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KARL KEATING'S E-LETTER
TOPICS:
MATTER INTO MIND?
EVANGELICALS DOWNPLAY MARY
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
Here it is, a new liturgical year--and a chance for a fresh start. At
the beginning of a new civil year, we make New Year's resolutions. We
can do the same at the beginning of a new Church year by working up a
religious to-do list.
When I meet with my spiritual director the day after tomorrow, I expect
him to have one or two items for my list. I just hope I am more
successful in following through with them than I usually am with New
Year's resolutions.
COMPUTERS NEVER WILL BE ABLE TO THINK
Charles Krauthammer writes a syndicated column for "The Washington
Post." Usually he writes on politics. Recently he wrote on philosophy.
He should have stuck with politics.
Krauthammer was musing about the implications of the recent
man-versus-computer chess match between Garry Kasparov and X3D Fritz.
Fritz is the successor to Deep Blue, which beat Kasparov in 1997.
"It all seems obvious to me," opined Krauthammer, "that machines will
achieve consciousness. After all, we did, and with very humble
beginnings. In biology, neurons started firing millions of years ago,
allowing tiny mindless organisms to move about, avoid noxious stimuli,
etc. But when enough of those neurons were put together with enough
complexity, all of a sudden you got ... us.
"In principle, why should that not eventually occur with silicon? It may
require centuries to construct. But I do not see why silicon cannot make
the same transition from unconsciousness to consciousness that carbon
did."
Krauthammer has at least two problems here. The first is that he
subscribes to a fairy tale. "Tiny mindless organisms" grew into bigger
mindless organisms, and at some point the organisms gained
consciousness.
Set aside the question of physical evolution. Whether tiny things
developed into big things is not really the point, although Krauthammer
thinks it implies something.
Compared to most animals, human beings are large. Sure, lions and tigers
and bears are larger, but there are few such species. Most species are
insect-sized or smaller. It is understandable that some people (but
someone as smart as Krauthammer?) will make the false inference that
larger implies more intelligent.
Even a moment's thought will see through such a notion, since it would
imply that lions and tigers and bears are more intelligent than man,
which clearly is not the case. (At least in general: I set aside for
further discussion that the intelligence of some men seems not to have
risen even to the ursine. Just ask their wives.)
Okay, so it isn't size that is determinative. Tiny mindless organisms,
once grown larger, are larger mindless organisms. Simple mindless
organisms, once complexified, are complex mindless organisms. Mindless
is as mindless does. Even if you think evolution occurs, its result
would be more sophisticated mindlessness but not a mind.
And why not? This is where Krauthammer makes his real mistake. X3D Fritz
may play chess well. It or its successor may play chess better than any
human opponent. But one thing a computer never will do is appreciate
beauty, for instance. No animal appreciates beauty--not the cleverest
monkey, not the most patient elephant--and no machine can or will
appreciate beauty, because such an appreciation is not a physical thing.
No concatenation of neurons can tell us anything about beauty or even
can realize that the beautiful exists, and the reason is simple: An
appreciation of beauty is a spiritual function. More properly, it is a
function of a spirit. In the case of man, who is a spirit embodied and a
body enspirited, it is the spiritual part that makes the difference.
And not just with respect to beauty. The human mind we think of,
falsely, in terms of what is inside the cranium, but the brain is only
the instrument for the mind. Our mind really is an attribute of our
spirit, our soul. Spirit knows; matter does not.
We speak loosely of our pets "knowing," and that is permissible language
when we speak colloquially, but it is not philosophical language. Fido
has no appreciation of beauty, whether the beauty of a painting or of
the multiplication table. And it isn't because Fido's genes haven't
developed quite enough. He could become a Superfido, and still he would
not know beauty because he would not have a spiritual soul.
I am very fond of my dog, but I refuse to anthropomorphize him. He is
clever in his own way, but he does not have the cleverness of true
thought. He may play with a flower in the garden, but he never will know
the flower's beauty, just as the flower never will know the beauty of
the stone that it grows next to.
Silicon comes from a stone and is fashioned by man into useful things
such as computers. The original stone has no mind, and the computer that
is descended from it has no mind and never will. That means it never
will have consciousness.
Sure, man will be able to program the computer so it presents a fair
simulation of mind, much as a magician, through sleight of hand, has the
audience think he really makes things appear and disappear. It is all
illusion.
I am writing this on a computer. It is much "smarter" than the computer
I first used, and it is not as "smart" as the computer I someday will
use. But neither it nor any of its successors ever will be as smart as
the child who sees a flower and its beauty.
Charles Krauthammer may worry that machines may supplant man as
technology matures. I am not worried. The brush never yet has supplanted
the artist.
STILL NEGLECTING MARY
The cover story of the current issue of "Christianity Today" is titled
"The Blessed Evangelical Mary." Timothy George, who is dean of Beeson
Divinity School, says Catholics give Mary too much emphasis while
Evangelicals have "an almost instinctive distrust" of her. It shouldn't
be this way for his co-religionists, says George. "Must nearly
everything we say about Mary be couched in the language of dissent and
disbelief?"
Maybe so, since even George, in an article intended to raise Mary in the
estimation of Evangelicals, subscribes to much of that disbelief. He
notes that Mary is seen typologically in Scripture, so that she can be
termed, for example, the New Eve. She also is a type for Israel. But
"Israel is not only portrayed as a virgin daughter, but also an
unfaithful bride. ... It is hard to relate this theme to Mary if we
consider her immaculately conceived and sinless from birth."
Quoting writer David Steinmetz, Mary is one who "does not understand
what God's purposes are, who intervenes when she ought to keep silent,
who interferes and tries to thwart the purpose of God, who pleads the
ties of filial affection when she should learn faith." The references
are to such events as the marriage feast at Cana and to the incident,
recounted in Mark 3:31-35, in which Jesus asks, "Who are my mother and
my brethren?"
"Seen in this light," says George, "Mary appears as both faithful and
faithless, obedient and interfering, perceptive and opaque, 'simul
iustus et peccator' ('at once a just person and a sinner.')"
George thinks Mary was a sinner, pretty much like the rest of us, and
maybe a bit dense to boot. In what way does her empathy for the wedding
guests become "interference"? How does she show a lack of faith by
standing outside the house and asking for Jesus? (For all we know, there
was a previous engagement that our Lord was being reminded of). Does any
of this show Mary trying to "thwart the purpose of God"? Does it show
Mary as "both faithful and faithless"?
I don't think so. I think it shows Timothy George straining not to fall
over the precipice. He is willing to move toward to edge, to admit,
without quite saying so, that the Catholic Church rightly gives Mary
credit that she is owed, but he won't take the plunge. He won't admit
that the Catholic Church has the Marian thing right from A to Z.
He nudges Evangelicals toward the Catholic position, but only a bit. He
wants them no longer to be anti-Mary but does not want them to be
pro-Mary. And he will not let those few scriptural passages in which
Mary is mentioned have their natural sense, the sense in which they have
been taken by twenty centuries of Christians.
By the end of the article, George unwittingly has confirmed Evangelicals
in their present attitude. His article is subtitled "Why we shouldn't
ignore her any longer," but he doesn't give the Evangelical reader much
reason to set aside his neglect of Mary.
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