INTELLIGENCE IS NOT KURZWEIL’S MAIN INTERESTKURZWEIL VS HAWKINS & LANIER

Dr Jacques COULARDEAUSYNOPSIS-PAIE, Nice, France

A sorry "debate” is developing on Amazon.co.uk on my review of Kurzweil’s book Transcend:Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.

Ray Kurzweil is using his MIT affiliation to sell a science fiction that is an absolute dystopia andsome people of course take that for science, as should be expected from all MIT scholars.

But it is no science at all. Jeff Hawkins and Jaron Lanier give the necessary information toanswer this dystopia, and we should think of what Wendy Hiu Kyong Chun says too (not covered in thispaper) on the interfaced individual or subject. Here we would lmike to think of several dangers inKurzweil’s painting of the future.

1- These nanobots of his will be intelligent, hence connected and they will communicateamong themselves within our body and within a certain distance outside our bodyand they will always be controlled by the motherboard of their inventors. That’s morethan Big Brother and his wired TVs. That’s even more than what Snowden revealed.

2- This technology will be expensive, which means it will be only for those who canafford it, either because they are rich individuals or because they have a good healthsystem in rich countries. This technology will create inequality and all the strugglingand battling and fighting such inequalities will create in the various countries and atthe level of the world itself.

3- This technology (some even see the possibility to reprogram our DNA so that wewould not age any more) would expand life expectancy tremendously, some evensee man in eternal gift wrapping, because that will be a serious Christmas present tohumanity, the impossibility to die of natural death. Accidents and wars will never beable to compensate and the population will grow exponentially.

4- If human beings can live let’s say 250 years, either they will all be gay, or they will allbe sterilized at a certain time in their life, or they will all abstain from any kind ofprocreative sex, in spite of Viagra and other drugs of the type. All that is highlyimprobable and even if each heterosexual couple only make one child every twentyyears they will make something like TEN children in a life time, which will be at leastfive times more than the average fertility rate for the simple maintenance of thepopulation at present level. So imagine the exponential demographic growth.

5- This is an absurd dystopia and humanity as a whole will have to manage suchdiscoveries and possibilities so that it will improve human life but no prevent naturaldeath and all it would mean: overpopulation and henceforth famines, starvation, war.

6- All utopian alternatives to this dystopia will work on the idea that human beings willno longer have the urge to make more than one child in a life time, no matter howlong. At a time when China is relaxing such a policy that they instated thirty yearsago or so, we would envisage it at the level of the whole humanity. At a time whenthe world is showing we can curb any dangerous policy like the nuclear policy of Iranwith diplomacy we would encourage a demographic policy that would lead to all kindsof wars. No one needs to be Dan Brown to understand that the demographic problemof this planet is becoming acute and dire, and that we will have to curb someinventions to avoid an implosive explosion at humanity level.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. RAY KURZWEIL – WHEN COMPUTERS EXCEED HUMANINTELLIGENCE, THE AGE OF SPIRITUAL MACHINES – 1999 –Review in May 2012

2. RAY KURZWEIL – THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR – 2006 – ReviewAugust 2011

3. RAY KURZWEIL – TERRY CROSSMAN, MD – TRANSCEND, NINESTEPS TO LIVING WELL FOREVER – 2009 – Review August 2011

4. RAY KURZWEIL – HOW TO CREATE A MIND – 2012

5. Kurzweil still has somework to do tobecome realistichttp://drjacquescoulardeau.blogspot.fr/

6. JEFF HAWKINS – ON INTELLIGENCE – 2004

7. ONE HALF A MANIFESTO By Jaron LanierCritical reading of the basic principals of Cybernetic Totalism

(Jacques COULARDEAU)

8. JARON LANIER – YOU ARE NOT A GADGET – 2010-2011

9. AMAZON.CO.UKhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R39WLXM9YE45LU?ref_=pe_780

071_41837251

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RAY KURZWEIL – WHEN COMPUTERS EXCEED HUMANINTELLIGENCE, THE AGE OF SPIRITUAL MACHINES – 1999 – Review inMay 2012

It is interesting to read this older book after the more recent ones. It reveals some ofthe ideological axioms and methodological traits and mistakes that he started from. Andunluckily it is necessary to go back to basics at times when you are dealing with abestselling author in a field where it is easy to predict the future, even the future of theworld, the field of technology and what’s more information technology.

Ray Kurzweil with more recent books took us into the clouds of his cloud computingand appeared on these clouds like some Messiah who was the rainmaker of theapocalypse, that time when humans will be taken over by another world entirely dominatedby a non-human intelligence, even if created originally by man himself. He tries to be theprophet of the future of a world created by evolution stated as intelligent (whoseintelligence?) and later by man’s intelligence, and then destroyed for plain humans by themachines created by this human intelligence. The vision is a mixture of Terminator 1-2-3-4,Matrix 1-2-3, The Stand, and The Book of Revelation. He even gives at the end of thishere book the four Horses of the Apocalypse page 256: Red War (“the species maydestroy itself before achieving this step”), White Political Power (“a malfunction,” hence aproblem in the system whose constitution is not clear cut), the Black Justice or Commerceand their scales (“a software virus” introduced by the badly designed software or by apirate or hacker) and the Pale Green Pestilence (a “real biological virus” devised andaccidentally, on purpose from the machine or on purpose from a malevolent human withreference to the example of “HIV”)

But this enormous metaphor, always present in this book, is quite often expressedwhen speaking of the beginning of the world, the creation of the Universe, the Big Bang,the end of the world, the end of the Universe, the Big Crunch or the Whimper, thebeginning of time and the end of time, etc, the total domination with the alpha and theomega, that basic biblical, Jewish, Christian and Islamic concept that time has a firstinstant and will have a last instant and both were decided by some God. He evenmanages to present the God’s spot of some epileptic god-fearing patients who see God intheir trances, and that vision is identified in one spot in their brain in such a way that wemay believe it is true for everyman on earth, hence that God is in every single one of ourbrains.

This is clandestine and yet widely open religious ideology directly borrowed from thebasic sacred books of the three Semitic religions. He could have quoted easily the OldTestament, the New Testament, the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls and the Koran. But he kepthis quotations secret. Too bad. When one is speaking religion it is important that this onesays so and give the references not to be accused of plagiarism.

Let’s start with time. Time does not exist in reality, in the real world. Only durationdoes and time was invented by human beings as soon as they tried to measure thatduration. So it is absurd to speak of an acceleration of time or of a deceleration of time.We may speak of the speed of a phenomenon, but not of the speed of time. Time is ahuman concept and as such it is absolutely objective and has to remain so, like anymeasurement invented by human beings. Then he speaks a lot about the subjectiveimpression we have according to various psychological states we may be in. That impliesthat we feel a certain amount of time as having a short or long duration but duration is nottime. A star does not know time, nor duration as for that, but for two different reasons,

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because time is a human invention and because a star has no consciousness orawareness of duration, or anything else as for that. Kurzweil when speaking of time orusing the concept of time is in fact juggling around with colored balls and he wants us tobelieve he is not a juggler but the balls and their dancing in the air are objectivedescriptions of the Universe.

If he had been prudent with time he would have been realistic with scientific andtechnological what’s more models. All our knowledge is nothing but a complex set ofmodels built by our mind on the basis of our sensations transformed into perceptions in ourbrain by our mind.

But Kurzweil never discusses the concept of mind and hardly refers to it. He refersto the brain which would in a way or another contain our intelligence and our knowledge.He uses most of the time a computing metaphor and the brain is a hard disk andintelligence is the software or the programming, knowledge being the memory or the databank of the hard disk. That metaphor is primitive and it is a shortcut if not a mental shortcircuit.

What is the mind? The mind is a construct of man’s brain built from all the individualhas accumulated as for sensations, transformed into perceptions and articulated one ontop, or whatever, of the other into a complex architecture from the very first moment ofconception. The Pro-life or Pro-abortion debate has no value here. The fetus starts feelingand accumulating things, sensations, as soon as it is a fetus, hence just after conception;That fetus will have a heart of its own around the fourth week and from one beating (itsmother’s heart) it will shift to two beatings (his mother’s and his own hearts) and these twowill coordinate from one moment to the next and the fetus experiences from the first dayand then from the fourth week the beating of one heart and then of two and thecoordination of both. Stress in the mother, pleasure in the mother, fear in the motherchange the beating of her heart and the fetus knows it. We mustn’t forget that the fetus willeventually develop mirror neurons that will multiply the empathy he is living from the veryfirst day. All that is ignored by Kurzweil.

Worse even he ignores that the child from the twentieth or twenty-fourth week ofgestation will be able to clearly hear all that the mother says and all that is said within oneyard and a half around the mother, and by the way not only said but all noises or music orwhatever sound. Before that audition the fetus could feel the vibrations of the mother’sbody while she was speaking. Now he can hear the very clusters of sounds she produces,and those are associated to the vibrations, and those that are produced in her direction. Atbirth the new-born will be able to react to the clusters of sounds that had been commonwith the mother and experiments were done with the names of the siblings of the new-bornand the baby reacted to these clusters one hour after birth. All that is ignored and ofcourse language is ignored in its hierarchical articulated nature.

But there is more. The birth itself is never taken into account and the trauma itbrings with discontinuous feeding, with breathing, with hunger and thirst, and the first cry ofthe baby. It will not take the baby very long to understand that when it cries some adult isgoing to come to take care of its needs, wants, discomforts and desires. That creates abasic MATRIX of hierarchized functions centering on a relation. The functions are themeand location, source and goal, agent and theme. These functions are the basic functions ofany human syntax and the relations, static (of the “be” type or of the “have” type) or active(of the transitive, intransitive, transferring or positioning types, not to speak of the particulartransfers of “give” and “take”). All that is learned from experience by the new-born child

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and built in his mind as a model that will inform the language when words becomepossible.

Yes the child listens and yes the child will babble and discover that the lipmovements of sucking or rejecting the tit of his mother or the bottle-tit can be articulatedon the flow of air coming from his larynx and when that larynx starts lowering the child willbe able to pronounce “ma”, “pa”, “da”, “ta”, “ka”. As soon as the larynx is low enough tocontrol the flow of air and as soon as the articulatory power of the mouth, jaws, tongue,glottis becomes more developed the child will be able to produce and articulate moresounds, and he will start associating the clusters of sound with the referential elementsaround him, on the basis of and into the basic MATRIX he will have by then vastlydeveloped in his mind through and from experience.

But the main mistake of Kurzweil is methodological. He does not seems tounderstand, actually he can’t, that the mind being a construct will change its constructionconstantly every single time a new element of knowledge appears. That connectionbetween the knowledge and the architecture of the mind is not seen by Kurzweil and theevolutionary nature of that relation is not seen either, especially not in its dual carriagewaydialectic: a given state of the mind enables a child to learn a certain item of knowledge butthat item of knowledge reacting on the mind changes it and restructures it and then themind is able to learn some new item of knowledge he could not learn before. And thatprocess is never finished, except with death, that can be mental before being physical, butthat’s not the point here.

So the main methodological defect appears then.

He states what he calls laws, particularly the Law of Accelerating Returns. But hedoes not seem to know this law is a mental model constructed by his mind of what mightbe a natural phenomenon. But his law contains a very old defect generally identified as theparadox of Ulysses and the Hare. If Man’s mental development is slower than themachine’s development then sooner or later the machine will step beyond man. But heforgets the basic principle of man’s development. It is mental, hence in the mind, hence aconstruct, a model, hence every step of it develops the mind itself and every developmentof what this mind produces develops the mind itself, which means we cannot in anywayconsider the mind (and Kurzweil only considers the brain) as in anyway static in power andextension. The brain is hardly overused by the mind. Isn’t it said that Einstein usedsomething like 12 or 13 % of his brain? The brain is far from being fully used and the mindhas quite a lot of brain reserve to develop more and more models of reality.

The last point I would like to make here is the social hierarchy that is behind thatthinking.

At the top you have “the software-based humans who vastly exceed those still usingnative neuron-cell-based computation.” No matter how vast this class is, it is a dominantclass. We are in pure science fiction where these superior beings are purely virtual living invirtual bodies in a virtual reality and that they can eventually descend into a nano-engineered physical body. That reminds me of Hubbard’s “theta” and “MEST”

The population this superior class dominates is to be seen as composed of severallayers.

First the middle human class that uses “neural implant technology to reach an

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enormous augmentation of human perceptual and cognitive abilities.” Note the mind is stillabsent since, according to Bertrand Russell, the body and its senses can only increase thequality of the sensations, and it is the mind that will build the perceptions. That’s the shortcut of the presentation which is a short circuit: without a mind the way I defined it, alongwith Bertrand Russell and all cognitive linguists, we blow the system because the mind isthe fuse of it.

At the bottom the lower class is composed of the humans who do not utilize theafore-mentioned implants and are unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues withthose who are using them.

This society is an echo of Brave New World and it amounts to real apartheid basednot on race, not even on culture and education, but on the use or not of neural implanttechnology. There is not choice whatsoever in this social vision. Under the virtual dominantclass that may condescend to get into a nano-engineered physical body to deal with realhumans, the choice, if it is a choice, is to accept neural implants or not. On one hand youcan participate in the society. On the other hand you cannot and I guess you will be sent tosome reservation if not a simple extermination plant. And this does not answer thequestion of who will decide and through what procedure, and with what appeal route, thatthis physical body will be entrusted to the virtual dominant individuals to be able tointervene in the real world. Who will decide who is going to be the vessel of these virtualdominant beings? We are this time in Supernatural. So we can ask who is Lucifer and whois Michael.

To conclude, and I will spend a lot more time to discuss Kurzweil’s books (all ofthem) in another arena, this ideology justifies deistic visions without hardly referring toGod. This ideology is socially segregative. This ideology negates the developmental role ofthe mind by negating the mind itself. This ideology does not understand the developmentalrole of language among humans. This ideology ignores all the research done on pre-natalexistence and cognitive process, procedures and power.

And surprisingly enough some of its conclusions are extremely close to Hubbard’s,particularly in the science-fiction of it. Hubbard was more on retrospective science fiction,inheritance from the very distant past. Kurzweil is more on a prospective science fiction,the production of a future that will transcend us. But both base their visions of man andhuman society on a selection according to some kind of science-fictional elaboration thattakes the form of some pseudo-psychiatric form in Hubbard, and that last “elaboration”word is an understatement.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

RAYKURZWEIL – THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR – 2006 – Review August2011

Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, the exponentially accelerating rhythmof technological progress is obvious but to quantify the phenomenon is an obsession forhim. This brings to a mistake when he says that the doubling of the capability ofinformation technology occurs every year and that it means a multiplication by 1,000 in tenyears and by 1,000,000 in twenty years. In fact 11 years will reach 1,024 and 11 moreyears will reach 1,048,576.

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But Kurzweil starts with a mathematical example to explain "the singularity", amathematic concept adopted by physics that he transfers into philosophy. His example isthe function f(x) = 1/x. It is a hyperbole centered on the orthogonal axes of a Cartesianplane. For x = 0 the function is undefined, hence for x = 0 + n, n being as small asconceivable, and a dimension can always be cut in two, f(x) moves towards the infinite. Inthe same way if x moves towards the infinite f(x) will move towards 0: asymptotic growth.He doesn't consider when x becomes negative though then the hyperbole is perfectlydefined, symmetrical to the first graph.

It is the old Achilles and the Tortoise Paradox, thus defined by Aristotle: "In a race,the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach thepoint whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead." (Aristotle,Physics VI:9, 239b15). In real life, the remaining distance between Achilles and thetortoise either is shorter than Achilles' arm, then Achilles will pick up the Tortoise, or it issmaller than Achilles' step then Achilles will overtake the Tortoise.

In fact Kurzweil ignores (two meanings intended) René Thom's Catastrophe Theory.In such cases of asymptotic growth x reaches the point of a qualitative change, and that isexactly what happens when x is nearing zero. In nature, no matter how small a particle ofmatter is, there is a qualitative threshold from one state to the other, from a particle to pureenergy for example. That's what nuclear fusion and fission produce.

This beginning then falsifies the whole reasoning. There will be a point whentechnology is so developed that humanity as a whole will step over a limit. When is it goingto be reached? For Kurzweil as soon as computers are as intelligent as man, or rathermore, and he dates it. In forty tears or so.

Then Kurzweil evacuates the problem of language in about one page and onereference to Chomsky (p. 190). His man, and of course machines have no articulatedcommunicational language. The whole theory is based on the consideration thatintelligence is nothing but a problem solving mental procedure. The question is notwhether it is genetic or the result of the functioning of the brain. The real question is whatis intelligence and where does it come from. The author's insistence on the fact thatevolution (producing intelligence) only starts with biology (p. 387), that intelligence is onlyhuman, that the rest of the material world does not even contain any rational element, thatit is human intelligence, when equaled and overtaken by the intelligence of machines, thatwill take possession of an essentially irrational cosmos, this insistence shows his man-centered and even machine-centered ideology.

