Life is ever from life?

 What Is the Essence of Life? 

Eric Hedin

One often answers this question by characterizing living organisms with attributes such as reproduction, metabolism, interacting with their environment, or even the processing of information. Insights into the complex biomolecular machinery within living cells that allow them to perform these functions have exploded exponentially in recent years. Despite these advances, the truth about the essence of life continues to elude any approach that ignores metaphysical aspects manifest in even the simplest biological forms.

The signs of a paradigm shift towards a teleological view of life have emerged even within the mainstream academy. As Mind Matters News explains:

It turns out that evolution is much more teleological than has been historically supposed. Not only has the prior evidence for the non-teleology of evolution mainly been overturned, but new research has increasingly focused on the teleological and teleonomic causes that underlie much of what shapes the direction of evolution.

“Goal-directed” behavior is unsupported within pure naturalism, but it would be expected if living things were designed by an intelligent agent. The behavior of living creatures appears to transcend a mechanistic version of teleology and exhibits qualities that are consistent with the essence of life as an imparted quality quite untraceable to physical origin.

Cells as “Sentient Beings”

Recently, microbiological research has come to entertain the notion that individual cells, in cooperation with other cells, possess a form of consciousness.

An earlier paper by Shapiro claims that “cells are sentient beings.”1

Contemporary research in many laboratories on cell–cell signaling, symbiosis and pathogenesis show that bacteria utilise sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication and even have the ability to commandeer the basic cell biology of ‘higher’ plants and animals to meet their own needs. This remarkable series of observations requires us to revise basic ideas about biological information processing and recognise that even the smallest cells are sentient beings.

Shapiro further describes this growing recognition of cellular cognition as a Kuhnian paradigm shift to view life as “informatics.”

My own view is that we are witnessing a major paradigm shift in the life sciences in the sense that Kuhn (1962) described that process. Matter, the focus of classical molecular biology, is giving way to information as the essential feature used to understand how living systems work. Informatics rather than mechanics is now the key to explaining cell biology and cell activities.

Astrophysicist Adam Frank also describes life in terms of information usage:2

But there’s another and perhaps more all-encompassing way of understanding life that puts information front and center. In this view, what makes life special — what makes it different from all the other physical systems — is its ability to use information.

Recognizing Cellular Intelligence 

Tufts University biologist Michael Levin identifies attributes of living cells that are foreign to a purely naturalistic way of thinking about life. He cites features such as goal-oriented cooperation, behaving cleverly, “problem-solving competencies,” and acting as “competent agents with preferences, with goals, with various abilities to pursue those goals, and other types of problem-solving capacities.”

Levin excuses researchers’ earlier failure to recognize cellular intelligence, saying “we really are very bad at recognizing intelligence in unconventional embodiments where our basic expectations strain against this idea that there could be intelligence in something extremely small or extremely large.” It’s an interesting irony that this blind spot applies to Levin himself, who along with many others, “really are very bad at recognizing” the signatures of intelligent design found pervasively throughout the biological realm.

The Source of Intelligence

If intelligence manifests even at the single-cell level, it becomes scientifically relevant to inquire as to its source. Some observers recognize intelligence as having a metaphysical origin. According to a recent ERG working group email:

[T]here appears to be a hierarchical organizational metaphysical masterpiece that unfolds as you pull back the curtains on cellular life.

Are we seeing that awareness and the rudiments of intelligence are an inherent accompaniment to life itself? James Barham comments on Shapiro’s statements about cellular intelligence with a discussion of various views of vitalism.

Historically, the term has most often been associated with the idea that a supernatural ‘life force’ impinges on living matter from the outside.

Barham offers the opinion that this historical view of vitalism would in principle debar scientific investigation of “the nature of the difference between the living state of matter and inorganic matter.” However, knowing, for example, that an advanced microelectronic device was made by intelligent designers from another place need not, even in principle, undercut scientific investigation of the device to see how it works. Likewise, we can learn the processes of biochemical engineering by studying cells, believing that they were intentionally designed, with arguably greater success than by studying them under the misguided presupposition of materialism.

Barham states that vitalism can also “refer to the claim that living things have properties and causal powers arising from within that are more than the sum of the properties and powers of the inanimate parts of which they are composed.” Such a position subscribes to an “emergentist” view of living systems that defies the traditional reductionistic approach to science.

My Reasons for Suspicion

As a physicist, I am suspicious of any claim of new and extraordinary properties of matter that are inconsistent with established and experimentally verified workings of the forces of nature. To claim that sophisticated “emergent properties” arise from collections of fundamental particles in specific complex arrangements, beyond what could be predicted by the laws of physics, is unwarranted and has no more scientific credibility than an appeal to magic.

What is scientifically credible is to claim that complex, functional arrangements of matter can result from the action of intelligent designers (my laptop is a case in point). The complexity of the simplest living organism far exceeds that of the most advanced human-engineered device. Above, life was described by its ability to use information. One of the traditionally recognized attributes of living things, that explicitly relies upon the creation, storage, retrieval, and usage of information, is their ability to reproduce (in theory, given the right conditions, forever). The origin of self-replication cannot be explained naturally and to describe it as an emergent property of matter violates mathematical analysis and known laws of nature. 

Not All Things Are Possible Naturally!

However, to ascribe self-replication in living things to an intelligent designer is a conclusion consistent with our well-established understanding of nature’s abilities and limitations. If the origin of the physical process of self-replication exceeds the limits of nature, claiming that cellular intelligence arises naturally is clearly not a scientific conclusion. 

It is well within the purview of scientific investigation for a scientist to draw a conclusion of “natural” or “unnatural.” For example, when astronomers observe a star near the center of our galaxy moving on an elliptical path with no visible object to cause such an orbit, they don’t conclude that some new law of motion has emerged, superseding Newton’s first law of motion. They conclude instead, consistent with established laws of physics, that since this star isn’t moving in a straight line, an external force must be acting on it, such as the gravity of a supermassive blackhole. Further applications of known laws of physics allow astronomers to accurately calculate the mass of this black hole3, even without being able to see it visibly.

A Dry Well

Naturalism is a dry well when it comes to explaining any of the attributes of cellular cognizance. Rather than recognizing such unphysical attributes as consistent with a view of God as the author of life, naturalism seems to be dredging up debris from pantheism and extending it to universal consciousness. Denyse O’Leary comments on the appeal and shortcomings of this view:

Panpsychism recognizes the reality of consciousness in the world of life. That is its strength. That is why it is slowly making inroads against materialism (physicalism, eliminationism, etc.). However, it avoids grappling with the reality of an Intelligence that is not and cannot be a part of nature. That is its weakness.

The strength of the intelligent design explanation for life lies in its full-orbed ability to address all aspects of life — its origin, complex biochemistry, information focus, consciousness, and ultimate purpose. Alternative views, when examined within the limits of nature, can only explain the “return to dust” of living organisms that have ceased to live, but they fail to explain the essence of life.

The caterpillar has eaten darwinism's lunch?

 

The inspiration and creativity of actual intelligence vs. Running of algorithmic programs by artificial intelligence.

