The Materialism of Limited Toolset

I make a point of always trying to listed on the EconTalk podcast each week -- a venue in which George Mason University economics professor Russ Roberts conducts a roughly hour-long interview with an author or academic about some topic related to economics. A couple weeks ago, the guest was Robin Hanson, also an economics professor at GMU, who was talking about the "technological singularity" which could result from perfecting the technique of "porting" copies of humans into computers. Usually the topic is much more down-to-earth, but these kinds of speculations can be interesting to play with, and there were a couple of things which really struck me listening to the interview with Hanson, which ran to some 90 minutes.

Hanson's basic contention is that the next big technological leap that will change the face of the world economy will be the ability to create a working copy of a human by "porting" that person's brain into a computer. He argues that this could come much sooner than the ability to create an "artificial intelligence" from scratch, because it doesn't require knowing how intelligence works -- you simply create an emulation program on a really powerful computer, and then do a scan of the brain which picks up the current state of every part of it and how those parts interact. (There's a wikipedia article on the concept, called "whole brain emulation" here.) Hanson thinks this would create an effectively unlimited supply of what are, functionally, human beings, though they may look like computer programs or robots, and that this would fundamentally change the economy by creating an effectively infinite supply of labor.

Let's leave all that aside for a moment, because what fascinates me here is something which Roberts, a practicing Jew, homed in on right away: Why should we believe that the sum and total of what you can physically scan in the brain is all there is to know about a person? Why shouldn't we think that there's something else to the "mind" than just the parts of the brain and their current state? Couldn't there be some kind of will which is not materially detectable and is what is causing the brain to act the way it is?

(Or to use the cyber-punk terminology which seems more appropriate with this topic: How do we know there's not a ghost in the machine?)

Hanson's answer is as follows (this section starts around minute 32 of the podcast):

"I have a physics background, and by the time that you're done with physics that should be well knocked into you, that, you know, certainly most top scientists, if you ask them a survey question will say, 'Yeah, that's it.' There really isn't room for much else. Sorry. It's not like it's an open question here. Physics has a pretty complete picture of what's in the world around us. We've probed every nook and cranny, and we only ever keep finding the same damn stuff.

We have enormous progress on seeing the stuff our world is made of. Almost everything around you is the same atoms, the same protons, electrons, the rare neutrino that flies around. And that's pretty much it. You have to get pretty far off to see some of the strange materials and things that physicists sometimes probe. Physicists have to make these enormous machines and create these very alien environments in order to find new stuff to study because they've so well studied the material around us. The things our world is made out of are really, really well established. How it combines together in interesting ways gets complicated and then we don't get it, but the stuff that it's made out of, we get.

Your head is made out of chemicals. We've never seen anything else. It's always theoretically possible that when something's really complicated and you don't know how to predict the complexity from the parts, you could say, 'Well therefore, it could be this whole is different from the parts, because it's too difficult to predict.'
...
We should separate two very different issues here. One is technological understanding and knowing how things work and how to make things, and the other is knowing what the world is made of. So, I make this very strong and confident claim: We know what the world is made of, and we know what pieces they are and how they interact at a fine grain. But at higher levels of organization, we don't know how to make other things like, even, photosynthesis in cells. We don't know how to make a photosynthesis machine. You could take your cell phone out of your pocket and take it apart and you wouldn't know how to make a phone like that.... We don't know how it works, but we're pretty sure what it's made out of."

Now, this line of thinking seems fairly familiar to me from talking with materialist/atheists of a scientific bent: We have all these great scientific tools, and all they've ever detected is matter and energy, never a "will" or a "beautiful" or a "soul", and so therefore it's pretty clear that when we talk about our minds we're really talking about our brains and there just isn't anything there except chemicals and electricity.

However, it seems to me that this presents a rather obvious blind spot. We, as human persons, experience all sorts of things which would seem to be evidence of having a will which decides things in a non-deterministic fashion. We also respond to ideas such as "beautiful" or "justice" or "good" in ways that would suggest that there is something there that we're talking about.

When we say, "Physicists have done all this work, and all they've ever found is matter and energy," you are really saying, "Given the tools and methodology physicists use, all they are able to detect is matter and energy." But I'm not clear how getting from that to, "Therefore there is nothing other than matter and energy," is anything other than an assumption.

Is there any valid reason why we should accept the jump from, "Tools that scientists use to detect things can only detect the existence of material things," to "Only material things exist"?

This seems particularly troublesome given that the project here is supposedly to create an emulation program which can be given a brain scan and then act like an independent human. If our experience of being human is that there is something in the driver seat, something which decides what is beautiful or what is right or who to marry or whether we want rice pudding for lunch today, then unless there is some active, non-deterministic thing within the brain which can be measured by this scan, then what you get is going to be, for lack of a better word, dead.

Availability Replaces Ownership

I bought a DVD the other day, something which was mildly notable in that I almost never buy any DVDs anymore. Once upon a time I had a movie library instinct which worked on nearly the same scale as my book library instinct. I had a steadily growing collecting of VHS and later DVDs of the sort of movies (many of them either foreign or obscure) that I liked and yet could never find on the shelves of the local Blockbuster or Hollywood Video.

What initially stalled the growth of my movie library was the lack of time for watching non-kid-suitable movies which afflicts many tired young parents, but over the last couple years we've gradually reacquired our evening leisure time (though sometimes only at the expense of many tears when 8pm rolls around and the monkeys are marched upstairs) and started to watch movies or TV shows on DVD 1-2 nights a week. And yet now we almost never buy movies, and the ones we do have are sealed up in boxes in the garage.

The difference is Netflix.

Since Netflix has practically every movie on DVD available on three days notice, it's become very easy to overcome my library building urge when it comes to movies. In essence, having access to Netflix becomes a substitute for owning the movie, and so the only movies I've picked up in the last several years have been movies that we'd be likely to want to watch all the time (some kids movies, and a few movies that we often feel like crashing with when tired and stressed.)

This strikes me as an interesting example of how a community resource can replace the need for people to own things individually. No one has restricted my ability to own movies, but having been provided (at a fairly nominal monthly cost) with a resource that replaces (and expands on) the benefits of building a movie library, I simply have no desire any more. For those who worry greatly about the impact to society and the environment of everyone wanting to own more things, Netflix is perhaps a good example of the sort of thing which declutters the world while actually pleasing people more.

The challenge is, many of the suggestions for reducing consumption which are pressed upon us are significantly inferior to the more consumption heavy alternative. Public transit is all very well, but for many of us it simply doesn't go where we want to go when we want to go there or is in fact more expensive in absolute terms than driving. One may appreciate the virtues of the old urban neighborhood with everything near by, but not enough to want to cram a family of six into a small flat. Etc.

But if one can come up with a collective resource which actually provides a better experience than personal ownership, people will quite happily jump aboard.

I find it had to imagine ever dropping my book acquisition instinct, but I imagine that if I had truly easy access to a library large enough or fluid enough that I could reliably find nearly any book that I wanted in it, I would drastically reduce my book buying activities. (As it stands, our local public libray is mostly only useful for children's books, very basic non fiction needs, and fairly common or best-selling fiction.)