The limits of biology

The limits of biology are practical, rather than theoretical, although some biological problems are so difficult, that it seems unlikely that we’ll be ever able to solve them. Among these problems, I will select the following:

·         The origin of life. The possibility of replicating an experiment is one of the fundamental principles of scientific method, as it is applied in the experimental sciences. No discovery is considered valid until it has been confirmed by an independent team. If an experiment cannot be replicated, it is not considered scientific.

The origin of life took place only once in the history of the Earth. Obviously, it cannot be replicated. Therefore, it is not a scientific fact, but a historical fact. Historic facts are treated in a different way than scientific facts: documents are sought that confirm that the fact did happen and describe how it happened. The credibility of these documents is then estimated. In the case of the origin of life, the documents would be fossil remains, but it’s practically impossible to find them, so it’s very likely that this problem will never be solved.

Conscience, Self-conscience and Artificial Intelligence

Ramón López de Mántaras

In an article published on 3/22/2021, these words are attributed to Josu Bilbao, head of the ICT area of ​​IKERLAN:

In three years, artificial intelligence will make an intelligent dialogue with machines possible.

We have seen many similar predictions since the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was invented over 60 years ago. In most cases (if not all) those predictions have been too optimistic. Is the same going to happen here?

I have consulted with one of the world's leading experts in the field of the automatic analysis of natural language, a technique used to implement the type of applications referred to in the article I am commenting, and he told me this:

It depends on how "intelligent dialogue" is defined. If it is restricted to a specific domain, for example, controlling your home automation systems using Google Home, that can be done now with a success rate above 70%, while ten years ago it was science fiction. If you want to have a philosophical conversation where your interlocutor understands what he is saying, rather than generating texts from a language model, this is too optimistic.

Neurons and free will

In another post in this blog I have described the four theories used by philosophers to try and solve the problem of human mind: What is intelligence? What is consciousness? What is free will? Are we actually free, or are we determined, just like meat machines?

At the end of last year, Javier Pérez Castells published a book where he addresses some of these issues from a scientific and philosophical point of view. Its title (in Spanish) is the same as the title of this post. In particular, chapter 8 of the book describes some of the models with which various scientists and philosophers have tried to explain how we make decisions more complex than those studied by the experiments performed by Libet, Fried and Haynes, which don’t go much further that pressing a button or raising a hand. These models are called two-stage, because they try to explain our decisions assuming that they are made in two phases: the first, more or less random, in which the brain generates the available alternatives, followed by a second phase, when we actually make a decision, after weighing those alternatives.

What is immortality

Pieter van Lint - Allegory of immortality

Immortality is in fashion. Every few weeks, the media publish news or interviews related to this matter. In addition to the one I mentioned in an earlier article, let's look at two others, quite recent:

•         We will live 1000 years (Aubrey de Gray, May 1, 2016).

•         Man is about to attain immortality and artificial intelligence, which will turn him into Homo Deus (Yuval Harari, September 11, 2016).

But first we must define what we mean by immortality; otherwise, we will hardly know what we are talking about. As one reader pointed out in my previous article, living 1000 years is not the same as being immortal. If you live 1000 years and then die, you are not immortal, you have just lived longer. This applies, whatever the duration of life. Living 1000 million years and then dying would not be the same as being immortal.

Those who believe that someday we will be immortal do not put all the eggs in the same basket. In recent years, three different ways have been proposed to achieve immortality:

Determinism versus freedom (2nd part)

Claude Elwood Shannon

Among the arguments used by deterministic neuroscientists to prove that human freedom does not exist, I’ll mention two:

• Brain injuries and mental disorders affect the mind and self-consciousness in various ways, depending on which part of the brain is affected. In the worst case, self-consciousness can be completely lost. Hence they deduce that self-consciousness is an epiphenomenon that can provide some evolutionary advantages, but at bottom is an illusion without objective reality.
• Moreover, mental states of all kinds (even mystical experiences) can be caused by applying electromagnetic stimuli to different parts of the brain. Hence they deduce that mental states depend only on the electrical state of our neurons, while mystical experiences, whatever their origin, are all hallucinatory. I have discussed this in another article.

The dilemma determinism versus freedom

In one of my mystery novels (El Zahir de Quetzalcoatl) the protagonist must solve three riddles, as in the classic fairy tales. The third puzzle consists of three statements that cannot all be true or false. This enigma is what you might call a trilemma.

C.S.Lewis

A famous trilemma (usually called the 3-L) was formulated by C.S.Lewis to justify the divinity of Christ. Assuming that Christ affirmed his own divinity, Lewis posed the following alternatives: either Christ was a Lunatic, or a Liar, or he was the Lord. Of these three statements, only one can be true, as each one excludes the other two.

On the question of human freedom, whose reality is denied by deterministic philosophy, Brigitte Falkenburg proposes another trilemma, a little different, because in this case any two of the three alternatives can be true, but then the third must be false. This is her trilemma:

About consciousness

Mirror Self-Recognition
(Steve Jurvetson, Menlo Park)

One of the most serious difficulties faced by materialists is the problem of consciousness, sometimes called self-awareness, the awareness I have of being myself rather than another person or object, the feeling of being the same individual from my first memory to my death, even though every few years all my atoms are changed, and hence the specific matter which makes up my body.

Since the materialist ideology assumes that only matter (in the broad sense) exists, it adopts a reductionist approach, according to which our self-consciousness must be, by definition, an epiphenomenon, the result of the joint action of our neurons. This is a dogmatic stance, without scientific support, as in the present state of our knowledge neuroscience has not the faintest idea about how self-consciousness is generated.

Are we about to become immortal?

Arthur C. Clarke

In 1965 Arthur C. Clarke published a short story, titled Dial F for Frankenstein, later published in the collection The wind from the sun: stories of the space age. In that story Clarke proposed the following scenario:

When all global telephone systems are connected via geostationary satellites, the number of components of the global system will exceed those in the human brain. As such a system will have access to the information in all the computers connected to the network, we’ll have a very complex system with an extremely high amount of information. If conscience arises automatically from such a system, the computer network, connected by telephone, should be conscious and, being far superior to any human brain, will take control of the Earth.