Worthington’s World

WORTHINGTONISM promotes a rational, deterministic, atheist society in a particulate universe based upon current empirical neurological findings. It is a reductionist concept that posits we are essentially bundles of atoms, molecules and forces and that we are connected with ambient surroundings only electromagnetically at sensory nerve endings in skin, retina, mouth, nose, ears and soma. The concept of of an integrated living earth was introduced by James Lovelock. He called it Gaia, the ancient Greek name for the Earth Goddess. A “living” Earth is a very appropriate term, since Earth, just as man and his brain and also flora, fauna, rocks, water and atmosphere, consist only of active particles in constant motion. This activity was determined by the expenditure of energy that burst forth at the Big Bang. Thus, reactions of atoms and molecules in the brain and throughout the universe are constrained by the natural laws of thermodynamics.

Human behavior and thought are manifestations of biochemical activity in the brain. Neurons are essentially electrophysiological units, their voltage flow being caused by the traveling passage of sodium and potassium ions passing through the cell membrane. See Hodgkin and Huxley’s study of the neural dynamics of the squid (1952).

Human contact with another object therefore amounts to stimulation of neural dendrites, say in the fingers. These cause electric charges to pass up through neurons into the brain. Countless numbers of parallel stimuli form a pattern which the brain processes into the felt object. It might be noted here that our conscious world is one of neural patterns.

Consciousness, or thought, is a continuous manifestation in the brain which computes about 200 transactions per second using transynaptic agents such as serotonin; thus our perceptions are a steady stream of instantaneous events, which like a movie, appears to be a seamless scenario: our lives. According to Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman in Fantastic Voyage, (pg.14), the brain as a computer is about one million times slower than today’s electronic circuits. – More on this later. As Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, has stated in an essay in The Next Fifty Years, (2002) John Brockman, ed., “After all, the only information that reaches us directly from the world is a pattern of infinitesimal photons hitting our retinas and disturbances of air vibrating at our eardrums.”

The brain is a self-organizing integrated unit with about one hundred trillion interneural connections. One’s personality is an emergent property of its complex activity.

The above brief summary of neural activity gibes with current neuroscientific thought. The question of free-will usually trumps determinism. In Minds, Brains and Science, 1984, John Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkley, deals with free will in Chapter 6: Since nature consists of particles and their relation to each other, and since everything can be accounted for in terms of these particles, there is simply no room for freedom of will. Indeterminism, at the level of particles in physics, gives no support at all for any doctrine of freedom of will; because the ostensible statistical indeterminacy at the level of particles does not show any indeterminacy at the level of objects that matter to us – human bodies, for example.

Searle further indicates that evolution has given us a form of experience of voluntary action where the sense of alternative possibilities is built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary, intentional human behavior. He believes that man will never be convinced that behavior is not by choice; that free-will is an illusion.

The reader may ask: If free-will is an illusion and our fate was determined 15 billion years ago why worry about the future, or anything else? Because our behavior includes worries about the future, our hopes, dreams, endeavors and failures, even a minor finger twitch is foreordained just like the activity of every particle of the universe. Its constituent energy – particles and forces – are governed by their innate –“natural”- laws. There has been no evidence of any intervention by a supernatural power or God, much less a loving God who cherishes humans as His children! Just note the natural calamities that are afflicting the world these days; or are they punishment by a vengeful God for our sinful behavior as Pat Robertson claims?

Thus, it is my fate to continue to write this essay as it was the reader’s to get this far. Incidentally, one hears philosophers and ethicists lament the sterility of atheistic determinism. Let them speak for themselves; I have been an atheist since before college and have found it very satisfying – far better than trying to reconcile the impossible with reality.
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Man’s reliance upon religious mythology to provide spiritual and moral guidance is obviously unsatisfactory. Throughout all of human history the more aggressive, stronger and slyer men have become tribal leaders and prophets who claimed intimacy with God and took unto themselves royal prerogatives such as levying taxes, determining moral standards and coercing the people to fight for them, flag and country. These powerful men actually did shape mankind’s history. They are now represented in the United States by such types as President Bush, his cabinet, congress, fundamentalist evangelicals, and the Mormon hierarchy; foolish men all!

