We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the unpleasant baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 18 in this series, and the topic is physics and logic. Did God create these, and what follows from that? And is God complex or simple?

God’s complexity

Atheist: We know the universe exists; we don’t know about any God. Occam’s razor says . . . you don’t multiply causes beyond necessity. What could POSSIBLY be more complex than an all knowing, all powerful mind? That’s about as much of a violation of Occam’s Razor as you can get.

Cross Examined Blog: And a related shaving-away maxim, also relevant here, is Hitchens’ Razor, named after Christopher Hitchens: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” Our soft theist makes himself vulnerable to this with declarations of his offended common sense. My own common sense is also offended by some of science’s conclusions, but that’s poor grounding for any conclusion that the scientific consensus is wrong.

Soft Theist: But being “complicated” is an attribute of our world. You can’t apply it to God. A God who is SUBJECT to the limitations of the world He Himself created, such as size, location, . . . complicatedness . . . is not a reasonable concept of God.

Why is it out of bounds to label God complicated or simple? Even if we only look at the supernatural realm, complicatedness must be a thing. And God does enter into our world. Even if you have no place in your theology for God performing miracles, he certainly played a role in our world, having created it.

William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga are Christians, not soft theists like you, but for what it’s worth, they say that God is simple. (I disagree.)

You’re inventing the properties of God, based on nothing.

Did God create physics?

I think your concept of God is a caricature. You automatically assume God is subject to the laws of physics, like some anthropomorphic being WITHIN the universe, instead of an ultimate power that transcends the world He created.

Here again it’s like you’re inventing the properties of a character in a Dungeons & Dragons world. Does it make sense that God would be able to invent the ultimate physics of our universe? On what would that physics be based? You’ll say it’s based on and built on nothing, but how do you know? “Well, we gotta create out of nothing somewhere, right?” isn’t good enough.

This brings to mind a swimmer in a pool who tries to push off from a wall but realizes that they’ve misjudged their distance and have simply pushed against water. Nothing happens. As a swimmer needs a wall if they want to push off, doesn’t God need something from which to create the properties of our universe? Yes, I know lots of theists imagine that God created from nothing, but Genesis 1 doesn’t even claim that, and it may make no sense to imagine God inventing properties in a property-less pre-universe situation.

You’re positing a being that breaks all the laws of physics.

I’m positing a being that created the laws of physics.

Did Walt Disney go on every Disneyland ride for free? Or did he feel obliged to buy a ticket like anyone else? I don’t know—it could have been either way. Or take the video game Civilization. You’re the boss as you decide what everyone does, but you’re constrained by the physics of the game.

Similarly, what are the constraints on a god creating our universe? We’re just making stuff up here, so let’s not imagine this handwaving about God reliably answers any question.

Did God create logic?

When you say that God is not subject to physics and the laws of logic, that’s merely an assertion, based on no evidence, and it opens the gates to a total breakdown of logic. Without evidence, you’re really just “making stuff up.” Your assertion that God would be the only entity not strictly subject to logic, makes no sense, and the only way it could ever make sense would be if you had any evidence for it. As soon as you say God Himself is not subject to logic, then ANYTHING goes!!

NOT AT ALL! The universe has its rules, it’s governed by logic and physics. But God . . . is a different level of reality. I think it’s very logical to say that IF, IF, a Creator of the world exists, then that Creator . . . created logic. If logic and physics existed by themselves first and then a creator came along, who could only operate within those parameters, then that is not a supreme being, but a LESS-THAN-SUPREME being!! To me, your assumption that the limitations of reality apply to an entity that CREATED reality, is NOT a reasonable concept of God. It is not a broad enough perspective on the issue.

God would be a less-than-supreme being if he were constrained by parameters? Okay then—he’s not a supreme being. You seem to imagine that that’s a problem somehow, but you’ve given no evidence for any god, supreme or otherwise.

You’re building your supernatural worldview in a sandbox. Create whatever you want, but don’t imagine that this is grounded on anything or that it’s convincing to others.

If God created logic and wasn’t constrained by any external reality, God could’ve made logic be anything. Show us that God could’ve made 2 + 2 = 9.

Soft theism or warm deism?

So, you’re a theist, not a deist? You think God cares about us?

Yeah, a totally non-caring deistic God doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t see why an intelligence would create a world with all this drama and meaning, on earth, and NOT care about it.

So he cares about us as if we were an ant farm, something to monitor but not assist? You’re treading an odd middle ground, like the Christian, where God cares . . . but not that much.

But this question of how much God cares is unresolved in my mind. If he deliberately made a world with these consequences, why not eliminate most or all of the bad parts like pain, premature death, illness, hunger, and so on. Seen from the other direction, if he didn’t care to tone down these bad features of life, why think that he cares at all?

Next: What good is the soft theist God?

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Image from Christian Holzinger (free-use license)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the unpleasant baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 17 in this series, and the topic is the life force. Is this a mandatory theory that fills gaps that naturalism can’t, or is it unnecessary special pleading?

Life force

Atheist: It may seem to you like there’s some special “spark” that makes life different from non-life, but that’s not really the case. At the molecular level, it’s still just chemistry. Why would some intelligence be required for chemistry to progress to the point of what we call life?

