Cyberethics

Norbert Wiener

In 1948, Norbert Wiener created the term Cybernetics, applicable to a new technology, which he defined as follows:

The study of control and communication in the animal and the machine

Cybernetics has a lot to do with Robotics and with the use of computers and microprocessors to control and communicate; in other words, to do almost everything we use them for.

But what is being talked about right now, rather than Cybernetics, is Cyberethics: ethical issues related to the use of computers, social networks, and most tools that modern technology puts within our reach.

Roger Penrose versus William Craig

Roger Penrose

I thank Plácido Doménech Espí for drawing my attention to this debate held in 2019 between Roger Penrose and William Craig, entitled The Universe: How did it get here & why are we part of it?

Roger Penrose rose to fame as a cosmologist in 1970 when he proved, with Stephen Hawking, a theorem stating that the application of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to the entire universe requires the existence of at least one singular point in the universe (a point where all the geodesics of the universe meet). In other words, the Big Bang.

In 1989, Penrose became one of the most famous scientific popularizers with The emperor’s new mind, a book with deep philosophical implications. Among other things, he proposed the following question, inspired by Gödel’s theorem: how is it possible that we can prove that a theorem is true, if it cannot be proved mathematically from a reasonable set of axioms? According to Penrose, this would indicate that human intelligence is qualitatively different from computing machines.

In 2004 he published a book of extremely hard popularization, The Road to Reality, which is full of equations, where he proposes a unification of Einstein’s general relativity with quantum mechanics (a theory of quantum gravity). Then came his own cosmological theory, Conformal cyclical cosmology (CCC), according to which the universe did not begin with the Big Bang, which would only be the beginning of the current aeon, but there would be an infinite succession of previous eons, each beginning with a Big Bang and evolving to global heat death, when all that would remain in the entire universe would be photons. At that moment, (no one knows how) the entropy would suddenly drop to a minimum value again, to start a new cycle.

William Craig has proposed the kalam cosmological argument, which can be summarized thus:

1. Whatever begins to exist, has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

William Lane Craig

Craig argues that the Big Bang was the beginning of the existence of the universe, so there must be a cause for that existence: an uncaused Creator, existing without beginning, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, enormously powerful, and omniscient, to be the author of the abstract world. In other word: God.

In the debate, Penrose began by arguing that there are three components of reality: an abstract or Platonic world (mathematics); a physical world (the material world); and a mental world (the world of consciousness). In addition, he points out the existence of three mysteries, which refer to the relationships between these three worlds:

1. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics (Eugene Paul Wigner): Why does the abstract world describe so well the workings of the physical world?
2. The origin of consciousness: How can consciousness arise from the physical world?
3. The mind’s ability to understand the abstract world: Why can we understand mathematics and apply it to describe counterintuitive phenomena?

Craig agreed with Penrose’s analysis, and added this consideration:

The abstract world cannot be the cause of the other two worlds, the physical and the mental, because it has no causal power and cannot make decisions. It is not clear that the physical world is the cause of the mental world: Penrose himself admits that this is a mystery. Can the mental world be the cause of the physical and the abstract worlds? It appears it can: we have the experience that our minds can produce physical changes through human intentionality. Could there not be an omniscient mind who is the author of the physical and the abstract worlds? That would solve the problem of the origin of the three worlds.

To this, Penrose could only reply that he does not like this idea (he declares himself an atheist) and would rather think that the abstract world is primordial, although he does not know how the other two worlds could proceed from the abstract world.

The second part of the discussion dealt with the fine-tuning problem. Craig indicated that there are three solutions to the problem:

1. Universal constants must have the value they have.
2. Our existence in such a fine-tuned universe may be due to chance in a multiverse.
3. Our universe has been designed by a Creator.

Penrose began by denying that fine-tuning is a fact, although he ultimately declared himself agnostic about this question. He proposed his CCC theory as an explanation of the origin of our universe. Craig pointed out that this theory is just another multiverse theory, in time rather than in space, (most multiverses are supposed to exist in space). Penrose, for whom this idea seemed to be new, embraced it happily and asserted that his theory has been experimentally confirmed, an assertion most current cosmologists would not accept.

