Attempts to create genuinely human-like intelligence and its associated characteristics; consciousness, free will, and abstract thinking; have been rooted in fundamentally materialist assumptions from the very beginning.
Researchers take for granted that the material world; the physical matter and energy of the universe and the physical forces that act upon them; is all there is to reality. Their work relies on the idea that matter is essentially all there is to mind.
And, truly, matter does have its effect on the human mind. Humans are physico-chemical beings. Like the rest of creation around us, we are made of particular arrangements of atoms and molecules. The human brain: which plays an essential role in the human mind; is clearly a physical object, made up of a vast network of neurons engaging in intricate chemical and electrical transmissions. Neuroscientists have many tools that allow them to measure how different activities and feelings excite different regions of the brain. Studies show that damage to the brain can dramatically alter one’s personality, and researchers have found that applying a magnetic field to a portion of the brain can even affect the moral choices a person makes.
Unquestionably, our physical brains play a vital role in making
us who we are.
MIND OVER MATTER
There is abundant
evidence that our minds are also more than
our brains; that something outside the
physical, chemical confines of the human brain also contributes powerfully to
the human mind.
In this regard,
neurosurgeon Egnor frequently points to the work of two famed individuals in
his field of brain science: Roger Sperry and Wilder Penfield.
Roger Sperry won the
Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his famous split-brain research with
human subjects whose corpus callosum
had been severed; the connection between the right and left halves
of their brains had been completely removed. The subjects seemed to function
just fine, even with one half of the brain completely unable to communicate
with the other. But Sperry’s tests teased out intriguing details; such as
finding instances when subjects could not describe an object seen by just one
eye, as the brain’s language center was located in the hemisphere lacking
access to the image that eye saw.
But he also found that
his subjects’ normal powers of reasoning and abstract thought were intact.
Surgery had limited the information to which they had access: the right eye,
for instance, could only pass information to the left hemisphere; but the
ability to reason, make conjectures, and think conceptually was not diminished
in the slightest, even
though their brains were literally severed into two distinct parts, each unable
to communicate with the other.
To fully account for
his research results, Sperry concluded, one must consider the realm of ideas and consciousness not simply as a
byproduct of the brain’s chemicals and molecules, but rather as vital elements
that act on those chemicals and molecules. “Mental forces in this particular
scheme are put in the driver’s seat, as it were,” Sperry concluded. “They give
the orders and they push and haul around the physiology and physicochemical
processes as much as or more than the latter control them. This is a scheme
that puts mind back in its old post, over matter, in a sense; not under,
outside, or beside it” ("Mind, Brain, and
Humanist Thinking," The
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, September 1966).
Simply reducing the human mind to the physical components of the brain, in Sperry’s formulation, fails to account for the complex activity of human thought, consciousness, and will.
While not denying that humans
possess a physical brain like that of the animals, Sperry concluded that his
view of the mind “does deny, however, that the higher human properties in the
mind and nature of man are the same as, or are reducible to, the components
from which they are fashioned.”
Another suggestion
that “mind” transcends the physical brain is found in neurosurgeon Wilder
Penfield’s advances in the field of brain surgery to control epilepsy. Penfield
found that, when performing brain surgery on conscious patients, he could
prompt them to experience particular phenomena by stimulating different parts
of the brain. Patients would experience sights, odors, and other physical
sensations: even emotions: prompted by nothing more than his electrical
stimulation of parts of the brain.
Yet he noticed that
one outcome never resulted
from his work: No poking or prodding of the brain ever produced an abstract thought in
a patient. It never produced a movement in the patient’s intellect or
conceptual thinking. While physical sensations could be teased physically out
of his patients’ brains, abstract thoughts and concepts could not. In fact, as
patients could communicate with him and reason about the illusory sensations he
was prompting, he understood that their human intellect, reasoning, and will
stood in some way apart from the work he was doing on the
physical brain.
Although Penfield
began his career as a materialist; believing that there was no more to the
human mind than the collection of material that makes up the brain; his 30-year
career in neurosurgery forced him to reconsider that position and conclude the
opposite: that something exists outside the brain, completing the human mind
and contributing to its higher faculties.
THE MISSING
INGREDIENT
The idea that Sperry and Penfield developed through their research; that the human mind is not completely reducible to the physical components of the brain and possesses some additional element; is actually reflected in the inspired pages of your Bible. There, we are told that “there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty gives him understanding” (Job 32:8).
Indeed, it is the spirit in man that gives him knowledge and
comprehension: “For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the
man which is in him?” (1 Corinthians 2:11).
This is not an
immortal soul; it is an essential God-given element of the mortal human mind,
making men and women who and what they are.
The spirit in man and the remarkable human brain combine to produce the phenomenon we know as the human mind.
Just as a player sitting at a piano produces music, the human spirit and human brain work together to make thoughts, plans, and consciousness possible. Separate the player and piano, and the music stops. Similarly, separate the human spirit from the human brain, and thoughts cease.
Indeed, the
book of Psalms describes the human condition at death: “His spirit departs, and
he returns to the earth. In that very day, his thoughts perish” (Psalm 146:4, World English Bible).
Consider the
difference between a “player piano”; a piano with a rotating drum that can
reproduce preprogrammed instructions to play its keys; and a seasoned musician
sitting down at a finely tuned instrument to perform a masterpiece. There
may be a superficial similarity at first, but when the preprogrammed notes run
out, the similarity ends. So, too, have all human attempts at creating AGI
fallen short of the wondrous reality of the human mind.
We may; in fact, we
almost certainly will come closer and closer to creating convincing imitations
of the real thing. But the dream of truly and fully reproducing the wonder of
the human mind through the realm of silicon and copper wire will likely remain
just that: a dream.
LIMITED AI AND
LIMITLESS HUMANITY
The human brain will
continue to create fascinating approximations of itself as scientists develop
ever-more-complex software that can interact with flesh-and-blood human beings.
It will surely create broader and broader implementations of what today are
narrow problem-solving artificial intelligences.
The more we advance in imitating ourselves through AGI, the more we will discover about the complex nuances of our own human image.
The more we learn in our attempts to “reproduce” our humanity, the more we learn about ourselves; including the amazing discovery that we are far more than an assembly of chemicals produced by repeatable physical processes.
We are in fact much more than the sum of our physical parts. We are truly something astonishing.
Indeed, how apt are these words attributed to Wilder Penfield: “How little we know of the nature and spirit of man and God. We stand now before this inner frontier of ignorance. If we could pass it, we might well discover the meaning of life and understand man’s destiny.”
Indeed, God reveals what mankind is unable to
discover; not only that there is a spirit in man, but also that mankind has a
wonderful destiny ordained by its Creator.
That destiny will not
ultimately be found in man’s struggle to create technology in his own image,
but in his rediscovering that he himself is made in the image of a creator God
- Yehovah. With one foot planted in the physical realm and one in the
spiritual, we bear the fingerprints of our Divine Designer in a way that should
fill us with wonder and cause us to reflect: For what purpose
has He made us so? And importantly: how have we
aligned our lives in harmony with that purpose?
Our
efforts to create something in our own image should impress upon us the
humbling significance of the fact that we are made in His.
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