Month: January 2012

Are Theists Obligated to Create a Simulated Universe?

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I recently re-read Mark Alan Walker‘s manuscript (unpublished?), A Neo-Irenaean Theodicy: Evolution, Playing God and Becoming Gods. The argument is straightforward and expands on the Theodicy of Irenaeus: God created evil as part of the process of letting His children–humanity–develop their own moral faculties as part of becoming gods ourselves. This quiet trick contra Augustinian Theodicy made it fashionable to treat The Fall as somewhat metaphorical that was inverted by the reclamation of the potential for moral perfection by Mary and Jesus.

Professor Walker’s paper takes Irenaeus further by suggesting that the obligation of becoming like God extends further towards perhaps genetic manipulation of ourselves, for if by having bigger, better brains makes us less likely to sin and more like God, then that transforms into a moral obligation. The argument seems to prescribe even more radical actions, too: are theists morally obligated, following our ascension as gods, to create new universes? Are simulations mandatory? Should Christians begin now?

… Read the rest

Simulated Experimental Morality

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I’m deep in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It’s also only about the third book I’ve tried to read exclusively on the iPad, but I am finally getting used to the platform. The core thesis of Pinker’s book is something that I have been experimentally testing on people for several years: our moral facilities and decision-making are gradually improving. For Pinker, the thesis is built up elaborately from basic estimates of death rates due to war and homicide between non-state societies and state societies. It comes with an uncomfortable inversion of the nobility of the savage mind: primitive people had a lot to fight about and often did.

My first contact with the notion that morality is changing and improving was with Richard Dawkin’s observation in The God Delusion that most modern Westerners feel very uncomfortable with the fire bombing of Tokyo in World War II, the saturation bombing of Hanoi, nuclear attack against civilian populations, or treating people inhumanely based on race or ethnicity. Yet that wasn’t the case just decades ago. More moral drift can be seen in changing sentiments concerning the rights of gay people to marry. Experimentally, then, I would ask, over dinner or conversation, about simple moral trolley experiments and then move on to ask whether anyone would condone nuclear attack against civilian populations. There is always a first response of “no” to the latter, which reflects a gut moral sentiment, though a few people have agreed that it may be “permissible” (to use the language of these kinds of dilemmas) in response to a similar attack and when there may be “command and control assets” mixed into the attack area.… Read the rest

Singularities as Child’s Play

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Dystopian literature is mostly about the unintended consequences of technological change.  Cory Doctorow expands on this theme related to technological singularities on Boing Boing:

Indeed, it seems to me that in literature, the Singularity’s role is to serve as a straw-man for critiquing technology as a one-sided panacea.

Fair enough. Literature and drama are all about conflicts and Man vs. Technology is at least one of the primary conflicts of the modern age.

Heaven stuffBut why is it that we are drawn to this notion of some kind of transcendent mechanism that alleviates us of the struggles of everyday existence? It’s a central theme of Hinduism (get off the wheel of existence), Buddhism (existence is void; free the mind of your very desire of it), Christianity and Islam (post-life existence is better and more perfect). I think it arises from the same predisposition for magical thinking combined with hope that is part of imaginative play among children. In play, the child creates an imagined and utopian existence where their alter egos typically overcome all obstacles. There are a few sex differences that are part conditioning and likely partly biological, but the patterns are remarkably utopian in terms of the dispositions of the children’s play avatars.

The translation of this into adult formulations of heavens filled with inchoate goodness and light (or many virgins), or even an emptiness that defies ordinary characterization, is just an extension of this urge to play. In a technological world, singularities are the secular equivalent, but with the additional propellant of observed technological change that surrounds all of us.… Read the rest

Welcome to Ex Uno Plura!

Mark Davis4 Comments

Ex Uno Plura is a blog with the goal of exploring arguments and ideas that are new and a bit cutting edge. Some of the topics that are explored include recent developments in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, machine learning, evolutionary adaptation, atheism (and its discontents), technology and the humanities, literature and literary theory, and a raft of other topics that register as experimental. The goal is to always try to do justice to the topic and contextualize it socially and as part of intellectual history.

Note that the title might be a translation mistake. I have conflicting information on this; maybe it should be Ex Uno Plures but others concur with Ex Uno Plura. At least it’s not as bad as some of the other guesses floating around, including a title by David Foster Wallace. Update via Giacomo Miceli:

@ExUnoPlura

I can confirm you it’s “Ex uno, plura”. Plura => Neutral noun (more things, many things) vs Plures => Numeral adjective (more, several).

My name is Mark Davis and I am an entrepreneur, computer scientist, and author. I split my time between homes in Portland and on the Oregon coast.  My background ranges from an unusual upbringing in New Mexico, to teaching in the US Peace Corps, to running a performance art group, to working for Microsoft and XeroX PARC, and, recently, to startups in computational linguistics, big data analytics, and machine learning.  I’ve got a graduate degree in the latter. I retired in 2015 from a role as a CTO and Distinguished Engineer at Dell Software Group following the sale of my startup company, Kitenga, one of the first big data analytics companies. I just resurrected a cognitive computing and deep learning startup focused on immersive entertainment and intelligent assistants.… Read the rest

Evolution, Rationality, and Artificial Intelligence

Mark DavisLeave a comment

We now know that our cognitive facilities are not perfectly rational. Indeed, our cultural memory has regularly reflected that fact. But we often thought we might be getting a handle on what it means to be rational by developing models for what good thinking might be like and using it in political, philosophical, and scientific discourse. The models were based on nascent ideas like the logical coherence of arguments, internal consistency, few tautologies, and the consistency with empirical data.

But an interesting and quite basic question is why should we be able to formulate logical rules and create increasingly impressive systems of theory and observations given a complex evolutionary history. We have big brains, sure, but they evolved to manage social relationships and find resources–not to understand the algebraic topology of prime numbers or the statistical oddities of quantum mechanics–yet they seem well suited for these newer and more abstract tasks.

Alvin Plantinga, a theist and modern philosopher whose work has touched everything from epistemology to philosophy of religion, formulated his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EANN) as a kind of complaint that the likelihood of rationality arising from evolutionary processes is very low (really he is most concerned with the probability of “reliability,” by which means that most conclusions and observations are true, but I am substituting rationality for this with an additional Bayesian overlay).

Plantinga mostly wants to advocate that maybe our faculties are rational because God made them rather than a natural process. The response to this from an evolutionary perspective is fairly simple: evolution is an adaptive process and adaptation to a series of niche signals involves not getting those signals wrong. There are technical issues that arise here concerning how specific adaptation can result in more general rational facilities but we can, at least in principle, imagine (and investigate) bridge rules that extend out from complex socialization to encompass the deep complexities of modern morality and the Leviathan state, and the extension of optimizing spear throwing to shooting rockets into orbit.… Read the rest