Singular Design

The Singularity book brought to mind a number of recent technology and science issues. First, Ray has no problem creating a new religion based on the perfectibility of man via technology and becoming such an adherent to that religion that he is taking 100’s of supplements and medications an attempt to be granted eternal earthy life on the alter of human technology. He doesn’t hammer as much on the foolishness of belief in God as some, but it is there, he is a materialist through and through, so one of the wags that I read put it, “we are 100% meat with absolutely no spiritual additives”.

Why is this view so important to scientists? They are generally extremely intelligent, yet they fall for to grade school philosophy with formulations like “evolution is how different species were formed, therefore God doesn’t exist”? That statement would be akin to someone saying “this blog was written with MS Word, therefore there is no Moose”.

I’d put the initial blame with the old Catholic Church. When science was in it’s infancy and the Church was in full power, it arrogantly usurped the power of God to claim that it could understand that if the Bible said “the sun stood still” in that one Old Testament battle, then that had to mean it literally stood still, therefore astronomers that claimed the earth orbited it were heretics. It only takes a couple scientists being burned as heretics for them to become a but untrusting of religion. The church ought to avoid pronouncements on the physical, and science should avoid pronouncements on the spiritual.  By this point in human history, movies like ‘The Matrix”, and imagined technology like the Star Trek Transporter ought to make it eminently clear the difficulties of the  “what is reality” problem that perplexed ancient philosophers back to Plato and before.

Any God that can create the universe can create it whenever and however he wants to create it, including doing it while I’m writing this sentence, and from the perspective of any science we have, or ever WILL have, we would be unable to tell the difference. We can ONLY know how it APPEARS from the limits of our senses and thought, and whatever machines we can derive from those. Even if we derive a computer that uses what we see as every particle in this or N universes for computation, it would still be operating from the perspective that WE see. It is possible that is the “only real and true perspective”, but making that decision is every bit the leap of faith that belief in the God of the Bible or some other god is.

Aside from the fault of the church in the normal anti-God view of scientists we have good old human nature. The current discussion about teaching of Intelligent Design (ID) in the schools is instructive. The “unstated alternative” is Random Design (RD). If there is no higher intelligence behind the universe, then we are here due to randomness and all the “design” that we see is random. No matter how much the scientist appeals to very very very large numbers, the thought that all the intricate balances between the forces of physics that allow stars, planets, and eventually intricate chemistry that underlies life to exist “just happens” strains credulity.

Like many liberal arguments, it is relatively easy to point out perceived problems with 6-day creation, age of the earth, or the fact that natural selection happens all the time in say disease resistance of bacteria, BUT, the real issue of “what is the alternative”? is left open. Liberals tend to be good at criticism, but HORRIBLE at implementation or suggesting REASONABLE alternatives! We know they don't like a "god of order", but does declaring a "god of randomness" and then believing that science and figure out things due to order in the universe REALLY make sense?

The god of chaos is willing to to just stand off to the side of the stage and be worshipped without acknowledgement. He realizes that the human soul can be suitably corrupted by just removing the God of order and intelligence from view;  chaos, evil, randomness; all are perfectly willing, and in fact more than happy to rule from the shadows.

One of the keys to perceiving the dark side is the criticism with no alternative, or the “action to nihilism”. “We seek only to be sure that a religious doctrine isn’t taught in the schools, therefore ID must be removed”. But what is it replaced with? “Nothing”, or effectively RD. The decision to worship at the altar of randomness and chaos is an equal leap of faith (and when faced honestly is a greater move against the very human soul), BUT the IMPRESSION is given that it is more “free” (there are “less rules”). This may be the cruelest hoax of all.

If this truly is a universe of RD, what do we know about issues like the perfectibility of man? Our ability to find more answers and create heaven on earth through science? Well, precisely nothing. It could be anything, it is random. We know very little extra in an ID universe if we don't accept something like the Bible, but it seems easier to believe that an ID universe is likely to “make sense” over an RD universe since there was intelligence that begat it in the first place.

As Ray winds his way through toward the Singularity he muddles around with trying to figure out how to claim that the vast new machine intelligence that will arise will be “good”. He admits that by definition it can’t be controlled, and the closest he comes to a reason for it’s goodness is “because it is a child of our minds”. Considering that Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Bin Ladin were all kids once, somehow I don’t find that very comforting, and I’m not sure why he does … I suspect he just threw up his hands and decided to find it so since he didn’t like the alternative.

While I find Ray wildly optimistic, if one extends the time scale to 1000 years rather than 100, I suspect he may not be SO very far off. My reasons for optimism though have little to do with the technology being OUR children, but a lot to do with us and the technology being children of a designer for whom the computational capacity of all the humans that ever lived in one second of clock time isn’t even an issue since his existence and capacity is beyond time and measure.