Everyone's always talking about artificial intelligence (A.I.). How come no one speaks of artificial biology (A.B)? The Bible says we already have the mind of Christ (a post-biological, and thus quasi-artificial intelligence) ----while the artificial body (post-biology, and thus quasi-artificial biology) is still in the making, is still being formed. What is it?
In a thread here a couple years ago (
Sex and the Origins of Death) I pointed out that the original living organisms were all immortal. I quoted a Phd. biologist (William R. Clark) saying that if given ample resources, and no external hazards, the original living organisms could live forever. Apparently that wasn't good enough. And why would it be? Imagine living thousands of years, building quite a crib, and then suddenly crashing your ride off a cliff and dying. We gotta do something about that. So life did. It traded its immortality for sex and death.
But don't think life stupid. Far from it. In the trade-off for embodied death (through sexually transmitted senescence), life literally conceived a way to live forever and ever ---even if the planet implodes ----by evolving artificial biology to go along with artificial intelligence. That seems pretty smart if you ask me.
Numerous science commentators of late, and not so late, have come to terms with the fact that so-called "cultural evolution," say space-travel, heart-transplants, A.I, logical examinations of space-time reality, and such, create a rather serious problem for the materialist's preferred worldview (i.e., that human thought is a secondary phenomenon of material causation). In a recent thread I quoted Karl Popper explaining why cultural evolution doesn't lend itself to the scientific materialist's chosen worldview.
Popper explains that there are pretty undeniably at least three distinct, independent (to some degree) worlds. The first is the world of material things, rocks, trees, suns, moons, and such. The second is the world of human psychological phenomenon, self-consciousness, sensory perceptions, emotions, and empirical experience in general. And the third is the world of mathematics, logic, philosophy, science, art, etc.,.
As Popper points out, the scientifically minded materialist might like to imply that the second world, human psychology, empirical perception, and such, is merely caused by certain material functions of the brain so that this second world, this psychological phenomenon, can be thought of as being anchored to material causation. And yet, as Popper points out, the third world requires the first two be self-contained and genuinely independent of one another to some degree.
One of my main points about the body-mind problem, is this. Even though World 2 may have emerged from World 1, it must have become, to a considerable extent independent of World 1, for in a critical discussion it must orientate itself on World 3 standards ---say, on logic ---rather than on World 1. If it were only an epiphenomenon of World 1, then our beliefs would all be illusions and on equal terms with other illusions; and this would hold for all "isms", including epiphenomenalism, and the theory of natural selection.
As Popper notes, if our subjective experience, i.e., our self-conscious self, is merely a trick played by material causation, then anything a self-conscious agent chooses to believe, say in the power of logic, or mathematics, etc., is mostly an illusion, so that if that belief in the power of logic, math, etc., allows the self-conscious second world to feed-back on the physical world, transforming it in undeniably profound ways, then the materialist's chosen belief that self-conscious experience is mostly unreal, implies that so too are sky-scrappers, I-phones, and images sent back from Mars by Curiosity or Perseverance.
Part and parcel of Popper's sound logic, and this relates directly to this thread, is the fact that in the same way that world two has to have a real existence free from merely material causation (or else belief in the power of logic and law would be impotent), so too, the third world has to have a real existence free from the first world, and the second world, or else it couldn't prove that the second world is free from mere contingency come from the first world. All three worlds must be real, and able to interact, for Curiosity or Perseverance to be built, sent to Mars, and send back images to be observed by a conscious observer.
Popper's three worlds are very much like a body (world 1, the physical world), a soul (world 2, conscious experience), and spirit (world 3, abstract concepts like logic, and beauty/symmetry). Do you kinda see why for a long time even Popper's own disciples sorta ignored his logic? The body needs the soul, and the soul needs the spirit, if Curiosity or Perseverance are to be anything more than a solipsistic illusion in the mind of a soliloquizing spiritualist with scientific materialists nipping at his heel.
John