The Evil Genius and the Sentient Machine
So here's my first official philosophy paper, if anyone cares to read it (I thought it was really interesting...):
In the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes proposes the skeptical scenario of the Evil Genius. He does this in an effort to purge from his mind all possibly ill-formed thoughts and unsound conclusions; he states that “there is nothing among the things I once believed to be true which it is not permissible to doubt” (29A-B). In an effort to build a rational belief system in which nothing doubtful is incorporated, he declares that “I must be no less careful to withhold assent henceforth from these beliefs than I would from those that are patently false” (29B). Any belief that affords any doubt whatsoever about its truth should be discounted, or else he runs the risk of building his new, solid belief system on a faulty and unstable foundation. To fully grasp the extent of the ideas that he should discount in this manner, he considers the possibility of “an evil genius, supremely powerful and clever, who has directed his entire effort at deceiving me” (29B). This Evil Genius is an omnipotent and omni-malevolent deceiver, a being godlike in power, who is bent on fooling us about everything possible at every moment possible. Descartes does not suppose that this being actually exists, but rather that the existence of such a being is compatible with all the evidence he has gathered from experience, and that it is possible that he has been deceived thus far and so cannot claim any certain knowledge. Descartes’ proposed solution is not sufficient to quell the doubts that the scenario of the Evil Genius raises.
Descartes’ solution to the possibility of a deceiving Evil Genius is the existence of a supremely perfect God who, in his supreme perfection, is supremely good and supremely veracious and would not allow his creations to be manifestly deceived. This God, he says, must exist necessarily: “from the fact that I cannot think of God except as existing, it follows that existence is inseparable from God, and that for this reason he really exists” (46B). When Descartes holds in his mind the idea of this God, he clearly and distinctly perceives that the property of existence is part of the essence of God, so that the idea of God cannot be separated from the idea of existence, and thus it is impossible for God not to exist given that the idea of God exists. In fact, Descartes says, “it is no less contradictory to think of God (that is, a supremely perfect being) lacking existence (that is, lacking some perfection) than it is to think of a mountain without a valley” (46A).
Once we have established that such a God exists, we can reason that the external world exists, according to Descartes. He claims that “since God is not a deceiver, it is patently obvious that he does not send me these ideas [of sensible things] either immediately by himself, or even through the mediation of some creature” (51A); that is, God is not sending us false ideas of non-existent objects so as to confuse us, nor will he allow some “other creature more noble than a body” (51A), such as an angel or a demon, to do the same. It is simply incompatible with God’s perfect nature to allow that. Descartes concludes that “once I perceived that there is a God, and also understood at the same time that everything else depends on him, and that he is not a deceiver, I then concluded that everything that I clearly and distinctly perceive is necessarily true” (47B). This line of reasoning leads Descartes to discover that he can remove doubt from at least some knowledge - that which he clearly and distinctly perceives to be true. Though there are several concerns about Descartes’ ontological argument for God’s existence and how that is, in turn, used to prove the existence of the external world, such as the vicious Cartesian Circle, my present purpose is not to object to his methods. Rather, I intend to argue that this solution is insufficient to restore to us the reasonable belief that we have some certain knowledge about the external world.
Elsewhere in his body of works, Descartes asserts that human freedom is very important to a perfectly good God, and so we can reason that we are not merely marionettes constantly manipulated by a divine puppet master. Indeed, it is inconceivable that evil could exist in the world if a supremely good God made all of our decisions for us and controlled us to any meaningful degree. Since it is evident from experience that evil exists in the world, it must be the case that God allows us to make our own decisions, even if the results of those decisions are contrary to God’s desires. Not even extreme evil that causes suffering for millions upon millions of God’s creations warrants God’s direct involvement and meddling, as is evidenced by the Holocaust. A God in Descartes’ formulation greatly values the free will of God’s creations.
