translate.google.com attempts to consolidate language. But two different people speaking the same language understand things differently, even though they are reading identical written works.

If everyone shares the same perspectives, then there are very much limited opportunities to discover new relationships.

Diverse interactions spawn greater numbers of Moments of Inspiration.

Ideally, we would each speak a different language and our brains would be able to correlate the vast systems of relationships of all languages and related written works; correction, all works. Living from moment to moment immersed in moments of inspirations.

Perhaps parallel processing of quantum computers will make this possible.

    Thanks for your comments, James. As a practical matter, in order to steer the future at all, let alone intelligently, we need to be able to understand one another and overcome differences. No doubt there are many ways to approach this problem in addition to the ones discussed in my essay.

    Mark, a most excellent essay. You have a facility for penetrating to the rotting roots of our human condition; there are few essays that engage me from beginning to end like yours. Kudos.

    We have a very similar worldview, though my own contribution focuses pretty narrowly on the content of your endnote (10).

    I look forward to more dialogue.

    Best,

    Tom

      Mark,

      your views, and views like yours about "artificial intelligence", are of concern to me. This is because, according to my estimation, you see reality in an invalid light. And as I try to explain in my essay this year, the invalid assumptions underlying (the equations of) physics (though I'm not in any way implying that there is anything invalid about the equations themselves), are major contributors to the attitudes that are destroying our planet home.

      You ask me to explain my view about "what aspect of the nature of reality would prevent the realization of a a machine composed of units which have input-output functions isomorphic to those of neurons in a human brain". As I have tried to explain in my essay, and in my posts to you above, reality is NOT 100% mechanism, and where reality is not mechanism, it is not random. Also, reality is inherently subjective and experiential.

      So the subjects that comprise reality (e.g. particles, molecules, plant cells and other living things) are totally unlike deterministic machines. As I contend in my essay "the subjects that comprise the universe are wild and free, within the context of a mechanism that gives the necessary structure to the freedom".

      As I said, I was impressed by your essay, but I disagreed with the bit that started on page 7 about "artificial intelligence". The essence of where our views differ is in our views about the underlying fundamental nature of reality.

      Cheers,

      Lorraine

      Dear Mark,

      You are certainly right that our inability to talk with and understand each other is a key to resolving most of our problems as a human race, and that the Tower of Babel story signifies just that. Your use of the Bible as an atheist as at least on occasion, good literature is admirable, and right to your point of engaging with "the other side".

      I take the other view, that the Bible tells us the truth about both worldview and good news. I do not think the Bible is infallible, it just gets worldview and good news right - in a way that nothing else does. And the Biblical story is in its main lines historically correct. I think that can be shown by the evidence of reason and fact to be the case. Being in the ranks of this group of scholars, etc., to present the Biblical case is a roller coaster experience, and lots of fun.

      You say on page 2 that "it does not seem that the bulk of evil is the result of purposeless malevolence." You might take a look at www.hawaii.edu on the purposeFUL malevolence all through the 20th century, most of which was not in war time but viciously secular governments destroying their own people (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, et al).

      I argue in my paper (How Shall We Then Live?) that it was specifically the Judeo-Christian West that began to turn around the grinding tyranny and poverty almost everywhere, and to give honor to every human being. Three things in Biblical religion did that: 1. the theme that all men are created equally in the image of God; 2. that God is sovereign over all things, including kings and other potentates (they no longer get a pass because they are big and powerful); and 3. that all human beings are bound by the law of God, to love God and to love each other just like we love ourselves. Seems to me a way of life hard to beat, and one which we will never do on our own, only with the help of God.

      I trace some of the broad steps through Western history leading to the growing freedom of the lower classes, the development of a free-market of ideas leading to universities, and then to science itself. Add to that a limited government for a free people. None of that, I think, could have happened apart from the Biblical culture as it slowly found its way into modernity. It indeed produced modernity.

      Then Christians betrayed themselves and God, rejecting the very science they had founded - for fear that science might disprove the Christian faith. Many Christians opposed reason to revelation, and so made Christianity irrelevant to modern culture which, then under the auspices of secularism was seeking to operate scientifically.

      You point to the collapse of unity among us all, an effect of the Tower of Babel. The essential unity among the Hebrews and Christians was the moral unity generated by the law of God - Decalogue and the Two Great Commandments. People agreed on the difference between right and wrong. When moral consensus collapses, the culture collapses. No more consensus on "how things are done", or on "where are we going?" Precisely the problem of our topic.

