Roger Penney has asked me to post this. Add your comments to mine at the end.
By Roger Penney
Not easy to Define
Are you aware of what you are doing by reading this and are you aware of yourself being aware? Some people may speak of consciousness but being conscious is not being unconscious and awareness is more than that.
Awareness is not easy to define since being aware is part of what we are. Breathing is part of what we are and we do not have to think about it. Awareness or consciousness is more so, since breathing is physical then our physical body may be observed doing it, but awareness is only apparent in our thoughts. We may be dreaming and aware that we are dreaming at the same time.
Not Material
To try to explain this in physical terms is impossible. We have to conclude that we are beings who are more than just the physical or the material. Atheistic Science tries to explain all things in terms of the material world. Some scientists try to explain awareness as something to do with waves generated by the activity of our brains. But radio, light and other energy waves are part of the physical/material world for they can be observed and measured. If waves or energies given off by our brain activity are measured or observed then they are not awareness.
How could we observe or measure the waves given off by our brain activity? We cannot. Alright we may measure some brain activity but not the activity involved in awareness.
We are Not Machines
Let us look at the argument another way. Are machines physical/material? The answer must be that they are. They are not aware of other machines, nor are they aware of themselves. They may respond to other machines or to situations but that is material and is built into them. After all the computer I am writing this on is not aware of me doing so nor does it have thoughts about the sort of person I might be who is making use of and commanding his circuits to do this or that.
No Such Thing as Artificial Intelligence
Scientists talk about ‘creating’ artificial intelligence. This just shows how very clever people in one field, in this case the field of technology, can make very silly statements in another, in this case the field of ideas. You may look at a stone for a million years and it will still be an inanimate stone. You my stare at it for another ten million but it will never cease to be what it is, inanimate.
So the machine. It does not have life, it is inanimate. I am sorry Doctor Frankenstein you failed, your idea of creating life did not happen. Even were it possible to sew bits and pieces of people together they would not live nor would they think. Equally you can stick pieces of machinery together and you will only have another machine. Your machine may even seem to speak but the speaking will be previously recorded verbiage responding to the stimuli you give it, you will never have a conversation with you android machine.
What then is Intelligence?
As for intelligence, I suspect that many academics and those who think of these things equate intelligence with knowledge as did Plato and as have other philosophers. Intelligence is more, it is the ability to select among the knowledge we have stored in our memories those things which apply to what we are thinking about and then to reach a solution or to go looking for further relevant knowledge.
No machine will ever be like the tiny human child. We will all have noticed the way even a two year old is full of questions. Even before birth they appear to be aware and certainly asking questions as they do about a wide variety of matters they display an awareness which no machine could possibly display.
Where does it Come From?
We are forced to the conclusion that there really is something called awareness, or, if you will, something called consciousness and it does not come from the mechanical, the material parts of our bodies. It is something above and beyond normal brain activity and yet it is part of it for in many ways it controls it for one of the things it does is to choose what our mind and brain attend to.
Indeed if we were not aware; if we were only superbly and wonderfully crafted machines we could have no sensation of awareness nor could we have such a word in our vocabulary. The words we use relate directly to the things around us and in us and the social world of other people, they are to do with emotions and problems and we use words as tools to correlate, to regulate, to remember, to think and to argue.
Soul and Spirit
So then our awareness must be something to do with those other mysterious words so hotly denied by dull dogmatic materialism. That is awareness is something to do with the soul, the being that is ‘I’ which lives and thinks and is writing this. It is also the many ‘you’ who are reading this article and who, I hope, are stimulated to meditate on the subject it attempts to deal with by it.
Then too it must be something to do with the spirit which is that part of our being which is aware of spiritual reality and of God.
