trans intelligence magazine # 5/6, 2000

                                                                            by Daniel Perez (USA)

Once an understanding of the computer is established, it is possible to overcome its limitations. We discover that the subconscious rules current society’s conceptual life, a subconscious based on concepts derived from the atomic world view and the dogma of natural selection. Our evolution as human beings depends on changing this rigid misconception and recognizing the higher nature of thinking, matter and the human organization. We can then resurrect an understanding of our spiritual nature.

Increasing numbers of books and articles are appearing with titles such as The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. With no scientific basis for such a claim, these publications contend that computation is equivalent to human thinking. People believe these “experts” as they describe future developments, relying on their expertise in mathematics and physics. It is all a crafted illusion that falls apart with rigorous scientific approaches. The so-called “experts” do not consider the very thinking process they use to understand the computation at work in machines, with the result that mechanical operations are confused with thinking.

Computer software is created out of an attempt to emulate logical thinking, to emulate our own thinking. Nothing of our own thinking is ever present, no matter how complex the computer, but a reflection of that thinking is. It is completely dead and immobile, as anyone knows who tries to simply “boot up” a computer. This will never change, no matter how sophisticated the paths of logic. Once a path is set down it is rigid, just as a corpse is rigid in moments after death. This is why there is the term “bit-rot.” “Bits” are what programs consist of, with alternating ones and zeros. Programs become obsolete rapidly with time, because there is no adaptation or self-consciousness; the “bits” rot. They cease to work because of other changes to a system, new requirements, hardware changes, or data information changes. This is equivalent to a corpse where there is no regeneration, reconstruction, or impetus for new life.

In contrast, the human mind is flexible and creative. Ideas and concepts are perceived, not locked in place or recorded for all time. Faced with a situation or problem, the mind looks for answers by connecting with concepts and laws present in our inner life and in the world. The computer, on the other hand, has no store of concepts from which to draw. If we write a program we create a fixed way for a machine to carry out a task from concepts which still only exist in ourselves. To be more precise, the concepts are only flexible and dynamic in us. The computer is now filled with fixed ways to carry out an activity, the program being the means through which the logic is carried out. It is filled with a distillation of what the individual programmer believes comprises the entire spectrum of the concept.

Just as a tree consists of many forms through its cycle of growth and decay, a concept lives in many forms. But this is not true in the computer. There is never a new way to look at a problem. A concept implemented in the computer may be flawed, in which case we spend the day on the technical support hotline to the software provider. We have, in fact, to return to the human being through which this task was conceptualized. When any new event occurs which was not previously anticipated by the programmer and thought through by the programmer, the fixed computer program cannot handle the new event, and human intervention is required. We are dependent not only on our machine, but upon the individual who brought concepts to the machine. The machine stands between the two individuals: the creator of the program and the user of the program. And nowhere is the computer bringing a new thought or idea or direction.

In the example of chess, the limitations of chess itself as a vehicle for measuring a higher form of thinking must be considered. In short, we are measuring cognition with a ruler that is not sufficient for the task. There is some limit to the number of possible game strategies that can be played out on the chessboard. It’s simply a matter of probabilities. Even if there are billions of combinations, this limit is finite. In the future, there will be a computer that can never be beaten. It will probably always win, and at minimum it will tie each game. This is because the entire spectrum of possible moves will be computed to the end of the game, and there is always a set of moves by which a deadlock occurs. However, the limit of the human brain to hold such a computational approach is actually an asset in this regard. Rather than getting stuck in an analytical, probabilistic method, we are free to be creative. In news articles about Kasparov, I read words such as “Beautiful” or “Elegant” with regard to his form of playing. The computer, on the other hand, is constantly drawn back to numerical analysis. This is not thinking. It is not artificial intelligence. It is computation, and the results are not what anyone could defend as brilliant or the work of a genius. Chess has limitations which do not make a clear distinction between brilliance and computation.

Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, recognized this fact in his book and proposed that we adopt this computation as the definition of thinking: “But if the human approach to chess—neural network-based pattern recognition used to identify situations from a library of previously analyzed situations—is to be regarded as true thinking, then why not program machines to work the same way?” The answer is that while human thinking can be applied to mechanical problems, it is not defined by such problems. It is therefore correct to call what the human being does “thinking” while the computer is “computing.” No matter how complex the data processing of the computer, the nature of the process is not the same as thinking, and these differences are significant.

A much more challenging problem for the computer scientists is to emulate the simple tasks a baby can already perform soon after birth, such as seeing. Computer vision is a problem I have worked on with other scientists in the field, and it makes chess look simple! The difficulty is that vision requires dynamic use of concepts. The programs get astronomically complex because all of the situations that we as humans solve through thinking must be solved statically and numerically in the computer. Take recognizing another person as an example. The computer can be programmed to contain the face of the individual. It can computationally match its stored image with accumulated images. But let’s say the face of the individual grows old with age. All of a sudden the computer can no longer match the new image of the face to its stored image. The program must change, but there is a lack of ability for change to occur in the computer. Programming changes must always be made. Either every possible event is programmed at once, or the program is constantly modified. These increasing difficulties with the computer are exposed with the simplest tasks a human can perform, not by the game of chess.

In the future, even the problem of “recognition” will be solved for the aging, changing human face. This is then a mechanical process built into the machine by a human being that anticipated the mechanical changes in the images. The point is that lack of adaptive handling of future unanticipated events exposes a fundamental difference between computation and thought.

Genetic algorithms are presumed to solve the problem of adaptive handling of new events by allowing “constructive” programming mutations to occur in the computer. However, any truly random event in the computer is termed a crash. It simply does not result in a positive event. If an algorithm allows for events to create new paths of logic, those events are still always limited by the original programmer’s intentions. The whole notion of mutation is taken from evolution theory. No individual has ever witnessed a constructive mutation, one that causes a real change in a system for the better, without an organizing force behind the metamorphosis.

The argument will be made that neural networks, named after the human brain’s neural network form, have proven this process works. What works is the accumulation of data into a model or process that never leaves its original boundaries and definition. It is not a fundamental leap in approach or design.

Attempts have also been made to make the computer less rigid in its logic forms and therefore independent of the human being. Fuzzy logic has been developed, where a set of possible outcomes is weighted by a number of factors. Similarly, probability and statistics have been applied to the logical process, with outcomes based on a certain set of random variables. This is the basis of neural networks. Neural net programming attempts to emulate the brain’s own function by computational means. Naturally, the outcome of these developments have nothing to do with human thinking. Random events do not comprise thinking. Ordered events do. In the same way, it doesn’t make sense to picture human evolution as a set of random events which miraculously led from a bath of chemicals to the human being. It is no wonder that modern science does not see the limits of the computer. They are restricted by their worldview and cannot see what the substance of thinking is.

When an apple fell on Newton’s head he had a new thought. He perceived a law at work in the movement of the apple from the tree to the earth. With this perception and new idea, he defined the equation for the movement of a solid body when acted upon by the gravitational force. This is thinking, an act a computer can never carry out. The objection may be made that a computer could be programmed to look for relationships in objects and derive a mathematical “law” just as a person can. However, this is not fully thought through. The computer can only be programmed to emulate events after they have taken place. If the next great law to be found in nature is cold fusion, for example, no computer can be programmed to find this law before a person has done so. The computer has nowhere to be directed before a person figures out the problem first. The basis of the modern scientific view is that some random events or computations will bring the computer to a law of nature; i.e., the act of thinking is purely computational. This is a hard line to argue, because this view is built upon numerous small events making up the whole. The traditional scientist’s consciousness is so overwhelmed with these numerous small events that “anything” can happen in their view, including the creation of civilization from mud. If you argue some point, they simply add more time and more events and more computation in never-ending confusion. For these scientists, thinking occurs as a natural law like gravity, but it can’t be seen or measured. It just happens. In essence, they are admitting defeat. They can know nothing for certain, because more time and events will always change the rules. They believe, similar to a “faith”-based religion, in something they themselves cannot grasp.

