Jaron Lanier Disagrees with Dawkins' Memes and Kurzweil's Singularity

Jaron Lanier Disagrees with Richard Dawkins' Meme Theory and Ray Kurzweil's Singularity

As a goat farmer, Jaron Lanier supported his way through college. While growing up, he lived far from cities and near Mesilla, New Mexico, with his father in tents until they built a house centered around a hippie-esque geodesic dome designed by Jaron. 

Freedom of Will: Myth of The Third Alternative.

Freedom of Will and The Myth of The Third Alternative

Nobel winner and writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, when asked if he believed in free will, replied "I have no choice."

We each believe that we possess an Ego, Self, or Final Center of Control, from which we choose what we shall do at every fork in the road of time. To be sure, we sometimes have the sense of being dragged along despite ourselves, by internal processes which, though they come from within our minds, nevertheless seem to work against our wishes. But on the whole we still feel that we can choose what we shall do. Whence comes this sense of being in control? According to the modern scientific view, there is simply no room at all for "freedom of the human will." Everything that happens in our universe is either completely determined by what's already happened in the past or else depends, in part, on random chance. Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these:

A set of fixed, deterministic laws.

A purely random set of accidents.

There is no room on either side for any third alternative. Whatever actions we may "choose," they cannot make the slightest change in what might otherwise have been-- because those rigid, natural laws already caused the states of mind that caused us to decide that way. And if that choice was in part made by chance--it still leaves nothing for us to decide.

Every action we perform stems from a host of processes inside our minds. We sometimes understand a few of them, but most lie far beyond our ken. But none of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know ; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self-control. We like to give names to what we do not know, and instead of wondering how we work, we simply talk of being "free." Perhaps it would be more honest to say, "My decision was determined by internal forces I do not understand." But no one likes to feel controlled by something else.

Why don't we like to feel compelled? Because we're largely made of systems designed to learn to achieve goals. But in order to achieve any long-range goals, effective difference-engines must also learn to resist whatever other processes attempt to make them change those goals. In childhood, everyone learns to recognize, dislike, and resist those various forms of aggression and compulsion. Naturally, we're horrified to hear about agents that hide in our minds and influence what we decide.

In any case, both alternatives are unacceptable to self-respecting minds. No one wants to submit to laws that come to us like the whims of tyrants who are too remote for any possible appeal. And it's equally tormenting to feel that we're a toy to mindless chance, caprice, or probability--for though these leave our fate unfixed, we'd still not play the slightest part in choosing what shall come to be. So, though, it's futile to resist, we continue to regard both Cause and Chance as intrusions on our freedom of choice. There remains only one thing to do: we add another region to our model of our mind. We imagine a third alternative, one easier to tolerate; we imagine a thing called "freedom of will," which lies beyond both kinds of constraint.

The Myth of The Third Alternative

To save our belief in the freedom of will from the fateful grasp of cause and chance, people simply postulate an empty, third alternative. We imagine that somewhere in each person's mind there lies a Spirit, Will, or Soul, so well concealed that it can elude the reach of any law--or lawless accident.

|Cause|----|Free Will|----|Chance|

I've drawn the box for Will so small because we're always taking things out of it--and scarcely ever putting things in! This is because whenever we find some scrap of order in the world, we have to attribute it to Cause--and whenever things seem to obey no laws at all, we attribute that to Chance. This means that the dominion controlled by Will can only hold what, up to now, we don't yet understand. In ancient times, that realm was huge; when every planet had its god, and every storm or animal did manifest some spirit's wish. But now for many centuries, we've had to watch that empire shrink.

