ALI 2018 Plenary Session Panel 2 (July 20th 10:45 am EDT)

10:45 am–12:30 pm: Plenary Session Panel 2 (Location: Meeting Room)
Chair: Peter A. Redpath (Adler-Aquinas Institute/Center for the Study of The Great Ideas)

Complete conference program (subject to change)

Update: Plenary Session video

Speaker: Jeffrey A. Martineau (Vice President, Center for the Study of Digital Life), “Life and Death in the Digital Paradigm”

The West is in a new culture war: humans versus the robots. Put in Gestalt terms, the ground has radically and irrevocably changed and history provides no life rafts. The world that our children, grandchildren, etc., will live in, is pervasive Digital (the dead) systems, designed to replace human thought and action through imitation of the natural powers of the soul in its various forms. This raises questions on a societal scale: Is the human soul itself a system? What is a proper distribution of souls between living creatures and moving machines, and by what causes can this be established? The current teaching is that humans can be understood through speculative mathematics/physics: we can understand the living by studying what is dead; that technology will lead to a cultural evolutionary process where what it means to be human will be radically different (Post-humanism); or that study of the Humanities (sans religion) will teach humans how to properly use, or live with, technology. Each of these fundamentally misunderstands human psychology, or that our perceptions are formed at a young age by the communication “tools” (the ground) we live with, and yet are unaware of – and within which formal education takes place. Each communication technology has “effects” on humans and creates “sensibilities” that have consequences. In the Digital Paradigm, the answers to societal questions have changed, thus our Digital “counter-culture.” What is the counter to viewing humans assystems that can be programmed? A new set of social sciences based upon Aristotle’s conception of the soul, as laid down in On the Soul and Memory and Recollection, as well as his Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics and Politics.

Speaker: Mark Stahlman (President, Center for the Study of Digital Life), “Alchemy and the Robots”

When MIT's Herbert Dreyfus wrote his 1965 "Artificial Intelligence and Alchemy" he was sure he could make fun of the field by suggesting a foolish lead-into-gold attitude for those making sweeping and implausible claims for early AI.  Today, the joke is on him.  Western civilization, along with the East, has long had its alchemists and, in fact, their goals weren't to transform "base metal" but rather to "perfect" humanity.  That "puritan" urge has grown dramatically over the past decades and what appears to many as chaos throughout society has only emboldened those who are committed to a post-human future. Their interest in AI is far more than mere commercial completion or intellectual curiosity.  Many of them intend to take charge of “evolution” -- both personal, biological and cultural -- and, when considering the dangers inherent in AI, their plans need to be honestly considered and comprehensively evaluated.

Speaker: Peter Berkman (Center for the Study of Digital Life), “Mediaeval Grammar & Digital Fantasy: Metamorphoses in Modes of Being, Understanding, and Signifying”

Over the past 20 years, human beings across the world have undergone a drastic perceptual transformation. Digital technology has performed this operation, and as the anesthetic wears off, we find ourselves with reorganized social responsibilities and a new sensory balance (exterior & interior). Marshall McLuhan's Thomist metaphysics is centered around the fact that the formal cause of any artwork whatever is a fictional audience. Any artist's business is to document cultural metamorphoses, which occur in all ages, due to the attention paid to their targets behaviors & attitudes. These transformative shifts, however, may also be made intelligible by 13th century scholastic grammar.

Speaker: Brian Kemple (Center for the Study of Digital Life), “Mediated Disclosures: Human Persons and Their Technological Environments”

What are the relationships between a technological environment and the faculties of the human psyche? How does each influence the other--and to what end? The cognitive psychologies of the 20th and 21st centuries—operating on modern sophistry's presuppositions about the person as reduced to a psychological subjectivity—cannot intelligently answer these questions. Without reasoned distinction of the human powers, distinguished according to a sense of the whole of the human person, the being of the person is subsumed entirely into a category of "who" to the exclusion of an intelligible "what". In contrast, by adopting a semiotically-enriched Thomist perspective which thoroughly explicates the nature of the human psyche, we hope to begin developing the necessary insight to understanding who the person is—and within that, what role is played by our technological environments.

Epigenetics: The Evolution Revolution

Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff at The New York Review of Books.