When Nietzche carried this form of thinking further to its inevitable conclusions, he came to define a natural limit to the creative process. There can be no new events in the world or higher conceptual order to a thought if thinking is mechanical. In fact, one comes to realize that all events in the world must be fixed within the spectrum of all possible combinations of matter. Even though the number of combinations is greater than we can conceive, the laws governing thinking are bound by probability and therefore recurrent. Steiner makes this observation of Nietzche’s ideas: “What happens at any moment must have occurred in exactly the same way innumerable times in the past and will recur innumerable times in the future. Thus at the present moment the atomic structure of the universe reveals a specific combination of the smallest entities; this will be followed immediately by another combination, and this in turn by yet another; when all possible combinations are exhausted, the first must recur. According to this picture, a human life in all its details must have existed innumerable times in the past and will return with all the same details innumerable times.” This, in essence, defines a computer program. The world becomes a machine that is programmed and repeats ad infinitum. Nietzsche demonstrated the difference between higher thinking and mechanical thinking.

Modern scientists have made the mistake of comparing the mechanical to organizational forces. Now they cannot deny there is some higher force or conceptual organization at work because of the failure of the computer in areas of artificial intelligence. They have simply ignored the question of the origin of thought. The computer scientist and biologist David Marr stated in his book Vision, “Thinking is brought about by neurons and we should not use phrases like ‘unit activity reflects, reveals, or monitors thought processes,’ because the activities of neurons, quite simply, are thought processes.” We see a process occurring before us that is only the effect of thinking, its symptom. This the materialist, in this case Marr, must label “thinking” because there is nothing else to be seen in our physical existence. He goes further to specifically deny higher forces acting through the neurons, “there is nothing else looking at what the cells are doing - they are the ultimate correlates of perception.” He simultaneously realizes there is a higher structure at work, to which he even assigns a three-tiered level of structure. Within a few paragraphs of the previous quote he writes, “The levels idea is crucial, and perception cannot be understood without it - never by thinking just about synaptic vesicles or about neurons and axons, just as flight cannot be understood by studying only feathers.” He talks about concepts being required to organize thoughts and that it is impossible to explain perception without this higher organization, and at the same time no concepts are to be found in neurons. This leaves schizophrenia or a spiritual aspect to thinking.

Modern mathematics has striven in recent years to account for higher formative forces at work in the world. This has now been applied to cognition as well, and a worldview has emerged based on randomness. Chaos theory, fractals and wavelets are all gropings at a higher formative force whose existence canít be denied but whose manifestation can only be found reflected in the physical world. Douglas Hofstadter wrote the definitive computer science book in the 1980s, Godel, Escher, Bach. He searched within mathematics for a way to introduce to the computer a method based on controlled randomness. With a materialistic interpretation, he turned to Zen Buddhism to find a way to break the rigidity of computer logic. He saw koans (the short proverbs of Zen) as a method to harness the power of random events while keeping them within the confines of a structured approach. Using the language of mathematics to capture what he experienced in Zen Buddhism, Hofstadter created elaborate systems to allow the revealing of thinking as if it were a natural law.

I see his results falling short of demonstrating cognition in the computer or emulating the brain. I picture this hypothesis with an analogy of a nuclear reactor. The core of a reactor consists of a process of random reactions within matter. The cooling rods of a reactor are inserted into the core to bring equilibrium to the reactions, to control them. If there were no cooling rods, the reactions would run out of control and cause a meltdown. The randomness must be curtailed or guided in some fashion. Likewise, Hofstadter searches for a guiding method of control over random (believed creative) events so they are constructive rather than destructive. A so-called formal system becomes this guide or the control rods in our analogy. However, the analogy goes much deeper, because controlling randomness affords greater or lesser random activity, not direction, intention, or intelligence. Ultimately, consciousness is removed when the human spirit is removed. What remains is the ability to mechanize data seaches at different levels of abstraction. Again, the levels and searches are confined by the program rules.