 Artificial General Intelligence: The Oracle Problem

William A Dembski

In computer science, oracles are external sources of information made available to otherwise self-contained algorithmic processes. Oracles are in effect “black boxes” that can produce a solution for any instance of a given problem, and then supply that solution to a computer program or algorithm. For example, an oracle that could provide tomorrow’s price for a given stock could be used in an algorithm that today — with phenomenal returns — executes buy-and-sell orders for that stock. Of course, no such oracle actually exists (or if it does, it is a closely guarded secret). 

The point of oracles in computer science is not whether they exist but whether they can help us study aspects of algorithms. Alan Turing proposed the idea of an oracle that supplies information external to an algorithm in his 1938 doctoral dissertation. Some oracles, like tomorrow’s stock predictor, cannot be represented algorithmically. Others can, but the problems they solve may be so computationally intensive that no real-world computer could solve them. The concept of an oracle is important in computer science for understanding the limits of computation.

“Sing, Goddess, of the Anger of Achilles”

Turing’s choice of the word “oracle” was not accidental. Historically, oracles have denoted sources of information where the sender of the information is divine and the receiver is human. The Oracle of Delphi stands out in this regard, but there’s much in antiquity that could legitimately count as oracular. Consider, for instance, the opening of Homer’s Iliad: “Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus.” The goddess here is one of the muses, presumably Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. In the ancient world, the value of artistic expression derived from its divine inspiration. Of course, prophecy in the Bible also falls under this conception of the oracular, as does real-time divine guidance of the believer’s life (as described in Proverbs 3:5–6 and John 16:13). 

Many of us are convinced that we have received information from oracles that can’t be explained in terms of everyday communication among people or everyday operations of the mind. We use many words to describe this oracular flow of information: inspiration, intuition, creative insight, dreams, reverie, collective unconscious, etc. Sometimes the language used is blatantly oracular. Einstein, for instance, told his biographer Banesh Hoffmann, “Ideas come from God.” Because Einstein did not believe in a personal God (Einstein would sometimes say he believed in the God of Spinoza), Hoffmann interpreted Einstein’s remark metaphorically to mean, “You cannot command the idea to come. It will come when it’s good and ready.” 

The Greatest Mathematician of His Age

Now granted, computational reductionists will dismiss such oracular talk as misleading nonsense. Really, all the information is there in some form already in the computational systems that make up our minds, and even though we are not aware of how the information is being processed, it is being processed nonetheless in purely computational and mechanistic ways. Clearly, this is what computational reductionists are bound to say. But the testimony of people in which they describe themselves as receiving information from an oracular realm needs to be taken seriously, especially if we are talking about people of the caliber of Einstein. Consider, for instance, how Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) described the process by which he made one of his outstanding mathematical discoveries. Poincaré was the greatest mathematician of his age (in 1905 he was awarded the Bolyai Prize ahead of David Hilbert). Here is how he described his discovery:

For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was then very ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which come from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours. Then I wanted to represent these functions by the quotient of two series; this idea was perfectly conscious and deliberate, the analogy with elliptic functions guided me. I asked myself what properties these series must have if they existed, and I succeeded without difficulty in forming the series I have called theta-Fuchsian.

Just at this time I left Caen, where I was then living, to go on a geologic excursion under the auspices of the school of mines. The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience’ sake I verified the result at my leisure.

Again, the computational reductionist would contend that Poincaré’s mind was in fact merely operating as a computer. Accordingly, the crucial computations needed to resolve his theorems were going on in the background and then just happened to percolate into consciousness once the computations were complete. But the actual experience and self-understanding of thinkers like Einstein and Poincaré, in accounting for their bursts of creativity, is very different from what we expect of computation, which is to run a computer program until it yields an answer. Humanists reject such a view of human creativity. Joseph Campbell, in The Power of Myth, offered this rejoinder to computational reductionism: “Technology is not going to save us. Our computers, our tools, our machines are not enough. We have to rely on our intuition, our true being.” Of course, artists of all stripes have from ages past to the present invoked muses of one form or another as inspiring their work. 

A Clash of Worldviews?

Does this controversy over the role of oracles in human cognition therefore merely describe a clash of worldviews between a humanism that refuses to reduce our humanity to machines and a computational reductionism that embraces such a reduction? Is this controversy just a difference in viewpoints based on a difference in first principles? In fact, oracles pose a significant theoretical and evidential challenge to computational reductionism that goes well beyond a mere collision of worldviews. Computational reductionism faces a deep conceptual problem independent of any worldview controversy.

Computational reductionism faces an oracle problem. The problem may be described thus: Our most advanced artificial intelligence systems, which I’m writing about in this series about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), require input of external information to keep them from collapsing in on themselves. This problem applies especially to large language models (LLMs) and their most advanced current incarnation, ChatGPT-4. I’m not talking here about the role of human agency in creating LLMs, which no one disputes. I’m not even talking here about all the humanly generated data that these neural networks ingest or all the subsequent training of these systems by humans. What I’m talking about here is that once all this work is done, these systems cannot simply be set loose and thrive on their own. They need continual propping up from our human intelligence. For LLMs, we are the oracles that make and continue to make them work. 

The Death Knell for AGI

The need for ongoing human intervention in these systems may seem counterintuitive. It is also the death knell for AGI. Because if AGI is to succeed, it must surpass human intelligence, which means it must be able to leave us behind in the dust, learning and growing on its own, thriving and basking in its own marvelous capabilities. Like Aristotle’s unmoved mover God, who does not think about humanity or anything other than himself because it is in the nature of God only to think about the highest thing, and the highest thing of all is God. Thus, the Aristotelian God spends all his time contemplating only himself. A full-fledged AGI would do likewise, not deigning to occupy itself with lesser matters. (As an aside, AGI believers might take comfort in an AGI being so self-absorbed that it would not bother to destroy humanity. But to the degree that flesh-and-blood humans are a threat, or even merely an annoyance, to an AGI, it may be motivated to kill us all so as not to be distracted from contemplating itself!)

Unlike the Aristotelian God, LLMs do not thrive without human oracles continually feeding them novel information. There are sound mathematical reasons for this. The neural networks that are the basis for LLMs reside in finite dimensional vector subspaces. Everything in these spaces can therefore be expressed as a linear combination of finitely many basis vectors. In fact, they are simplexes and the linear combinations are convex, implying convergence to a center of mass, a point of mediocrity. When neural networks output anything, they are thus outputting what’s inherent in these predetermined subspaces. In consequence, they can’t output anything fundamentally new. Worse yet, as they populate their memory with their own productions and thereafter try to learn by teaching themselves, they essentially engage in an act of self-cannibalism. In the end, these systems go bankrupt because intelligence by its nature requires novel insights and creativity, which is to say, an oracle. 

Research backs up this claim that LLMs run aground in the absence of oracular intervention, and specifically external information added by humans. This becomes clear from the abstract of a recent article titled “The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget“:

GPT-2, GPT-3(.5) and GPT-4 demonstrated astonishing performance across a variety of language tasks… What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as Model Collapse and show that it can occur in Variational Autoencoders, Gaussian Mixture Models and LLMs. We build theoretical intuition behind the phenomenon and portray its ubiquity amongst all learned generative models. We demonstrate that it has to be taken seriously if we are to sustain the benefits of training from large-scale data scraped from the web. Indeed, the value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of content generated by LLMs in data crawled from the Internet.

