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Homo Deus

Media – The Bourne Identity

John Dickson – Studio

That’s my wife Buff’s favourite man – that’s how it feels – Matt Damon as Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity, talking about his amazing abilities … as yet unaware that he got them through a combination of advanced drugs and psychological tampering. It’s an exciting, deadly example of transhumism. Transhumanism is the transformation of the human condition through sophisticated technologies that modify our physiology and intellect. We’re continuing our exploration from last week of artificial intelligence and we’ve Professor John Lennox, Dr Vicky Lorrimar and Grenville Kent. The question is: How close are we to the homo deus – the human god? I’m John Dickson and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson – Studio

First stop in our attempt to understand Transhumanism … Professor John Lennox and his book 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. John has a long career, at Oxford and elsewhere, specialising in mathematical group theory and the philosophy of science.

John Dickson:
Transhumanism. Uh, it gets a long section in your book. Um, again, it’s good and bad. Um, what do you think is good and bad about wanting to upgrade humans?

John Lennox:
Well, here, I’m talking to you and our listeners can’t see it, but both of us are wearing glasses. So we’ve upgraded our eyesight and we can think of many other things. And of course, increasingly bionic implants are becoming a practicality, um, neural implants, for example. And it seems to me that, although there’s a gray area here, there is a difference between repair and enhancement and some of the enhancements may be very useful. For example, I like birdwatching. So I could do a telescopic vision where I begin to deep concern is where we’re attempting to reconstruct humanity. And the trans humanness program is very much geared to that kind of a reconstruction of humanity that is it’s stated, um, aim and Harare in particular. Uh, he says that right, we are want to improve the human condition.

John Dickson – Studio

Dr. Vicky Lorrimar studied genetics and biochemistry, before completing her doctorate at Oxford University in theology and science, under the famed Professor of Science and Religion, Alister McGrath. Transhumanism is her speciality – the study of it, that is.

John Dickson:
How far back in history can we see the human longing to shape the human?

Vicky Lorrimar:
If we think about things like education and training as means to shape ourselves you know, we could go back quite a long way. I think the, the Renaissance I want to say is a particularly significant time period when it comes to this idea that, that we can shape ourselves. Uh, at this point we have the rise of humanism, uh, this, this sense that humans are malleable, um, really came into its own as part of the Renaissance. So Pico for example, is one of the Italian humanists, and he described humans as the free and the proud shaper of your own being. And if we look at what was going on at the time, uh, in Renaissance Florence, for example, there was this explosion of art and architecture, uh, and even the precursors to modern science. So I guess these are some of the sort of historical events that, that kind of come into this idea of shaping ourselves. But if we want to move to maybe a more contemporary understanding, which, which starts to be sort of biological, um, I guess the history of, of understanding ourselves as something that can change that, that can grow that sort of really came into its own during the Renaissance was then sort of influenced by that rise of modern science, you know, less than a century later with bacon, you know, the sense that we could, um, we could master nature. We could almost undo the effects of a fallen world through science and maybe even master ourselves as well. Francis Bacon, the, um, father of modern science was, was very much concerned with undoing the effects of the fall. Like it was, it was a deeply Christian kind of sense that the led to this understanding of, of dominion and of mastery.

John Dickson:
And then there’s a more secular version that you are, I think about to jump to when people began to think of humans as animals that are evolving and therefore…

Vicky Lorrimar:
Something that could, could evolve into something else, perhaps. Um, we really see this shift, um, even with bacon from, from comparing humans to God and, and realizing just how very insignificant we are in comparison to instead comparing humans with the rest of creation, with nonhuman creation and therefore emphasizing our superiority. So it’s all of this kind of fuels this dominion or progress narrative that sort of marches forward, uh, to the point where, you know, I think this idea of shaping ourselves is an old one, but, but with, with Darwin and with the idea of biological evolution with the discovery of genes, um, certainly it’s taken on new characteristics and aims as, as our understanding has developed.

John Dickson – Studio

We met Dr. Grenville Kent last episode. He says that this dominion narrative is alive and well, even if the real breakthrough always seems to be just beyond our reach.