If I conjecture: “If the sky were red instead of blue, would such a fictitious world have a red ocean?” I bring relevance, direction and purpose to the question. In contrast, if a computer computes every possible color for the sky, goes down numerous iterative paths and computes every possible result in the world caused by this change, what would it do with this new data? At every stage of computation there is a lack of consciousness directing the assembly of the data. With my question I may be searching for a new conceptual understanding of the universe. The blue sky may reveal a property of the organization of man, and man would have to be organized differently if the sky were red. The computer has no motive, purpose, or will. Most importantly, it has no access to new concepts. It would produce numerical garbage as its result, as current results in artificial intelligence research have confirmed.

Hofstadter has a true appreciation for the beauty of higher consciousness, even if the fact that its non-physical source eludes him. He demonstrates this understanding with a critique of his own efforts to write a computer program to write prose,

As an example, here is a poem created by Ray Kurzweil’s program, after passing it the text of poems by Patricia Camerena Rose and Sue Klapes Kelly. This is the best poem I could find, and holds together better than most through random piecemeal phrases. Even in this case, no meaning exists in the phrases. The original poetry used types of phrases that could be copied, but the computer poem is lacking any unity or purpose:

A parrot can “talk” but its words are devoid of meaning. Similarly, computer prose will continue to be as tiresome and pointless.

Hofstadter also uses the idea of infinite incremental events to describe all of physical matter, and ends his book with a description of how computers can have self-reflection, even intuition and will! There is not a new idea here, but a culmination of what Nietzche first experienced. In the age of the computer we have lost the ability to think about thinking and are now repeating what has already been thought. This is because “innumerable repetitions” are now almost achievable in the computer, and the atomic worldview is guiding our thinking. Hofstadter looks at the world as being built of numerous small effects, like the atom being the basis of the physical macro-world. He sees reasoning to likewise be built of small increments of reasoning where a major result can be the outcome of these small steps. What he fails to see is that each small step is not understood; he takes the small steps in the naive realist’s sense of being self-evident.

“This strong experience left me with an image: a glimmering sense that real thought was composed of much longer, much more complicated trains of symbols in the brain—many trains moving simultaneously down many parallel and criss-crossing tracks, their cars being pushed and pulled, attached and detached, switched from track to track by a myriad neural shunting-engines." This is like the infinite recurring combinations that Nietzsche proposed, the result of chaos as the source of creativity, and demonstrates the atomic theory’s influence on thinking. The question must be asked, “what or who is doing the switching and directing in this description?”

Hofstadter goes further and constructs a fictitious computer where many algorithms run in parallel and claims there is a form of self reflection which occurs as one algorithm analyzes the results of the previous one. If some input is given to this fictitious computer, it is operated upon by a “self” algorithm that monitors all other processes and passes the input to all levels of computation. According to Hofstadter, levels of rigid rules are to give birth to a flight of self-reflection, and ultimately free will. “The self-symbol is incapable of monitoring all its internal processes, and so when the actual decision emerges— ëLí or ëRí or something outside the system—the system will not be able to say where it came from. Unlike a standard chess program, which does not monitor itself and consequently has no ideas about where its moves come from, this program does monitor itself and does have ideas about its ideas, but it cannot monitor its own processes in complete detail, and therefore has a sort of intuitive sense of its workings without full understanding. From this balance between self-knowledge and self-ignorance comes the feeling of free will.”

