Singularity: Limits of Wisdom?

Singularity Loop?

We can only hope . . .

Explaining the Future

My good friend Malcolm Pollack, over at his own blog, Waka Waka Waka, liked a question I posed, in fact, liked it so much that he made it the topic for a blogpost. So . . . what am I talking about?

The issue began with a post by Malcolm, titled "What Next," on the coming "Singularity" - simply put, the very rapid convergence of various developments in science and technology to a point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. Malcolm suggested the need for wisdom to deal with this rapidly approaching future, to which I said:

Wisdom is insight gained through reflection on experience, and it worked well as a guide to dealing with a future that would be similar to the past, but the future we face threatens to be radically unlike the past, so what role remains to wisdom?

This is a point that's been knocking about in my head for the past few years now, so I'm grateful to see what others think on this, and here's a big thanks to Malcolm and his blog, where an incisive debate will surely take place on his next blogpost, titled, "Is Wisdom Obsolete" - so go there!

Armand Marie Leroi: Digitizing the Humanities into a Science?

Digitizing the Humanities
Illustration by Nishant Choksi

Armand Marie Leroi, professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College, London, inadvertently alarms us to the threat of scientism's frontal assault on the humanities in "One Republic of Learning: Digitizing the Humanities" (New York Times, February 13, 2015). Inadvertently? Yes, because he's describing scientism without realizing it, not even when he cites the term only to dismiss it:

In the Republic of Learning[,] humanities scholars often see themselves as second-class citizens. Their plaintive cries are not without cause. When universities trim budgets it is often their departments that take the hit. In the last 10 years, however, there has been one bright spot: the "digital humanities," a vast enterprise that aims to digitize our cultural heritage, put it online for all to see, and do so with . . . scholarly punctilio . . . . The digital humanities have captured the imaginations of funders and university administrators. They are being built by a new breed of scholar able to both investigate Cicero's use of the word "lascivium" and code in Python . . . . But the true promise of digitization is . . . . the transformation of the humanities into science[,] . . . mean[ing] using numbers to test hypotheses. Numbers are the signature of science; they allow us to describe patterns and relationships with a precision that words do not. The quantification of the humanities is driven by an inexorable logic: Digitization breeds numbers; numbers demand statistics. The new breed of digital humanists is mining and visualizing data with the facility that bioinformaticians analyze genomes and cosmologists classify galaxies. All of them could, if they cared to, understand each others' results perfectly well . . . . [The triumph of numbers is] easy to see . . . . A traditional, analog, scholar will make some claim about the origin, fate or significance of some word, image, trope or theme in some Great Work. He'll support it with apt quotations, and fillet the canon for more of the same. His evidence will be the sort that natural scientists call "anecdotal" - but that won't worry him since he's not doing science[, except that] . . . . then a code-capable graduate student will download the texts - not just the canon, but a thousand more - run the algorithms, produce the graphs, estimate the p values, and show the claim to be false, if false it indeed is. There will be no rejoinder; the analog scholar won't even know how to read the results. Quantification has triumphed in field after field of the natural and social sciences. It will here, too . . . . [even though h]ard words such as . . . "scientism . . . will be flung about . . . [because] the vocabulary of anti-science is rich, well-honed.

This scientistic triumphalism sounds 'too bad to be false'! But it isn't, because it isn't true, as Leroi himself admits, sort of:

If the rudiments of a new cultural science are visible, so are its limits. There is one great difference between human and natural things: The former have meaning; the latter do not. That is why the humanities are filled with critics and the natural sciences are not: Critics tell us what artifacts mean . . . . [But] deep-learning algorithms are becoming very good at extracting meaning from data; and, as art becomes data, it is always possible that new meanings may be revealed by algorithmic microscopes yet unbuilt. That said, it would take a very clever algorithm to flag up irony in Jane Austen. More fundamentally, the truth of art criticism is not the same kind as scientific truth.

This concession is deeply at odds with Leroi's earlier triumphalism and undermines the whole scientistic enterprise! Quantification and the mining and visualizing of data will have their uses, but the 'influence' of some text upon other texts cannot - at the most fundamental level - be measured, for the mere occurrence of some word or other says nothing about whether the 'influence' favors the later writer's acceptance or rejection of the earlier writer's view. Influence is thus intrinsically ambiguous! And that is precisely where the question of meaning gets raised.

Or so I interpret. What do others reading this post think?

Is Nothing Sacred?

Leonard Mlodinow and Stephen Hawking

Photo by Judith Croasdell

(Image from MSNBC)

Alan Boyle, writing for MSNBC, asks "Is the grand design within our grasp?" By which, he means to say, has the unified theory of everything been found? Do we finally have GUT, the Grand Unified Theory? The theory that puts even God in the place of unnecessary hypotheses?

Well, I don't know, so interested readers will just have to go to the link and see what they think, but I do have a question about something -- or rather, nothing -- that Boyle reports on in the claims of Lawrence Krauss, Leonard Mlodinow, and Stephen Hawking. Boyle especially cites Krauss:

What Krauss finds exciting is that there could be ways to verify that something can come from nothing -- which is the point behind Hawking's claim that God isn't necessary to explain the universe's creation.

