A Few More…..
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
George Bernard Shaw
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
Mark Twain
On the technology front, we will finally accept that computers are NOT going to take over the world, unless used, as explosives and words are used, by unprincipled liars and deviants. Materialists have been claiming for decades that computers will become ‘smarter than people’. No they won’t. Computers make earthworms look smart. AI or AGI will not be cleverer (ie ‘more creative’) than people. The danger is that many people will think that they are and allow them to run wild (until they create a disaster of some sort).
§ Darwin reasoned that worms must indeed be smart as they always pull leaves into the earth by the stalks. Thus, they must be able to distinguish one end of a leaf from the other. This task would be a great challenge for a computer (see ‘umbrella’ below).
Remember GIGO? Garbage in, garbage out? That is the level at which a computer ‘mind’ works. It’s a supercharged abacus, with NO mind of its own at all, needing to be fed and coddled by intelligent outside forces (that’s you and me) at all times. It can be ‘trained’ to make sophisticated selections when the choices are clearly input, but it is completely lost when faced with a something open-ended or novel. As an example, on a 2010 BBC Horizon programme, an MIT expert said a computer ‘might’ be able to recognise an umbrella (meaning ‘from any angle and in many circumstances’) in the next five to ten years. Has this happened yet (2022?). It probably has, given the meteoric rise of AI, but the point remains, I think. We shall see…..
§ In the 1960’s experts were certain that: ‘Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.’ HA Simon, and ‘Within a generation … the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved.’ Marvin Minsky. Compare with Crick and Watson claiming to have discovered the secret of Life Itself in the structure of DNA.
Materialism is never short of the sort of confidence that comes with a faulty premiss. The current Big Thing is that we will all have microchip implants in our brains within a decade or two. These implants will give us enormous memory power and will boost our intelligence to unheard of levels, they say. But I wonder how, in principle, a living holistic system based upon Intuitive-Mind is going to integrate with a digital system based on electro-mechanics? How will memory-on-a-chip relate to the non-local memory of a living brain? And how can you digitise (ie, reduce to 1’s and 0’s) ‘the ability to see the point’ (this being a useful definition of intelligence)?
As for the claims that we can program a computer to have emotions… this is just more Materialist fantasy. We might well be able to fake a pseudo-emotional response, but it will be bogus, and detectable as such. The danger is that not all people will realise this. Some politicians and deviants will welcome it.
Nothing is obvious to a computer. Computers will never have ‘the ability to see the point’. It is proved to us every time we clear out our spam. You and I can spot spam a mile off, but a computer can’t. To it, all alphanumeric strings are equally valid. Hence, it’s pointless blocking spam containing the string ‘Viagra’, as the computer will happily accept ‘viaggra’, via’gra’, ‘Vviagra’, viagza’, ‘via6ra’ etc, ad infinitum.
§ I once saw a demonstration of a primitive robot that had been programmed to stack four small blocks into a pyramid. The arm grabbed the first block, positioned it accurately, and released it. It bounced off the table. There was a snag: the robot had begun forming its pyramid from the top.
The programmers said they had learned that common sense is alien to a silicon chip.
Computers will never have a moral sense, as the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are not programmable. Some sort of fudge will occur, no doubt, but it will be a fudge.
True artificial Intelligence will never be created.
§ You could baffle a computer by asking it to convert ‘We must draw the fangs of those red herrings which are bottling up the wheels of progress’ into proper English. You and I can do it. A computer can’t, unless specifically ‘trained’ to. Another challenge would be ‘What is the value of pi?’, with the intonation carrying the question of ‘What is the point of pi?’
Neither will the dreaded ‘nanobots’ take over the world. For something to self-replicate, it needs information on a colossal scale (see Chapter 22), plus constant access to pure raw materials, plus a power supply, plus a complex command and control system, plus some sort of programme of purpose, plus a means of carrying out that purpose… plus.. plus…. It will never happen (unless human deviants/Mind make it so).
§ See Roche Biochemical Pathways (expasy.org) for the Command and Control algorithm for the operation of a single human cell, and remember that the cell dies immediately without the 24/7/52 backing of the even more complex algorithm of nutrition, supply, and excretion that the whole bodily system (plus Mind) provides.
