Letter #222: The Guy in the Gorilla Suit

What Are We Looking For?

Spench.

“It is… above all things important that the moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions.” Thus Winston Churchill. And, of course, he was right. After all, he was Winston Churchill.

But I can’t help feeling that there’s an insidious counter-force working against us. In his essay, Carl Trueman wrote, “to assess cultural, technological, and political developments on the basis of whether they restore or enhance what it means to be truly human… requires a prior understanding of what it means to be human.” It seems to me there is a way that science undermines that understanding even when and as it enhances our lives.

Psychotropic drugs are the best example. A bugbear of mine, I admit. I mentioned them way back in letter #19. An individual is depressed. He takes an antidepressant. He feels better. And yet at scale, depression becomes epidemic. Isn’t it possible that treating a spiritual malady by physical means creates a mis-impression of the human condition that is, in itself, depressing?

Artificial Intelligence, too. Like everyone, I’m impressed by the latest iterations. It really looks as if it’s thinking. But it’s not thinking. It’s simply recognizing patterns. Isn't it possible it will teach human beings that this is what thought is, that it will turn us into itself?

Consider the famous Turing Test. If a human interrogator can’t distinguish a computer from a fellow human, the computer is said to have human intelligence. How idiotic! If I mistake a giraffe for an elephant does it become an elephant?

Humans are not a machine of various parts. We are holistic organisms. We think not only with our brains but with our hearts and loins. This is not a bug. It’s a feature. Test after test shows that our holistic sense of the world — assisted and checked by reason — is more accurate and realistic than reason alone. We were clearly made to know life at a deeper, richer level than any machine can ever do.

And yet, we have already made ourselves more like machines than we should. Our hearts have reasons reason knows not of, and yet we've convinced ourselves they are mere hotbeds of illusion.

Here’s something I wonder. The great leap in cases of autism. We keep looking for some food we eat or pollutants we breathe as a cause. But maybe it’s a learned handicap. We taught ourselves autistic thinking, that shaped our brains and now we pass the shape on to our children.

You know that experiment where people are asked to look at a video for certain information, and a guy walks through the scene in a gorilla suit and they don’t even see him because that’s not what they’re looking for? I think we’ve been told to look for what machines can see, and we can no longer see the guy in the gorilla suit. And I think the guy in the gorilla suit is God.

Love, Dad