=1 "Are thinking machines necessary?"
 |
 |
|
Are thinking machines necessary?
by the editors
The cybernetic revolution which started in the 1950's promises to be the most critical revolution in human history for our so-called human values.
Up to now human inventiveness was directed toward augmenting his muscular force or the speed of his travel, and contributed only indirectly to his social or cultural evolution.
Notable exceptions were the inventions of writing and printing which helped him to conserve his cultural acquisitions and distribute them through time and space. Both were relatively recent, and in their quiet way basically revolutionary, though at the time of their invention nobody understood that they were necessary or the bearers of a great change.
So when the computers came few men felt that they could supplement man's weakest capacity, mathematical logic, or realized that more even than the invention of the wheel or the sailing ship, they would make him master of the universe, that from now on there would be no biological limits to his brain power.
When man started to make artificial teeth for himself in the form of a stone axe, he liberated himself from the necessity of carrying cumbrous fangs in his mouth, and thus contributed indirectly to the development of his brain. (The big chewing muscles of the apes are anchored on top of their skull. So in their absence man's skull could expand.)
How proud he had been to be man, the thinker! As he supposed, the only one in the universe besides God.
Now, just at the point when his weakness in thinking and his overcapacity in doing reach the levels of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents, with seeming spontaneity, the computer, which enables him to deal with the magnitudes of a complex planetary society.
With the birth of cybernetics man automatically acquires a new dimension, a new kind of thinking, the massive control of huge data accumulations, the decision-making capacity for handling large-scale systems with many complex and variable factors like a defense department or a systems set-up for reaching the moon – things he could not do before, things he handled up to now by instinct, by flair, or perhaps by intuition, i.e. at best in a vague or haphazard manner.
If the domestication of the horse, the invention of the chariot or the telescope, each brought about a new age, a new man, the effect of the computer will be more far-reaching than all previous inventions combined.
Now man has a real brain companion, a mate, a mentor, an initiator, a slave for the conquest of kingdoms he didn't even know existed.
Now, perhaps, will we realize that our capacity for logical thinking is not the only or the best or the quickest way to reality, to consciousness or bliss. Perhaps there are higher faculties latent and unused in us, which when used would put man again above the computer, in a separate class, apart, in a new kingdom where he will again be sole sovereign.
Perhaps when we have fully traced out the step-by-step advance of a logical mind we will discover intuitive mind. And when we have finished the final programming of the total exploration of matter for the ultimate computer, we will be able to advance to the total exploration of pure consciousness.
Perhaps when we relegate our now almost exclusive exploration of the physical world to the computerized laboratories of the future, we will be able to meditate again on truly immortal things which the computer can not measure or explore.
Perhaps when we relegate the storage of data to the computers we will discover that real knowledge is more than data, not data at all in fact, but a deep identification of the knower and the known.
Perhaps when we leave the computing of numerical and mathematical values to the computer we will rediscover the values of life and love.
Perhaps then our mind, liberated from slavery to mechanical thought, will discover higher regions of imagination and freer ways of thinking, and will learn not only a better appreciation of art, poetry and music but also the more subtle thought processes of the mystic and yogi.
Perhaps we will discover new levels of consciousness above the thinking mind. Instead of saying “cogito ergo sum”, we will say: “I am that I am. I am the salt of the earth. I am Being, Consciousness and Bliss”.
Perhaps when we abandon to the computer the little mechanical logics of multiplicity we will be able to devote ourselves to the true mathematics of infinity, the vast and new logic of the oneness of things.
See also