The Singularity Is Near_ When Humans Transcend Biology Part 26

You might point out that the decorations don't seem to have any significance.

Yes, that's true. Neither does the pedestal. The same can be said for the human and for the room.

You might also point out that the premise is absurd. Just changing the mechanical linkages in a mechanical typewriter could not possibly enable it to convincingly answer questions in Chinese (not to mention the fact that we can't fit the thousands of Chinese-character symbols on the keys of a typewriter). (not to mention the fact that we can't fit the thousands of Chinese-character symbols on the keys of a typewriter).

Yes, that's a valid objection, as well. The only difference between my Chinese Room conception and the several proposed by Searle is that it is patently obvious in my conception that it couldn't possibly work and is by its very nature absurd. That may not be quite as apparent to many readers or listeners with regard to the Searle Chinese Rooms. However, it is equally the case.

And yet we can make my conception work, just as we can make Searle's conceptions work. All you have to do is to make the typewriter linkages as complex as a human brain. And that's theoretically (if not practically) possible. But the phrase "typewriter linkages" does not suggest such vast complexity. The same is true of Searle's description of a person manipulating slips of paper or following a book of rules or a computer program. These are all equally misleading conceptions.

Searle writes: "Actual human brains cause consciousness by a series of specific neurobiological processes in the brain." However, he has yet to provide any basis for such a startling view. To illuminate Searle's perspective, I quote from a letter he sent me:

It may turn out that rather simple organisms like termites or snails are conscious....The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis, and you should look for its specific biology as you look for the specific biology of these other processes.

I replied:

Yes, it is true that consciousness emerges from the biological process(es) of the brain and body, but there is at least one difference. If I ask the question, "does a particular ent.i.ty emit carbon dioxide," I can answer that question through clear objective measurement. If I ask the question, "is this ent.i.ty conscious," I may be able to provide inferential arguments-possibly strong and convincing ones-but not clear objective measurement.

With regard to the snail, I wrote:

Now when you say that a snail may be conscious, I think what you are saying is the following: that we may discover a certain neurophysiological basis for consciousness (call it "x") in humans such that when this basis was present humans were conscious, and when it was not present humans were not conscious. So we would presumably have an objectively measurable basis for consciousness. And then if we found that in a snail, we could conclude that it was conscious. But this inferential conclusion is just a strong suggestion, it is not a proof of subjective experience on the snail's part. It may be that humans are conscious because they have "x" as well as some other quality that essentially all humans share, call this "y." The "y" may have to do with a human's level of complexity or something having to do with the way we are organized, or with the quantum properties of our microtubules (although this may be part of "x"), or something else entirely. The snail has "x" but doesn't have "y" and so it may not be conscious.

How would one settle such an argument? You obviously can't ask the snail. Even if we could imagine a way to pose the question, and it answered yes, that still wouldn't prove that it was conscious. You can't tell from its fairly simple and more-or-less predictable behavior. Pointing out that it has "x" may be a good argument, and many people may be convinced by it. But it's just an argument-not a direct measurement of the snail's subjective experience. Once again, objective measurement is incompatible with the very concept of subjective experience.

Many such arguments are taking place today-though not so much about snails as about higher-level animals. It is apparent to me that dogs and cats are conscious (and Searle has said that he acknowledges this as well). But not all humans accept this. I can imagine scientific ways of strengthening the argument by pointing out many similarities between these animals and humans, but again these are just arguments, not scientific proof.

Searle expects to find some clear biological "cause" of consciousness, and he seems unable to acknowledge that either understanding or consciousness may emerge from an overall pattern of activity. Other philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have articulated such "pattern emergent" theories of consciousness. But whether it is "caused" by a specific biological process or by a pattern of activity, Searle provides no foundation for how we would measure or detect consciousness. Finding a neurological correlate of consciousness in humans does not prove that consciousness is necessarily present in other ent.i.ties with the same correlate, nor does it prove that the absence of such a correlate indicates the absence of consciousness. Such inferential arguments necessarily stop short of direct measurement. In this way, consciousness differs from objectively measurable processes such as lactation and photosynthesis.

As I discussed in chapter 4, we have discovered a biological feature unique to humans and a few other primates: the spindle cells. And these cells with their deep branching structures do appear to be heavily involved with our conscious responses, especially emotional ones. Is the spindle cell structure the neurophysiological basis "x" for human consciousness? What sort of experiment could possibly prove that? Cats and dogs don't have spindle cells. Does that prove that they have no conscious experience?

