[MD] The Singularity is near

[Ham Priday]

Greetings Joseph, also Ian, Gene --

> I recently came accross the writings of the Ray Kurzweil,
> who I realise can be a potential ally in softening
> academic/public opinion in favour of the MOQ.

I remember seeing a few of your posts when I joined this forum in 2004.
Having written a column for my Value page on Kurzweil a couple of weeks ago,
your mention of his name instantly caught my attention.

Kurzweil is a cybernetics technician and pattern recognition expert recently
turned philosopher, who has made a good living out of marketing the idea
that information = intelligence = cognizance, to borrow from Pirsigian
logic. (Actually, neither Pirsig nor Kurzweil defines consciousness and both
seem to believe that it has little significance.)

I don't know why you think Kurzweil's ideas can "soften" public opinion in
favor of the MoQ, unless you believe his pseudo-science is acceptable to the
logical positivists whom Pirsig strived to appease.  The "cognitive
scientists", in particular, have persuaded many objectivists that
intelligence is not limited to conscious awareness but exists as a "natural
principle" of the universe, in the same way that mathematics and the laws of
thermodynamics are thought to be intrinsic to "the real world".

Pirsig's Intellectual Level certainly supports this notion, although there
is much confusion as to how intellectual "information", in the cybernetic
sense, can be derived from Quality.  The so-called modernist view of Reality
is that everything has a "natural" (i.e., biological or inorganic) origin
and that consciousness is merely a complex pattern of evolutionary
development.  This nihilistic objectivism has profoundly shaped intellectual
thought in our technological age.  thithe postmodern age.  We now regard
computers and their miniaturized surrogates as "thinking machines" capable
of being programmed to exceed the capacity of human brains.

Kurweil himself realized the resistance of his public to this notion, but it
hasn't discouraged him from trying to link computer technology to human
brain functions.  In 2001, he said: "If you run into a character in a video
game and it talks about its feelings, you know it's just a machine
simulation; you're not convinced that it's a real person there.  This is
because that entity, which is a software entity, is still a million times
simpler than the human brain.  In 2030, that won't be the case."

The author's peculiar use of the statistical term Singularity in reference
to the acceleration of technological complexity doesn't make his case that
we are about to ring in "an epoch of such rapid and profound technological
change that we will see the merging of biological and nonbiological
intelligence."  The idea is based on McFadden's theory that "the brain
generates an electromagnetic (em) field that influences brain function," and
that this field "...is in fact the physical substrate of consciousness."
Like many cognitive scientists, Kurzweil believes it's all a matter of
"complexity", and his repetition of the idea that "technological change is
exponential", as compared to human development, can be seen as deceptive to
anyone who understands that relating machine intelligence to human
cognizance is an apples-and-pears comparison.

If, as many of his followers believe, the metaphysics hidden in Pirsig's MoQ
is that Intelligence is a collective stratum of DQ which individuals tap
into at a certain stage of their evolutionary development, I for one will be
very disappointed.  As you probably know, I have a particular beef with any
philosopher or movement seeking to objectify proprietary cognizance.  The
very core of my philosophy is based on the "differentiality" of human
awareness, including value sensibility.

Here is how I concluded my "rebuttal" to a recent essay Kurzweil ran in the
Philadelphia Inquirer to promote his new book:

"Kurzweil and his supporters may not be dissuaded by the fact that Science
is incapable of resolving the difference between objective behavior and
subjective awareness.  But we are-or, at least, should be.  The truth is
that, no matter how fast the pace of change is accelerating, Artificial
Intelligence is not what it is stacked up to be.  It is not human
cognizance.  And it is not a brain-expander.  It is only a technological
tool of electro-mechanical engineering.  For those of us who have resisted
the nihilism of the probability theorists, man is not now, nor will he ever
be, the creator of cognizant intelligence."

Anyway, despite what I regard as misplaced enthusiasm, I'm glad to see you
back on the MD.

Regards,
Ham