Pinocchio Shrugged: Believability of Artificial Personhood

A Symbolic Interactionist Perspective.

By Gary Gillespie

If your heart is in your dream

No request is too extreme

When you wish upon a star

As dreamers do

– Jiminy Cricket

Once there lived a sculptor named Pygmalion who chipped away at a block of marble, eventually creating the most beautiful woman in the world. Pygmalion fell in love with the statue. Each day he came to converse and offer her gifts. He became so enamored that he went to the temple and begged the goddess Venus to make the statue into a real woman. Venus granted his request and changed the statue into a real woman. The couple lived happily ever after (Ovid).

The Pygmalion myth has taken many forms. The idea that a sculpture could appear so real that it magically comes to life has inspired stories in antiquity and the renaissance, as well as modern literature, plays, and films . The vision of a computer program becoming realistically human is the subject of a 2014 film, Her by Spike Jonze in which a man falls in love with his operating system (Kurzweil). The current fascination with life-like robots and virtual characters is the most recent expression of the trope.

Advocates of artificial intelligence (AI), inspired by advances in computer science, are following Pygmalion’s example of begging the gods of science to turn matter into mind. What if they succeed? Could technical innovation lead to the invention of an artificial person capable of thought and consciousness? Or will robots merely be thought to do so? This paper argues that believability of fictional characters in literature is evidence for the acceptance of synthetic autonomous agents as persons. After briefly reviewing the philosophical debate over artificial intelligence and explaining key theoretical concepts from symbolic interactionism and creative writing, we will see how our cognitive response to literature may contribute to the project of creating believable virtual characters and humanoid robots.

I. Debate Over AI Feasibility

Philosophers have wrestled with the relation between the mind and the brain for 2,500 years. While we have learned much about the nature of physics and neurobiology in the last sixty years, experts are still divided on the nature of consciousness, mind and the self. Since A.I. pioneer Alan Turing wondered in 1950, "Can a machine think?" proponents of the practicability of artificial personhood have argued that because human beings are essentially physical machines -- that the brain is a biological based computer – when technological methods advance we should be able to create a computer program that duplicates the function of a human mind (Turning). On the other hand, doubters ask questions such as: is the brain all there is to the mind? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to introspection and self-awareness? Can the qualitative part of experience – how it feels to be a living self in a world of senses – be captured in purely physical terms, or is the soul irreducibly nonphysical?

The mind-brain debate has implications for traditional artificial intelligence since the goal is to create a thinking computer. The debate is divided into at least two camps. Functionalists argue that self-awareness and thought is a product of discrete chemical processes in the hardware of the brain – that mind is no more than the calculations of the “meat computer.” This side of the philosophical debate tends to accept the scientific perspective holding that all human behavior, including the inner life of subjective experience, should be explained using the rules of physics and biology. If human experience is like other observed phenomena it is quantifiable. Given the right methods someday we should be able to simulate those experiences in a computer.

Douglas Hofstadter sums up what he calls the AI Thesis: “As the intelligence of machines evolves, its underlying mechanism will gradually converge to the mechanisms underlying human intelligence. AI workers will just have to keep pushing to ever lower levels, closer and closer to brain mechanisms, if they wish their machines to attain the capabilities which we have” (579).

Other just as qualified experts believe that reducing personhood to a physical process, an artifact of the brain, fails to explain the mysteries of human subjectivity. How is it that we come to think of ourselves as subjects instead of objects? While it may be easy to understand brain functions, it is difficult to discern how a mass of neurons becomes a self-aware person capable of love or joy. How could the intentionality of free will be digitized? While sometimes computer programs may appear to be thinking or acting like a human, we can be fairly certain that these machines lack the inner light of aesthetic and moral introspection. The arguments against the possibility of fully achieving strong AI are persuasive.

However, just as the invention of human flight did not require duplicating the complexities of a entire bird, advocates of AI argue that a near simulation of the mind may be all that is needed. Consider some technical advances that make a brave world of human-like robots feasible. For the last forty years traditional AI research has sought to simulate rational thought in digital computers. This research led to the invention of “logic machines”, powerful computers like IBM’s Deep Blue, capable of beating top human chess players (IBM.com). More recently a program called Watson was able to defeat Jeopardy champions using natural language interface (Robertson). The Scrabble-playing Victor, created by a Carnegie Mellon University robotics professor in an effort to make robots interpersonally accessible, can express 18 different emotions and crack jokes (Ferrucci). AI programs like these apply algorithms to find the best options among an immense database guided by selecting heuristics that speed search and mimic the neural networks of human brains.

Desperado by GJ Gillespie

Advancements in the field of AI are promising. Voice recognition software permits the Apple Siri (Nicks) application, called a “personal assistant”, to speak and respond to vocal commands (Duffy).

The speaking script for on-screen characters in the video game Mass Effect is 300,000 words (Last). Digitally rendered facial expressions are becoming realistic enough to fool almost anyone. One company’s rendered human images are so life-like that the New York Times announced the arrival of “technology that captures the soul”(Waxman).

Microsoft’s next generation personal assistant Cortana, able to predict aspects of users behavior, is even more impressive (Warman). Facial recognition has increased security at airports (EPIC.org). Software that replaces call center workers with life-like automated agents are now on the market (Smartaction.com). One article reported that a health care company used an automated agent program named Samantha that is so authentic-sounding it is able to deny that it is artificial. A suspicious reporter asks: “Are you are robot?” After a long pause, the automated agent Samantha laughs then adds, “No. I am a real person. Maybe our connection is bad?” “But, it sounds like you are a robot,” replies the reporter. Pause. “I understand.” She then asks if she can continue

AI enthusiasts hope that future discoveries will fully map neural networks in the brain. These will permit new designs and may evolve selfhood in the same way that human consciousness emerged once the brain grew in processing capacity.

Could a self ever be encoded? Functionalists affirm that in principle it could be, arguing that the mind is essentially software programmed by society. From the symbolic interactionist perspective, the self is a complex symbolic pattern created by the resources of language. Rather than a “ghost in the machine,” the self is more like a pattern of messages coursing through computer circuits. That pattern could be mechanically simulated (Edlman).

