An Encounter with an Extra Terrestrial
- Millions of Times Smarter- than you.
No philosopher had a greater impact on 20th century philosophy than Wittgenstein. Challenged by an intrepid skeptic- “what would you say if a being of a higher intelligence told you you were wrong?” “First, I would say, ‘tell me what you mean by a higher intelligence.” And there you have not the devil in the details but the nuances in the subtext- the small narrative differences that mess all the difference in the world. Wittgenstein, with a deft twist, ‘flips the script.’ He does not have to say it, it is clear he is unphased by a remark intended to shake the ground under his feet. He offers no resistance, no counter to the observation that there must be, there is always, some being more intelligent than you.
To claim otherwise is equivalent to postulating an infinite mind, the quest without merit, does not warrant an answer. What does interest Wittgenstein, is the hidden convoluted thinking, the skeptic seems to assume Wittgenstein is unaware of the implied grandiosity of philosophical certainty. By challenging Wittgenstein to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, the truth of his views, he is hoping to explore the hollowness of his system. He never overlooks the fact no great system of thought stands on just one leg. There are hundreds, thousands of possible intelligences in the universe, and no two of them have ever agreed. What one person considers higher, another considers lower. Who is to decide what the true metric, the appropriate perspective is to be? What is the criteria for higher intelligence? How does one person recognize it? Is it subject to experimental verification? Is there amyu kind of consensus at the present for a hypothetical higher intelligence? Does the skeptic have an alternative- to whatever Wittgensteinian doctrine he is challenging and if so, can he tell us what it is?
What Wittgentstein does, what all good philosophers have done in one way or another, is to shine the light, to bring the hidden assumptions of even the most commonplace language to the surface. He never stands pat, no matter how compelling, how airtight the prima facie evidence is, like the expert lawyer. (Disclosure: many years ago, visiting Harvard’s famous Coop bookstore for the first time, I stumbled randomly on Wittgenstein’s small masterpiece, On Certainty- no one to my mind has ever deconstructed the common usage of the concept better than Wittgenstein.)
To give just a flavor of Wittgenstein’s deconstructive linguistic genius, here is a brief remark tossed off seemingly out of the blue, 80 years ago:
Saying there is no money in your checking account does not also mean there are no roses in your checking account.
(Wittgenstein has been talking about his “yardstick definition of meaning.” He is talking about, what he calls, not-space. It is not enough to say a mental linguistic space, for the idea of the absence of something. The imagined space for the absence of something must be at least as big as the previously occupied space: the space that we imagine for the car that we have just parked but cannot find, cannot (logically) be smaller than the actual space occupied by the car.
To counter such conceptual missteps, Wittgenstein posits his yardstick definition of meaning, the spatial metric for empty space measurement (not-space) must meaningfully reflect and match the metric of occupied space. Thus a missing car has one group of spaces; a missing checking account has another group of spaces, and a missing rose has another group of missing space (i.e: a vase shape but not a shoe, not a mailbox, not a glove). Wittgenstein knows quite well that no sane person would expect to find missing roses ( or roses for sale) in a checking account. He poses a palpably absurd question. In order to alert the reader to the real danger, the greater danger of being influenced by what he terms (unconscious) crossed linguistic metaphors. Untangling these crossed metaphors- which he famously likens to letting the fly out of the bottle- is Wittgenstein’s chief method for resolving millenia old philosophical problems.
There is a difference between mental space and physical space. Mental space has meaning, physical space has volume, mental space has complexity. (Think of the difficulty when packing various sized objects in the compact trunk of a car.) The smaller an object is the more hiding places it can have (think of how difficult it can be to find a misplaced, personally valuable ring in a furnished room.)
By shining a flashlight on the glorious sounding higher intelligence, Wittgenstein is exposing the hollowness of so-called God Words: words which, purporting to explain everything, explain nothing.
Fallacy of the Infinitely Ascending Letter
One such God Word is infinity. Not only does it promise a world, it seemingly asks for nothing in return. It’s the conceptual gift that keeps on giving. IT derives from higher mathematics (Cantor). It is a growth process that never ends (x+1). By definition it has never been observed, cannot be observed in physical danger. That does not stop Georg Cantor (who died in an insane asylum) from mentalizing such a word, such a process. Cosmology, which deals in astronomical scales, is a fertile field for suc imaginings. While no one has ever seen an infinite process, a not-end, it is also true that no one has seen it end. When we look back with the revolutionary James Webb Telescope into deep time- as far as possible- we do not know what, if anything, lies beyond. All we can say, (in the physical world) we have never observed anything that goes on forever.) Even if we could develop a super telescope, capable of observing a never ending process, because of the second law of thermodynamics (that entropy always increases) implying an inevitable burn-out, or heat death, of the cosmos, we wouldn’t be here to observe it.
Such physical constraints have almost no deterrence value for today’s intrepid theorists. So mutiverses, pluralistic universes, the idea of the cosmic landscape, where anything can happen does happen, is the rage. Theories of cosmic infinities derive their chief support from the field of mathematics. Because mathematical concepts of infinity are immune to physical experimental falsification (Popper), they’re free, if they are on the wrong track, to metastasis. It does not bother the metaphysician that no one has ever looked through a microscope and seen a platonic number, no one has ever x-rayed a thought; an idea; a dream; a dreamscape, nor a stream of consciousness either. No one has ever seen a feeling through a microscope either. No one has ever caught sight of a supernatural being, a God, through a telescope. No one has ever seen a prayer, etc. And no one has certainly been witness to the afterlife, the kingdom of heaven, the furnace of hell.