Soft Theist: All I can say is . . . how could it not require it!? To me, it’s axiomatic, it’s obvious. No matter how long it took, consciousness emerging from rocks does not make sense to me, unless there is some conscious intelligence behind that whole process. . . .

Cross Examined Blog: You say, “it’s axiomatic, it’s obvious,” and I think that’s your problem. Lots of things seem obvious from our inexpert standpoint, but when experts have discarded those positions, we must remember that expert opinion trumps novice common sense. Let’s have a bit of humility.

You say that the conventional scientific explanation for consciousness doesn’t make sense to you, but do you have the background in the relevant fields for your intuition to count for anything?

You say that human consciousness can’t exist without a cause, and you solve that problem with a Creator that exists without a cause.

Must we posit a life force?

So, you think there is some sort of life force? But . . . the philosophy of . . . Vitalism . . . has long since been discredited. The theory that . . . life is dependent on some force distinct from chemical or physical forces.

Ahh, I think vitalism is a caricature of what is actually a sound idea. Agreed, that historically vitalism is nonsense; there are not magical forces behind this, that, and everything else. But the basic idea, that living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities, I think, is sound. There is a life force! There is a difference—a PROFOUND difference—between a live creature and a dead one!

A profound difference? Let’s think about that. A live thing is different from a dead thing like a wound-up mechanical clock is different from a wound-down clock. Or: water in a river shapes the river bank, but that stops if the river dries up.

You’ll say that dead clocks can be wound up again, and dry rivers can be restarted with rain, but a dead person is dead. You’re looking for a life force here, but “dead” is a moving target. Thanks to medical advances, people who would have been dead in the past from infection, scurvy, diabetes, cardiac dysrhythmia, and so on aren’t today. Does a life force leave the body when a heart stops and return after CPR and adrenaline? Or is this better explained by saying that quick action ensures that the body’s cells don’t die, and restarting the heart through mechanical action and drugs returns the body to a state where the heart pumps blood to keep those cells healthy?

I don’t see what’s magical about this. When a cell stops getting nutrients, it dies. The process of cell death in this way is well understood, and there’s no “and then the life force goes away” step. At a higher level, the various ways that an organ or a living being can die (such as injury or age) have no need for this idea.

I think the wound-down clock is an effective parallel. Wind it back up again and it does its job, and feed a starving person, and they return to health. A smashed clock is like a body smashed in a car accident. A digital clock with the battery sealed inside is like a person with a finite lifespan. You’d be right to say that we know a lot less about human health than about clocks, but if you want to image a life force, we need to see an argument.

Healing is unexplainable naturally

When I do yardwork and get a scratch on my arm, a few days later, it’s healed. There is some sort of life force.

I’m sorry. You lost me again. How can a well described and understood process, such as healing, be in any way supernatural? An unmeasurable force that animates us!? Science has never found such a force.

I disagree. You CAN measure an organism to determine whether it’s alive or dead. You can’t measure the life force in and of itself, but you can measure its effects, its results, like heartbeat, breathing and so on. So, if you can measure it, doesn’t that prove it exists?

I can listen to a mechanical clock to hear if it’s ticking. Am I detecting the mechanical equivalent of a life force, or can this be explained without that hypothesis?

It’s like gravity. You can’t measure the force of gravity itself, per se, but you can measure its effects and results, and therefore, we know it exists, and is active, even though the force itself, is an invisible, unmeasurable, non-isolatable thing. I’m not making forces up. There is clearly a difference between a live squirrel and a dead one. . . . You would say gravity is measurable. I say life force is measurable also!

We know that gravity is measurable because scientists have measured its force. They’ve also measured Higgs bosons, which are caused by the field that gives things mass. We turn to physicists for information about gravity, and if you want to argue your case for a life force, you must point to the biological consensus.

Imagine a complex domino pattern made of thousands of dominoes. The first domino is knocked over, and the process begins. It’ll eventually run out of upright dominoes, and the process will end. Sometimes, a domino misses its successor, and the process unexpectedly ends. Do we need to imagine a special force to explain this? That a force was in effect while the dominoes were tumbling but left when it stopped? True, human metabolism is more complex and harder to understand than dominoes, but this does nothing to argue for a life force.

Is this grounded in reality?

But if you believe things exist outside the physical laws of the universe, then you can believe anything.

I don’t think that follows at all. Positing a source for nature itself, is to me very reasonable. That doesn’t mean I’m going to believe in ghosts and goblins.

Are ghosts and goblins more fanciful or ridiculous than a Creator? The claims made for a ghost are much more modest than those for a Creator.

But in [the] last 100 years what we’ve learned in biology, genetics, etc. essentially leaves nothing for this supposed life force to do.

Yes, science explains the operation of that life force, but not its existence. Again, that subtle difference atheists never get. All the ingredients needed for life, do not equal . . . life. I think the life force is what makes all these biochemical reactions work. . . .

What life force? Show me this in a biology textbook. Without this, you’re no more credible than the Creationist. With abiogenesis and consciousness, you at least had real topics with open questions.

I, um, hate to give Christian creationists any credit but I heard one make an interesting point. He said no one has ever produced life in a lab, and if a group of scientists get together some day in the future and DO succeed, then what would that prove? . . . that life requires intelligence, to produce it.

Or that they’ve proven a plausible sequence of chemical reactions by which life on earth could’ve begun.

