Raymond Kurzweil discusses the concept of pattern in this excerpt from the last chapter of the new online book Are We Spiritual Machines?
Ray Kurzweil
In their foreword, George Gilder and Jay Richards describe me (as well as John Searle and Thomas Ray) as “philosophical materialists,” a term they define by quoting Carl Sagan’s view of the material world as “all there is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Kurzweil, Searle, and Ray, according to Gilder and Richards, “agree that everything can or at least should be described in terms of chance and impersonal natural law without reference to any sort of transcendent intelligence or mind. To them, ideas are epiphenomena of matter.”
There are many concepts here to respond to. But my overriding reaction is: What’s the problem with the so-called material world? Is the world of matter and energy not profound enough? Is it truly necessary to look beyond the world we encounter to find transcendence?
Where shall I start? How about water? It’s simple enough, but consider the diverse and beautiful ways it manifests itself: the endlessly varying patterns as it cascades past rocks in a stream, then surging chaotically down a waterfall (all viewable from my office window, incidentally); the billowing patterns of clouds in the sky; the arrangement of snow on a mountain; the satisfying design of a single snowflake. Or consider Einstein’s description of the entangled order and disorder in, well, a glass of water (i.e., his thesis on Brownian motion).
As we move into the biological world, consider the intricate dance of spirals of DNA during mitosis. How about the “loveliness” of a tree as it bends in the wind and its leaves churn in a tangled dance? Or the bustling world we see in a microscope? There’s transcendence everywhere.
A comment on the word “transcendence” is in order here. To transcend means to “go beyond,” but this need not compel us to an ornate dualist view that regards transcendent levels of reality (e.g., the spiritual level) to be not of this world. We can “go beyond” the “ordinary” powers of the material world through the power of patterns. Rather than a materialist, I would prefer to consider myself a “patternist.” It’s through the emergent powers of the pattern that we transcend.
Consider the author of this chapter. I am not merely or even principally the material stuff I am made of because the actual particles that comprise me turn over quickly. Most cells in the body are replaced within a few months. Although neurons persist longer, the actual atoms making up the neurons are also rapidly replaced. In the first chapter I made the analogy to water in a stream rushing around rocks. The pattern of water is relatively stable, yet the specific water molecules change in milliseconds. The same holds true for us human beings. It is the immense, indeed transcendent, power of our pattern that persists.
The power of patterns to persist goes beyond explicitly self-replicating systems such as organisms and self-replicating technology. It is the persistence and power of patterns that, quite literally, gives life to the Universe. The pattern is far more important than the material stuff that comprises it.
Random strokes on a canvas are just paint. But when arranged in just the right way, it transcends the material stuff and becomes art. Random notes are just sounds. Sequenced in an “inspired” way, we have music. A pile of components is just an inventory. Ordered in an innovative manner, and perhaps with some software (another pattern), we have the “magic” (i.e., transcendence) of technology.
We can regard the spiritual level as the ultimate in transcendence. In my view, it incorporates all of these, the creations of the natural world such as ourselves, as well as our own creations in the form of human technology, culture, art, and spiritual expression.
Is the world of patterns impersonal? Consider evolution. The “chanceÖimpersonal” swirl of dust and wind gave rise to ever more intelligent, knowledgeable, creative, beautiful, and loving entities, and has done so at an ever accelerating pace. I don’t regard this as an “impersonal” process because I don’t regard the world and all of its attendant mysteries as impersonal. Consider what I wrote in the first chapter, that “technology is evolution by other means.” In other words, technology is a continuation of the evolutionary process that gave rise to the technology creating species in the first place. It is another paradigm shift, a profound one to be sure, changing the focus from DNA-guided evolution to an evolutionary process directed by one its own creations, another level of indirection if you will.
If we put key milestones of both biological and human cultural-technological evolution on a single graph, in which the x-axis (number of years ago) and the y-axis (the paradigm shift time) are both plotted on exponential scales, we find a straight line with biological evolution leading directly to human-directed evolution.
There are many implications of the observation that technology is an evolutionary process, indeed the continuation of the evolutionary process that gave rise to it. It implies that the evolution of technology, like that of biology, accelerates.
It also implies that technology, which is the second half of the evolutionary line above, and the cutting edge of evolution today, is anything but impersonal. Rather, it is the intensely human drama of human competition and innovation that George Gilder writes about (and makes predictions about) so brilliantly.
How about the first half of the line, the story of evolution that started with the swirling dust and water on an obscure planet? The personalness of the biological stage of evolution depends on how we view consciousness. My view is that consciousness, the seat of “personalness,” is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. In other words, there is no scientific test one can postulate that would definitively prove its existence in another entity. We assume that other biological human persons, at least those who are at least acting conscious, are indeed conscious. But this too is an assumption, and this shared human consensus breaks down when we go beyond human experience (e.g., the debate on animal consciousness, and by extension animal rights).
We have no consciousness detector, and any such device that we can imagine proposing will have built in assumptions about which we can debate endlessly. It comes down to the essential difference between objective (i.e., scientific) and subjective (i.e., conscious, personal) reality. Some philosophers then go on to say that because the ultimate issue of consciousness is not a scientific issue (albeit that the more superficial, i.e., the “easy” issues of consciousness as the philosopher David Chalmers describes them, can be amenable to scientific exploration), consciousness is, therefore, an illusion, or at least not a real issue. However, a more reasonable conclusion that one can come to, and indeed my own view, is that precisely because these central issues of reality are not fully resolvable by scientific experiment and argument alone, there is a salient role for philosophy and religion. However, this does not require a world outside the physical world we experience.
The arguments that I do make with regard to consciousness are for the sole purpose of illustrating the vexing and paradoxical (and in my view, therefore, profound) nature of consciousness, how one set of assumptions (i.e., that a copy of my mind file either shares or does not share my consciousness) leads ultimately to an opposite view, and vice versa.
So we could say that the universe—“all that is”—is indeed personal, is “conscious” in some way that we cannot fully comprehend. This is no more unreasonable an assumption or belief than believing that another person is conscious. Personally, I do feel this to be the case. But this does not require me to go beyond the “mere” “material” world and its transcendent patterns. The world that is, is profound enough.
Read the rest of the chapter from Are We Spiritual Machines?
Reposted from KurzweilAI.net