      This is a long-winded way of saying that perhaps, as the Tower of Babel story points to the problem of the human race, so God's answer to that problem might just be the real one, the restoration of His law and grace among us.

      Computers can give us tons of information, but I think they are not capable, as you believe, of giving us wisdom. There is a break of kind between information and wisdom.

      Best wishes, Earle

        Lorraine,

        If I may guess what you are getting at, it seems you may not believe that animal behavior can be fully explained in terms of the input-output functions of neurons. It might turn out, for example, that those functions are nondeterministic and the way in which neurons act to control our muscles (such as those of my fingers typing this message) can only be explained in terms of interactions with some unknown entity which we might call "spirit" or some other name. However, this would mean that we could, in principle, observe brain matter behaving in a way that contradicts known physics. Again, this is logically possible, but I expect it will not turn out to be the case.

        Cheers,

        Mark

        Tom, thanks for your comments. I remember from years ago your fascinating work on artificial evolving ecologies - classic stuff. Your paper here is also very interesting. I think it addresses much more than the napkin sketch in my endnote, but I do see the connection. I'll comment on your paper when I've had a chance to reread and think about it a bit.

        best,

        Mark

        Dear Earle,

        Thanks for engaging an unbeliever. At least I'm not an evangelical atheist - I only thought that some people might dismiss me reflexively for quoting the Bible.

        I don't expect computers to give us wisdom, but I do hope they can help us to overcome barriers to communication and understanding, and dispel a great deal of foolishness.

        best reasonable wishes,

        Mark

        Mark,

        I'm not talking about spirits, "entities" or gobbledegook.

        I'm talking a bout a different view of the nature of reality. I'm daring to assume that the models of physics as they stand are NOT the last word on the subject for ever and for all time.

        As I have just posted to the "How Should Humanity Steer the Future?" blog:

        "The physical reality we observe is both dependable and regular. I think that it is NOT an "illusory belief that anything can be represented by a system of physical laws" - surely there is too much evidence of physical laws and the regularity of nature to just throw laws out?

        But reality ALSO involves real creativity i.e. the new.

        I don't mean a physical outcome that just appears on the surface to be new e.g. because of complexity, but underneath surface appearances is actually entirely the result of old pre-existing deterministic law-of-nature rules.

        What I mean by "new" is something truly new: a new law-of-nature rule; a new unpredictable to observers, but non-random, physical outcome; a new injection of information into the universe.

        Where the models of physics are wrong is where physics has assumed that nothing truly new ever happens in the universe; but if something truly new DOES happen, then it is just a purely random outcome.

        As they stand, the models of physics cannot cope with a creative universe."

        Cheers,

        Lorraine

        Still it remains that "a new injection of information into the universe" implies observable behavior of matter which would be inconsistent with known physics. It would be either something that is forbidden to occur, or some deviation from predicted statistics. Either way, it would be observable. Now, you might accept that, and say, after all, perhaps we will observe that. I rather think that we will be able to understand how the brain works, and why we have experience and apparent free will, on the basis of neuron input-output functions which we can understand in terms of biology. I rather expect that we will be able to demonstrate animal-like and human-like artificial intelligence in nonbiological systems. In fact, I expect the day when we can do this is not so far off, mere decades. But I might be wrong. You might be right. I just don't think so.

        best reasonable wishes,

        Mark

        Thanks Mark - Solo critique is tough, but it seems you've mastered it. Your cautious, explanatory style inspires the confidence of a sure-footed guide. By page 3, I'm thinking (unlike Margarita) that it'll be a near perfect essay, one whose flaws, even, are admirable. You end with a hopeful gesture in which the possibility of personal AI assistance figures - something I don't understand, and which I suspect there's no room to explain - but you offer it only as a tentative example, and it succeeds in any case by underlining the sincerity of the gesture. Throughout, your thesis is well supported: our steering capacity is limited by bottlenecks in intersubjective communication and therefore we should steer by addressing those bottlenecks. For me (unlike John), that's a clear enough strategy. And your essay (unlike mine) has no apparent faults. - Mike

        Hi Mark,

        As you know, "quantum mechanics, via decoherence, is constantly injecting new bits of information into the world" (Physicist Seth Lloyd, The Computational Universe, Pages 98 to 100, Information and the Nature of Reality, Cambridge University Press, 2010).