Grenville Kent:
We can go back a generation to people like Ray Kurtzweil, who wrote a book called the age of spiritual machines in 1999. We can go back to the seventies and find academics who say by the year 2000, there will be marriage between robots and humans and you won’t be able to tell them apart. Um, uh, and they all say that stuff because they assume that robots are no different from us. We are just highly evolved. Robots made of matter. That’s all that is in us. And so if that’s your world, you, well, of course it just is a bit, it’s just a matter of getting more technical and more evolving, more skillful, um, mental and physical features of a robot. And then you’ll be able to sure. Enjoy them as much as, as a person. 

John Dickson – Studio

Buuuut if robots fail to deliver the pleasure we’re looking for, we can always alter ourselves to achieve what we’re after. 

John Dickson:
What are some of the more interesting, uh, human enhancement technologies that you’ve seen in the literature, um, that are maybe on the horizon?

Vicky Lorrimar:
That’s such a great question. And I think, you know, the more you read the more, I mean, this is not original. So many people have made comparisons between science fiction and sort of transhumanists and human enhancement visions. And it is pretty hard at times, I think to sort of separate out what’s actually feasible and what’s sort of your blue sky thinking, but, um, uh, I think we can sort of maybe identify a few themes. So, um, radical life extension would be a particular kind of goal, whether that’s sort of biological. So there are, there are researchers working on all the various molecular processes that contribute to aging and trying to hold those, or even reverse them. Um, th that, in some ways that’s an intermediary to some kind of more permanent kind of state of mortality, which, uh, many transhumanists would see as a, um, a digital undertaking. So this idea of mind uploading, I think is, is really fascinating this, um, this proposal to that the human brain can be scanned and read and copied, and all of the information encoded could then be uploaded onto a computer so that we can live forever in, in, in digital form. 

John Dickson:
Let’s talk briefly about science fiction. Now this is the point where producer Mark, uh, just is in raptures, listening into us by nerd. I just want you to confirm for me that Sci-Fi is rubbish, right? That’s your basic,

Vicky Lorrimar:
Oh yes, no, this is no good chapter of my thesis.

John Dickson:
In all seriousness, you think Sci-Fi can, um, help us say both the longing for and limitations of the humanist project, uh, for redemption or improvement.

Vicky Lorrimar:
Absolutely. I mean, I think science fiction is really, you know, in some sense it’s a laboratory for the future. It gives us a chance to sort of speculate about how potential technologies might be used, what the consequences might be. You have some have even spoken of speculative fiction is really a projection of the present onto the future. Um, and I think we have to ask questions, like why is so much science fiction dystopian? Like, what’s the reason for that. Um, and I wonder if, if we’re constrained in some way by our present condition and, and our imagination can only take us so far and our technologies that we develop can only take us so far. So I think, um, it gives us a way to reflect, to imagine what the possible ends of any given technology is. You know, in a, in a language and a medium that is, is much more sort of accessible and, um, popular. And, uh, I think appeals to the imagination and just hugely important in this.

John Dickson – Studio

Upgrading humanity fascinates storytellers. Imagine being able to engineer custom bodies to populate other worlds … like in Altered Carbon…

Media – Altered Carbon

John Dickson – Studio

Another strategy is giving birth to better babies, like in the film Gattaca.

Media – Gattaca

John Dickson – Studio

And who wouldn’t want a child that was able-bodied and intelligent? John Lennox says it’s just one of the steps along transhumanism’s grand, evolutionary ambition.