He cannot understand that from the very first instant we may consider, and that isnot the beginning of the cosmos or matter – there is something before the big bang – thematter we consider is rational and has an architectural dynamic pattern. From this startingpoint, which is not the beginning of the cosmos but an arbitrary point taken just after the"big bang", the rationality of each state will produce that of the next. The question is howmore than if. From the very first matter particles evolution will produce life. The evolution ofmatter particles from simple to complex will eventually produce the elements that will makelife possible and then, along with this geological evolution, we have the evolution ofspecies where haphazard mutations are selected by natural selection: useful or not for thesurvival of the individual or species.

Here Kurzweil falls in an enormous trap: language. Human intelligence is based onconceptualizing power. That power can only develop if the mind is able to label theseconcepts derived from the real referential environment, which means a language entirely

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invented by the mind in a situation when the body, as a side effect of bipedal running,produces three phylogenic hierarchical articulations in a context of social cooperation andcommunication indispensable for the survival of individual and species. Knowledge is notgiven, like with Kurzweil but it is a construct invented through assimilation, which requiresa knowledge acquisition threshold implying motivation, transferences and cognitivestrategies. All these are absent from Kurzweil's approach. If a machine could produce afather transference hampering or dynamizing its learning, I might become a believingconvert.

Last remark: his inspiration, probably unconsciously, is recuperating some oldtrans-cultural religious concepts. For example the six epochs of the universe (whathappened before the Big Bang?) is a very kosher number. "The Singularity will ultimatelyinfuse the universe with spirit." (p. 389) The Messiah of the Old Testament and the SecondComing of the New Testament promise the same illumination, after the end of the materialworld, with inspiration from the Spirit or the Holy Sprit of God himself. John said it, orEzekiel did. Kurzweil speaks of "a common Buddhist ontology [that] considers subjective –conscious – experience as the ultimate reality" (p. 388). Total ignorance of Buddhism forwhich man's lot is the permanently changing cycle of birth-life-death-rebirth, i.e. theconcept "dukkha", and the possibility through "nibbana" to move out of it and merge intothe pure energy of the universe. This vision of Buddhism seems to be out of RayKurzweil's consciousness.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

RAY KURZWEIL – TERRY CROSSMAN, MD – TRANSCEND, NINE STEPSTO LIVING WELL FOREVER – 2009 – Review August 2011

The first thing I have to say is that the title is definitely false advertising. “Forever”does not exist with any natural phenomenon. Everything in the world is born to life, liveswhich means follows a track of growth and decay, dies and eventually is reborn throughsome form of reproduction for the organisms that can reproduce. No one will live forever.The human species is genetically planned to disappear in a way or another like all otheranimal species. The best thing that happens with animal life is that natural evolutioneliminates organisms that are no longer fit for survival in the changing environment it livesin and replaces it with an organism that is fitter to that environment.

The point with human beings is that natural evolution has endowed our species witha form of intelligence that enables us to go against this natural evolution by changing theenvironment, by producing our means of survival, by going against decay and death evenfor the individuals who are obviously badly adapted for survival and would die in a jiffy ifnatural evolution had the last word. Religion, science, technology, medicine are the humaninventions that enabled the species to extend its survival and expand its living conditions.

We find that same “human” vanity in the first chapter when the authors say “Youcreate your brain” (p. 7). The brain is a given organ that depends as for its existence onthe genetic inheritance of the individual or the species. They say then “You create yourbrain from the input you get” (p. 8). This is less false since it takes into account the input,but the genetic input cannot be an input “you” get because “you” do not exist in anywaybefore this genetic inheritance is brought up by the fertilization of an egg by aspermatozoon. They finally come to a closer truth when they say “I do indeed create mymind from my own thoughts” (p. 8) The mind is not an organ, but it is a meta-sense,

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meaning it is potentially contained in the genetic structure and functionality of the brain inits body and under the survival requirement in the body’s and species’ environment.

The mistake is the use of the word “create”. The comparison with muscles shouldhave made them realize the vanity of this word. Exercise and training does not “create” amuscle but only develops it. The proper approach of the mind would be that our sensorialexperiences and the strong requests from our environment in order to survive, and todayto get an education which is the basic social survival requirement, DEVELOP the mentalfunction of the brain and hence the MIND. As for the brain the same sensorial experiencesplus physical activities along with the development of language DEVELOP the brain’sability to “think”, DEVELOP our THOUGHTS or THINKING and hence enable the brain toDEVELOP in itself connections and relations between the various cells that are geneticallyprogrammed to establish such relations and connections. True enough it is this globalexperience of coordinated actions, coordinated thinking, articulated language andsystematic reflection (distantiation and mental reconstruction) that makes the brain of anyindividual what it is, rich or poor, richly developed or underdeveloped, etc.

I am surprised that the authors did not speak of mirror neurons that are essential incontact with other people and learning. Yet they compensate this flaw with the mention ofspindle cells that are essential to build complex responses to the environment, i.e.coordinated, articulated and empathetic reactions. Language is these responses thoughthe authors concentrate on emotions. They do not even consider the ancillary role, not tospeak of the conceptual role of language in thinking, communicating, emotional contact,etc. Their world is entirely language-empty, and that is regrettable because articulatedlanguage is a basic human dimension resulting from natural evolution.

Now this book, by far too big for simple readers, is clear on a few healthy elements:To live better and longer, man or woman must be active, practice regular and ratherexacting exercise, sleep properly, eat healthy and balanced food, drink moderately andnon exciting beverages (alcohol or caffeine or energizing drinks, though they don’t mentionthese that are included under caffeine) and practice relaxation and even meditation.

As for activity and exercise, they do not specify a wide enough variety: no walking,no bicycling, no swimming, apparently only aerobics and running lengthily mentioned. Asfor healthy food, they speak against deep frying and other high temperature cooking, butthey do not speak one word on low temperature cooking that microwave ovens provide. Asfor relaxation and meditation they stop short, a long way short, of Buddhist and Orientalmeditation that some consider as being self-hypnosis into total inner relaxation by pushingaway outer environmental elements. Yoga is definitely, in its Western reduction to somekind of physical and mental recipe, a trendy suggestion in Northern America and thedeveloped world.

The TRANSCEND program is also very surprising in its first element, “talk with yourdoctor” and heavy emphasis on medical tests and prescription drugs, because it soundslike open and unconditional support to the medical profession that has not done much sofar for prevention but has done so far a lot for surgical and chemotherapeutic inflexibility ifnot obduracy. People have to become their own mental doctors and meditation as well aseducation are essential, and the “talk with your doctor” provides neither. The book thenbecomes a set of recipes (including a vast food recipe section) and suggestions (includinga vast aerobic section) counterbalanced by long lists of supplements and drugs andchemical elements etc. Anyone who does not have a high degree of training and curiosityin the field will not get a real positive return from this book.

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Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

RAYKURZWEIL – HOW TO CREATE A MIND – 2012

We must understand this title that pretends to tell you how you can create a mindhas to be taken literally. Ray Kurzweil believes in his Artificial Intelligence engineer’senthusiasm that he can create a mind, that he may qualify as god himself, a secular godas a matter of fact.

“Evolution can then be viewed as a spiritual process in that it creates spiritualbeings, that is, entities that are conscious. Evolution also moves towardgreater complexity, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty,greater creativity, and the ability to express more transcendent emotions,such as love. These are all descriptions that people have used for theconcept of God, albeit God is described as having no limitations in theseregards.” (p. 223)

And do not consider all that is pure rhetoric or pulpit preaching. He believesevolution is the real God when he says: “Our neocortex is virgin territory when our brain iscreated . . . the biological process of actually growing a brain.” (p. 62) We can wonderabout this evolution or biological process if it is a creator or a grower, God or a simplefarmer. But we have to wonder what Kurzweil means by “brain” and “mind.” Page 23 over26 lines he uses the following string of words: “mind . . . brain . . . mind . . . theories . . .ideas . . . thought . . . thinking . . . theories . . . thought . . . brain . . . thinking . . . “ We canassert that these words are not really discriminated. This lack of clear definitions of theseterms is of course an enormous shortcoming that is just as nearly irritating as the levitywith which he deals with Einstein: “Einstein articulated my goals in this book well when hesaid that ‘any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex . . . but it takes . . .a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.’” (p. 11) It is obvious Einstein did notarticulate his goals since he has not been alive for a while now. That use of the passive byKurzweil to draw to himself what the quoted person said is even more astounding with atleast two and quite often more than three quotations, at times long ones, at the head of allchapters and even subchapters. Kurzweil seems to forget that quoting does not proveanything. But this quoting and bringing together opposed ideas is the basic unitarianobjective of the author:

“The truth can be discovered only by finding an explanation that overrides –transcends – seeming differences, especially for fundamental questions ofmeaning and purpose. That is how I resolve the Western-Eastern divide onconsciousness and the physical world. In my view both perspective have tobe true. On the one hand it is foolish to deny the physical world . . . On theother hand, the Eastern perspective – that consciousness is fundamental andrepresents the only reality that is truly important – is also difficult to deny.” (p.222)

On one hand blunt and brutal materialism since Kurzweil does not seem to considerthe material existence of the mind, except when reduced to the brain, or of ideas,thoughts, ideologies, etc. On the other hand a principle that is derived from a falsereference to Buddhism.

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“In the Eastern view, consciousness is the fundamental reality, the physicalworld only comes into existence through the thoughts of conscious beings . .. I call this the Buddhist school of quantum mechanics, because in it particlesessentially don’t exist until they are observed by a conscious person.” (p.218-219)

Kurzweil does not know what he is speaking of. Buddhism is basically expressed inthe Dhammapada and the Abhidhamma. For Buddha the whole material world existsoutside our consciousness and we are part of it because we have a body. This wholeworld can only be captured by our six senses, the five basic senses plus the mind as ameta-sense that processes the sensations captured by the five other senses plus theabstract concepts conveyed by language and organized in abstract reasoning ordescription. The word “consciousness” that Kurzweil uses does not correspond at all to thewords used for the “mind” that sixth sense or meta-sense. In fact there are two words inPali for the mind, “mana” that refers to the meta-sense itself and “citta” which refers to thevarious mental states of an individual experiencing some type of feeling, emotion, mentalexcitation, etc. Kurzweil uses the word “determined” a lot about the material world. Thereis a Buddhist concept behind. The whole physical world, including us as physical beings isdetermined, follows the physical laws governing the cosmos. By using the mind anyindividual can get into meditation, which will lead him onto the eightfold path of illuminationthat is to say the possibility to get detached from the determined world and hence to mergewith cosmic energy once death has come, thus getting out of the triple characteristic of thedetermined world: everything is changing all the time; everything is carried by a cycle thatgoes from birth to life and decay then to death and then to rebirth. Nibbana (known inSanskrit as Nirvana) is that mentally produced escape from this cycle into cosmic energy;everything has no essence, soul or permanence of any type.

This is important because this should lead us to refusing the basic objectiveKurzweil gives to humanity: to use intelligent machines to “coloniz[e]” (p. 281) theuniverse. In previous books he was rejoicing in the idea that the speed of light could bestepped over, hence speeding the “colonizing [of] the universe” (p. 281) though in thisbook he is more realistic since the good news about having transported molecules at aspeed higher than the speed of light has been disproved in this very 2012 year. But theobjective remains: to colonize the universe. Some people never learn. The colonization ofthe planet by the Europeans has not exactly been the best thing in the world producingslavery, the eradication of American Indians, Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, etc, colonialism andthrowing three continents, if not four into, underdevelopment and exploitation. It is hightime Kurzweil questions his basic fundamental motivation. The conquest of the universe isnot on the agenda. So far we are dealing with the discovery of the universe. We mightnever conquer it, especially if intelligent beings exist here and there. The use of the cavalryseems to be slightly passé.

This said, and it is fundamental we can move to the main subject of the book: themind, though in fact he never speaks of it reducing it to the brain. So let’s start with thebrain.

After a rather long career and many books published on his “Singularity” that wasand still is heftily criticized by many people in the field, including people who arespecialists, theoreticians and entrepreneurs in computing science and technology likeKurzweil himself, he wrote this book to get back in phase with others. Criticism wasgenerally rejected high-handedly before. This time he makes an effort to integrate theresearch of others in the first half of his book, hence to describe the functioning of the

11

brain the way it is known by scientists, though in the second half of the book he goes backhis messianic, apocalyptic, prophetic, oracular prediction of the merging of biologicalintelligence, hence man, into non-biological intelligence, hence machines and we jumponto the track to Terminator 25 all over again and dreams of a time when “computers willhave . . . surpassed unenhanced human intelligence.” This phrase gives us in a nutshell,not a walnut but a hazelnut, his basic thinking. Note he of course neglects the fact thathuman intelligence develops along with all the intelligent machines and theories man hasinvented. If these intelligent machines are used properly, that is to say at the top of theircapabilities, then the intelligence of the users will tremendously develop. Will we have anew mutation in biological evolution? Some human beings are able to develop sometremendous capabilities as for memory, the assimilation of hierarchical systems likeforeign languages, etc. These are supposed to be autistic, but do we know anythingserious about autistic people apart from believing they are different and have to be putaway?

Let’s speak of the brain now. I will not be over technical about it. He borrows fromvarious other researchers (Jeff Hawkins, Dileep George and Jaron Lanier mostly) thegeneral architecture of the brain and adds a couple of things.

The neocortex is the part of the brain that controls our most advanced humanintelligent activities. It has six layers and it is structured in vertical columns across thesesix layers; Each column hence has six layers too. These columns are connected in manyways first of all to the columns around each one of them on a proximity basis, but somespindle neurons can connect many columns in all parts of the brain, 60% of these spindleneurons in the right hemisphere and 40 percent in the left hemisphere. They appearedwith hominids, our ancestors after branching out of apes some 10 or 15 million years ago.But we must know that they already existed in apes since Gorillas have about 20% of ournumber, Bonobos have 2.5% and chimpanzees about 2%. Other mammals do not haveany at all. Kurzweil does not speak of mirror neurons and he should have since they arealso only vastly present in Homo Sapiens, though they must have been present inhominids and are present in some apes, and these are essential for learning and empathysince they enable someone to imitate the actions of someone else and to empatheticallyfeel the same emotions as other people around them. He also mentions though lightly thefact that a fetus has a brain as soon as one month of age and this fetus will hear (he doesnot mention this one) and see around the 20th or 24th weeks of pregnancy. He forgets tosay that the brain grows after birth. But he does mention that everything happening whilethe brain is growing has important consequences on the growth of this brain. But hemakes his basic mistake here at the very basis of his approach.

First he considers that “learning and recognition take place simultaneously.” (p. 63)He just forget in the womb the fetus cannot learn because all he hears or feels has noreferential dimension; These sensations he feels and the sound clusters of any type hehears are registered, that was proved, but with no reference, hence no real meaning,though they can have a comforting or disturbing effect on the fetus along with the mother’smood. After birth it is obvious then the baby has the possibility to attach a referent hencea meaning to what he sees and identifies. At this point it is impossible to say that learningand recognizing happens simultaneously for the same things. You have to learn aboutsomething before recognizing it. Even if is only a comforting sensation you have toexperience it first, to more or less identify it second before being able to recognize it.Recognition is necessarily second at least because to identify you have to experienceseveral times and that’s what he probably means. The first time you just experience, thesecond time then you recognize and by recognizing you identify even if it is superficially.

12

But there must be a first moment of pure experience. But this is nothing in itself. The mainshortcoming at this moment is the absence of any consideration about language. ForKurzweil language, spoken first and written second are the only two inventions of humanity(he says so twice p. 27 and 159) bringing together in one movement two human inventionsthat have at least 300,000 years between them and it neglects the phylogeny of thatlinguistic ability. Once again without entering details, language which was oral only for atleast 300,000 years out of 305,000 years is an invention of humanity, ,hence of the brainand since language is not something you can touch it is part of the mind. Written languagewill only come very late in human history. There are still some human groups on the earththat do not write at all.

To invent human articulated language the neocortex has to have a hierarchicalorganization, which is the case in each column and in the neocortex all together and withinthe brain between the old brain and the neocortex. That hierarchical architecture of thebrain makes the brain only able to function along that line. The hierarchical architecture ofthe brain produces hierarchical thinking, hierarchical language, hierarchical society, etc. Allhuman activities contain a hierarchical dimension that is the reflection of the architecture ofthe brain. And here with language you hold an essential line of thought. Every singleadvancement in phylogeny, in lexicon, in syntax is produced by the mind and eachadvancement is inscribed in the mind and determines the next advancement. We couldshow how complex but also how direct and simple this transitive productive process is.What’s more the experience of a human being in front of any entity is hierarchical. He mustfirst discriminate it. Then he has to identify it and name it with a new name if it is a newentity or an old name if he recognizes it as already known and named. Then it has to beclassified and that leads to another abstract operation that is known has conceptualization.There is no concept if there is no conceptualization; Kurzweil uses the word “concept”several times, though he does not list it in his index, but he does not use the word“conceptualization” which means for him concepts are generated by magic.