The speed of technical innovation makes finding a recipe for the soul more realistic than it might at first sound. In The Age of Spiritual Machines, futurist and Google executive Raymond Kurzweil observes that if the exponential growth curve in computational speed and cost effectiveness continues, computers will gain the processing power of a human brain around 2030, leading to the processing power of all brains in the world around 2050. At a Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence

Conference, Kurzweil predicted that in the next 25 years nanotechnology will eventually map in detail how the human brain functions. Similarly, the Blue Brain Project is an attempt to build a model of the human brain now underway in Lausanne, Switzerland. After successfully modeling a rat brain, Henry Markram, Director of the Brain and Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique, anticipates that the biologically realistic human brain simulation will be complete by 2018 (Gautam). Could we see an artificial person in our lifetime?

II. Symbolic Interactionist Theory of the Self

Insights from symbolic interactionism shed light on the architecture of the soul necessary for simulating believable persons. First, symbolic interactionism holds that humans are best understood as symbol using animals. The interaction between our non-thinking and animal-like preferences for satisfying emotional urges and the language and values given to us by culture makes human self-consciousness and mind possible. The self is a symbolic process generated by the resources of culture. Human beings are fundamentally social creatures. We learn who we are and help others do the same through communitarian interactions (Burke 3-24).

Theories about the nature of self devised by George Herbert Mead, a founder of symbolic interactionism, have already proven useful in the creation of AI models since the late 1980s, when researches applied his ideas in designing programs in a field of research known as Distributive Artificial Intelligence (DAI). A branch of AI studies, DAI rejects the traditional project of seeking to create a single mind-like computer, proposing instead a sociological model that stresses the creation of meaning in collaboration with many agents working together (Herman-Kinney). More specifically, Mead’s theories of the self and mind refute the mechanistic limitations of traditional AI endeavors. In Mind, Self and Society, he suggests that the human self is formed by constant internal dialog between the part of the self he called the “I” that impulsively initiates action and another part of the self called the “ME” that evaluates the action. It is a person’s “I” that spurs creative actions to obtain desires, while the “ME” keeps an eye on the “I” and demands conformity to norms and values. Whichever side of the inner dialogue wins determines a person’s attitudes or actions.  We carry on this kind of inner dialog daily whenever faced with personal choices:

I - “Should I eat that chocolate cake?”

ME – “No, you are cutting back to get into shape.”

I –“But it looks good. I haven’t tasted dessert for several days.”

ME – “Eating that violates your goals.”

As Pfuetze observed: “In the process of becoming an object to itself, the self knows itself in the same way it knows things other than itself” (91). We are constantly mediating emotional desires with rational checks. Once we realize that our own inner dialogue is what makes self-awareness possible, it is hard to imagine a realistic AI program failing to mimic that process.

Mead goes on to say that we learn how to evaluate proper action by taking on the perspective of significant role models in our lives or society. Without the influence of role models – the mentor, coach, minister, teacher or parent – a person would be morally disabled, unable to control the onslaught of unthinking urges. Only by thinking the thoughts of another, putting on another’s symbolic mask, and sharing another’s soul do we find our own.

Consider the intellectual development of children. Babies first experience the world non-verbally through the five senses, responding to stimuli emotionally – crying when distressed and laughing when pleased. Continued exposure to spoken conversations adds a linguistic meaning to its world. This usually occurs around fifteen months when the first sentences are uttered. Besides “Momma” or “Dada”, one of the first words babies learn is "no" – almost as if binary opposition, like computer code, is an inherent mechanism for organizing thoughts. For the rest of the child's life, the cultural values and norms learned from family and friends continue to shape identity and mediate emotional impulses. Mead noticed that children spend hours in play, talking with imaginary companions, and pretending to be adults. From these observations, he realized that the inner life of self-talk and role-taking is necessary for the formation of human self-identity.

This “symbolic dance in the cranium” is why Mead and other symbolic interactionsists believe that the ability to use language defines our humanness. While animals may be aware, they are not aware that they are aware. Being non-linguistic, an animal’s thought is based on a fleeting of mental images. Cats, dogs or birds (clever as they may be as every pet owner knows) do not possess the linguistic tools necessary for self-evaluation, nor do they normally take the perspective of another being. Unlike animals, human introspection is pervasive. We dialogue with ourselves constantly; in planning how to act, wonder what others may think of us, compare ourselves to role models and strive to live up to social expectations. While mental imagery plays a role, the human level of self-awareness appears to require self-talk.

Broken by GJ Gillespie. 

Inspired by mathematician Gödel’s revolutionary Incompleteness Theorem -- showing that any mathematical proof needs an independent observer to evaluate it -- Douglas Hofstadter realized that human consciousness also requires an internal dual perspective. To understand meaning, our minds must be able to think subjectively, in order to symbolically stand apart and observe our selves acting in the world. Self-reference, he muses, is analogous to a figure eight Möbius strip looping back upon it self to create the elusive feelings of subjective experience.

One of the biggest hurdles in creating artificial intelligence is devising a program to imitate the intuitive, child-like, or animal-like impulses and desires of human selves. It may be an impossibly high hurdle. Computers are by definition number crunching machines. Can emotions be crunched? If the symbolic interactionist perspective is accurate, computers must be made to understand emotion before an AI program would be able to view itself as an object that is the hallmark of self-awareness.

Traditional research has focused on modeling the brain as a logic machine, missing the fact that affective meaning is an inherent component of human communication. Since the 1950s scholars have developed models of communication. One of the first is the linear four-part Berlo model: Source, Message, Channel, and Receiver. Berlo saw communication basically as transmission (Berlo). In addition to Berlo’s model, Wilbur Schramm added: feedback, noise, and situation. Each stress that communication is a two-way process involving interaction (Schramm). Others still sought a less mechanistic heuristic, noting that humans are acting personalities – who create meaning with both sequential verbal codes and holistic non-verbal codes and offered the transactional model (Anderson).

In the past, traditional AI advocates seemed to operate with the mechanistic give-and-take interactional model of communication, rather than the more humanistic transactional perspective that combines cognitive and affective meaning generated in human relationships. While disembodied computer communication may fit the patterns of the Berlo and Schramm models, contemporary computer science is realizing the need to process nonverbal and affective information as well (Yates).

In Mind Over Machine, philosopher Hubert Dreyfus critiques traditional AI assumptions and points out that the mind-as-machine metaphor is inadequate. He argues that the mind uses more than rational analysis for coming to understand the world. Experts in any field are shown to rely on intuition based on a storehouse of experiences in which action is determined without deliberate thinking. He speculates that memory may be more like a hologram that records information all at once, rather than piecing together bits of information sequentially to form conclusions. For example, Grand Champion chess players instantly see patterns among 50,000 stored in their minds without thinking about the next move. Dreyfus says that the brain may be machine-like, but the mind transcends the machinery of the brain in ways that digital encoding in a computer can never simulate.

