Dualism: Syria and A.I.

(This essay, one of my first–but not the last–of my efforts to consider dualism and oneness as part of our spirituality as well as part of what it means to be fully human, was first written in March, 2016)

My visits to Time magazine are hit and miss; my wife and I go back and forth on the question of whether or not to renew our subscription and further infest our already magazine and paper-cluttered household.

So it must have been serendipity when I picked up the March 7, 2016 issue and was struck by two back to back articles. The first, on the collapse of the Syrian state, described the utter chaos and hopelessness of the war in Syria. Millions are dead, homeless, or trapped and there is little hope that a cease-fire will work, at least not until the Russians first help Assad re-conquer as much devastated land as he can. Not only, the article suggests, is there no “light at the end of the tunnel,” but the tunnel itself seems to be collapsing on its victims, while the world lets it all happen.

The next article, “Encounter with the Archgenius,”  by David Von Drehle, is a discussion of Artificial Intelligence with David Gelernter, a sixty-year old pioneer in the study of A.I. His book, The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of A.I. argues that most in the field of A.I. are dangerously off track because they ignore or refuse to answer the question: “Does it matter that your brain is part of your body?” or “What is the human mind without the human being?”

A.I. enthusiasts, Gelernter laments, talk of downloading all the functions of the brain to computers and making our brains “infinitely upgradable.”  This ignores our emotions and the physical body which are inextricably linked to our brains.  “The question is obvious, Gelernter says; “I can run an app on any device, but can I run someone else’s mind on your brain?

Obviously not.”

For Gelernter (the name means “learner” in German), the problem is more serious than the Cartesian mind-body dualism familiar to Western philosophy. A.I. scientists are simply ignoring the body as irrelevant. They study human intelligence as if it were fully understandable in mathematical terms. What about the forms of intelligence “that produced Bach and Shakespeare, Jane Austin, and Gandhi?”

In addition, Gelernter complains that engineers cannot build human bodies, bodies that change and grow and that have brains that change as the body grows—from a baby’s mind to that of an elderly person. “Feelings are involved: a lifetime of pain and elation go into the formation of the human mind, loves, losses and longings.”

A.I. may give us super intelligent machines or “zombies,” but not human beings.  Computers do not and cannot have “genuine human feelings,” warns Gelernter. They cannot ”know the fear and exaltation of riding a roller coaster, much less the racing heart and flip-floppy stomach. . .the depressed exhaustion of grief. . . .or perhaps most important, the . . . .existential dread or weird magnetism of death.”

The author of the article tells us that Gelernter is not the “only dissenter from A.I. orthodoxy“ that wants to merge the human and the machine and escape death. Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk worry with him, but they are outnumbered by the brain-as-processor proponents.

These articles pair up in an interesting way. The first article on Syria shows human evil and human behavior at their worst, while the A.I. article implies that we might be able to avoid such evil by simply removing all emotions from humans—creating a world of Mr. Spocks “on steroids.” These two extremes are equally destructive, even as they inhabit different ends of the emotional spectrum.

The wars in Syria and the attempt to create artificial intelligence by programming the brain like a computer while ignoring the rest of what makes us human are both examples of a dualistic view of reality that clashes (intellectually and emotionally) with the notion that everything is ultimately One and that we as humans—in some way, to some extent, and on some level—can become a part of that Oneness.

As a person trying to grow spiritually, I accept this idea of Oneness, at least cognitively, as an abstract truth. Therefore, I wonder if perhaps I should be more attracted to the promise of salvation offered by the A.I. leaders like Ray Kurzweil, Engineering Director at Google. Kurzweil says that the technology being developed by A.I. pioneers will help us find cures for diseases and clean up the environment. What’s not to like about that?

Artificial Intelligence research promise us a brain that works faster and analyzes problems more thoroughly—but not necessarily with greater wisdom, if we understand wisdom as David Gelernter does, as something found in that elusive, non-quantifiable thing called our soul. That wisdom, found in literature, art, music and in human relationships—all enmeshed in our emotions—cannot be artificially created.

Artificial Intelligence can give us technical solutions to environmental problems, help us make solar or wind power cheaper and more efficient. But how would the A.I. folks deal with Syria? Can they ease or end the struggles among multiple ethnic and religious groups in Syria? Some might say yes. Super-rational humans without emotions would see no reason to kill each other, one supposes.  Wars, after all, are clearly irrational.

But would such beings even be human?   While it would certainly be wonderful to see an end to the “mine-yours,” “either-or,” “friend-enemy” dualisms that have beset humanity since Cain killed Abel, do we want to see this happen at the expense of ending the human species as we know it?

Maybe not.

But then, if we reject A.I. as an appropriate way to deal with human evil, how can we address the many examples of mass murder, whether in Syria, Rwanda, or during the Holocaust in Nazi-dominated Europe?

These articles highlight different equally appalling forms of dualism. Both deny that humans can achieve a unity within ourselves and a wholeness and integrity in our relationships with other—a wholeness that has always been the goal of mystics and spiritual seekers throughout history.

So we are back to the question of Oneness.

Is there (or will there ever be) a way for us to accept dualism as part of the human condition, and yet at the same time transform it?  Is there a way to move from “either-or” to “both-and?”  The practical mystic Franciscan priest Richard Rohr says there is but his answer applies to individuals.  He tells me to accept the evil within myself but then to move beyond it by forgiving myself and focusing on my true self, the God within, the divinity which is a consequence of—a condition of—being “made in the image of God.”

It is hard to see how I could do that were I living in Syria today, but I can at least imagine myself being loving, even in that tormented environment. I cannot imagine myself behaving in a self-accepting way and loving others in the emotionally thin air of the hyper-rational world imagined and promised by the A.I. thinkers.

Franciscan “practical mystic” Richard Rohr writes that non-dual or non-polar thinking “teaches you how to hold creative tensions, how to live with paradox and contradictions, how not to run from mystery and . . .how to practice what all religions teach as necessary: compassion, mercy, living kindness, patience, forgiveness, and humility.” [Yes, And…Daily Meditations (Franciscan Media, 2013), 405.]

We live in a strong world in which we kill each other with a stone age brutality enhanced by a level of technology that helps us make that killing more efficient. Yet we have also reached a point where that same technology can explore and even mimic the behavior of our last frontier, the human brain.

  May God help us live with that “paradox and contradiction.”

And maybe we should continue that Time subscription for another year.