AI and the End of Humanity by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2023-06-29T19:11:59+00:00

HOW RATIONAL IS TYPE II, THEN?

If E.T. cannot be perfectly rational, how far might its rationality have nevertheless taken it? Let us consider the role of reason in the only Type II we have experience of.

“If the great evolutionists still believe in the myth of free will, why should we trust them on anything?”

– astrophysicist writing to Will Provine, 1 February 2008, after viewing biologists’ responses to the Cornell Evolution Project

Free will, freedom of choice, freedom for any particular individual to have chosen differently, cannot exist in this or any possible universe. It is formally called the dilemma of determinism, given we inhabit a universe where all current and future events − at least from the point of view of human action − are necessitated by past ones. But it could as easily have been termed the dilemma of indeterminism, where indeterminism recognises events with no cause, as arguably (because this is still much debated) in the quantum world. As the philosopher Paul Russell puts it, “one horn of this dilemma is the argument that if an action was caused or necessitated, then it could not have been done freely, and hence the agent is not responsible for it. The other horn is the argument that if the action was not caused, then it is inexplicable and random, and thus it cannot be attributed to the agent, and hence, again, the agent cannot be responsible for it” (1995, p.14). As Russell spells out, the dilemma of determinism has stark implications because if our actions are caused, then we cannot be responsible for them, but if they are not caused, we cannot be responsible for them. “Whether we affirm or deny necessity and determinism, it is impossible to make any coherent sense of moral freedom and responsibility.”

We can arguably debate around the concept of responsibility, but we cannot reasonably debate around the concept of moral freedom. The absence of freedom to have chosen differently is woven into the very fabric of the cosmos; it is built into the logic of the universe. And in a world without free will “luck swallows everything”, as the Oxford philosopher Galen Strawson puts it (1998), and all of life is reduced to the pure lottery of biological and environmental luck. Before I was mentored in evolutionary paradoxes by George Williams my background was philosophy and metaphysics. Philosophers like my colleagues Bruce Waller (1990, 2006), Derk Pereboom (2001, 2007) and Richard Double (1990, 2002) have written extensively on why, logically, luck swallows everything in human life. The reason that the publishing sensation Yuval Noah Harari can assert as self-evident that “humans have no free will” (2018, p.300), and that this is “such a radical message” with “sinister implications” (p.251), is largely because of Bruce’s, Derk’s and Richard’s earlier, and courageously contrarian, analyses. And the above leads to some fascinating insights. For 3,000 years the most sought-after principle in ethics has been the possibility of an objective base to knowledge. The absence of free choice – and

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