It is obvious then that written language amplifies the intellectual conceptualization ofpeople since they do not have to simply remember plain facts that are recorded in books.They can step further into more abstract thinking. Imagine what it is when you have theInternet at the tip of your fingers. There are thus systematic hierarchies that he neglects.From root to theme and then frond at the level of the semantic units of the language oftencalled words. From syncretic concatenation, to clause structure, to multi-clause structureby concatenation and then embedding, as for syntax often called grammar. From simplecalls, to orders, to descriptive discourse, to explicative discourse, to any other discoursewith an ever higher level of abstraction, social meaning, content or intention, and that hasto use various media to be uttered or produced.

But there is more if you cross brain and language.

Each column, and that is Kurzweil’s approach, is composed of many modules, eachone having about 100 neurons. These modules are connected inside the column incomplex intertwined networks. Hence we then have a first hierarchy: neurones and theirrelations within a module, then modules and their relations within a column and at eachlevel relations between the elements and the direct outside: neurons from one module toneurons from another module in the same column, modules from one column to modulesfrom the same column and to modules from other columns. And yet we miss the spindleneurons that can connect any column to any other column and any module to any othermodule. These spindle neurons seem to be totally opportunistic and develop according tothe needs of this or that moment for this or that individual. We thus get to what Dileep

13

George calls “recursive cortical networks” (quoted p. 152) and I insist on the fact that thesenetworks are growing from nearly conception to death, or at least to an advanced age, aslong as we can learn new tricks, that they are flexible and versatile in many ways, whichexplains why we can learn new things all the time: there is plenty of room in the brain andany learning does not depend on a type of available neurons, they are all basically thesame. This enables man to use many ways of thinking and one at least is unpredictableand hence inimitable.

The simplest way is to put together two entities and their proximity implies they areconnected. It’s what is called syncrertic thinking and it corresponds to what Kurzweil calls“leakage” in the brain, one neuron being in a certain state due to some influx of informationcoming to it may have a direct influence on its neighbors as if it leaked its information overhis surrounding neurons.

Then we can build a deductive argumentation. One event is the cause of anotherwhich is the effect of the first one. We can thus build deductive chains. That’s the standardreasoning in sciences like mathematics. We can also inverse the reasoning and get into aninductive chain of reasoning. From what I know I induce that this should be true. It is ahypothesis. This is also important in sciences, but also in everyday life like: it was rainingyesterday hence my father must have stayed home.

But there is another way of thinking. I call it subduction. The simplest form ofsubduction is a metaphor; I treat one entity as if it were another and that may reveal anaspect of the first entity I had not seen at first. A metaphor or a subduction does not proveanything. It has to be demonstrated afterwards, but that’s how the most creative activitiesof man develop. We have a deep feeling, a strong emotion, a profound conviction, posttraumatic stress, and we draw from this the idea that the working truth should be this orthat. It is an induction in a way but a lot vaster and deeper. This sudden truth is the Eurekaof Archimedes. A sudden illumination. Note such epiphanies can happen at any time andanywhere and in any field of activity. This subduction corresponds perfectly to therecursive cortical networks Dileep George is speaking of. Note language is notindispensible. A composer can just experience such epiphanies in his composing and hewould be unable to explain in words what it means. That’s generally why I would considerthe artistic creator is the last person who can explain his own creation.

The question that I will only evoke here is where do these elements of the mind of aperson register in the brain. Kurzweil does not even ask the question. For him whole listsof patterns as he calls them are available in the various modules. The question is to knowwhere all these elements, patterns or not, are registered. My idea is that we are working atthe level of the molecules with particularly the proteins in the microtubules of the neuronssince it is proved some of these proteins can vary including in structure when impacted bysome influx of information. Same thing about the transportation of the sensorial informationfrom the sensorial organs to the brain: how is it done? A vast discussion is needed here.

The last point I would like to make here is about Artificial Intelligence. Kurzweil’sobjective is to copy a real brain, or maybe several (though mixing two brains mightproduce strange effects since there cannot be two brains that are identical due to theirpsychogenetic history), and then compress the information by cutting out all redundancyand the brain is very redundant. Kurzweil says that should have no effect. I would doubt itsince each instance of one piece of information was registered in one specific situationwith particular emotional or sensorial elements around it and these variations from onerecording to the next of the same item will be lost by compressing. Then he will simulate

14

that compressed version of a brain in an intelligent machine. His machine will only be ableto simulate the compressed version of one particular brain and hence will in no wayrepresent the human brain at the level of its abstract totality. But Kurzweil knows it is inmany ways bound to be too short:

“Almost certainly we would not find a precise match; the neuronal structurewould invariably differ in many details compared with the models in thecomputer. However, I would maintain that there must be an essentialmathematical equivalence to a high degree of precision between the actualbiology and our attempt to emulate it; otherwise these systems would notwork as well as they do.” (p. 153)

What is lost in such a simulation is what makes a brain different from all others, thecircumstantial elements attached to each item of knowledge, but it is these elements thatmay be particularly pervasive in a subductive inspirational way of thinking. A plane after allflies pretty well but it is quite different from a bird, isn’t it, though it performs the task offlying quite well.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Kurzweil still has somework to do tobecome realistichttp://drjacquescoulardeau.blogspot.fr/

Saturday, January 26, 2013 Kurzweil still has somework to do tobecome realistic

This book is probably essential. Ray Kurzweil is reaching the age when he startslistening to various critics and trying to integrate their work in his. But he stillbelieves the human world we know is coming to its end to give way to amechanically enhanced human world that sounds a lot like Terminator 25.

RAY KURZWEIL – HOW TO CREATE A MIND – 2012

We must understand this title that pretends to tell you how you can create a mindhas to be taken literally. Ray Kurzweil believes in his Artificial Intelligence engineer’senthusiasm that he can create a mind, that he may qualify as god himself, a secular godas a matter of fact.

“Evolution can then be viewed as a spiritual process in that it creates spiritualbeings, that is, entities that are conscious. Evolution also moves towardgreater complexity, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty,greater creativity, and the ability to express more transcendent emotions,such as love. These are all descriptions that people have used for theconcept of God, albeit God is described as having no limitations in theseregards.” (p. 223)

And do not consider all that is pure rhetoric or pulpit preaching. He believesevolution is the real God when he says: “Our neocortex is virgin territory when our brain iscreated . . . the biological process of actually growing a brain.” (p. 62) We can wonderabout this evolution or biological process if it is a creator or a grower, God or a simple

15

farmer. But we have to wonder what Kurzweil means by “brain” and “mind.” Page 23 over26 lines he uses the following string of words: “mind . . . brain . . . mind . . . theories . . .ideas . . . thought . . . thinking . . . theories . . . thought . . . brain . . . thinking . . . “ We canassert that these words are not really discriminated. This lack of clear definitions of theseterms is of course an enormous shortcoming that is just as nearly irritating as the levitywith which he deals with Einstein: “Einstein articulated my goals in this book well when hesaid that ‘any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex . . . but it takes . . .a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.’” (p. 11) It is obvious Einstein did notarticulate his goals since he has not been alive for a while now. That use of the passive byKurzweil to draw to himself what the quoted person said is even more astounding with atleast two and quite often more than three quotations, at times long ones, at the head of allchapters and even subchapters. Kurzweil seems to forget that quoting does not proveanything. But this quoting and bringing together opposed ideas is the basic unitarianobjective of the author:

“The truth can be discovered only by finding an explanation that overrides –transcends – seeming differences, especially for fundamental questions ofmeaning and purpose. That is how I resolve the Western-Eastern divide onconsciousness and the physical world. In my view both perspective have tobe true. On the one hand it is foolish to deny the physical world . . . On theother hand, the Eastern perspective – that consciousness is fundamentaland represents the only reality that is truly important – is also difficult todeny.” (p. 222)

On one hand blunt and brutal materialism since Kurzweil does not seem to considerthe material existence of the mind, except when reduced to the brain, or of ideas,thoughts, ideologies, etc. On the other hand a principle that is derived from a falsereference to Buddhism.

“In the Eastern view, consciousness is the fundamental reality, the physical world onlycomes into existence through the thoughts of conscious beings . . . I call this the Buddhistschool of quantum mechanics, because in it particles essentially don’t exist until they areobserved by a conscious person.” (p. 218-219)

Kurzweil does not know what he is speaking of. Buddhism is basically expressed inthe Dhammapada and the Abhidhamma. For Buddha the whole material world existsoutside our consciousness and we are part of it because we have a body. This wholeworld can only be captured by our six senses, the five basic senses plus the mind as ameta-sense that processes the sensations captured by the five other senses plus theabstract concepts conveyed by language and organized in abstract reasoning ordescription. The word “consciousness” that Kurzweil uses does not correspond at all to thewords used for the “mind” that sixth sense or meta-sense. In fact there are two words inPali for the mind, “mana” that refers to the meta-sense itself and “citta” which refers to thevarious mental states of an individual experiencing some type of feeling, emotion, mentalexcitation, etc. Kurzweil uses the word “determined” a lot about the material world. Thereis a Buddhist concept behind. The whole physical world, including us as physical beings isdetermined, follows the physical laws governing the cosmos. By using the mind anyindividual can get into meditation, which will lead him onto the eightfold path of illuminationthat is to say the possibility to get detached from the determined world and hence to mergewith cosmic energy once death has come, thus getting out of the triple characteristic of thedetermined world: everything is changing all the time; everything is carried by a cycle thatgoes from birth to life and decay then to death and then to rebirth. Nibbana (known in

16

Sanskrit as Nirvana) is that mentally produced escape from this cycle into cosmic energy;everything has no essence, soul or permanence of any type.

This is important because this should lead us to refusing the basic objectiveKurzweil gives to humanity: to use intelligent machines to “coloniz[e]” (p. 281) theuniverse. In previous books he was rejoicing in the idea that the speed of light could bestepped over, hence speeding the “colonizing [of] the universe” (p. 281) though in thisbook he is more realistic since the good news about having transported molecules at aspeed higher than the speed of light has been disproved in this very 2012 year. But theobjective remains: to colonize the universe. Some people never learn. The colonization ofthe planet by the Europeans has not exactly been the best thing in the world producingslavery, the eradication of American Indians, Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, etc, colonialism andthrowing three continents, if not four into, underdevelopment and exploitation. It is hightime Kurzweil questions his basic fundamental motivation. The conquest of the universe isnot on the agenda. So far we are dealing with the discovery of the universe. We mightnever conquer it, especially if intelligent beings exist here and there. The use of the cavalryseems to be slightly passé.

This said, and it is fundamental we can move to the main subject of the book: themind, though in fact he never speaks of it reducing it to the brain. So let’s start with thebrain.

After a rather long career and many books published on his “Singularity” that wasand still is heftily criticized by many people in the field, including people who arespecialists, theoreticians and entrepreneurs in computing science and technology likeKurzweil himself, he wrote this book to get back in phase with others. Criticism wasgenerally rejected high-handedly before. This time he makes an effort to integrate theresearch of others in the first half of his book, hence to describe the functioning of thebrain the way it is known by scientists, though in the second half of the book he goes backhis messianic, apocalyptic, prophetic, oracular prediction of the merging of biologicalintelligence, hence man, into non-biological intelligence, hence machines and we jumponto the track to Terminator 25 all over again and dreams of a time when “computers willhave . . . surpassed unenhanced human intelligence.” This phrase gives us in a nutshell,not a walnut but a hazelnut, his basic thinking. Note he of course neglects the fact thathuman intelligence develops along with all the intelligent machines and theories man hasinvented. If these intelligent machines are used properly, that is to say at the top of theircapabilities, then the intelligence of the users will tremendously develop. Will we have anew mutation in biological evolution? Some human beings are able to develop some

17

tremendous capabilities as for memory, the assimilation of hierarchical systems likeforeign languages, etc. These are supposed to be autistic, but do we know anythingserious about autistic people apart from believing they are different and have to be putaway?

Let’s speak of the brain now. I will not be over technical about it. He borrows fromvarious other researchers (Jeff Hawkins, Dileep George and Jaron Lanier mostly) thegeneral architecture of the brain and adds a couple of things.

The neocortex is the part of the brain that controls our most advanced humanintelligent activities. It has six layers and it is structured in vertical columns across thesesix layers; Each column hence has six layers too. These columns are connected in manyways first of all to the columns around each one of them on a proximity basis, but somespindle neurons can connect many columns in all parts of the brain, 60% of these spindleneurons in the right hemisphere and 40 percent in the left hemisphere. They appearedwith hominids, our ancestors after branching out of apes some 10 or 15 million years ago.But we must know that they already existed in apes since Gorillas have about 20% of ournumber, Bonobos have 2.5% and chimpanzees about 2%. Other mammals do not haveany at all. Kurzweil does not speak of mirror neurons and he should have since they arealso only vastly present in Homo Sapiens, though they must have been present inhominids and are present in some apes, and these are essential for learning and empathysince they enable someone to imitate the actions of someone else and to empatheticallyfeel the same emotions as other people around them. He also mentions though lightly thefact that a fetus has a brain as soon as one month of age and this fetus will hear (he doesnot mention this one) and see around the 20th or 24thweeks of pregnancy. He forgets tosay that the brain grows after birth. But he does mention that everything happening whilethe brain is growing has important consequences on the growth of this brain. But hemakes his basic mistake here at the very basis of his approach.

First he considers that “learning and recognition take place simultaneously.” (p. 63)He just forget in the womb the fetus cannot learn because all he hears or feels has noreferential dimension; These sensations he feels and the sound clusters of any type hehears are registered, that was proved, but with no reference, hence no real meaning,though they can have a comforting or disturbing effect on the fetus along with the mother’smood.  After birth it is obvious then the baby has the possibility to attach a referent hencea meaning to what he sees and identifies. At this point it is impossible to say that learningand recognizing happens simultaneously for the same things. You have to learn aboutsomething before recognizing it. Even if is only a comforting sensation you have toexperience it first, to more or less identify it second before being able to recognize it.Recognition is necessarily second at least because to identify you have to experienceseveral times and that’s what he probably means. The first time you just experience, thesecond time then you recognize and by recognizing you identify even if it is superficially.But there must be a first moment of pure experience. But this is nothing in itself. The mainshortcoming at this moment is the absence of any consideration about language. ForKurzweil language, spoken first and written second are the only two inventions of humanity(he says so twice p. 27 and 159) bringing together in one movement two human inventionsthat have at least 300,000 years between them and it neglects the phylogeny of thatlinguistic ability. Once again without entering details, language which was oral only for atleast 300,000 years out of 305,000 years is an invention of humanity, ,hence of the brainand since language is not something you can touch it is part of the mind. Written languagewill only come very late in human history. There are still some human groups on the earththat do not write at all.

18

To invent human articulated language the neocortex has to have a hierarchicalorganization, which is the case in each column and in the neocortex all together and withinthe brain between the old brain and the neocortex. That hierarchical architecture of thebrain makes the brain only able to function along that line. The hierarchical architecture ofthe brain produces hierarchical thinking, hierarchical language, hierarchical society, etc. Allhuman activities contain a hierarchical dimension that is the reflection of the architecture ofthe brain. And here with language you hold an essential line of thought. Every singleadvancement in phylogeny, in lexicon, in syntax is produced by the mind and eachadvancement is inscribed in the mind and determines the next advancement. We couldshow how complex but also how direct and simple this transitive productive process is.What’s more the experience of a human being in front of any entity is hierarchical. He mustfirst discriminate it. Then he has to identify it and name it with a new name if it is a newentity or an old name if he recognizes it as already known and named. Then it has to beclassified and that leads to another abstract operation that is known has conceptualization.There is no concept if there is no conceptualization; Kurzweil uses the word “concept”several times, though he does not list it in his index, but he does not use the word“conceptualization” which means for him concepts are generated by magic.

It is obvious then that written language amplifies the intellectual conceptualization ofpeople since they do not have to simply remember plain facts that are recorded in books.They can step further into more abstract thinking. Imagine what it is when you have theInternet at the tip of your fingers. There are thus systematic hierarchies that he neglects.From root to theme and then frond at the level of the semantic units of the language oftencalled words. From syncretic concatenation, to clause structure, to multi-clause structureby concatenation and then embedding, as for syntax often called grammar. From simplecalls, to orders, to descriptive discourse, to explicative discourse, to any other discoursewith an ever higher level of abstraction, social meaning, content or intention, and that hasto use various media to be uttered or produced.

But there is more if you cross brain and language.

Each column, and that is Kurzweil’s approach, is composed of many modules, eachone having about 100 neurons. These modules are connected inside the column incomplex intertwined networks. Hence we then have a first hierarchy: neurones and theirrelations within a module, then modules and their relations within a column and at eachlevel relations between the elements and the direct outside: neurons from one module toneurons from another module in the same column, modules from one column to modulesfrom the same column and to modules from other columns. And yet we miss the spindleneurons that can connect any column to any other column and any module to any othermodule. These spindle neurons seem to be totally opportunistic and develop according tothe needs of this or that moment for this or that individual. We thus get to what DileepGeorge calls “recursive cortical networks” (quoted p. 152) and I insist on the fact that thesenetworks are growing from nearly conception to death, or at least to an advanced age, aslong as we can learn new tricks, that they are flexible and versatile in many ways, whichexplains why we can learn new things all the time: there is plenty of room in the brain andany learning does not depend on a type of available neurons, they are all basically thesame. This enables man to use many ways of thinking and one at least is unpredictableand hence inimitable.

