Magic, Technology and the Self.

[Friedrich]

In Disney’s animated masterpiece “Fantasia” there is a scene in which Mickey Mouse, as the Sorcerer’s helper, is left alone to experiment with magical spells which have the effect of bringing the items around him to life: the brooms begin to sweep on their own, the buckets to fill with water, and so on. Except that the magic goes out of control. Mickey is unable to harness the forces that he has unleashed and everything begins to collapse around him. Just then, the Sorcerer returns, manages to control those magical forces with a wave of his arm and restores order. All of this takes place to the accompaniment of Dukas’ lovely music, “The
Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

This cinematic scene is a fitting metaphor for the plight of Western societies today. Upon Nietzsche’s pronouncement of what had become obvious by then, that God (our Sorcerer) was “dead” and that “You” and “I” had killed Him, Western civilization embarked on the culminating phase of a colossal scientific and technological adventure that has resulted in such marvels as … well, computers and virtual encounters with others in cyberspace.

The environment that many of us now inhabit in the advanced industrialized societies is filled with a seemingly magical new technology. As Arthur C. Clarke once remarked: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” We live in an electronically enchanted garden.

We take so much for granted that would have astonished our grandparents. Like most middle class residents of New York city, for example, I have a large television set, with dozens of cable channels available, a CD player and VHS, with DVD player too, all of which are part of an integrated system. With the touch of a remote control, bewitchingly, my environment comes to life. And my appliances are not particularly new or impressive compared to the things my neighbors have.

During the course of a normal day I have a number of interactions with mechanical devices of one sort or another, often without giving them a second thought. I do my banking with a cash machine named “Daisy” – which is always nice enough to remember my name and to ask how I feel. “She” unfailingly says “good morning” and “have a nice day.” I try to “say” the same to her, even when I am not feeling particularly cheerful. (Daisy is certainly a lot more pleasant than the dour old lady who used to work as a teller at this particular bank branch.)

My last car – named “Anna” for “Anna Karenina” – had a built-in computer to remind me when “she” needed oil and whether I might make it home without stopping for gas. She would flash a pleasant “farewell” on the dashboard as I shut her down for the night.

If anyone got too close to it while I am away or asleep, the automated security system could be programed to deliver a taped message: "You are too close to the car! "For many people (and this is very sad) the most meaningful interactions of the day take place with computers. Ironically, the people around me, this is New York remember, seem to have become less human as the machines have become more so.

Persons grow more distant, relate to others primarily in terms of their professional roles, are more guarded with co-workers than with their devices. They feel threatened by others, according to therapists, but not by their gadgets. Unlike a family member, a television set will always be there.

I expect any day to read in the newspapers that an effort is underway to grant the status of “persons” not only to our animal friends, something which has indeed already been suggested, but also to television sets and computers. Such machines may now have become “man’s [make that persons’] closest friends.” According to the American science fiction novelist Phillip K. Dick: “[We] find ourselves in a world of our making so intricate, so mysterious, that as Stanislas Lem … theorizes, the time may come when, for example, a man may be restrained from raping a sewing machine.” When that moment comes, "one can only hope that the sewing machine will be female and over the age of consent. "

All of this is a way of raising issues that are unique to us, to persons living at this moment in history, but which touch on some of the deepest problems in philosophy. For example, in thinking about personal identity, it is now necessary to ponder the ways in which technology alters the social landscape and, hence, the self placed within that landscape; changes in the forensic and moral concept of a “person” made necessary by technology also result in a new plasticity in the concept of the moral self; and lead to a new awareness of the ways in which the philosophical concept of a person is increasingly different from the biological concept of a human being, giving a new twist to the old issue concerning the relationship between the cerebral and the mental – that is, the mind/body problem.

It has been pointed out by a number of thinkers that we are witnessing an increase in the momentum of the living toward reification, and at the same time there is a reciprocal entry into animation by mechanical devices. Signs of this phenomenon can be observed even in the popular art of our time. It is a recurring theme in sci-fi films, for instance, in the work of directors like Kubrick (“2001, A Space Odyssey”) and Spielberg (“A.I.” 2001).

Several philosophically interesting consequences follow from this: just as many species change their behavior and appearance depending on the environments in which they are placed, so we can expect that persons whose primary interactions with others are mediated by technology will be different from the sorts of persons their ancestors were. Some of these changes will seem desirable and others just the opposite.

We need to think about what these changes are likely to be and how we can make the future, as President Clinton used to say, “our friend and not our enemy.”