Ha ha. Or, just that you need to get the right ingredients together with a source of energy . . . over time. We haven’t completely mapped out the path from non-life to life yet . . . but we’re pretty close. All you need is basic physics to end up with chemistry, and the right chemistry leads to life . . . to brains . . . to human intelligence. Why would an outside intelligence need to be involved at any point?

What is the God hypothesis good for?

I agree—God is a solution looking for a problem. Has Soft Theism found such a problem, or will it always be at the frontier of science, pretentiously pointing to questions it didn’t uncover and saying, “Well then what about this?”?

I can only answer that by again asking the opposite question—How could [an outside intelligence] not be involved? Or maybe I should say . . . go ahead, prove to me you can create life from inanimate materials.

Prove to you? No, the burden of proof is yours. All you have is, “Science hasn’t explained abiogenesis. Maybe this is where God is hiding!” Yes, maybe a century from now abiogenesis will be the first question about which science throws up its hands and admits that the God hypothesis looks pretty good. But that’s certainly not the way to bet.

You’re being like the Creationists who argue some form of “Science has unanswered questions; therefore, God.” They’ll never stand their ground, saying that if you solve this scientific puzzle, they will reject their faith because that was part of their foundation. Science is never part of their foundation; they just attack things they think are in ours! They have no skin in the game.

Or better yet, prove to me that you can create matter out of nothing. Or show me you can create a law of nature. Or can create a human being with intelligence. I say there is logically an intelligent life force behind all these . . . phenomena . . . an entity commonly referred to, as God.

Create matter out of nothing? Maybe there’s no matter to create. With the zero-energy universe hypothesis, positive and negative energy cancel each other out, leaving a net energy of zero. Matter is part of the positive energy, and negative energy in the form of gravity cancels it out.

This is just a hypothesis at the moment and so doesn’t thoroughly resolve your challenge. But it is a nice reminder that naive intuition at the frontier of science doesn’t count for much.

Next: God’s role in physics and logic

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Image from Marco Verch Professional Photographer (license CC BY 2.0)
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This has been a long post series, but that was expected, since I’ve been responding in depth to a 76-minute video. We’re getting close to the end, and there will be about five more posts.

As I mentioned at the start, “Soft Theism” has been a refreshing change for me, since I had been spending most of my time focused on Fundamentalist/Evangelical arguments. I hope this has been productive for you readers as well.

I’d also like to thank Miklos Jako, whose dialogue we’ve been examining, for participating in the comments. I hope that when this series is over he’ll write a guest post to summarize his conclusions.

This is post 16 in a series (part 1), and the topic this time is consciousness, emergent phenomena, evolution, and the miraculous.

Is it natural or a miracle?

Soft Atheist: I don’t believe in breach-of-nature miracles, but I believe life itself is a miracle. Intelligence itself, consciousness itself, ARE miracles. Awareness of the material world, is of a different nature than that world, even though it emerges from it, and correlates with it.

Cross Examined Blog: Life is a miracle? I might agree with you depending on how you define “miracle.”

Are you saying that there’s something supernatural here? Or that science’s natural explanations of life, intelligence, and consciousness will forever be insufficient? If so, you need to back up these claims.

Atheist: I see no reason to distinguish consciousness from any other evolutionary process or to attribute evolution to anything more than natural causes. Consciousness is the inevitable result of a sufficiently large brain. What’s your evidence that consciousness is something separate from the brain? Consciousness is simply what the brain does.

Well, when you examine the brain, you’re examining chemistry, you’re not really examining consciousness. It seems separate to me. And I can’t accept the adjectives, “simply” or “just” or “merely” . . . in a discussion about consciousness. I think consciousness is an extraordinary reality. I think it IS magical, and may never be satisfactorily explained by science.

Sure—label whatever you want as magical, and maybe you’re right that science won’t ever completely explain consciousness. But you seem to imagine something objectively correct about identifying consciousness as special. Maybe someone else sees life evolving consciousness as likely but the evolution of eukaryotes as magical. And many Christians will tell you how remarkable the Cambrian Explosion was. Is this just a bunch of uninformed opinions, or can this be grounded in something we can all agree on?

To have a convincing argument, you must move beyond “Well, to me this is extraordinary.”

Emergent phenomena

I think that . . . thinking is an emergent phenomenon.

Yes, and I think this explains much that theists insist is unanswered and even unanswerable.

The concept of emergence is easy to understand. You can’t make a snowflake or even an ice crystal with a single water molecule. A single water molecule doesn’t have pH or salinity, and it doesn’t have the property of fluidity.

Or take another example: I’ve mentioned lizard brains before. The lizard doesn’t have a poorly developed sense of humor or wit or irony—it has none at all. Our larger brain doesn’t make us like a lizard, just better; it makes us something different. It’s not just better by degree (same features, just better) but by kind (with new features).

The human brain has about 10¹¹ cells. Some animals have brains ten percent this size. Others, one percent. And they all think. But below some point, thinking doesn’t happen. A single brain cell doesn’t think 10^–11 times as fast; it doesn’t think at all.

Perhaps it’s like artificial intelligence. A calculator is at one extreme; it doesn’t have AI. At the other extreme would be a computer that can reliably pass the Turing Test. At some point it does enough interesting things sufficiently convincingly that we’ll say that it thinks.

