We are able to love and think, but Andrew Stark asks, what if our single vast universe is joined by thousands upon thousands of other universes in the metaverses promised by Mark Zuckerberg and others.Pete Marovich/The New York Times News Service
Andrew Stark is a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto and author of The Consolations of Mortality: Making Sense of Death.
Standing alone in the middle of the Saskatchewan prairie, the writer Wallace Stegner found it remarkable that – even from his height – he could see out miles in every direction. Stegner’s observation seems like a splendid metaphor for the human condition. Though the universe’s vastness seems to mock our speck-like insignificance, we nevertheless rise above it because we are conscious, while the universe itself, for all its unreachable regions and incalculable forces, remains stonily insensate.
The polymath Frank Ramsey once made this point explicitly. “I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens,” he declared. “The stars may be large but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities that impress me far more than size does.” There’s a twofold, age-old message here. Collectively, human beings are special in the universe because we have minds. And, individually, we are special to one another because of the unique ways we each use those minds to love and to think.
But now what happens to that hallowed message if our single vast universe is joined by thousands upon thousands of other universes – the metaverse promised by virtual-reality mavens such as Mark Zuckerberg? And what happens if our billions upon billions of individual human minds are joined by the single vast artificial intelligence – the single “Mind expanding at near lightspeed” – predicted by visionaries like Hans Moravec?
The single actual universe, the one we have always known, has two possible origins. Maybe God created it. Or maybe it emerged out of nothing at all. Virtual universes, however, will all be created by us ordinary human beings.
Meanwhile, unlike us ordinary human beings, artificial intelligence faces two possible futures. It may never become conscious, remaining a kind of blank nothingness. Or, using its vast computing power, it might attain a form of unlimited superconsciousness akin, as the philosopher John Gray says, to that of a god.
Perhaps, then, we are heading for a kind of inversion in our way of conceiving both the universe and the mind. We will go from living in a massive stand-alone universe created either by God or by nothing at all toward abiding, as well, in countless human-created ones. And we will go from living amid countless human minds toward abiding, as well, alongside a massive stand-alone intelligence where either nothing at all, or else something entirely godlike, is going on.
Many of us, laypersons as we are, feel a profound unease when we read the more fantastic scenarios that scientists and philosophers are now sketching about virtual realities and artificial intelligence. But why exactly? What’s bothering us? Perhaps it has to do with a foreboding that they spell the end of our specialness, collective and individual.
Can virtual universes convey the sense of specialness that comes – for those who believe in God – from our dwelling in a universe created by a transcendent being who loves us? Not if those universes are created by distinctly untranscendent twentysomething techies. Can virtual universes provide for the sense of specialness that comes – for those who do not believe in God – from contemplating how our flicker of consciousness transcends a universe of insensate particles? Not if those universes – controlled and manipulated by creators whose tech savvy far transcends our own – are themselves smarter than we are.
In his book Mirror Worlds, the computer scientist David Gelernter constructs an alter ego who expresses this anxiety: “The guys who run these operations [will] control reality … High school hackers are going to be a lot better at it than the chairman of the Political Science Department.” While techies might “soar to new heights” in such universes, Mr. Gelernter writes, the rest of us who live in their worlds will “sink into pig-ignorance.”
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence seems inherently incapable of providing us with the sense of specialness that other human minds can, no matter how it evolves. Suppose, on the one hand, that artificial intelligence – even with all its power of memory and analytics – nevertheless fails to attain consciousness and so, in the end, fails to transcend even the dullest of dull matter. Then it’s hard to see how engagement with it could ever furnish the sense of specialness that we draw from the love, appreciation and regard of our fellow internally illuminated Homo sapiens. Suppose, on the other hand, that artificial intelligence did develop a godlike consciousness entirely transcending our own. Then it’s hard to see, as dystopian visionaries fear, how it could do anything other than take a wrecking ball to our sense of specialness.
Human specialness has come under legitimate question these days. But that’s when we are thinking of how it has governed our relationship to the planet and to other species. The specialness that comes from our relationship to the universe and to other minds, however, is an entirely different matter. That kind of specialness has psychologically sustained so many for millennia. Are we ready, in this age of political, environmental and pandemic threat, to loosen our ties to it as well?
I am in no position to say if any of these prognostications, whether about virtual reality or artificial intelligence, will come to pass. But they are very much part of our historical moment, swirling around in the zeitgeist. William F. Buckley used to say that a conservative is someone who stands athwart history yelling “Stop!” Virtual reality and artificial intelligence promise too many artistic and scientific benefits for us to give that kind of sharp command. But all of us – conservative or not – might want to calmly consider, even as we sail along with the historical current, the merits of proceeding with caution.
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