19

The simplest way is to put together two entities and their proximity implies they areconnected. It’s what is called syncrertic thinking and it corresponds to what Kurzweil calls“leakage” in the brain, one neuron being in a certain state due to some influx of informationcoming to it may have a direct influence on its neighbors as if it leaked its information overhis surrounding neurons.

Then we can build a deductive argumentation. One event is the cause of anotherwhich is the effect of the first one. We can thus build deductive chains. That’s the standardreasoning in sciences like mathematics. We can also inverse the reasoning and get into aninductive chain of reasoning. From what I know I induce that this should be true. It is ahypothesis. This is also important in sciences, but also in everyday life like: it was rainingyesterday hence my father must have stayed home.

But there is another way of thinking. I call it subduction. The simplest form ofsubduction is a metaphor; I treat one entity as if it were another and that may reveal anaspect of the first entity I had not seen at first. A metaphor or a subduction does not proveanything. It has to be demonstrated afterwards, but that’s how the most creative activitiesof man develop. We have a deep feeling, a strong emotion, a profound conviction, posttraumatic stress, and we draw from this the idea that the working truth should be this orthat. It is an induction in a way but a lot vaster and deeper. This sudden truth is the Eurekaof Archimedes. A sudden illumination. Note such epiphanies can happen at any time andanywhere and in any field of activity. This subduction corresponds perfectly to therecursive cortical networks Dileep George is speaking of. Note language is notindispensible. A composer can just experience such epiphanies in his composing and hewould be unable to explain in words what it means. That’s generally why I would considerthe artistic creator is the last person who can explain his own creation.

The question that I will only evoke here is where do these elements of the mind of aperson register in the brain. Kurzweil does not even ask the question. For him whole listsof patterns as he calls them are available in the various modules. The question is to knowwhere all these elements, patterns or not, are registered. My idea is that we are working atthe level of the molecules with particularly the proteins in the microtubules of the neuronssince it is proved some of these proteins can vary including in structure when impacted bysome influx of information. Same thing about the transportation of the sensorial informationfrom the sensorial organs to the brain: how is it done? A vast discussion is needed here.

The last point I would like to make here is about Artificial Intelligence. Kurzweil’sobjective is to copy a real brain, or maybe several (though mixing two brains mightproduce strange effects since there cannot be two brains that are identical due to theirpsychogenetic history), and then compress the information by cutting out all redundancy

20

and the brain is very redundant. Kurzweil says that should have no effect. I would doubt itsince each instance of one piece of information was registered in one specific situationwith particular emotional or sensorial elements around it and these variations from onerecording to the next of the same item will be lost by compressing. Then he will simulatethat compressed version of a brain in an intelligent machine. His machine will only be ableto simulate the compressed version of one particular brain and hence will in no wayrepresent the human brain at the level of its abstract totality. But Kurzweil knows it is inmany ways bound to be too short:

“Almost certainly we would not find a precise match; the neuronal structure wouldinvariably differ in many details compared with the models in the computer. However, Iwould maintain that there must be an essential mathematical equivalence to a high degreeof precision between the actual biology and our attempt to emulate it; otherwise thesesystems would not work as well as they do.” (p. 153)

What is lost in such a simulation is what makes a brain different from all others, thecircumstantial elements attached to each item of knowledge, but it is these elements thatmay be particularly pervasive in a subductive inspirational way of thinking. A plane after allflies pretty well but it is quite different from a bird, isn’t it, though it performs the task offlying quite well.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

JEFF HAWKINS – ON INTELLIGENCE – 2004

This is an extremely important book in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The authorreject this Artificial Intelligence because it identifies intelligence to the behaviors producedby this intelligence. Hence the machine simulates intelligent behavior but is not intelligent.Three things are essential goals to satisfy if we want to move towards intelligent machines.We have to take into account and integrate time. We have to include as architecturallyessential the process of feedback. We have to take into account the physical architectureof the brain as a repetitive hierarchy. Strangely enough the main mistake is alreadypresent in this first programmatic intention. Jeff Hawkins does not include the productionsof that intelligent brain. I mean language, all ideological representations or models of theworld from religion to philosophy and science, not to speak of arts and culture. Andstrangely enough this mistake is locked up in an irreversible declaration:

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“A human is much more than an intelligent machinre . . . The mind is thecreation of the cells of the brain . . . Mind and brain are one and the same.”(41-43)*

We cannot but agree with the first sentence, but the mind is not “created” byanything. It is produced, constructed by the brain from the sensorial impulses it gets fromthe various senses and the way it processes them in its repetitive and parallel hierarchicalarchitecture. But the mind is a level of human intelligence of its own. Unluckily Hawkins willnot see it. I have already said what it excludes from this human intelligence, but we mustadd the fact that this human intelligence lives in a situation that enabled this intelligence todevelop and invent its first tools when Homo Sapiens started its journey on earth some300,000 years ago. This situation requires from the weak animal that Homo Sapiens is todevelop these tools to compensate for its weakness, and to coordinate its survival anddevelopment with communication and social organization which implied and required aculture, a model of the world to migrate, develop new productive means, and be able todevelop as a species in order to expand all over the world: Homo Sapiens was a migratingspecies from the very start because of his very brain and the mind it could procude. JeffHawkins forgets about the phylogeny of Homo Sapiens. He takes intelligence as existingin itself without a genesis from nothing to what it is today. In other words he speaks ofevolution but he does not study it and how this evolution brought this human species intodeveloping intelligence, means of communication and means of production that did notexist before.

At the same time he does not consider the feelings and emotions of that humanbeing and he at best locates them in the old brain, the brain inherited from the speciesbefore mammals since the cortex only developed with mammals. It is also obvious this is amistake. Due to mirror neurons man is able (with some top mammals along with him, todevelop empathy, the possibility to imitate (hence to learn through imitation and whenlanguage was invented to learn through repetition) and to share the feelings of others andone’s own feelings with others. It is this ability more than the old brain that is at stake hereand is neglected. That makes Hawkins neglect social aims, productive objectives, culturaltargets, ideological psychological social motivations and of course social organization. Toinvent and develop intelligent machines would not even exist as a plan or a project or evena desire if Homo Sapiens had not been able to blaze and then run the track leading todevelopment.

He is sure right on the fact that behavior is only the consequence of all this but byrejecting behavior because he rejects behaviorism (which is purely ideological on his part)he also locks himself out of the possible approach of human relations, human motivationstowards others, hence concrete, material and also emotional and intellectual behaviors.And that prevents him from coming back to the situation that has to be controlled and setup collectively to reach collectively defined objectives. Globalization is right now the bestexample of how objectives have to be defined at the level of the planet and no longer atthe level of particular countries or groups.

But apart from that the whole book is essential because Hawkins concentrates onthe study of the brain and its hierarchical architecture, and I should say its doublearchitectural structure, not double in nature but double in working.

The whole adventure starts with the senses and he straight away says there are alot more than five senses even if we can consider there are only five basic sensorialorgans: the eye, the ear, the tongue, the skin and the nose.

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At the level of the eye we have to add motion, color, luminescence and spatialorientation. At the level of hearing we have to add pitch, length, intervals, timbre, spatialorientation and balance (vestibular system). At the level of touch we have to add pressure,temperature, pain, vibration but also spatial orientation and movement on the skin that willbe useful both in torturing (along with pain) and eroticism or emotions (along withpleasure). At the level of smell we have to consider intensity, appeal (good, bad orsomewhere in-between), spatial orientation. At the level of taste we have to addtemperature, texture, appeal (good, bad or somewhere in-between), and even finerelements like sweet, salty, acid, alcoholic and many others. But, and he insists on that, thegeneral senses of the body are essential too. The whole body is a network of sensors thatchecks and measures our joints and joint angles, all our bodily ,positions, and allproprioceptive receptors (sensory receptors, in muscles, tendons, joints, and the inner earto detect motions or positions of the body or the limbs, that respond to stimuli arising withinthe body.) Note these are indispensible for walking, running, swimming and allmovements, particularly coordinated movements like gymnastics and all kinds of martialarts And we should add the physiological sensors and mechanisms that measure our innerlevel of satisfaction, dissatisfaction, balance and unbalance of every single organ of ours.These last sensors are essential for a new born child since it is those he/she will use fromthe very start and that will prompt his first cry or call. And every single of these senses andsensors sends messages to the brain in temporally organized sequences. The eye rebootsits vision three times per second, what is called a saccade.

The first hierarchy he takes is exemplified by vision. I will integrate the eye into itright away though the eye is more or less marginalized in Hawkins’s approach. And herethe eye sends many messages according to the particular abilities of the various retinalcells that capture the signal. I will insist on the fact that he neglects: the signals are sentfrom the retina and are spatially oriented right-side right and upside down. He neglects itbecause we do not have an “image” on the retina and it is not an “image” that the retinasends. But the spatial orientation of this “pattern” as he calls it is essential. The brain willhave to interpret this orientation to reestablish the proper one thanks to the signals sent tothe brain by the other senses and thanks to its experience starting right after birth.Experiments have been performed using glasses that inverted the orientation of the“pattern” on the retina and after a short while the brain corrected the initial correction andprovided the mind with the proper spatial orientation.

In the neocortex, the capture of a visual stimulus is hierarchically organized and wemust keep in mind that the signals are renewed three times a second. In the V1 area onlymany small segments and isolated characteristics like colors are deciphered. Thesenumerous small elements are sent to the V2 area where they are regrouped into largerelements. Then they are sent to the V4 area where they are regrouped into recognizableelements like a nose, an eye, etc Then they are sent to the IT area where they arereconstructed into a face for example. Here Hawkins defines a pattern as being “a stablecell assembly that represents some abstract pattern” (p. 80). At each level after learning,hence after first stimulation by one unknown element (which is sent unanalyzed to thehippocampus that takes over, identifies it and sends it back into the system), an invariantrepresentation of each identified pattern is memorized (cortical memory, p. 100) in thecells (he does not specify the electrical and chemical procedure nor the molecular level ofit). The cortical procedure then, after learning, is a recognition procedure: the patternreceived corresponds to one invariant representation previously memorized, otherwise it issent up as far as the hippocampus if necessary. The last element we have to understandis that the identification is not done in detail but as corresponding to an invariant sketch of

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the element and that sketch accepts variations. That explains why we can recognizesomeone and yet be mistaken. The mind did not make a mistake it used some elementsthat corresponded to the sketch it had in memory, and that was the wrong sketch.

The three basic characteristic of this hierarchical functioning are:1- its sequential memory (sequences of patterns hence spatial in the pattern

and temporal because serialized);2- its autoassociative nature (it memorizes a sketch and not the real detailed

pattern when learning, though this detailed pattern is also memorizedwhich enables us to realize we made a mistake when we took someone forsomeone else, and then it recognizes this sketch in the real pattern itreceives after learning);

3- and finally its “invariant representation” dimension which is theidentification of these sketches as referents for further use. Here instead ofsaying that these sketches have to be “named” he should have said thatthey have to be identified at each level with some kind of Cortical Identity(CI) and this when connected with the invention of language by HomoSapiens, or the learning of language by children would have led him to theword “concept” that he uses rarely, and the operation of“conceptualization” that he does not use at all. Homo Sapiens seems to bethe only animal who managed this conceptualization power of the neo-cortex (dominated by the hippocampus) into producing language.

We come then to the heart of the volume:

“The three properties of cortical memory . . . (storing sequences, auto-associative recall, and invariant representations) are necessary ingredientsto predict the future based on memories of the past . . . Prediction . . . is theprimary function of the neocortex, and the foundation of intelligence . . .Evolution discovers that if it tacks on a memory system (the neocortex) to thesensory path of the primitive brain, the animal gains an ability to predict thefuture . . . This new idea of the memory-prediction framework of the brain . . .“ (p. 84-105)

We can notice there is an intellectual drift in his reasoning. Evolution does not havea mind or intelligence. Just as we can prove human articulated language is the result ofthe conceptualizing power of the brain on one hand, and of other physical mutationsdictated by the long distance bipedal nature of Homo Sapiens (not the first hominid to havethat characteristic but the first to be endowed with mutations that go a lot farther thanbefore) that are absolutely necessary for survival on the other hand (low larynx, high levelof innervation of the laryngeal-glottal-buccal masticatory and articulatory apparatus, highlevel of coordination of various organs and functions), we have to consider evolution asbeing a blind and unguided process that selects haphazard mutations when they arepropitious to bringing a higher survival potential to a given species. It is quite obvious thatthe development of the neocortex of mammals into human neocortex provided HomoSapiens with a higher survival potential. In other words Hawkins suffers of someteleological bias which is a way to escape from asking who did it and hence a way toexclude the possible religious answer. But that is wrong. We don’t have to answer thequestion of where does the logic of evolution comes from because we cannot answer thisquestion with any scientific final elaboration.

Then Hawkins moves to the second hierarchy, that of the neo-cortex structures.

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The neocortex is divided into columns that are perpendicular to the surface of it. It has sixlayers. The first layer has few cells that have myriads of small dendrites connected to theirneighbors by synapses that can build and rebuild themselves. Then they have threeaxons, two horizontal and lateral in the first layer connecting this cell to distant other cellsall over the brain on one side and on the other side, the famous spindle cells, and a thirdone going down into lower layers of the neocortex. When layers 1, 2, 3 are activated theactivating pattern goes to layer 5 and then layer six. In layers 1, 2, and 3 the pattern isanalyzed to be finally identified in layer 5. Then it is moved to layer 6 where a predictionmight be performed about what may come next from this identified pattern. Then thetransmission branches into part of it being sent to the Thalamus and then back to layer 1as a feed back and part of it being send simultaneously to motor areas for processing.Layer 4 is the layer where a newly learned pattern, identified by the Hippocampus arrivesto activate the column, that is to say layers 5 and 6 and beyond. This can be summarizedin a triple hierarchy: the mind must first discriminate an element, then identify andeventually name that discriminated element, and finally classify ort conceptualize thisidentified and named element. This basic conceptualization that has to be constructed in achild through education, just the way it was constructed in Homo Sapiens throughexperience.

It is important then to cross this approach with a phylogenic and psychogeneticapproach of language to understand how language was invented and how it is learned.That of course would require a lot of space and it is not here it can be presented. But let’ssay that three hierarchies can be seen in language and all of them can only be understoodas the crossing of the neocortical capabilities of Homo Sapiens on one side, and the highlyfrail state of Homo Sapiens or the highly dependent state of a human newborn on theother side. These hierarchies are that of the word: consonantal roots, isolating charactersor themes, and conjugation-declension fronds giving the three (maybe four) vastphylogenic families of languages: consonantal Semitic languages, isolating Chinese,Tibeto-Burman and Khmero-Vietic languages, and agglutinative (the vast Turkic familyfrom Turkish to Siouan) or synthetic-analytic languages (Indo-European and Indo Aryanlanguages).

The triple syntax of any language: Categorial syntax (discriminating nouns andverbs, spatial units and temporal units), Functional syntax (building the sentence on thepattern [AGENT (feed-ER) – RELATION (feed) – PATIENT (feed-EE) – THEME (feed-Ø,food, fodder)] and finally Expressive syntax (expressing the mood and modalizationsimposed onto the utterance by the speaker and his relations to his environment. Thesethree syntactic functions are mapped onto the first hierarchy by making it all discursive inroot-languages, making the last two discursive in theme-languages and only keeping theexpressive level for discursive means in frond-languages. Note each one of these threesyntaxes is a hierarchy too by themselves.

Taking language into account would have enabled Hawkins to understand that hecannot consider the mind is the brain. The mind is an abstract and absolutely virtualconstruct of the brain from the various patterns the brain has registered in its own cells andmolecules. I insist here on molecules because Microtubule Associated Proteins have beenproved as having a role to play in various mental operation, particular with the loss of ,theirphosphorylation when activated by some stimulus, for one example. The mind is based onthe hierarchical potential and architecture of the brain and this potential and architectureproduce the conceptualizing potential that will produce the virtual mind and its tools. Thesetools are essential if we want to understand the emergence of Homo Sapiens as thesuperior intelligent mammal on earth and if we want to understand today’s man and

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human society. The first of these tools is (spoken) language (note written language wasinvented only around 5 or 6 thousand years ago some 300,000 years after the invention ofspoken language). Then Homo Sapiens invented all “ideological” tools to understand andexplain the world in order to survive and expand in a state of great physical inferiority ascompared to most of his predators. These tools are religion, astronomy, science, history,all constructed models of the world produced or that could be produced with theconceptualizing power of the human brain. Note here Neanderthals could not even inventfishing whereas Homo Sapiens just started with fishing to move onto agriculture, herd-husbandry, and so, and all that before inventing written language.