Think of It This Way

LLMs like ChatGPT are limited by a fixed finite number of dimensions, but the creativity needed to make these artificial intelligence models thrive requires added dimensions. Creativity is always orthogonal to the status quo, and orthogonality, by being at right angles with the status quo, always adds new dimensions. Oracles add such creativity. Without oracles, artificial intelligence systems become solipsistic, turning in on themselves, rehashing only what is in them already, and eventually going bankrupt because they cannot supply the daily bread needed to sustain them. AGI’s oracle problem is therefore real and damning. 

But if AGI faces an oracle problem, don’t humans likewise face an oracle problem? Suppose AGIs require human oracles to thrive. Yet if oracles are so important for creativity, don’t humans need access to oracles as well? But how, asks the computational reductionist, does the external information needed for human intelligence to thrive get to us and into us? A purely mechanistic world is a solipsistic world with all its information internal and self-generated. On mechanistic principles, there’s no way for humans to have access to such oracles.

But why think that the world is mechanistic? Organisms, as we’ve seen, give no signs of being mechanisms. And physics allows for an informationally porous universe. Quantum indeterminacy, for instance, cannot rule out the input of information from transcendent sources. The simplest metaphor for understanding what’s at stake is the radio. If we listen to a symphony broadcast on the radio, we don’t think that the radio is generating the music we hear. Instead, the radio is a conduit for the music from another source. Humans are such conduits. And machines need to be such conduits (for ongoing human intelligent input) if they are to have any real value to us. 

On getting solar energy right.

 

The plot thickens?

 

Man : Son of the God.

 

Magaret Gatty vs. Charles Darwin.

 

Darwinism is devolving?

 Darwinists Devolve

John G West

One sign of a robust scientific theory is the quality of its most prominent proponents. 

During its long history, Darwinian theory has had no shortage of gifted champions, starting with Charles Darwin himself. 

Whatever else he was, Darwin was a masterful scientific communicator who collected and interpreted a vast array of observations from the natural world. One can’t read his writings without being duly impressed. Darwin’s civil and measured tone was calculated to persuade. Darwin was especially impressive in taking objections to his theory seriously and seeking to answer them. 

Throughout the decades, Darwinism has had many other able scientific advocates. In our own lifetimes, there were Harvard biologists such as Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould. 

And, of course, Oxford University boasted evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. A convincing popularizer and polemicist, Dawkins at least started out as a serious scientist who raised some of the right questions.

The Rise of Intelligent Design

But as the intelligent design movement gathered momentum in the 1990s, something interesting started to happen. 

On the one hand, intelligent design scientists and philosophers started publishing a stream of increasingly sophisticated books and research critiquing modern Darwinism or arguing more generally for the detectability of purpose in nature. Think about books such as Darwin’s Black Box, The Design Inference, No Free Lunch, Icons of Evolution, What Darwin Didn’t Know, Nature’s Destiny, The Privileged Planet, Debating Design, The Edge of Evolution, Signature in the Cell, and Darwin’s Doubt. Or think about the research by Douglas Axe and Ann Gauger challenging the evolvability of new functions in proteins through Darwinian means.

On the other hand, as the case against Darwin was growing, the proponents of Darwinism seemed to be shrinking in stature. 

Consider Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, author of the anti-ID polemic Finding Darwin’s God in 1999. Miller was a gifted debater, but his arguments all too often relied on citation bluffing and critiquing straw-man versions of the ideas of Michael Behe and others. 

Francis Collins, in his book The Language of God, was even shallower in his critique. Indeed, if you read Collins’s book today, you’ll find that many of his arguments, including junk DNA, have been increasingly thrown overboard by mainstream science.

So who was left to champion the old time religion of Darwinism? 

Passing the Baton — Down

Well, you had evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago, a loudmouth atheist. At least he was at a prestigious academic institution, and he could muster an argument if he had to. 

You also had biologist P. Z. Myers at the University of Minnesota Morris. He too could debate, although the quality of what you got was decidedly second rate. His preferred mode of discourse was invective. As he once instructed his fellow evolutionists, they should “screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots” — by which he meant, of course, anyone who dared to criticize Darwin’s theory.

In short, serious defenders of Darwinism were getting scarcer. 

The trend continued as more and more thoughtful intellectuals gave up their Darwinian faith. For example, in 2005 Nobel laureate physicist Robert Laughlin at Stanford University observed: “Evolution by natural selection… has lately come to function more as an anti-theory, called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong” (Laughlin, A Different Universe, 168).

In 2012, atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a book with Oxford University Press, the subtitle of which declared: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Yale computer scientist David Gelernter wrote a piece in 2019 titled “Giving Up Darwin.”

In Search of a Theory

Meanwhile, on the Darwinian side, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific organizations, the Royal Society in England, convened an international conference of scientists in 2016 in search of some new theory of evolution, because of the growing understanding that traditional Darwinism didn’t adequately explain the most important advances in the history of life.

The remaining public champions of old-line Darwinism kept dwindling and devolving. Post-COVID, they seem to have become a truly endangered species.

So who is the most prominent public advocate of Darwin in America today?

Probably Dave Farina, aka “Professor Dave.” 

Except Professor Dave isn’t actually a professor, and he doesn’t even have a PhD in a science or any other discipline. He makes his money off of YouTube videos. And many of his arguments consist of copious four-letter words, and I’m not speaking of the words “atom,” “gene,” or “cell.” Farina’s method is to attack anyone who disagrees with him as evil or an idiot — or both. More recently, Professor Dave has revealed himself to be a vile anti-Semite to boot.

Now people as nasty as non-Professor Dave can be rather depressing to deal with. But think about what it means that the most prominent defender of Darwin left is someone as small-minded and unserious as non-Professor Dave. What does it say when the most prominent defender in American society today is someone like THAT?

And what does it say when the prominent defenders of ID include people like Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, Casey Luskin, Winston Ewert, Michael Behe, Marcos Eberlin, Guillermo Gonzalez, Ann Gauger, Emily Reeves, Brian Miller, Jonathan McLatchie, Douglas Axe, and many others? 

I think it says the future does not belong to Darwinian materialism. 

So take heart! As we approach another birthday of Charles Darwin on February 12, Darwinists may be devolving, but intelligent design proponents are progressing.

On the name Jesus: the Watchtower Society's commentary

 Jesus,

Wol.JW.org

(Jeʹsus) [Lat. form of the Gr. I·e·sousʹ, which corresponds to the Heb. Ye·shuʹaʽ or Yehoh·shuʹaʽ and means “Jehovah Is Salvation”].

Jewish historian Josephus of the first century C.E. mentions some 12 persons, other than those in the Bible record, bearing that name. It also appears in the Apocryphal writings of the last centuries of the B.C.E. period. It therefore appears that it was not an uncommon name during that period.

1. The name I·e·sousʹ appears in the Greek text of Acts 7:45 and Hebrews 4:8 and applies to Joshua, the leader of Israel following Moses’ death.​—See JOSHUA No. 1.

2. An ancestor of Jesus Christ, evidently in his mother’s line. (Lu 3:29) Some ancient manuscripts here read “Jose(s).”​—See GENEALOGY OF JESUS CHRIST.

