artificial meaning

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We humans are a unique form of nature due to our intelligence. It is what sits us at the top of the food chain, and the inspiring force behind the initial launch of inquisition into consciousness. Let’s face it, we are fascinated by ourselves. So much so that we are actually endeavoring to create a new being, called AI, through the use of our own intellect rather than letting nature carry its course. It feels like our own self-aggrandizing attempt to surpass nature like we are somehow greater than whatever it is that created us. There are proclamations that we could build beings that are like us, but maybe even better. For starters, they’ll likely be immortal; overcoming a human’s most ultimate—and natural—threat. They will definitely be smarter than us; each of them endowed with their own super calculators, while mathematical genius is reserved for only a special few among us mere mortals. And while we are at it, we can even save them from the all-too-human existential crisis.

In theory we could save each object of mechanical intelligence the suffering caused by the ambiguity of existence by programming it with purpose. While we fumble around searching for our elusive purpose using our compass' that often succumb to their own intrinsic defects, these ‘beings’ need not to look. However, one big caveat is there seems to be something that us humans understand, but struggle to put into words. It isn’t about knowing what meaning is; any factual sense of meaning is not analogous to feeling it. Take Maslow’s work for example, decades of research exploring human motivation. Maslow formulated a very clearly defined framework that he believed would help one find purpose in life. Religion is another great example. Hundreds of years of purpose coming from an external source that is handed down. And yet, constant questions of “why am I here?”, “what does it all mean?”, never cease to cycle back into purview despite the answers. It could just be, however, the inherent instability that cultivates meaning in the first place. As Jan Zwicky writes in the Experience of Meaning, “Putting up with uncertainty is the price we pay for making ourselves available to meaning.”

This is not to say that humans are not capable of knowing meaning. There are people who claim to know their purpose in life, or that life does in fact have some grand meaning. These people are not stating facts, but rather stating an overwhelming confidence in a sense. Zwicky further points out that: “Knowledge—of any sort—is never just about facts; it is always a function of the interpenetration of facts and character.” She is citing Aristotle’s view on character, consisting of our habitual actions and emotions. So to say that you know what your purpose is, despite it not being factual, isn’t wrong or misguided. To have knowledge is to combine the facts you have learned with experience, to come from a place of rationality and perception. This disposition that helps shape knowledge is of an utter mystery to humans. We have an incredible number of theories to try to explain where our dispositions come from (the entire field of psychoanalysis, for starters…), but are really none the wiser. It is because, so far, we have not been reduced to a recipe. We are not “two parts vanity, three parts determination and a dash of grumpiness” as Zwicky points out. She references poet Gerard Manley Hopkin’s notion of character, called inscape, to further denounce character being akin to a recipe: “Landscapes are not simply assemblages of trees, rocks, and water; they hang together in ways that are hard to analyze.” This is not the same as a machine having a programmed answer.

There is this interesting endeavour taking place in the tech world where a handful of tech giants are trying to create a database of all human knowledge. Some like to theorize what it would be like to hook up a brain to the database once it is complete. Just like a computer, you would simply ‘know’ information that you have no real experience of. Although, it is speculated whether or not you would ‘know’. Or instead, would you just have the facts without the character? Take away character, and you lose the contextual nuances, the insight of perception, wisdom. Just like uncertainty makes us available to meaning; could it be experience that makes us available to knowledge? To lack in character is to lack in experience. Where is the suffering through failure, mistakes, and hardship to know its counter that is fulfilment, success, and meaning? To quote Thoreau who so romantically points out the difference between knowing and meaning in a letter to Harrison Blake:

“Do men know nothing? I know many men who, in common things, are not to be deceived; who trust no moonshine, who count their money correctly, and know how to invest it; who are said to be prudent and knowing, who yet will stand at a desk the greater part of their lives, as cashiers in banks, and glimmer and rust and finally go out there. If they know anything, what under the sun do they do that for? Do they know what bread is? or what it is for? Do they know what life is?”

Though it isn’t just about knowing anything that equates to intelligence. For a computer to have intelligence, it must pass The Turing Test. If a computer passes The Turing Test, it is said to think like a human. While knowing is a major mechanism of thought, it is only part of the equation. Thought also includes the ability to predict and react to change. And so what if we build an AI that is an empty slate, learning from their environment the moment you hit the on switch? That’s what us humans do, right? We learn from our environment. Will they then come to have a sense of meaning in the same way that we do? I’m not so sure. Humans are naturally made; the ways in which we exist phenomenologically are inherently different. We are not born an empty slate. And further, do we have any sense of meaning because we are intelligent? Intelligence allows us to ask the question, but is it what gives us a purposeful experience? If anything, our pursuit to recreate intelligence has led us to discover what it is we do not know. Or rather, that we don’t know.

All the years of philosophical and cognitive inquiry and still we don’t even know what a human thought actually is, nor are we any closer to knowing the true meaning of life. And yet, if a computer passes The Turing Test it is said to think like a human. To me this quest to build intelligence feels reductionistic. But maybe that is just the human in me, clinging onto human experience and hoping that it is as special as it makes me feel. Reductionism in the sense that we can really take all that we are, and replicate it as if there is some deducible recipe. Looking to intelligence as a way to further substantiate life feels as if it is leading us further away from any real experience of meaning. What happens to our feelings of purpose if we become captured in a mechanistic form? It is the search for meaning that reminds me that I am human, and not a robot.

Zwicky further points out that:

“Our experience of meaning is not fundamentally linguistic either in structure or in content: it is a quasi-perceptual gestalt phenomenon. Because it is a gestalt phenomenon, the intellectual capacities involved in the experience of meaning can be disrupted if we try to analyze or describe them. This, it seems to me, has important consequences for a culture that values analysis and description as core features of intelligence.”

She goes on to further explain: “People in such a culture will be encouraged to regard aspects of ecologies as facts; but they won’t be encouraged to pick up on how or that those facts matter. The meaning of the facts will be obscured.” Think about how it would feel to structure your life in such a way that you were climbing up Maslow’s hierarchy, in chronological steps. No doubt there are instances where our intellect may intervene to bring about positive shifts in experience, but it is a loose and intuitive form—a guiding hand. If we become reduced to just intellectual beings, we will diminish our sense of meaning we currently experience as humans. It is the natural, human parts of us that give us any purpose at all. I would hate to be the smartest being in the universe but be utterly and totally purposeless. Like even with all the greatest intellectual capacity, there is nothing left to know, nothing left to do, nothing left to experience, and there is nothing worth living for anymore.

You would see I am much less than I appear if it weren't for my editor-in-charge d. fors