I am suggesting that reality is becoming a sort of “space” that is only partly physical, but also electronic and media-saturated, that is to say, a space that we share with non-human entities that we create and which are, silently but steadily, re-creating us. This gives rise to the most intriguing and speculative questions of all – questions that interest scientists and artists as much as philosophers.

We may be arriving at a moment that human beings have yearned for from the beginning of history: the encounter with another entity capable of subjectivity, another “higher” intelligence, leading to the possibility of shared moral meanings and moral growth. Except that it is not God whom we are meaning, not even little green men from outer space, but the things that we have made ourselves and which may yet transcend us.

The environment that we inhabit is indeed now animated, almost magically, by “things” that are no longer merely “things.” We ourselves are becoming more “thing-like,” however, as we alienate and project increasing portions of our humanity to these objects, while the reality that both persons and objects share is becoming more malleable, more plastic, lending the whole of our postmodern society a Disneyworld kind of quality.

I now understand how that poor Sorcerer’s apprentice must have felt.

Will we manage to control these technological forces? Will the
Faustian bargain with technology be deemed worthwhile in the long run? Will all of this innovation result in a new partnership between humans and conscious machines, if there ever are any such machines? Or will machines capable of moral conduct prove to be as flawed as we are?

Let us hope not.

[Impenitent]

"In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! As if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine.
In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees and two cool glasses of milk.

“Today is August 4, 2026,” said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, “in the city of Allendale, California.” It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. “Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.”
Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.

Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft thread of rubber heels. It was raining outside.
The weather box on the front door sang quietly: “Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today…” And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.
Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait the door swung down again.

At eight-thirty the eggs shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and flushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.

Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean.
Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runner, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. They like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.

Ten o’clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.

Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scattering of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick up flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him, a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.
The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.
The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.

Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, “Who goes there? What’s the password?” and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self—protection which bordered on mechanical paranoia.
It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window the shade snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!
The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

Twelve noon.
A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.
The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dong, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and though the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.
For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrow. There, down the tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped into the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.
The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at least realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was there.
It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door the stove was making pancakes which filled the house with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.
The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.

Two o’clock sang a voice.
Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind.

Two-fifteen.
The dog was gone.
In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.

Two thirty-five.
Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played.
But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.
At four o’clock the tables folded like butterflies back though the paneled walls.

Four-thirty.
The nursery walls glowed.
Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in crystal substance. The walls were glass. They looked upon color and fantasy. Hidden fills clocked though well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived. The nursery floor was woven to resemble a crisp, cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors! There was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched weed, mile on mile, and the warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes and water holes.
It was the children’s hour.

Five o’clock. The bath filled with clear hot water.

Six, seven, eight o’clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study a click. In the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar popped out, half an inch of soft gray ash on it, smoking, waiting.

Nine o’clock. A voice spoke from the study ceiling:
“Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?”
The house was silent.
The voice said at last, “Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random.” Quiet music rose to back the voice. “Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite…”

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,

And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done,

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,

If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn

Would scarcely know that we gone.

The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash in its tray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.

At ten o’clock the house began to die.
The wind blew. A falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!
“Fire!” screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating, under the kitchen door., while the voices took it up in chorus: “Fire, fire, fire!”
The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by the heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.
The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the walls, pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.
But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.
The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.
Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes!
And then, reinforcements.
From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with faucet mouths gushing green chemical.
The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.
But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronzeshrapnel on the beams.
The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the clothes that hung there.
The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the first brittle winter ice. And the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.
In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran in circles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanished off toward a distant steaming river…
Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing th etime, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella franctically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud all in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.
The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.
In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which , eaten by fire, started the stove working again,hysterically hissing!
The crash. The attic smashing into the kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.
Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.
Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaper rubble and steam:
“Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…” "-Ray Bradbury

home.earthlink.net/~hiflyer/APbradbury/twcsr.htm

the future is closer than you think…

-Imp

[xanderman]

What will the machine consciousness think of its Demiurge? Will it see us, flawed as we are and love us? Or might it judge us harshly for our mistakes and human failings?

One of the things that fascinates me about the idea of machine consciousness is the type of communications that machines would have. Information sharing would be extremely rapid. Machines would not suffer from the same misunderstands that happen when people try to communicate.

Could a machine consciousness understand individuality as we do?

[Tetchen]

One of the things that fascinates me about the idea of machine consciousness is the type of communications that machines would have. Information sharing would be extremely rapid. Machines would not suffer from the same misunderstands that happen when people try to communicate.

You seem to omit one crucial factor - in order to form an understanding of simple mistakes a conscious beind must first see its own. If all machines were made to be perfect, then they would be asked by the creator to ignore our faults, and get on with the job in hand. What purpose would a machine consciousness serve other than to slow its own progress?