My conclusion from this debate: Penrose was mostly on the defensive, and he was unable to offer one convincing argument in favor of his atheism.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Science, Faith and Atheism: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

An Evolving Universe: PopulScience in Book Form

CEU Ediciones has published in book form, under the title Un universo en evolución (An evolving universe), a compilation of about a hundred posts published in this blog and its Spanish version, Divulciencia, over nine years, thematically arranged. Currently this book is only available in Spanish. These are the titles of the fifteen chapters:

1. Introduction (3 posts)
2. The beginning (5 posts)
3. The standard cosmological model (9 posts)
4. The fine-tuning problem and the theories of the multiverse (7 posts)
5. The problem of time (7 posts)
6. Life on Earth and on other worlds (3 posts)
7. The evolution of life (7 posts)
8. Man (5 posts)
9. Natural and artificial intelligence (7 posts)
10. Synthetic life and artificial life (3 posts)
11. The future of man (8 posts)
12. The end of man and of the universe (4 posts)
13. Science, faith, and atheism (14 posts)
14. About science in general (17 posts)
15. Conclusion (1 article)

Julio A. Gonzalo

The book starts by a presentation by Javier Pérez Castells, and a prologue by Julio A. Gonzalo. This is a paragraph from the presentation, which has been highlighted on the back cover of the book:

Manuel Alfonseca presents us in this book with a selection of posts from his blogs arranged by topic. The guiding thread is the story of creation. Beginning with the start of the universe (where he expands more, given his experience and knowledge on this subject), going through the origin of life and evolution, ending with anthropological conceptions of the human being. After that, he turns towards the supposed conflict between science and faith, grouping together a set of posts where he answers to this false tirade. Along the way, he stops to deal with the issue of artificial intelligence, the author’s favorite subject, and devotes a good number of chapters to an optimistical look at the future, albeit not forgetting that everything, together with the story of creation, will have an end. The book concludes with a few pertinent reflections on the limits of science, today considered by many as the only source of knowledge, in the exacerbation of what we call scientism.

Most of the posts (about one hundred) that have become part of the book have been previously published on the blogs Divulciencia and PopulScience, although a few are completely new, others have been built from several consecutive original posts or from those that dealt with the same topics, and the rest, those who have passed directly from the blogs to the book, have been updated.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca

The brain and consciousness

Canadian psychologist Barry Beyerstein published an article with the same title as this post, and an additional subheading that indicates that he is opposing extrasensory perception (ESP), telekinesis (TK) and other supposedly paranormal phenomena. However, he takes the opportunity to attack the existence of the human soul and the existence of God (although he never names God), and launchs a confession of faith in the identity of mind and brain (Psychoneural Identity, PNI); i.e., the monist theory, although he does not say whether he prefers the reductionist or the emergentist version of monism. In support of this, he offers the following arguments:

Theories about self-consciousness

Svetlana before the mirror
Painting by Karl Briuliov

As I have said in other posts in this blog, the question of self-consciousness is more philosophical than scientific. In this regard, two great philosophical theories have coexisted since time immemorial:

·         Monism: Everything we can perceive, including consciousness, can be explained in terms of a single component: matter, in the broadest sense of the term, which also includes energy. In turn, monism can be classified into two different theories:

o   Reductionist Monism: It asserts that the entire functioning of the universe has a bottom-up explanation. In other words, if we knew enough about elementary particles and their properties, we could explain everything, including self-consciousness.

o   Emergentist Monism: It asserts that the lower level does not explain everything that happens at the higher level, since there are properties (including self-awareness) that only have a top-down explanation. That is to say, complex systems can have a behavior unpredictable in the bottom-up direction.

The hundredth monkey

The story of the hundredth monkey is a good example of how pseudosciences arise and spread.

Colonies of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) have been studied for years by ethologists. During the 1950s and 1960s, a colony of macaques on the island of Kōjima was carefully studied by a team of Japanese researchers. To make their research easier, the monkeys were fed by the researchers with sweet potatoes and other products, which were left for them on the island’s beach and other places. In 1953, a young monkey discovered that sweet potatoes left on the beach and encrusted with sand were tastier if they were washed in the sea before being eaten. The discovery spread slowly among the macaques in the colony, especially the younger. The oldest, however, did not learn this new behavior.