Hofstadter himself has no idea where these new impulses, “something outside the system,” come from. The machine doesn’t have a “feeling of free will,” only the author does. He projects his own inner experience into the world of matter. This is like saying the paint brushes used to paint the Cistine Chapel had a creative spark. The point is there is only computation here, if the “self” symbol were to be observed at a moment in time it would be involved in a computation. Where is the actual consciousness located? Computations produce numerical results, not hopes and dreams. The viewpoint is further elucidated when Hofstadter describes a human being at work writing a paper, “Think for instance, of a writer who is trying to convey certain ideas, which to him are contained in mental images. He isn’t quite sure how those images fit together in his mind, and he experiments around, expressing things first one way and then another, and finally settles on some version. But does he know where it all came from?” From the statement I surmise that subconsciously Hofstadter realizes there must be a source for ideas which is not physical, which is not part of a physical brain or a machine. He relies on something (thinking) whose origin he admits he does not know, in order to write his book. Then with confidence he declares the absence of an origin to thinking! This is not a scientific method. It is a fundamental identity crisis. Just like the “emptiness” of the pq-system, the atomic worldview destroys self-reliance, self-knowledge and ultimately, identity.

Ray Kurzweil takes Hofstadter’s ideas and looks to predict a future where computers can recreate every human experience. He similarly fails to address the origin of thinking. Instead, he defines intelligence by his own presuppositions regarding the outer phenomena he understands. From his pedestrian view he comes to the following conclusion, “Regardless of the nature and derivation of a mental experience, spiritual or otherwise, once we have access to the computational process that give rise to it, we have the opportunity to understand its neurological correlates. With the understanding of our mental processes will come the opportunity to capture our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual experiences, to call them up at will, and to enhance them.”

When I wrote this paper I knew definitively the source of my ideas. They may be disputed but they are grounded in reality, and a guided, conscious experimentation that is not a random groping. This approach to analyzing my own thinking is consistent with the basis of modern science. The mental images were as real as my arm or leg. I, as individual, decided how they should be brought together. If I were a “self-symbol” in a machine I should experience the machine and the groping just as Hofstadter describes. I do not experience this synthesis of information, but instead a reality of thoughts that do not originate in matter. It may be argued “how I can know the origin of my thoughts?”, but by using deductive reasoning as a modern scientist I can base results on evidence. The evidence points away from synthetic algorithms to concrete experience. Hofstadter offers no counter evidence; the topic is not even realized. Therefore, we find that with nowhere to look beyond the physical, people will continue to attempt to imbue computers with the gift of thought.

Ray Kurzweil has experiences with meditation and now looks for the computer to enhance those experiences through biofeedback. He then jumps to the conclusion that because computer-assisted biofeedback helps him meditate, the computer must be able to meditate! This is how the modern age anthropomorphizes the computer. The “scientists” do not see their own self. They exist in the sentient world and jump from sentient experience to sentient experience, jumping right over the thinking itself!

I must give credit to Roger Penrose, the award-winning physicist, for his exploration of this topic in Shadows of the Mind. He points to the fact that he cannot know the nature of thinking, but what he can know is that computation cannot explain human thinking. This is based on Godel’s famous argument about formal systems. “Godel’s argument does not argue in favor of there being inaccessible mathematical truths. What it does argue for, on the other hand, is that human insight lies beyond formal argument and beyond computable procedures. Moreover, it argues powerfully for the very existence of the Platonic mathematical world. Mathematical truth is not determined arbitrarily by the rules of some “man-made” formal system, but has an absolute nature, and lies beyond any such system of specifiable rules.” Eventually, the materialistic scientist will come to face these realities to a greater degree and stop the ignorant anthropomorphizing Ray Kurzweil insists on. Penrose almost touches on a higher understanding of thinking at the end of his book. “Every one of our conscious brains is woven from subtle physical ingredients that somehow enable us to take advantage of the profound organization of our mathematically underpinned universe--so that we, in turn, are capable of some kind of direct access, through that Platonic quality of “understanding”, to the very ways in which our universe behaves at many different levels.” Like Marr, he gains a glimmer through his rigorous thinking taking him into the very nature of human thought and its profound significance.

The chess tournament with Kasparov was a tournament between a man and a team of men. Men who worked behind the scenes constantly changed the program, experts who brought their minds and new ideas to the computer that acted as a conduit, a tool. The origin of new ideas always points back to human involvement. If this computer program were left in a fixed state and Kasparov were given time to think through its programming, he most definitely would have beaten it or at least tied it. However, the match was rigged to his disadvantage and targeted to use his own techniques against him. Fixed techniques these were, but altered by the people behind the scenes.