3. Jesus Christ.​—See JESUS CHRIST.

4. A Christian, evidently Jewish, and fellow worker of Paul. He was also called Justus.​—Col 4:11.

Ps. Note please there are many Jesuses, their are many Christs, but there is but one JEHOVAH, the only name in ALL of scripture EVER Referred to as Holy.

On distinguishing between God's personal name and His official titles: the Watchtower society's commentary..

 Wol.Jw.org

In its articles on JEHOVAH, The Imperial Bible-Dictionary nicely illustrates the difference between ʼElo·himʹ (God) and JEHOVAH. Of the name JEHOVAH, it says: “It is everywhere a proper name, denoting the personal God and him only; whereas Elohim partakes more of the character of a common noun, denoting usually, indeed, but not necessarily nor uniformly, the Supreme. . . . The Hebrew may say the Elohim, the true God, in opposition to all false gods; but he never says the JEHOVAH, for JEHOVAH is the name of the true God only. He says again and again my God . . . ; but never my JEHOVAH, for when he says my God, he means JEHOVAH. He speaks of the God of Israel, but never of the JEHOVAH of Israel, for there is no other JEHOVAH. He speaks of the living God, but never of the living JEHOVAH, for he cannot conceive of JEHOVAH as other than living.”​—Edited by P. Fairbairn, London, 1874, Vol. I, p. 856.

The same is true of the Greek term for God, The·osʹ. It was applied alike to the true God and to such pagan gods as Zeus and Hermes (Roman Jupiter and Mercury). (Compare Ac 14:11-15.) Presenting the true situation are Paul’s words at 1 Corinthians 8:4-6: “For even though there are those who are called ‘gods,’ whether in heaven or on earth, just as there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords,’ there is actually to us one God the Father, out of whom all things are, and we for him.” The belief in numerous gods, which makes essential that the true God be distinguished from such, has continued even into this 21st century.

Paul’s reference to “God the Father” does not mean that the true God’s name is “Father,” for the designation “father” applies as well to every human male parent and describes men in other relationships. (Ro 4:11, 16; 1Co 4:15) The Messiah is given the title “Eternal Father.” (Isa 9:6) Jesus called Satan the “father” of certain murderous opposers. (Joh 8:44) The term was also applied to gods of the nations, the Greek god Zeus being represented as the great father god in Homeric poetry. That “God the Father” has a name, one that is distinct from his Son’s name, is shown in numerous texts. (Mt 28:19; Re 3:12; 14:1) Paul knew the personal name of God, JEHOVAH, as found in the creation account in Genesis, from which Paul quoted in his writings. That name, JEHOVAH, distinguishes “God the Father” (compare Isa 64:8), thereby blocking any attempt at merging or blending his identity and person with that of any other to whom the title “god” or “father” may be applied.

The war of the titans rolls on.

 

On the future of AI

 

Mark's gospel teaches that Jesus is the most high God? : Pros and Cons.

 

A molecular biologist's journey to the dark side

 

Australia's ancient kingdom of the terrible lizard.

 

Resurrection of a dead body or a dead soul

 

Many are looking forward to the hope of a resurrection from the dead.The Abrahamic religions Judaism,Christianity and Islam all mention a resurrection from the dead at the end of the age.The confusion here though lies in the fact that most of the religious authorities in this bracket also teach that there is an immortal soul that survives the death of the body,so it begs the question if the soul(the real man) is immortal how can there be a resurrection.To counter this obvious difficulty the claim is made that the bible is speaking of a resurrection of the body not of the soul(the person),now my question is if the body is merely clothing for the soul how can we speak of its dying,for it was never truly alive,it was merely animated by the person,in the same way that our clothing is moved by our bodies as we work,play etc.,thus never having lived it cannot die and never having died it cannot be resurrected only reconstituted.

So the idea of man's being an immortal spirit soul trapped in a physical body is simply incompatible with the idea of a resurrection.But in as much as proponents of this theory appeal to the bible for support let us see what the bible has to has to say on the matter,is the person actually resurrected or merely clothed with the reconstituted remains of his former body.

2Corinthians5:1NASB"For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down,we have a building from God,a house NOT made with hands,eternal in the heavens."
Note carefully this scriptural description of the resurrection.The remains of the earthly tent(body) are not to be reassembled it is to be replaced by the heavenly tent(body).So then it is the soul or person that is to be reconstituted with a new body,not the remains of the corpse.
Consider also 

revelation20:4NASB"Then I saw thrones,and they sat on them,and judgment was given to them.And I saw the SOULS of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God,and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image...and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years."

Note it is the souls of the faithful that are spoken of as coming to life a thing that,would be impossible if these souls were immortal.

1Corinthians15:36NASB"You fool!That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies." 

Now that ought to be self-evident.If the soul/person is an immortal spirit clothe with matter which it animates with its life,then neither the soul nor the matter which clothes it can be spoken of as dying and thus neither the soul nor the matter which clothes it can be resurrected.
Those who don't go beyond what is written,1Corinthians4:6,never have to wrestle with such contradictions.The scriptures are quite clear the human soul is mortal Ezekiel18:4 and immortality is gift from Jehovah through our lord and saviour Jesus Christ 2Timothy1:10

Scientists' ruminations on ruminants' EQ

 Researchers: Goats Can Read Basic Human Emotions

Denyse O Leary

Readers may wonder at first whether this research was worth doing, but hang on. It turns out that goats can understand basic human emotions by voice alone, according to University of Hong Kong research, co-led by Prof Alan McElligott at City University of Hong Kong and Dr. Marianne Mason of London’s University of Roehampton:

In the experiment, goats listened to a series of voice playbacks expressing either a positive (happy) or a negative (angry) valence during the habituation phase, i.e., when the goat becomes accustomed to the human voice and valence, so they would respond less as the phase progressed. The recording was then switched from a positive to a negative valence (or vice versa) before being reversed.

“We predicted that if goats could discriminate emotional content conveyed in the human voice, they would dishabituate, looking faster and for longer towards the source of the sound, following the first shift in valence,” said Dr. Marianne Mason, University of Roehampton, UK.

MICHAEL GIBB, CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG, “RESEARCH SHOWS GOATS CAN TELL IF YOU ARE HAPPY OR ANGRY BY YOUR VOICE ALONE,” PHYS.ORG. THE PAPER IS OPEN ACCESS

When the emotional valence changed, 75 percent of the goats looked at the speaker for a longer time. That suggested that the goats had indeed sensed a change in emotional content.

Dogs, Horses, Livestock

Dogs and horses are well known to be sensitive to human emotions but, it can be argued, that is why humans form close relationships with them. What about livestock — animal species that we work with, and maybe live with, but are less likely to bond with? If they also can sense human emotions, that fact should be factored into their care, the researchers argue:

 the results are essential for adding to our understanding of animal behaviour, welfare and emotional experiences, especially since goats and other livestock will hear the human voice in their daily lives. Negatively valenced voices, like angry ones, may cause fear in animals. In contrast, positive ones may be perceived as calming and may even encourage animals to approach and help with human-animal bonding. 

CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG, “BY YOUR VOICE ALONE”

Reason and Moral Choice

It shouldn’t be very surprising if a wide range of animals can understand the most basic human emotional states, like contentedness vs. anger or maybe fear. After all, those are precisely the elements of the mind that we all share. What animals don’t understand are reason and moral choice, the elements we don’t share. The goat may sense that the human is angry but she does not think “I wonder if he is angry because the price of feed has gone up?” or “It’s not morally right for him to go around shouting at everyone like that! It’s not our fault if the feed price went up!” She responds to simple emotion because that is what she understands. In the same way, humans can understand, and even study, the animal emotions we share.

Interestingly, this distinction plays a role in arguments about the immortality of the soul. As philosopher Edward Feser writes, “ … it is because human beings are rational animals that our souls can survive the deaths of our bodies, since … rational or intellectual powers are essentially incorporeal.” The underlying assumption is that abstractions, ideas, and moral principles are immaterial (incorporeal); thus the aspect of our minds that apprehends them must be too. The basic emotions that we share with animals are, on that view, more rooted in physical nature.

One outcome of this view, of course, is that, as Christof Koch has complained, it meant that no dogs, including his beloved Purzel, go to heaven. However, C. S. Lewis had thought of a possible way around that problem. For more on that story, see “Do Any Dogs Go to Heaven? If So, Why?”

Ps. With all due respect to Mr. Feser,his comments perfectly illustrate how false religious ideas like reductive spiritualism short circuit clear thinking . Obviously emotions like joy,and anger are as immaterial as our moral sense. So to claim that the ability to experience/comprehend emotion is not as much evidence of a reductive spirit soul(if indeed there is such a thing) as possessing a moral sense is arbitrary. Another consideration is that at the beginning of our lives our moral sense is probably on the same level as a dog's or a cat's, is this evidence that this supposed reductive spirit soul is absent at that stage of development.

Why the big deal about JEHOVAH'S Name.: The Watchtower Society's Commentary.

 

Questions From Readers

How did the article “Let Your Name Be Sanctified” in The Watchtower of June 2020 clarify our belief regarding Jehovah’s name and his sovereignty?

Wol.JW.org

In that article, we learned that there is really just one issue facing all intelligent creation: the sanctification of Jehovah’s great name. The issue of sovereignty​—that is, Jehovah’s way of ruling is best—​is a facet of the one great issue. Likewise, the issue of human integrity is another facet of that one great issue.

Why do we now emphasize that the greatest issue centers on Jehovah’s name and sanctifying it? Let us examine three reasons.

First, Satan attacked Jehovah’s name, or reputation, in the garden of Eden. Satan’s sly question to Eve implied that Jehovah was an ungenerous God who placed unreasonable restrictions on His subjects. Then Satan directly contradicted Jehovah’s words, in effect calling God a liar. So he slandered Jehovah’s name. He became “the Devil,” which means “slanderer.” (John 8:44) Because Eve believed Satan’s lies, she disobeyed God, rebelling against his sovereignty. (Gen. 3:1-6) To this day, Satan slanders God’s name, spreading lies about Jehovah as a Person. Those who believe such lies are more likely to disobey Jehovah. So to God’s people, the slander against Jehovah’s holy name is the ultimate injustice. It is the root cause of all the misery and wickedness in the world.

Second, for the good of all creation, Jehovah is determined to vindicate his name, clearing it of all reproach. That is of the utmost importance to Jehovah. He thus says: “I will certainly sanctify my great name.” (Ezek. 36:23) And Jesus made clear what should be a top priority in the prayers of all faithful servants of Jehovah when he said: “Let your name be sanctified.” (Matt. 6:9) The Bible again and again emphasizes the importance of glorifying Jehovah’s name. Consider just a few examples: “Give Jehovah the glory due his name.” (1 Chron. 16:29; Ps. 96:8) “Sing praises to his glorious name.” (Ps. 66:2) “I will glorify your name forever.” (Ps. 86:12) One of the times that Jehovah himself spoke from heaven occurred at the temple in Jerusalem, where Jesus said: “Father, glorify your name.” Jehovah, in turn, answered: “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”​—John 12:28.a

Third, Jehovah’s long-range purpose is connected to his name, or reputation. Consider: After the final test that follows the Thousand Year Reign of Christ, what next? Will intelligent creation continue to be divided over the great issue, the sanctification of Jehovah’s name? To help us answer that question, let us recall the two related facets​—human integrity and universal sovereignty. Will humans who have proved faithful continue to face the challenge of keeping their integrity? No. They will be perfect and fully tested. Everlasting life will lie ahead of them. Will universal sovereignty continue to be a focus of discussion, even division, among intelligent creation? No. The rightfulness and supremacy of Jehovah’s way of ruling will be established for all time. What, though, about Jehovah’s name?

Jehovah’s name will by then be completely sanctified, completely free of slander. However, it will continue to draw the attention of all faithful ones in heaven and on earth. Why? Because they will see Jehovah continue to do amazing things. Consider: Because Jesus will humbly turn all rulership over to Jehovah, God will “be all things to everyone.” (1 Cor. 15:28) After that, humans on earth will delight in “the glorious freedom of the children of God.” (Rom. 8:21) And Jehovah will completely fulfill his long-range purpose to bring all intelligent creation in heaven and on earth together as one great, united family.​—Eph. 1:10.

How will those developments affect Jehovah’s family in heaven and on earth? It stands to reason that we will feel a need​—an ardent desire—​to keep praising Jehovah’s beautiful name. The psalmist David was inspired to write: “May Jehovah God be praised . . . May his glorious name be praised forever.” (Ps. 72:18, 19) For all eternity, we will continue to find new and thrilling reasons to do that.

After all, Jehovah’s name represents everything about him. Mainly, then, his name reminds us of his love. (1 John 4:8) We will always remember that Jehovah created us out of love, that he provided the ransom sacrifice out of love, and that he demonstrated the righteousness of his way of ruling out of love. But we will continue to see how Jehovah showers his creation with his love. For all eternity, we will be moved to draw closer to him as our Father and to sing praises to his glorious name.​—Ps. 73:28.

The Bible also shows that Jehovah acts “for the sake of his name.” For example, he leads his people, helps them, rescues them, forgives them, and preserves them alive​—all for the sake of his great name, Jehovah.​—Ps. 23:3; 31:3; 79:9; 106:8; 143:11.

The Watchtower Society's commentary on the envisioned beast of bible prophecy.

Beasts, symbolic

Wol.JW.org

From time immemorial, mankind has observed the characteristics and habits of animals and has applied them in a figurative or symbolic sense to persons, peoples, governments, and organizations. The Bible makes good use of this effective means of illustration. Examples pertaining to the figurative use of the qualities residing in an animal, or suggested by its characteristics, are listed in the accompanying charts.

Beasts as Symbols of Governments. Certain major world powers of history appear directly in the Biblical record, and all of these, as well as other nations, have used animals as symbols of their governments. In Egypt, the serpent figured prominently, the uraeus, the sacred asp, appearing on the headdress of the Pharaohs. However, Egypt was also represented by the bull, as was Assyria. Medo-Persia used the eagle (the shields of the Medes bore the golden eagle; the Persians bore an eagle fixed to the end of a lance). Athens was designated by the owl; Rome, the eagle; Great Britain is designated by the lion; the United States, the eagle. From the most remote times China has been symbolized by the dragon. Well known is the German “two-headed eagle.”

