07/14/2007 The Turing Apocolypse

07/14/2007 The Turing Apocolypse

I have come to the conclusion that you can't judge someone for their politics. That's not just some sort of liberal-pansyist plea for tolerance, but rather a hard won bit of knowledge that comes from realizing my own failings. To make a long story short, we all learn our politics when we are young, then spend the rest of our lives gathering evidence in our own favor. That's just a fact. We are all pleasure seekers. We all seek the pleasure of being told we are right. And we all seek the safety of our own expectations. So we all live within our own set of assumptions. True self-knowledge of this kind is strictly given on a need-to-know basis.

But it still makes me mad to read about Alan Turing. Turing lived not too long ago, 1912-1954. They at least allowed him to live to be 41. Alan Turing was a great mathematician who played an integral role in inventing the computer.

At 14 he was so determined to get to school that he once biked over 60 miles to get to his class. At 14, I wouldn't even have driven to the next town. The only reason I ever showed up for class was that I was afraid to get caught skipping.

But Turing was a Homosexual and that's a no-no, isn't it? Bad boy. He was injected with hormones to reduce his sex-drive and grew breasts. He lost his job with the navy and killed himself. Fun bit of unjust justice for all the homophobes out there.

Turing was one of the first advocates for the possibility that there could be an artificial intelligence that could think just like a human being. This doesn't seem as far-fetched today as in the past, when only God could build a tree.

Now, imagine it. Artificial intelligence; the ability to create a consciousness from the ground up. That's the same, I would say, as creating the world from the ground up. Imagine if you could see the world without the encumbrance of instinct, of personal needs or desires. To see the world as the Buddhists want to see it. But let me put it another way...

What if you could see God for who he really is? What if you could hear God tell you he doesn't exist? Would you open your eyes? When you look around you at the world God created, does it seem to indicate that God is as compassionate as you want him to be? Will God appear to you as a kindly old man like Ronald Reagan? What if God is not what you expect him to be; what you need him to be?

Suppose we could see the world as it really is. Suppose we build an intelligence that can see the world without our paradigms. What would this thing do without a goal? What would it see? If you could take every belief you have and pinpoint a memory that leads to it, and erase it, what would you be? Then, if you could see the world that way, what would you take from it? Would any idea of the world automatically lead to mathematics? Would artificial intelligence use logic to defeat itself and declare it irrelevant? Would it become a pleasure seeker? Would it believe in God? In love? What would it say about humans?

If justice was a natural part of the universe and not a human invention, then what would artificial intelligence, or God, say we owe for Alan Turing?