on page 43 of cregg’s book the programmer of rodin “widely expected [it] to be capable of independent thought and reasoning. . . . he had every confidence that his software engineers could instill in it a philosophical approach to its deliberations. he even went so far as to predict that it would develop genuine emotions. but most of all, Carl redmond sincerely believed rodin would develop autonomous creativity. . . . would he have understood that such an achievement had fundamentally and irrevocably changed the meaning of humanity?”
expressed in this excerpt is a belief seen among people today that such a computer with artificial intelligence could be “the ultimate man-made creation. it would, according to carl, usher in the inevitable next step in human evolution. all it lacked was a robotic body.”
both secular materialism and darwinian macroevolution are represented by these comments (concepts that are endorsed today by many working in the neurosciences). in my next blog post addressing the original perspectives of the creators of rodin as identified above, we shall see how the surviving creator, sam weissman, and roland caymus came to understand that the wetware of the human brain relates to the human mind, a realization guided by what the computer’s programmed software was unable to do. my writings have addressed the “how” of this relationship extensively - dualist interactionism.