Searle writes: "It is out of the question, for purely neurobiological reasons, to suppose that the chair or the computer is conscious." I agree that chairs don't seem to be conscious, but as for computers of the future that have the same complexity, depth, subtlety, and capabilities as humans, I don't think we can rule out this possibility. Searle just a.s.sumes that they are not, and that it is "out of the question" to suppose otherwise. There is really nothing more of a substantive nature to Searle's "arguments" than this tautology.

Now, part of the appeal of Searle's stance against the possibility of a computer's being conscious is that the computers we know today just don't seem to be conscious. Their behavior is brittle and formulaic, even if they are occasionally unpredictable. But as I pointed out above, computers today are on the order of one million times simpler than the human brain, which is at least one reason they don't share all of the endearing qualities of human thought. But that disparity is rapidly shrinking and will ultimately reverse itself in a couple of decades. The early twenty-first-century machines I am talking about in this book will appear and act very differently than the relatively simple computers of today.

Searle articulates the view that nonbiological ent.i.ties are capable of only manipulating logical symbols and he appears to be unaware of other paradigms. It is true that manipulating symbols is largely how rule-based expert systems and game-playing programs work. But the current trend is in a different direction, toward self-organizing chaotic systems that employ biologically inspired methods, including processes derived directly from the reverse engineering of the hundreds of neuron cl.u.s.ters we call the human brain.

Searle acknowledges that biological neurons are machines-indeed, that the entire brain is a machine. As I discussed in chapter 4, we have already recreated in an extremely detailed way the "causal powers" of individual neurons as well as those of substantial neuron cl.u.s.ters. There is no conceptual barrier to scaling these efforts up to the entire human brain.

The Criticism from the Rich-Poor Divide

Another concern expressed by Jaron Lanier and others is the "terrifying" possibility that through these technologies the rich may gain certain advantages and opportunities to which the rest of humankind does not have access.39 Such inequality, of course, would be nothing new, but with regard to this issue the law of accelerating returns has an important and beneficial impact. Because of the ongoing exponential growth of price-performance, all of these technologies quickly become so inexpensive as to become almost free. Such inequality, of course, would be nothing new, but with regard to this issue the law of accelerating returns has an important and beneficial impact. Because of the ongoing exponential growth of price-performance, all of these technologies quickly become so inexpensive as to become almost free.

Look at the extraordinary amount of high-quality information available at no cost on the Web today that did not exist at all just a few years ago. And if one wants to point out that only a fraction of the world today has Web access, keep in mind that the explosion of the Web is still in its infancy, and access is growing exponentially. Even in the poorest countries of Africa, Web access is expanding rapidly.

Each example of information technology starts out with early-adoption versions that do not work very well and that are unaffordable except by the elite. Subsequently the technology works a bit better and becomes merely expensive. Then it works quite well and becomes inexpensive. Finally it works extremely well and is almost free. The cell phone, for example, is somewhere between these last two stages. Consider that a decade ago if a character in a movie took out a portable telephone, this was an indication that this person must be very wealthy, powerful, or both. Yet there are societies around the world in which the majority of the population were farming with their hands two decades ago and now have thriving information-based economies with widespread use of cell phones (for example, Asian societies, including rural areas of China). This lag from very expensive early adopters to very inexpensive, ubiquitous adoption now takes about a decade. But in keeping with the doubling of the paradigm-s.h.i.+ft rate each decade, this lag will be only five years a decade from now. In twenty years, the lag will be only two to three years (see chapter 2).

The rich-poor divide remains a critical issue, and at each point in time there is more that can and should be done. It is tragic, for example, that the developed nations were not more proactive in sharing AIDS drugs with poor countries in Africa and elsewhere, with millions of lives lost as a result. But the exponential improvement in the price-performance of information technologies is rapidly mitigating this divide. Drugs are essentially an information technology, and we see the same doubling of price-performance each year as we do with other forms of information technology such as computers, communications, and DNA base-pair sequencing. AIDS drugs started out not working very well and costing tens of thousands of dollars per patient per year. Today these drugs work reasonably well and are approaching one hundred dollars per patient per year in poor countries such as those in Africa.