Physicists have noted that the positive energy contained in particles and the negative energy represented by gravitational attraction appear to balance out precisely. "Empirically, we can actually have evidence that the universe came from nothing. One of the key things is that the total energy of the universe is zero, which is only possible if the universe came from nothing. It could have been otherwise. It could have been not zero," Krauss said.

The concept of a zero-energy universe and getting something from nothing may sound crazy, but this article from Mercury magazine and this video of one of Krauss' lectures, both titled "A Universe From Nothing," show that the ideas has (have) been percolating among scientists for years. Such ideas are central to "The Grand Design," as well as to the book that Krauss is currently in the midst of writing.

In an interview that Boyle offers at the bottom of the article, Mlodinow adds to what Krauss has said:

As far as God goes, we describe our theory of where the universe came from, and why the laws of nature are as they are. And we show that with this theory, there's no need for a God to create the universe or to create the laws of physics as they are. All of this can come purely from physics, from science, from nature.

Sounds like Pierre-Simon Laplace redux: "Sire, I have not need of that hypothesis," Laplace reportedly informed Napoleon, when the latter asked why God wasn't mentioned in his celestial mechanics.

Anyway, my postponed question is this: What do Hawking and the others mean here by "nothing"? It actually sounds like an unstable something that can fracture into an exact balance of "positive energy contained in particles and . . . negative energy represented by gravitational attraction." As such, this original 'nothing' would appear to have had some sort of ontological status, a 'nothing' that exists.

Is this the only concept of "nothing" that is possible? Wouldn't a more radical concept of nothing insist on absolute nothingness, which does not exist, rather than a 'nothing' that does exist? We're talking metaphysics, not physics, and I wonder if Hawking and his fellow physicists aren't perhaps equivocating on the term "nothing." One might as well claim that 'nothing' is sacred because it is 'Creator' of the universe!

I suspect that my cyber-friend, Bill Vallicella, would have some choice words on this 'scientific' issue. He's already had some thoughts about nothing . . .

Death as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans?

Rudolf Otto

Author of The Idea of the Holy

(Image from Kelley L. Ross)

Still working on my prepared responses to several scholar papers scheduled for this week's upcoming religious studies conference at Sogang University on Death, Dying, and Spirituality, I have written the following couple of paragraphs as part of my response to a paper about experiencing the numinous in the face of death (albeit reworked for this blog to leave the scholar unidentified):

The scholar offers the interesting perspective that the world's religions provide a panacea for our fear of death, by which he may mean to imply that this is their primary function, but we will have to see on this point. What strikes me about his point is that he argues that even Hinduism and Buddhism affirm continuation of the self after death through reincarnation or translation to a heavenly realm and that this affirmation of the continued existence of one's self is what helps these religions provide consolation to the average believer. Even more striking, because surprising, is his observation that even science, or perhaps 'Scientism', seeks to deny death and aims to overcome it by achieving physical immortality. Yet, he wonders if fear of death is common to humans in every epoch, and he cites the possibility that our early ancestors didn't fear death as we do today. If this is correct, he suggests, then the world's religions have developed alongside a rising sense of self-importance. This would suggest that as the individual has grown increasingly in importance, so people have grown to see themselves as individually important, and perhaps all-important, which is somewhat counter-intuitive since the great world religions claim to diminish the significance of the individual. At this point, I would note the remark by Dorothee Soëlle quoted in the paper, namely, "never are people so self-involved as when they fear death" (Soëlle, Mystery of Death, page 5), which suggests the ironic possibility that belief in immortality reduces self-involvement by removing the fear of death. Moreover, if Hinduism and Buddhism have proven attractive for many people for so long because -- despite what they may affirm about dissolution of the self as an ultimate aim -- they offer personal immortality in their popular forms and have long done so in cultures not noted for their individualism, then I wonder about the thesis that fear of death undergirds religion and that the great religions have developed along with a growing fear of death as the self grows in significance. There is at least some complexity to this issue, and perhaps even an ironic counter-argument, as I've suggested.

At any rate, the possibility that death might end not just our earthly life but even our entire being remains troubling to many of us, and the scholar cites Martin Heidegger's description of the sort of anxiety stirred up by the realisation of one's impending demise as unheimlich, or uncanny, which is understood in the sense offered by Rudolf Otto for the experience of our encounter with "The Holy," for Otto describes our encounter with the numinous in the sense of the sacred as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a mystery both terrifying and fascinating (Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy). In such a sense as this, death itself seems to take on the qualities of a fearsome deus absconditus who is not so much the ontological ground of our existence as an existential threat to our being. For most of us, however -- suggests the scholar -- perhaps as a sort of Freudian reaction formation (cf. Freud, Reader, page 295 et passim), rather than directly confronting our mortality, a belief arises in us that we shall become like the Wholly Other and live forever, the Wholly Other being a God who has not absconded but who offers a reliable promise guaranteeing the survival of our self.

Such is the current state of these remarks as I try to develop them. They sound a bit awkward to me now, partly because I've had to rework them to avoid quoting or mentioning the scholar whose paper I'm responding to, for the conference has yet to take place.

Perhaps I'll be reporting on this sort of topic over the next several days, for the conference begins tomorrow.

Bibliography:

Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. W.W. Norton and Company, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by John Harvey. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Soëlle, Dorothee. The Mystery of Death. Translated by Nancy Lukens-Rumscheidt and Martin Lukens-Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007 (Mystik des Todes: Ein Fragment. Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 2003).