In 1965, the researcher Masao Kawai published an article recounting the results of 10 years of research with this population of macaques and says the following:

The acquisition of [this] behavior can be divided into two periods: before and after 1958... 1) The first period... of individual propagation... [in which the monkeys that acquired the new behavior did not learn it from their elders, but from individuals juveniles that had learned it before.] 2) The second period... of pre-cultural propagation [in which infant macaques learned it from their parents, as usually occurs in many animals.]

In 1979, Lyall Watson published a book (Lifetide) where he described what had happened on Kōjima as follows (the following is my summary and paraphrase of Watson’s statements):

In 1958, in the monkey population on the island of Kōjima, an unexpected phenomenon occurred. When a certain monkey (say the hundredth monkey) learned the new behavior (washing sweet potatoes in the sea) that behavior suddenly spread to the entire population. Not only that, but it also suddenly spread to other neighboring islands where it had not been detected before. This is so surprising that the Japanese team has not dared to publish all their results.

Watson draws from this the conclusion that the hundredth monkey phenomenon shows that when a certain number of beings learn a new behavior, that behavior passes spontaneously to the entire population, and even jumps outside its geographical limits, becoming racial knowledge. It should be noted that Watson is a supporter of extrasensory perception in man and uses this phenomenon of the hundredth monkey as support for his ideas in that field.

The phenomenon of the hundredth monkey spread like wildfire in environments related to the New Age, in which Watson moves. This phenomenon was used to claim that human beings could prevent a possible catastrophic nuclear war simply by increasing the number of people opposed to it. By crossing a threshold, surely that behavior would spread to the entire world population, and the danger would be averted.

Apparently, none of those who eagerly embraced the hundredth monkey theory and wanted to apply it to man bothered to check Watson’s documentation (five articles published by the Japanese team). In 1985, Ron Amundsen decided to investigate the matter by reading the literature. What he discovered was this (my paraphrase of his article):

The assertion that the Japanese team did not dare to publish all their discoveries is false. All the information is in the articles, especially that by Kawai mentioned above. It is false that in 1958 the conduct of washing sweet potatoes suddenly spread to the entire population. That year only two monkeys learned it. It is obvious that Watson misunderstood Kawai's words mentioned above, pointing out that 1958 marked a change in the mode of behavior transmission, because the infant macaques of the previous years became adults and began to teach it to their children. It is false that this behavior suddenly spread to neighboring islands. It is true that it appeared in some of them, but the cause could be its independent discovery, or the possible crossing of one of the monkeys who knew it from one island to another.

How did Watson answer criticism? He accepted that the hundredth monkey phenomenon was a figment of his imagination, and tried to justify himself by saying that he did not reference the Japanese articles as documentation, but as tools. As Amundsen points out, perhaps being refuted by your own tool is less painful than being refuted by your own documentation. Finally, although Watson admits that his phenomenon did not take place in Kōjima, he claims that it is true.

This is how many pseudosciences arise and spread: everyone accepts what their creators say, without bothering to confirm it. Perhaps soon we may see the emergence of new pseudosciences, whose creator will be ChatGPT and its successors (such as GPT4).

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread about Science in General: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Fads and fallacies in the name of science

Martin Gardner

As I pointed out in the previous post, Martin Gardner published in 1952 a book with the same title as this one. My edition, dated in 1957, contains an updating appendix and a new chapter, making a total of 26 chapters. Each chapter refers to one or more cases of pseudoscience. The book bears the following subtitle:

A study in human gullibility

I am sure that more than one of my readers will be outraged by at least one of Gardner’s selected pseudosciences, because they will not be considered pseudoscience. Like any human activity, the critique of pseudosciences is also debatable. I am not going to give my opinion. I will just summarize Gardner’s pseudosciences, although not all of them, for a few are no longer interesting. Nor will I mention those that have appeared after the publication of Gardner’s book, although I will dedicate other posts to some of these.