Theos-Talk Archives (June 2003 Message tt00186)

Thought this a very wise observation of the "Brave New World Order" coming 
into existence around us. (while we sleep through it? :-) Wonder if we will be 
able to cope. Worth thinking about at any rate. 
Lenny

>From the current issue of JCS:

William Irwin Thompson
The Borg or Borges?

It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to 
grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labour to subtract 
it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of 
consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural 
nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation with the help of 
the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the 
humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the 
robotics scientist. This atmospheric inversion from above to below, one 
in which a sky turns into the smog of a thickened air, happened once 
before in the world of knowledge, when Comtian positivism inspired a 
functionalist approach to the study of the sacred. The social scientists 
first said that in order to study the sacred, one had to study how it 
functioned in society; then having contributed to the growth of their 
own academic domain, they more confidently claimed that what humans 
worshipped with the sacred was, in fact, their own society. There simply 
was no such thing as God or the sacred, and so Schools of Divinity began 
to be eclipsed by the elevation of the new towers of the office 
buildings of the Social Sciences. Indeed, as I turn now away from my 
computer screen, I can see outside
my window the William James Building of Social Relations competing for 
domi-nance of the skyline with the Victorian brick Gothic of Harvard's 
Memorial Hall.

This clever move to eliminate the phenomenological reality of human 
con-sciousness as a prelude to the growth of a new robotics industry is 
a very successful scam, for it has helped enormously with the task of 
fund-raising for costly moon shots, such as the Japanese government's 
'Fifth Generation Computer Project' which promised to create an 
autonomously thinking machine in the 1980s. No one seems to talk much 
anymore about the failure of this project, but the gurus of A.I. 
continue to prophesy - as Ray Kurzweil now does - that by 2030, humans 
will be surpassed by machines in cultural evolution.

Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are now at a great 
bifurcation in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil,
Danny Hillis and HansMoravec prophesy that we are at the end of 
the human era, and that 'nanobots' are about to be embedded in our 
bodies until our antique organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by 
a new silicon noosphere of networked computers . . .

Full text: 
http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/WI_Thompson.pdf