Two notions that might have a story in 'em

I

"Artificial intelligence" and the limits of Personhood

"Persons" posess minds and in most cases, personalities. The “limitation” of a particular perspective, with a somewhat-clear delineation between self/psyche and “everything else” seems to me an essential quality of a recognizable personhood. A limitless (therefore formless), omnipotent/omniscient AI or Deity or whatever would be entirely different from a human mind. Would such a thing even have a recognizable mind or personality? Could it? A mind that truly encompassed the Universe might in fact be indistinguishable from it. Baruch Spinoza, among others, considered these issues centuries ago. Witness his “heretical” conception of an impersonal God, fascinatingly similar to ideas from the Vedantic Hindu tradition. Perhaps this suggests a basic limit  to how far humans can transform themselves without completely dissolving their existence as persons.

Even a “hive-mind” is a space-time limited construct and process, with a particular vantage point onto a larger reality. Perhaps it is more accurate to describe such a communal organism as representing an agglomeration of individual vantage-points, somehow unified into a higher- but still delimited- order of being.

Post-humans might assume many different forms; cybernetic, bizarrely biological, even grouped together in a Borg-like collective. But if they wished to preserve a distinct personal identity, they would still need to remain beings; embodied (virtually or physically) intelligences with idiosyncratic motivations and feelings about things. Non-human Artificial Intelligences would be created to carry out a particular function,  whereas persons would exist independently of any particular function. 

AI’s might emulate human psychology to a large degree, if it made interacting with them easier (human factors would be as much about mental architecture as about physical design, I imagine). But beyond the particular tasks to which these intelligent Artifacts were applied, would it be necessary or even desirable to imbue them with sentiments, dreams or subjective lives of any kind? Might they instead be motivated only to fulfill their designed purpose and have no inner psychological life beyond that? This would be a sort of complex-yet-mindless intelligence, insect-like. 

Perhaps these Artifacts would develop greater awareness over time, if they were allowed to “mutate” their own mind-programming. But the inclusion of such a mutation-capability might be just as likely, if not more so, to create inefficiencies and performance-deficits and thus be undesirable.

How to create, instead of a clever Artifact, a fully formed “person”, a being for which it is “like” something to be them, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Nagel. This might turn out to require a deliberate effort, rather than being something that is likely to spontaneously arise. What if sentience (as opposed to just intelligence) is about more than just increased speed and complexity? What if it entails the creation of a system with the right kind of complexity--though I don’t know what that would mean in practice. I don’t think anyone does, yet.

What if a stable “embodiment” turns out to be a vital component of any recognizable individual identity? That is not to say that the “embodiment” need be physical in the human sense. Consider Agent Smith from The Matrix. He is a being of pure software, but within his world he inhabits a body, with a defined, unique point of view, and from which he interacts with the perceived “external” reality of the Matrix. He develops emotions, motivations, and an individual awareness, which allows him to "unplug" himself and exist as an independent entity (thus also becoming the antithesis to Neo, who also becomes fully self-aware by unplugging himself from an imposed reality). Even when Agent Smith replicates himself into an army of clones, there is a sense in which they are all “him” and yet each is still a particular, delineated, embodied self-awareness. When in the later films he seeks to enter the “real” world, he must first find a way to imprint the informational patterns that make up his mind into a host body, which then becomes his new embodiment in the outer world.  

Time may ultimately bring answers to some of these questions, but in the meantime it’s a lot of fun to ask them, and in doing so to challenge some of the long established science-fiction tropes around AI and post-humanism.  

II

Magic

The other day I was listening to a radio interview of a history professor, Brian Levack, who has written a book about the history of belief in demonic possession, “The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West.” Strangely, though maybe not surprisingly, many of the callers were more interested in discussing their belief in the actual reality of the demons, themselves. To many of them, illness, misfortune, rebellious teenagers, and of course mental illness were all explainable as manifestations of literal demonic possession. It was as though someone had invented a time-telephone and sent it back in time 400 years to take calls.

At the same time, I have been reading The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Thematically it shares a bit with Harry Potter, in that it's set in modern times and involves a school of magic hidden from the mundane world with its sleeping masses. Otherwise it is quite different in tone, and is completely distinct from J.K. Rowling's world. And it got me thinking.

There have been many discussions about scientific proof or lack thereof with respect to paranormal phenomena. Ritualistic and mythological metaphors are integral to all societies. Many of us though, continue our wishful fixation on excessively literal interpretations of these mythic elements while neglecting the underlying socio-cultural and psychological factors that would help us understand their value in its full cultural context. At the same time “modern” world continues to misunderstand psychological phenomena, often misinterpreting them as evidence of the supernatural or of psychic abilities.

Though the evidence is shaky at best, perhaps there are as-yet unexplained metaphysical forces at work in the universe, beyond the purely subjective realm of the mind. If so, their effects seem to be marginal, highly ambiguous and unreliable. There are always intriguing anecdotes to be found which hint at something more, while rarely offering much which falls outside the realm of alternate explanations.

I think even if there were to be discovered strong evidence of extrasensory abilities or invisible beings made of something other than matter, it would point to a new and fascinating unexplored territory within the natural universe. I strongly doubt on the other hand that such a discovery would lend credence to fundamentalist notions of a supernatural, demon-haunted world based on projections of human fears and folk-beliefs about how to ameliorate the viscissitudes of life. Or at least I sure hope not.  

Imagine, however, a parallel world where things had developed differently. What if early scientists and mathematicians had begun applying their Enlightenment methods to subjects like demonology, astrology and ESP, and had found compelling evidence of some actual effect, alongside their discoveries in chemistry, astronomy, physics, anatomy and so on? After all, there was a time when subjects like chemistry, electricity, mesmerism, radiation and so on seemed so strange as to be magical. What if, as with the spooky but somewhat inexplicable observations of quantum effects, there were equally compelling and inexplicable observations of “magical” effects? What if these effects existed alongside, though obviously somehow separate from, the so-called Laws of Nature? What if the study of these anomalies became a field of serious scholarly study all its own? What if scientists gathered magical lore from around the world in order to study and systematize it, in the same way ethno-botanists gather data on medicinal plants and other organisms whose active ingredients may inspire new classes of pharmaceuticals? What if “magic” was explored and applied like a branch of mathematics, information theory, neuropsychology, linguistics?

Even if a fundamental physical understanding of observed magical effects were lacking, the principles derived from their systematic study could still be applied to create predictable and useful effects (as is often the case with scientific discoveries put to practical use). We know that certain drugs work, and that certain physical priniciples hold true, through observation, study, and replication. We may not fully understand how they work, but we can still reliably make use of them. In a world where magic was a real, reliably documented and applicable physical manifestation of some higher priniciple of the natural universe, the process would be no different. The notion of an "applied science of Magic" might be a fully accepted one.