John Lennox:
We have gone through the animal stage and now we’ve got homo-sapiens, but now we’re going to upgrade human beings by genetic engineering and various perhaps robotic implants and produce something that is superintelligent. In other words, homosapiens becomes Homo Deus – a man who is God, and that’s not only Harare you see, I mentioned, Sir, Martin Reese. And he thinks that there’s going to be unprecedented change to human beings by perhaps cybernetic engineering and so on within a few decades. So it’s very much in the air that we are going to produce gods. And I don’t know whether Elon Musk’s warning is going to be heeded. He talked about AI as summoning the demon, but the idea of humans becoming gods is very ancient. That’s embedded in history, and we’ve seen the immense suffering to which it is led not only in the ancient past for the Roman Caesars or the Babylonian emperors, but we’ve seen it in essentially modern times when Stalin and Mao and all of these people who wish to be treated as God. So it’s very much in the air. And of course, as power centers in our world get concentrated ever more into individual hands, the danger is absolutely with us. There’s kind of an invincible power. And there I see a major ethical problem because currently, as you know, the normal kind of ethics is by Peter Singer’s preference, utilitarianism, something like that.

John Dickson – Studio

Utilitarianism is the idea that an action is right if it maximises ‘good’ in the world, and wrong if it hinders the ‘good’. The adage, going back to the 19th-century philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, is “the greatest amount of good for the greatest number”. It sounds logical. The problem is working out what the ’ good ’ is. Many utilitarians say ‘pleasure’ or ‘happiness’. So an action that makes more people happy is good. There are at least two problems, though. What if an action makes more people happy, at a few people’s expense? Is that still good? And what do we say to other cultures and times that defined the good not as ‘happiness’ but, say, honour, duty, justice, Islamic law, or Christendom? Utilitarianism starts to get pretty interesting at that point. Well, for now, in our culture, ‘happiness’ is thought of as the good. And that’s the goal most transhumanists are aiming at – making more people happy. John Lennox isn’t convinced. 

John Lennox:
Utilitarianism as a philosophy works moderately. Well, if you’ve got equal centers of power, but once I have enough power that I don’t care what you do, utilitarianism doesn’t work. Because if you say to me, look, if you do this, I will, I’d say “You’ll what?” If I’ve got the power, I don’t care. And Hitler showed that pretty clearly. He made political treaties on the way up, but once he got the power, he tore them to pieces. And so we’re facing a huge problem because in the reach for Homo Deus, the forgotten element is the flaw in human nature. And that floor is not going to be corrected by genetic engineering.

John Dickson – Studio

AI raises a huge philosophical question (not just all the ethical ones): Are we naturalists or supernaturalists? Naturalism is the view of most atheists today. It says that material things, nature, are all there are. Everything can be reduced to matter and energy. Even our mind and consciousness are just weird illusions that emerge from the firing of neurons. Supernaturalism has, of course, been the default view throughout human history. It isn’t about believing in miracles and ghosts (necessarily). Supernaturalism is just the intellectual conviction that the very structure of the material world itself points beyond itself to a rationality, a mind or consciousness, that undergirds the rational elegance of nature. Naturalists tend to say that their view has the advantage of being concerned with what can be seen, touched and tested. Supernaturalists tend to say that their view has the advantage of encompassing all of those visible, tangible things PLUS providing an explanation of why those things seem so ordered and rational, and why Nature has produced minds, our minds, that can detect that order. Here’s how the great Oxford and Cambridge don CS Lewis challenged ‘naturalism’ in an essay titled “On living in an Atomic Age”:

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“Most modern people claim to be spirit; that is, to be reason, perceiving universal intellectual principles and universal moral laws and possessing free will. But if Naturalism is true, they must in reality be merely arrangements of atoms in skulls, coming about by irrational causation. We never think a thought because it is true, only because blind Nature forces us to think it. We never do an act because it is right, only because blind Nature forces us to do it. It is when one has faced this preposterous conclusion that one is at last ready to listen to the voice that whispers: ‘But suppose we really are spirits? Suppose we are not the offspring of Nature…?’  For, really, the naturalistic conclusion is unbelievable. For one thing, it is only through trusting our own minds that we have come to know Nature herself. If Nature, when fully known, seems to teach us (that is, if the sciences teach us) that our own minds are chance arrangements of atoms, then there must have been some mistake; for if that were so, then the sciences themselves would be chance arrangements of atoms and we should have no reason for believing in them. There is only one way to avoid this deadlock. We must go back to a much earlier view. We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings.”