The Wild Beasts of Daniel and of Revelation. That the beasts described in these books represent political kingdoms or governments, exercising rulership and authority, is clearly stated. (Da 7:6, 12, 23; 8:20-22; Re 16:10; 17:3, 9-12) A consideration of the Biblical passages reveals that, while these political ‘wild beasts’ vary in symbolic form, yet all have certain characteristics in common. All are shown as standing in opposition to God’s rule by the Messianic Kingdom over mankind. They are also depicted as in opposition to God’s “holy ones,” his covenant people, first the Jewish nation, then the Christian congregation. Those specifically named (Medo-Persia and Greece) were major world powers, and the great size attributed to the others or the description of their actions indicates that these too were not minor kingdoms. (It may be noted that subordinate kingdoms are symbolized by horns in some cases.) All the beasts are represented as very aggressive, seeking the dominant position over the nations or peoples within the reach of their power.​—Compare Da 7:17, 18, 21; 8:9-11, 23, 24; Re 13:4-7, 15; 17:12-14.

Many commentators endeavor to limit the fulfillment of the visions of the beasts in the book of Daniel so that it does not extend beyond the time when Jesus Christ was on the earth, at which time the Roman Empire was the dominant power. The prophecies themselves, however, make plain that they extend beyond that time. The final forms of the beasts are shown as reaching down to the ‘arrival of the definite time for God’s holy ones to take possession of the kingdom’ in “the appointed time of the end.” Then the Messiah destroys such beastly opposition for all time. (Da 7:21-27; 8:19-25; compare also Re 17:13, 14; 19:19, 20.) It may be noted that Christ Jesus expressly foretold that opposition to the Messianic Kingdom would continue into the time of the end, so that his disciples then preaching that Kingdom would be “objects of hatred by all the nations.” (Mt 24:3, 9-14) This obviously does not allow for any nation, particularly world powers, to be excluded from possible identification with the final forms or expressions of the symbolic wild beasts.

Daniel’s vision of the beasts out of the sea. After Egypt and Assyria had finished their respective periods of dominance, and toward the close of the Babylonian Empire, Jehovah God gave Daniel a vision of “four huge beasts” coming up out of the vast sea. (Da 7:1-3) Isaiah 57:20 likens persons alienated from God to the sea, saying: “But the wicked are like the sea that is being tossed, when it is unable to calm down, the waters of which keep tossing up seaweed and mire.”​—See also Re 17:15.

Bible commentators regularly link this vision with that of the colossal image in the second chapter of Daniel. As a comparison of chapters 2 and 7 shows, there are definite similarities. The colossal image had four principal parts or sections, to compare with the four beasts. The metals of the image began with the most precious, gold, and became successively inferior, while the beasts began with the majestic lion. In both visions the fourth part, or “kingdom,” receives particular consideration, shows the greatest complexity of form, introduces new elements, and continues down till the time when divine judgment is executed upon it for standing in opposition to God’s rule.

Briefly the four beasts were: a lion, first having eagle’s wings, then losing them and taking on human qualities; a bear (a less majestic and more ponderous creature than the lion), devouring much flesh; a leopard with four wings (adding to its great speed) and four heads; and a fourth wild beast not corresponding to any actual animal, unusually strong, with large iron teeth, ten horns, and another horn developing with eyes and “a mouth speaking grandiose things.” Much of the chapter relates to the fourth beast and its unusual horn. While each beast was “different from the others,” this was especially true of the fourth one.​—Da 7:3-8, 11, 12, 15-26.

In the last quarter of the seventh century B.C.E., Babylon became the dominant power in the Middle East. The Babylonian kingdom swiftly extended its domain over Syria and Palestine, overthrowing the kingdom of Judah with its line of Davidic rulers who sat on the glorious throne of Jehovah in Jerusalem. (1Ch 29:23) It may be observed that, when warning Judah of its impending fall to Babylon, the prophet Jeremiah likened the future conqueror to ‘a lion going up out of a thicket.’ (Jer 4:5-7; compare 50:17.) After the fall of Jerusalem, Jeremiah said that Babylon’s forces had been “swifter than the eagles” in their pursuit of the Judeans. (La 4:19) History shows that Babylon’s expansion, at one time reaching as far as Egypt, before long came to a halt, and in the latter part of the empire, Babylon’s rulers showed little of the earlier aggressiveness.

Babylon fell to the Medo-Persian kingdom, with its heartland in the hills to the east of the plains of Mesopotamia. The Medo-Persian Empire was quite different from the Semitic Babylonian Empire, being the first Japhetic (or Aryan) power to gain the dominant position in the Middle East. The Jews, though allowed to return to Judah, continued as a subject people under the Medo-Persian yoke. (Ne 9:36, 37) This empire showed an even greater appetite for territory than had the Babylonian, extending its domain from “India to Ethiopia.”​—Es 1:1.

Medo-Persia’s domination was ended by the lightning conquest of the Grecian forces headed by Alexander the Great. In a few short years he built up an empire that embraced parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. This was the first European-based power to hold such a position. After Alexander’s death his generals struggled for control of the empire, four of them eventually gaining the rulership of different sections. Palestine was fought over by the rival Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms.

The Grecian Empire was eventually taken over completely by Rome. The Roman Empire surpassed all the preceding empires not only in the extent of its domain (covering the entire Mediterranean area and in time reaching to the British Isles) but also in the efficiency of its military machine and the firmness of its application of Roman law to the provinces of its far-flung empire. Rome, of course, was the political instrument used to execute the Messiah, Christ Jesus, as well as to persecute the early Christian congregation. The empire extended for nearly a thousand years thereafter in different forms but eventually broke up into various nations, with Britain finally gaining the dominant position.

Historian H. G. Wells makes the following interesting observations on the distinctiveness of the Roman Empire: “Now this new Roman power which arose to dominate the western world in the second and first centuries B.C. was in several respects a different thing from any of the great empires that had hitherto prevailed in the civilised world. It was not at first a monarchy, and it was not the creation of any one great conqueror. . . . It was the first republican empire that escaped extinction and went on to fresh developments. . . . Its population was less strongly Hamitic and Semitic than that of any preceding empire. . . . It was so far a new pattern in history, it was an expanded Aryan republic. . . . It was always changing. It never attained to any fixity. In a sense the [administrative] experiment failed. In a sense the experiment remains unfinished, and Europe and America to-day are still working out the riddles of world-wide statecraft first confronted by the Roman people.”​—The Pocket History of the World, 1943, pp. 149-151.

The ram and the male goat. In the vision Daniel received two years later (Da 8:1), the powers represented by the two symbolic beasts involved are clearly named. The kingdom of Medo-Persia is here pictured as a male sheep (a ram) having two horns, the taller horn coming up afterward. History shows that the Medes first were the stronger, and the Persians thereafter gained the ascendancy, though both peoples remained united in a dual power. A he-goat, moving very fast across the earth, symbolized the world power of Greece. (Da 8:3-8, 20, 21) The prophetic vision shows that the goat’s “great horn” located between its eyes, representing the first king, was broken “as soon as it became mighty,” and four kingdoms resulted, though of inferior strength. (Da 8:5, 8, 21, 22) The rapid conquest of the Medo-Persian Empire by Alexander has already been commented on, as well as the division of his kingdom among four of his generals.

