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Apologia Report 19:5 (1,188)
February 27, 2014
Subject: Ray Kurzweil and the "cult" of transhumanism
In this issue:
DEMON POSSESSION - as seen "from the perspective of a decidedly sober, non-charismatic Christian denomination"
FICTION - Ender's Game and current debates on violence and children
SCIENCE - bestowing consciousness upon robots
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DEMON POSSESSION
I Am Not Afraid: Demon Possession and Spiritual Warfare, by Robert H. Bennett [1] -- Timothy R. Furnish notes in his review that this book is written by a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastor and published by his denomination. "Slightly over half of the book treats possession and exorcism in Madagascar [where the author worked as a missionary], while the remainder deals with those topics in the New Testament, in Luther's time, and in the views of a number of prominent LC-MS theologians. ...
"Bennett's narrow focus on the conservative Lutheran assessment of possession and exorcism limits this book's analytical utility and its appeal to other Christians." Bennett writes that he regularly dealt with Christians among the people of Madagascar who were demon possessed. "Bennett notes that 'sometimes many exorcisms are needed to free the possessed person from the grasp of the demons,' and the exorcism is not deemed successful until 'the individual regains composure and begins to pray in Jesus' name. ...
"I Am Not Afraid is a convincing modern examination of spiritual warfare, particularly on two levels: it deals with the church's activity in a little-known, Third World mission field, and it does so from the perspective of a decidedly sober, non-charismatic Christian denomination." Touchstone, Nov/Dec '13, pp48-49.
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FICTION
Robert Velarde reviews the big-screen version of Orson Scott Card's classic sci-fi novel Ender's Game [2]. Velarde calls the movie [3] "yet another military action film about the survival of the human race in the face of a formidable alien threat," which is nonetheless interesting because "the soldiers in this war are primarily children." The main character, a young boy named Ender Wiggin, "believes that understanding his [enemies] will somehow lead him to love them, though he is not opposed to training to defeat them in battle. ...
"Ender's Game is relevant to current debates regarding violence and children. ... Is the source of violence derived from media such as television, video games, or the evening news? In an era of mass school shootings, these are not merely academic questions, but speak both to human nature and our culture and its influence. ...
"[A]ccording to Ender, 'the way we win matters.' This is an insightful point, suggesting there are real moral rules to follow. It may seem strange, given the inherent violence of warfare, but various theories of warhave attempted to grapple with the ethical ramifications of war, offering certain rules or guidelines to govern warfare." Velarde briefly discusses this and notes that Card is a Mormon, but finds that "no Latter-day Saints theology is present in the film."
In conclusion, Velarde summarizes that "the film is best approached as a morality tale about the seemingly paradoxical human capacity for violence, compassion, remorse, and - unfortunately - warfare on a massive scale." Christian Research Journal, 36:6 - 2014, pp60-61.
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SCIENCE
"The Closing of the Scientific Mind" by David Gelernter, "professor of computer science at Yale" -- observes that "science used to know enough to approach cautiously and admire from outside, and to build its own work on a deep belief in human dignity. No longer.
"Today science and the 'philosophy of mind' - its thoughtful assistant, which is sometimes smarter than the boss - are threatening Western culture with the exact opposite of humanism. Call it roboticism. Man is the measure of all things, Protagoras said. Today we add, and computers are the measure of all men.
"Many scientists are proud of having booted man off his throne at the center of the universe and reduced him to just one more creature - an especially annoying one - in the great intergalactic zoo. That is their right. But when scientists use this locker-room braggadocio to belittle the human viewpoint, to belittle human life and values and virtues and civilization and moral, spiritual, and religious discoveries, which is all we human beings possess or ever will, they have outrun their own empiricism. They are abusing their cultural standing. Science has become an international bully.
"Nowhere is its bullying more outrageous than in its assault on the phenomenon known as subjectivity. ...
"The present problem originated at the intersection of artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind - in the question of what consciousness and mental states are all about, how they work, and what it would mean for a robot to have them. ...
"The modern 'mind fields' encompass artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. Researchers in these fields are profoundly split, and the chaos was on display in the ugliness occasioned by the publication of Thomas Nagel's Mind & Cosmos [4] in 2012. Nagel is an eminent philosopher and professor at NYU. In Mind & Cosmos, he shows with terse, meticulous thoroughness why mainstream thought on the workings of the mind is intellectually bankrupt. He explains why Darwinian evolution is insufficient to explain the emergence of consciousness - the capacity to feel or experience the world. He then offers his own ideas on consciousness, which are speculative, incomplete, tentative, and provocative - in the tradition of science and philosophy. ...