We return to the thinking of the individual programmer being fixed and locked into the computer, as it was with this chess program, and the user of the computer being bound to the limits of this fixed form. Oddly enough, the beauty of the computer is that that part of us which is repetitive and non-creative is made conscious by the virtue of the fact that a computer can even carry out the activity. Moreover, the computer likewise can free us of activities that hold us back from our full potential. It is important to note how Kasparov’s style changed when he played the computer. He was relegated to playing its game, replete with quantitative tradeoffs and strict accounting. Gone were the variations and counter moves that occur when one mind meets another. It was so clear when the computer won the final game. In the final game it was a beginner’s level of exchange that did Kasporov in. He simply could not play a higher level game with the computer, and ultimately could not succeed at this lower level. The computer formed the individual’s thinking, rather than assisting true thinking to blossom.

Kasparov’s personality is not without fault in this. The program was targeted to beat him using all the knowledge that has ever been accumulated about his style of play and approach. It could be said that Kasporov met his “double” (as Steiner describes that portion of ourselves which is of a hardened or lower nature). Kasparov’s double was a distillation of all the fixed forms of thought he had ever used in his life as a chess expert. If he held the perfect human mind, it would always be flexible enough to change so dramatically as to be able to meet the computer with a whole new approach. This is a goal to which no man on earth can claim victory, but it doesn’t mean the potential is not there, or that the underlying genius is not the basis for all our human thinking. Our challenge is to evolve beyond the computer.

I have met many people who are very confident in their materialistic worldview. The computer has helped them solidify their stance by making information-processing central to the advancement of a modern society. From their perspective our goal as evolving animals is to maximize the absorption of facts. The Internet has accelerated this process by allowing tremendous access to information. It is structured in much the same way as the brain is believed to work, by cross-communication. Pieces of information are linked by subject, and an individual can move from one page of information to another based on these associations. This new process is a positive one, but without the proper viewpoint it can be destructive. We do think by association, and having access to information about the world organized in an accessible form is wonderful; but the fact that the information is in a lifeless and rigid form must be reckoned with. One finds the adrenaline rushing by having the power to wade through centuries of ccumulated information at the touch of a button. To what degree we make this information our own and reinvigorate it with purpose is a matter of personal development.

This computer chess match brings to light how unconscious we are in relationship to these machines. We don’t realize how the forces imbued into the technology work back upon us, how the relationship between creator and machine is not uni-directional. The matter of which these machines are made is clearly dead, but by what laws do the conceptions and ideas and mechanisms live? When we as human beings fall asleep at night, we leave our physical body on the earth and our consciousness is taken up by a new dimension, a dimension based on a spiritual inter-connectedness. Our bodies remain and are filled with spiritual forces that maintain them during our lapse of earthly consciousness. What forces are at work after we have filled our computers with our dead logic and have relegated tasks that in previous history were considered sacred to this logic? With the computer, we have made a home for dynamic processes that are ruled by our programming skill and our ability to solve fixed functions in the material. However, it is also clear that part of our destiny becomes bound up with these programs and mechanisms. We in fact make a space or a void in the body of the physical device. The concepts that lived dynamically in a balance between the soul and spiritual world are removed from this dynamic and descend into the material. With this descent, a part of our own will lives on.

The spiritual in those individuals who are not conscious is drawn away from them, sucked out of them by the orphaned concepts that now live in the material. Concepts and ideas are beings, beings with which we long to reconnect. Before birth and in our sleep we live in communion with these beings. Now we search for these beings in a prison of logic. People can be fooled into seeing no difference between these dead concepts and the enlightened concepts at their source.

They can then be dragged into the material and live by laws that are non-human, even anti-human.

Steiner describes the descent of man in the Apocalypse of St. John: “Instead of finding in matter just the opportunity to develop the ego and then rise up again, man would only descend deeper and deeper into matter.”