In chapter 2 I cited the World Bank report for 2004 of higher economic growth in the developing world (over 6 percent) compared to the world average (of 4 percent), and an overall reduction in poverty (for example, a reduction of 43 percent in extreme poverty in the East Asian and Pacific region since 1990). Moreover, economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin examined eight measures of global inequality among individuals, and found that all were declining over the past quarter century.40

The Criticism from the Likelihood of Government Regulation

These guys talking here act as though the government is not part of their lives. They may wish it weren't, but it is. As we approach the issues they debated here today, they had better believe that those issues will be debated by the whole country. The majority of Americans will not simply sit still while some elite strips off their personalities and uploads themselves into their cybers.p.a.ce paradise. They will have something to say about that. There will be vehement debate about that in this country.-LEON FUERTH, FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER TO VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE, AT THE 2002 FORESIGHT CONFERENCE Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to our deepest longings and greatest accomplishments.-LEON Ka.s.s, CHAIR OF THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON BIOETHICS, 2003 The criticism concerning governmental control is that regulation will slow down and stop the acceleration of technology. Although regulation is a vital issue, it has actually had no measurable effect on the trends discussed in this book, which have occurred with extensive regulation in place. Short of a worldwide totalitarian state, the economic and other forces underlying technical progress will only grow with ongoing advances.

Consider the issue of stem-cell research, which has been especially controversial, and for which the U.S. government is restricting its funding. Stem-cell research is only one of numerous ideas concerned with controlling and influencing the information processes underlying biology that are being pursued as part of the biotechnology revolution. Even within the field of cell therapies the controversy over embryonic stem-cell research has served only to accelerate other ways of accomplis.h.i.+ng the same goal. For example, transdifferentiation (converting one type of cell such as a skin cell into other types of cells) has moved ahead quickly.

As I reported in chapter 5, scientists have recently demonstrated the ability to reprogram skin cells into several other cell types. This approach represents the holy grail of cell therapies in that it promises an unlimited supply of differentiated cells with the patient's own DNA. It also allows cells to be selected without DNA errors and will ultimately be able to provide extended telomere strings (to make the cells more youthful). Even embryonic stem-cell research itself has moved ahead, for example, with projects like Harvard's major new research center and California's successful three-billion-dollar bond initiative to support such work.

Although the restrictions on stem-cell research are unfortunate, it is hard to say that cell-therapy research, let alone the broad field of biotechnology, has been affected to a significant degree.

Some governmental restrictions reflect the perspective of fundamentalist humanism, which I addressed in the previous chapter. For example, the Council of Europe proclaimed that "human rights imply the right to inherit a genetic pattern that has not been artificially changed."41 Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the council's edict is its posing a restriction as a right. In the same spirit, I a.s.sume the council would advocate the human right not to be cured from natural disease by unnatural means, just as activists "protected" starving African nations from the indignity of consuming bioengineered crops. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the council's edict is its posing a restriction as a right. In the same spirit, I a.s.sume the council would advocate the human right not to be cured from natural disease by unnatural means, just as activists "protected" starving African nations from the indignity of consuming bioengineered crops.42 Ultimately the benefits of technical progress overwhelm such reflexive ant.i.technology sentiments. The majority of crops in the United States are already GMOs, while Asian nations are aggressively adopting the technology to feed their large populations, and even Europe is now beginning to approve GMO foods. The issue is important because unnecessary restrictions, although temporary, can result in exacerbated suffering of millions of people. But technical progress is advancing on thousands of fronts, fueled by irresistible economic gains and profound improvements in human health and well-being.

Leon Fuerth's observation quoted above reveals an inherent misconception about information technologies. Information technologies are not available only to an elite. As discussed, desirable information technologies rapidly become ubiquitous and almost free. It is only when they don't work very well (that is, in an early stage of development) that they are expensive and restricted to an elite.

Early in the second decade of this century, the Web will provide full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality with images written directly to our retinas from our eyegla.s.ses and lenses and very high-bandwidth wireless Internet access woven in our clothing. These capabilities will not be restricted just to the privileged. Just like cell phones, by the time they work well they will be everywhere.