The problem with sincere, naive believers in the God of all religions, is that they fail to realize that all cerebral animals are governed by four dominant drives: for food, sex, shelter and most important of all, “peer recognition”; this latter drive accounts for the alpha male syndrome, top dogs in the financial world, urban gang leaders, government war mongering “statesmen”, the Pope and other prominent men of God. The Church, rather than devoting its efforts to community welfare problems and worthwhile “good works”, wastes its time preaching mythology and endeavoring to brain-wash simpletons into belief and behavior according to the Gospels, Torah, Koran or some other “sacred” text. The benighted clergy believe that saving men’s imaginary souls is more important! In view of the fact that unfortunately, practically all humanity adheres to some form of religion, no matter how stupid, there is no point in belaboring it.

It should be noted that despite thousands of years of religious indoctrination and codes of ethics, civilized man for the most part still lies, cheats, steals and commits bloody mayhem when it is to his interest. There is absolutely no evidence of an increase in morality in all of recorded history. Most people just do not take their spiritual selves very seriously except by hating (scorning, at any rate) persons of a different belief.

What amazes me is the vast number of ostensibly intelligent, educated persons who still accept the Bible verbatim. It is as if they claimed black is white or 2+2 = 5. Like the ignoramuses who believe in creationism or intelligent design, they are afflicted with warped neural networks. Those endeavoring to promote such anti-science nonsense are undoubtedly in it for whatever financial rewards may be forthcoming as well as for publicity. Peer recognition, remember?

In fact humanity has few interests that are not self-serving. It must be realized that human life is dependent upon utilizing environmental resources, renewable or not. Environmentalists may lessen air and water pollution but controlling the climate is, I think, beyond man’s ability. In any event, the evolution of Earth will continue as scheduled!

According to futurists, the outlook is not all bleak: nanotechnology is becoming one of the most important developments of this century. Though a problem for some who reject any new ideas, it offers humanity its best bet for survival. Bioconservatives such as Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama, members of the President’s Council on Bioethics as well many other confused people on both the right and left, fear any biotechnology that might improve the human condition and threatens their devoutly held ideas of proper human behavior and undermine community control. According to Ronald Bailey,(pg.1 Kass warns against “a utopian project to achieve ‘nothing less than a painless, suffering-free, and, immortal existence.’”!

Nanotechnology relates to the engineering of devices at the atomic and molecular level. It was made possible by the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope, for which Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd K. Binnig received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. There is also an atomic force microscope that can be used to move nanoparticles around on surfaces and create patterns. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter; about the width of a few hydrogen atoms.

Scientists have found that in small clusters, atoms and molecules have different properties. Nanotechnology exploits these differences. When two or three atoms of carbon or iron, for example, are joined they form nanoparticles with electrons on the outer surface; thus they can form bonds to other molecules such as antibodies. For more on their use as diagnostic and therapeutic agents see Weissleder et al “Cell-specific targeting of nanoparticles by multivalent attachment of small molecules” Nature Biotechnology, 23, 1418, Nov. 2005.

“The Coming Era of Nanotechnology” , the subtitle of K. Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation. (1990) is recommended for an overview for the coming revolutionary technology and its potential dangers. It has already been reported that targeting cancer cells with specific anti-tumor molecules by injected nanobots into the circulating blood stream has been successful. Nanobots, or nanoparticles, are small clusters of atoms small enough to penetrate the membrane protecting the brain from foreign bodies. Their active surface readily attracts therapeutic molecules. Such a procedure using superoxide dismutase might be practical for ridding the body of free-radicals that are thought to be responsible for aging. The book, Understanding Nanothechnology by the editors of Scientific American (2002) presents a review of the foreseeable limits of nanotechnology, which, though awesome, are somewhat more conservative than those of the futurists who predict a future of overwhelming technology based upon the continued operation of Moore’s law which has been evident for four or five decades.

Kurzweil and Grossman’s : Fantastic Voyage suggests that humans may eventually redesign and rebuild, their bodies and brains molecule by molecule, thus reversing aging. Nanotechnology has many other far-out uses. Solar energy will amply supply, at practically no cost, all the energy required by our advanced society. There will be no sickness and human embryos will be designed and incubated in vitro. Life will be truly idyllic.

“Moore’s law”, which provides the basis for the wild dreams of the future, was formulated by Gordon Moore in 1965. It states that computational capacities of integrated circuits on “chips” double every two or three years. The increased speed of computer circuitry is due to the reduced distance between components thus an electric current, which is the flow of electrons, has less distance to travel and so is therefore faster. This trend has remained valid for some forty years. According to deGaris (The Artilect War,) if the trend continues until 2020 it will be possible to store a single bit of information on a single molecule and quantum computing will be possible. (A “bit” is a binary digit, a 0 or a 1 that is used to represent numbers and symbols in computer calculations.) Thus during this century computers will have a capacity trillions of trillions of times above our current ones.

