I.Q……..How Do You Do?

1.                                       I. Q. …… How Do You Do?

                                                     by Marco M. Pardi

“Intellect is invisible to the person who hasn’t any.” Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays

Deep in the mist of my youth I decided the distinction between smart and intelligent.  Smart: Able to quickly grasp and use what is. Intelligent: Able to ponder what is and develop what could be.  Smart people are described as clever; intelligent people are described as thoughtful.  Smart is usually associated with brain, intellect with mind. I also noticed that smart people are generally admired and rewarded; intelligent people are viewed, like spiders that can dart in any direction, with grudging suspicion.  How many people turn away as they say to themselves, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

I have known many smart people.  But of these, I felt only a few were intelligent.  I also found that if I asked a smart person “Why did you do that” or “Why did you think that” I was more likely to get a conversation truncating answer or an “I don’t know, I just did.” The same questions asked of an intelligent person opened the thinking domain for almost unlimited perusal, even threatening a descent into frank reductio ad absurdum.

Some would wonder how this applies, if at all, to concepts of other than human animal intelligence.  Obviously, that is a large topic best presented on its own.  Suffice it to say anyone doubting such un-coached intelligence need only look – really look, at the play behavior of non-human animals, whether sea, land, or air. When we include in that behavior play with objects provided for them they more than satisfy my criterion of pondering what is and developing what could be.    

In recent years there is growing discussion of artificial intelligence and “the singularity”.  It is hard to say whether the general population is reacting to entertainment themes such as the Terminator series or whether the Terminator series, and its spin-offs arose from the growing awareness and fears in the population.  And, as so often happens when the general public gets a whiff of something, terms get misused.  The term specific to computer based intelligence is Technological Singularity; it refers to the development of “strong artificial intelligence” beyond humanity’s ability to comprehend its reasons for doing what it does or its calculations in doing so.  Ironically, it is only the most recent expression of an affliction which already characterizes most of humanity’s current relationship to science – the emergence of scientism as a belief system in science for those who value it but cannot understand it.

Apparently unseen in the anticipation, even fear of computer development of superintelligence, recursive self-improvement, is a fundamental flaw in reasoning: the failure to integrate new realizations pertaining to two centuries old paradoxes.  In 1967 the materialist writer Arthur Koestler published The Ghost in The Machine, a title penned by Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle, in which he confronted Cartesian dualism by asserting the purely material relationship of mind to brain and ushering in the popular love affair with Carl Sagan, equally a materialist.  Unfortunately, many people do not bother to read before forming their opinions, or their fears.

Thus, Koestler and his followers may have been unaware that the Newtonian clockwork universe had been overthrown as early as the 1920’s by the exponential growth in the understanding of quantum mechanics.  This same development opened new perspectives on Free Will versus Determinism.

Further, the explosive growth of demonstrable data documenting functional mind during prolonged periods of non-functioning brain, arising from almost countless volumes documenting veridical experiences during newly available medical procedures supports the position that mind is fundamentally independent of brain.  Turning off a radio only turns off the instrument delivering the broadcast, it does not turn off the broadcast. Turning off the brain does not turn off the mind.

The first use of “singularity” in the context of technological development is attributed to John von Neumann (nee Janos von Neumann – Budapest, then Johann von Neumann – Gottingen, then John von Neumann – Princeton) in 1958. As a “pure” mathematician, he was an ardent disciple of David Hilbert.  But Hilbert’s assertions, including mathematical decidability, had already been questioned in the 1920’s by Alan Turing, another pure mathematician.  Yet Turing’s motivation was in large part driven by his conviction that his prematurely deceased first love, Christopher Morcom, a mathematics student one year ahead of Alan, was somehow communicating with him from beyond the grave, inspiring his tunneling into the increasingly closed world of pure mathematics.  Seeking to reconcile this feeling with the universe as viewed at the time, Alan drew upon Arthur Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World and the writings of the neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher John M. E. McTaggart, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Much as Alan had labored on the development of a model of natural existence, an “automatic typewriter” in which human intervention would play no part,  he was drawn back into the question of mind – which he called spirit, existing independently of the machinery of brain, exercising will independent of “the configurations” of such machinery. In a private letter to Christopher’s mother he went so far as to assert that “We have a will which is able to determine the actions of the atoms probably in a small portion of the brain, or possibly all over it. The rest of the body acts so as to amplify this. There is now the question which must be answered as to how the action of the other atoms of the universe are regulated.  Probably by the same law and simply by the remote effects of spirit but since they have no amplifying apparatus they seem to be regulated by pure chance. The apparent non-predestination of physics is almost a combination of chances……Then, as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I consider that the body by reason of being  a living body can ‘attract’ and hold a ‘spirit’, whilst the body is alive and awake the two are firmly connected….when the body dies the ‘mechanism’ holding the spirit is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later perhaps immediately.” (Alan’s grammar was famously Byzantine)

In his 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, Turing proposed a test to determine if a human could accurately discern which of two remote respondents to questions was human and which was computer.  It was in his revision of his initial question that he named the test The Imitation Game, which became the title of a recent film about his cracking of the Nazi Enigma Code.  Though conceding that “thinking” is difficult to define, throughout this paper and his many defenses of it he argued against all assertions that machines can not think.  Unanswered in this exchange was his earlier paradox over the nature of “spirit” and its ability to alter the “configuration” of the brain – recursive self-improvement, a problem he tried to neatly address in the (unrealized) configuration of his automatic typewriter.

Because people commonly fail to pursue depth analysis of topics before reaching conclusions we have inherited tag lines such as “artificial intelligence” and all the sensationalist spin-offs that follow.  Even respected scientists got into the game; in 1997 Frank Tipler, a physicist and mathematician at Princeton published The Physics of Immortality, proposing that humans could be scanned into microchips and seeded throughout deep space. After working through his dense and imaginative math, I was gratified to see reviews concurring with my impression that he was only the latest to formulate Man as machine, totally reducible to binary code.

Equally, because there are still pre-20th Century thinkers who see mind as solely a function of brain (just as there are still some who deny Man’s role in climate change) we acquire fears of the construction of an electronic brain replete with a mind far beyond our comprehension.  But what of those people who have literally zero idea of what transpires between their automobile ignition key and their wheels?  Do they fear the CPU at the heart of this hurtling steel box will decide driving along pavement is unsatisfying and should be abandoned in favor of plunging through a guard rail to fly out over a scenic overlook?  Or, “But Officer, my car did not like the looks of that pedestrian!”

I will continue to resist getting a Smart Phone not because I fear competition but because I abhor wasteful duplication. But I am far less concerned about intelligent machines than I am about unintelligent politicians, people who can unleash “smart bombs” and enact utterly destructive social policies based on fantasies developed out of centuries of mistranslated texts taken out of their temporal and geographical contexts.

Just as some look to the night skies in hopes of seeing the arrival of superior intelligences to save us from ourselves, I have occasional thoughts that computer based superintelligence might not be all a bad thing.