In the 2020s we will routinely have nan.o.bots in our bloodstream keeping us healthy and augmenting our mental capabilities. By the time these work well they will be inexpensive and widely used. As I discussed above, reducing the lag between early and late adoption of information technologies will itself accelerate from the current ten-year period to only a couple of years two decades from now. Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in our brains, it will at least double in capability each year, as is the nature of information technology. Thus it will not take long for the nonbiological portion of our intelligence to predominate. This will not be a luxury reserved for the rich, any more than search engines are today. And to the extent that there will be a debate about the desirability of such augmentation, it's easy to predict who will win, since those with enhanced intelligence will be far better debaters.

The Unbearable Slowness of Social Inst.i.tutions. MIT senior research scientist Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld writes: "Just looking back over the course of the past century and a half, there have been a succession of political regimes where each was the solution to an earlier dilemma, but created new dilemmas in the subsequent era. For example, Tammany Hall and the political patron model were a vast improvement over the dominant system based on landed gentry-many more people were included in the political process. Yet, problems emerged with patronage, which led to the civil service model-a strong solution to the preceding problem by introducing the meritocracy. Then, of course, civil service became the barrier to innovation and we move to reinventing government. And the story continues." MIT senior research scientist Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld writes: "Just looking back over the course of the past century and a half, there have been a succession of political regimes where each was the solution to an earlier dilemma, but created new dilemmas in the subsequent era. For example, Tammany Hall and the political patron model were a vast improvement over the dominant system based on landed gentry-many more people were included in the political process. Yet, problems emerged with patronage, which led to the civil service model-a strong solution to the preceding problem by introducing the meritocracy. Then, of course, civil service became the barrier to innovation and we move to reinventing government. And the story continues."43 Gershenfeld is pointing out that social inst.i.tutions even when innovative in their day become "a drag on innovation." Gershenfeld is pointing out that social inst.i.tutions even when innovative in their day become "a drag on innovation."

First I would point out that the conservatism of social inst.i.tutions is not a new phenomenon. It is part of the evolutionary process of innovation, and the law of accelerating returns has always operated in this context. Second, innovation has a way of working around the limits imposed by inst.i.tutions. The advent of decentralized technology empowers the individual to bypa.s.s all kinds of restrictions, and does represent a primary means for social change to accelerate. As one of many examples, the entire thicket of communications regulations is in the process of being bypa.s.sed by emerging point-to-point techniques such as voice over Internet protocol (VOIP).

Virtual reality will represent another means of hastening social change. People will ultimately be able to have relations.h.i.+ps and engage in activities in immersive and highly realistic virtual-reality environments that they would not be able or willing to do in real reality.

As technology becomes more sophisticated it increasingly takes on traditional human capabilities and requires less adaptation. You had to be technically adept to use early personal computers, whereas using computerized systems today, such as cell phones, music players, and Web browsers, requires much less technical ability. In the second decade of this century, we will routinely be interacting with virtual humans that, although not yet Turing-test capable, will have sufficient natural language understanding to act as our personal a.s.sistants for a wide range of tasks.

There has always been a mix of early and late adopters of new paradigms. We still have people today who want to live as we did in the seventh century. This does not restrain the early adopters from establis.h.i.+ng new att.i.tudes and social conventions, for example new Web-based communities. A few hundred years ago, only a handful of people such as Leonardo da Vinci and Newton were exploring new ways of understanding and relating to the world. Today, the worldwide community that partic.i.p.ates in and contributes to the social innovation of adopting and adapting to new technological innovation is a substantial portion of the population, another reflection of the law of accelerating returns.

The Criticism from Theism

Another common objection explicitly goes beyond science to maintain that there is a spiritual level that accounts for human capabilities and that is not penetrable by objective means. William A. Dembski, a distinguished philosopher and mathematician, decries the outlook of such thinkers as Marvin Minsky, Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland, and Ray Kurzweil, whom he calls "contemporary materialists" who "see the motions and modifications of matter as sufficient to account for human mentality."44 Dembski ascribes "predictability [as] materialism's main virtue" and cites "hollowness [as] its main fault." He goes on to say that "humans have aspirations. We long for freedom, immortality, and the beatific vision. We are restless until we find our rest in G.o.d. The problem for the materialist, however, is that these aspirations cannot be redeemed in the coin of matter." He concludes that humans cannot be mere machines because of "the strict absence of extra-material factors from such systems."

