Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

426 THE EVOLUTION OF MEANINGS Safe Passage to the Future 427
which was to create a survival machine, but it, like you, has taken on a certain
autonomy, has become a locus of self-control and self-determination, not by
any miracle, but just by confronting problems during its own "lifetime" and
more or less solving them—problems of survival presented to it by the world.
Simpler survival machines—plants, for instance—never achieve the heights
of self-redefinition made possible by the complexities of your robot; considering
them just as survival machines for their comatose inhabitants leaves no
patterns in their behavior unexplained.
If you pursue this avenue, which of course I recommend, then you must
abandon Searle's and Fodor's "principled" objection to "strong AI." The
imagined robot, however difficult or unlikely an engineering feat, is not an
impossibility—nor do they claim it to be. They concede the possibility of
such a robot, but just dispute its "metaphysical status"; however adroitly it
managed its affairs, they say, its intentionality would not be the real thing.
That's cutting it mighty fine. I recommend abandoning such a forlorn disclaimer
and acknowledging that the meaning such a robot would discover in
its world, and exploit in its own communications with others, would be
exactly as real as the meaning you enjoy. Then your selfish genes can be
seen to be the original source of your intentionality—and hence of every
meaning you can ever contemplate or conjure up—even though you can then
transcend your genes, using your experience, and in particular the culture
you imbibe, to build an almost entirely independent ( or "transcendent" )
locus of meaning on the base your genes have provided.
I find this an entirely congenial—indeed, inspiring—resolution of the
tension between the fact that I, as a person, consider myself to be a source of
meaning, an arbiter of what matters and why, and the fact that at the same
time I am a member of the species Homo sapiens, a product of several billion
years of nonmiraculous R and D, enjoying no feature that didn't spring from
the same set of processes one way or another. I know that others find this
vision so shocking that they turn with renewed eagerness to the conviction
that somewhere, somehow, there just has to be a blockade against Darwinism
and AI. I have tried to show that Darwin's dangerous idea carries the
implication that there is no such blockade. It follows from the truth of
Darwinism that you and I are Mother Nature's artifacts, but our intentionality
is none the less real for being an effect of millions of years of
minndless, algorithmic R and D instead of a gift from on high. Jerry Fodor
may joke about the preposterous idea of our being Mother Nature's artifacts,
but the laughter rings hollow; the only alternative views posit one skyhook or
another. The shock of this conclusion may be enough to make you more
sympathetic to Chomsky's or Searle's forlorn attempts to conceal the mind
behind impenetrable mystery, or Gould's forlorn attempts to escape from the
implication that natural selection is all it takes—an algorithmic series of
cranes cranking out ever higher forms of design.
Or it may inspire you to look elsewhere for a savior. Didn't the mathematician
Kurt Godel prove a great theorem that demonstrated the impossibility
of AI? Many have thought so, and recently their hunch was given a
powerful boost by one of the world's most eminent physicists and mathematicians,
Roger Penrose, in his book The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning
Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics ( 1989), to which the next
chapter is devoted.
CHAPTER 14: Real meaning, the sort of meaning our words and ideas have,
is itself an emergent product of originally meaningless processes—the algorithmic
processes that have created the entire biosphere, ourselves included.
A robot designed as a survival machine for you would, like you, owe
its existence to a project ofR and D with other ulterior ends, but this would
not prevent it from being an autonomous creator of meanings, in the fullest
sense.
CHAPTER 15: One more influential source of skepticism about AI (and
Darwin's dangerous idea) must be considered and neutralized: the persistently
popular idea to the effect that Godel's Theorem proves that AI is
impossible. Roger Penrose has recently revived this meme, which thrives in
darkness, and his exposition of it is so clear mat it amounts to exposure. We
can exapt his artifact to our own purposes: with his unintended help, this
meme can be extinguished.
with the real world is the disposition to engage in supple future interactions, appropriately
responsive to whatever novelty the world imposes. But—and this is the solid
ground, I think, for Dretske's intuition—since this capacity for swift redesign is apt to
show itself in current or recent patterns of interaction, his insistence that an artifact
exhibit "do-it-yourself understanding" ( Dennett 1992 ) is plausible, so long as we jettison
the essentialism and treat it simply as an important symptom of intentionality worthy of
the name.