LIKE THE ACCELERATED PACE OF EVOLUTION, IT IS EVIDENT THAT TECHNOLOGY DOES GROW EXPONENTIALLY.

THE SINGULARITY

The futurist, Ray Kurzweil has recently proclaimed in a new book that a “singularity” is almost upon us. The Singularity Is Near (2005) with a subtitle “When Humans Transcend Biology”. (A singularity is defined as a unique happening. The Big Bang was a singularity.)

Kurzweil’s singularity is a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid that human life will be irreversibly transformed. He bases his prediction on the law of accelerating returns. Information technologies will continue to expand exponentially (Expansion by repeatedly multiplying by a constant as opposed to linear expansion of adding a constant.) He indicates that there is a doubling of the paradigm shift every ten or so years. (A paradigm shift is a major change in accomplishing a task.) As an example he believes that we will not achieve 100 years of progress during this century; it will be more on the order of 20,000 years of technical advance.

Looking ahead several decades there will be a merger of the vast knowledge embedded in our brain along with vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our technology. He suggests that most of the intelligence of our civilization will ultimately be nonbiological but derived from biological design. We will remain human but with understanding far beyond what we consider human today. It will be a time when greater-human-knowledge drives progress.

Kurzweil states (pg.194) that in the decades ahead we will be able to interface our brain with a computer and that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is spending $24 million per year to investigate such interfacing.In addition, the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Munich are already interfacing nerves with electronic devices. “As the computational power to emulate the human brain approaches – we’re almost there with superconductors – the efforts to scan and sense the human brain and to build working models and simulations of it are accelerating.”(pg.196). Machines will process and switch signals at close to the speed of light (about 300 million meters per second), compared to about 100 meters per second for electrochemical signaling in biological brains.

Between 2030 and 2040 nonbiological intelligence will predominate. In our brains, nanobots will interact with biological neurons enabling full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all the senses.
Machines will have access via the internet to all the knowledge of our human-machine civilization.

Any serious assessment of the history of technology reveals that technological change is exponential. Using this evidence, Kurzweil leaves this planet and projects humanity’s brain-power to the distant regions of the universe! (pg. 364)

Another futurist who builds “artificial brains” is Hugo de Garis. His book, also about the consequences of Moore’s law is as fanciful about the future as Kurzweil’s. He indicates that with new neuroscientific knowledge and nanotech tools, along with quantum computing, it will be possible to build intelligent, conscious machines which he labels: “artilects” (artificial intellects). On page 193 de Garis says that although artilectual progress will be exponential it will take many decades to create true artificial intelligence. “Terrans”, bioconservative opponents of artilects, (as opposed to “cosmists” who are proartilect), feel that artilects are potentially too dangerous to be built. However, according to de Garis they will probably not get worried until they see real intelligence in their household appliances. De Garis expects the conflict to heat up in the 21st century and that our children will be involved. Artilects with their superior intelligence might easily exterminate the human species thus ending another interval in the history of the universe – the extinction of homo sapiens!

REFERENCES

Bailey, Ronald, Liberation Biology 2005, Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York.

Brockman, John, ed. The Next Fifty years, 2002, Random House, New York.

de Garis, Hugo, The Artilect War, 2005, ETC Publications, Palm Springs, California.

Drexler, K. Eric, Engines of Creation, 1990, Anchor Books, New York.

Kurzweil, Ray, The Age Of Spiritual Machines, 1999. Penguin Books, New York.

Kurzweil, Ray, The Singularity Is Near, 2005, Viking, New York.

Kurzweil, Ray, vs the Critics of Strong A.I., Are We Spiritual Machines? 2002, Discovery Institute, Seattle, Washington.

Scientific American, Editors: Understanding Nanotechnology (2002) Warner Books, New York.

Searle, John, Minds, Brains and Science, 1984, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Addendum

A review article by Gabriel A. Silva entitled: “Neuroscience nanotechnology: progress, opportunities and challenges” in Nature Reviews/Neuroscience, 7, 65 –74, January 2006, is recommended for readers interested in more information on nanotechnology.

Charles C. Worthington, 18 January 20