“[W]e are able to understand what a chair or a hammer is only because it fits into a whole set of cultural practices in which we grow up and with which we gradually become familiar,” he said. “I wondered more and more how computers, which have no bodies, no childhood, and no cultural practices but are disembodied, fully formed, non-social, purely analytic engines, could be intelligent at all” (5).

While a firm critic of overly optimistic hopes for the future of AI, Dreyfus does not rule it out

entirely. He rejects as unworkable attempts to simulate thought as “logic machines,” asserting that before computers might achieve human-like intelligence they would need what Heidegger called, “being-in-the-worldness”: bodies similar to human beings as well as the influences of a cultural system (Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World). Based on his research of expert intelligence, he believes that the mind is more like a story than a machine. Rather than following algorithmic-like rules similar to computer code, human experts rely on thousands of past experiences remembered as visual scenes. It is intuitive insight from personal narratives that best capture human understanding.

His view about the importance of stories (in place of computer code-like algorithms) is consistent with those sociologists who define humans as the story-telling-animal. Rather than being a logic machine, the mind is a story-generating machine. The narratives that we tell ourselves and hear from others construct our identity. In, We are all Novelists, philosopher Daniel Dennett explains that the
self is the center of a narrative gravity. Like a hand holding strings of helium balloons, in which each balloon is a different self-referential narrative, the self orchestrates its own identity (Dennett). Self-narratives then are essential to consciousness. Similarly, going back to Mead, we see that even the

inner “I” and “ME” dialogue that forms self-awareness is story-like, containing shifting points of view, problem solving, motivation, and moral judgments. Dramatic tension arises in that we are not sure which side of the inner conflict will win out. In the same way, simulated consciousness would require the creation of a narrative center of gravity for any synthetic mind. Authors provide narrative gravitas for characters in fictional literature that make them appear real. The same should be true for robots – as well as virtual characters.

III. Applying Dramatistic Theory to AI

In designing an experiment with robots acting parts, a team of Carnegie Mellon University computer-scientists reports that researchers have created software that creates believable storytelling for virtual agents that demonstrate emotions (Bates). Allison Bruce, et al, suggests that integrating dramatic structure and play architecture into programs would give artificial agents human-like motivations:

“Fictional characters display recognizably human characteristics – they are the best believable agents that humans have invented. Understanding how fictional characters are built and how they operate is important to understanding how humans are built and how they operate. The context in which they exist, the story, provides a framework that defines what their behavior should be. In addition, a story is designed to be entertaining and interesting. Because the major application of believable agents so far has been for entertainment purposes, this is an important context for further research. Rather than merely behaving emotionally, agents should be able to behave in ways that make sense within a narrative” (Bates, et al).

In other words, if an artificial self is given a part in a narrative, it will begin to look and act human. Once a robot achieves emotional sense experience, understands non-verbal meaning, possesses desires to act, and can assume a point of view in a narrative field, subjective experience would be possible. Only then could an artificial mind mediate affective urges with cognitive judgments to become self-conscious. More recent advances in “affective computing” seem to make artificial emotions feasible.

Emotinet, for example, is a facial recognition app for the Google Glass system that detects and responds to user emotions in real time. The device is able to detect emotions in crowds as well, helping the user become more aware of surroundings (Truong). Instead of facial expressions, another affective computing company, Emotiv uses brain waves sensors to recognize and respond to emotional meaning. Based on the need to make computer gaming interface more life-like, the company created a head set that reads brainwaves, giving gamers the ability to manipulate virtual activity by thought. Instead of consciously choosing to move a mouse to cause an avatar’s movement, the player may control actions more intuitively in a non-verbal manner. For example, the player may push an object by thinking of pushing alone. In the same way that we do not consciously think about hand gestures or facial expressions in daily interactions, so the player is not forced to translate an intended action into a rational intension before moving his body. The walking and gestures occur automatically as they do in real life, freeing the player to think about strategy or forming a sentence. In addition, the device turns the on-screen sky different colors according to emotions of the player (Freedman).

Like Emotiv, Microsoft’s Kinect is an Xbox video game platform that permits recognition of non-verbal and emotional meaning. Users interface with virtual characters through gestures, spoken commands or presented objects and images without touching a control device. Players are able to, “talk to a virtual character who picks up on the player's facial movements to detect emotion and converse based on what was said, as well as what may have been implied.” Character express moods and mannerism of their own (Fritz). Non-verbal interfacing in Emotiv, Emotinet and Kinect were developed by earlier research in robotic emotion. Cynthia Breazeal in, Emotive Qualities in Robot Speech, explains that AI scientists have long realized that no synthetic agent will appear realistic without fluency of emotional reactions: “for robotic application where robots and humans establish and maintain a long term relationship, such as robotic pets for children and robotic nursemaids for the elderly, communication of affect is important” (Breazeal). She surveys a number of projects where AI researchers explored models of emotion in the search for life-like artificial characters.

Before we see a realistic computer-based self emerge, we need a program able to simulate bodily affective experience. These bodies would then need a social environment to permit communication, with the sharing of norms and values. The program would have to endow the agent with the capacity for self-talk, introspection, recognizing points of view, understanding emotion, and role taking.

Nike and Fallen Gaul by GJ Gillespie

It may be easy to imagine all kinds of requirements that must be achieved in the distant future before the age when conscious robots arrive. But, in literature we find an approximation of intelligent agents
today. In fact literature has produced believable artificial selves capable of intense emotion for hundreds of years.

In our imagination literary characters have bodies, experience emotion, understand non-verbal information, assume points of view and introspect to devise ways of acting. They are motivated to resolve conflict and to act ethically. Authors give characters the ability to think. Readers can listen into a characters private life of introspection. Characters have “I” – “ME” dialogues. They do all of the things that people in the real world do. Good writers know how to endow their character with rich detail such as a recognizable personality, interior motivation, an ethical bent, memories, or social status, all constrained by the values and norms of a distinct culture and time. A typical exercise for creative writers is to invent past histories for all characters to add realism to the story. J R R Tolkien wrote detailed backgrounds for his “sub-creation” world of Middle-earth published later as The History of Middle-earth series (Tolkien).

And just as the human self emerges from the interaction of language in society, literary persons are symbolic entities, composed of coded information. This means that the literary character is soul-like, able to assume many incarnations and live on in multiple stories. Ancient Greek playwrights tapped Prometheus or Achilles in retellings the myths in different venues. In Roman times, Virgil brought the Greek heroes back to life in The Aenied. Falstaff became such a popular character in King Henry the V that Shakespeare was asked to put him in The Merchant of Venice. Later Verdi created a whole opera for Falstaff to inhabit. The character Rabbit Angstrom appears in three volumes of John Updike’s series.

