Weekend Roundup: Being Is Not an Algorithm

Recently, The WorldPost published an interview with "Sapiens" author Yuval Harari in which he envisioned a future where "organisms become algorithms" as computer and biological sciences converge. In a response, Deepak Chopra writes this week that being cannot be reduced to an algorithm, nor can the mind be reduced to the wiring of the brain which artificial intelligence strives to mimic. "Of all the weird contradictions that plague modern life," Chopra says, "the strangest is the collapse of philosophy with the triumph of science. Aesthetics, morals, love, transcendence, idealism -- all of these fields of thought, having persisted for thousands of years, in the East and in the West, mean nothing in scientific terms because they cannot be reduced to data, measurements and experimentation." "What we need," he concludes, "is a wholesale commitment to a meaningful life, placing our best hopes there, not in logic machines and their parody of having a mind." In a related reflection, I explore how advances on the frontiers of science, especially our godlike capacity to read and write the genetic code, are paradoxically resurrecting the religious imagination by raising anew all the foundational questions of human origins and destiny. "Science has no knowledge of being," I write by way of introducing several thinkers who have meditated deeply on the subject, "It can only report that we are a collection of cells. A bundle of nerves. An immune system. 'Being,' 'the person' and 'human...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news