Journey 11 - ANIMACY AND FREE WILL A typewriter will never turn itself on in the middle of the night and begin clacking out the "Great American Novel." However, a cat will wake itself up in the middle of the night, find a ball b all of yarn, and bat it all around the living room, leaving a tangle of yarn around the legs of chairs. There, in a nutshell, is the difference between all machines and all life. It is odd that the behaviorists, alleged students of behavior, do not seem to have noticed this difference. We know that no real car will ever behave like "The Love Bug" in some Disney movies, partly because we have at least lea st some crude knowledge of how cars work. The great humbug of AI (Artificial Intelligence) arises because most programmers do not become fluent in assembly language, and never learn the physics of a logic gate. It's just a dumb machine, and like any other machine, it does only what we tell it to do. If we don't tell it to do anything, it is just an expensive paperweight. Our ordinary everyday experience is that machines beha ve very differently from living creatures when it comes to Animacy. Animacy. Hollywood writers instinctively instinctively recognize this difference. When they want to show us AI, instead they show us Animacy. Animacy. Herbie the Love Bug starts by itself and goes where it wants, regardless of the operator's inputs. Hal 5000 has to be cajoled, and the crew is nervous about its decisions. If Reductionists want to claim that living creatures are machines, the burden of proof is on them. Our ordinary experience is that machines and living things are very different in behavior. We have to push the buttons on machines. Living things, on the other hand, may initiate action without anything pushing their buttons. The first attribute of Animacy is initiative. When we run a computer program with the same inputs, it always produces the same outputs. This is still true if the program includes a random number g enerator, with the same "seed" number. Given the same environment, cloned life-forms take different actions. Thus, the second attribute of Animacy is choice. A virus may attack a cell immediately, immediately, or it may lie low and hide for years. Don't blame this on quantum mechanics. In any case, the equations of quantum mechanics are deterministic. The third attribute of Animacy is strategy, strategy, such as the strategy of a virus that decides to hide out in some unusual host while it rearranges genes until it can survive some new antibody to it. See Kilboume's book Influenza. Strategy is a combination of purpose and creativity. It is this combination of initiative, choice, and strategy that gives e mpirical content to the empty philosophical term "free will." AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a belief in magic. It is an age-old dream, one found in Pinocchio, the dream of bringing an inanimate object to life with some magic spell. In the case of AI, the "magic spell" is a computer program. AI enthusiasts believe if they can just make the program big enough or smart enough, the computer will suddenly "come to life," like Number-5 in one of those Disney movies ("Short Circuit"). It will never happen. There are no essential differences between computers and other machines. If a computer co mputer can come to life, a car or a screwdriver can also come to life. Ally Sheedy Sheedy says, "I'm a machine, and I'm alive." Well Well then, she should have a serial number
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stamped on her butt. We should be able to take her all apart, put her back together again, and have her “run,” or more exactly, exactly, “live.” I wouldn’t attempt that, Ally Sheedy. Sheedy. It won’t work. work. All living things have Animacy. Animacy. Viruses, bacteria, fungi and plants display Animacy and coherent c oherent behavior without a trace of a nervous system. To To see the free will in a tree, we have to look at the world from a tree's point of view. Study carefully the complex pattern the limbs make against a winter sunset. No two trees are alike. Nor do they sound the same in the wind. Not only are different species different different in the wind, each eac h individual tree of the same species makes its own song. Each tree decides when to turn colors in the fall and when to drop them. The exact patterning of colors is different on identical clones of identical species in identical soil. Therefore, there is choice at work here, but one must have a deep appreciation of the exact details to see it. I give two examples of coherency coherenc y. If we watch bacteria under u nder a microscope, we see all the internal parts jiggling around, doing the dance of life. At cell death, all cease simultaneously. simultaneously. There is no ripple of failure that spreads out from one place or another. Another instance of unexplained coherency comes from the study of Neuro-physiology in higher animals. A certain stimulus causes certain columns of neurons in the cortex to fire. However, there remains an inexplicable leap of faith from