Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2)

by Richard Farr

  That last bit is vital, and people routinely get it wrong, so read it again. OK, don’t, but allow me to repeat it in a different way. Failing T2 establishes the absence of consciousness. (“Trickery detected: it’s merely a device designed to fool us, and we’re not fooled!”) But it doesn’t follow that passing T2 establishes consciousness, or even gives us evidence for its probable presence (“trickery ruled out”). Passing T2 only establishes that the question remains open. In the formal language of logic: “A entails B, and A” entails B. But “A entails B, and not-A” entails exactly squat about B.

  With that in mind, suppose it’s the year 2101, and the latest DomestiBots are so convincingly “human” that your grandchildren really have started to think of their new 9000-series DomestiDave as kind and caring. Or happy. Or depressed. Or tormented by a persistent pain in his left shoulder blade.

  (As an aside, I should say that I’m skeptical of the common assumption that even this will happen. Our computers can already be programmed do things that everyone in Turing’s day would have counted as impossible for a mere machine—which is to say, our computers might well have passed their T1. Yet we, having built and spent time with such clever machines, and indeed carried them around in our pockets, aren’t even slightly tempted to think of them as conscious. Whence comes the assumption—present in Turing’s paper, and now virtually universal in fiction, AI, and popular culture generally—that our grandchildren will be more gullible than we are?)

  But OK, just suppose our grandchildren really do find themselves ascribing emotions or intentions to their machines. Remember, remember, remember: that will be a psychological report about them, not about their machines.

  The 2015 film Ex Machina makes explicit the point I’ve hinted at here: in the end, Turing’s “veil” (wall, disguise) is irrelevant in either form. Ava is a robot who’s perfectly capable of passing T2. But her smug inventor, Nathan, already knows that. He wants to find out instead whether his rather feeble-minded employee Caleb will fall for her flirty shtick even when he’s allowed to see from the start that she’s not a beautiful woman but “just” a machine. “The challenge,” Nathan says, “is to show you that she’s a robot—and then see if you still feel she has consciousness.”

  In a way the filmmakers perhaps didn’t intend, this awkward line of dialogue exposes the problem at the heart of Turing’s idea and any version of the test. For it’s an interesting technological question whether a “Nathan” will ever be capable of building an “Ava.” And, if he does, it’ll be an important psychological question whether the world’s “Calebs” will feel that she truly has (and feel compelled to treat her as if she truly has) emotions and intentions. But the far deeper and more troubling question is an ethical one, and (ironically, given the film’s relentless nerdboy sexism) it’s a question about Ava, not Caleb. Never mind what the rather clueless Caleb is emotionally inclined to “feel” about her! Leaving that aside, what does it make sense for us, all things considered, to believe she is? On that distinction just about everything hangs—and that’s why Turing’s attitude in his paper, which could be summed up in the phrase “as good as real should be treated as real,” is a fascinating idea about computational intelligence but a wholly and disastrously wrong idea when the issue comes to be, say, whether that pain in the left shoulder blade actually hurts.

  More on this in The Babel Trilogy, Book Three: Infinity’s Illusion. As my story will ultimately suggest, I believe that in time, we will come to think of Turing’s ideas about artificial “thinking machines” and mechanical intelligence as a long blind alley in our understanding of the mind.

  Epigenetics, Hominin, et cetera

  Genetics is the study of what changes when the genome changes. Epigenetics is the study of inherited changes in the way genes work (or are “expressed”) that don’t depend on changes in the genome. See my note on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in The Fire Seekers; for the full fascinating story, check out Matt Ridley’s Nature via Nurture or Nessa Carey’s The Epigenetics Revolution.

  If you’re confused by hominid and hominin, welcome to the club. The simple version is this: the great apes (including us) are hominids, and anything in the genus Homo (living or extinct, and including us) is a hominin.

  The FOXP2 “language gene”

  The FOX (“fork-headed box”) family of proteins gives its name to the genes that code for it, and FOXP2 is a real protein manufactured by what has been described, misleadingly, as “the language gene.”

  People are fond of the idea that there’s a gene for blue eyes, for anemia, for Tay-Sachs disease, et cetera, as if we’re made from a neat stack of children’s blocks. In some cases it’s like that. But a condition like having bad impulse control, or good eyesight, involves many different genes. And what really makes it complicated is that (see note on epigenetics) we all carry genes that may or may not get switched on. Even environmental factors, like nutrition and radiation, can switch a gene on or off. And that’s what FOXP2 does: shaped like a box with a pair of antlers, it’s a transcription factor, affecting whether other genes work or not.

  The much-studied “KE” family in England is real. About half of them have difficulty understanding sentences where word order is crucial, and show the same tendency to leave off certain initial sounds—for example, saying “able” for “table.” A paper published in 2001 identified a mutation in FOXP2 as the culprit.

  Babblers share a different mutation on the FOXP2 gene

  As far as I know, there’s no evidence for a genetic mutation to explain giftedness in languages, and most stories about such giftedness are exaggerated. On the one hand, there are cultures where most people can get by in several languages, and being able to get by in four or five is quite common; on the other hand, there are few people anywhere who maintain full mastery of more than about five languages at any one time.