I would prefer that we call Dembski's concept of materialism "capability materialism," or better yet "capability patternism," Capability materialism/ pattern ism is based on the observation that biological neurons and their interconnections are made up of sustainable patterns of matter and energy. It also holds that their methods can be described, understood, and modeled with either replicas or functionally equivalent re-creations. I use the word "capability" because it encompa.s.ses all of the rich, subtle, and diverse ways in which humans interact with the world, not just those narrower skills that one might label as intellectual. Indeed, our ability to understand and respond to emotions is at least as complex and diverse as our ability to process intellectual issues.

John Searle, for example, acknowledges that human neurons are biological machines. Few serious observers have postulated capabilities or reactions of human neurons that require Dembski's "extra-material factors." Relying on the patterns of matter and energy in the human body and brain to explain its behavior and proficiencies need not diminish our wonderment at its remarkable qualities. Dembski has an outdated understanding of the concept of "machine."

Dembski also writes that "unlike brains, computers are neat and precise....[C]omputers operate deterministically." This statement and others reveal a view of machines, or ent.i.ties made up of patterns of matter and energy ("material" ent.i.ties), that is limited to the literally simpleminded mechanisms of nineteenth-century automatons. These devices, with their hundreds and even thousands of parts, were quite predictable and certainly not capable of longings for freedom and other such endearing qualities of the human ent.i.ty. The same observations largely hold true for today's machines, with their billions of parts. But the same cannot necessarily be said for machines with millions of billions millions of billions of interacting "parts," ent.i.ties with the complexity of the human brain and body. of interacting "parts," ent.i.ties with the complexity of the human brain and body.

Moreover it is incorrect to say that materialism is predictable. Even today's computer programs routinely use simulated randomness. If one needs truly random events in a process, there are devices that can provide this as well. Fundamentally, everything we perceive in the material world is the result of many trillions of quantum events, each of which displays a profound and irreducible quantum randomness at the core of physical reality (or so it seems-the scientific jury is still out on the true nature of the apparent randomness underlying quantum events}.The material world-at both the macro and micro levels-is anything but predictable.

Although many computer programs do operate the way Dembski describes, the predominant techniques in my own field of pattern recognition use biology-inspired chaotic-computing methods. In these systems the unpredictable interaction of millions of processes, many of which contain random and unpredictable elements, provide unexpected yet appropriate answers to subtle questions of recognition. The bulk of human intelligence consists of just these sorts of pattern-recognition processes.

As for our responses to emotions and our highest aspirations, these are properly regarded as emergent properties-profound ones to be sure but nonetheless emergent patterns that result from the interaction of the human brain with its complex environment. The complexity and capacity of nonbiological ent.i.ties is increasing exponentially and will match biological systems including the human brain (along with the rest of the nervous system and the endocrine system) within a couple of decades. Indeed, many of the designs of future machines will be biologically inspired-that is, derivative of biological designs. (This is already true of many contemporary systems.) It is my thesis that by sharing the complexity as well as the actual patterns of human brains, these future nonbiological ent.i.ties will display the intelligence and emotionally rich reactions (such as "aspirations") of humans.

Will such a nonbiological ent.i.ty be conscious? Searle claims that we can (at least in theory) readily resolve this question by ascertaining if it has the correct "specific neurobiological processes." It is my view that many humans, ultimately the vast majority of humans, will come to believe that such human-derived but nonetheless nonbiological intelligent ent.i.ties are conscious, but that's a political and psychological prediction, not a scientific or philosophical judgment. My bottom line: I agree with Dembski that this is not a scientific question, because it cannot be resolved through objective observation. Some observers say that if it's not a scientific question, it's not an important or even a real question. My view (and I'm sure Dembski agrees) is that precisely because the question is not scientific, it is a philosophical one-indeed, the fundamental philosophical question.

Dembski writes: "We need to transcend ourselves to find ourselves. Now the motions and modifications of matter offer no opportunity for transcending ourselves....Freud ... Marx ... Nietzsche, ... each regarded the hope for transcendence as a delusion." This view of transcendence as an ultimate goal is reasonably stated. But I disagree that the material world offers no "opportunity for transcending." The material world inherently evolves, and each stage transcends the stage before it. As I discussed in chapter 7, evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, greater love. And G.o.d has been called all these things, only without any limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, and infinite love. Evolution does not achieve an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably toward our conception of G.o.d, albeit never reaching this ideal.