"Until the mid-1970s, no one suspected that the way in which the DNA was “read” could be altered by environmental factors, or that the nervous systems of people who grew up in stress-free environments would develop differently from those of people who did not. One’s development, it was thought, was guided only by one’s genetic makeup. As a result of epigenesis, a child deprived of nourishment may continue to crave and consume large amounts of food as an adult, even when he or she is being properly nourished, leading to obesity and diabetes. A child who loses a parent or is neglected or abused may have a genetic basis for experiencing anxiety and depression and possibly schizophrenia. Formerly, it had been widely believed that Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms—variation and natural selection—were the only means for introducing such long-lasting changes in brain function, a process that took place over generations. We now know that epigenetic mechanisms can do so as well, within the lifetime of a single person."

#evolution

The Conflict Continues

John Farrell reviews On Faith and Science, by Edward J. Larson and Michael Ruse, at Commonweal.

"The laws of nature in the heavens were one thing, but applying such laws to human beings was something else. And in the third chapter the authors deal with the impact of Newtonian mechanics on the concepts of the mind and soul. Descartes’ separation of an immaterial mind from the mechanics of the human body can be viewed in this light as a sort of pre-emptive strike to protect the unique status of the soul. If so, it was short-lived, as the advent of Darwinian evolution threatened to place everything human under the power of natural selection.

"Here is where the real conflict with faith remains."

Nick Bostrom on 'The Future of Human Evolution'

"Abstract

"Evolutionary development is sometimes thought of as exhibiting an inexorable trend towards higher, more complex, and normatively worthwhile forms of life. This paper explores some dystopian scenarios where freewheeling evolutionary developments, while continuing to produce complex and intelligent forms of organization, lead to the gradual elimination of all forms of being that we care about. We then consider how such catastrophic outcomes could be avoided and argue that under certain conditions the only possible remedy would be a globally coordinated policy to control human evolution by modifying the fitness function of future intelligent life forms."

at his website

(via Joshua Spencer)

#evolution

What is the smallest number of genes that a living organism can get away with?

The Economist reports.

"Partly, the purpose of this minimal-genome project is to understand the core nature of bacterial being, which may even shed light on how the group evolved; and partly it is to create a simple and reliable chassis for the construction of new organisms that could do useful things for humanity, as a contribution to the emerging field of synthetic biology."

Hitler’s World

Timothy Snyder at The New York Review of Books. [link fixed -ed.]

"Nothing can be known about the future, thought Hitler, except the limits of our planet: “the surface area of a precisely measured space.” Ecology was scarcity, and existence meant a struggle for land."

How You Consist of Trillions of Tiny Machines

Tim Flannery reviews

• Life’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable, by Paul G. Falkowski, and
• A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries About the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth, by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink

at The New York Review of Books.

From the Center: Adler on human uniqueness; Concepts in Western Thought series

Recent communications to members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• Mortimer Adler on evolution and human uniqueness
• Books in the Concepts in Western Thought series

Here on the weblog, we've added the Dead Philosophers Society of Holy Apostles College and Seminary to the sidebar blogroll.

GMO U N I

The human genome: a bit of insect, some worm, dash of mushroom. On genetically modified humans http://t.co/iNTR5UMnf3 pic.twitter.com/5N7alTCfN5

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 21, 2015

Charles Darwin’s tragic error: Hitler, evolution, racism and the Holocaust

Adapted from How Could This Happen? Explaining the Holocaust, by Dan McMillan, at Salon.

Dissent of Man

John G. West reviews Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel, and Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, by Rebecca Stott, at the Claremont Review of Books.

"For all of the discussion and debate provoked by his book, he ultimately offers a rather simple, if profound, objection to Darwinism: 'Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability, and in doing so undermines itself.' In other words, if our mind and morals are simply the accidental products of a blind material process like natural selection acting on random genetic mistakes, what confidence can we have in them as routes to truth?

This objection is not new. Indeed, it reaches back to Charles Darwin himself. Darwin published a lengthy tome, The Descent of Man, purporting to prove that his theory of unguided evolution could explain basically everything, including man's mind and morals. Yet in his private writings, he expressed a lingering reservation over the impact of his theory on the trustworthiness of reason. In a letter written in 1881, he disclosed that 'with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?'"

The letter mentioned is to William Graham, July 3, 1881, available at the Darwin Correspondence Project.

The human element

Emily Esfahani Smith reviews The Social Conquest of Earth, by Edward O. Wilson