        The nature of reality is such that new information, in the form of physical outcomes with some individually unpredictable parameters (e.g. time, spatial location), is constantly being injected into the universe. This is most clearly seen and studied at the foundations of reality.

        The best that physics can do by way of an explanation is to provide some statistics on these physical outcomes, and to claim that individual physical outcomes are "random". However this disconnection from deterministic behavioural laws-of-nature, this very important generating force of physical outcomes in the universe, is not mentioned in physics models. E.g. physics could call it "the unpredictable physical outcome generator".

        But physics deterministic mindset can't explain the unpredictable parameters of individual physical outcomes, so they pretend that nothing of note is happening. Physics conceals the problem with statistics. So yes, it IS "inconsistent with known physics".

        Cheers,

        Lorraine

        Prediction markets are actually unusually robust to manipulation by people trying to spend money to gain the price results they want. The more such interested parties that are expected to participate, the *more* accurate prices become.

        Lorraine,

        Your quote from Seth Lloyd represents one view of quantum mechanics. It's one I probably agree with, but I just note that it's not the only one. In any case, QM doesn't just allow for randomness, it prescribes particular statistical distributions of outcomes. If particular outcomes, such as say, just those that are needed to explain animal behavior given that more definite neuron input-output functions fail to do so (e.g. because they turn out not to be definite enough), are observed to occur more often than QM predicts, this would contradict known physics, and such a contradiction would, in principle, be observable. So again, I don't know for sure that this won't turn out to be the case, but I don't believe it will.

        best reasonable wishes,

        Mark

        Mike, that's impossible. I'm only running a 4.2. Anyway, I'll review your essay now. - Mark

        Mark,

        I'm sure we must agree to disagree about the nature of reality: you say that reality/the universe is essentially deterministic and that consciousness somehow evolves out of complexity; but I say (e.g. in my essay) that reality/the universe is inherently creative, subjective and experiential. You think everything is a machine, but I don't.

        These differing views about the nature of fundamental reality inevitably lead to differing views about the nature of living subjects and about the potential for "machine evolution".

        Cheers,

        Lorraine

        Lorraine,

        Where did I say the universe is essentially deterministic? We know that it is not, unless you believe in Everett's many worlds; I don't, but that is because we experience quantum randomness (as well as unaccountable classical noise) and the occurrence of events, and I don't find Everett's ontology attractive.

        Where did I say everything is a machine? I would not say that because the word machine has meanings which I do not and would not project onto other things than those that actually are machines (made by humans). But I do think we are unlikely to observe macroscopic (as opposed to micro- or mega-scopic) violations of physics that is by now well supported by tons of evidence.

        best reasonable wishes,

        Mark

        I suppose in some cases that would be true, but if a party is interested in manipulating the outcome of a prediction market, precisely in order to deceive others into placing a bad bet or (equivalently) trusting the untrustworthy or ignoring a real hazard, etc., then it would not be so. Again, I was only trying to explain why the idea hasn't caught on. I think the scenario of manipulation by an interested party is one that immediately occurs to people, no matter if that is realistic or not. But more than that, people probably just don't think the rich are necessarily all that smart.

        Mark,

        I wasn't quoting you, but the words "essentially deterministic" and "everything is a machine" seemed to me to be a good summary of the views you have expressed.

        E.g. "But I do think we are unlikely to observe macroscopic...violations of physics that is by now well supported by tons of evidence." Presumably by "physics" you mean "the deterministic laws of physics". Granted, a macroscopic object like a chair or a ball or a computer will not ever violate the laws of physics e.g. when it comes to space and time parameters. But a living thing can and does creatively move freely in time and space, and I contend that these time and space outcomes are NOT 100% due to deterministic processes going on in the living thing, and not due to deterministic processes outside the living thing, and not due to deterministic processes plus "quantum randomness (as well as unaccountable classical noise)". One problem with any purported "randomness" and "noise" is that living things aren't showing random physical outcomes.

        I contend that, unlike computers, the subjects that comprise the universe (particles, molecules, cells and other living things) are inherently creative, subjective and experiential. And as explained above (Apr. 29, 2014 @ 14:43 GMT), a computer or robot can never experience the information that their component parts represent.

        Cheers,

        Lorraine

        Lorraine,

        Perhaps you should reconsider whether words that I would never say and that I don't agree with are a good summary of the views I have attempted to convey.

        best reasonable wishes,

        Mark