And I’m afraid helpful robots like Star Wars‘ C3PO aren’t going to happen either, despite enduring Materialist optimism. The more scientists try to reduce human complexity to mechanically reproducible fractions, the more they realise that the lines of program required for a robot to make a cup of tea in a strange kitchen is virtually infinite.
Battalions of autonomous robotic soldiers aren’t going to happen, either. For a start, what would they do when confronted by a man opening and closing half an umbrella between his legs? Or when confronted by a bank of mirrors?
§ Non-autonomous versions may be made, however, although it would be interesting to see how such a technological giant would cope with a smart kid with a slingshot, never mind a group of experienced guerrillas in rough terrain.
Star Trek-style teleportation won’t ever happen, either, given our current understanding of the rules of chemical formation. If one could reduce a human body to its constituent atoms, and then somehow pipe these atoms to a far place, how would the pile of atoms get reconstituted into a human body? Expasy’s unbelievably complex algorithm (see above) refers just to the operation of one single cell, never mind how the cell is constructed in the first place and then cooperates with trillions of others; and never mind the enormous extra complexity of a tissue, an organ, a system or a whole body, able to see and interpret the world ‘out there’ despite not apparently having adequate means to do so (as in Chapter 19 on vision/brain).
For once, my biology teacher would be correct in saying that ‘You are nothing but a kilo of this and hatful of that’, as spewed out at the teleported destination. Your Mind would have very wisely long departed before its monkey-suit was puréed.
And for the same reason, the whole principle of cryogenic storage and revival is complete nonsense. It ain’t going to work. Ever.
Also, we need not fear The Curse of the Clones, as the cloning process generates only the physical body.
§ Dolly the Sheep followed 277 failed attempts. A problem with cloning is that during the process modifications (so far) inexplicably occur within the DNA. So a clone isn’t ‘identical’ and there is a high risk of the cloned beast being a ‘less fit and more disease-prone’ too, according to the Institute of Regenerative Medicine at UCSF.
It is not uncommon for one ‘identical’ human twin to be gay while the other is straight. But Materialist dogma insists that ultimately only (chemical) DNA can account for behavioural and taste differences.
However, D+ does acknowledge the possibility of some sort of as-yet-unknown mental control over genes, their switching, and their significance. Perhaps one day ‘junk’ DNA will be shown to admit mental forces in some way, via its vibrations. I wonder?
The personality is not made via cloning, but enters the body independently, if the Yogic/Esoteric Philosophy is correct, which reason insists it must be. Thus there is no reasonable chance of ‘resurrecting’ dear old Bonzo, I’m afraid; but neither need we fear rampaging hordes of Little Hitlers bred from a single moustache cell in darkest Paraguay.
§ Back in the 1990’s I was startled by a news report claiming that scientists had cloned a human ear, growing it on the back of a mouse. This was a thunderbolt. If true, then all my tentative conclusions were wrong. But I needn’t have been alarmed. It was just another case of irresponsible ‘journalitis’: exaggerating a story to the point of untruth. In fact, the ‘ear’ was manufactured from bovine gristle cells grown onto a biodegradable ear-shaped mould. It was nothing to do with genes and cloning, didn’t involve ‘a human ear’, and didn’t use any human cells at all. So the impression that ‘organ’ cloning had taken place was quite wrong. How could I possibly have got this wrong impression? Only through the dogmatised news media. An awful lot of people still think that that ‘human ear’ was cloned, thanks to what is sometimes called ‘journalistic geno-porn’. The Dogma runs very deep.
Dr Craig Venter, a hero of the human genome project, is convinced that we will soon create Artificial Life. DarwinPlus says ‘artificial nuts!’, if by Artificial Life we mean Life created from raw elemental chemicals alone, according to Materialist ‘origin of life’ dogma, and not some sleight of the test tube involving cytoplasm, chopped-up chromosomes, mitochondria, and other cellular organelles or membranes.
