O’Gieblyn is an evangelical Christian turned atheist, who writes essays on philosophy, religion, technology, and science. This book is part memoir of her conversion, written as intellectual odyssey, as well as digressive philosophical musings on the nature of the self, modernity, subjectivity, the history of religion, and general artificial intelligence.
O’Gieblyn begins with the state of modernity. “All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.” The possible rise of AGI has forced humanity to re-question what it is that exactly makes us human. The hard problem, as coined by philosopher David Chalmers, is to be able to objectively explain just what the nature of consciousness exactly is. “Today, as AI continues to blow past us in benchmark after benchmark of higher cognition, we quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals.”
The mind-body dualism espoused by Descartes strikes the modern mind as quaint. Perhaps, we are all materialists now? O’Gieblyn suggests, “Materialism is the only viable metaphysics in modernity.” Consciousness resides in the realm of the subjective. Modernity is objective, if it is anything, right? “Science put a bracket around consciousness because it was too difficult to study objectively, but this methodological avoidance eventually led to metaphysical denial, to the conclusion that because consciousness cannot be studied scientifically, it does not exist. Within the parameters of modern science, subjective experience has come to seem entirely unreal.”
Ray Kurzweil is, perhaps more than any other academic, responsible for popularizing the ideas of transhumanism and the Singularity. “Kurzweil calls himself a “patternist.” He believes consciousness is a pattern of information, a biological configuration of energy and matter that persists over time. It does not reside in the hardware of our brains—the cells and atoms and neurons, which are always changing—but in the computational patterns that make up our sensory systems, our attention system, and our memories, which together form the distinctive algorithm that we think of as our identity.” Norbert Wiener had already suggested, “We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”
Transhumanism is materialism all the way down, just with a software and hardware distinction. “A pattern, after all, is essentially computational, which means it can, at least in theory, be transferred onto a computer…. Most transhumanists insist that this understanding of personal identity is fully compatible with physicalism…. Its fundamental ideology is actually nudging us down to a lower ontological level.” Individuality, consciousness, thoughts, feelings, sensation: these all just become patterns in the data. “The promise of a coming Singularity served to justify a technological culture that privileges information over human beings.” This is what computer scientist Jaron Lanier decries as an “antihuman approach to computation [where] bits are presented as if they were alive, while humans are transient fragments.” There are more than faint echoes of religion. “What makes transhumanism so compelling is that it promises to restore through science the transcendent—and essentially religious—hopes that science itself obliterated.” Kurzweil, himself, claims, “The major religions emerged in pre-scientific times so the metaphors are pre-scientific. That the answers to existential questions are necessarily metaphoric is necessitated by the fact that we have to transcend mere matter and energy to find answers…. The difference between so-called atheists and people who believe in “God” is a matter of the choice of metaphor, and we could not get through our lives without having to choose metaphors for transcendent questions.”
O’Gieblyn states that, contrary to popular notions, many of these transhumanists are actually de-anthropomorphizing the world. They are attempting to remove the human subjectivity from objective reality. “Proponents of decentralized intelligence are less interested in projecting human qualities onto nonhuman objects than they are in reconfiguring human intelligence through the lens of these inanimate systems.” Philosopher Philip Goff cautions, “The fact that physical science has been extremely successful when it ignores the sensory qualities gives no reason to think that it will be similarly successful if and when it turns its attention to the sensory qualities themselves.” AGI researchers have chosen to pursue practical results over any understanding of theory. “It turns out that much of life can be “gamified,” reduced to a series of simple rules that enable these machines to build their own models of the world…. Many forms of machine learning are considered “black box” technologies. They are composed of many hidden layers of neural networks, and there’s no way to ascertain what kind of model they are building from their experience…. This metadata—this shell of human experience—becomes part of a feedback loop that then actively modifies real behavior.” O’Gieblyn compares the inscrutable certainty of these neural networks to the Calvinist theology of predestination— able to be taken only on faith alone. And taken only with a measure of doubt too, for the thoughtful, at least, perhaps. “The doctrine [of predestination] eradicated not only free will but any coherent sense of self. To concede that one’s mind is controlled by God is to become a machine. It is to grant that the heart is also a black box, full of hidden desires and shadowy motivations whose true causes remain hidden from the conscious mind.”
Perhaps the most intriguing part of O’Gieblyn’s book is her section on idealism, the belief that consciousness is all that exists. According to O’Gieblyn, philosopher Bernardo Kastrup contends that “the world is just one universal consciousness and that the physical world is the extrinsic appearance of this cosmic mind…. The universal mind—whether it goes by God, Brahman, or some other name—is a common feature of idealism…. All living, conscious creatures were the “disassociated alters” of the cosmic mind.” However, O’Gieblyn makes clear, Kastrup “doesn’t believe the cosmic mind is omniscient, omnipotent, or benevolent; most likely it is not even self-reflective, or self-aware…. Some physicists have suggested that the cosmos is one entangled system.” Anti-materialism is, therefore, not anti-science. “One can speak of the behavior of atoms, their properties, their relationships, regardless of whether one believes they are composed of matter or information or emanations of the cosmic mind.” Kastrup posits, “The meanings we think to discern in the world may not, after all, be mere personal projections, but actual properties of the world…. Each of us, as individuals, can now give ourselves permission to dedicate our lives to finding meaning in the world reassured by the knowledge that this meaning is really there.”
Historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests that when we reach the point where we, as humanity, allow blackbox algorithms to not only choose our movies and restaurants, but also our spouses and occupations, then we will have annihilated the modern project of individualism. “Harari argues that this would officially mark the end of liberal humanism, which depends on the assumption that an individual knows what is best for herself and can make rational decisions about her best interests.” But can we really remove the human perspective from our human reality? O’Gieblyn continues, “A vantage so far removed from human nature cannot account for human agency. The view of earth from the Archimedean point compels us to regard our inventions not as historical choices but as part of an inexorable evolutionary process that is entirely deterministic and teleological…. We ourselves inevitably become mere cogs in this machine, unable to account for our actions in any meaningful way, as the only valid language is the language of quantification, which machines understand far better than we do…. What we are abdicating, in the end, is our duty to create meaning from our empirical observations—to define for ourselves what constitutes justice, and morality, and quality of life—a task we forfeit each time we forget that meaning is an implicitly human category that cannot be reduced to quantification.”
O’Gieblyn concludes by pointing out that a culture built upon the reliance on digital technology and quantification is an ideology in itself. It has normative implications for the direction of humanity’s future. “The central pillar of this ideology is its conception of being, which might be described as an ontology of vacancy—a great emptying-out of qualities, content, and meaning. This ontology feeds into its epistemology, which holds that knowledge lies not in concepts themselves but in the relationships that constitute them, which can be discovered by artificial networks that lack any true knowledge of what they are uncovering.” This is the brave new world in which AGI suggests and humanity obeys, without question. Hannah Arendt had agreed that consciousness is truly humanity’s hard problem, “It is really as though we were in the hands of an evil spirit who mocks us and frustrates our thirst for knowledge, so that whenever we search for that which we are not, we encounter only the patterns of our own minds.”
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