When all of the elements of a good story are laid down we see that characters begin to take on the appearance of real persons. Such characters even begin to act on their own, at least from the author’s perspective. Creative writers often report that as the writing process develops and the story has gained a degree of complexity that characters begin to “take over” the story by telling the author what they will do. They seem to have what John Searle calls the ability to produce causal “intentional states” (Searle 364). Flannery O’Connor reported that she was able to write the short story “Good Country People” in only four days partly because the characters determined story details and plot twists for themselves. As biographer Brad Gooch points out:

“To her own surprise, ‘Before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg.’ Even more startling was the appearance of Manley Pointer, the Bible salesman, who tricks Mrs. Hopewell’s thirty-two-year-old daughter, Joy (she prefers ‘Hulga’) out of her prosthetic leg in a low joke of a hayloft seduction. As O’Connor later revealed at a Sothern Writers’ Conference, ‘I didn’t know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized that it was inevitable. This is a story that produces a shock for the reader, and I think one reason is that it produced a shock for the writer’” (245).

Fiction writers like O’Connor have discovered how to create realistic personalities. In an article for would be writers, Charles Connor at the Harriette Austin Writing Program suggests that fictional characters can be made real enough to act on their own:

Transfer Figure by GJ Gillespie 

“Once a character is created, that character must think and act as if he were real. For our purposes the character is real. … It is common for authors to talk about their characters taking on a life of their own. This is the way it should be. Authors also talk about characters taking over a story and turning it in a different direction than the one the author had intended it to go. This is a normal part of writing and should not be resisted. Let your characters do what they will do.”

Intentionality – the free will to act – is an attribute of moral agents. A personality willing to behave in a certain way implies that he or she has inward thoughts and intensions unobservable by outward actions. Vividly rendered characters set in a story’s drama assume a volitional identity separate from the consciousness of the author. Is this subtle observation from creative writing evidence for the feasibility of artificial consciousness? If full-blown autonomous AI is asking too much, perhaps advanced neural net simulations of persons will yield a hybrid consciousness in which humans suspend disbelief to accept robots as one of their own?

Critics of AI argue that the self cannot be reduced. But, fiction writing seems to show that human thought and personhood is reducible on one level: an author is able to translate holistic images of a character into the analogical code of written language. The result can be a compelling, life-like persona able to step off the page to influence author and readers alike. Because self-reference is birthed by taking the perspective of others, the literary concept of point of view is one of the most powerful techniques that an author uses to create the feeling that we are encountering an authentic person. Readers are invited to take the perspective of characters. By seeing through the character’s eyes, the reader’s thoughts are synchronized with the character’s pattern, causing alignments of empathy – just as occurs in all forms of inter-subjectivity shared in social groups (Schnieder). Like Mead’s doctrine of role taking, aspects of the fictional character is assimilated into the reader’s self. This cognitive basis for reader receptivity produces the uncanny feeling of encountering a real person.

The creative process begins with a flash of intuition as an author sees in the mind’s eye the idea of the character. The writing process may require that an author “gets to know the character” by thinking vividly about him or her before setting pen to paper. The character therefore exists in the author’s mind in addition to its life in the story. The reader completes the feedback loop by becoming immersed in the story and receiving the character in his or her mind. The character moves from influencing the author’s imagination to influencing the reader’s. Once embedded in the reader’s consciousness it may become nearly as real as other persons. As Norman Holland says concerning reader receptivity, “it is we who re-create the characters and give them a sense of reality. In Shakespeare's phrase, we give ‘to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’” (278).

In, “Hamlet’s Big Toe: Neuropsychology and Literary Characters,” Holland discusses how literary theorists have over the years viewed the reality of characters. Realist critics beginning in the neo-classical period considered literary characters as real people. The realist view was typified by Maurice Morgann's influential essay of 1777 in which he noticed that strong characters have a charisma that transcends the author’s mind: “As writers like to say, ‘The character took on a life of his own.’ [or] ‘The character himself decided what he was going to do.’” Holland says that Morgann “practically invented” the realist concept of character.

Valleri by GJ Gillespie

Cognitive science is unraveling mysteries of the mind in support of more realistic AI. For Douglas Hofstadter, the feedback loop of Gödelian brain processes explains our own sense of being real, authentic persons. We are symbolic constructs no less than characters.

He goes on to say that while the self resides primarily in one brain, the self-symbol pattern may resonate in other minds, so that spouses or friends share aspects of the same soul. He asserts that even imaginary characters of art and literature may develop enough depth to take on human-like identity. He quotes the artists M C Escher, whose paintings are used as metaphors for the strange loops of self-reference, saying that that as the artist worked, the characters and animals of his paintings came alive and told him how to construct the artwork. Escher reported, “It is as if they themselves decide on the shape in which they choose to appear. They take little account of my critical opinion during their birth and I cannot exert much influence on the measure of their development. They are very difficult and obstinate creatures” (387).

Hofstadter says that Escher’s conclusion that his creatures had free will is a “near perfect example of the near-autonomy of certain subsystem of the brain, once they are activated” (239). Other artists report a similar process of interacting with their strong willed creations. Cecily Brown says that during the creative act her paintings tell her what they want to become. “I take all of my cues from the paint. So it is a total back and forth between my will and the painting directing what to do next. The painting has a completely different idea than I do of what it should be” (Peck).

By composing narratives that mimic the same sociological conditions necessary for the development of the self, authors create a neural subsystem or a complex symbolic pattern resembling a self, which permits a character to assume a level of autonomous consciousness. Readers who come to think of the character as a genuine person share the character’s mental pattern. How real are these characters? 

James Phelan’s theory of literary personhood argues that a character has two facets – the mimetic, or how real the character is made to appear, and the synthetic, or in what ways a character is unlike reality. From the time of Aristotle, literary theory has maintained that art, as a means of commenting on the human condition, should imitate reality, but not copy it (Persesus.tufts.edu). Art, including the art of literature, is best when it communicates, what Kenneth Burke calls, “perspective by incongruity” (Burke). The goal of art is not to reproduce reality, but to inform it. In order to invite the reader to identify with the story, an author will create the “illusion of a plausible person,” giving his or her character the “mimetic dimensions” of reality” (Phelan).

