Use the Silver Bullet

There's more than meets the eye than mere materialism

Sidney Paget (1860-1908), The Hound of Baskervilles, 1902.

“I see the dog.”

I have sometimes thought that that one sentence is a silver bullet shot through the heart of any notion that human beings can be reduced to mere matter, or that they are no more than carbon-based computers on legs. Each word of it is a mystery.

The old card catalogue that we have in our attic will never see a dog, and despite all the sensors we give it, a computer will never see one, either.  All the computer can do is to provide a predetermined output when something that we have already seen to be a dog is flashed before it, and though the technology is sophisticated, and though it wears a considerable disguise to make it easy for us to pretend that there is such a being as, say, “Alexa,” it is much closer to, and perhaps in the most important ways identical to, what a photographic plate does when it is exposed to the colors of the dog, than it is to the nervous system of a flea, let alone the brain of a man, or, infinitely more mysterious, the mind of man.