No, it doesn’t think with the same mechanism as a brain, but who cares? If you want to say that this computer has artificial intelligence but doesn’t think and can never think, that’s fine. You’ve just added a “gotta use an animal brain” caveat to the definition of “think,” but you’ve won your argument by moving the goalposts.

The role of evolution vs. the miraculous

Mmmm, well, I notice you used the word “phenomenon.” To some extent, you’re acknowledging the amazing nature of thinking and consciousness. I go one step further and regard it as . . . miraculous.

There’s that word again.

Is life on earth now a miracle? I’ll grant that life is pretty marvelous, but this from Richard Dawkins gives the credit to evolution.

The ratio of the huge amount that [evolution] explains (everything about life: its complexity, diversity and illusion of crafted design) divided by the little that it needs to postulate (non-random survival of randomly varying genes through geological time) is gigantic. Never in the field of human comprehension were so many facts explained by assuming so few.

But [thinking and consciousness being miraculous is] not really evidence, just your personal slant.

Right, right, agreed, I can’t show you hard evidence . . . I don’t think it’s a matter of science, but of philosophy, of interpretation . . . approach . . . mindset.

Again, philosophy is your sanctuary. You hide there to avoid having to provide a convincing argument. But if philosophy to you means you needn’t have evidence, or you benefit from it being unfalsifiable, it’s no longer an asset but a refuge. The more it protects you from the necessity of evidence, the more it hurts your argument. “You can’t get me!” is no argument.

Intelligence: from evolution or from another intelligence?

If the world is intelligible, doesn’t that imply an intelligence behind it?

Not if evolution provides a natural answer.

I agree that we don’t find minds without bodies here on earth.

Right, and we don’t find minds without brains either. That might be a good start, proving that a brainless mind can exist.

Yet it makes sense to me that at the level of a Creator, at the level of an ultimate cause of nature and its laws . . . there is a mind.

You said that intelligence must come from intelligence, but this is just another infinite regression. You’re the we-can’t-have-an-infinite-regression guy, remember? Stated another way, why must human intelligence demand a Creator when you’re content with “just cuz” for the Creator?

I don’t see intelligence emerging on its own, from matter.

But there’s a wealth of evidence in paleontology and archaeology that documents the gradual development of intelligence, without the need for magical assistance. Throughout the animal kingdom we have examples of every stage of cognitive development, from simple sensors, to reptilian brains, to our brains. All the antecedents are in place, so I don’t see anywhere in the process where a prior intelligence would be required.

I’m surprised you’re not aware of this, as you seem to have an inquiring mind. Intelligence did not just “appear” as an entity, it’s a demonstrable by-product of evolution, and there is no real evidence to suggest otherwise.

Animal eyes have independently evolved forty times. Intelligence in animals has also happened more than once—for example, the octopus developed its intelligence independently from vertebrate animals. Intelligence is just another example of convergent evolution, which is the independent evolution of similar traits such as wings (bats and birds) or spiky protection (porcupines and hedgehogs).

If intelligence has evolved more than once, maybe it’s not as miraculous as you imagine.

Abiogenesis and consciousness: unexplainable without the supernatural

Well, yes, clearly the emergence of intelligence occurred, incrementally, through evolution, over a vast period of time. But, for me, two transition points demand some intelligence or creative force outside of nature, namely the point where inanimate matter became alive, and the point where living matter became conscious . . . however indeterminate those points may be.

Why these? Why not the development of the Eukaryota domain of life (cells with a nucleus)? Or the Cambrian explosion? Or the genetic bottleneck roughly 70,000 years ago that reduced the number of Homo sapiens to as few as 3000 individuals? You’re being arbitrary, and if you disagree, show us that abiogenesis and consciousness are objectively the most unexplainable and foundational puzzles and therefore the most in need of a supernatural explanation.

I wonder: what would it take for you to remove abiogenesis and consciousness from your list of showstoppers?

Next: must life have a life force?

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Image from McKay Savage (license CC BY 2.0)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the unpleasant baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 15 in this series, and we wrap up the question of whether humans are equivalent to robots or if a spiritual explanation is necessary.

Personality and the spiritual

Soft Theist: If science tells us that all the molecules of our bodies are replaced every seven years, why can’t I murder someone, and then 8 years later claim, “Hey it wasn’t me, it was the other guy!” I cannot make such a claim, because we are more than just a collection of molecules. We have souls, or spirits . . . or . . . personalities, to use a term more acceptable to you.

Cross Examined Blog: Sure, we have personalities. Evolution has programmed us to be social animals and to support other humans. That does nothing to convince me that souls or spirits exist.

Atheist: If my mother, were revealed to be . . . a robot, I wouldn’t love her any less. Because my reasons for loving her are based on her nature, and intelligence, and kindness. Not what she is made of, whether it’s metal, or, some . . . “mystical spirit.”

Oh, I think you would love her less . . . because exactly what you love her for—her nature, intelligence, and kindness—you’d realize, are not genuine, but only programmed responses. As a robot, she wouldn’t REALLY care about you. It would be an illusion!

Would a Kurzweil simulation (discussed in the previous post) be an illusion if it were an accurate representations of a person’s thinking? Did Deep Blue not really beat the human chess champion because it was a computer? Does a calculator not really do accurate math because it doesn’t have an organic brain? Does a dishwasher not really wash dishes because it moves the water and not the dishes?

