Beautiful Machines

A human being is a complex entity and many factors will determine how a human behaves, that in practice it it not always possible to predict exactly what a human being will do, though it is sometimes possible such as predicting that a human being will be at a certain place or at a certain time, as that of a previously arranged meeting or appointment. 

Humans tend to be proud of their unpredictable behaviour, which is fair enough, after all behaving like a simple thermostat would not be, for example, much of  a life.  Many humans will go further and reject the idea that their behaviour can be broken down into a series of mini-steps, each step being a simple disposition to behaving in the same way when a given stimulus is presented. Instead , they may believe that something mysterious, called free will, possessed perhaps by another mysterious entity, called the soul, contributes to determining their actions and that these mysterious entities constitute the essence of being a person, whereas the other machine-like notion is considered to be the essence of a robot.  Even if you tell such humans that they are 'magic meat machines', they will probably not buy it, because even though magic has a certain appeal, the meat 'part' and the 'machine' part has a bitter taste which cannot be suppressed by the sugar of the magic and their faces will screw up as if having bitten into an apple with a maggot inside (a machine-like disposition, dare I say). 

I think machines are beautiful in the sense that mathematics is beautiful.  I think also that if souls were investigated, they would turn out to be beautiful also, assuming they existed.  I suspect that what appears to be a kind of magic would be reducible to machine-like tendencies such as behaving in a certain way according to a certain frequency on reception of the same stimulus, which is a kind of disposition that even a non-personal entity may possess. Alternatively, the signals that a soul may pass on to the human brain and body, may be produced by this free will phenomenon and then there would be the question of how this free will generates its outputs. When such probing questions are pursued, the investigator could well turn up something that even a 'soulful person' would not like.  The root of a belief in a soul or free will (not including machine-like versions of free will, such as compatibilism,which says that free will is emergent phenomenon out of deterministic machine-like behaviour) is a desire for such questions  not to be pursued, because somehow the questions pursued do not have answers.  Then we may ask, well, how is it that such questions have no answer? But this too would be a question without an answer.  But then how could this particular question have no answer?  And so on, ad infinitum.  This default position, which is machine-like in character leads to a kind of stagnation as it kills intellectual inquiry and replaces it with a mindless jaw-dropping awe of mystery, part of which is bolstered by the belief that human brains cannot understand everything.  The root of this belief then leads one  to underestimate what human brains can do.

One reason for believing in the magic of mystery that I have come across is that a system such as a human behaviour is unable to understand something more complex than itself.  I would say that such a contention needs to be expanded on.  The question, "Why not?" springs to my mind given that many of the details of a complex phenomenon are trivial and do not need to be represented by the less complex phenomenon. Rather, it is the general principles which matter and a less complex phenomenon may be perfectly adequate to represent the more complex phenomenon.  Thus as humans we may not have the exact details of how a butterfly flapping its wings may cause a storm on the other side of the world, but we still may derive an understanding, which is of the important sort, of general principles involved, such as sensitive dependence on initial conditions.  Such an understanding would not necessarily leave any mysterious gaps for us to drop our jaws at.  Rather the gaps are trivial , involving the filling in of unnecessary detail, since  it is ignorance of the general principles, which makes a mystery profound, rather than lack of trivial data such as the positions and velocities of each air molecule on Earth at a given time. 

One mystery is that if the essence of a robot or machine is that the machine is governed by dispositions giving the same output for a stream of given input.  How are such dispositions explained?  We cannot appeal to the normal mechanism of a machine since this would involve dispositions also and such an explanation would be circular.  We could be tempted to appeal to a higher entity which chooses the laws of physics that are operate in nature.  But this too appeals to a disposition where any possible output is correlated to the input which is the entity's specification of the laws it wants. 

All in all, we have this great schism between those with a questioning spirit and those without, although the latter may challenge the questioning spirit, perhaps because it undermines their power to dictate all the answers.