\u00a0<\/p>\n
Who would not think, to see us compounding everything \t\tof mind and<\/p>\n
matter, that such a mixture is perfectly intelligible to \t\tus? Yet<\/p>\n
this is the thing we understand least; man is to himself \t\tthe greatest<\/p>\n
prodigy in nature, for he cannot conceive what body is, \t\tand still<\/p>\n
less what mind is, and least of all how a body can be \t\tjoined to a<\/p>\n
mind. This is his supreme difficulty, and yet it is his \t\tvery being.<\/p>\n
Blaise Pascal1<\/sup><\/p>\n (17th Century)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Kasparov himself, in explaining how he eventually beat the \t\tmachine, wrote, I changed slightly the order of a well-known opening \t\tsequence. Because it was unable to compare this new position \t\tmeaningfully with similar ones in its database, it had to start \t\tcalculating away and was unable to find a good plan. A human would have \t\tsimply wondered, ‘what’s Garry up to?,’ judged the change to be \t\tmeaningless and moved on.2<\/sup> Was this the limit for a \t\tmachine? Will there always be that gap between calculation and \t\tconsciousness or have we just not had enough time to put a mind into \t\tthis machine?<\/p>\n To many, these issues of the technology age signify the end \t\tof the reign of materialism over the soul of man. George Gilder of the \t\tDiscovery Institute wrote, “For the central fact of the twentieth \t\tcentury is not the overthrow of the mind, but the overthrow of matter.”3<\/sup> He refers to the demise of the last two hundred years of scientific \t\tthinking that man is just a glob of protoplasm that learned to speak. \t\tHe goes on to say, “From Marxism to behavioralism, from routine \t\tevolutionism to logical positivism, from deconstructionism to reflex \t\tpsychology, scientists and scholars produced an unending stream of \t\ttheories that reduced man to a mechanism.”4<\/sup> The old \t\tnaturalistic view is that as man and his brain organism evolved, the \t\tidea of consciousness was produced by the advanced brain. But now, with \t\tthe coming of quantum physics and the separation of matter and energy (a \t\tsubject for another time), Gilder says, “We find a high drama of richly \t\tintelligible activity where electrons combine and disappear without \t\toccupying conventional time or space, and things obey the laws of mind \t\trather than the laws of matter.”5<\/sup> That is to say, \t\tmaterialists can account for the matter in the universe but they cannot \t\texplain where the intelligence, consciousness or thought come from.<\/p>\n So when this month’s issue of Time Magazine asks the \t\tquestion “Can Machines Think?,” they are equally asking, “Does man have \t\tan immaterial part to him that we will never be able to build into a \t\tmachine? Does man have a soul?” Time highlights two robots, Cog and Cyc, \t\twhich are stretching the limits of “AI” (artificial intelligence) but \t\thas to conclude, “With AI, the tenets of strict materialism are being \t\trealized–and found, by some at least, incapable of explaining certain \t\tparts of human experience. Namely, the experience part.”6<\/sup><\/p>\n In more common language this is like asking, “Will computers \t\tbecome so complex that eventually they will develop (or evolve) their \t\town conscious will and take over?” After all, we already speak of \t\tcomputers being ill with a “virus.” Time reports that next month an \t\tecobiologist in Japan will release a tiny self-reproducing program onto \t\tthe Internet (an experiment called “digital biodiversity reserve”), a \t\t“virtual organism” which will quickly “populate the network and begin to \t\tevolve.”7<\/sup> (Insert Twilight Zone music here)<\/p>\n A few years ago, Neil Postman wrote of this concern. He \t\tsaid, The computer, it is implied, has a will, has intentions, has \t\treasons\u2014which means that humans are relieved of responsibility for the \t\tcomputer’s decisions. Through a curious form of grammatical alchemy, \t\tthe sentence ‘we use the computer to calculate’ comes to mean ‘the \t\tcomputer calculates.’ ‘The computer shows’ or ‘the computer has \t\tdetermined.’ It is Technopoly’s equivalent of the sentence ‘It is God’s \t\twill.’8<\/sup> This directs our attention to the question of moral \t\tauthority.<\/p>\n Has this latest form of art, the technological machine, \t\tillustrated for us and convinced us that man is a machine as well? Just \t\tas the computer has evolved to the point where wires, chips and plugs \t\tactually think for themselves, so man has evolved to the point where \t\ttissue, blood and mucus have developed consciousness? Ravi Zacharias \t\twrites, “Fyodor Dostoevsky predicted that at first art would imitate \t\tlife, then life would imitate art, and finally, that life would draw the \t\tvery reason for its existence from art.”9<\/sup> The materialist, \t\tanyway, has long thought that the mind came from a brain, not the brain \t\tfrom a Mind.