Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

226 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
ficult to achieve anything like human competence in that arena), but the
computer does it very differently. If we are shown a series of unfamiliar
photographs of familiar famous people we would probably have little difficulty
making the correct identifications. It would be more difficult for the
computer/robot because the machine must go about the process differently.
We perceive the whole thing at once and say, “That’s Bernard Shaw”
or “That’s Virginia Woolf.” The computer merely processes numbers; or
more literally, turns electrical switches on and off. It does not—it cannot—
“see” the image as we see it. Each pixel is processed separately, one at a
time. There is, so far as we can possibly tell, no time when all the electrically
represented bits of information come together to create an image of
Shaw or Woolf. Of course, we do not know that the computer does not
“see” the image; we just have no good reason to suppose that it does. It has
been designed to do the job of assigning labels to photographs without
consciousness. Consciousness was left out of the design. It could not be
designed any other way because we do not have the slightest notion how to
produce consciousness. Our engineers cannot use what our scientists cannot
comprehend. Yet our brains somehow go to a lot of trouble to provide
us with images of our surroundings. If those images were not useful, if our
brains could just as easily process the information as a computer does, why
did evolution bother to produce awareness? If the brain is, in some sense,
aware actually only of itself, why is so much of that awareness structured
as a model of the brain’s surroundings? Why is so much of our awareness
devoted to a model of that which is outside of us? The implication is that
our complex, fluid awareness is achieved at a high price and with much
difficulty. It would not exist unless it were necessary. Teleological, purposeful,
causation must exist. Don Juan was right.
This does not, however, necessarily imply dualism. Reductionism is
still possible. The mental may not be capable of reduction to the physical,
but the reverse is true: material causation could be a special instance of
teleological causation. The key is awareness, made possible by those special
connections of perception. Our experience suggests that a complex consciousness
such as our own is achieved at a great cost and under special
circumstances. Even if the entire universe is teleological, if the seed of purpose
in the form of some elemental units of pain and pleasure somehow
pervades it, events would still follow a mechanistic pattern without awareness.
For purpose to appear purposeful, it must act through some sort of
consciousness. Without that awareness the behavior of the elements of
the universe is essentially mechanistic. Even if pain and pleasure, or some