  There’s a fascinating tour through the world of hyperpolyglots (actual ones, not Babblers) in Michael Erard’s Babel No More.

  Scanner . . . “this is low resolution, compared with what we can do”

  For a sense of how far away this still is, you might take a look at the short video Neuroscience: Crammed with Connections, at https://youtu.be/8YM7-Od9Wr8. My own suspicion is that we’re way, way, way farther from “complete brain emulation” than even this suggests. (See the note on the Bekenstein bound.)

  Language: “a crazy thing that shouldn’t exist”

  Anyone who knows the literature about “Wallace’s Problem,” as it’s sometimes called, will detect here the influence of linguist Derek Bickerton. See in particular Adam’s Tongue, in which he argues that, despite misleading similarities, phenomena such as animal warning cries, songs, and gestures have essentially nothing to do with the abstract features underlying human language.

  Paradoxically, humans are good at underrating the intellectual, social, and emotional sophistication of other animals—especially when doing so makes it easier to eat them or mistreat them—while being real suckers for the romantic idea that we might one day learn to “talk” to them. Chances are we never will talk to them, because they’re just too cognitively distant from us.

  One aspect of that distance is particularly telling. Much has been made of the fact that elephants and some other species pass the “mirror recognition test.” But nearly all animals, even the most intelligent, fail another superficially easy test. Think how routine it is for humans, even young children, to follow another’s pointing hand, and thus demonstrate their ability to make the inference “Ah, she’s paying attention to something that she wants me to pay attention to.” Human infants start to “get” this when they are as little as nine to fourteen months old. Michael Tomasello, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, has pointed out how striking it is that our closest genetic cousins, the chimpanzees, absolutely never get it. They have many cognitive abilities we once thought they lacked, yet even adult chimps definitively lack this mark of “shared intentionality.” T
hat may explain a further critical difference: aside from the exception that some chimps occasionally cooperate to hunt monkeys, nonhuman primates generally lack the human ability to form groups dedicated to cooperating in pursuit of a common goal.

  In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes makes a broader point that may be rooted in this cognitive difference. “The emotional lives of men and of other animals are indeed marvelously similar. But . . . the intellectual life of man, his culture and history and religion and science, is different from anything else we know of in the universe. That is fact. It is as if all life evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and simply exploded in a different direction.”

  The big question is why. For at least a partial answer, check out the TED talk “Why Humans Run the World” (and the book Sapiens) by Yuval Noah Harari. For something more technical, specifically on Wallace’s Problem (“How could language ever have evolved?”), see Derek Bickerton’s More Than Nature Needs.

  Oh, but wait: here’s a key point on the other side of the cognitive debate. There is at least one species with highly sophisticated “shared intentionality” that routinely does “get” the pointing gesture, perhaps because of its inherently social nature or perhaps because it has spent thousands of years (possibly tens of thousands of years) coevolving with us: Canis lupus familiaris, otherwise known as the dog.

  For one fascinating possible consequence of that coevolution, see the note “Neanderthals . . . went extinct not much later.”

  “The Neanderthals had bigger brains than we do”

  It’s true, just. The later Neanderthals—and their Homo sapiens contemporaries, around fifty thousand years ago—were equipped with about 1,500 cc of neuronal oatmeal, on average, whereas we get by on about 1,350 to 1,400 cc. Again, this is on average: the “normal” ranges for the two species are surprisingly large, and overlap—and arguably the differences vanish completely when you take into account body size and other factors.

  “We have complete genomes for . . .”

  Not yet. We have essentially complete genomes for some Paleolithic Homo sapiens, at least one late Neanderthal (a female who died in Croatia approximately forty thousand years ago), and one Denisovan—even though all we have of the entire Denisovan species is a finger bone and a few teeth. (All people of European descent have some Neanderthal DNA; some people of Melanesian, Polynesian, and Australian Aboriginal decent have some Denisovan DNA.) Intriguingly, the Denisovan genome suggests they interbred with H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, and yet another, unidentified human species.

  We have nothing yet for the Red Deer Cave people and don’t even know for sure that they’re a separate species. Some experts have suggested that they were the result of interbreeding between Denisovans and H. sapiens, but a recently rediscovered thigh bone, dated to fourteen thousand years old, suggests that the Red Deer Cave people are, like H. floresiensis perhaps, a long-surviving remnant of a more primitive population, probably H. erectus.

  The bit about FOXQ3 is pure invention—a claim that some knowledgeable readers may find hard to believe. I had Natazscha “discover” it in a draft of this chapter that I wrote while reading some of the research on FOXP2 in early 2015. But there really is a gene called FOXO3 (associated with human longevity, no less, and of great interest to the real-world people I make some fun of here as the “Extenders”). I found out about the real FOXO3, quite by chance, more than a year after I’d invented FOXQ3.

  The Great Leap Forward

  The carving of a woman known as the Venus of Hohle Fels (Venus of the Hollow Rock, discovered in 2008) comes from this period. At forty thousand years old, it’s the most ancient representation of a human being currently known.

