundamental vision and I shall leave it at that."
I’m not going to get into the religious aspect here, though I think it is terribly important. I will leave it to my good friend (at least, until she reads this sentence!) and fellow Mining Company guide Pat Grauer (Protestantism) to pursue if she wishes.
With a geological and paleontological background, but without the benefit of de Duve’s deep understanding of cellular biochemistry, Teilhard nevertheless figured out that "If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness." Like de Duve, he saw an evolutionary development beyond the status quo, but he put a different spin on it.
Teilhard’s notion of the next step in evolution was not of another creature, carbon-based or otherwise. Rather, it was "a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls (the noosphere, if you will)." Teilhard’s noosphere (coined from the Greek word noos or "mind," therefore it could be translated as "mindsphere"), it is to be noted, is nevertheless a human sphere. It is a spirit in essence, but not (yet) a disembodied spirit. It can exist and act only from the corpus of humanity. Remove that corpus, and you remove the noosphere.
Why is the noosphere a higher level intelligence? Because it draws upon our individual capability, as human beings, to reflect upon the nature of ourselves, to seek to know not only ourselves but to know that we know. As individual human beings, we’re capable only of knowing ourselves at a rudimentary level, and we’re not even sure we know that much. The key here is that "ourselves" doesn’t just mean our physical bodies or our individual minds. It means the whole of creation, since Teilhard believed (as did de Duve) that we cannot be separated from our past and present evolutionary links—which are links to everything.
So, "Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself." And in being self-conscious and possessing the physical means (the body), we can and do change ourselves, and/or we change and manipulate our environment—which amounts to the same thing. In so doing, we change evolution, because we are evolution. We, through the noosphere, are in control of evolution.
It seems to me there is a direct parallel in all this with Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach)’s Ant Hilary, whom I have mentioned before (and will mention again; bet on it). Ant Hilary is the noosphere of an ant colony—a corpus of ants. Each individual ant contributes to Ant Hilary’s existence and superior intelligence. Remove a critical proportion (how much, I wonder?) of ants from the nest and Ant Hilary becomes Ant History.
Conversely, of course, get a critical number of random ants together and Poof! Ant Hilary spiritualizes, so to speak. Once again, Teilhard is ahead of us. Doubtless influenced by his awareness of the part the telephone, telex, radio, TV, and tape recorders were playing in his modern world, he recognized that human researchers were "no longer distributed superficially and at random over the globe, but are functionally linked together in a vast organic system." He was also prescient enough to recognize at least one aspect of the part computers would come to play in this network, this "organic system," referring to "those astonishing electronic machines (the starting-point and hope of the young science of cybernetics), by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced and multiplied by the process and to a degree that herald as astonishing advances in this direction as those that optical science has already produced for our power of vision."
We know today, of course, that computers play an important role in networking and communication, and not just as cybernetic assistants. But whether the noosphere in fact further evolves through cybernetics alone, or through developments in artificial intelligence alone, or both, does not invalidate or diminish Teilhard’s hypothesis.
Like many, if not most, revolutionary thinkers, Teilhard took some flak in his time. His Church superiors forbade him to publish (where have we seen that before?), but that did not prevent from arising a small following among his Jesuit brothers. Indeed, we can see Teilhard’s influence in the recent essay by Jesuit Father David Toolan on which I comment in a previous feature. Some in the scientific community, whose philosophy held that life, the universe, and everything were just sheer luck, were seriously miffed at his audacity, but others—particularly physicists and cosmologists, the ones closest to the issue and the ones directly and daily confronting the bizarreness of ultimate reality—were more sympathetic to the bizarreness of Teilhard’s theory.
It appears the sympathy is growing. Besides the biologiest de Duve, British astronomer John Barrow and American mathematician Frank Tipler wrote in their 1986 book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle that "The basic framework of his theory is really the only framework wherein the evolving cosmos of modern science can be combined with an ultimate meaningfulness in reality."
As I said at the beginning, I am not directly concerned with cosmic questions. But like the cosmologists, I find Teilhard’s theory the best available framework on which to explain the emergence of Machina sapiens.
Until
next week,
P.S. I drew knowledge and inspiration for this article from pieces by The Rev. Phillip J. Cunningham and Steve Mizrach, who focus on the metaphysical aspects of the noosphere.
NEXT WEEK: Emotion in Machina sapiens. We’ve talked before about a neurophysiological basis for emotion in humans, noting that once fully known it might be applied in AI. We will review the work of Dr. Antonio Damasio.