(4 of 5)
For the sake of argument, however, what if Dreyfus, Moore and common sense were all wrong? What if the mind with its legion nettings could in fact be replicated in steel and plastic, and all human befuddlements find their way onto a program—would the battle be lost? Hardly. The moon is always in the man. Even if it were possible to reduce people to box size and have them plonked down before themselves in all their powers, they would still want more. Whatever its source, there is a desire that outdesires desire; otherwise computers would not have come into being. As fast as the mind travels, it somehow manages to travel faster than itself, and people always know, or sense, what they do not know. No machine does that. A computer can achieve what it does not know (not knowing that 2+2=4, it can find out), but it cannot yearn for the answer or even dimly suspect its existence. If people knew where such suspicions and yearnings came from, they might be able to lock them in silicon. But they do not know what they are; they merely know that they are—just as in the long run they only know that they exist, not what their existence is or what it means. The difference between us and any machine we create is that a machine is an answer, and we are a question.
But is there anything really startling in this? With all the shouting and sweating that go on about machines taking over the world, does anyone but a handful of zealots and hysterics seriously believe that the human mind is genuinely imperiled by devices of its own manufacture? In Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), Douglas R. Hofstadter's dazzling book on minds and machines, a man is described—one Johann Martin Zacharias Dase (1824-61)—who was employed by governments because he could do mathematical feats like multiplying two 100-digit numbers in his head, and could calculate at a glance how many sheep were in a field, for example, or how many words in a sentence, up to about 30. (Most people can do this up to about six.) Were Mr. Dase living today, would he be thought a computer? Are computers thought of as men? This is a kind of cultural game people play, a false alarm, a ghost story recited to put one's mind at rest.
The trouble is that "at rest" is a poor place to be in this situation, because such a position encourages no understanding of what these machines can do for life beyond the tricks they perform. Alfred North Whitehead said that "civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." In that sense, computers have advanced civilization. But thinking about the computer, as a cultural event or instrument, has so far not advanced civilization about whit. Instead, one hears humanists either fretting about the probability that before the end of the century computers will be able to beat all the world's chess masters, or consoling themselves that a computer cannot be Mozart—the response to the first being, "So what?" and to the second, "Who ever thought so?" The thing to recognize about the computer is not how powerful of is or will become, but that its power is finite. So is that of the mind. The finitudes in both cases are not the same, but the fact that they are comparable may be the most useful news that man's self-evaluation has received in 200 years.