So I do not believe “the mind is just a label of what the brain does.” (p. 204) and themind the way I have sketched it is something that might be one day equaled by machines.But these minded machines will not be human since they will not be able to learn anddevelop their brain and mind the way man does it, from scratch and as the result of anintense and highly emotional intercourse between an individual and his/her linguistic,cultural, social and emotional environment. We are not speaking of a machine loving aman, but of a machine loving a machine not as something programmed but as somethinglearned from experience. As a matter of fact the Terminator saga is a lot more instructiveon that point than what Hawkins says. In the same way the intelligent machines are not themachines themselves but all the Mr. Smith taking over the earth by decision of theArchitect who manipulates machines into attacking humans till one, two or three humansare able to negotiate the end of the war with machines who accepts on the basis of Neobeing crucified in order to be able to defeat all the Mr. Smith and the Architect’s matrix.Once again we are far away from what Hawkins says.

To conclude, Hawkins’s book is the first important step against the apocalypticmessianic prophetic prediction the engineers turned theoreticians like Ray Kurzweil whoare already taking all the necessary pills to be able to live long and merge with intelligentmachines in less than fifty years, and thus become the nurtured cows of these intelligentmachines, who would not be intelligent enough to understand that kind of slavery would bedoomed to destruction just like any other form of slavery was and has been doomed todestruction. If these machines were humanly intelligent they would understand that as abasic requirement to qualify for intelligence.

But at the same time Hawkins does not reach the level of the mind. He lockshimself in the physiological and biological brain pretending it is the mind mixing up thecapacity and the potential. He thinks too much with metaphors and comparisons. To useone I would say that a plane CAN fly but that this plane is not the FLYING POTENTIALitself. The plane has that potential but to realize it a whole procedure is necessary (withkerosene, air strips, engineers in the air traffic control tower, pilots, passengers, freight,stewards and stewardesses, etc) and flying can only become a reality when that procedurehas been performed. Hence the FLYING POTENTIAL is a VIRTUAL capability of theplane, just like the MIND is a virtual construct of the brain using its POTENTIALINTELLIGENCE, and this POTENTIAL INTELLIGENCE cannot produce anyINTELLIGENT ACTION if the VIRTUAL MIND is not activated and used by the brain.

The first intelligent machine invented by man was language in order to satisfy theneed for communication Homo Sapiens had. That language has had a long career inimproving and developing man’s lot. It has also transformed its inventor and his/hersociety.

There still is a long way to go to even approach such humanly intelligent machines.

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In the meantime we will invent and use more and more intelligent machines that willliberate our brain and body of innumerable tasks that would otherwise use our mental andphysical time and energy. With this mental and physical time and energy we will developnew forms of intelligence that we cannot even imagine today, and we must not forget thatevolution goes on and man is a natural species. The more contact he/she will have withintelligent machines the more chances there will be he/she will go through mutations anddevelopments that will be retained by evolution and education as vastly increasing humanintelligence. The more intelligent machines, the more chances man will become moreintelligent.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

ONE HALF A MANIFESTO By Jaron LanierCritical reading of the basic principals of Cybernetic Totalism (JacquesCOULARDEAU)

I hope no one will think I'm equating Cybernetics and what I'm callingCybernetic Totalism. The distance between recognizing a great metaphor andtreating it as the only metaphor is the same as the distance between humblescience and dogmatic religion.

1) That cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best wayto understand reality. 

The cybernetic impulse is an ego trip for technicians or engineers who getoverwhelmed by the apparent power they unleash with their inventions. They aresorcerer’s apprentices turned theoreticians. That leads to a form of totalism that we couldconsider to be intellectual and technical totalitarianism. Jaron Lanier discards this firstargument of theirs by simply saying that real computers will never be able to achieve thatdreamlike potential, because computers don’t have that possibility. The realistic argumenthere will find more precise arguments later on. But computers are dumb as we well knowand there are reasons for that dumbness. Will the causes of it be alleviated in the future?Jaron Lanier’s answer is no.

What’s more he clearly says here that epistemologically computers like alltechnologies cannot be thought outside a cultural context. Unluckily he will not really enterthat argument which should have led him to the tool without which a culture does not exist,viz. language which would have led him to wondering, which he does not do, about theorigin of that language, hence about the brain that produces it and about the fact languageis the main tool of the mind. There is no thinking without the power of conceptualizationwhich uses the cortical hierarchy to discriminate, then identify and finally classify braininputs, and that cortical potential cannot develop if it does not invent the linguistic tool thatrealizes this conceptualization in real mental and intellectual terms, but alsocommunicational terms. No language no thinking, and no potential to discriminate-identify-classify inputs from our sensorial organs.

That might have led him to a question he does not ask: has the human speciesreached its maximum level of evolution or is it still going through mutations and selection?Will human intelligence be able to develop to higher still unknown forms? Will humanintelligence be able to produce machines that could be more intelligent than itself?

2) That people are no more than cybernetic patterns. 

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Jaron Lanier deals with Artificial Intelligence in this section. For him the dilemma isto know whether machines are becoming more intelligent than men or whether men arebecoming less intelligent than machines. He insists on the importance of ArtificialIntelligence software, that so far they are all targeting one task and not the full humanrange and that even at this level software is particularly inadequate. It changes very slowlyand most of the time only in details and they are very limited in reach and range, and arehampered by all kinds of security problems, crashes and other internal problems. Onecannot trust software even if the hardware is perfect. In other words the Singularity is adream since it only considers speed and memory, both being hardware (includingprocessors) and not software. If software does not grow at exponential speed the power ofthe hardware is very limited. In fact even Kurzweil is clear on that point: the objective of theCybernetic Totalists is to simulate the brain, negating the mind and not consideringlanguage. In other words they want to circumvent the software problem by using superrepetitive and simple operations to take advantage of the speed of the hardware.

The best example would have been translating machines. All translating machinesbased on non-categorized, or only little categorized corpora, like Google Translate,produce only very approximate translations and even for simple words propose a wholepalette of possible translations. What’s even worse is that this software does not integratethe difficulties it encounters and does not know the principle of feedback which becomeslearn-back in our present context. In other words the machine does not have ahippocampus that can discriminate, identify and classify unknown items. It just works onthe basis of statistical frequencies of words and their immediate context. In other wordsJaron Lanier is quite right but remains at the surface of things. People are not cyberneticpatterns because their brain is able to develop a mind based on the indispensible tool itcreates itself, language, and this leads to the fact that people are not isolated individualsand they cannot develop as human beings if they do not grow and expand in a context ofconstant empathetic nurturing and communication.

3) That subjective experience either doesn't exist, or is unimportant becauseit is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect. 

Here Jaron Lanier touches what I concluded my previous remark with: empathy andthe “circle of empathy” he considers everyone of us draws around ourselves. Does thiscircle of empathy contain computers or not. His answer is no. He does not push hisargument against the theory, which is more a phantasm than a theory, that computers aresentient. He rejects this idea that sentience is not exclusively human. He considers thatsentient and empathetic experience is purely human and that it is essential to becomehuman. He does not push the argument further. He notes that there has been some kindof a comeback of humanities and scholars in that field with their post-modernism thoughhe seems to understand it more as a doubting principle than as a new approach to humanmind and sentience.

Nevertheless technologies, technicians and engineers have had the upper hand sofar. He calls them the technologists and considers they are the great winners. He justmakes fun of this technical way of looking at the world. “A person [is] a gene’s way ofpropagating itself, as per Dawkins” That sounds ridiculous in the way biology is turned intothe master of the world and this gene gets some kind of authority that it projects onto thehuman organism, if not even evolution, to realize its objective of surviving by reproducingitself.

“[a person is] a sexual organ used by machines to make more machines, as perMcLuhan.” Here he kind of warps McLuhan’s approach of technology. For McLuhan atechnique, no matter which, is the extension of one of man’s senses or organs, includinghis brain and his mind. So to put McLuhan’s thinking upside down the way Jaron Lanier

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does is unfair. Machiness are nothing but the babies of man, the creatures of man, theextension of man’s ability at discriminating, identifying and classifying an objective, theprojected means necessary to reach it and then an extension of his brain, mind and bodyto conceive and produce the machines necessary to reach that objective. For McLuhanmachines do not have any autonomous existence outside man’s objectives and projects.

“A person is shit’s way of making more shit” quoted from Steve Barnett shows howhe considers such approaches that consider machines and even evolution have some kindof will or power, that guides and governs the future, including the human species. Thispoint should be discussed in more depth because that subjectivity and that sentience areman’s specific power in the world and the real question is where does it come from? If wedo not answer this question then the logical reversal performed by technologists becomepossible and even acceptable. The endowment of evolution with some kind of authorityand controlling power has to be discarded. Jaron Lanier says very rightly that thisquestion, if not answered, will bring the creationists and other fundamentalists back to theforefront. The question is not where does evolution come from, but what is the position ofman in that evolution? Very rightly then Jaron Lanier comes to Darwin, the inventor of theconcept of the evolution of species.

4) That what Darwin described in biology, or something like it, is in fact alsothe singular, superior description of all creativity and culture. 

Technologists are speaking of a post-human world as if man was finished as aspecies. Darwin invented the concept of evolution and defined it very precisely, and yet hehimself opened the door to the present drifts. Jaron Lanier does not always sees why, buthe does say a few interesting things on the subject. Darwin contains a certain level ofeschatology in his assertion of the evolution of species itself. If there is a continuousevolution we are justified in asking where is the beginning and where is the end? If weconsider the human species is the only species with intelligence and that man crowns thisevolution we have to wonder about two things. On one hand if it is considered as the topechelon of this evolution of species, then man is the end of evolution, man does not evolveany more and there is no other biological possibility beyond. All that is wrong of course.Man is still evolving and if that evolution goes on, new forms of human life may appear andthe new forms will essentially be new levels of intellectual development. But at the sametime if that intellectual development were conceived as a development within someconditions, hence as a mental construct and not as an organ we could easily understandthat the intelligence of the human species has been evolving all the time and is stillevolving, but as a construct and not as an endowment. The main tool of that developmentis language and Jaron Lanier does not use that argument.

Then he considers the other option that he rejects from his point of view, viz. theidea that machines are the next step of that natural evolution and that the future for man isto merge with the machine. This theory or prediction comes from evolutionarypsychologists for whom there is no objection possible against that future. He also evokesthe “cybernetic totalist Darwinians” who are leaving the domain of rational biology todefend, like Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, “rape [as] a ‘natural’ way to spreadgenes around.” Jaron Lanier sees very well such a theory is the result of Darwin’s ownshortcoming. “Darwin created a style of reduction that was based on emergent principlesinstead of underlying laws.” Darwin only considered the emergent concept and emergentset of facts he called evolution with the concept of natural selection to make this evolutionwork. Jaron Lanier considers Darwin did not reach the level of the power under thatevolution that makes that evolution emerge. That’s a very good question but Jaron Lanierdoes not even try to answer it in this text. He is dealing here with core questions andproblems: is there a teleology in that evolution, does it go from one point to an end point

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that would be the final point of that evolution, will this evolution go on beyond man and canwe consider machines as an evolutionary stage in the general procedure known as theevolution of species? Hence are machines, even intelligent machines a new species? Or isthe new species man and machine merged into one?

That leads Jaron Lanier into a strange discussion about evolution to prove thatevolution is not logical because it did not invent the wheel that is definitely the best andmost economical method to travel. It is difficult to know if it is some absurd reasoning,some humor, more or less black, or if he is really seriously considering that proposition.Yet he has a point in the fact that evolution is not all-powerful and cannot produce whatman produced with his intelligence and his various mental and physical tools. Apparentlyevolution has not produced any living organism that can leave the earth and travel acrossthe cosmos, except man of course that can do that with specially devised tools, nothingnatural. It is at this point Jaron Lanier notes these cybernetic totalists are more craftsmenthan technicians or engineers, and certainly not scientists. They just invent variousconcrete applications that enable them to achieve one direct task like simulatingIntelligence. If the result this machine produces is similar to that of the human mind, then itis intelligent like the human mind. Jaron Lanier is quite justified in saying that humanism isthrown away with the bath water of this Artificial Intelligence dream.

5) That qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of inform ation systems willbe accelerated by Moore's Law.

Here Jaron Lanier deals with software. The first and simple idea is that Moore’s Lawworks for hardware but definitely not for software that seems to follow “a reverse Moore’sLaw.” Software development is slow, excruciatingly slow.

The second idea is that software is brittle, “it breaks before it bends.” In fact there isno bending: even if it is self programming, it can only do it within the limits of its originalprogramme. Jaron Lanier considers cybernetic totalists have “fetishized” Moore’s Law.

Then computers today are not growing exponentially apart from what has to do withhardware, speed and memory, or even power if we want to use that word, but not withsoftware which makes computers quite slow after all for any operation that is justcomplicated and not a simple scanning of a database with one or two selectiveinstructions.

He sees two reasons to that phenomenon. The first one is that any software hasoverheads and most of these overheads have logarithms that do not develop exponentiallybut at a merely linear rate and that straight line is not very steep at all. This then can beexplained by the fact that in any complex software you have many different layers andsome can grow exponentially, others close to a flat line and those that grow at that nearlyflat line rate slow down the others, creating bottlenecks and gridlocks. And here we cometo the “brittleness” of software again: if you try to force one slow pod, then that pod breaksdown.

And that is not going to change because of the software industry. Developers haveto go fast to be first on the market, so they look for the little improvements that can beeffective in the very short run and they do not consider the slower and longerimprovements that would be good for future developers and developments. So it is notsurprising that many of these developments rather bloat the software up and block theirfuture. He heavily insists on one case in that line: the old pre-GUI software known as UNIXwas just later on turned into a GUI software under the name of LINUX. The wrapping hadbeen changed but the software was still the old one just as awkward and heavy.

That leads him to a double question: “Does software tend to be unwieldy onlybecause of human error, or is the difficulty intrinsic to the nature of software itself?” Thequestion is all the more interesting when we know Jaron Lanier is a software developer.

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This may have to do with the fact that software is relying on a language, and that is in away the common point with man, though the two languages are not at all of the samenature. So when he says “Both human-created software and natural selection seem toaccrue hierarchies of layers that vary in their potential for speedy change,” his comparisonseems slightly circumstantial. The problem here is these layers and what they depend onand the nature of their hierarchies. A close comparison should probably be performed buthe very rightly says that in biology we come to the double “nature- and nurture-dominateddynamics.” That is just the point. Nature is simple to conceive, but nurture needs a raisingmilieu, a nurturing environment and when we deal with animals and particularly man,communication, social organization and culture. He should have taken that into accountand then his parallel human-created software and natural selection are no longer at allcomparable. Software is a production of man’s mind and can only be compared to anotherproduction of man’s mind and then we have to say it uses an extremely primitive languageand a mostly primitive procedure to process the data which only aims at speed and theprocessing of enormous data bases but without considering the human way intelligenttasks are performed and the only human procedure that is copied is parallel processing ofthe data, and that is done to increase the speed whereas the human brain is vastly parallelto be able to bring together vast amounts of data from many differently areas todiscriminate-identify-classify new items, recognize known items and draw hypotheses onthe future, including the future steps of the intellectual procedure at large, of the mentalprocess in reciprocal relation with a real phenomenon. One day maybe some machinemight be able to practice that type of subduction and invent the concept of gravitationwhen getting an acorn on its nose, well the center of its tactile screen or tactile pad.

And finally, the most dramatic:6) That biology and physics will merge with computer science (becoming

biotechnology and nanotechnology), resulting in life and the physical universebecoming mercurial; achieving the supposed nature of computer software.Furthermore, all of this will happen very soon! Since computers are improving soquickly, they will overwhelm all the other cybernetic processes, like people, and willfundamentally change the nature of what's going on in the familiar neighborhood ofEarth at some moment when a new "criticality" is achieved- maybe in about the year2020. To be a human after that moment will be either impossible or something verydifferent than we now can know.

After a quick allusion to Bill Joy’s terror in front of “the coming cybernetic cataclysm”announced or should I say prophesized by Ray Kurzweil and a few others, Bill Joy’s terrorbased on the fear of super machines that would reduce man to being some kind of “keptcattle” of the machine like in Matrix, and super weapons, Jaron Lanier shifts to his ownterror that seems to be slightly different.

The smaller danger he sees is how the entrepreneurs who are rich over night butare miserable and poor the next week will be able to cope with this kind of wealth yoyoplaying they cannot even control. But he is afraid of a second vastly more importantdanger. The society will get divided into two groups. At the top the super rich and at thebottom the rest who will not be super poor, though there might be a very low stratum ofsuper poor people, but rather the rest of just better-off but in no way wealthy. This dividemay widen year after year. He is afraid the rich class may have the means to manipulatethemselves into becoming a completely different species. They will be able to lengthentheir lives tremendously, including with genetic manipulation. Their children will begenetically manipulated too so that they should be part of the elite by their genes and nolonger their chance or talent.

