Synthetic aliens and the problem of design

How would you be able to know whether X was a robot or not?

Quotes and comments;

1. 'Michael Dyer, a computer science professor at UCLA, is certain that the first aliens to visit Earth will be robots.
“If an extraterrestrial spaceship ever lands on Earth, I bet you that it is 99.9999999 percent likely that what exits that ship will be synthetic in nature.” [1.]

- I take it that by synthetic he means something that has been put together by a process that is not natural. [2.]

- I think we can define design as a creation process that isn't based on the laws of physics. Design then is something that wouldn't have happened by itself... i.e. wouldn't have happened based on the 'laws' of chemical attraction or repulsion. (e.g. as far as I can determine, the genetic code isn't a natural thing, isn't based on the laws of chemistry or physics.... wouldn't have happened 'naturally' and so therefore I agree with those who see it as an example of design.)

- The trouble with this definition is that materialists (and their angry cousins the atheists) claim that 'life' did form naturally.... this despite the fact we don't ever see chemicals arrange themselves this way. They admit this, but claim this 'miracle' did happen in the ancient past. (This isn't science; this is materialism in search of metaphysical rescue.) If it did happen I don't know how; as it couldn't have been a 'natural' process; material processes just don't work this way.

2. 'A third [idea] is his belief, based on the inevitability of artificial intelligence (AI), that humans will eventually replace themselves on Earth by robotic progeny. That implies that advanced aliens will have already reached that point in their evolution.' [1.]

- I don't understand why humans would want to replace themselves with robots. I don't understand why people find this appealing. Is it because they have a death wish. To replace yourself with a robot is to die, to commit suicide. Why would the human race want to commit suicide? I think we see in this idea the strong influence Darwinism has had on secular thinking. The grand story is one of constant progress; progress in power and intelligence. ("There is a grandeur in this model," said a bearded guru of the past.) Maybe people think they can escape God by turning themselves into robots :=] The irony is that in trying to escape they will commit suicide.

- If mankind doesn't want to live, why would robots? (Maybe they'd turn themselves back into humans.)

- We might ask how people who get visited by aliens would be able to tell whether they were synthetic beings or not. If they were composed of metal or plastic it might be easy to tell (maybe not) but if they were biological creatures that had been created in the laboratory how could it be determined whether they were 'natural' or 'synthetic'? They might look natural, but in fact be designed. I suppose it's possible they could look designed and not be. How could anyone know?

3. 'Scientists have long projected that technology will eventually reach the point where our brain-based consciousnesses can be transferred to synthetic media, and Dyer sees this as the third path to machine supremacy. [3.]

- The trouble with this idea is that there's no such thing as generic consciousness. i.e. there is the consciousness of a dolphin, and there is the consciousness of a human being. You can't transfer human consciousness to a hard drive. If a computer had a consciousness (if this were possible) it would be the consciousness of a computer... of a particular kind of computer. Human beings have flesh and blood, and that is an integral part of their consciousness. We are conceived, grow to full term in a womb, we're born, we suckle, we grow up gradually over many years, etc. and all this is inseparable from our particular form of consciousness. The idea of a generic consciousness is a myth; it's an abstraction and not real.

4. 'Continuing leaps forward in artificial intelligence (AI) — brought to popular attention recently by IBM's Watson computer vanquishing its human champions in the quiz show "Jeopardy!" — imply that machines will eventually be able to think for themselves.' [3.]

- Searching a data bank for answers to objective questions has little to do with what we call thinking... and it doesn't imply machines will eventually be able to think for themselves. (The author of that statement wasn't thinking very deeply.) Again we have a problem with abstractionism. There is no such thing as generic thinking. What this IBM computer did and what human beings do aren't the same. This is equivocation.

The processing done by a computer that is programmed to do it, isn't the same as the mental processes engaged in by human beings, and they shouldn't be referred to by the same term. The thinking that went into constructing this computer isn't remotely the same as the 'thinking' done by the computer as it 'plays' Jeopardy. (Computers don't play for one thing. I wonder if it knows it has the name Watson, and what it feels about being tagged with such a moniker.)

- M. Johnson; Mar/28/2011

Notes;
1. If Pigs Have Wings, SETI Could Be Robots - Creation/Evolution Headlines 03/11/2011
March 11, 2011 — The SETI program is still waiting to catch a sentient signal from deep space, but in the absence of data, people are free to speculate. Michael Dyer, a computer science professor at UCLA, is certain that the first aliens to visit Earth will be robots. He even attached a probability to it, according to Adam Hadhazy, a reporter published on Live Science. “If an extraterrestrial spaceship ever lands on Earth, I bet you that it is 99.9999999 percent likely that what exits that ship will be synthetic in nature.”
2. Synthetic;
# Relating to, involving, or of the nature of synthesis.
# Chemistry Produced by synthesis, especially not of natural origin.
# Not natural or genuine; artificial or contrived:
# Prepared or made artificially: synthetic leather. See Synonyms at artificial.
3. If Aliens Attack: Visitors to Earth Will Likely Be Robots - Adam Hadhazy
4. 'Dyer has identified four paths that could lead to the substitution of humans or other biologicals by their own robotic creations — and given enough time, he thinks such a fate awaits most life in the cosmos.
- Gee; maybe this is what happened to the dinosaurs... maybe they volunteered to commit suicide so the mammals could take over. Maybe they even designed and created mammals.
5. 'Regardless of how machines ultimately end up in charge, their expansion into space seems certain — whether to obtain new resources or to explore (or, for less appealing motives, to exterminate all biological life).
- it's not clear to me why a machine would want to do anything. Does my toaster want to make toast? Not want to make toast? Does it want to travel to Mars? Any 'desires' it would have would have to be programmed in... and thus wouldn't be desires per se, but merely programmed instructions... which presumably could be easily changed... so why not just program for machines not to want anything... therefore eliminating the need for resources. (The idea of combing the galaxy for resources in colonial type thinking... circa 1800.)
- I have no idea why machines would want to travel in space. What would be the attraction? I can't even see machines finding anything attractive or appealing. If they did it would just be a matter of programming... which could be changed. (People are obviously projecting human desires and feelings onto a robotic, AI, canvas. These aren't real robots they're talking about, but metal bots with humans sitting inside them.)
6. 'At any rate, the future is not terribly bright for homo sapiens, at least in a flesh-and-blood form. "I think the most we can hope for is to embed software into all intelligent synthetic entities to cause them to want to protect the survivability of biological entities, with humans at the top of the list for protection," Dyer said.
- and why couldn't these synthetic entities just get rid of such programming?
7. "If an extraterrestrial spaceship ever lands on Earth, I bet you that it is 99.9999999 percent likely that what exits that ship will be synthetic in nature," said Michael Dyer, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles
- Here's a scenario to contemplate. Let's say we encountered some aliens (synthetic or not) and discovered what planet they lived on. Let's say we visited this planet. Could we tell whether this planet was 'natural' or whether it had been engineered? i.e. could we tell if it had 'evolved' or whether it had been created by intelligent beings? How might we make such a determination? If there's no way for us to decide, isn't there something incomplete about our scientific method?