It is worthy of mention here that the same nation or its rulers may be represented by different animal symbols in different prophecies. Thus, the kings of Assyria and Babylon are represented by lions at Jeremiah 50:17, while at Ezekiel 17:3-17 the rulers of Babylon and Egypt are pictured by great eagles. Ezekiel elsewhere likens Egypt’s Pharaoh to a “great sea monster” lying in the Nile canals. (Eze 29:3) Hence the fact that Medo-Persia and Greece are represented by certain symbolisms in Daniel chapter 8 does not eliminate the possibility of their being represented by other symbolisms in the earlier vision (Da 7) nor in subsequent prophecies.

The seven-headed wild beast out of the sea. In the vision had by the apostle John and recorded at Revelation 13, a seven-headed, ten-horned wild beast comes up out of the sea, leopardlike, yet with feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion. It is thus a composite form of several of the symbols appearing in Daniel’s vision of the four beasts. The dragon, identified at Revelation 12:9 as Satan the Devil, gives the beast its authority and power. (Re 13:1, 2) This beast’s seven heads (bearing ten horns) distinguish it from the one-headed beasts of Daniel’s vision. Seven (and ten) are commonly acknowledged as Biblical symbols of completeness. (See NUMBER, NUMERAL.) This is corroborated by the extent of this beast’s domain, for it exercises authority, not over one nation or a group of nations, but “over every tribe and people and tongue and nation.” (Re 13:7, 8; compare 16:13, 14.) Noting these factors, The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible comments: “The first of these beasts [of Re 13] combines in itself the joint characteristics of the four beasts of Daniel’s vision . . . Accordingly, this first beast represents the combined forces of all political rule opposed to God in the world.”​—Edited by G. Buttrick, 1962, Vol. 1, p. 369.

Two-horned beast. Then John saw a beast out of the earth with two horns like those of a harmless lamb, yet speaking as a dragon, exercising the full authority of the first wild beast, just described. It directs making an image of the globally ruling seven-headed beast, putting all persons under compulsion to accept its “mark.”​—Re 13:11-17.

It may be recalled that the two-horned ram of Daniel chapter 8 represented a dual power, Medo-Persia. Of course, that power had long since disappeared by the apostle John’s day, and his vision was of things yet future. (Re 1:1) Other dual powers have existed since John’s day, but among these the historical association of Britain and the United States is particularly notable and of long duration.

The other notable characteristic of the two-horned beast, its speaking like a dragon, recalls the “mouth speaking grandiose things” on the outstanding horn of the fourth beast of Daniel 7 (vss 8, 20-26); while its ‘misleading’ earth’s inhabitants compares with the deception practiced by the ‘fierce king’ described at Daniel 8:23-25.​—Re 13:11, 14.

The scarlet-colored wild beast. At Revelation 17 the apostle records his vision of a scarlet-colored beast with seven heads and ten horns, mounted by the symbolic woman “Babylon the Great.” This beast thus resembles, or is in the image of, the first beast of Revelation 13 but is distinct because of its scarlet color and the fact that no crowns are seen on its ten horns. Beholding the beast, John is told that five of the seven kings represented by the seven heads had already fallen, while one existed at that time, and the seventh was yet to come. The scarlet-colored beast itself is an eighth king but springs from or is a product of the previous seven. The “ten kings” represented by the ten horns exist and exercise authority in association with the scarlet beast for a short time. Warring against the Lamb, Jesus Christ, and those with him, they go down in defeat.​—Re 17:3-5, 9-14.

Some scholars would apply this vision to pagan Rome, and the seven heads to seven emperors of Rome, followed by an eighth emperor. They disagree, however, as to which emperors should be included. The Bible itself does not mention more than three Roman emperors by name, with a fourth (Nero) being mentioned under the title of “Caesar.” Other scholars understand the “heads” or “kings” to represent world powers, as in the book of Daniel. It is noteworthy that the Bible does name five world powers in the Hebrew Scriptures, namely, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece, while the Greek Scriptures name a sixth, Rome, ruling in John’s day. While this would leave the seventh ‘king’ unnamed, the fact that it had not yet appeared when John recorded the Revelation would allow for such anonymity. The eighth king, the symbolic scarlet beast, in some way unites in itself these seven heads while at the same time springing from them.

JEHOVAH Continues to school the wannabes.

 Artificial General Intelligence: Machines vs. Organisms

William Dembski

In this series about Artificial General Intelligence, it may seem that I’m picking too much on Ray Kurzweil. But he and I have been crossing paths for a long time. He and I, over the last few years, have frequented the same Seattle area tech conference, COSM, where we both speak, albeit on opposite sides about the question of artificial intelligence. He and I also took sharply divergent positions on the Stanford campus back in 2003 at the Accelerating Change Conference, a transhumanist event organized by John Smart. Yet our first encounter goes back to 1998, at one of George Gilder’s Telecosm conferences.

From “Intelligent” to “Spiritual”

At Telecosm in 1998, I moderated a discussion where the focus was on Ray Kurzweil’s then forthcoming book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, which at the time was in press. Previously, Kurzweil had written The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990). By substituting “spiritual” for “intelligent,” he was clearly taking an even more radical line about the future of artificial intelligence. In his presentation for the discussion, he described how machines were poised to match and then exceed human cognition, a theme he has hammered on ever since. For Kurzweil, it is inevitable that machines will match and then exceed us: Moore’s Law guarantees that machines will attain the needed computational power to simulate our brains, after which the challenge will be for us to keep pace with machines, a challenge at which he sees us as destined to fail because wetware, in his view, cannot match hardware. Our only recourse to survive successfully will thus be to upload ourselves digitally. 

Kurzweil’s respondents at the Telecosm discussion were John Searle, Thomas Ray, and Michael Denton, and they were all to varying degrees critical of his strong AI view, or what we would now call his AGI view. Searle rehearsed his Chinese Room thought experiment to argue that computers don’t/can’t actually understand anything, an argument that remains persuasive and applies to recent chatbots, such as ChatGPT. But the most interesting response to Kurzweil came, in my view, from Denton. He offered an argument about the complexity and richness of individual neurons, pointing out how inadequate our understanding of them is and how even more inadequate our ability is to computationally model them. At the end of the discussion, however, Kurzweil’s confidence in the glowing prospects for strong AI’s (AGI’s) future remained undiminished. And indeed, they remain undiminished to this day. The entire exchange, suitably expanded and elaborated, appeared in Jay Richard’s edited collection Are We Spiritual Machines?

Denton’s Powerful Argument

I want here to focus on Denton’s argument, because it remains relevant and powerful. Kurzweil is a technophile in that he regards building and inventing technology, and above all machines, as the greatest thing humans do. But he’s also a technobigot in that he regards people of the past, who operated with minimal technology, as vastly inferior and less intelligent than we are. He ignores how much such people were able to accomplish through sheer ingenuity given how little they had to work with. He thus minimizes the genius of a Homer, the exploration of the Pacific by South Sea Islanders, or the knowledge of herbs and roots of indigenous peoples captured in oral traditions, etc. For examples of the towering intelligence of non-technological people, I encourage readers to check out Robert Greene’s Mastery. 