If we’re going to make Life, let’s do the job properly and begin with my biology teacher’s flasks of oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and a block of carbon, along with a few grams of phosphorus, sulphur and whatnot, and traces of copper, selenium, boron, molybdenum, zinc etc, and ‘enough iron to make a small nail’, all available from industrial chemists. Make Life from that, and I’ll believe it. It’s not going to happen, is it?
§ Borel’s ‘law’ of probability claims that if the odds of an event happening are worse than 1 in 1050, then it will simply never happen. (‘Never’ can’t be used in statistics, but we see what he means. Imagine one single chance in ten-followed-by-fifty-zeroes.) Dr Harold Morowitz, former Professor of Biophysics at Yale University, estimated that the probability of the chance formation of the simplest form of living organism known is 1 in 10340,000,000. That figure is so well beyond certain to ‘never happen’ that words cannot begin to describe it. (For example, it is estimated that there are only about 1080 electrons in the whole universe.)
Dr Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist (and Materialist), considered that the probability of a specific human genome self-assembling by accident would be about 1 in 102,000,000,000. It is worth repeating that if something never ‘happened by chance’, but rather ‘happened by intention’, then no odds of any sort are applicable.
We are also not going to see grown-from-chemicals ‘artificial organs’ for transplants, although some sort of replication of tissues may be worked out. How can organs, which are complex and heavily featured, be grown from scratch, without the plan, the ‘form’, the design necessary to build in their features and complexities in the right position, size and sequence? Even the humble nostril is complex and featured, and would require an huge amount of planning to create from scratch… and it’s not even an organ. A liver needs to carry out 500 different functions, and to be able to completely replace itself, error-free, every two years.
We may also safely predict that DNA will gradually lose its mystique as being Life Itself or the Secret of Life, etc. Try Why Us? by Dr James Le Fanu for an account of how recent genetic research has confirmed beyond doubt that DNA is not the sole power in heredity.
§ We might thus predict a win for Dr Sheldrake in his bet with Professor Wolpert: ‘By May 1, 2029, given the genome of a fertilized egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities.’ Wolpert bets ‘yes’. Sheldrake bets ‘no’. The winner will receive a case of fine port. I’m tempted to put half a million on the outcome myself.
We can expect Lamarck’s ideas on evolution to be reconsidered, as more evidence will be found for the ‘100th monkey syndrome’ by impartial and undogmatised observers.
The question is: when a new skill or understanding is shared by more individuals, does there come a quantum tipping point at which the learned item moves via a thought-field, or similar, (that’s where the ‘100th monkey’ comes in) to become common property: ie part of the species’ ‘mindset’? For example, might this sort of thoughtform help to explain the migration of butterflies who have never made one before, or the emergence of millions of cicadas virtually overnight after living underground for thirteen [or seventeen] years?)
§ See Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html.
Maybe Lamarck’s ‘inherited characteristics’ will finally complete Darwin’s own theory (see Chapter 22).
§ Remember ‘I am convinced that natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive, means of modification.’? Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, all editions. Since Darwin’s day DNA has become the focus for the inheritability of characteristics, via random mutation at the genetic level. D+ suggests that Mind must be considered as the ultimate power behind mutation.
If so, the implication is that a gene is a link to information to be used in future constructions, maybe via the resonant ‘tagging’ suggested earlier. We might even predict that the genome will eventually be seen not as an active powerhouse in itself (after all, it is just a dumb chemical), but as a vector via which complex Karmic Law designs a particular physical body. Along with this, I suspect that no single gene or even combination of genes will ever be found which absolutely correlates with a particular behaviour or aptitude in all persons (or other creatures).
§ Every plant and animal, and every fingerprint and voice-print are unique.. so why not every genetic operating system?
The unexplained genetic shuffling encountered during the cloning process (see above) might come in here somehow.
Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now
Eckhart Tolle
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana
after Anthony Oettinger
A little further into the future, D+ predicts that Time will finally be reconsidered, and split into ‘Measuring Time’ and ‘Experienced Time’.
Many of these ideas are pretty controversial, as you will have noticed! Please pass them around your friends for further discussion… Thanks.CG.