John Dickson – Studio

Matter-only … versus Mind and Matter. That’s the challenge thrown up by AI. Is a super complex robot just the same kind of thing as a human? Or is consciousness a transnatural or supernatural reality that robots, by definition, can’t experience?

John Dickson:
Why do you think the best argument is on the side of, uh, information and mind being more basic than, uh, matter?

John Lennox:
Well, my main reason for that to scientific, of course, there’s also a biblical reason, but as physics has moved on, we’ve discovered that things have moved towards mind dependence. Many people I meet do not realize what a revolution was brought about in the first 25 years of the 20th century by quantum mechanics, because what quantum mechanics did was it began to let me put it this way, dissolve matter. And by showing that the human mind is involved. In other words, that John Wheeler, the famous physicist said, this is a participatory universe. Minds have an effect. Minds are actually very real. 

John Dickson – Studio

John Lennox’s mind is very real and big … and he expects us all to know all this stuff about quantum mechanics and observation. Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that describes the behaviour of subatomic particles mathematically. At this quantum level, our regular descriptions of size and movement cease to be useful. And the super weird thing about it – and the thing John is alluding to – is that it seems that our human observation of particles affects the behaviour of the particles. It’s as if nature knows we are looking, and even if we are planning to look. We’ll put a cool BBC article explaining all this in the show notes. As Lennox puts it, quantum mechanics doesn’t just begin to dissolve matter; it challenges any philosophy that says matter is all there is.

John Lennox:
And therefore we got people even like Paul Davis people with no theistic, um, part to their being saying, look, we’ve always thought it’s bit from it. In other words matter is fundamental and information and mind are derivative, but what does it say all the way round? What if it’s mind that’s fundamental and matter is derivative and some of the early quantum theorists Heisenberg, Bohr, and so, um, they very much favored this and this revolution actually in physics for me spells the end of materialism without any theological or philosophical argument, materialism is dead. They because of that. And what’s so very interesting is that there’s a very interesting physicist that I came across recently, Henry Stark, who worked with five Nobel prize winners, I believe. And he’s not a theist again, but here’s what he says about quantum mechanics is it crumbles it causes to crumble the whole classical physics system of the billiard ball universe that’s completely deterministic. And so on that comes crumbling down and it replaces that with a view of reality that gives human persons and their minds ultimate significance, and then he adds fascinatingly. And that I’m only paraphrasing here that you cannot see in this, any argument against the religious worldview. In other words, it opens up the possibility. Now, if I wear a Christian hat for a moment, in the beginning was the word is the opening line of John’s gospel. All things came to be through the word. In other words, word is primary. And it seems to me that that actually is a conviction that not only is given to us by quantum mechanics, but mathematics itself, the mathematical describes the ability of the universe. And perhaps also in biology, the fact that the longest word we’ve ever discovered is a chemical word, it’s the human genome and wherever we see words that carry meaning, a semantic dimension, we know of no other explanation that fits the bill than that of mind. It’s not an up-down proof, but it’s much better than the naturalistic, which gives us no grounds for trusting our human minds, even when we do science.

John Dickson – Studio

Transhumanism isn’t just an ethical battleground; it’s a philosophical and theological one as well. And after the break, we explore how close transhumanism is to achieving the homo deus – the godlike-human – and whether this does away with the normal conceptions of God.

Break

John Dickson:
So for you, what’s the biggest challenge AI poses to theology? And what’s the biggest challenge theology poses to AI?

John Lennox:
Well, AI poses challenges to theology and ethics in that here it is rushing ahead. We’re seeing human beings made in the image of God and incidentally, I was fascinated watching Jordan Peterson the other night, giving a lecture on Genesis and he cited the statement that God made man men and woman in his own image. And he said, he said, man, he said, this is the cornerstone of civilization. We neglect it our peril. So that, that aspect of belief, that theological statement is a huge challenge to the redefinition of humanity that AI is causing. Now, AI challenges, theology, in almost in the same way, because it’s saying, look, we know what human beings are. You don’t, there is no God dimension. And if we construct in the end, something that functions exactly as a human being that will exclude God. And of course that’s nonsense because if the human mind can construct life, that simply shows that life can be constructed by a designing intelligence, which I believe in the, in the beginning anyway, but there are huge questions, practical questions, even with autonomous vehicles as to how you build in the ethics to say nothing of autonomous weapons of intrusive surveillance and all this kind of thing. We desperately need theologically, ethically trained people who can take a sane and not a crazy look at these things and guide humanity into sensible decisions. But one really does fear with the rate at which governments are getting away with highly intrusive uses of AI, that it may be completely unstoppable.

