The Mind Machine

I'm not here to make you comfortable. Hell, I'm not here to make me comfortable. The beginning of class every year forces me to lay out a program which I attempt to follow and then throw out about a month in. And I'm not talking about a work ethic; I'm talking of something deeper. Last year I tried to reduce everything people cherished to mechanical things. I thought it was edgy and depressing at the time, but I then found that it was quite compatible with beauty and purpose, once we removed the dross of our cherished prejudices. I've come a long way from the morbid high-schooler who sat on the lawn one day and muttered "it's all potassium" (what I meant, of course, was that everything I thought was just a pattern of action potentials in my brain--which includes calcium and sodium ions as well as potassium, but I was going for effect). In a sense, of course, everything I think and feel and believe is nothing more than aaction potentials and their patterns. But what I've learned is that the phrase "nothing more than" is a holdover from old dualist, Christian times. People need to face that we are machines. We are not "nothing more than" machines. We are beautiful, streamlined machines. There is a wealth of consciousness that supervenes (I love that word--it allows me to escape constricting lariats of "nothing more than" discourse) on my patterns of nerve activation. That's my program this year: to work out in my mind how to reconcile my cherished values with mechanism and evolutionary neccessity (in the sense that our brains and minds were built to survive, not to reflect except insofar as it helped survival, i.e. childbearing, i.e. fucking). I might have to throw out a lot of values.

Here's the question: how can a mind machine have values? How do you make a jump from a biological organism's on-board computer to a mind that engages with the world and categorizes into value judgements? To what end? Are ethics just a hedonistic, utilitarian kind of argument? Are they just aoutgrowths of power? I have a year. Starting now.

Consider: "We've tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we've not been very inventive. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. Few found the similarity suspicious."