William Weddell
The Meat Heads
In a match between two identical computers, both programmed identically, with the same algorithm, set to combat any one of the millions of possible chess strategies and their appropriate counter-measures, the outcome will always be victory to the computer operating the white pieces. That is because white has the first move, is always one move ahead, and is always left with one man on the board. That is the nature of the game of chess which has been designed by the trial and error of men possessing intelligence down the centuries so as to favour the most intelligent player. Computers have no intelligence but, like the game of chess, they bear the stamp of that force which brought them into existence — human rational thought.
Likewise, in a game played by humans, who vary in intellectual capacity, victory generally goes to the most intelligent player. Here intelligence means the rational organisation and use of the amount of knowledge and experience of the game of chess. It does not imply that chess players are necessarily more intelligent in spheres apart from chess, although it can help.
If one model of computer wins the game more often than its opposing model, that means that the competing human intelligence embodied in the conflict favours the computer that was designed and/or programmed by the designer with the greatest conceptual grasp of computer design, programming and the game of chess itself. This and nothing else. Machines cannot think. This is because there is no such phenomenon as "artificial intelligence."
The researchers into this alleged faculty believe (says Time magazine, No. 14, April 1, 1996 in an article entitled "Can machines think?") that the human brain can be regarded as a "meat machine" — hence such researchers are honoured in this article by the choice of its title!
We may, however, use the rules of epistemology to demonstrate the relevance here of the principle of untruth by self-exclusion, and its application to the false concept of "artificial intelligence." Observe in how many ways this expression contradicts its own content. Intelligence is a faculty of the artificer of anything artificial. The artificer, to possess the required intelligence to create intelligence, would have to be a living entity. A machine is not a living entity. If the artificer had enough intelligence to understand this he would, at the outset, abandon the attempt to create an existential impossibility. The meat heads do not possess such intelligence. In the company they keep, intelligence is a rare occurrence, hence their tendency to characterise any form of response, however mechanistic, as "thinking." This is not because the machines are becoming more clever but because, under the influence of modern philosophy, their builders are becoming more stupid.
The concept of a neuron, which is a unit component of a living entity, cannot be equated with a microswitch, which is a unit component of a non-living entity. These two concepts — neuron and microswitch — like the two concepts synapse and transistor, are pairs of analogous concepts, the first defined in the terminology of biology and the second defined in the terminology of physics, in particular, electronics. Both terms of such a pair entirely lose their meaning if the context of one is switched to the context of the other. That this has been done has resulted in the meaning of both concepts shrinking to vanishing point. This species of anti-logic is defined in formal philosophy as "equivocation," and it is commonly indulged in by the meat heads at their bull sessions in the playpens of the state-owned and controlled universities, the habitat which is funded compulsorily by tax money created by the intelligent thought of its rightful owners and extorted from them by the "social planners."
There is no such possible contradiction as "artificial intelligence" permitted by the metaphysical laws of the universe. This statement is not mere definitional hair-splitting, neither is it a species of linguistic confidence trick. If it were, our problems would all effortlessly disappear, magically solved by a leap into some transcendental realm of meta-reality that permits us to arbitrarily redefine both machines and intelligence and thus to "deem" them to be the same.
But there is no such nirvana wherein there are no evil consequences upon blurring over, with buzz words, the fundamental distinction between, for instance, a Markov Chain and a syllogism. The clear distinctions between opposites is a matter of life or death for the human species.
The form in which Time magazine presents its case shows that our problem does not consist of just answering absurd rhetorical questions such as "Does a computer that can mimic [sic] thought have an inner life?" but of evaluating their significance. For instance, we should observe and examine the psychology of Alan Turing, a computer scientist and perpetrator of the Turing Test that claims to measure the "intelligence" of computers by their ability to copy his own design strategy. "To the extent that a computer fools [sic] interrogators, it can be said to think." Not "to think" notice, but to be "said to think." Mr Turing is arrogantly confident that his so-called "thinking" will be assessed as a function of his ability to fool interrogators. "I believe that at the end of the century" he continues, i.e. in a couple of years "the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted." You have been warned! Now you may know the punishment that the meat heads in the universities have planned for you.
In this connection we should be very grateful to Alan Turing for giving us such a candid warning that it is the technique of psycho-cybernetics that is to be used to destroy us. Our gratitude is also due to Random House for defining the word "cybernetics" as "the study of human control functions and of mechanical and electric systems designed to replace them." The prefix "psycho" defines the precise nature of those "control functions," i.e. the mind.
Do not dismiss the idea of artificial intelligence as mere nonsense. Let Ellsworth Monkton Toohey, villain of The Fountainhead, have the last words:
"Don't bother to examine a folly — ask yourself only what it accomplishes. ... Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it. But be careful. Don't deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you may give your hand away. Don't say reason is evil — though some have gone that far and with astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there is something above it. What? You don't have to be too clear about it either. The field's inexhaustible. [like cosmic speculation, pandemonium AI models, psychophysics, human consensus reality?] ... If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn't make sense — you are ready for him. You tell him that there is something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel He must believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it. You've got him. Can you rule a thinking man? We don't want any thinking men."
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