The evaluation by a person is what matters. What doesn’t matter is whether that person was convinced by synapses or transistors.

Can robots have emotions?

OK . . . yeah. But, I think uniqueness is what it’s all about. I think every person is precious because of their unique qualities and character and thoughts. It doesn’t matter to me that we are just a collection of molecules.

It does to me, because if you define human beings that way, then we ARE . . . JUST sophisticated robots. But, we, are not. We are . . . sentient. We DO have the capacity to feel.

Humans are the ones to judge whether someone or something is indeed feeling an emotion. Poll an audience after seeing WALL-E and ask if the robot feels. (Or the blue people in Avatar or the robot in Bicentennial Man or the love interest in Blade Runner or whatever your favorite intelligent non-human is.)

In the last post, you accused Mr. Atheist of being “severely stunted philosophically.” This conversation makes me wonder if you’re severely stunted emotionally.

Your “just sophisticated robots” label doesn’t matter. Do you have humans you love? Your emotions might be quite complicated, but what pushes your buttons doesn’t have to be. A one-year-old’s big eyes and smile invoke an emotional reaction (love, desire to nurture), and it’s not surprising that a robot with a similar appearance could push the same emotional buttons.

Well, that’s kind of what I was saying, about a person’s subjective, unique makeup.

Yeah, but at the same time, you dismiss the idea of a person’s spirit or soul as theist nonsense, when THAT is really what we’re talking about—personality, character, all the unique aspects of who you are as a human being. I say what emerges from molecules, is a greater reality than the molecules themselves.

Emergent properties is an important idea that we’ll get to next time.

Belief as a social disease

Wouldn’t you say that, historically, superstitious beliefs, traditional religious beliefs, belief in a spirit world . . . have amounted to a . . . social disease?

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I share your contempt there. BUT . . . I think, at least in the scientific community, the pendulum has swung somewhat in the other direction—not acknowledging ANYTHING as real unless it can be measured.

I read an article by [Yale professor David] Gelernter, and he says scientism, or he calls it . . . roboticism, was at first just an intellectual school, but today has become a . . . social disease! That we are dismissing the subjective world, when that world is real and absolutely key to our identities as human beings. The world of our . . . own, fears, and hopes, and loves. Our particular memories, of a garden, or a friend, or a trip. Our states of mind, times of sadness, joy. All these subjective feelings we have, can be experienced by you alone; they ARE . . . just in your mind. But, he says, they DO exist . . . and are important.

(I respond to another article from Gelernter here. It was a rejection of evolution, which is an odd article to come from a computer science professor.)

[Gelernter] says man is only a computer if you ignore everything that distinguishes him from a computer. Unlike computers and robots, we don’t have just information: we have feelings.

So, I agree with his general point. If we devalue our subjective worlds, our emotional worlds, we are denying life.

Machines and humans work differently

This raises an interesting point. People are like computers in some ways (both have memory and perform computation) and unlike them in other ways (such as what they’re made of, what powers them, and serial vs. parallel architecture).

The Soft Theism thesis is that we’re not just molecules or computers. That’s true, but we need to understand an important difference, that when compared with people, machines usually achieve the same goal but with a different route. What I think is most important for our conversation is the same goal rather than the route. I explore it this way in my book Future Hype (2011):

[Airplanes] flirted with animal inspiration in their early years. But flapping-wing airplane failures soon yielded to propeller-driven successes. The most efficient machines usually don’t mimic how humans or animals work. Airplanes don’t fly like birds, and submarines don’t swim like fish. Wagons roll rather than walk, and a recorded voice isn’t replayed through an artificial mouth. A washing machine doesn’t use a washboard, and a dishwasher moves the water and not the dishes. Asking whether a computer can think or wonder is like asking whether a car can trot or gallop—a computer has its own way of operating, which may be quite different from the human approach.

We can approach the question of thinking another way: does a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it make a sound? That depends on how sound is defined. Similarly, whether a computer duplicating a particular human skill is thinking or not depends on how think is defined. You could say that a computer chess champion doesn’t think because it doesn’t operate the way people do. Or you could say that it thinks in its own way because it obviously gets the job done. To take another example, ELIZA was a famous 1965 computer program that played the role of a psychiatrist. It was so convincing that some users earnestly poured out their problems to the imagined intelligence, even though replicating ELIZA is simple enough to be assigned as homework in a college artificial intelligence course. Marvin Minsky considered artificial intelligence “making machines do things that would be considered intelligent if done by people.”

Computers and AI try to copy what humans do, not how they do it. This is no proof, perhaps not even evidence, that AI will never convincingly display feelings and emotions. This undercuts Soft Theism’s claim that naturalistic explanations will always be insufficient and that there must be a spiritual something-or-other at the bottom.

Next time: Intelligence and consciousness: evolution or miracle?

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Image from Possessed Photography (free-use license)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the unpleasant baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 14 in this series, and the question is whether humans are equivalent to robots or if a spiritual explanation is necessary.

Humans as moist robots

Atheist: Just because we can be reduced to molecules in motion, that doesn’t take anything away from our experience as human beings.

Soft Theist: I think it does! Philosophically, It totally sabotages the meaning of life, if we are, in essence . . . just molecules.

Cross Examined Blog: Meaning in life for humans is what humans define it as. If you’re alluding to an objective meaning in life—that is, meaning grounded in something outside humans—then show that such a thing exists. (I respond to William Lane Craig’s confusion about this here.)