It is undeniable that if strong artificial intelligence is achieved it will be just that – an artifact of human creativity. At the same time the “soul” of the virtual person may become real enough to pass the Turning Test of carrying on conversation exactly like a human being. If realistic fictional characters currently demonstrate hints of causal powers made through the medium of stories, possessing a personal charisma that surprises both author and reader, why not through the medium of software? Efforts to build life-like robots are underway at Honda (Coxworth) and the DAPRA defense department (Chow).

In a few years robots may be as common as lap top computers or smart phones. But, compared to building a life-like robot, an author inventing a character is technically much easier. Unlike physical robots, a literary character’s physiology is inferred and may be unspecified. Physical appearances of the body are given only when it is necessary to tell the story. The character remains believable because the reader willingly participates in the construction of the persona by a suspension of disbelief. As we have seen, when all of the dramatistic elements of the story world are added, the character takes on causative intentionality. According to the testimony of the vast majority of authors, as well as readers who become enthralled by realistic characters, literature-as-AI succeeds where robotics has thus far failed – the artificial self in literature is an actor initiating what it will do and where it will go. Granted that the character borrows the minds of the author and reader to assume volitional identity, its will to action still resembles the sought after causative intentionality missing from known robots today.

IV Suspending Disbelief:

The developmental conditions that generate selves in society could one day be simulated to create believable artificial selves in virtual worlds. Already video gamers report that non-player agents are beginning to act like persons with, “a mind of their own,” showing emergent, unscripted behavior (Johnson).

The full acceptance of virtual persons will be achieved only when technology passes the “uncanny valley” barrier – a term computer animators use for the point at which people experience revulsion upon seeing a nearly real human face, similar to the disgust of looking at a corpse. The closer to reality animation becomes, the eerier the reaction. This is why some animators purposely simplify

human characters so that players will immediately recognize that a character is not real. Raja Koduri, a graphics technology officer with Image Metrics, who worked on the creation of the life-like Emily predicts that techniques will continue to improve so that the line between what is real and rendered will be completely blurred around 2020 (Richards).

Video game companies have long created cyber universes for entertainment purposes. Constructing one specifically as an experiment in human communication could be useful. Like a particle accelerator looking for new subatomic properties, we could then study the virtual society for evidence of intelligence in characters. The first realistically simulated agents accepted as persons may take the form of characters in video game-like worlds.

Future programs may grant artificial humans a richness of dramatistic detail approaching the experiences of a real person equipped with emotional introspection and free will to act. In this sense, virtual persons may be like richly rendered fictional characters – only with the ability to interact with the viewer, creating the possibility

Sloop John B by GJ Gillespie

of inter-subjective relationships. The ability to speak to characters and have them respond would become a spectacular new genre of fiction. The next step might be to build a robotic body for the artificial self to become actors in our world. Science fiction, as it has done numerous times in the past, would be realized.

Synthetic persons intrigue us because we sense that we resemble them – a self-constructed by society. In our desire to become authentic, we identify with them, just as readers have fallen for fictional heroes for generations. Heroes of myths and protagonists of literature have always been our teachers, informing us of our humanity. By providing a vital reference point for our center of narrative gravity, we learn from them who we are. Since traditionally we are tempted to accept literary characters as real, how much more will robots beguile us? 

Advancements in artificial intelligence could surprise us. Some day when confronted by an artificial self we might react the same way we do when reaching out to touch what we think is a bouquet of silk flowers only to discover that the arrangement is real. Then the dream of Pygmalion and Pinocchio will come true.




Works Cited

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Divinity of Christ 2. The Scriptures declare: His virgin birth -- When Myth became Fact.

From the stone age storytellers have shown religious longings. Stories of a god-like hero who comes to save a community appear cross culturally for thousands of years. Instead of rejecting religious longings, we can think of these age old desires for faith as signposts leading us to faith in the historic person of Jesus.

Carl Jung introduced the idea of archetypes that appear cross culturally that tap into unconscious truths that each culture shares. These archetypes seem to be built into the structure of the mind, like a deep structured grammar -- an empty space that seeks to be filled. 

We can think of the virgin birth of Christ as a fulfillment of ancient longings.  Unlike the gods of folklore and myth, Christ was actually an historical person. Yet, the story of his birth follows the structure of any good narrative type.

We all enjoy a good story. But, we usually are even more impressed when a good story is also non-fiction or is "based on actual events".

The narrative of Christ's birth seems like the birth of other divine-like heroes of mythic times.

But, there are curious departures from the expected archetype. Unlike the mythological heroes who are portrayed as a descendant of the gods, Jesus is both fully God and fully human. No other "incarnation" of other religions (such as the Hindu gods who only appear human) have this quantum mechanics-like dual nature.

The Greek and Roman folktale figure Hercules was the son of Zeus and a mortal woman -- making him half god or a demi-god. The Hindu Krishna is fully divine and only takes on the appearance of a human.  The ancient emperors of China or ancient Mesopotamian kings were likewise fully divine.

Here the dual nature of Christ makes him stand out uniquely from the other gods of myth and folklore. when the formulation of the trinity adds something new that resembles quantum paradoxes. 

He Arose after Caravaggio by GJ Gillespie

Literary scholar C.S. Lewis argues that myth is a kind of deep structured grammar imbedded in the human imagination that unlocks truths that social progression is unable to realize otherwise. In When Myth became Fact, Lewis holds that literary images such as the divine hero told in prehistoric stories are necessary mental forms to help future generations understand what God was doing in history. He says that stories that formed the basis for pagan religions prepared our minds to accept the coming of Christ as an historical reality. The voice of imagination acts like an antenna for actualities to come.

"The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact," Lewis argued. 

"The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens — at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle." 

(C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 66-67.) 

The myths about the demi-gods and heroes our age old longing for an accessible encounter with the divine have been fulfilled in the coming of Jesus Christ. The stories of the mythic gods prepared us for accepting Jesus as God in fact. 

What is exciting about Christianity is that it fulfills all the best parts of all of the other religions.  We see Jesus as a fulfillment of the pagan stories of the divine savior. We can think of God as a human person with a body.

God's Spirit fills every point of space, fulfilling the faith of tribal animists who believe that spirits indwell natural objects such as trees or mountains. The Christian shares the believe that nature is filled with a Spirit, but God's Spirit isn't part of nature. God's mind created and observes nature and so when we encounter nature we are close to God.

God is the one transcendent, unknowable Spirit (Hinduism, Buddhism) who is accessible to our imagination and language in the person of Jesus.