Dembski continues:

A machine is fully determined by the const.i.tution, dynamics, and interrelations.h.i.+ps of its physical parts "[M]achines" stresses the strict absence of extra-material factors The replacement principle is relevant to this discussion because it implies that machines have no substantive history....But a machine, properly speaking, has no history. Its history is a superfluous rider-an addendum that could easily have been different without altering the machine....For a machine, all that is is what it is at this moment. ... Machines access or fail to access items in storage....Mutatis mutandis, items that represent counterfactual occurrences (i.e., things that never happened) but which are accessible can be, as far as the machine is concerned, just as though they did happen.

It need hardly be stressed that the whole point of this book is that many of our dearly held a.s.sumptions about the nature of machines and indeed of our own human nature will be called into question in the next several decades. Dembski's conception of "history" is just another aspect of our humanity that necessarily derives from the richness, depth, and complexity of being human. Conversely, not having a history in the Dembski sense is just another attribute of the simplicity of the machines that we have known up to this time. It is precisely my thesis that machines of the 2030s and beyond will be of such great complexity and richness of organization that their behavior will evidence emotional reactions, aspirations, and, yes, history. So Dembski is merely describing today's limited machines and just a.s.suming that these limitations are inherent, a line of argument equivalent to stating that "today's machines are not as capable as humans, therefore machines will never reach this level of performance." Dembski is just a.s.suming his conclusion.

Dembski's view of the ability of machines to understand their own history is limited to their "accessing" items in storage. Future machines, however, will possess not only a record of their own history but an ability to understand that history and to reflect insightfully upon it. As for "items that represent counterfactual occurrences," surely the same can be said for our human memories.

Dembski's lengthy discussion of spirituality is summed up thus:

But how can a machine be aware of G.o.d's presence? Recall that machines are entirely defined by the const.i.tution, dynamics, and interrelations.h.i.+ps among their physical parts. It follows that G.o.d cannot make his presence known to a machine by acting upon it and thereby changing its state. Indeed, the moment G.o.d acts upon a machine to change its state, it no longer properly is a machine, for an aspect of the machine now transcends its physical const.i.tuents. It follows that awareness of G.o.d's presence by a machine must be independent of any action by G.o.d to change the state of the machine. How then does the machine come to awareness of G.o.d's presence? The awareness must be self-induced. Machine spirituality is the spirituality of self-realization, not the spirituality of an active G.o.d who freely gives himself in self-revelation and thereby transforms the beings with which he is in communion. For Kurzweil to modify "machine" with the adjective "spiritual" therefore entails an impoverished view of spirituality.

Dembski states that an ent.i.ty (for example, a person) cannot be aware of G.o.d's presence without G.o.d's acting upon her, yet G.o.d cannot act upon a machine, so therefore a machine cannot be aware of G.o.d's presence. Such reasoning is entirely tautological and human-centric. G.o.d communes only with humans, and only biological ones at that. I have no problem with Dembski's subscribing to this as a personal belief, but he fails to make the "strong case" that he promises, that "humans are not machines-period." As with Searle, Dembski just a.s.sumes his conclusion.

Like Searle, Dembski cannot seem to grasp the concept of the emergent properties of complex distributed patterns. He writes:

Anger presumably is correlated with certain localized brain excitations. But localized brain excitations hardly explain anger any better than overt behaviors a.s.sociated with anger, like shouting obscenities. Localized brain excitations may be reliably correlated with anger, but what accounts for one person interpreting a comment as an insult and experiencing anger, and another person interpreting that same comment as a joke and experiencing laughter? A full materialist account of mind needs to understand localized brain excitations in terms of other localized brain excitations. Instead we find localized brain excitations (representing, say, anger) having to be explained in terms of semantic contents (representing, say, insults). But this mixture of brain excitations and semantic contents hardly const.i.tutes a materialist account of mind or intelligent agency.

Dembski a.s.sumes that anger is correlated with a "localized brain excitation," but anger is almost certainly the reflection of complex distributed patterns of activity in the brain. Even if there is a localized neural correlate a.s.sociated with anger, it nonetheless results from multifaceted and interacting patterns. Dembski's question as to why different people react differently to similar situations hardly requires us to resort to his extramaterial factors for an explanation. The brains and experiences of different people are clearly not the same, and these differences are well explained by differences in their physical brains resulting from varying genes and experiences.

