Laws of nature are wild stuff.
Water always flows down hill, following the gradient created by gravity and the layout of the landscape.
I was high up in the Waitakere ranges not long ago with a spectacular view out over the bay’s sunlit blue waters dotted by green-capped hills and islands.
It hit me in that moment that all that was created by physical processes. Nothing more than the laws of physics and chemistry could explain how the rock and water arranged itself to the scene before me.
And yet that isn’t nearly enough.
Rocks and water don’t experience a landscape before them, or appreciate a moment of sublime awe at nature’s wonders.
Human beings do.
We’re an odd kind of creature, with our bodies and brains being of nature-stuff governed by its laws, while we ourselves have one foot outside the world.
A human life is a sort of stutter. Whatever we are right now leaps out of itself toward the future or the past. We’re never just “here”.
The purpose we see in what we do, the reason for doing it, the in-order-to, dominates our motivations in ways experienced by no inanimate object and even no animals.
Animals recognize things and act intelligently, but even the smartest animals don’t know the difference between a thing and the question of why a thing exists.
Existence is only a problem for us upright hairless apes.
That’s a real pickle for us because there is no User’s Manual given to human beings at birth. Animals live mainly by instinct, according to a fairly simple life-cycle.
If you want to know why you’re here and what for, you don’t have the luxury of a simple life-cycle to answer the questions for you.
I think about this a lot now that AI [sic] is intruding so much of our lives, and the Very Smart People are opining over whether such things are conscious or aware or have experiences or really think.
For my money, they don’t.
But at the same time I wonder how much it matters, since I also wonder how many human beings around us are conscious or aware or really think. If it turns out that mechanical intelligences only simulate human intelligence, but most of the population can’t tell the difference, does the question even matter?
That leads down a frankly depressing road and I don’t like thinking about it too much.
The good news is, history plays by its own rules. Every oracle predicting the future turned out wrong in ways large and small.
Nobody knows, and the uncertainty can be met with despair or hope.
That’s up to you.
But the second one is a much better place to be inside yourself, I can tell you that much.
No matter how smart the machines might get, or how bad the news makes the world seem, you can always go soak up the sunshine while looking out over the bay.
The mechanical part of us isn’t nearly the whole thing. Go enjoy yourself. Experience beauty in nature and art. Talk to people, dammit. They aren’t all terrible no matter how grumpy I get on low carbs.
The human part of yourself is not just body and not just mind, as if the two come in separate pieces.
Move yourself, get yourself in shape, lift things, burn calories, and enjoy the goods of life.
If you can do those things, the rest of the made-up nonsense meant to scare you doesn’t matter nearly so much.
Matt Perryman