The brain is an organic computer. Nothing more. It is matter that processes data. We have the impressions we have because of the processes going on inside of our brains. There’s no need for there to be anything more than that in terms of explaining what we experience, and what our brains are capable of. As to the issue of matter having intelligence . . . yes, it does. I don’t see what the problem is.

The problem is . . . that if human beings are organic computers . . . “nothing more” than complex robots, then we are expendable, and replaceable. But human beings are not expendable. When a father loses a child, he doesn’t go to Best Buy to get a new one!

I agree that humans aren’t expendable, but I’d say that other life forms on earth aren’t expendable, either. And this belief that humans aren’t expendable, though deeply felt, is a shared feeling, not an objective fact. There’s no law in the universe or book in God’s library that says this. There’s no external grounding for this feeling or any other moral principles. Human worth is what we define it as, nothing more. But that’s enough.

Humans as computers

At some point we will create computers that have the same sort of intelligence that we have and they will also be . . . simply matter.

Ray Kurzweil wrote about this in The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999). He predicted a time in the near future when technology will be able to do two things. First, we’ll be able to scan a living brain with sufficient resolution to know the state and interconnections of every neuron. And second, we’ll have a brain simulation that can make sense of this data and continue the simulation in real time. From the standpoint of the simulation, “people” would suddenly wake up in the environment created by the computer. That environment might be like the one they’d been experiencing in their carbon-based bodies or be very different, like a permanent virtual reality simulation. These wouldn’t be clumsy mental caricatures but perfect copies. We see this in the TV series Upload (2020).

In writing my response to this question about humans as robots, I’ve used a few references to TV and film. Popular media is a great place to find speculative ideas about the future. If these ideas did not ring true for us, they wouldn’t be plausible in fiction.

Soft Theism denies humans as computers, but a corollary that comes out of this claim, which I think Soft Theism must also defend, is that computers could never duplicate or be equivalent to humans. I found Kurzweil far too optimistic about when computers will be able to mimic authentic human intelligence, but that’s not the point here. Soft Theism must claim that re-creating (or creating) authentic humans as digital simulations would be impossible, not just twenty years in our future but also twenty million. That sounds unlikely.

Oh man! I think you are way wrong. There is a difference between humans and robots. We are not moist robots. We have feelings; robots do not have feelings! We give birth; robots do not give birth!

Oh, I can see robots replicating themselves someday.

Giving birth is a red herring. If we agree that mammals are conscious, the platypus isn’t excluded just because it comes from eggs.

Real emotions?

Aaaahhh, . . . yeaaah but [these robots] still will not have REAL emotions. They are not really alive.

Let’s judge whether these robots have real emotions based on whether they invoke emotions in the experts in human emotions, humans.

Consider the 2008 film WALL-E, a “computer-animated science fiction romantic comedy” (Wikipedia). The primary thread through the film is a romance between two robots. Ask these expert judges if the emotions are believable and if they trigger an authentic emotional response.

You . . . “believe” that humans are more than organic computers, but, you have no evidence.

I think you are severely stunted, philosophically. You’re so conditioned to the mechanistic mindset of science, you cannot think outside of that box.

Am I also stunted sartorially because I can’t appreciate the emperor’s new finery? Let’s first make sure that what you’re pointing to actually exists, whether it be diaphanous clothes or the uniqueness of human emotions.

Are humans more than molecules?

There is nothing irrational about facing up to the fact that we ARE simply a collection of molecules.

Well, yes, of course, physically that’s what we are, but I think it IS irrational to think that is ALL we are, with no spiritual component. Robots have no hearts, no intrinsic identity. . . . If, a thousand years from now, I had an amazing dog robot, I still couldn’t love him the way I would love an imperfect, but REAL . . . dog.

Yes, it would be irrational to overlook the spiritual side of reality if reality actually had a spiritual side. You must show that.

Your reference to a dog brought to mind the mechanical dog in the film Sleeper (1973) that could do little more than wag its tail and say, “Woof, woof. Hello, I’m Rags.” We’ve come a long way with AI (artificial intelligence) in the fifty years since then. I think your lovable AI-driven dog will exist in another fifty years, but you’re saying it won’t in a thousand years. I strongly doubt that.

Robots as sympathetic characters

I think you overestimate the complexity of human emotions or what our real triggers are. Why was the robot in WALL-E a sympathetic character? He had camera-ish eyes and scooper hands, and he moved with tank tracks instead of legs. But those eyes were big, like a baby’s, he made cute sounds, and he paused in admiration or wonder like we would. Would no one call him lovable by the end of the film? Or even five minutes into the film?

R2D2 in Star Wars was even less anthropomorphic. Little more than a cylinder, I’m sure some people found it lovable. It could convey emotions like excitement or despair with a limited range of movements and whistling sounds.

People convinced by artificial: ELIZA and the Turing Test

AI has a long way to go, but it’s already becoming somewhat indistinguishable from humans. ELIZA was a program created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 that mimicked a Rogerian psychologist—the kind who mostly ask questions to explore the patient’s emotions. He said,

I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with [ELIZA] became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it. Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room.

While people today are more aware of what computers can do and would be more skeptical of an online therapist, AI today is vastly better at holding a conversation and is improving quickly.