"The voice most strongly associated with what I've termed roboticism is that of Ray Kurzweil, a leading technologist and inventor. The Kurzweil Cult teaches that, given the strong and ever-increasing pace of technological progress and change, a fateful crossover point is approaching. He calls this point the 'singularity.'
...
"Kurzweil believes in 'transhumanism,' the merging of men and machines. He believes human immortality is just around the corner [by 2045]. He works for Google.
"Whether he knows it or not, Kurzweil believes in and longs for the death of mankind." In route to this destiny, subjectivity is being banished. The argument goes something like this: "I can't know that the color I call blue looks to me the same way it looks to you. And yet we both use the word blue to describe this color, and common sense suggests that your experience of blue is probably a lot like mine. Our ability to transcend the subjective and accept the existence of objective reality is the cornerstone of everything modern science has accomplished."
This mindset is helped by seeing the brain as just another computer. "The dominant, mainstream view of mind nowadays among philosophers and many scientists is computationalism, also known as cognitivism. This view is inspired by the idea that minds are to brains as software is to computers. ... In some ways this is an apt analogy. In others, it is crazy. At any rate, it is one of the intellectual milestones of modern times. ...
"If the brain is merely a mechanism for thinking or problem-solving, how does it create consciousness? ...
"In Consciousness Explained [5], [Daniel C.] Dennett lays out the essence of consciousness as follows: 'The concepts of computer science provide the crutches of imagination we need to stumble across the terra incognita between our phenomenology as we know it by 'introspection' and our brains as science reveals them to us.' (Note the chuckle-quotes around introspection; for Dennett, introspection is an illusion.) ...
"Thus consciousness is the result of running the right sort of program on an organic computer also called the human brain. If you were able to download the right app on your phone or laptop, it would be conscious, too."
Gelernter considers the flaws in such reasoning. One of the deepest, he finds, is that "Mainstream computationalists treat the mind as if its purpose were merely to act and not to be. But the mind is for doing and being." In addition: "Computationalists cannot account for emotion. It fits as badly as consciousness into the mind-as-software scheme.
"And there is (at least) one more area of special vulnerability in the computationalist worldview. Computationalists believe that the mind is embodied by the brain, and the brain is simply an organic computer. But in fact, the mind is embodied not by the brain but by the brain and the body, intimately interleaved.
"[T]here is a serious, thought-provoking argument that purports to show us that consciousness is not just mysterious but superfluous. It's called the Zombie Argument. ...
"By zombie, philosophers mean a creature who looks and behaves just like a human being, but happens to be unconscious. ... He (meaning it) is actually a robot with a computer for a brain." Gelernter discusses this further.
Moving on, Gelernter notes: "Nagel believes that 'our mental lives, including our subjective experiences' are 'strongly connected with and probably strictly dependent on physical events in our brains.' ... Nagel also believes that explaining subjectivity and our conscious mental lives will take nothing less than a new scientific revolution.
...
"On consciousness and subjectivity, science still has elementary work to do. ...
"Of course the deep and difficult problem of why consciousness exists doesn't hold for Jews and Christians. Just as God anchors morality, God's is the viewpoint that knows you are conscious." Lengthy cover story. Commentary, Jan '14, pp17-25. <www.ow.ly/tTJPW>
For more on Ray Kurzweil's singularity, see <www.ow.ly/tTJ5L>. And for more on transhumanism, see <www.ow.ly/u0gHI> and <www.ow.ly/u0gKC>.
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - I Am Not Afraid: Demon Possession and Spiritual Warfare, by Robert H. Bennett (Concordia Pub, 2013, paperback, 215 pages) <www.ow.ly/tTGsG>
2 - Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card (Tor Teen, 2013, hardcover, 384 pages) <www.ow.ly/tTxXA>
3 - Ender's Game, Starring Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, Abigail Breslin, Ben Kingsley and Harrison Ford (DVD, 1 disc, Rated: PG-13, Run Time: 114 minutes, 2013) <www.ow.ly/tTFWe>
4 - Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel (Oxford Univ Prs, 2012, hardcover, 144 pages) <www.ow.ly/kZGPJ>
5 - Consciousness Explained, by Daniel C. Dennett (Back Bay, 1992, paperback, 528 pages) <www.ow.ly/tTKd3>
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