that fact to the coherent field of perception. See "The Puzzle of Conscious Experience," by David J. Chalmers, in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, AMERICAN, December 1995, p. 80. Physiology can never jump that gap. No reductionists can explain any living thing in terms of heredity and environment. The truth is that Reductionists have ignored Animacy. Animacy. They haven't explained it away, any more than they have explained away consciousness. Another way of looking at Animacy is in terms of challenge-and-response. Sometimes it is opportunity-and-response. The great historian Arnold Toynbee Toynbee found repeated patterns of challenge-and-response in human affairs, although no one has ever found an example of cause-andeffect in history that could stand up to close scrutiny. scrutiny. This is why I list Arnold Arnold Toynbee as one of the philosophers of the 20th Century. He has laid the foundations for what could be a splendid science of history, history, and the first legitimate science of history, history, one that looks for patterns of o f challenge, and patterns of response, rather than cause and effect. So far, the historians and philosophers of history have totally misunderstood Toynbee. Toynbee. How can Sir Karl Popper put Toynbee among the "historicists" who believe in some deterministic view of history? The truth is just the opposite. Toynbee Toynbee is the first historian who didn't do that, the first to give meaning to free will as it applies to history. In academic philosophy, synonymous with sophistry, sophistry, free will is an empty concept concep t that seems to leave no connection co nnection between antecedent and consequent. Note that this is not true of Toynbee's patterns. There is a connection between antecedent (the problem) and the consequent c onsequent (attempted solution). However, it is not one of cause and effect, for if it was, we could predict it. One can never predict a creative response to a problem, nor can one predict whether it is creative enough. The connection is that of problem and solution. Consider the two contemporary civilizations, on opposite ends of Eurasia in Classical times. In the West, we had the Greco-Roman civilization c ivilization in 4 stages: Mycenaean, classical Greek, Rome, an d
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Byzantium (which always called itself Roman). Homer was the favorite author throughout this space and time (about 3000 years) and chariot racing the favorite sport. In the East, we have classical China, beginning with the marvelous bronzes of the Shang, then the Chou (age of warring states and great philosophers), Han (universal state, like the Roman Empire), T'ang (600 CE to 900 CE) which rose to brilliance just as the Western Western part of the Roman Empire E mpire was sinking into a dark age, and followed by Sung, Ming, Ming, and Manchu (I am leaving out a few). few). The classical Chinese civilization finally came to an end in 1912, but had been decadent for several centuries. The typical lifespan of civilizations is 3000 years, so the Classical Chinese Civilization is exceptional in having a lifespan of 3500 years. And what is the civilization of China today? It is a variation of Western Western civilization, and we find such variants all over the Pacific Rim. When historians ask, "why did we have a Dark Age in the West," West," they should add, "and not in the East?" Both civilizations were about the same age, had the same challenges at the same times from the same barbarians and the same plagues. Both had an absolute dictatorship at about the same time, one that fell to pieces, as government gov ernment and the army became top-heavy top-heav y and insupportable. Both Byzantium and China made creative crea tive responses to these problems, including the Mandarin system of government in China, and Greek fire in Byzantium. The Greeks and Romans never d id solve the problem of lawful lawful succession. Civil war bled Rome white. China, by contrast, was able to absorb wave wav e after wave of invaders from the North and was always able to restore stable government. Give the Emperor all the Earthly treasures and pleasures he could imagine, but leave the government and the tax collecting to the Mandarins, who were so good at it. In the West, West, the Greco-Roman civilization could not re-establish itself after absorbing barbarian invasions. Byzantine society was not very creative. The religious wars over icons lasted cen turies and sapped its strength. In the East, they the y maintained separation between church and state. The Mandarins were followers of Confucius, but the result was social theory, not religion. In most periods, there was some tolerance for a variety of religions, including Taoism, Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, Christianity, Jesuits and Islam. This analysis is my own contribution co ntribution to the once and future science of Toynbeean Toynbeean history, history, the study of patterns in challenge-and-response.
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