The Turing Test is another example of computers pretending to be people. There are many variations of the test, but the general idea is that a human judge converses through a keyboard and screen with two entities, one of which is a person and the other a computer program. The test is run with many different judges, and the program wins if the judges correctly identify the hidden entities no better than chance.

The goal of a Turing-winning program isn’t to be as quick and accurate as possible but as human-like as possible. Today it’s fairly easy to give the program traits that a century ago would have seemed to be quintessentially human such as quick math answers and a deep knowledge in every area of human inquiry. The problem is that being too good would give the program away. Humans make mistakes, defend their bruised egos, type typos, and have other frailties.

If a program that reliably wins a Turing test doesn’t already exist, it can’t be far into the future. But to return to the topic of this post, would such a program think? Is it really intelligent? That’s debatable, but that’s not the point. The point is that it fools humans into thinking it’s human.

Killing a robot

Neither of us feel that killing a human being is the same thing as terminating a robot. The fact that we have that kind of intuitive feeling, is evidence to me that there IS a critical distinction.

Suppose someone had to die, and you had to choose between killing your favorite fictional robot (assume it really existed) and your cranky 80-year-old neighbor whose only interaction with you has been to criticize where you put your trash cans. You’re saying that your intuitions would argue that the neighbor was a human so you’ll terminate your robot without a second thought?

Next time: a little more on whether human brains are equivalent to computers

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Image from Andy Kelly (free-use license)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the unpleasant baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 13 in this series, and the topic is the nonphysical world.

Nonphysical causes

Atheist: But to talk about an “immaterial” cause . . . I have to say I have no idea what an “immaterial” cause would be? I don’t see any magical, non-physical causes working in the world.

Soft Theist: I do . . . If I raise my arm . . . that’s my non-physical . . . will, causing that to happen.

I find that incomprehensible. It’s perfectly evident that the raising of my arm is a physical process. And perfectly evident that physical processes can have only physical causes. If we accept the scientific view of the world, then whatever it is that led to the lifting of my arm, must itself be a physical process, which is explicable in terms of neurochemistry. If something non-physical, causes a physical action, we’d have to overthrow the entire body of scientific knowledge!

See, right there, you’re confirming your scientific presupposition. You literally said, “If we accept the scientific view of the world.” You are presuming a scientific, mechanistic, worldview to begin with!

Cross Examined Blog: And you aren’t? You see an interesting rock on the beach and think that God put that there to brighten your day? You have a car accident and think that God is testing or toughening you? Of course not—when natural explanations are at hand, you accept them without a thought. Natural explanations have steamrollered over supernatural explanations in countless situations without a single example of the reverse.

You want to avoid dismissing the supernatural. Okay, let’s consider the supernatural, but don’t pretend that future mysteries won’t likely be resolved with yet more natural explanations.

The spiritual component of reality

And I am denying that premise, that the physical world is all there is. I say reality has BOTH a physical and spiritual component. And the example of raising my arm illustrates a non-physical root cause, having a physical effect. That doesn’t overthrow the laws of physics, it just points to the limits of the explanatory power of physics.

What’s the opposite of physical? Is it “spiritual,” or is it “nonphysical”? Spiritual things like gods and ghosts are very different from commonplace nonphysical things such as courage or enthusiasm. Lifting your arm might have a nonphysical cause—the mental trigger “my leg itches” or “I hear a mosquito”—but that doesn’t make it supernatural.

So far, supernatural explanations have always failed when confronted by evidence. You seem to be hiding behind science’s uncertainty at its frontier. Your justification is “science hasn’t proven me wrong” rather than “here’s the scientific evidence that shows me right.”

Infinite regress of causes

If I decide to raise my arm, you would say that that was caused by the contraction of certain muscles. But what caused those muscles to contract? And, what caused that cause? At some point you run out of physical causes and have to say the first cause, the root cause, the real cause . . . was something immaterial—my free will. I DECIDED to raise my arm. . . .

And have you avoided the infinite regress problem? If a physical result has a spiritual cause (from a ghostly homunculus or a soul), what caused that? You’ll say that supernatural things are eternal, but again you’d be handwaving them into existence.

I think it is absurd to say something physical is the root cause of my raising my arm. The muscle contraction is only the proximate physical cause, not the root cause . . . And, likewise for the universe, I think you cannot keep on going back to never ending, antecedent, PHYSICAL causes.

But where did the physical energy come from, to cause a person’s brain to fire neurons, to raise his arm?

Well, that’s just it. I don’t think science will ever be able to isolate what it was that started that process. I call it . . . free will. The whole process of course is dependent on a physical matrix, yes, but, I think it’s absurd to claim that the root cause of my lifting my arm was actually some PHYSICAL thing my great-great grandfather did many years ago. I raised my arm, from within myself, very simply, because I . . . decided to.

And that’s why I regard consciousness as miraculous; it’s a non-physical entity that is wondrously able to affect the physical world, not breaking the laws of nature, but using the laws of nature.

It doesn’t break the laws of nature? Then how it is miraculous?

Scientific reductionism?

I don’t think scientific reductionism, adequately explains reality. It doesn’t account . . . for intention. If you examine the molecules of ink on a menu, that gives you no useful understanding of what a menu is. You need to understand the intention of a menu, its purpose.

