I was in the United States for three and a half weeks. I started out in New York, moved over to NE Pennsylvania, and closed the chapter with more New York. It was a lot of living outside of the Stone Street Monastery. It was a lot of human contact. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of experience.
You'd think a 65 year old would just say something like 'it was nice' and get on with his preparations for death, but you'd be wrong. The reason for this is linked very subtly to the Android operating system. I don't mean the one by Google, I mean the one envisioned by guys like Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and, more recently, Ray Kurzweil. On top of the science, we have guys like Charlie Stross and Verner Venge giving us the futurist view of 'post-singularity' society.
What's this got to do with my summer vacation?
An observation.
An experiment.
AI (artificial intelligence) is all about behavior. Intelligence is the the way a brain responds to decision making and problem solving (a multi-branching decision tree). Decision making is contextual. Dickson and New York cities are contexts. Your living room is a context. If you understand the concept of original mind, you understand the problem of artificial intelligence. If you understand the concept of context sensitivity in language, you understand the problem of human behavior. If you understand the problem of human behavior, you understand the problem of artificial intelligence. The problem with artificial intelligence is this:
we don't fully understand
any of the
above
We all start out with the same bits and pieces, arranged a little differently because of historical context. Some develop into mystics, some into murderers, and the rest lie somewhere in between. The way we see them is the way we have been taught to see them, and for many of us, that doesn't work anymore, so we are conflicted about it. We don't want to be afraid of people because of their skin color or the density of their tattoos and piercings, the language that they speak, or any other marker that tells us they are from another context, but we are. Fear, anger, hatred is the primordial progression of emotional response to out of context markers. It results from our training in dualism.
I:Not I.
Good:Evil
God:Man
Escaping this eternal looping of our psychological defenses is the goal of artificial intelligence proponents of the singularity, the technological singularity, the point at which we reach an event horizon where we can no longer understand or predict the behavior of our creations. The basic premise is this: algorithms will become self-teaching, transcending human intelligence, becoming super intelligent, and will travel beyond the reach of human comprehension.
Some suggested solutions to the problem entail implants: augmented perception, learning, behavior, through the implantation or wearing of devices with direct feedback and feed-forward access to the brain. Secondary benefits to such technology include increased longevity, and even immortality. When your augmentation senses something going awry in your shell, it adjusts it back to acceptable levels. Potential health and behavior problems can be detected, regulated, and maintained. We are the Borg.....
On on hand, heaven on earth, on the other.....
Heaven:Hell
Man:Not Man
One way of seeing augmented Man is through the lens of Trans-humanism, the human transcended by augmentation, a kind of techno-mysticism. You first need to program morals and values into the intelligence by incorporating a fail-safe set of algorithms corresponding to the belief that man is the reason for being of the universe and therefore should be protected from harm at all costs. This way, rogue machines, regardless of their transcendent state, will be prevented from doing anything men would think irrational or immoral. One problem with that is the human-centric notion of free-will. If the algorithms are to be human-like, they're supposed to have it, which means that they are allowed to harm humans as well as other machines. The whole thing is a double-bind: damned if you do, and damned if you don't. The double bind is a well documented trigger for schizophrenia. Draw your own conclusions.....
There is another way to getting to this state. You can come to Steinstrasse and meditate. Just follow your breath and realize that heaven and hell, god and man, good and evil, pretzels and ice cream are all loved, feared, enjoyed, avoided based on psychological reality (a sort of magical state in which you create your own heaven or hell, otherwise known as daily life). The key is finding your Steinstrasse, your psychological reality, the universe which makes you happy and doesn't harm any other sentient being because of its existence. Once you've created yourself, you've only got to avoid extinction. Context is what you allow it to be and what we allow, we teach, so teach the world that one human sitting quietly is trans-human and proto-human and superhuman. When we finally realize that the reality of the singularity is an internal event horizon, a quiet walk across the borders of perception and conventional learning into a world that is free from suffering it's okay if the machines and rocks and pretzels think for themselves. It's the nature of nature.
Which brings me back to New York and Dickson City, my daughter and my son, and Gideon the Great, Grandson of he who sits on Steinstrasse. New York, Dickson, and Herford are studies in contrast. Size, architecture, demographics, infrastructure, even the birds change the context, and yet, if you look at it in the right way, they're all the same thing, which brings us back to nature, which is (if you think about it in the right way) everything. I think it's time for a nap.
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