Reductive materialists are still trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Dangerous Skating: Kauffman, Jaeger, and Roli on the Need for a New Teleology

Paul Nelson 

Here is a fascinating article: “How Organisms Come to Know the World: Fundamental Limits on Artificial General Intelligence,” by Andrea Roli, Johannes Jaeger, and Stuart A. Kauffman, writing in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Notice how closely the authors skate to a robust teleology:

                  Our insights put rather stringent limitations on what traditional mechanistic science and engineering can understand and achieve when it comes to agency and evolutionary innovation. This affects the study of any kind of agential system — in computer science, biology, and the social sciences — including higher-level systems that contain agents, such as ecosystems or the economy. In these areas of investigation, any purely formal approach will remain forever incomplete. This has important repercussions for the philosophy of science: the basic problem is that, with respect to coming to know the world, once we have carved it into a finite set of categories, we can no longer see beyond those categories. The grounding of meaning in real objects is outside any predefined formal ontology. The evolution of scientific knowledge itself is entailed by no law. It cannot be formalized…What would such a meta-mechanistic science look like? This is not entirely clear yet. Its methods and concepts are only now being elaborated…But one thing seems certain: it will be a science that takes agency seriously. It will allow the kind of teleological behavior that is rooted in the self-referential closure of organization in living systems.

                           All three authors insist on their naturalistic bona fides. That’s understandable. Openly breaking with naturalism can get one dispatched to the gulag of intelligent design. For most scholars, that is a one-way trip to academic Siberia.

So, to use a musical metaphor, I simply enjoy this trio’s lyrical melody, and ignore the “Just naturalism!” squawks when they occur.

                    

For sale: immortal evil?

 Pre-Order Immortality Now! (It’s Only 8 Years Away, Apparently)

 Evolution News 

Ray Kurzweil, former Google engineer, thinks that humanity is a mere “eight years away” from achieving immortality. No, he’s not a spiritual leader predicting the eschaton. He’s not telling you to seek union with God and achieve immortality the old-fashioned way. He thinks we’ll be able to live forever via age-reversing “nanobots.” These “tiny robots” will correct damaged cells and make us immune to disease, thus leading to radically increased human longevity. Stacy Liberatore writes at the Daily Mail, 

          Now the former Google engineer believes technology is set to become so powerful it will help humans live forever, in what is known as the singularity. 

Singularity is a theoretical point when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and changes the path of our evolution, LifeBoat reports. Kurzweil, an author who describes himself as a futurist, predicted that technological singularity would happen by 2045, with AI passing a valid Turing test in 2029. It is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. He said that machines are already making us more intelligent and connecting them to our neocortex will help people think more smartly. Contrary to the fears of some, he believes that implanting computers in our brains will improve us. ‘We’re going to get more neocortex, we’re going to be funnier, we’re going to be better at music. We’re going to be sexier’, he said. ‘We’re really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree.’

STACY LIBERATORE, HUMANS WILL ACHIEVE IMMORTALITY IN EIGHT YEARS, SAYS FORMER GOOGLE ENGINEER | DAILY MAIL ONLINE

                                            Efforts to increase biological longevity (if not total immortality) are funded at places like Altos Labs, which both Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos are involved in. Peter Biles covered Altos Labs and similar operatives in this piece here, and considered the following questions: Who could afford the technology? Are the futurists delusional in thinking we can actually achieve immortality?

On a more philosophical note, greater length of physical life doesn’t solve the more fundamental, existential questions of meaning and purpose that we all have as human beings. Would living forever in a utopian technological society really be as great as the transhumanists insist? 

PS.What technology's evangelists never seem to take into account is that given the tragedy of the human condition technological advancements are just as likely to empower criminality and tyranny as beneficence . For example if the proponents of the technological singularity are to be taken seriously, soon we would not merely have to worry about criminal syndicates hacking our machines but hacking us.