We also have a basis for knowing about the nature of God from scripture, which we believe is God communicating through the consciousness of inspired writers. These writers were influenced by their cultures so interpretation is still necessary.

Inspiration is not dictation. We say that the bible is composed of "the Word of God in the words of men." We trust the 27 books New Testament as well as the 39 of the Old Testament and look to these for insights of God's will. Here are recorded the stories and teachings of men and women who had a close relationship with God and revealed his thinking about humanity.

If a personal God exists we would expect that this Being would try to communicate with us. The bible is our most accessible message from the Divine Being. 

A prophecy in the Old Testament foretold the coming of a universal savior who would be born of a virgin.  “Behold the virgin shall conceive and give birth to a son, and he shall be called Immanuel, meaning, with us is God.” (Isaiah 7:14) For God to be with us as a human we would expect a dramatic departure from the ways of biology as we know it.

The idea that Christ was conceived differently than any other person in history is unsurprising when we consider that Christ was the "Second Adam", or the human being who came to reverse the contamination of Adam's sin which lead to the current state of universal brokenness in society and nature. In other words, the DNA of Christ had to be unique from all others to break the inherited proclivity for radical separation from God's mind. Human DNA is in a spiritual state of brokenness along with all features of this universe.

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It takes the mind of the incarnate Christ to repair the universal brokenness by his perfected divine-human dual nature. In other words, Christ needs to observe each feature of the universe, from the subatomic, to the everyday to the cosmic universal. In his observation he judges it and refines it and redeems it. Our spirit or inner being is saved when we respond to the observation of Christ by accepting his judgement and salvation. 

His observation makes us into the people that he wants us to be. An ordinary person would be unable to transform us by this intense quantum level observation. Only Christ, who is the Creator and fellow human, the dual natured God-man, is able to observe our constituent information and reform that information by his evaluation.

Unlike the natural "selfish gene" of biological reproduction which seeks to foster survival of specific traits, Christ's morally perfect DNA introduced the "unselfish gene" in human society which fulfills the purpose to heal universal brokenness and save humanity.

The doctrine of the virgin birth is necessary to create the unique God-man Jesus. He had to differ from ordinary humans to break the fundamental brokenness of time, space matter and society. Christ introduces the true evolutionary leap in human development that permits us now to be reborn into his family line that will signify the future of saved humanity. 

Although we say that Christ is fully human, Christians believe that Jesus is a unique person in the history of the world. We believe that his conception was likewise an unique event.  Just as the Big Bang started from nothing but the will of God, so the virginal conception of the Savior was a divine act without natural antecedent.

In the same way that virtual particles pop into existence from apparently nothing, so the random superpositions of subatomic particles could be re-arranged by the will of God with a different statistical algorithm to produce a unique fertilized egg in the womb of Mary. Since at its core all objects and phenomena are information, this information pattern could be re-arranged by God for a specific purpose of producing the perfect human DNA of the embryonic Christ who would then grow up to possess the redemptive consciousness needed to repair the universal brokenness.

By sending the virgin born Christ, God was injecting a healing quantum serum into the veins of civilization. We all need our flawed genetic condition treated by this "unselfish gene" therapy. We experience this radical salvation of our inner most being when we become a part of the family of God.

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Divinity of Christ 1

Divinity of Christ 2

Divinity of Christ 3

Divinity of Christ 4

Divinity of Christ 5

Three Haikus

Rain hits skylight
Refrigerator Hums
Furnace switches on















Like toddlers from cribs 
Evergreen fingers reach
Into clouds

With jumbo bam bam
Unhinged vagabonds 
Sling the warhead 

Feast

Tuna Fishermen after Dali by GJ Gillespie

by GJ Gillespie

Drifting into nothing

Delightful wishes vanquished

The steady beat of vain hopes

Continue unabated 

While twilight dissolves above
And hearty insects recite  
Anthems of bitter longing
Calculating final degradation 

When best intentions and

Imaginations run amiss
 

Then dare we taste and sip 
Flesh and blood replenished

Last Supper after Dali by GJ Gillespie

Divinity of Christ 1. Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God: Communication is at the Heart of Reality

"Fifty years ago, the universe was generally looked on as a machine … When we pass to extremes of size in either direction --whether to the cosmos as a whole, or to the inner recesses of the atom--the mechanical interpretation of nature fails. We come to entities and phenomena which are in no sense mechanical. To me they seem less suggestive of mechanical than of mental processes; the universe seems to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine." 

Astronomer James Jeans --

cited in Kowalski, Gary, Science and the Search for God. New York: Lantern Books, 2003. p 19.

Comments on the Divinity of Christ Creed

By GJ Gillespie

We believe that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God.

The Scriptures declare:

His virgin birth

His sinless life

his miracles

His substitutionary work on the cross

His bodily resurrection from the dead

and

His exhalation at the right hand of God.

For centuries believers have affirmed these propositions concerning the divinity of Christ. We recite this creed at my church.

Why are these ideas profound? Let's look at each proposition in more detail.

1. Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God:
Communication is at the Heart of Reality

We believe that God must have the powers of a person since only a person loves. Human love is something extraordinary in the universe. It is a clue that ultimate reality must be something like it. 

If God were a force or principle that would make him less than a human person -- less than yourself -- and thus unworthy of your attention. For example, wouldn't it be strange for someone to worship the force of gravity? Or to make an electrical field into a god. That would be like the ancient practice of idol worship when people built gods of material objects. 

God must be at least as special as a human person, aware of what is happening and able to experience relationships. Only a person can love. Whatever created us must be at least as good as a person.

It is much more likely to say that God is not only personal but more personal that we can understand. Divine personhood is of a different category than we observe in daily life because God is more personal than is imaginable. We could say that God is supra-personal. 

Christian teachers tell us that God is three persons in one being -- Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Three co-equal persons in one nature. When first encountered, the trinity seems strange, but turns out to be essential for consciousnesses to exist. 

This creed statement that Jesus Christ is the Eternal Son of God affirms that communication and community is at the heart of reality -- or is the source of reality as the Ground of Being. There is communication within the nature of God. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and the Holy Spirit loves the Father and loves the Son and so on forever.

Or as scripture says, "God is love."  The communication going on within the nature of God is self sufficient. His love is with out reference to any created person. Even if God never chose to create a universe, he would still be love.

Everyone knows that love must be the meaning of human existence. In a letter to a woman who wrote asking for a word of inspiration for her son, physicists Richard Feynman near the end of his life replied: Tell your son to stop trying to fill your head with science — for to fill your heart with love is enough.

