i highly recommend the book by Jeff cregg, a retired software developer entitled an emergent truth, texas sisters press, LLc, 2022. Though a fictional story, the author shares considerable factual information about artificial intelligence (ai) as considered by reductionist materialists. cregg shares in his story line how scientists with this perspective anticipate seeing ai greATLY exceed human cognitive capacity with the eventual elimination of mysticism, all religions and especially the acceptance of the reality of god. even the SIGNIFICANT lengthening of human life is anticipated by the development of ai. however, toward the end of the book cregg shares comments by a principal in chapter 24 named sam THAT i want to include as a blog post since they mirror so closely perspectives i have offered in my posts as well as in my books. the question addressed in this post is if ai can ultimately express free will and creative thought.
“BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, IT SHOWS THAT A COMPUTER PROGRAM DOES NOT UNDERSTAND INFORMATION THE WAY PEOPLE DO. . . . REMEMBER HOW I SHOWED YOU LAST NIGHT THat RODIN ULTIMATELY THINKS THE WAY It’S BEEN PROGRAMMED TO? . . . THIS DEMONSTRATION GETS TO THE HEART OF WHY WE CAN NEVER PROGRAm a machine to be autonomously creative. it’s because true autonomy is an attribute of an agent who possesses genuine free will. and as far as we know, that kind of agent is only known to exist in a metaphysical sense - it cannot be empirically detected or, for that matter, doesn’t even seem logically coherent. but we all know from our own subjective experiences that human beings are such agents. there is no biological equivalent of a prewritten software program that is stored in, and runs on, the wetwareof our brains. no neuroscientist alive can tell you what comprises, or is responsible for, the existence of our conscious selves. every computer programmer knows you can’t reproduce what you cannot define, . . . oh sure, we’ve done an amazing job of simulating aspects of intelligence. as you know, we’ve gotten to the point of fooling the vast majority of people who converse with our machines into believing they’re talking to another person. but in the end, our software doesn’t intuitively understand what a word is or how to use it like our brains do because we don’t have a clue how it’s done. this is part of the hard problem of consciousness; the subjective reality we all experience. it’s hard because no one has any idea how our minds grasp the meanings of things or how experiences invoke emotions that inspire us to write poetry or paint masterpieces. those emotions are essential to give depth and perspective to our existence. . . . we take all of that for granted in our daily lives. but to software developers who think they can duplicate it in a computer, it’s what i’ve known all along - it’s impossible to achieve because we simply have no way to digitally reproduce an immaterial entity like consciousness. whatever we call ai, we will never be able to artificially recreate human consciousness unless we can do two things. first, we must write a practical, non-circular definition of it. and second, we must understand how our physical brains interact with it.”
I add at this point that the focus of my more than 20 years of research has been on understanding just how the synaptic networks of our brain interact with the cognition of the immaterial mind. I have shared in my most recent blog posts how specific immaterial/imagined thoughts can now be detected and interpreted as neural codes! so much of the text of cregg’s book is prescient! by the intelligent design of our creator god the means by which dualist interaction occurs provides for the personal communion we can have with the mind of god via his holy spirit as well as with one another. Whether conscious or not, we experience dualist interaction between the immaterial mind and the material components of the brain’s synaptic networks, a topic addressed in my writings.