This is the inversion of H.G. Wells’ vision in The Time Machine. In that novel the

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human species evolved into two species, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi were thedescendants of the bourgeoisie and the Morlocks of the working class that used to liveunderground in the mines. Wells imagined that the Eloi became the cattle and huntinggame of the Morlocks, raised and taken care of by the Morlocks on the surface of an idyllicplanet Earth that had regressed to its natural wild state.

It becomes really surprising that he imagines that these super rich people could liveso long that they could appear as being immortal which would make them appear likeGods to the lower class or classes.

But he dismisses this terror with four arguments. First it will be very expensive to getthat immortality. That’s a weak argument for the super rich. The second argument is a lotmore powerful. “I suspect that the hardware/software dichotomy will reappear inbiotechnology and indeed in other 21st century technologies . . . Getting computers toperform specific tasks of significant complexity in a reliable but modifiable way, withoutcrashes or security breaches, is essentially impossible.” That’s the very technical problemand the rebuke of the cybernetic totalists’ dream for them and nightmare for us.

The third argument is also very powerful. “Likewise one can hypothetically programDNA to make virtually any modification in a living thing and yet designing a particularmodification and vetting it thoroughly will likely remain immensely difficult.” This argumentdeals with genetic engineering and there he is considering the most extreme cases. Wemight be able to develop a technology to replace one chromosome or part of onechromosome but so far we cannot do that. It is obvious that when we start becoming ableto do that we will have to consider the side effects. Such a technology will require time andprobably tremendous amount of money. We will also be obliged to consider the ethicalquestion because humanity has always managed its problem in a collective andconsensual way.

The fourth and last argument is powerful too. “Scenarios that predict thatbiotechnology and nanotechnology will be able to quickly and cheaply create startling newthings under the sun also must imagine that computers will become semi-autonomous,super intelligent, virtuoso engineers. But computers will do no such thing if the last halfcentury of progress in software can serve as a predictor of the next half century.” In otherwords this very technical argument is final. It would have been a lot stronger if the study ofsoftware had been pushed into a real comparison with man’s best and oldest mentalcreations, language, science, religion, philosophy. And that would have supported theconclusion.

ConclusionI share the belief of my cybernetic totalist colleagues that there will be huge

and sudden changes in the near future brought about by technology. The differenceis that I believe that whatever happens will be the responsibility of individual peoplewho do specific things. I think that treating technology as if it were autonomous isthe ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. There is no difference between machineautonomy and the abdication of human responsibility . . .

. . . There is a real chance that evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence,Moore's Law fetishizing, and the rest of the package, will catch on in a big way, asbig as Freud or Marx did in their times. Or bigger, since these ideas might end upessentially built into the software that runs our society and our lives. If thathappens, the ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals will be amplified fromnovelty into a force that could cause suffering for millions of people.

The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it claimed wasfalse, but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly complete path to understandinglife and reality. Cybernetic eschatology shares with some of history's worstideologies a doctrine of historical predestination. There is nothing more gray,

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stultifying, or dreary than a life lived inside the confines of a theory. Let us hopethat the cybernetic totalists learn humility before their day in the sun arrives.

The first paragraph is a rejection of such apocalyptic messianic prophetic cataclysmwith a basic philosophical argument. It would have been very strong if it had beensupported by anthropological and phylogenic arguments about the human species, thebrain, the mind, and all the tools evolution enabled man to develop with this brain, and hisbrain’s body, in his mind. Philosophy is just one of these tools and the rejection ofhumanism is just unthinkable. If that were to happen I am pretty sure the human specieswould develop a resistance with some charismatic leaders like Neo in Matrix, or JohnConnor in Terminator, or Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

In the same way we cannot say what the natural biological development of thehuman species, and particularly his brain and mental potentialities will be within the vastand ever richer environment of intelligent machines and education, not to speak ofcommunication and culture.

The second part of the conclusion is both easy and deep. It is easy to quote Freudand Marx as if they were two scarecrows. Yet it is deep because they represented duringthe first wave of industrialization what Marx called the metaphysical vision of a world cut intwo. Two classes, two parents, etc. Neither Marx not Freud understood that these twodualisms were schematic and unrealistic. These two dualisms came to an end in thesecond half of the 20th century. Both are die-hard ideologies, philosophies and scientificconstructions. But they are from another age both of them. Marxism has given a lot ofdescendants to the world. Some found their way into the market economy of the globalizedworld, some locked themselves up in small cells with or without companions or hostages.But they are doomed to die, disappear or get reformed. The Marxists are pathetic whenthey preach the use of power, violent power as well as street power, to impose a point ofview onto all others. The Freudians do not exist anymore as such because psychoanalysishas tremendously changed and evolved. But the sacred parental pair is coming to an endafter having governed this world for a few centuries. It is only very recently in urban zonesthat the nuclear family was imposed as the norm in our societies and the raising ofchildren. Mandela quotes an old African proverbs that clearly shows were we are comingfrom: “It takes a whole village to raise a child.” Yet some are ready to fight against theevolution talking place in the world that is the discarding of the two heterosexual parents ofa nuclear family as the only conceivable raising structure for a child.

JARON LANIER – YOU ARE NOT A GADGET – 2010-2011

This book is small by its size but it is enormous by the subject it discusses. Hestarts in an extremely positive way by saying: “Technologies are extensions ofourselves.” (p. 4) We could then believe he was going to follow Marshall McLuhan in histracks since the latter was the inventor of this idea in many books covering a full history ofhuman technology and how each step of it was a new extension of one new sense or onenew physiological, sensorial or mental ability of man. We could have expected JaronLanier was going to show how the “cloud” or “web 2.0” were extensions of ourselves, ofour central nervous system for example, of our brain maybe, or our mind.

But Jaron Lanier does not even refer to Marshall McLuhan. And he does not followthat track.

He targets two types of Technologists he identifies as “cybernetic totalists” and“digital Maoists.” This community is qualified by what they advocate or represent. First of

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all they are the open culture community, those people who consider everything has to beon the Internet and everything on the Internet has to be free of access, economically freehence everyone can get it for nothing, and what’s more everyone can do what they wantwith what they find and appropriate freely. Jaron Lanier calls that mashups. These peoplebelieve in Creative Commons, a license that is no license at all, a license that authorizesanyone who wants to use something for a non commercial production to do it without inanyway contacting the initial proprietor and without leaving any tracks behind. Theappropriated “goods” are thus used in all possible ways without anyone knowing reallywho is responsible for the final product or products thus produced, the afore-mentionedmashups. Their mascot software is Linux which is nothing but the old command-linesoftware known as UNIX wrapped up in a Graphical User’s Interface to make it user-friendly. They are the people of the Artificial Intelligence lobby that pretends that they can,or will soon be able to, simulate human intelligence and the machine they will use tosimulate that intelligence will be intelligent, just as if a plane, since it can fly, were a bird.They are the full proponents of web 2.0, this version of the web that enables the circulationof all kinds of products, freely and easily, with the development on top of it of socialnetworks. And finally they are characterized by the fact that they want to share andmashup files that have no context, meaning they cannot be attached to anyone or anythingthat could claim some propriety right on the file. They are called anti-context file sharersand remashers.

Jaron Lanier takes a strong stance against these people but not in the name of thetechnology they propose or advocate, but in the name of the deep consequences of thesetechnologies. The whole book is dedicated to that exploration. But he defines his objectiveas soon as page 19 when he explains the five reasons why all this is important, all thatamounting to “people defining themselves downward.”

1- “Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing the individual in the design ofsociety, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblikebehaviors. This leads to not only empowered trolls but to a generally unfriendlyand unconstructive online world.”

2- “Finance was transformed by computing clouds. Success in finance becameincreasingly about manipulating the cloud at the expense of sound financialprinciples.”

3- “There are proposals to transform the conduct if science along similar lines.Scientists would then understand less of what they do.”

4- “Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominatedby trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, andby fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. Itis a culture of reaction without action.”

5- “Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself outof existence.”

The diagnosis is severe and the book is trying to suggest solutions.

His first question then is about how this cloud or web 2.0 technology is changingpeople. It develops in them a crowd mentality, what he calls a “hive mind” or “noosphere.”The reference to “noosphere” is never exploited, but the term “hive mind” is vastlyexploited and developed into “hive mind thinking,” “hive thinking” and other expressions ofthis type. It is a metaphor and he may not be responsible for it since it is an old metaphor.But using it for the mentality of the people blindly using web 2.0 and cloud technology iswarping the metaphor out of any meaning but excludes the only proper meaning of a herd

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stampeding wildly across the virtual sky of the Cloud. A hive is a social organization with avery clear and rather rigid hierarchy, with each member having to do one task everyday,each category of members having one special task to perform, including the queen whohas to feed in order to lay eggs. The hive produces several products that are highlysophisticated all transformed from collected pollens: honey, wax, royal jelly, propolis, andmany others. They take care of the hive and keep it in perfect shape: any mishapendangers the whole colony or swarm. There is nothing of the sort in the cloud, on theInternet on web 2.0. What’s more bees have a language that enables one to tell the otherswhere she has found a good field of flowers. This language is a highly symbolic sign anddance language based on extremely objective elements like the sun, angular orientation tothe sun, distances, etc. No one has studied what happens to a bee who could notaccurately give that kind of information, or who would endanger the hive and the swarm byreckless actions. That kind of social organization of the survival project of a beehiverequires some kind of regulatory authority to take care of trespassers. Hackers are notwelcome.

This metaphor is bad and it would have been well advised to use another one likeherd psychology or crowd psychology. In fact he could have even been ironical with anexpression like Panurge’s sheep borrowed from Rabelais’s Pantagruel, himself borrowingit from antiquity, Panurge meaning in Greek “he who can do everything”.

Beyond that Jaron Lanier insists on the reductionism of this cloud ideology. It forcesto anonymity and pseudonymity, both practices that reduce simple personal humanity. Hepoints out how this ideology, this technology produces a complete contradiction that theyassume: “It’s the people who make the forum, not the software. Without the software theexperience would not exist at all.” (p. 72) The forum is then illusionary. He says thesoftware is “flawed.” The point is that everyone knows it is flawed in its very principle ofrequiring in the form of an encouragement and an incitation to use personae and avatarsinstead of real identity and pictures, and then everyone makes do with this software, withthis technology. And yet Jaron Lanier is not entirely clear since he advises not toconcentrate on the software because then you forget the person behind or the person inthe user of the software. If the software is bad, it has to be gotten rid of. But we have towonder if this anonymity and pseudonymity is not in a way a positive element. Not forsecurity of course, since the IP of a computer can be traced within seconds by any let’ssay “security authority” not to speak of hackers and spywares. Some people complain thatthe Internet enables anyone to say anything without any control. Then what’s the problem?The Internet does not aim at only telling the truth, and what is the truth? Somethingdecided by Parliament or Congress or the United Nations? Some people consider we arenot dealing with real people since they are hiding behind avatars. And then what! Deal withthe ideas expressed by these avatars, if they express ideas, otherwise forget them. JaronLanier seems to believe that this crowd psychology was invented by the Internet and web2.0. That is certainly not true. We all know “bread and circuses” events in all societies in allhistorical periods including some war episodes to satisfy public opinion and populardemand. Some of these mass events could be very grim like hanging and drawing andquartering people in England, frying homosexuals in oil in France, impaling people in othercountries, and still beheading people with swords like in Saudi Arabia still.

He is right when he says Cybernetic totalism has failed spiritually by fetishizingobjects and objectizing people; behaviorally by undervaluing individuals and overvaluingthe crowd; and economically by endangering the economy of all types of expression(music, videos, photography, text, etc) and by permitting highly risky financial schemesthat could not be devised before. This cloud reduces the creativity of individuals by erasing

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any circumstantial, existential, experiential real data from Internet products. Real creativitycan only come from a circumstantial, existential, experiential real environment of one realindividual who invests all that environment in his creativity and in his creation. If theInternet and web 2.0 succeed in that line, how long can the world live without creativity?Yet I will express some reserve on this extreme vision. Real creative people are producedby their circumstantial, existential, experiential context. The Internet and the Cloud can bepart of this context but cannot erase it. Mozart would always have been Mozart even if hehadn’t died in poverty: he would still have been composing on his death bed, I guess. Thenew point is that all those whose creativity is very limited can today “create” and broadcasttheir “creations” thus producing a tremendous inflation on the cultural or musical market.But even if that may harm many professional creators of value, these have to find ways toprotect their work and to guarantee their survival. That’s called union action. I believe thatthe proportion of creative artists is not going to go down because of this technology. Playsin theaters, concerts in concert halls, films in cinemas, but also the DVDs of these liveshows are multiplying their audiences, direct live audience as well as indirect audience ata distance in space and time. A full reform of the management of the Internet is to bethought through and brought about but there is no reason to believe creativity is going tobe drowned by the mediocre flock bleating of the herded crowd of the newly Internet-empowered people.

Jaron Lanier is conscious of this dimension and he proposes a humanistic approachof this Cloud technology. The main suggestion is to make all products freely reachable onthe Internet but the user would not pay a flat rate but a rate in proportion with the quantityof bits that user would have reached no matter what, including the pictures of his/hersweetheart/boyfriend. On the other hand that user would get a payment for all the bits ofhis/hers that have been reached by other people, including from his/hersweetheart/boyfriend. This suggestion should be taken seriously because then thecirculation of bits on the Internet would become a market and that would bring quality atthe top. Though we must not forget that before the Internet and that will be eternal all thatreaches the broadcasting public sphere is not necessarily good and all that is good doesnot necessarily reach the broadcasting public sphere. Thousands of good books havenever been published and thousands of good Mozarts have never been able to perform orbecome publicly known. Jaron Lanier’s approach though requires some reflection on howa creative work is produced, by whom, at what and which and whose cost, how thatcreative production can be encouraged? Subsidize it, encourage the profitablebroadcasting of it, create events where creators can confront themselves with others andwith an audience;, including critics, and many other solutions have to be found. PersonallyI am quite more afraid of the weight of norms, standards and traditions in professionalfields than of the competition from the herd’s mooing and dooking.

He insists on another effect of computational technology on any knowledge or let’ssay semantic data. It grinds it down into small items in order to digitalize them. Itstandardizes the basic units: computationalized music notes do not contain any fuzzyvariation; they are pure but no instrument played by any musician will ever produce purenotes. Considering the meaning of anything comes from the variations this anythingcontains, a dog being seen differently by any single person thinking of a dog, thissystematic purification and simplification of every item processed digitally produces anenormous loss of meaning. Imagine the 25 or so ways Eskimos have to speak of the snowand Egyptians or Arabs have to speak of the sand or the sun. This grinding of everythingdown into some bit-powder destroys the architecture of the original object and its innerhierarchy: it aims at simulating a phenomenon or an object but a beautiful picture of a rosedoes not smell like a rose: it does not prick either. What’s more all the particular

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environment attached to that item by the person who carries it is erased and lost.

That’s when Jaron Lanier tries to cope with language and bring it back into hisconception of computationalism. He is no linguist and he refers to people who are nolinguists. To come to his own version he has to reject other approaches. First of all RayKurzweil’s Singularity as becoming a newly invented secular religion:

“Those who ,enter into the theater of computationalism are given all themental solace that is usually associated with traditional religions. Theseinclude consolations for metaphysical yearnings, in the form of the race toclimb to ever more “meta” or higher-level states of digital representations,and even a colorful eschatology, in the form of the Singularity. And indeed,through the Singularity a hope of an afterlife is available to the most ferventbelievers.” (p. 178)

He rejects in the same way the approach that considers the inner thing is the samething as the outer thing that supports that a computer with specialized features is similar toa person, hence is a person. He rejects of course the Turing approach since it is basicallya very similar attempt: a machine that cannot be differentiated from a human person in itsand his/her reactions is as intelligent as that human person, hence is a human person.

It’s when he suggests a realistic approach of computationalim that he gets lost intolanguage.

He starts with Jim Bower and tries to compare olfaction with language. He assertsthat both work “from entries in a catalog not from infinitely morphable patterns” (p. 165).He contradicts this assertion for language page 167: “Only a handful of species, includinghumans and certain birds, can make a huge and ever-changing variety of sounds.” OfCourse he speaks of sounds and before he spoke of words. That’s just the point. Thewords have been phylogenetically produced from sounds. He misses the articulations oflanguage. He contradicts his first assertion again page 190: “We can make a wide varietyof weird noises through our mouths, spontaneously and as fast as we think. That’s why weare able to use language.” He does not wonder why we can do that: what physiologicalparticularity enables us to do it?

He continues his parallel with olfaction and says: “the grammar of language isprimarily a way of fitting those dictionary words into a larger context. Perhaps the grammarof language is rooted in the grammar of smells.” (p. 165) This is a non-cautious assertionabout linguistic syntax. It negates the various articulations that build the hierarchy oflanguage. Language can’t really be compared with smells. Once again the grammar oflanguage is an invention of man and has been produced from scratch by a long andcomplex phylogenic process from simple isolated sounds to complex discourses.

