Belief in The Singularity is Fideistic Selmer Bringsjord1 • Alexander Bringsjord2 • Paul Bello3 1Department of Computer Science Department of Cognitive Science Lally School of Management & Technology Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Troy NY 12180 USA [email protected] 2Motalen Inc. Troy NY 12180 USA 3Human and Bioengineered Systems, Code 341 Office of Naval Research 875 N Randolph St Arlington VA 22203 USA [email protected] Contact: [email protected] January 25B 2012 Abstract We deploy a framework for classifying the bases for belief in a category of events marked by being at once weighty, unseen, and temporally removed (wutr, for short). While the primary source of wutr events in Occidental philosophy is the list of miracle claims of credal Christianity, we apply the framework to belief in The Singularity, surely — whether or not religious in nature — a wutr event. We conclude from this application, and the failure of fit with both rationalist and empiricist argument schemas in support of this belief, not that The Singularity won’t come to pass, but rather that regardless of what the future holds, believers in the “machine intelligence explosion” are simply fideists. While it’s true that fideists have been taken seriously in the realm of religion (e.g., Kierkegaard in the case of some quarters of Christendom), even in that domain the likes of orthodox believers like Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and Paley find fideism to be little more than wishful, irrational thinking — and at any rate it’s rather doubtful that fideists should be taken seriously in the realm of science and engineering. 1 Introduction; Plan We deploy a framework for classifying the bases for belief in a category of events marked by being at once weighty, unseen, and temporally removed (= wutr). While the primary source in Occidental philosophy of such events is credal (= orthodox) Christianity,1 we follow Dennett (2007) in viewing philosophizing as equally applicable to religion and science, and apply this framework to the dominant basis (A) for belief in The Singularity, surely — whether or not itself religious in nature — a wutr event. We conclude from this application not that The Singularity won’t come to pass, but rather that regardless of what the future holds, the failure of a fit between A and either rationalist or empiricist argument schemas in support of this belief im- plies that believers in the “machine intelligence explosion” are simply fideists. While it’s true that fideists have been taken seriously in the realm of reli- gion (e.g., Kierkegaard 1986 in the case of some quarters of Christendom), even in that domain the likes of believers like Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and Paley,2 in line as they are with Christian orthodoxy and hence rationalism, find fideism to be little more than wishful, irrational thinking — and at any rate it’s rather doubtful that fideists should be taken seriously in the realm of science and engineering. 1.1 Preliminaries To make the situation a bit more tidy before we begin in earnest, we take a series of preliminary steps. First, we acknowledge the initial oddness of speaking of belief in an event. Traditionally, of course, the targets of belief (and knowledge) are propositions — though we certainly do say such things as that “Knox believes in General Washington,” in which case we are pointing to belief in a person. The situation before us is easily and quickly made cleaner: When we say that some believe in The Singularity, where this is an event, we simply mean 1Which shouldn’t be confused with the denomination known as ‘Greek Orthodox’ — a denomination that does though happen to itself be orthodox/credal in our sense. An elegant characterization of orthodox Christianity is provided by Chesterton (2009). Along the same lines, and no doubt paying homage to his intellectual and spiritual hero, is Lewis’s (1960) Mere Christianity. A more mechanical and modern characterization is obtained by simply following Swinburne (1981) in identifying orthodox Christianity with the union of the propositional claims in its ancient creeds (e.g., Apostle’s, Nicene, Athanasian), which then declaratively speaking within this limited scope harmonizes Catholicism and Protestantism. 2And — see note 1 — Chesterton, Lewis, and Swinburne. 