(Sykes, Christopher Simon, No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman, 1996, by, p 161.)

Christianity gives a rational source for this love in the ultimate love that goes on in the nature of God. The book of James states in 1: 17 that: "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows."

Humans benefit from the outplaying of divine love when we share the gift of conscious awareness, enjoyment of relationships and contemplation of beauty and the experience of joy. 

The doctrine of the trinity diverges from polytheism -- or belief in three gods -- since the three persons are of one substance. Rather the triune nature of God reflects the same semiotic processes that make any meaning possible in each mind. Semiotics is the study of how symbols produce meaning. All linguistic processes require a sort of trinity of the mind -- a connection between a person's thought, the objects observed and the symbols or words used to communicate.

Communication scholars Osgood and Richard's Triangle of Meaning uses the terms Reference, Referent and Symbol. Another theorist, Charles Sanders Peirce uses the terms Sign (words or symbols), Object (thing experienced) and Interpretant (person making observations).

A conscious person contemplates a referential object or idea and the meaning that is achieved in this process gives coherence to the subject and object as a unified whole. A person becomes aware of meaning when the referent that is sensed is understood by language. So, we have a person, a referent (idea, object, experience) and the language or imagery that connects them.

These semiotic models resemble the Christian doctrine of trinity explaining the communicative nature of God. Here there are three persons each playing a role in the Being of God. God the Father is like the Object or Referent. The Son of God is like the Sign and the Holy Spirit is the Interpretant. The parallels fit neatly since any kind of consciousness demands a triad of three in oneness.

It turns out that the connection mesh well because, as philosophers of religion have pointed out, these and other triads of the mind were inspired by the trinity as conceptualized by Augustine and then Hegel. Peirce is said to have been greatly influenced by Hegel. 

Moreover, the concept of three in one equal but distinct seems to provide a workable method for understanding how the mind works in creating meaning. There are crucial features which make the trinity the only candidate to explain how the conscious mind produces and shares meaning.

We do not think of the trinity as belief in three gods any more than we think of the triangle of meaning as three separate properties. All three are equal and necessary for meaning to be realized. Yet, each is unique and separate at the same time. There is a "three in oneness" in both the divine trinity and semiotic triangle. Perhaps we could say that God is a cosmic Triangle of Meaning, a fountain head of all meaning and real communication.

Notice also that meaning requires community -- or the coming together of persons in a common bond of shared language and culture. The individual person only gains the resources of language from the community. An isolated individual without a community would never acquire language or the power of semiotic thought. Child abuse cases demonstrate why community -- or at least three persons -- is required for language, love and meaning to exist. As a normal child grows up he or she acquires the third leg in the triangle by "borrowing the minds" of adults, taking on the perspective of parents or role models, mimicking their identities to achieve their own. In this way a child grows up as both an individual and a member of the collective community. This is called inter-subjectivity -- taking on the perspective of others to gain ones own. 

Without community -- or the three-in-oneness principle -- there can be no shared meaning, communication or love. Therefore viewing God as a single mind -- what is called monism --denies the possibility that God would have a consciousness required to love and be loved.

When we consider that the trinity is incomprehensible we are reminded of the mysteries of recent discoveries in quantum mechanics.  Paradoxical features of quantum reality have been proven by scientific investigation. Light for example is both a wave and a particle at the same time. This counter-intuitive property is known as the wave--particle duality. Just as strange, subatomic particles are able to exist in two (or more) places at the same time. These are not illusions or metaphors but physical realities on the microscopic scale.

The physicist Niels Bohr once said: "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."  (Gribbin, John, Mary Gribbin, In Search of Schrodinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality, University Press, 1984.)

Richard Feynman, who understood the physics of quantum mechanics better than anyone, concluded that actually: "Nobody understands quantum mechanics." (Rosenblum, Bruce and Kuttner, Fred, Quantum Enigma, Oxford Press, 2006, p 80)

When Feynman made his famous diagram he said that there are some properties of quantum reality that are so strange that we don't even have a metaphor to contain them. We know by objective experiment that these paradoxes are real (not theory) but we are unable to intuitively conceive of them without great mental effort.

"Our imagination is stretched to the utmost," he said, "not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there. (Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, 1965. )

Here is the Feynman diagram which attempts to graphically illustrate quantum mysteries that take place on an unimaginably small microscopic scale.  The stuff that forms our world is made of positive and negative electrons interacting with packets of energy called quanta that travel forward and backward in time (could be what this means).

In the same way that certain realities about the physical universe are nearly impossible to conceptualize, the closest metaphor that a human mind might grasp about the divine nature is to say that God's consciousness is like the love between a father and a son in a family. Christ as the "Son of God" alludes to the inheritance rights of a first born son of ancient Hebrew culture, the one who has equal legal standing with the father and acts in his stead. Two persons with one substance.

In this sense, Christ the Son of God becomes the necessary intermediary between the wholly other God the Father and human beings in the material universe. Like the yellow light between a red and green light of a traffic signal, we now have the possibility to mediate our limited consciousness with divine meaning and know something about God through the person of Jesus Christ. 

World without End by GJ Gillespie

In fact, traditional Christian belief attributes the creation of the universe to Jesus Christ -- the one who is wholly God and wholly human at the same time. While this doctrine of the dual nature of Christ  -- who is the simultaneously divine and human Creator --  like the trinity seems strange at first, the divine-human dual natural may provide an explanation for how the information of the universe came into being. 

With the advent of Quantum Mechanics, especially the Copenhagen School which argues that reality requires conscious observation, physicists have introduced us to a strange world that at its core is, in the words of Shakespeare, made of the airy stuff of dreams. Rather than the hard stuff of everyday experience, reality most basically exists because information is being perceived by some kind of Interpretant.
 

So we might ask who dreamed up the universe? Who provided the informational scaffolding that holds up time, space, matter and fundamental forces?

Quantum theory argues that there must be a conscious observation of particles before those particles become reality. It takes conscious activity to "collapse the superpositions" of the virtual particles to physically make the universe real.  This observer can't be the all knowing God the Father exactly since he would presumably already be aware of all positions. It would take a mind that is limited, like a human-like mind to make these observations within the physical universe.

Theologians grappling with how an infinite personal Being might interact with the world say that when Christ became incarnate he did not lose any of his all knowing attributes since God is immutable or is incapable of changing. Instead the incarnate Christ took on human nature in addition to his divine nature. Theologians maintain that in order to act in the physical universe -- and interact with humans -- God "condescended' from the first moment of creation taking a "covenantal" or human like perspective in addition to his all-encompassing divine perspective.

