Made in the Image of God: Mind and Subjectivity Separate Us from Computers
Written by Matthew Sabatine
Imaged credits belong to: geralt | Pixabay
“The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone.’” Genesis 2:18
Can you imagine a life without social interaction? What would your life be like if there were no other minds to interact with yours? Your caretaker at birth was the first one to interact with you, to establish the foundation in shaping your mind. Of all the potent influences in your environment, other minds are so important to shaping your mind, to such an extent that your mental health cannot thrive without them.
Facial expressions and tone of voice are nonverbal communications that we may often take for granted. They may seem minor to us, as adults. But they are vital to our child’s mental functioning and growth, beneath the surface. The fact that we started seeking after the attention and affection of our caretaker, straight out of the womb, means that no mind has ever functioned with total independence from other minds. This is still true even when we insist on writing an inner narrative about how independent we are or feel. If it was not good for Adam to be alone in Genesis 2:18, it is not good for any human in general to be alone, and that premise is reinforced by our affection-seeking that begins at birth.
Board-certified psychiatrist and Christian author, Curt Thompson, tells us on page 3 of his book Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices:
“There is no such thing as a self-made man or woman. Think about it for a moment. Even when we are not interacting with other people, a great deal of what we daydream about includes our imagined interactions with others. In this way, even what we consider to be the privacy of our own thoughts involves the activity of relationships.”
When I look at the constant reciprocal influences between human minds, our collective mental health’s dependence on each other, and the interpersonal communications that must take place for us to have sustenance and build societies, I find the implication that we are all connected. But not in a New Age way. I mean… we are all connected in a way that does not allow us to thrive, build, act, and have sustenance without each other. Perhaps that seems too poetic for you. But this tells me that we were meant for each other.
Thompson mentioned the word “privacy.” Privacy does not literally mean you are alone in your thoughts, since others have introduced thoughts into your mind, and at every moment you are striving to use those thoughts from others to your advantage. Privacy seems to be the place where you prepare yourself before giving your verbal and behavioral presentations to the world that judges you. Harsh judgment is a constant prospect, and because of that, we spend a lot of time trying to socially forestall that threat.
Two words come to mind here: persona and paranoia. A persona is the particular personality that you want the public to see, which, for the lack of better terms, could be called a ‘fiction’ if it is meant to conceal certain truths about oneself. Paranoia is the false perception that others are intending to hurt you.
Why is this relevant to the privacy of your thoughts?
Well, my next point is perhaps more philosophical than it is empirical. But I will tell you anyway.
Perhaps paranoia stems from an overactive imagination of the world harshly judging you, and that is why paranoia causes hypervigilance and hypersensitivity to anything that resembles inhumane judgment. Your persona is meant to prevent you from displaying whatever unwanted social consequences that your paranoia foresees. Though we conceptualize paranoia as an unhealthy and maladaptive state, paranoia could be your mind’s extreme attempt to salvage any respectable status with your peers. That stems from the desire to remain in contact with other minds and avoid the abandonment and ostracism that possibly ranks high on humanity’s list of most dreaded fears.
These characteristics (persona and paranoia) are phenomenal worlds filled with many subjective layers, adding further to our uniqueness that separates us from the computers and machines. Though there are discussions about social robots with human-like features, I currently see no evidence that they have any biological needs for socialization and affection, which, a lack thereof would give rise to depression, anxiety, loneliness, and other health detriments that humans experience when socially deprived. These are a few features among others that signify what it means to be conscious, and I think that artificial intelligence lacks them, and therefore does not have consciousness.
Comparing Us to Computers
Human brains have an efficiency tactic called heuristics that saves on time and effort when solving problems and making judgments. Computers use algorithms which are the “building blocks of programming” done sequentially to accomplish a task.
Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist who has been prominent in his studies on human decision-making, dividing us into two realms or modes of fast and slow thinking.
The fast thinking takes place when we make judgments that act like push-buttons with minimal effort and minimal reflective control. The slow thinking involves special care to the details to ensure that the methodical steps are done for the assembly of thoughts, likened to “complex “computations.” These complex computations overshadow the sudden and unreflective urges of the heuristic approach. Slow thinking is often linked with “the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.”
Our human heuristics is one feature among other features distinguishing us from computers. Your heuristics will use your prior experience as the foundation upon which you will make your broad brushstrokes, but with the tendency to be more erroneous than algorithms. Algorithms are the rule-followers that should guarantee more accuracy, when properly employed. For instance, when you bake a cake, you might use your prior experience to estimate the number of ingredients and baking time. This would be a heuristic quite distinguishable from a recipe of step-by-step instructions that would be an algorithm guaranteeing a better cake than your heuristics.
This is not meant to convey that our human heuristics are totally incapable of being accurate or that computer algorithms are infallible at making conclusions.
However, this is meant to show that our human information-processing shortcuts prefer whatever matches our expectations of the future, with ignorance to anything else contradictory that might also still be relevant. This is called the representativeness heuristic.
It appears to me that computers do not do this, as they are programmed to calculate all probabilities and other relevant information counteracting human intuitive beliefs.
Our availability heuristic will orient us toward memories that are superficially retrievable and trick ourselves into thinking that memory is a reliable groundwork for judgment. Perhaps a good example is this: what would initially come to mind if I asked you to guess whether the English language has more words beginning with R or more words having r as the third letter? You may be more apt to think of the words beginning with R than those with r as the third letter, because words are easier to remember according to their beginning letters instead of the ones following later. Your shortcut method may lead you to guess incorrectly about the English language having more R-beginning words than r-third-letter words.
As we are biased toward what is most or easily retrievable, computers seek everything that is retrievable in general. I think a Google search is a good example of this.
Forgive me if this example is based on direct user experience instead of an empirical data/argument.
But anyway…
Your Google will bring up a search of thousands upon thousands of results related to your typed words, whether loosely or not loosely related. Though the results depend on the nature of your query, Google covers an unfathomable vastitude of results, exposing you to results you would rather not see, as you are trying to be specific and narrow in your search. Though the first few resulting pages may make it seem that Google favors particular content over others, that is not the doing of Google but rather the doing of a human pre-programmer who put the instructions in place.
Though Google searches for you based on relevance, it lacks a salience bias. Salience is the prominent, emotionally stunning, attention-grabbing quality of a stimulus that makes it more memorable. Our human heuristics that include specificity can cause us to make biased conclusions targeting salient events, whereas artificial intelligence will not disregard the hundreds of other significant points situated on or outside of our human periphery.
Lastly, and I feel that this is a very salient point in my article: Google uses anonymized data (i.e. encryption tools for privacy protection) and aggregated interaction data (i.e. data that is grouped in a manner to make it reportable) that are tweaked for judging the relevance of search results to your queries, and can convert the data into signals for machine-learned systems to also find other relevant content stemming from the original keywords. But artificial intelligence is not "designed to analyze subjective concepts such as the viewpoint or political leaning of a page’s content." Those final quoted words are quoted from Google…themselves.
This leads me to think that analysis of subjective concepts is strictly a human trait. That is something that man cannot give to anything else nor give to himself. Someone else, such as an Intelligent Designer, who I believe is the God of the Bible, gave it to us.
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