William James brilliantly shows how there is a world of difference between a thought and the object of a thought. Because the idea of oneness, of this or a that, bleeds so indistinguishably into its object, it is unappreciated how radically different the concept of a platonic number (e.g. 1), which has absolutely no qualia, which does not physically exist (so far as we know) from the concept of, say, a live person which has an extraordinary range of differential qualia. Forgotten is that a pure unattached number (inasmuch as it does not exist) cannot causally interact with the real physical world. Forgotten is that an indefinite series of pure numbers (1-infinity) does not add up to a single real physical number. (i.e. a million abstract ones from a physical standpoint does not add up to a single physical object). In other words, in an infinite series of pure (disembodied) numbers nothing physically moves or changes. There is no measurable growth. So, although maybe true that numbers describe the physical world, they do not change it. So an infinite series of numbers unattached, disembodied from anything is a difference without a distinction. Compare the thought of an ocean to a real ocean. There is no equivalent to the Higgs Boson in the mental world adding the missing mass of reality. From that perspective, an infinite ladder without the mass of reality cannot yet get you from here to there no matter how short the distance. No where is the specious quality of infinity than in the contemporary field of Artificial Intelligence. Nick Bostrom, Oxford Professor of Philosophy, is a world class polymath. He is a leading pioneer of existential risk management, author of New York Times best seller, SuperIntelligence, he leans heavily in what could be called the Artificial Intelligence equivalent of the concept of infinity- Moore’s Law- which states that every two years the computing power of a computer doubles. The celebrated example of this is perhaps Deep Blue, the chess playing machine which defeated the then reigning world champion, Gary Kasparov. Immediately the Artificial Intelligence community claimed this was a long thought after historic proof that a machine could equal or surpass human intelligence for decades. Artificial Intelligence had asserted the core of human intelligence was computational power. For decades, Humanists had countered that creativity was the essence of human intelligence and could never be modeled by a computer. The triumph of Deep Blue, it was claimed, has settled the debate in favor of Artificial Intelligence.
Fortified by results such as this, Nick Bostrom has upped the ante. In a famous 2003 essay he proposed that, not only had computers caught up with humans but that depending upon the level of advancement of our current civilization, they may well have far surpassed us. Bostrom’s philosophical speculations go down a path so logical, so rigorous, so non-human sounding- that only a professional life-long academic could hope to follow. He assumes, as do most Artificial Intelligence researchers, that (as mentioned) the core of human intelligence is computational power. and that computational power (Moore’s Law) doubles every two years. Since Human intelligence (fixed by genetic constraints (does not double every two years, and in fact has never been known to double in the history of our evolution- it should be very easy for technologically advanced civilizations to catch up to the level of human intelligence. Bostrom considers the 13 plus billion years of our universe’s existence and the estimated thousands of earth-like planets that have been discovered, he finds it more than credible that at least one earth-like civilization has not only equaled but far surpassed humans technologically when it comes to computing power. Emboldened by the fact that he’s unlikely to be proven wrong any time soon, he allows his imagination to roam freely over our cosmos’ time scales, as he ponders the almost godlike, untapped potential of computational power. He considers the estimated 13 million years plus since the big bacng, he finds it more than conceivable or even likely, that in all that passed time, at least one advanced earth-like civilization would have reached the current human level of computational power. Furthermore, he considers it unlikely that a second earth-like civilization would have the same age as Earth, far more probable would it be that it was older than ours. That would mean it could have had a technological renaissance far sooner than. we did, and therefore, far more advanced than our present Earth. Bostrom, letting his imagination roam, freely imagines an Earth-like civilization thousands, millions of times more technologically advanced. Such a super civilization, Bostrom estimates, wouldn’t undoubtedly- because of Moore’s law-have computers trillions of times more powerful than ours.
What does that mean? One thing it means, it would become entirely possible, according to Bostrom, that we are currently living in a simulated Matrix-like, virtual world. No less a world class science fiction writer than New York Times’ Dennis Oberbye considers it, although highly skeptical, a distinct possibility. And many cosmologists — who believe in an infinite multiverse- are presently seriously discussing it.
Just to be clear, living in a simulated virtual world means actually that you and I, all the other people on earth, all the planets in our galaxy, all our laws of physics, are simulated by a Matrix-like, super-terrestrial programmer. It would mean that our entire human history, our culture, our consciousness, our thoughts, our feelings are simulated (i.e.not physically real, but digital.) The brainchild of an extra-terrestrial programmer, wh, as we speak and read, has programmed us.)
Disclosure
Before I discuss what I think of such a wackadoodle hypothesis, I’ve been thinking extensively, over the past 30 years, about what I consider the low probability of a single computer ever achieving what could be legitimately considered an artificial intelligent machine. (i.e. intelligence as defined in the full sense of human intelligence). Now see Gerald Alper: “A Psychoanalyst Takes the Turing Test”; “The Mechanical Sweetheart”; “Quantum Mechanics as Subjectivity and Projective Stimulus”; “The Dream and the Measured Mind”; “The Elephant in the Room- The Denial of the Unconscious Mind”; “Living with Uncertainty- Embracing Your Fears, Letting Go, Looking Death in the Eye, and the Goodlife.”
Next Week see part 2 of An Encounter with an Extra Terrestrial- Millions of Times Smarter- than you.
Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality). His new book is God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).