To crown it all he compares the Tourette syndrome in which a man or womanuncontrollably produces all kinds of swear words to the “pheronomic system [that] detectsvery specific strong odors given off by other animals (usually of the same species) typicallyrelated to fear and mating.” (p. 165) First consider the fact that all mammals produce thesame hormone for fear, which explains that in the wild a man’s fear can be detected byother mammals which will get on the offensive because an animal who is afraid attacks,and since the man here is detected as being afraid hence as going to attack, the bestdefense is to attack, so the wild animal will attack. Anyone who has some practice of somejungle knows that. Never be afraid in such a situation if you want to have one chance to

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survive. Then I can’t see how he can compare these pheromonic smells, their detectionand the reactions a mammal may have to them to swear words. A Tourette patient cannotuse swear words he/she has not heard first, learned second, memorized third. Swearwords are not instinctive.

At that point we have to say Jaron Lanier is completely off the point concerninglanguage. He does not take into account the phylogeny of language experienced by HomoSapiens in concrete conditions; he does not consider the psychogenesis of languageexperienced by a child learning it in concrete conditions. He does not know about thehierarchical articulations of language and the immense variations from one family oflanguages to the next, and within each family of languages. Finally he does not knowabout the distinction between “langue” which represents the infinite expressive potentialcarried by language and “discourse” which is the concrete realization of one expression ofone meaning in real conditions.

And yet he is brandishing the essential concept to approach these problems:neoteny, the fact that human children are born extremely immature, premature,dependent for a long period of several years. That would have given to all his otherarguments a power they do not have. Yet he concludes properly not as the final conclusionof the whole book but as the conclusive deduction of the final concept of neoteny broughtup at the end of the book.

Moore’s law (the exponential development rate of hardware) will have to accept tobe slowed down or even blocked by the very slow development rate of software, the factthat neoteny has a conservative effect since the younger generation are forced into anever longer period of training that reproduces and ossifies previous knowledge and know-how. Cultural neoteny is even more drastic since it leads to Bachelard’s Poetics ofReverie, vastly overused here since Bachelard is from a period when these moderntechniques did not exist, when life expectancy was very limited and when education wasonly for an elite but the general idea is correct: “The good includes a numinousimagination, unbounded hope, innocence and sweetness.” (p. 183) But on the other sidechildhood can also produce what Jaron Lanier identifies as William Golding’s Lord of theFlies: “The bad is more obvious, and includes bullying, voracious irritability, andselfishness.” (p. 183) His conclusion is realistic for once: “The net provides copiousexamples of both aspects of neoteny.” (p. 183) This constant dichotomy, and in fact weshould see more than two sides, on the Internet is the possibility for the Internet to be theplace were various approaches will be confronted, confronting one another, hence will bea marketplace of some sort, the marketplace of global communication.

If he is right about childhood and youth, we better start thinking of education andstart integrating the internet and the Cloud in our systematic education efforts not tomoralize, not to demonize, not to advocate the Internet but to teach children how to use itto their own advantage along their own motivations, not the teachers’. He sure is rightwhen he says: “Our secret weapon is childhood.” (p. 188) Why the heck did he not startfrom there and consider the phylogeny of Homo Sapiens and the psychogenesis of allchildren.

I will overlook his “Post Symbolic communication.” Homo Sapiens started onhis/her track to humanity by developing his symbolic power and among other things byusing it to invent language from his multiple sounds through a simple process ofdiscriminating items, identifying them including with names and classifying them intoconcepts and conceptual classes. Homo Sapiens could only recognize one item when he

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had already encountered it, discriminated it, identified it and classified it, otherwise HomoSapiens had to start all over again for the item he did not know.

If by any chance Homo Sapiens moved beyond that symbolic power and lost ithe/she would lose everything, including all his/her knowledge that was constructed withlanguage. If Jaron Lanier wants to mean that man is going to reach a higher level ofsymbolic power, I would entirely agree. The machines developed today by the scientificand technical elite of the world are going to be used by everyone as soon as they are born,and even before their birth, which will increase their intelligence tremendously. Theincreased intelligence of the global population will also mean an increased intelligence ofthe elite of the world. The elite only reflects the level of their surrounding masses.

But Jaron Lanier forgets that Homo Sapiens is still an animal species going throughmutations. The point is that there is no natural selection among humans any more. Allthose who are different are treated as handicapped or dangerous and they are kept asideor away. It is high time we start changing our vision and consider the potential of thosewho are different. Autistic children with the Asperger syndrome for example seem to havegreat possibilities, among other things in languages. Daniel Tammet is one example of asuccessful Asperger Savant in foreign languages. It is urgent to consider that Childhood isour secret weapon and to really make an effort to screen these new different people andhelp them find out their real capabilities and develop them to the best level possible. Rightnow we might be rejecting the people who represent the future of our species, not thedestroyers of it, those who will bring our intellect and intelligence to a higher ever point andwill event even better machines to serve humanity.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

AMAZON.CO.UKhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R39WLXM9YE45LU?ref_=pe_780071_41837251

13 of 25 people found the following review helpful Some good things but a few flaws, 22 Aug 2011

By Jacques COULARDEAU "A soul doctor, so to say"

This review is from: Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (Paperback)

The first thing I have to say is that the title is definitely false advertising. "Forever" does notexist with any natural phenomenon. Everything in the world is born to life, lives whichmeans follows a track of growth and decay, dies and eventually is reborn through someform of reproduction for the organisms that can reproduce. No one will live forever. Thehuman species is genetically planned to disappear in a way or another like all other animalspecies. The best thing that happens with animal life is that natural evolution eliminatesorganisms that are no longer fit for survival in the changing environment it lives in andreplaces it with an organism that is fitter to that environment.

The point with human beings is that natural evolution has endowed our species with a formof intelligence that enables us to go against this natural evolution by changing theenvironment, by producing our means of survival, by going against decay and death evenfor the individuals who are obviously badly adapted for survival and would die in a jiffy if

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natural evolution had the last word. Religion, science, technology, medicine are the humaninventions that enabled the species to extend its survival and expand its living conditions.

We find that same "human" vanity in the first chapter when the authors say "You createyour brain" (p. 7). The brain is a given organ that depends as for its existence on thegenetic inheritance of the individual or the species. They say then "You create your brainfrom the input you get" (p. 8). This is less false since it takes into account the input, but thegenetic input cannot be an input "you" get because "you" do not exist in anyway beforethis genetic inheritance is brought up by the fertilization of an egg by a spermatozoon.They finally come to a closer truth when they say "I do indeed create my mind from myown thoughts" (p. 8) The mind is not an organ, but it is a meta-sense, meaning it ispotentially contained in the genetic structure and functionality of the brain in its body andunder the survival requirement in the body's and species' environment.

The mistake is the use of the word "create". The comparison with muscles should havemade them realize the vanity of this word. Exercise and training does not "create" amuscle but only develops it. The proper approach of the mind would be that our sensorialexperiences and the strong requests from our environment in order to survive, and todayto get an education which is the basic social survival requirement, DEVELOP the mentalfunction of the brain and hence the MIND. As for the brain the same sensorial experiencesplus physical activities along with the development of language DEVELOP the brain'sability to "think", DEVELOP our THOUGHTS or THINKING and hence enable the brain toDEVELOP in itself connections and relations between the various cells that are geneticallyprogrammed to establish such relations and connections. True enough it is this globalexperience of coordinated actions, coordinated thinking, articulated language andsystematic reflection (distantiation and mental reconstruction) that makes the brain of anyindividual what it is, rich or poor, richly developed or underdeveloped, etc.

I am surprised that the authors did not speak of mirror neurons that are essential in contactwith other people and learning. Yet they compensate this flaw with the mention of spindlecells that are essential to build complex responses to the environment, i.e. coordinated,articulated and empathetic reactions. Language is these responses though the authorsconcentrate on emotions. They do not even consider the ancillary role, not to speak of theconceptual role of language in thinking, communicating, emotional contact, etc. Their worldis entirely language-empty, and that is regrettable because articulated language is a basichuman dimension resulting from natural evolution.

Now this book, by far too big for simple readers, is clear on a few healthy elements: To livebetter and longer, man or woman must be active, practice regular and rather exactingexercise, sleep properly, eat healthy and balanced food, drink moderately and non excitingbeverages (alcohol or caffeine or energizing drinks, though they don't mention these thatare included under caffeine) and practice relaxation and even meditation.

As for activity and exercise, they do not specify a wide enough variety: no walking, nobicycling, no swimming, apparently only aerobics and running lengthily mentioned. As forhealthy food, they speak against deep frying and other high temperature cooking, but theydo not speak one word on low temperature cooking that microwave ovens provide. As forrelaxation and meditation they stop short, a long way short, of Buddhist and Orientalmeditation that some consider as being self-hypnosis into total inner relaxation by pushingaway outer environmental elements. Yoga is definitely, in its Western reduction to somekind of physical and mental recipe, a trendy suggestion in Northern America and thedeveloped world.

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The TRANSCEND program is also very surprising in its first element, "talk with yourdoctor" and heavy emphasis on medical tests and prescription drugs, because it soundslike open and unconditional support to the medical profession that has not done much sofar for prevention but has done so far a lot for surgical and chemotherapeutic inflexibility ifnot obduracy. People have to become their own mental doctors and meditation as well aseducation are essential, and the "talk with your doctor" provides neither. The book thenbecomes a set of recipes (including a vast food recipe section) and suggestions (includinga vast aerobic section) counterbalanced by long lists of supplements and drugs andchemical elements etc. Anyone who does not have a high degree of training and curiosityin the field will not get a real positive return from this book.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Comments

Showing 1-10 of 13 posts in this discussionInitial post: 27 Jul 2013 17:14:29 BDT

R. Springall says:On Dr Jacques points, I would disagree about the book being false advertising. If he isfamiliar with the authors work he would know that ray kurzweil believes, as do many of thetechnology elite at intel, google, Facebook, Microsoft and apple, and professor StephenHawkins that mankind will face the singularity in the near future. This book just tells youhow to live better in order to live long enough to see the singularity come to pass. Whenthis does happen, and it will, we will all live forever.You replied with a later post

1 of 1 people think this post adds to the discussion.

Your post, in reply to an earlier post on 27 Jul 2013 23:57:21 BDT

Jacques COULARDEAU says:The belief is crazy. 

The human brain is devised in such a way that it can improve its performance along withthe world and I would not think humanity will accept to have millions of nanobotscirculating everywhere in our bodies, all of them connected together and communicating,and what's more communicating with a central cosmic dashboard, motherboard or server.Let me laugh? Big Brother and Prism at genetic level.

Ray Kurzweil is just one example of the astounding condescending arrogance of MIT. LetChomsky speak of his genetic black box. It simply does not exist. Full stop, period, etc.

Jacques0 of 1 people think this post adds to the discussion.

In reply to your post on 21 Nov 2013 17:25:27 GMT Last edited by the author on 21 Nov 2013 17:28:25 GMT

M. Edwards says:Jacques

You are mistaken here. Organic life does not have to degenerate. We only die because of

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a process that currently occurs in our cells, driven by our DNA. There is absolutely noreason to doubt that, just as we can alter DNA to prevent certain diseases, we will at somepoint in the future be able to stop the processes that result in cell degeneration.

When that happens we will be able to "live forever".

Nano technology is a separate issue entirely and is not required to prevent call ageing.You replied with a later post

Your post, in reply to an earlier post on 22 Nov 2013 22:00:53 GMT

Jacques COULARDEAU says:Humanity is slightly more complex than science fiction.

Luckily in the long run humanity has always done what is good for an ever growing numberand proportion of people. Who will be able to afford such medicine?

These nanobots will of course communicate among themselves within your body, withother nanobots in other bodies around you and of course with the "motherhead" or should Isay "BigBrotherMaxOrSam" board that created them and will control them all. I like that: allhuman beings controlled by one such board, or maybe two to create some class struggle.

Your dream is a dream and it will not be

Jacques0 of 1 people think this post adds to the discussion.

In reply to your post on 22 Nov 2013 23:57:37 GMT

M. Edwards says:Jacques

You do not appear to have read, or understood, my comment. What is your obsession with"nano bots"? This is only one part of the possible future.

You seem to be totally unaware of the research that is currently going on in the Biotechindustry and the fact that we are probably only 10 or 20 years away from being able toreprogram human DNA.

Who will be able to pay? The same sorts of people who are using any of the drugs beingused today, each one of which cost billions of dollars to bring to market.

Please stop posting such drivel about things you clearly do not understand.You replied with a later post

Your post, in reply to an earlier post on 23 Nov 2013 10:39:12 GMT Last edited by you 22 hours ago

Jacques COULARDEAU says:No one is supposed to tell me what I can do or can't do. As the series Lost has it.

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You are living in a golden ivory tower. Even in France where medicine is nearly free, thetwo implants I will be getting in my eyes next month will cost me all counted and of courseafter social security payments at least 5 or 6 HUNDRED euros. I know in France at leastone third of the population cannot afford that for themselves or their kids. 

In GB where medicine is in the hands of the NHS you can get things nearly free but whydo some English people come to France to get what I am going to get within a month?Waiting queues outside the hospitals on the sidewalks or pay first please in private clinics.And what about the USA where 45 million people have no health coverage? And whatabout the rest of the world. My dentures are a LUXURY in Sri Lanka which is far from thepoorest country in the world.

Stop imagining yourself eternal and just go back to basics and watch Tristan and Isoldeand tell me how it feels to die in the hands of the poor who want to find bread or eyeimplants?

Take a vacation in Burkina Faso and you will know it all. And don't tell me the nanobots arean obsession; I was listening to Ms Chun (Programmed Visions) in Paris two days ago andshe was explaining how all the computers that are connected to the cloud can readsabsolutely all that is being done on all other computers in the world and that it is possibleto see it in the USA but it is forbidden to have the proper mode for that on computers inEurope.

You seem not to have listened to the Snowden problem.

But dream of eternity and of at least 120 love affairs of 20 years each one and thepossibility to vary the orientation from one to the other at least twenty times. That's adream. And keep insolent and down-looking and condescending words like "drivel" toyourself for your partners in life. I am not one of these.

Have a good day. I am going back to my snivel-ling

Jacques

0 of 1 people think this post adds to the discussion.

In reply to your post on 23 Nov 2013 12:38:12 GMT

M. Edwards says:More drivel I am afraid. You seem totally unable to put together a logical argument.

Yes, I am well aware of the "Snowden problem". I am well aware of the activities of theNSA and GCHQ. I have my own views about these things. The thing is, these issues haveno relevance here! You are saying that this new biotechnology is science fiction becauseof ethical issues The two are separate things.

The FACT is that within the next 20-50 years what you refer to as science fiction will bescience fact. We will be able to alter the human genome to enable cells to dividecontinually without degrading. You keep insinuating that immortal organic cells are afantasy - you should read about the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii and see just how wrong youare.

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You note that you find it hard to afford your eye implants. Why do you suppose that mightbe? How much do you suppose it cost to develop these implants to a point they could beclinically viable? Many hundreds of millions of dollars? Billions maybe? How manyimplants do they perform each year? Thousands maybe. Yes, it will be expense perprocedure. What do you think the demand will be for a procedure that rejuvenates aperson's DNA. Certainly hundreds of millions I should think. Yes, the procedure will beexpensive when it first becomes available but it will quickly fall - just as the cost ofsequencing the human genome has collapsed from millions of dollars to just about $1000.

Are you saying that because this is expensive it should not be done? Using your logic, theeye implants you are getting should not have been developed. What you are saying makesno sense.

Yes, wealth is not evenly spread around the world and that is bad. That, however, hasnothing to do with this issue.You replied with a later post

Your post, in reply to an earlier post on 23 Nov 2013 13:31:01 GMT

Jacques COULARDEAU says:I generally make the difference between the hot-dog and the bread. In fact I throw awaythe hot-dog because of my doctor's orders and I eat the bread without the relish, ketchup,mustard or whatever but I keep the fresh onion if there is any.

I am not against something because it is expensive. But who is going to pay for those whocan't pay? Sir. You don't need to be a nincompoop of the Tea Party to understandsomeone will have to pay. and what's more what will me do when we are 25 billions on thisplanet? You should read the latest book by Dan Brown. Our science (I mean HEREEXCLUSIVELY the science of Kurzweil who is no scientist though he misuses his MITaffiliation as a selling argument for his hunky-dory nightmares, because our science isunder scrutiny of many organizations that will not accept that kind of science fiction even itit were possible) goes against the basic principle of nature and of the cosmos. That will goboom but in 25 years of time I won't be here to see it.

We cannot negate the basic principle of natural selection because it will produceoverpopulation (already well started), then extinction of most animal and vegetal species(well started) and then the total burning-out of the earth's resources (very well started) andthen what??? True enough they have managed to produce true real yummy beef in alaboratory by lab-culture of beef cells. That's more than reprogramming the humangenome. 