2 that some believe that The Singularity will occur. In a parallel that will form a persistent theme in the inquiry herein, when someone says that they believe in The Resurrection, they are reporting their belief that the event in question (Jesus rising from the dead) happened. Note that belief in an event is thus paired with belief that a certain proposition is true. The same kind of association is in play in the case of belief in a person, since Knox clearly believes such things as that Washington is competent.3 In a second preliminary step, note that the properties being weighty, being unseen, and being temporally removed are here applied to events; and we invoke the already-seen abbreviation of this three-part adjective: wutr. We assume that the property of being temporally removed is clear enough to obviate any sustained analysis. This property applies to an event if it’s purported occurrence is either beyond the recent past or immediate future. Hence, the aforementioned Resurrection is temporally removed. So is WWI, the American Revolutionary War, the death of Adolf Hitler, the falling of a vast part of California into the Pacific Ocean due to a major earthquake, the Second Coming, and the arrival in 2020 of aliens superior in intelligence to most currently alive Norwegians. Clearly, The Singularity is temporally removed. We devote section 2 to characterizing the first two properties in ‘wutr.’ In a third preliminary move, we denote by S the event associated with The Singularity (the arrival on Earth of computing machines more intelligent, indeed vastly more intelligent, than human persons,4) and denote by S the corresponding proposition that this event will in the near future come to pass. By ‘near future’ we mean to encompass any length of time short of a century; hence we charitably adopt a temporally latitudinarian stance with respect to those confident that S will occur. On this stance, we are of course allowing much more time than any reasonable interpretation of ‘foreseeable future,’ and this is a phrase often used to frame predictions that advanced computing-machine intelligence will or will not arrive. For instance, Turing (1950) famously declared that he could foresee a time when humans not only routinely ascribed intelligence and other mental attributes to computers, 3We are happy to agree that believing in a person includes more than mere propositional belief, but this topic isn’t germane to our objectives herein. 4We recognize that The Singularity has now come to be associated with a group of events (e.g., the group often is taken to include the ability of human persons to exist in forms that are not bio-embodied), but to maintain a reasonable scope in the present paper we identify S with only the “smart-machine” prediction, which is quite in line with e.g. the sub-title of the highly influential (Kurzweil 2000): “When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.” There is also in alignment with the locus classicus: (Good 1965). 3 but also when his test (the so-called ‘Turing Test’) would be passed; indeed he specifically predicted that by 2000 a level of such intelligence on par, linguistically speaking, with that possessed by humans would arrive.5 This prediction turned out to fall completely flat, as we all know by now.6 In a second example, this one falling on the side of pessimism, Floridi (2005) has argued that a certain ingenious test of self-consciousness cannot in the foreseeable future be passed by a computing machine.7 Finally, note that Chalmers (2010) recounts a number of the time-indexed predictions about when S will supposedly occur; our allowing a full century is in this context hyper-charitable. As confirmation of this, consider: Good (1965): S by 2000; Vinge (1993): the explosion between 2005–2030; Yudkowsky (1996): 2021; and Kurzweil (2000): 2030. On the other hand, Chalmers himself appears to believe that S will occur within centuries (note the plural). Since we wish to retain the concept of a foreseeable future, this is too large a range for us to use herein. 1.2 Plan for the Remainder With these preliminary matters settled, we announce our planned sequence for the remainder: In the next section (§2), our exposition aided by considera- tion of the claims of credal Christianity,8 we briefly characterize the category of the weighty and unseen, into which, as will be seen, surely The Singular- ity falls. Then (§3) we briefly summarize the three main epistemic positions of empiricism, rationalism, and fideism. These positions are sketched with help from the basic but eminently sensible and non-partisan epistemological framework erected by Chisholm (1977). Next (§4), we present our proof-by- cases argument for the claim that belief in S is fideistic — an argument that 5We recognize that Turing’s optimism was constrained by certain conditions regarding how long a computing machine’s prowess on his test would last, but such niceties can be safely left aside. 6As a matter of fact, Turing, like — as we shall see — those predicting the coming S, would seem to be guilty of the same fatal sin: failing to give a rationalist (or even an empiricist) argument for the prediction in question. One of us rather long ago happily conceded that the Turing Test will be passed (Bringsjord 1992), but this concession was not accompanied by any timeline whatsoever — and if there had been a timeline, it would have been an exceedingly conservative one.