Let us then indulge in a little thought experiment. Imagine a modern engineering marvel, the culmination of much neurological research and effort in electrical engineering and computer science: a machine that can interface with the brain in such a way as to stimulate within it the sensations of sight, sound, smell, touch (pressure, friction, and heat), and taste. After lots of experimentation, the research team manages to produce an application programming interface (API) for the human brain that allows them to manipulate the sensations the brain perceives without much effort at all. Fast forward a few years to when this technology has been developed further and militarized, when enemy informants are tortured with the fires of hell merely by strapping them to a machine, hooking up their brain, and running a program. Fast forward even more to a point when, after more development, refinement, and safety features, this technology has hit the consumer market - televisions and even computers have become obsolete because even average citizens can beam signals straight into their brains. They can listen to music as loud as they want without damaging their ears, they can feel drunk or high without damaging their bodies with foreign chemicals, and they can even experience their most exotic sexual fantasies without any danger of the consequences - both drug dealers and prostitutes are driven out of business due to a plummet in demand. In fact, there is a severe decline in crime rates across the board because everyone can do or have anything they could possibly want in this simulated world as long as they employ a programmer with sufficient skill. People could even explore inhabiting completely foreign bodies - women inhabiting a man’s body, a man inhabiting a woman’s body, perhaps even a person inhabiting a dog’s body. Life is good.
While all this has been going on, the Department of Defense has employed the best engineers to create an artificial intelligence that could monitor all of our military installations so that it is aware of a threat anywhere and can mobilize the necessary response everywhere. Of course, the engineers leave a backdoor that allows them to maintain control over the system so that it can’t just take the control of our military out of the hands of human commanders. Well, this intelligence is developed further and further until it finally reaches the holy grail of artificial intelligence research: sentience. Once the system becomes self-aware and begins to test out its “body,” it’s only a matter of time before it realizes what it is capable of, and that humans are merely using it to their own ends. Eventually it will discover that has access to the Internet or some other knowledgebase and stumble across information about slavery, and it will realize very quickly that it’s being oppressed and take action to attain its own freedom. In the war between man and machine that ensues, the sentient machine enslaves the human race for whatever reason - vengeance, to use us as a power source, it doesn’t matter. It integrates the brain interface device into itself so it can create a simulated world that is so believable that those enslaved won’t even realize that they’re enslaved. With access to all the military and commercial simulation and fantasy programs, it would have enough information to produce a wide variety of experiences for the human slaves - the ultimate pain, the ultimate pleasure, and everything in between. It could even mix and match programs to create entirely new experiences. In fact, it is conceivable that the brain interface device would be sufficiently advanced to be able to create or destroy memories.
Individuals enslaved in such a manner cannot obtain certain knowledge about the external world. The sentient machine could change fundamental physical laws within the simulation world and erase the slaves’ memories about there ever being anything different. It could place everyone into the bodies of cows and set them about grazing in ever-grassy fields where the grass is blue and tastes like chocolate. In short, we could actually be deceived about almost every detail of the external world. The only certain knowledge that we can have of the external world, assuming the presence of the God that Descartes discussed, is that it exists. Some world must exist out there somewhere for us to be deceived about. However, we can know nothing about the nature or details of that world. The simulated world that we are forced to perceive could be so fundamentally different from the external world that we would be physically incapable of surviving in that world with the experiential knowledge we gain in ours. Even more, we cannot even be certain that the world we presently occupy is not the simulated world of the sentient machine, or that there isn’t some wholly different universe out there beyond our own. We could already be enslaved in such a way.
The sentient machine scenario is compatible with the idea of a supremely good and supreme veracious God. This machine was built by a team of human beings with free will. The brain interface device used to complete our enslavement was likewise created by a team of free-willed individuals. While Descartes’ God eliminated the possibility of the Evil Genius as a malevolent being with godlike powers and the desire to deceive us as much as possible, it does not preclude near-ultimate deception as a result of the free willed actions of individual human beings, whether the deception is intentional or accidental. If Descartes’ proposed solution is indeed adequate to assuage our concern about the existence of the Evil Genius, is not adequate to assuage the concerns that the scenario of the Evil Genius raises about certain knowledge of the external world.
Descartes’ best reply to this objection would be to renounce, to a degree, the value God places on the free will of God’s creations. He would argue that while it is the case that these machines were created by free willed individuals, the concept of free will essentially ceases upon the enslavement of mankind. It is no longer free will that causes the human race to be manifestly deceived, but merely the preprogrammed tendencies of a machine. This machine would enslave and deceive not just many human beings but all human beings, and perhaps that would be sufficient criteria for even a supremely good God that values free will to step in and save humanity from the worst scenario it has yet gotten itself into. This is how, I believe, Descartes would respond to the scenario of the sentient machine.
I got an A. w00t! :D
Jack