  The Bekenstein bound

  Is nature ultimately grainy or smooth? Is it made of indivisible units, or is it smooth and infinitely divisible? This may be the most profound question in science, and it’s been debated since at least 500 BCE, when the philosopher Leucippus, and his student Democritus of Abdera, invented the idea that everything was constructed from elementary particles that were atomos—indivisible.

  The modern “atom,” first conceived of by John Dalton around 1803, was supposed to be atomos, and then it turned out not to be. But quantum mechanics is a return to Democritus in that it too claims there’s a very, very tiny “smallest possible thing”—an indivisible ultimate unit of space itself, the Planck length.

  If that size really is an absolute minimum, then there’s a huge but finite number of ways to arrange the contents of space. Think of a cube-shaped “toy universe” consisting of eight dice, seven of which are red and one of which is yellow; there are only eight possible ways for this universe to be. If quantum mechanics is right about graininess, then any volume of space—including both the whole universe, the visible universe, and the much smaller bit of the universe that has the special honor of being the inside of your head—is subject to the same principle.

  Physicist Jacob Bekenstein’s interest was in entropy and black holes. But his quantum-based idea—that any region of space contains a finite amount of information—seems to have implications for the debate over consciousness and the physical basis of the mind. If I can create an exact copy of my brain down to the last Planck unit, then everything about that copy will be identical too: that brain (that I?) will also dislike loud noise, love the taste of figs, remember falling out of a tree on a summer afternoon in England decades ago, and wish it were smart enough to understand quantum mechanics; it will be me, in fact—or, at least, it will be wholly convinced that it’s me.

  Notice the very big if, way back there at the beginning of that last overpacked sentence. And, if you don’t have anything more pressing to do right now, look up “Boltzmann brain.”

  PART III: AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD

  Linear B

  The scripts known as Linear A and Linear B were discovered on Crete at the beginning of the twentieth century, shortly before the Phaistos Disk was found. They’re closely related syllabaries—which is to say, they’re physically similar, and, as in much of Egyptian hieroglyphic script, each symbol represents one syllable. But think of English and Finnish: despite the visual similarity, which makes it clear the scripts are related, Linear A and B encode two entirely unrelated languages.

  Linear A is believed to be the written form of a pre-Greek indigenous Cretan language, but any other knowledge of it is lost. It was used only for a relatively short time, between about 1750 BCE and 1450 BCE, and apparently only for routine bureaucratic purposes, which suggests that we see in it the first emergence of a writing system—a way of keeping lists, for instance—in an otherwise preliterate culture.

  Linear B was used for several centuries, beginning just before the end of the Linear A period. Finally cracked in 1952, it should really be called “Mycenaean Linear B,” because what it encodes is not a Cretan language but the earliest written form of Greek.

  The Mycenaean Greeks (from the Peloponnese, the big peninsula in southern Greece) brought their language across the Mediterranean to Crete when they invaded the island around 1550 BCE, in the wake of the Thera eruption. Presumably they also had no writing at that time and adapted the recently invented local system, Linear A, as a vehicle for their own language.

  Centuries later, after the fall of Mycenaean influence during the Bronze Age Collapse, Greeks adopted from the Phoenicians the completely different alphabetical writing system (alpha, beta . . .) we’re familiar with.

  The whole story of how the truth about Linear B was recovered, mainly by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris, is told brilliantly by Margalit Fox in The Riddle of the Labyrinth.

  “Kraist . . . someone he’s never even met”

  I cribbed the Tainu’s response to Kurtz from a real tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, the Pirahã (pronounced PIR-aha). I admit that, being inclined to atheism, I find it an initially plausible and tempting response—but on second thoughts it’s far fro
m persuasive.

  Linguist and former missionary Dan Everett has lived among the Pirahã for decades. He says that he lost his Christian faith partly because he found their skepticism about his own beliefs compelling. (“Wait—you’ve been going on and on about Jesus, and you want us to believe all this stuff about him, and yet now you admit that you never even met the guy?”)

  For Everett’s own account, search “Daniel Everett losing religion” on YouTube, or read the last sections of his fascinating and moving book about his fieldwork, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. But, before you walk away with the idea that the Pirahã have a knockdown argument for the silliness of religious belief, consider an obvious response. Wouldn’t their reasons for being skeptical about Everett’s Jesus also force them to be skeptical about my claiming to know that Henry VIII had six wives, or that Abraham Lincoln was once president of the United States? And yet, in any sane view of what knowledge is, I do know these things. As Everett himself attests, the Pirahã have no records of their own past, and thus little sense of history. So maybe they were right not to believe what Everett said about Jesus or maybe they weren’t, but the mere fact that Everett hadn’t walked with him by the Sea of Galilee seems to be a poor basis for that skepticism.

  Smoked ancestors

  This is (or was) true of the Angu (or Anga) people, who live in the Morobe Highlands of far western Papua New Guinea. The practice has been frowned upon by missionaries, who have attempted to ban it. For some vitriolic commentary on the damage that banning traditional burial rites does to indigenous people, see Norman Lewis, The Missionaries. By the way, Lewis’s revulsion at the influence missionaries were having on indigenous people led to the creation of the organization Survival International.