Taken with the power and prospects of artificial intelligence, Kurzweil thinks that ChatGPT will soon write better prose and poetry than we do. Moreover, by simulating our human bodies, medical science will, according to him, be able to develop new drugs and procedures without having to experiment on our human bodies. He seems unconcerned that such simulations may miss anything crucial about ourselves and thus lead to medical procedures and drugs that backfire, doing more harm than good. Kurzweil offered such blithe assurances about AGI at the 2023 COSM conference.

Whole organisms and even individual cells are nonlinear dynamical systems, and there’s no evidence that computers are able to adequately simulate them. Even single neurons, which for Kurzweil and Marvin Minsky make up a computer made of meat (i.e., the brain), are beyond the simulating powers of any computers we know or can envision. A given neuron will soon enough behave unpredictably and inconsistently with any machine. Central to Denton’s argument against Kurzweil’s strong AI (AGI) view back in 1998 was the primacy of the organism over the machine. Denton’s argument remains persuasive. Rather than paraphrase that argument, I’ll use Denton’s own words (from his essay “Organism and Machine” in Jay Richards, ed., Are We Spiritual Machines: Ray Kurzweil vs. The Critics of Strong A.I.):

Living things possess abilities that are still without any significant analogue in any machine which has yet been constructed. These abilities have been seen since classical times as indicative of a fundamental division between the [organismal] and mechanical modes of being. 

To begin with, every living system replicates itself, yet no machine possesses this capacity even to the slightest degree… Every second countless trillions of living systems from bacterial cells to elephants replicate themselves on the surface of our planet. And since life’s origin, endless life forms have effortlessly copied themselves on unimaginable numbers of occasions.

Living things possess the ability to change themselves from one form into another. For instance, during development the descendants of the egg cell transform themselves from undifferentiated unspecialized cells into [widely different cells, some with] long tentacles like miniature medusae some hundred thousand times longer than the main body of the cell… 

To grasp just how fantastic [these abilities of living things] are and just how far they transcend anything in the realm of the mechanical, imagine our artifacts endowed with the ability to copy themselves and … “morph” themselves into different forms. Imagine televisions and computers that duplicate themselves effortlessly and which can also “morph” themselves into quite different types of machines [such as into a microwave or helicopter]. We are so familiar with the capabilities of life that we take them for granted, failing to see their truly extraordinary character. 

Even the less spectacular self-reorganizing and self-regenerating capacities of living things … should leave the observer awestruck. Phenomena such as … the regeneration of the limb of a newt, the growth of a complete polyp, or a complex protzoan from tiny fragments of the intact animal are … without analogue in the realm of mechanism…

Imagine a jumbo jet, a computer, or indeed any machine ever conceived, from the fantastic star ships of science fiction to the equally fantastic speculations of nanotechnology, being chopped up randomly into small fragments. Then imagine every one of the fragments so produced (no two fragments will ever be the same) assembling itself into a perfect but miniaturized copy of the machine from which it originated — a tiny toy-sized jumbo jet from a random section of the wing — and you have some conception of the self-regenerating capabilities of certain microorganisms… It is an achievement of transcending brilliance, which goes beyond the wildest dreams of mechanism. 

Between Organism and Mechanism 

The lesson that Denton drew from this sharp divergence between organism and mechanism is that the quest for full Artificial General Intelligence faces profound conceptual and practical challenges. The inherent capacity of living things to replicate, transform, self-organize, and regenerate in ways that transcend purely mechanical processes underscores a fundamental divide between the organic and the artificial. 

Organisms demonstrate a level of complexity and adaptability that no machine or artificial system shows any signs of emulating. The extraordinary characteristics of life recounted by Denton suggest that full AGI, capable of the holistic and versatile intelligence seen in living organisms, will remain an elusive goal, if not a practical impossibility. We therefore have no compelling reason to think that the pinnacle of intelligence is poised to shift from the organismal to the artificial, especially given the fantastic capabilities that organisms are known to exhibit and that machines show no signs of ever exhibiting. 

At the top of the list of such fantastic capabilities is human consciousness. If AGI is truly going to match and ultimately exceed humans in every respect (if we really are just computational devices, or computers made of meat), then AGI will need to exhibit consciousness. Yet how can consciousness reside in a computational device, which consists of finitely many states, each state being binary, assuming a value of 0 or 1? Consciousness is a reflective awareness of one’s identity, existence, sensations, perceptions, emotions, ethics, valuations, thoughts, and circumstances (Sitz im Leben). But how can the shuffling of zeros and ones produce such a full inner life of self-awareness, subjective experience, and emotional complexity?

This Is Not a New Question

In pre-computer days, it was posed as whether and how a mechanical device composed of material parts could think. The philosopher Gottfried Leibniz raised doubts that such mechanical devices could think at all with his thought experiment of a mill (in his 1714 Monadology). He imagined a giant mill and asked where exactly thought would reside in the workings of its gears and other moving parts. As he saw it, there would be an unbridgeable gap between the mill’s mechanical operation and its ability to think and produce consciousness. He saw this thought experiment as showing that matter could not be converted into mind.

More recently, philosopher John Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment (in “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” 1980) highlighted the divide between mechanical processes and the subjective experience of consciousness. In Searle’s Chinese Room, a person translates Chinese by mechanically applying rules to items in a large database. The person’s success in translating Chinese follows simply from faithfully following the rules and thus requires no understanding of Chinese. This thought experiment illustrates that processing information does not equate to comprehending it. 

For me personally, the most compelling thought experiment for discounting that computation is capable of consciousness is simply to consider a Turing machine. A Turing machine can represent any computation. It includes two things: (1) a tape consisting of squares filled with zeros and ones, or bits (for more than two possibilities in each square, put more than one bit per square, but keep the number of bits per square fixed); and (2) a read-write head that moves along the squares and alters or leaves unchanged the bits in each square. The read-write head alternates among a fixed number of states according to transition rules that depend on the other states and where the head is on the tape, changing or leaving unchanged the present square and then moving left or right one square. 

So Here’s the Question

Where is consciousness in this reading and writing of bits? As a reductio ad absurdum of this thought experiment, I imagine a world with an unlimited number of doors. Doors can be open or closed. An unlimited number of people live in houses with these doors. Let closing a door correspond to zero, opening it to one. As these doors open and close, they could be executing an algorithm. And if humans are computers, then such an algorithm could be us. And yet, to think that the joint opening and closing of doors could, if the doors were only opened and closed in the right way, achieve consciousness, such as sharing a glass of wine with your beloved while overlooking a Venetian veranda, seems bonkers. Such thought experiments suggest a fundamental divide between the operations of a machine and the conscious understanding inherent in human intelligence.

One last thought in this vein: Neuroscientific research further complicates the picture. The brain is increasingly showing itself to be not just a complex information processor but an organ characterized by endogenous activity — spontaneous, internally driven behaviors independent of external stimuli. This perspective portrays the brain as an active seeker of information, as is intrinsic to organic systems. Such spontaneous behavior, found across all of life, from cells to entire organisms, raises doubts about the capacity of machines produce these intricate, self-directed processes.