But before modern science fathered the technologies that reified and concretized its otherwise abstract systems, the systems of thought that defined man's place in the universe were fundamentally juridical. They served to define man's obligations to his fellow men and to nature

REMEMBER THIS THE NEXT TIME you hear someone wonder why and how democracy is in decline in the age of the internet, even as "freedom" is the fetish of fascists as well as those who support democracy, in some fashion. I'd guess that will be sometime before noon, today.

Certain individuals of quite differing minds, temperaments, interests, and training have - however much they differ among themselves and even disagree on many vital questions - over the years expressed grave concern about the conditions created by he unfettered march of science and technology; among them are Mumford, Arendt, Ellul, Roszak, Comfort, and Boulding.  The computer began to be mentioned in such discussions only recently.  Now there are signs that a full-scale debate about the computer is developing.  The contestants on one side are those who, briefly stated, believe computers can, should, and will do everything, and on the other side those who, like myself, believe there are limits to what computers ought to be put to do.  It may appear at first glace that this is an in-house debate of little consequence except to a small group of computer technicians.  But at bottom, no matter how it may be disguised by technological jargon, the question is whether or not every aspect of human thought is reducible to a logical formalism, or, to put it into the modern idiom, whether or not human thought is entirely computable.  That question has, in one for or another, engaged thinkers in all ages.  Man has always striven for principles that could organize and give sense and meaning to his existence.  But before modern science fathered the technologies that reified and concretized its otherwise abstract systems, the systems of thought that defined man's place in the universe were fundamentally juridical.  They served to define man's obligations to his fellow men and to nature.  

 I will break into this paragraph to point out that this is one of the most important and dangerously ignored distinctions between mathematical and scientific framing of thought which by agreement and, so, inevitably leave out all considerations of morality from their formal discourse.  The consequence of that, when the claim is that science produces the only valid means of ascertaining "the truth" as is, actually the faith of scientism and most of the philosophically degraded forms of atheism, is that there is more than a mere tendency to downplay or ignore questions of morality to denying those questions are real or are, at best, the product of social consensus among members of a society.   And even members within a society who mean to profit themselves under this degraded understanding of moral obligations and, as is always legally and politically important, a belief that there will be an ultimate price to be paid for immorality will have no qualms about getting away with as much as they can get away with.   If you think that framing is not a problem, consider how the modern legal apparatus, under "enlightenment" scientistic thinking, in which all questions must resolve themselves in a never attainable logically compact argument has allowed Trump to get away with everything all of his life.  Judges, lawyers, members of juries, certainly members of appeals and Supreme Courts are always finding outs for themselves and those they want to let off through the far from logically tight use of that standard which does not work for large portions, perhaps most of human life and human experience of the world.   There are lapses in that system of a kind not that much different from the injustices that religious authority is often guilty of, only one based merely on logical formalism has no means of identifying why that is wrong, which is why judicial wrongdoing is so often explained away as a matter of judicial formalism and convenience.

The Judaic tradition, for example, rests on the idea of a contractual relationship between God and man.  This relationship must and does leave room for both God and man, for a contract is an agreement willingly entered into by parties who are free not to agree.  Man's autonomy and his corresponding responsibility is a central issue of all religious systems.  

I will break in again to note that it is this aspect of covenant making, breaking, keeping and restoring which Walter Brueggemann identifies as one of, if not the central concern of the Jewish Scriptural tradition, Old and New Testaments inclusive.   Something which was news to me when I first heard his explanation of that in his book The Bible Makes Sense but which makes so much of the otherwise confusing literature in that collection understandable.

The spiritual cosmologies engendered by modern science, on the other hand, are infected with the germ of logical necessity.  They, except in the hands of the wisest scientists and philosophers, no longer content themselves with explanations of appearances, but claim to say how things actually are and must necessarily be.  In short, they convert truth to provability. 

And as I've pointed out above, that claimed required standard of provability is as useful to those who want to get away with as much as they can, both outside the civil law and inside it, with all manner of outs and permissions to ignore truths that are clear but which cannot be stated in terms of logical formalism.   Which Weizenbaum also understood.

As one consequence of this drive of modern science, the question,  "What aspects of life are formalizable?"  has been transformed from the moral question, "How and in what form may man's obligations and responsibilities be known?" to the question,  "Of what technological genus is man a species?  Even some philosophers whose every instinct rebels against the idea that man is entirely comprehensible as a machine have succumbed to the spirit of the times.  Hubert Dreyfus, for example, trains the heavy guns of phenomenology on the computer model of man.  But he limits his argument to the technical question of what computers can and cannot do.  I would argue that if computers could imitate man in every respect - what in fact they cannot - even then it would be appropriate, nay,urgent, to examine the computer in the light of man's perennial need to find his place in the world.  The outcomes of practical matters that are of vital importance to everyone hinge on how and in what terms the discussion is carried out. 

As one of the comments on this series pointed out in regard to armed drones being given the "ability to decide for themselves" whether to bomb a wedding party in the desert or tall people or others is a problem, here and now.  Even people who are absolved from exercising the highest level of care to not make mistakes will make such decisions, relying on the formalized protocols for making such decisions, especially remotely, which is also how so many police who assassinate Black People and other do so with the confidence that their Union and lawyers can use such formality in the legal system to get away with it.  Allowing machines which will not be accountable in any way that matters to them to make such decisions is not going to make things better, though I can imagine them being adopted on the formality of cost saving and other such "efficiency." 

One position I mean to argue appears deceptively obvious;  it is simply that there are important differences between men and machines as thinkers.  I would argue that, however intelligent machines may be made to be, there are some acts of thought that ought to be attempted only by humans.  One socially significant question I thus intend to raise is over the proper place of computers in the social order.  But, as we shall see, the issue transcends computers in that it must ultimately deal with logicality itself- quite apart from whether logicality is encoded in computer programs or not. 

We live in a world so degraded by materialism, by scientism, by faith in computing, by atheism, I'd argue, that we can have rich tech savants - so many of whom prove to be idiots - who are taken seriously when they propose things such as human immortality in the form of computerizing "our brains" of "downloading" all of our experience, all of our personality, all of our thoughts into a physically durable form and, so, we can be said, according to their definition of all of those in terms of computable terms and equations, to be immortal.  I would assume such thinking would require multiple copies of our non-souls be kept around as J. K. Rowling had Voldermort producing multiple horcruxes to ensure his immortality.  Though I do have to wonder how they'll get by the little issue of all of the protons in the universe decaying, that is unless the present day models that produced that theory are overtaken and overturned by future models of the universe.  

In the meantime, all of this that Joseph Weizenbaum warned about almost a half a century ago has only become more and more dangerous.  It is asked how the modern democratic order has been so endangered in the age of the computer and the internet while ignoring that the very thing that democracy depends on, a view of human beings as transcendent thinking entities, able to achieve freedom of thought and to practice equality which is dependent on something even more of an accomplishment, when it is accomplished, the morality of good will, of doing justice, of making love real in interactions of people with other people and other living beings.  None of that is expressible in logical formalism, none of it can be computed, none of it can enter into scientific thought so any system based in an absolutist view of science or materialistic monism can not possibly support the foundations on which egalitarian democracy, or even the lesser form of mere electoral democracy for a single second.