<\/p>\n The good news is that the more science has tried to produce \t\tconsciousness from matter, the less it has succeeded. The new \t\texperiments with robotics, computers and even quantum physics have only \t\tshown that mind, consciousness and “being” stand apart from the material \t\tuniverse and cannot be explained by it. But C.S. Lewis warned us fifty \t\tyears ago, The extreme limit of this self-binding is seen in those who, \t\tlike the rest of us, have consciousness, yet go about to study the human \t\torganism as if they did not know it was conscious. As long as this \t\tdeliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such \t\tunderstanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final \t\tvictory over materialism.10<\/sup><\/p>\n Perhaps one day we will learn, as Time mused, you don’t \t\tinvite a forklift to a weightlifting competition! But more is at stake \t\tstill, with our materialistic generation than chess matches and tests of \t\tstrength. We have been conditioned in every modern way possible to live \t\tin this world as though there is no other. We have, in the now familiar \t\twords, created God in our own image. In a very real way, to the \t\tmaterialist, the only god there is, the only real consciousness, is a \t\tproduct of the material world. Our soul is only an unexplained energy \t\tfield produced by selective evolution.<\/p>\n Jesus said, “A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of \t\tthe things which he possesseth” (Luke 12:15). He then added a parable \t\tof a rich man whom we could rightfully call a materialist. He lived \t\tonly for the material things which he could collect and finally thought, \t\t“I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many \t\tyears; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry” (vs 19). Can there be \t\tany doubt that our materialistic age has adopted this attitude? (Don’t \t\twe often define heaven or eveen spirituality by the absence of material \t\tthings rather than by the presence of the spiritual?)<\/p>\n Jesus had an answer for this man and for every age of \t\tmaterialism: “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: \t\tthen whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?” (vs 20). \t\tThen He said to the disciples, “The life is more than meat, and the body \t\tis more than raiment” (vs 23). God has devised a final exam for the \t\tquestion of mind and matter. It is called death. You can guess at the \t\tanswer, or ignore the evidence but you can’t skip the exam!<\/p>\n I return to Pascal for this final observation: Man is only \t\ta reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no \t\tneed for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a \t\tdrop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to \t\tcrush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows \t\tthat he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The \t\tuniverse knows none of this.<\/p>\n Thus all dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must \t\tdepend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never \t\tfill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of \t\tmorality.11<\/sup><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Rick Shrader<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n 1. Blaise Pascal, Pensees (London: Penquin Books, 1966) \t\tp. 94.<\/p>\n 2. “Can Machines Think?” Time, March 25, 1966, p. 55.<\/p>\n 3. George Gilder,”The Materialist Superstition” The \t\tIntercollegiate Review, Spring, 1996, p. 8.<\/p>\n 4. Gilder, p. 7.<\/p>\n 5. Gilder, p. 11.<\/p>\n 6. “Can Machines Think?” p. 55.<\/p>\n 7. “Can Machines Think?” p. 58.<\/p>\n 8. Neil Postman, Technopoly (New York: Vintage Books, \t\t1993) p. 114-115.<\/p>\n 9. Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God (Dallas: Word \t\tPublishing, 1994) p. 73.<\/p>\n 10. C.S. Lewis, The Weight Of Glory (New York: \t\tMacmillan, 1980) p. 72.<\/p>\n 11. Pascal, p. 95.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Does Mind Matter? \u00a0 Who would not think, to see us compounding everything of mind and matter, that such a mixture is perfectly intelligible to us? Yet this is the thing we understand least; man is to himself the greatest prodigy in nature, for he cannot conceive what body is, and still less what mind […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[123],"tags":[152,158],"class_list":["post-1097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-technology","tag-thinking-reading"],"yoast_head":"\n