Moravec's paradox
The work of Hans Moravec and others in Artificial Intelligence demonstrates the paradox that, despite appearances to the contrary (and the word “appearance” is telling) abstract reasoning makes a relatively small computational demand upon our resources whereas, by contrast, the everyday pottering about, as well as the cooking, sewing and cleaning that make up the texture of our physical lives requires enormous computational resources. As Moravec writes:
Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.
(Mind Children, 1988, Harvard University Press, pp. 15–16)
An older co–worker in the field, Marvin Minsky says, in The Society of Mind (see Bibliography):
What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.
The cognitive and linguist scientist Steven Pinker puts it succinctly in The Language Instinct:
The main lesson of AI [and Robotic] research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted—recognising a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question—in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived…gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.
Likewise, whether a bird thinks is a less useful question than how it learns not to stall when flying. As Leonardo and Gerard Manley Hopkins observed and wondered at the magnificence of their flight, in doing so, they used up less intelligence than in their sitting and walking. Their artefacts enlarged the size of our cultural potential, shared and expanded by millions on another order of existence, to which we may all belong. As a footnote I would add that while sitting and thinking and writing a book, looking at a computer screen all the while, may be tiring after a concentrated stretch, it is not just the demands made upon blood glucose by focused cerebration that takes its toll, but that the proprioceptive mind has all the while been underused. It is this uncoupling of the needs of the physical with the mental that is the source of deep fatigue. Poise at its height implies deep physical comfort but it is as life is in continuous inner movement; besides, sociality will inevitably recruit some emotional discomforts. That is what it is there for, to remind us that:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.
(From A Selection from the Prose of John Donne—London: The Folio Society, 1997)
The materialist defence
The defence is needed against the spiritualist claims of superiority which lead to all manner of dualist absurdities. When I write my signature, I do not claim that my hand wrote it while I merely supervised from on high. Our patients often say that their current state probably comes from their hormones as if somehow these are separate agents over whom they have little control. I respond usually by pointing out that we are our hormones as much as we are our hands, mouths, eyes and feet. In politics, we may speak of a body being an agent of the state, but in biological systems, which cannot be other than integrated, our parts are our whole.
Just as the subconscious is an upsurge from the parts we cannot see, so spirituality is a down-surge from the totality of our being, reminding us of the extensiveness of our conscious minds. Materialism is not a denial of religion or religiosity (see—Reflexive Collectivism in Section 17—the unconscious).
Intelligence is an index of capability. The early IQ tests suggested that narrow computational skills were the only predictive and useful ones and displayed an equally narrow hierarchical version of capability. They seemed to suggest that animal intelligence is somehow lower, but being intelligent enough to be a dog or a fish is no more or less than is needed. There are of course a multitude of capabilities and most of them are temperamental. Intellect, for example, is not an index of intelligence, just a particular disposition and attitude to the world. Children suffer if their parents have little emotional intelligence.
For the concept of intelligence to be comprehensive and distributed rather than hierarchical, it must be integrated at all levels with praxis. Matter matters this much.
Choice without constraint presents an enormous burden, almost more than an entire absence of choice: dilemmas become multiplied, meaning extinguished. In ideal political and social systems, every voice should be heard and considered but commitment to action or inaction must exclude someone's wishes. The patient leaves our dispensary with a package of medicinal products, not with a sheaf of immense possibilities or pregnant ideas. Not all of these medicaments will prove to be the ablest runners at that moment. There is always the future with its possibility of change and adaptation, but the present has momentum on its hands. In an ideal democracy, though current exclusion might be inevitable, if mobility were infinitely fluid (or at least no more than viscous) no elite could prevail for long though prevail for the present it must.
There is, however, a philosophical narrowness in scientific materialism in that not all events are locatable, except transiently. A thought may be located in a single human brain but when transmitted to another it will almost certainly undergo some change. Here, the distinction between process and event is difficult to maintain with any coherence. When a thought is written down it is an abstraction from the original thought; indeed, every time the original thought is repeated it will have undergone metamorphosis of some kind. In that sense, if a process is a continuity of events, all events are immediately lost by the passing of time. We retrieve them only partially. Our minds are embodied, our multiple identities perceptual, figured in the ground we feel as we walk upon it.
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89 Cf. Oliver Hart's work on the contracts that underpin societies for which he jointly won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2016.
90 For a discussion, see Etkin and Johns in Prendergast, HDV 1998.
91 Line 1, East Coker, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot.
92 Parathyroid Hormone (PTH), calcitonin and Vitamin D3.
93 Via Atrial Natriuretic Factor (ANF).
SECTION SEVEN
Health and poise
The Hippocratic innovation viewed illness as an ecological distemper and not, as had been previously believed, the failure to pacify the gods. Medicine nudged its way into the priesthood. One of the unfortunate outcomes of humoral medicine concerns the assertion that environmental qualities like heat and damp are intimately connected with human health, an anthropomorphic construction projected upon the visible world. Typologies of human character—derived from the elements—were essentialist: constitutional flaws led inevitably to certain kinds of diseases. A hierarchy of good and unfortunate dispositions from sanguine to choleric was created. The four elements94 were considered material in this