John Dickson:
So Vicky, um, have you got any tips for us about how to discern the good and the bad in transhuman technologies?

Vicky Lorrimar:
Yeah, I think firstly, we need to start from a proper understanding of where we fit in. So if we consider that God graciously allows us to participate in what God is doing in the world, you know, and even if that’s as, as very junior partners, then that actually does give us responsibility to use our creativity and our ingenuity pretty well. So, so there’s responsibility on the one hand. Um, you know, I think we, we see, uh, engaging in these technologies or something not necessarily to avoid, but it is something for discernment. But then if we also understand that God is the ultimate agent of redemption, you know, it’s not something we can engineer for ourselves, then we’re freed from that burden too. So, so it ends up becoming kind of like any other technology that we discern around. So we need to consider the end of the particular technology being proposed. Uh, that’s not always clear given how speculative most of these technologies are. So that’s where again, I think the imagination is an important tool. We can explore possible futures through fiction. We need to listen to lots of voices to make sure that the people sort of developing and reflect and reflecting on technology are not sort of all the same and all guided by a single vision of, of what the good life is.

John Dickson:
What do you say to those who would, um, push back and say, ‘Ah, but all that moral and religious questioning of technology is hindering progress. I mean, the church has always tried to hinder progress and here you are trying to slow it down with all this ethical religious mumbo jumbo’.

John Lennox:
Well, I’d first say that you’ve got to define what progress is and the idea that the church has hindered progress scientifically sheer nonsense because the pioneers of modern science like Galileo and Newton and Kepler and so on, we’re all believers in God. It was their faith in God that drove the rise of modern science. Now, of course, there are certain iconic incidents with Galileo and so on, but when you examine those, they do not support that thesis, that that Christianity is against progress. I mean, I believe that both of us are involved with universities that are Christian foundations. If belief had gardens hindered progress, whence, came, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, and all the rest of them? The fact is as we look back over the centuries in the early days, particularly at you as a historian, I think would have a lot to say about this, that it was the Christians that out-thought their competitors in the ancient world. And so it’s simply a slander on the name of God that they’re against progress. Now the morality side is vastly important because once morality is jettisoned, then anything goes, and that leads to chaos anarchy and a great deal of suffering. We need that moral dimension if only to give our lives real, meaning.

John Dickson – Studio

And that’s exactly what a lot of those pesky science fiction writers suggest. Once technology frees us from moral constraints, we become the worst version of ourselves. In the cult TV show Westworld, human beings are set free by science to behave towards unbelievably human robots in unbelievably inhuman ways.

Media – Westworld

John Dickson – Studio

Westworld’s technology promises to satisfy our deepest desires, but in the end, it reveals our defects. John Lennox reckons this is where Christianity comes into its own.

John Dickson:
You end your book with a pretty robust account of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and return, and all the apocalyptic stuff with that. And you, you put it to readers that this is the ultimate answer to the human longings raised by AI and transhumanism. Can, can you give me the short version of this wonderful reflection of how Christ and the whole show answers, the longings that you see in AI?

