Humanists of the world gather up!

Hi Steven, last year I read a book by Bas Haring, it's called The Iron Will. Bas Haring is a philosopher specialized in evolution theory and in artificial intelligence. He asks the same questions you do and tries to answer them of course. I don't think it's available in English, it's a very funny and interesting book. He is also known for making philosophy understandable for young people and basically for everyone.

Anyway, about this book. The fun thing is he asks himself if robots and computers can be like man or can be better than man (if made by man), can be considered alive, etc. I believe he starts of by turning it around and looking at animals as 'machines' and he looks at behaviour and how we are programmed to survive and what free will actually is. How free is free will?

He discibes how we can program a computer program, the way we are programmed and we behave. He illustrates this very well btw by really writing down how we can easily make a screen saver with a fish and a shark and how we can improve the program in such a way that the fish will escape from the shark and the shark tries to catch the fish. While this is a computer program, we will soon say the fish is scared or the shark wants a fish, and other human behaviour expressions.

He also asks himself what 'alive' is and he says a living being can reproduce itself. Now here is where I have questions because i thought the definition of a living being was that it can grow (so reproduce cells). But he takes his definition and says that if a species can reproduce then computer programs or robots are alive if they are programmed to make new robots or new computer programmes.

He also talks about human things like fear of death, how we try to survive and how a robot designed to survive is 'afraid to die' and responds to that exactly the same. He also talks about consciousness, with animals, humans, and yes artificial consciousness.

I'm sorry for this messy post, I just quickly wrote down some things I remembered from the book. Perhaps I should write a better post about it soon when I have time, or at least give you a translation of the content of the book (or the chapter titles to give an idea).

My opinion? Well, I just feel more comfy with things in my life such as personal identity, love, certain experiences and some feeling of spirituality, and other things that seem just so human to me, but I'm careful with saying that these feelings can't be produced artificially. I really don't know. I don't see why not but I do have a sense of what I would call then 'the human particle'.

Thanks for your interesting input.

Seems like an interesting book! I'm very deep into physics at the moment, but as soon as I give that a rest (which may be never, but anyway), I'll likely delve into some philosophy books.

I pretty much agree you here:



Although I've never been comfortable with the concept of 'spirituality', at least not in an external sense, I guess it's something deeply ingrained in human consciousness: the idea of 'the self' being more than just the sum of our parts. It's very hard to come to terms with the idea that we are only made from matter and force particles (even if intricately complex in structure) where all emotions, experiences and thoughts are described by the positions, velocities and functions of our constituents. Even I dislike this notion; but comfort of thought shouldn't be indicative of fact. So I remain agnostic but stubbornly practical about it.

It's true that philosophy crops up in physics, it's pretty much an inevitable result of asking the Big Questions of existence and fundamental reality. But I'm far more interested in the physics side of science rather than the philosophical side... for now (even though I still find a lot of interest in philosophy). Also, I've very little interest in anything wishy-washy and too speculative (that is speculations based on unverifiable -especially even in principle- assumptions about "spirituality", so I doubt I'll be reading about Buddhism any time soon.... and even if that's a horribly skewed description of Buddhism, it just doesn't interest me at this point).

Though you can sometimes ignore philosophy depending on what it is you want to describe. You don't need to delve in philosophy to explain why and calculate how a massive object experiences an inverse square law of gravity the further it travels from another massive object: all you need is numbers that come with axioms (which are perhaps nearing an explanation through M-theory/string theory).

Simply put, Buddhism has nothing to say about what happens to nature at the Planck scale, or indeed hold a quantum description of gravity, which is nothing against Buddhism, I'm sure it has constructed various paths leading out of philosophical quagmires (or maybe not, I don't know), but rather it's specifically why it holds no interest to me in describing nature. That's best left to physics, and for now that is what piques my interest. Thus, I'll be reaching for the physics book every time!