Does this mean that we must embrace the modern scientific view and put aside the ancient myth of voluntary choice? No. We can't do that; too much of what we think and do revolves around those old beliefs. Consider how our social lives depend upon the notion of responsibility and how little that idea would mean without our belief that personal actions are voluntary. Without that belief, no praise or shame could accrue to actions that were caused by Cause, nor could we assign any credit or blame to deeds that came about by Chance. What could we make our children learn if neither they nor we perceived some fault or virtue anywhere? We also use a selfish impulse, yet turn it aside because it seems wrong, and that must happen when some self-ideal has intervened to overrule another goal. We can feel virtuous when we think that we ourselves have chosen to resist an evil temptation. But if we suspected that such choices were not made freely, but by the interference of some hidden agency, we might very well resent that interference. Then we might become impelled to try to wreck the precious value-schemes that underlie our personalities or become depressed about the futility of a predestination tempered only by uncertainty. Such thoughts must be suppressed.

No matter that the physical world provides no room for freedom of will; that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. We're virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false--except, of course, when we're inspired to find flaws in all our beliefs, whatever may be the consequence to cheerfulness and mental peace.

 (From Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind.  See Minsky Awareness is No Big Deal 24 May 2004 in Mind Shadows)

Marvin Minsky: Awareness is No Big Deal

Thinking Without Thinking: Marvin Minsky, The Dalai Lama, and Artificial Intelligence

Some people think that consciousness and computers are a contradiction in terms. That is, they believe that computers can never qualify as conscious, which is a uniquely human quality.

Marvin Minsky believes that conscious artificial intelligence is not at all out of the question, which is in keeping with his writings. His thinking in no regard qualifies as religious, and therefore holds nothing sacred about human ability. Would religious leaders differ with him? If readers expected solid disagreement from the Tibetan Buddhist community, they might be surprised to learn that the Dalai Lama does not take exception to a point of view such as Minsky's. Here, then, are two perspectives on the issue, first Minsky, then the Dalai Lama.

Minsky: " Just as we walk without thinking, we think without thinking! We don't know how our muscles make us walk--nor do we know much more about the agencies that do our mental work. When you have a hard problem to solve, you think about if for a time. Then, perhaps, the answer seems to come all at once, and you say, ' Aha, I've got it. I'll do such and such.' But if someone were to ask how you found the solution, you could rarely say more than things like the following :

' I suddenly realized . . . '

' I just got the idea . . . '

' It occurred to me that . . . '

If we could really sense the workings of our minds, we wouldn't act so often in accord with motives we don't suspect. We wouldn't have such varied and conflicting theories for psychology. And when we're asked how people get their good ideas, we wouldn't be reduced to metaphors about ' ruminating,' and ' digesting,' ' conceiving' and ' giving birth' to concepts--as though our thoughts were anywhere but in the head. If we could see inside our minds, we'd surely have more useful things to say.

Many people seem absolutely certain that no computer could ever be sentient, conscious, self-willed, or in any other way ' aware' of itself. But what makes everyone so sure that they themselves possess those admirable qualities? It's true that if we're sure of anything at all, it is that ' I'm aware--hence, I'm aware.' Yet what do such convictions really mean? If self-awareness means to know what's happening inside one's mind, no realist could maintain for long that people have much insight, in the literal sense of seeing-in. Indeed, the evidence that we are self-aware--that is, that we have any special aptitude for finding out what's happening inside ourselves--is very weak indeed. It is true that certain people have a special excellence at assessing the attitudes and motivations of other persons (and, more rarely, of themselves). But this does not justify the belief that how we learn things about people, including ourselves, is fundamentally different from how we learn about other things. Most of the understandings we call ' insights' are merely variants of our other ways to ' figure out' what's happening." (The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky, (Simon and Schuster) )

The Dali Lama once said that there is no theoretical limit to artificial intelligence. If "conscious" computers are some day developed, he will give them the same consideration as sentient beings.
(Salon Magazine, 27 February 1997, in an interview with Jeff Greenwald.) Elsewhere, he had this to say about artificial intelligence : "It is very difficult to say that it's not a living being, that it doesn't have cognition, even from the Buddhist point of view. We maintain that there are certain types of births in which a preceding continuum of consciousness is the basis. The consciousness doesn't actually arise from the matter, but a continuum of consciousness might conceivably come into it." (Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind, Jeremy Hayward and Francisco Varela ( Shambala) )