By the way your eugenics are nothing different from what was practiced in Scandinaviastarting at the beginning of the 20th century, then copied by Hitler directly from the mouthof H.G. Wells (and this last one in the most racist terms since he called for the eliminationand extermination of all non white "races" except the "Jewish race", I love that one, sinceJews are Semites and hence white people, for the only reason given by Wells was thatthey intermarry).

You are driving yourself off the ground right chitty chitty bang bang into the pink cloudspeopled with purple elephants, the purple elephants of DYSTOPIA. Why don't you readErewhon?

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Have a good cool winter

Jacques0 of 1 people think this post adds to the discussion.

In reply to your post on 23 Nov 2013 13:56:07 GMT

M. Edwards says:"Who is going to pay who can't pay"?

Youmay as we'll say Apple will never work, who'll afford to pay £600 for a phone or aniPad!

In the rich west it will be bought first by the middle classes who can afford it. When thecost comes down it will be provided by the national health services. It will saves theseservices millions from not having to treat thousands of people with degenerative diseases.

Population? People will have fewer children - that trend is already here. The population willstabilise.

You have really used Dan Brown as a reference for your argument. You are funny!You replied with a later post

Your post, in reply to an earlier post on 23 Nov 2013 16:14:13 GMT

Jacques COULARDEAU says:I admire your optimistic demographics. 

If no one dies any extra child will be an increase and let's say every couple will have onechild every twenty years and the population will go up 2 billions every twenty years. ATLEAST. 

Have you ever learned arithmetics, you know the third R: Reading, wRriting andReckoning or aRithmetics. Or you were sitting next to the coal burning stove at the back ofthe classroom just enjoying the heat you did not have at home? And we are speaking ofexponential growth in demographics, of course, at least geometric growth.

You know nothing about being poor. You should join the Tea Party and ask for the closingup of all governments who prevent the world from becoming a hothouse and nursery oftwo billion people every twenty years with no death whatsoever......... or do you mean allthat only for the happy middle class???? and you must mean upper middle class since 600euros, sir, is half the net minimum wage in France and think of a family of four who have topay, net after all possible grants and helps and whatever APL as they call it in France, whohave to shell out 200 euros for the rent of their four room fifty five square meter apartmentin Paris 19th district, and they will have to buy four travelling passes for Paris, somethinglike 200 more euros per month.

I will let you bathe yourself in your self-centered egoticistic egotism.

Don"t let the vapor in your sauna, steam bath in some other discursive registers, get toohot. Youmight blister all over.

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Jacques

In reply to your post on 23 Nov 2013 18:41:36 GMT

M. Edwards says:There you go with your childlike logic. Who said there would be no death? We havealready established that not everyone will take up the "treatment". There will be a numberlike yourself who will prefer to shrivel and die after your 3 score years and 10. Of thosethat do, there will still be accidents and new diseases to contend with. As I said, populationwould stabilise; I didn't say it would stop increasing or fall.

Yes, there will be issues to content with as population increases (with or without DNAregeneration) no one said life was easy.

No, I know nothing about being poor. I am not claiming that I do. I am talking about thereality of the development of biotechnology.

I must admit I got bored of reading your drivel so I'm not sure where saunas or steambaths come into it, but I'm sure it means something to you.You replied with a later post

Your post, in reply to an earlier post on 23 Nov 2013 21:13:09 GMT

Jacques COULARDEAU says:As for the Second Coming you can always plan it in Bethlem:

The Bethlem Royal Hospital is a hospital for the treatment of mental illness located inLondon, United Kingdom and part of the South London and Maudsley NHS FoundationTrust. Although it has moved three times from its original location, it is recognised asEurope's first and oldest institution to specialise in mental illnesses. It has been known byvarious names including St Mary Bethlehem, Bethlem Hospital, Bethlehem Hospital and,informally and most notoriously, Bedlam.

They do have saunas and steam baths to treat overheated spirits.

Bye Bye Cherio Cheerio Cheers and Salutations.

Jacques0 of 1 people think this post adds to the discussion.

1 new post since your last visitIn reply to your post on 23 Nov 2013 21:22:34 GMT

M. Edwards says:Really? Well I'll just take your word for that.

I'll let you get back to your steam treatment old chap.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful

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 Science-fiction turned religious philosophy, May 11, 2012By Jacques COULARDEAU "A soul doctor, so to say"

This review is from: The Age of Spiritual Machines (Paperback)

It is interesting to read this older book after the more recent ones. It reveals some of theideological axioms and methodological traits and mistakes that he started from. Andunluckily it is necessary to go back to basics at times when you are dealing with abestselling author in a field where it is easy to predict the future, even the future of theworld, the field of technology and what's more information technology.

Ray Kurzweil with more recent books took us into the clouds of his cloud computing andappeared on these clouds like some Messiah who was the rainmaker of the apocalypse,that time when humans will be taken over by another world entirely dominated by a non-human intelligence, even if created originally by man himself. He tries to be the prophet ofthe future of a world created by evolution stated as intelligent (whose intelligence?) andlater by man's intelligence, and then destroyed for plain humans by the machines createdby this human intelligence. The vision is a mixture of Terminator 1-2-3-4, Matrix 1-2-3, TheStand, and The Book of Revelation. He even gives at the end of this here book the fourHorses of the Apocalypse page 256: Red War ("the species may destroy itself beforeachieving this step"), White Political Power ("a malfunction," hence a problem in thesystem whose constitution is not clear cut), the Black Justice or Commerce and theirscales ("a software virus" introduced by the badly designed software or by a pirate orhacker) and the Pale Green Pestilence (a "real biological virus" devised and accidentally,on purpose from the machine or on purpose from a malevolent human with reference tothe example of "HIV")

But this enormous metaphor, always present in this book, is quite often expressed whenspeaking of the beginning of the world, the creation of the Universe, the Big Bang, the endof the world, the end of the Universe, the Big Crunch or the Whimper, the beginning oftime and the end of time, etc, the total domination with the alpha and the omega, that basicbiblical, Jewish, Christian and Islamic concept that time has a first instant and will have alast instant and both were decided by some God. He even manages to present the God'sspot of some epileptic god-fearing patients who see God in their trances, and that vision isidentified in one spot in their brain in such a way that we may believe it is true foreveryman on earth, hence that God is in every single one of our brains.

This is clandestine and yet widely open religious ideology directly borrowed from the basicsacred books of the three Semitic religions. He could have quoted easily the OldTestament, the New Testament, the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls and the Koran. But he kepthis quotations secret. Too bad. When one is speaking religion it is important that this onesays so and give the references not to be accused of plagiarism.

Let's start with time. Time does not exist in reality, in the real world. Only duration doesand time was invented by human beings as soon as they tried to measure that duration.So it is absurd to speak of an acceleration of time or of a deceleration of time. We mayspeak of the speed of a phenomenon, but not of the speed of time. Time is a humanconcept and as such it is absolutely objective and has to remain so, like any measurementinvented by human beings. Then he speaks a lot about the subjective impression we haveaccording to various psychological states we may be in. That implies that we feel a certainamount of time as having a short or long duration but duration is not time. A star does not

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know time, nor duration as for that, but for two different reasons, because time is a humaninvention and because a star has no consciousness or awareness of duration, or anythingelse as for that. Kurzweil when speaking of time or using the concept of time is in factjuggling around with colored balls and he wants us to believe he is not a juggler but theballs and their dancing in the air are objective descriptions of the Universe.

If he had been prudent with time he would have been realistic with scientific andtechnological what's more models. All our knowledge is nothing but a complex set ofmodels built by our mind on the basis of our sensations transformed into perceptions in ourbrain by our mind.

But Kurzweil never discusses the concept of mind and hardly refers to it. He refers to thebrain which would in a way or another contain our intelligence and our knowledge. Heuses most of the time a computing metaphor and the brain is a hard disk and intelligenceis the software or the programming, knowledge being the memory or the data bank of thehard disk. That metaphor is primitive and it is a shortcut if not a mental short circuit.

What is the mind? The mind is a construct of man's brain built from all the individual hasaccumulated as for sensations, transformed into perceptions and articulated one on top, orwhatever, of the other into a complex architecture from the very first moment ofconception. The Pro-life or Pro-abortion debate has no value here. The fetus starts feelingand accumulating things, sensations, as soon as it is a fetus, hence just after conception;That fetus will have a heart of its own around the fourth week and from one beating (itsmother's heart) it will shift to two beatings (his mother's and his own hearts) and these twowill coordinate from one moment to the next and the fetus experiences from the first dayand then from the fourth week the beating of one heart and then of two and thecoordination of both. Stress in the mother, pleasure in the mother, fear in the motherchange the beating of her heart and the fetus knows it. We mustn't forget that the fetus willeventually develop mirror neurons that will multiply the empathy he is living from the veryfirst day. All that is ignored by Kurzweil.

Worse even he ignores that the child from the twentieth or twenty-fourth week of gestationwill be able to clearly hear all that the mother says and all that is said within one yard anda half around the mother, and by the way not only said but all noises or music or whateversound. Before that audition the fetus could feel the vibrations of the mother's body whileshe was speaking. Now he can hear the very clusters of sounds she produces, and thoseare associated to the vibrations, and those that are produced in her direction. At birth thenew-born will be able to react to the clusters of sounds that had been common with themother and experiments were done with the names of the siblings of the new-born and thebaby reacted to these clusters one hour after birth. All that is ignored and of courselanguage is ignored in its hierarchical articulated nature.

But there is more. The birth itself is never taken into account and the trauma it brings withdiscontinuous feeding, with breathing, with hunger and thirst, and the first cry of the baby.It will not take the baby very long to understand that when it cries some adult is going tocome to take care of its needs, wants, discomforts and desires. That creates a basicMATRIX of hierarchized functions centering on a relation. The functions are theme andlocation, source and goal, agent and theme. These functions are the basic functions of anyhuman syntax and the relations, static (of the "be" type or of the "have" type) or active (ofthe transitive, intransitive, transferring or positioning types, not to speak of the particulartransfers of "give" and "take"). All that is learned from experience by the new-born childand built in his mind as a model that will inform the language when words become

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possible.

Yes the child listens and yes the child will babble and discover that the lip movements ofsucking or rejecting the tit of his mother or the bottle-tit can be articulated on the flow of aircoming from his larynx and when that larynx starts lowering the child will be able topronounce "ma", "pa", "da", "ta", "ka". As soon as the larynx is low enough to control theflow of air and as soon as the articulatory power of the mouth, jaws, tongue, glottisbecomes more developed the child will be able to produce and articulate more sounds,and he will start associating the clusters of sound with the referential elements around him,on the basis of and into the basic MATRIX he will have by then vastly developed in hismind through and from experience.

But the main mistake of Kurzweil is methodological. He does not seems to understand,actually he can't, that the mind being a construct will change its construction constantlyevery single time a new element of knowledge appears. That connection between theknowledge and the architecture of the mind is not seen by Kurzweil and the evolutionarynature of that relation is not seen either, especially not in its dual carriageway dialectic: agiven state of the mind enables a child to learn a certain item of knowledge but that item ofknowledge reacting on the mind changes it and restructures it and then the mind is able tolearn some new item of knowledge he could not learn before. And that process is neverfinished, except with death, that can be mental before being physical, but that's not thepoint here.

So the main methodological defect appears then.

He states what he calls laws, particularly the Law of Accelerating Returns. But he does notseem to know this law is a mental model constructed by his mind of what might be anatural phenomenon. But his law contains a very old defect generally identified as theparadox of Ulysses and the Hare. If Man's mental development is slower than themachine's development then sooner or later the machine will step beyond man. But heforgets the basic principle of man's development. It is mental, hence in the mind, hence aconstruct, a model, hence every step of it develops the mind itself and every developmentof what this mind produces develops the mind itself, which means we cannot in anywayconsider the mind (and Kurzweil only considers the brain) as in anyway static in power andextension. The brain is hardly overused by the mind. Isn't it said that Einstein usedsomething like 12 or 13 % of his brain? The brain is far from being fully used and the mindhas quite a lot of brain reserve to develop more and more models of reality.

The last point I would like to make here is the social hierarchy that is behind that thinking.

At the top you have "the software-based humans who vastly exceed those still using nativeneuron-cell-based computation." No matter how vast this class is, it is a dominant class.We are in pure science fiction where these superior beings are purely virtual living invirtual bodies in a virtual reality and that they can eventually descend into a nano-engineered physical body. That reminds me of Hubbard's "theta" and "MEST"

The population this superior class dominates is to be seen as composed of several layers.

First the middle human class that uses "neural implant technology to reach an enormousaugmentation of human perceptual and cognitive abilities." Note the mind is still absentsince, according to Bertrand Russell, the body and its senses can only increase the qualityof the sensations, and it is the mind that will build the perceptions. That's the short cut of

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the presentation which is a short circuit: without a mind the way I defined it, along withBertrand Russell and all cognitive linguists, we blow the system because the mind is thefuse of it.

At the bottom the lower class is composed of the humans who do not utilize the afore-mentioned implants and are unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues with those whoare using them.

This society is an echo of Brave New World and it amounts to real apartheid based not onrace, not even on culture and education, but on the use or not of neural implanttechnology. There is not choice whatsoever in this social vision. Under the virtual dominantclass that may condescend to get into a nano-engineered physical body to deal with realhumans, the choice, if it is a choice, is to accept neural implants or not. On one hand youcan participate in the society. On the other hand you cannot and I guess you will be sent tosome reservation if not a simple extermination plant. And this does not answer thequestion of who will decide and through what procedure, and with what appeal route, thatthis physical body will be entrusted to the virtual dominant individuals to be able tointervene in the real world. Who will decide who is going to be the vessel of these virtualdominant beings? We are this time in Supernatural. So we can ask who is Lucifer and whois Michael.

To conclude, and I will spend a lot more time to discuss Kurzweil's books (all of them) inanother arena, this ideology justifies deistic visions without hardly referring to God. Thisideology is socially segregative. This ideology negates the developmental role of the mindby negating the mind itself. This ideology does not understand the developmental role oflanguage among humans. This ideology ignores all the research done on pre-natalexistence and cognitive process, procedures and power.

And surprisingly enough some of its conclusions are extremely close to Hubbard's,particularly in the science-fiction of it. Hubbard was more on retrospective science fiction,inheritance from the very distant past. Kurzweil is more on a prospective science fiction,the production of a future that will transcend us. But both base their visions of man andhuman society on a selection according to some kind of science-fictional elaboration thattakes the form of some pseudo-psychiatric form in Hubbard, and that last "elaboration"word is an understatement.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Comments

Initial post: Aug 29, 2012 6:59:47 AM PDT

B. Gresham says:I read this book recently. And I come from an easily more religious background than manyAmericans. In recent years I have come, however, to identify myself as a Deist. I can'taddress your other points so well, but your attempt to connect this book with some sort ofhidden attempt at religion just don't compute with me. I saw nothing of the sort. In fact,almost the opposite. It was almost as if he said "spirituality is nothing more than a sufficientlevel of computational complexity; not the result of god-communication".You replied with a later post

1 of 1 people think this post adds to the discussion.

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Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Aug 29, 2012 8:57:43 AM PDT Last edited by you on Aug 29, 2012 9:09:19 AM PDT

Jacques COULARDEAU says:You are absolutely right.

But it is a common way of looking at the furture when you are a Jew. If you take Jewishthinkers, some great like Karl Marx, some less great like Ray Kurzweil - but the Jews arenot the only people to think like that - the present state of the world will end in some kind ofapocalypse that will bring a messianic peace of one thousand years. For Marx it iscommunism when human society will no longer have class conflicts. For Kurzweil it iswhen the Singularity is reached and the world will forever be managed mechanically bymachines, hence without any conflict or contradiction. 

If you take some non Jewish approaches of the same problem like Terminator or TheMatrix or The Stand the takeover of the world by machines means a long struggle ofhuman survivors against that dictatorship and victory in some kind of peace or truce, or theneuclear destruction of the bad ones and the sacrifice of three good ones (Stephen King'sThe Stand).

In the same line as Kurzweil and Marx you have Fukuyama and his end of history, endfinality but then end because when the finality of history is reached history will come to itsend. That ideology of an apocalypse with a messianic Jerusalem beyond is typical of theOld Testament and the Book of Revelation that is more Jewish than Christian. That's whatI mean and meant and still mean.

Have a good day.

Jacques

1 of 2 people think this post adds to the discussion.

In reply to your post on Aug 29, 2012 9:09:57 AM PDT

B. Gresham says:Ooooh... I see exactly what you are saying now. Thanks for the clarification. :)

I think Kurzweil's book was *AWESOME* -- *BUT*, like you I think it requires werespectfully consider the other angles... I like to propose people reading him also read BillJoy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" (still positive, but more balanced) andKaczynski's manifesto (which takes the exact opposite view as Kurzweil). 

But yeah, I agree; his positive outlook makes for a nice read but it's doubtful that it will beall roses as he hopes.You replied with a later post

Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Aug 29, 2012 9:29:23 AM PDT

Jacques COULARDEAU says:Right on my colleague

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Right on

We must share some mirror neurons

Jacques

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