John Lennox:
Well, let me put it this way. Take Harare’s agenda, conquer physical death. That’s number one agenda. The next thing is to enhance homosapiens center, homo Deus, and upgrade humanity so that we will have eternal life in that sense. And when people say that to me, I say, you’re too late. And they say, what do you mean you’re too late? Well I said both of those problems have been sold in a historically and experiential credible way, the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus rose from the dead. No, if that’s true, it means that our solution has been found to human physical death. And if we investigate that a bit more closely, we’ll discover that the Christian message is that if we accept Jesus as the son of God and saviour that the resurrection gives evidence off, then we too will receive a new life called eternal life, which will, although we may die, it will outlast death because we will be raised from the dead when Christ returns. So they’re too late in that sense. And as for the upgrade, well, it amused me when I thought of this. I didn’t think of it immediately, but I realized that what Christianity offers is actually a kind of wonderful upgrade because it says, look, death has been conquered. There’s a new world coming. There’s a resurrection of the dead coming. There are new heavens and a new earth, and you’re going to have new potentialities. If you want to know anything about them, have a look at the capacities that Jesus had after he was raised from the dead. You can be involved in all of that. So the Christian message, which has been running for 20 centuries now, I believe has a wonderful promise embedded into it. That is evidence based as Jesus rose from the dead. And the New Testament historian. Luke tells us that finally, he left them and he ascended vertically into the sky and then was received out their sight. He didn’t just go up and up and up and up. He went up to demonstrate that he was going to around that in a sense was above our world. And then he disappeared. And what I call a junction or C S Lewis called a junction between the two worlds and the early disciples who were gazing at this incredible sight were spoken to why do you stand gazing up into heaven? The same Jesus shall so come and the way you saw him go. So I understand the Ascension to be a thought model of the return of Christ. So there is a real homo Deus it’s Jesus himself. He is the man who is God, and he is going to return. And those who trust him are going to be raised from the dead. And they were moving into a new realm that seems to be very much beyond this realm in terms of the capacities that we shall have a although we’ll be connected with what we are at the moment. I find that immensely exciting to put against the vast panoply of scenarios that are conjured up by physicists like Max Tegmark or people like Harare and so on and so forth. So my argument simply was this, look, if we’re prepared to take seriously, these futuristic scenarios based on very little evidence, but based on projections of AI, let’s put beside them a scenario that’s been around for a very long time, and which at least has some strong historical and experiential evidence to support.

John Dickson:
I want to end with a more personal question about how John Lennox thinks about things. So just, just bear with me. Um, you, uh, near the end of the book, you quote C S Lewis, uh, as you are fond of doing, um, to the effect where he said, um, there’s no point worrying about Christianity if it is a watered down Christianity, it’s either the supernatural Christianity or it’s nothing. And that seems to be a strong theme through your whole ministry. You are in, you know, incredibly rational professor of mathematics and all of that, but all that I’ve known of you over these years and in your works, you are not interested in a watered down Christianity, the kind of Christianity you’d expect someone like you to adopt in order to appeal to a skeptical world. Instead, you just see like this jolly brick wall of Christian orthodoxy. And I want to ask why is that so central that supernatural unwatered down Christianity,

John Lennox:
It comes from a conviction that goes back to my childhood, that Christianity is true. In other words, it’s not a set of moral or ethical rules or a comforting kind of scheme to be believed in to help you through life. It is true as a descriptor of where we are, the universe we live in and our significance as human beings. And I was very early on attracted to find out what evidence there is for the truth of Christianity. And I suppose it’s simply that the more I investigated, the more I discovered two things, first of all, the rationality of accepting that there is a supernatural dimension and Lewis helped me enormously very near the beginning. When I suddenly realized that he was saying, you don’t have to start with the miracles in scripture to get to the supernatural. You simply have to start with the fact that we can reason as humans, because there must be a supernatural dimension to reason itself that it’s giving us a mirror. If there’s a purely natural explanation offered, then reason wouldn’t be reason. We wouldn’t know when that sounds what we were talking about. So very early on in my teenage, these ideas were being built into me. And when I got to university, I could see that the only thing that changed people’s lives in the practical sense was a supernatural world view that once we confine ourselves to a closed system of cause and effect, well, end up in my view with meaninglessness with atheism, with nothing really to live for. Now that of course doesn’t prove Christianity is true, but if it’s true, you would expect that people get transformed. And that’s why wishy washy Christianity never (I was about to say never washed with me) and it just appeared to be, to be something and nothing, and that wouldn’t change lives. And it’s always very helpful to discover that you’re not the first one to be committed to what Lewis called a thoroughgoing supernaturalism.

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