A METAPHYSICAL DEBATE BY BLOG
My friend Tom Reasoner has just started a blog, and I made a comment on his first post, which I thought I'd post here too:

First, on AI: You claim that it is already "laid to rest" that AI is possible. From what I've read (admittedly I am no great connossieur of the subject), I had the opposite impression, namely that even some influential voices from the materialist side of the aisle had put forward potent arguments against the possibility of AI. Personally, I am convinced that computers can never be a path to AI (at least not in the interesting or meaningful sense of the word), because their mechanical "intelligence" is incommensurable with human intelligence. They can digitally record the what but they can never understand the why.

I should return here to the parenthetical remark here about the "interesting or meaningful sense" of artificial intelligence. To speak of "intelligence" is to get off on the wrong track. Scientific materialists are using the word "intelligence" to describe what sets human beings apart from the world, but this is a very misleading description: what sets human beings apart is that they have souls; that they have consciences, and are ineradicably creatures subject, and who feel themselves to be subject, to an ethical law, and yet they can (and constantly do) break it. One manifestation of this supernatural character of human beings is that they have an introspective, privileged access to logic and mathematics, "the language in which God has written the universe," as Galileo said, and this faculty is mostly what scientists and scientific materialists have in mind when they use the word "intelligence." This of course can be simulated. But computers cannot and never will be able to properly use language, a human faculty that gives much fuller expression to our "intelligence," or, to put it more fully, the intuitive, ethical, aesthetic, and ultimately supernatural element that sets apart the human being.

About faith: As a religious person, I have struggled to understand the notion of "faith" over the years. I was raised among Mormons, who define faith as "a desire to believe;" in their case, the desire becomes strong enough that they manage to believe some pretty absurd things. If this is faith, it is a bad thing, like a scientist who beings an experiment with an outcome in mind before hand; his prejudice may bias the results (and in Mormons' case, it certainly does).

I don't think faith has to mean (as you are assuming here) an unexamined, a priori belief. It may mean (what is somewhat similar but ultimately different) that in life, there are moments when the soul attains greater and lesser insight, and that in moments of lesser insight, moments when one feels confused or depressed or uncertain, one should remember what one saw and believed in better times, and cling to those believes in a somewhat "dogmatic" fashion. But this is only a temporary expedient, until one manages to dispel the confusion and depression; sooner or later, when one feels calm and confident again, one should re-examine these beliefs and try to come to terms with, to synthesize new experiences and perhaps adjust, re-interpret, expand or correct one's core beliefs.

Where I find the meaning of the word "faith" is at the end of an argument by Thomas Hume (an 18th-century Scotsman): the disproof of inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning refers to simple, dry logic, e.g. "(1) All men are mortal. (2) Socrates is a man. (3) Therefore, Socrates is mortal." We can probably agree that statement (3) follows from statements (1) and (2). But statements (1) and (2) could never be discovered through deduction. How can we know that "all men are mortal." By "experience," you may say-- everyone dies sooner or later-- but the way we learn from experience is induction. We anticipate that if the sun has risen every day until now, it will continue to do so. We anticipate that if gravity has bound us to the ground our whole lives, it will continue to do so. We will not suddenly become weightless and start floating off into space. There is order. The world follows patterns. If we observe a pattern, we anticipate that it will continue. This is inductive reasoning, and the vast majority of beliefs that we hold and live by, including all of natural science, are based on it.

But why should we trust inductive reasoning? As Hume argues, inductive reasoning makes sense only on the assumption that the world follows patterns (or "laws"). But how can we know that it follows patterns. We cannot say that "we know the world follows patterns because we have observed in the past that it follows patterns," because this is another step of induction, which assumes that the world follows patterns-- circularity. It seems that rationalist rigor is forcing us to end up by stating: "I have no evidence that the world follows patterns at all. If you ask me, will the sun rise tomorrow, my only answer must be: 'I have no information about that whatsoever.'" Surely this is madness!

We believe there is order, that there are patterns, that there is natural law. This belief seems to be indelibly written in our souls, so that even to question it (as Hume invites us to do) seems surreal, impossible, and insane. Faith is the belief, prior to reasoning, that there is order in the world, and in that sense it is a condition of sanity. At this point, faith has not yet acquired a specifically religious connotation (that comes at a further stage of development) but that is where it begins.