Dembski's resolution of the ontological problem is that the ultimate basis of what exists is what he calls the "real world of things" that are not reducible to material stuff. Dembski does not list what "things" we might consider as fundamental, but presumably human minds would be on the list, as might be other things, such as money and chairs. There may be a small congruence of our views in this regard. I regard Dembski's "things" as patterns. Money, for example, is a vast and persisting pattern of agreements, understandings, and expectations. "Ray Kurzweil" is perhaps not so vast a pattern but thus far is also persisting. Dembski apparently regards patterns as ephemeral and not substantial, but I have a profound respect for the power and endurance of patterns. It is not unreasonable to regard patterns as a fundamental ontological reality. We are unable to really touch matter and energy directly, but we do directly experience the patterns underlying Dembski's "things." Fundamental to this thesis is that as we apply our intelligence, and the extension of our intelligence called technology, to understanding the powerful patterns in our world (for example, human intelligence), we can re-create-and extend!-these patterns in other substrates. The patterns are more important than the materials that embody them.

Finally, if Dembski's intelligence-enhancing extramaterial stuff really exists, then I'd like to know where I can get some.

The Criticism from Holism

Another common criticism says the following: machines are organized as rigidly structured hierarchies of modules, whereas biology is based on holistically-organized elements in which every element affects every other. The unique capabilities of biology (such as human intelligence) can result only from this type of holistic design. Furthermore, only biological systems can use this design principle.

Michael Denton, a biologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, points out the apparent differences between the design principles of biological ent.i.ties and those of the machines he has known. Denton eloquently describes organisms as "self-organizing, self-referential, ... self-replicating, ... reciprocal, ... self-formative, and holistic."45 He then makes the unsupported leap-a leap of faith, one might say-that such organic forms can be created only through biological processes and that such forms are "immutable, ... impenetrable, and ... fundamental" realities of existence. He then makes the unsupported leap-a leap of faith, one might say-that such organic forms can be created only through biological processes and that such forms are "immutable, ... impenetrable, and ... fundamental" realities of existence.

I do share Denton's "awestruck" sense of "wonderment" at the beauty, intricacy, strangeness, and interrelatedness of organic systems, ranging from the "eerie other-worldly ... impression" left by asymmetric protein shapes to the extraordinary complexity of higher-order organs such as the human brain. Further, I agree with Denton that biological design represents a profound set of principles. However, it is precisely my thesis, which neither Denton nor other critics from the holistic school acknowledge or respond to, that machines (that is, ent.i.ties derivative of human-directed design) can access-and already are using-these same principles. This has been the thrust of my own work and represents the wave of the future. Emulating the ideas of nature is the most effective way to harness the enormous powers that future technology will make available.

Biological systems are not completely holistic, and contemporary machines are not completely modular; both exist on a continuum. We can identify units of functionality in natural systems even at the molecular level, and discernible mechanisms of action are even more evident at the higher level of organs and brain regions. The process of understanding the functionality and information transformations performed in specific brain regions is well under way, as we discussed in chapter 4.

It is misleading to suggest that every aspect of the human brain interacts with every other aspect and that it is therefore impossible to understand its methods. Researchers have already identified and modeled the transformations of information in several dozen of its regions. Conversely there are numerous examples of contemporary machines that were not designed in a modular fas.h.i.+on, and in which many of the design aspects are deeply interconnected, such as the examples of genetic algorithms described in chapter 5. Denton writes:

Today almost all professional biologists have adopted the mechanistic/ reductionist approach and a.s.sume that the basic parts of an organism (like the cogs of a watch) are the primary essential things, that a living organism (like a watch) is no more than the sum of its parts, and that it is the parts that determine the properties of the whole and that (like a watch) a complete description of all the properties of an organism may be had by characterizing its parts in isolation.

Denton, too, is ignoring here the ability of complex processes to exhibit emergent properties that go beyond "its parts in isolation." He appears to recognize this potential in nature when he writes: "In a very real sense organic forms ... represent genuinely emergent realities." However, it is hardly necessary to resort to Denton's "vitalistic model" to explain emergent realities. Emergent properties derive from the power of patterns, and nothing restricts patterns and their emergent properties to natural systems.