Machines Like Us – Science News

I'm not a religious person. The only time I ever go to a church is when I'm obliged by social convention to attend a baptism, funeral, or wedding. I feel a bit like a wolf in sheep's skin when I go, and fight the urge, often unsuccessfully, to answer with silly or snide comments when asked as part of the audience if I accept Jesus into my heart, or if I reject Satan and sin. (As an aside, I consider it the mark of an enlightened being to accept all parts of oneself, even the parts that are considered immoral. Of which I have none, of course, but you know, hypothetically.)

I think Mano Singham's excellent Scientific Proof of God's Non-Existence is the most compelling argument I've ever read against the existence of a God - the God, at least, of major religions as the prime creative force standing somehow outside of the universe, His creation, making his presence felt everywhere in the hearts of the faithful but not, unfortunately, in the realm of the physical.

It is on the basis of such rejection that people call themselves atheists. Although technically I am an atheist for that reason, I've never been comfortable with that label. And I'll tell you why without merely giving the wishy-washy cliche "well I think there must be something out there."

The problem with atheism, as I see it, is that it's too comfortable. Great, we've dealt with the God problem, and that's that. What's for dinner? Atheism functions for many in the same way religion does: as an easy answer to life's big questions. Religion casts you in a particular role in the greater drama of Good versus Evil, whereas atheism says simply, there is no drama. You're an accident. A wonderful accident, as my parents explained to me (although now that I think about it, they might have been talking about something else).

Well, maybe. But is the case really closed? Is it really a such an easy dichotomy, God on one hand, and nothing on the other? Having absorbed some Taoism and Buddhism, not to mention some ayajuasca (a story for another day), I have an alternative point of view. The basis of my spirituality, such as it is, lies in an exaltation of the Mystery of it all.

Experientially, this manifests as awe or wonder, when looking up at the stars, or the Grand Canyon, or some other marvel that highlights the immensity of the world. Also, as wonder at the fact that the machine called me is experiencing wonder at the fact that the machine called me is experiencing wonder (and so on). This awe is a rewarding and useful feeling. It helps us to see our place in the world, as simultaneously a center of consciousness and as just a tiny speck in a seemingly infinite universe. It provides a feeling of connection with the world, as its center. Have you ever had the realization, while looking at a night sky, that the light from all those stars has arrived at your eyes simultaneously from such great distances?

Intellectually, it manifests (for me, anyway) in the philosophy of radical constructivism - the set of ideas that: experience is primary; everything in our experience is a construction (not a representation); and that all we know is our constructions. The experience we create in every moment may not have anything at all to do with "reality", but that evolution has selected us in such a way that the constructions we end up making prove advantageous to our survival and propagation. In other words, even our solid world of experience is an illusion, and the so-called Reality behind it, an utter mystery.

(Radical Constructivism, by the way, is the only philosophy that provides the necessary framework to support Strong AI, or the idea that intelligence and free will can arise in and of themselves in the right kind of emergent context. All other philosophies that rely on some sort of representational epistemology - i.e. what we experience directly represents the world out there - have serious flaws if used as part of an explanation of artificial intelligence. Likewise for artificial life.)

Radical Constructivism imparts the notion that a belief in an objective reality is also an act of faith. It's certainly reasonable to believe in an objective reality, and indeed doing so has been enormously successful as a strategy. Science obviously would be impossible without at least a "working" model of objective reality (as in, we do science "as if" there were an objective reality - this is how RC reconciles itself with science). But at the end of the day, our world of particles and waves is just a construction, one that becomes incoherent at the extremes of our experience (as any quantum theorist will tell you).

If we atheists are correct to dismantle religious faith, it's a simple act of consistency to turn that skepticism on ourselves. It's a "lie of omission" not to do so, in fact. What we are left with once we do so is the mystery of our existence, reality, and our selves. Isn't it beautiful?