Consciousness and God

[ignorantianescia]

Salon features an excerpt from a book by one Amir Aczel: www.salon.com/2014/04/19/science_doesnt_disprove_god_where_richard_dawkins_and_new_atheists_go_wrong/

Advances in paleontology and physical anthropology since the nineteenth century have brought us close to an understanding of how the human species has evolved over many millions of years—from fish to reptiles, to early mammals, to primates, and finally to a hominid that was remarkable seemingly only for its upright gait. This is indeed an accomplishment; however, these advances have been seized upon by New Atheists to explain away the remarkable arc of human history, whereby we became the creators of breathtaking technological and cultural achievement totally unique in nature.

At the 2011 Ciudad de las Ideas conference, I was pitted (together with Dinesh D’Souza and Rabbi David Wolpe) against the evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban, the cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus, and the skeptic Michael Shermer. We were taking part in a debate on whether life has a meaning. My opponents argued that meaning is something that can be created artificially and that in fact a machine can create meaning for itself. Thus, they argued, there is no design or purpose in our universe. “We are all robots,” Robert Kurzban announced.

I argued that we humans have never been able to create consciousness, and that therefore it does not follow that consciousness is likely to just arise on its own in a machine. We can build more and more powerful computers and robots—but these computers and robots will not have free will or self-awareness. The other side maintained that eventually they will. But if we have not ever built a machine that developed consciousness, then how can we claim that life and consciousness and free will can be developed in a lab? And without anyone being able to exhibit how these qualities that make us human come into existence, “scientific atheism” cannot prevail.

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In his book “The Singularity Is Near,” Ray Kurzweil fancifully imagines a future civilization in which computers that have developed a consciousness build even more powerful computers for their own needs. But this scenario is fictional. We have not created even a shadow of consciousness in any machine thus far. Consciousness, symbolic thinking, self-awareness, a sense of beauty, art, and music, and the ability to invent language and pursue science and mathematics—these are all qualities that transcend simple evolution: they may not be absolutely necessary for survival. These attributes of the human mind may well be described as divine: they belong to what is way above the ordinary or the compulsory for survival. The origins and purpose of consciousness and artistic and musical and literary and scientific creativity remain mysterious. Why would evolution alone bring about such developments that appear to have little to do with the survival of an individual or a species?

[jonkon]

The issue has been complicated by Claude Shannon's unfortunate use of the term "information content" to describe the variability of messages possible in a communication system. Thus a light switch has an "information content" of 1 bit (the switch is either "ON" or "OFF"). The confusion arises from the fact that the communication system designer is interested only in the number of possible messages that must be communicated, not in the actual specific message being communicated. Thus a message with a high "information content" (often because of the presence of noise) is not necessarily a "meaningful" message, since the original message may have been corrupted in transmission.

The significance of Shannon's information theory to the concept of "consciousness" is that in a communication system, the "meaning" of a message is imposed external to the communication system and is independent of and forms a higher level of organization to that system. Thus different media (such as CD, paper, or flash drive) can be chosen to communicate the same message, such as the content of the book "War and Peace." The bottom line is that the concept of "consciousness" represents a different and higher level of organization than the physical organization of the human brain, which is also subject to Parminides argument on the nature of "being." Since human "consciousness" is not eternal, its existence requires a still higher level of being which is itself eternal and unchanging.