Remember the example of the calculator display before. Just because you can understand the result at a very low level—as electrons from semiconductors making bits of liquid crystal light or dark—doesn’t mean the value shown in the display doesn’t correctly inform a problem at the human level like a spacecraft maneuver or a medicine dosage. Or take cancer—understanding DNA mutation at the quantum level can inform us about a disease at the human level.

You can try to understand a menu at the ink level, and you’re right that this isn’t the most efficient way, but science and evidence inform the high level as well. I see nothing demanding a god.

If one asks, why is this kettle of water boiling? You might say, because the water has reached a certain temperature. I . . . would say, because I’m making a pot of tea. It’s two different realms, the physical world and the world of intentions. And, we need . . . BOTH to get a valid description of reality.

I’ve heard this analogy—there are some mice living in a piano. And the scientist mouse does some exploring and determines that the wonderful sound comes from a vibrating string. But the philosopher mouse does some more exploring and finds the music really comes from . . . an agent, a piano player . . . Similarly, explaining the universe in purely physical terms is not adequate for me; I find positing an ultimate agent, makes better sense of the world than . . . scientific reductionism

Where does love come from?

Love is, essentially, a certain pattern of electrical activity in our brains.

No, it’s not. That’s what it is physically, but not what it is . . . essentially. That’s not what love actually is!

Imagine a stereotypical middle-school nerd boy who’s experiencing romantic attraction for the first time. He may focus on his physiological changes when near his heart’s desire—elevated pulse, sweaty palms, and so on. Things make more sense as he becomes more experienced with romantic relationships. But as you move to higher levels (from chemistry to biology, physiology, neuroscience, and psychology), why imagine the supernatural is necessary anywhere? Yes, we can understand things at a low level or a high level, but what is left for the supernatural to explain?

But we know that if the physical brain is damaged, like in Alzheimer’s cases, then the behavior of a person will be affected. So, the source of behavior is rooted in the physical brain!

Agreed. I’ve written about Phineas Gage, the railroad worker whose personality changed after a severe brain injury.

Does nonphysical mean supernatural?

Yes, of course, it IS rooted in [the brain], but that fact does not refute the spiritual realities that emerge from the brain. Would you say the friendship between you and your best friend . . . is not real!? It IS real, it’s just not a physical entity.

Yes, it’s real. That doesn’t make it supernatural or spiritual.

I don’t see how you can claim that there are “non-physical things.” Just how do you know that “non-physical” things exist? Friendship is a state of neurons and electrical brain activity in your mind. It “exists” as a mental state. It’s not “non-physical”; it results from your brain, which is physical.

If there were no brains to hold this state then there would be no idea of friendship. The same goes for intention. None of these things would exist without physical brains. They exist as brain neurons and electrical states, which are physical. I do not see your justification for claiming that “non-physical” “things” exist.

Carl Sagan presents an analogy. Someone claims there is a dragon in his garage. You look and see no dragon. He claims, well, he’s an invisible one. And ultimately, Sagan concludes, what’s the difference between an invisible, undetectable in any way, dragon . . . and no dragon at all?

Yeah, I see the point. But I would say the difference is, invisible dragons play little role in our lives, but invisible friendships, ARE critical in our lives, at a very deep level. AND, invisible friendships ARE detectable in many . . . non-scientific ways.

(Which reminds me that invisible gods indistinguishable from nonexistent play little role in our lives.)

If I say a mother loves her child, would you say because it’s invisible, therefore, her love doesn’t exist? Would you say all abstract nouns, like honesty, freedom, curiosity . . . that the ideas that those words represent, don’t really exist!? Aren’t you implicitly acknowledging them as real, by giving them names?

Immaterial math 

Aren’t mathematical concepts immaterial, but, absolutely real? Man didn’t create mathematical concepts; they were already there, to be discovered.

I think this is debated. Society invented the rules of matrix multiplication (to give one example) because it was a useful shorthand. If it hadn’t been useful, it would’ve been defined in a better way or discarded. Vectors, tensors, manifolds, sets, the ∇ operator, and much more were invented for our convenience.

It was true that F = ma was true before Newton’s second law of motion was written, but the equivalence F = ma and the statement of the law are different. Newton applied existing mathematical ideas but also invented new notation and ideas as necessary (for calculus, for example).

I’m not saying that proves God, but I’m responding to your contention that I have no reason to think that non-physical things exist.

The law of averages? Non-physical, but real.

Time? Non-physical. but real.

[You believe in reason, right? Isn’t reason . . . non-physical, but real?]

Does nonphysical mean spiritual?

There are physical things and nonphysical things. But the nonphysical is more than spiritual things; let’s call the remainder abstract. That which is not physical isn’t automatically spiritual. For example, courage and envy aren’t physical, but they’re not spiritual, either. They’re abstract.

Is this the rock on which our conversation has foundered? You seem to be insisting on two categories here, not three.

I think we are chemicals and electricity, and everything is reducible to that.

I disagree, I think chemicals and electricity are a necessary substrate for everything, but we are NOT REDUCIBLE to that. A scientific explanation of why a car works is valuable, but a scientific explanation of what a kiss is . . . is worthless. I think the true essence of our lives is not molecules, but, emotions.

You’ve convinced me—some things are low level (quantum physics) and others are high level (love). This still doesn’t require a god.

Next time: Are human brains computers?

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Image from Bureau of Land Management (license CC BY 2.0)
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