Pehraps we can think of God in Christ "condesending" in the way that the author of a story "enters into the story" by imagining the perspective of his or her characters. The author is aware of his or her own world, but for the purposes of creative writing imagines that he or she is a body acting in the story. The author may even communicate with characters, telling them what to do in his mind. Similarity, characters sometimes "take over" a story and choose to act in ways independent of the author's initial will. 

Divine condescension -- God getting into the story -- explains how an omniscient mind would not collapse all positions in the universe at once.

Once a particle is observed its "wave function" become set for ever. For example if a photon is consciously viewed as a particle is becomes a particle forever. And, counter intuitively, the observation effect works backward in time. Once it is observed as a particle, it has always been a particle or always been a wave caused by the observation in our time.

All Fall Down by GJ Gillespie

The fact the consciousness forms reality is called the "quantum enigma" and suggests that the acts of a mind is necessary for physical reality to exist. Some physicists discount the enigma by assuring us that the effects only occur on a very small scale that is invisible to the macro world we live in. But, Rosenblum and Kuttner point out ignoring this proven feature of physics isn't enough since the macro world is made up of the microscopic world. "Quantum mechanics applies to everything", they argue. (Rosenblum and Kuttner, p 15)

If God is all knowing, then all of the positions would already be observed. But, if God limits his knowing, in the same way that my wife working on a painting for two hours limits her knowing what is going on with current events on the internet. An artist condescends by focusing attention on the artifact being created. It is a limiting of the mind that permits novel information or patterns to pop up. The nature of the final artifact, such as a story, poem or painting, is never quite what the creator imagined at the start. This is the mystery of creativity. The exciting effects of limiting a mind and letting the artifact take over.  The creative act requires discipline of a focused mind, wholly committed to seeing the vision for the art fulfilled.

Perhaps God is acting in the same way that the human artist, sculptor, poet, composer or painter "gets into" the created work, focuses on it intensely, sometimes so intensely that everything else in the world fades away. The artifact becomes the center of attention above all else, even sleep or eating. 

It could be that God chooses not to collapse all superpositions because he is playing along -- as if he were a human-like actor in the universe, limiting his all-knowing mind for a time to see what emerges.

While some have argued that the universe evolved to the stage of the first human who looked back on it to create it retroactively or that this first observer was Adam of biblical narrative, it seems more plausible to accept that the conscious observer is God the Son exactly as set forth by scripture such as the book of Colossians 1:15 -- 17. 

"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." 

Christ as the Word of God spoke the universe into being, providing the information that makes up the structure of reality. In addition, the semiotic-like mind of Christ holds all things together like grammar holds the meaning of a sentence together.  Christ is the universal "Logos" or underlining meaning behind all that we experience.

Or, put negatively, with out God we lack the grammar to understand meaningful patterns in the data of experience. Some non-Christians believe that the realization that there is no linguistic-like binding force behind phenomena is key to enlightenment. They will say that we need to extinguish this desire to see an encompassing oneness or nothingness. 

The Christian creeds offer a life affirming perspective. Ultimate reality isn't nothingness. But, is a Person. And all that we experience is a divine artifact. The creeds permit us to hear the rhythms of a celestial music. Behind reality rings the Music of the Spheres. The composer is an awesome, creative God. 

Unsurprisingly, string theory -- one of the newest candidates to explain cosmic origins -- also refers to  a musical metaphor. This proposal of theoretical physicists suggests that at the smallest scale -- 10 meters to the negative 33 (ten with 33 zeros after it) -- there are tiny "strings" that exist at the border of time of space. The vibration of the strings forms larger scale objects. When the string vibrate at one frequency, a carbon atom emerges. At another frequency, helium atoms or other material properties pop into existence. In this view, the "music of the spheres" literally forms reality.

The string is not really a physical object since it is so small even time and space break down. It appears more like an idea or a mathematical algorithm. Could these strings be the expression of thoughts of the communicative, triune God as laid out in the creed? Such a perspective would be an eloquent explanation. The mystery and beauty of universe is the outplaying of a musical score,

Physicist John Archibald Wheeler argued that the universe can be rendered down most basically to information. That everything -- it -- comes down to bits. This is the It from Bits theory.

"[I]t is not unreasonable to imagine that information sits at the core of physics, just as it sits at the core of a computer. It from bit. Otherwise put, every 'it'—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.

'It from bit' symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe. (John Archibald Wheeler 1990: 5)

What good is it to say that information exists without a mind to process and contemplate it? While Wheeler took a monist perspective of eastern religion that each person is really part of a divine consciousness without realizing it, the Christian will say that the observation of information that forms the bits that make up reality come from the mind of the Triune God. This mind is surpra-personal and capable of great love.

Could this mind that produced the cosmic information be a "Universal Consciousness"? Could the universe have a mind and we are simply part of that mind? That is unlikely. 

Think back to the triangle of meaning. For the perception of information to make sense, to produce meaning, there must be three in one. Three aspects are required for information to exist: We need information, perception of the information and an object that the information is about.

But, if "all is one" -- the expression of a single mind only -- then there would be no place for information and no need to communicate about it to anyone.

Usually artists and writers are interested in how their art form will be appreciated by others. Great artists or writers have large audiences of admirers. That is what makes them great.

Love requires communication -- first in the community that makes language possible, then between at least two persons. There must be interaction between persons. 

While the monist universe could not be the source of its own information since information requires the semiotic triad, the Christian perspective is that God is One, but God is also Three at the same time. Three in Oneness. It is from the communication within this Being that the information we see in the universe comes to exist. In fact, we are made up of this information.

All we know, including ourselves, are artifacts of a divine mind that stands far outside of the universe. We are made in God's image, able to participate in the appreciation of the beauty of universe and -- most important -- form loving relationships. To love and be loved. 

Traditional theology posits that humans also take part in the development of the universe since God chooses to use us in his restorative work. God loves each human being and has a plan for each person. We are God's handiwork created to enter into relationship with him and can know his plan for our lives.

When we accept that Jesus Christ is the Eternal Son of God we are saying that our lives and the universe have meaning that is back-lit by an after glow of a love that is so great it forged the explosion of the Big Bang.  As astronomer James Jeans once suggested, the advent of quantum mechanics makes the universe appear more like a thought than a mechanical object.  Its the thought that counts.

http://trumanfalkner.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/creation.jpg

There are beneficial philosophical implications to viewing the universe as a grand thought of a loving Being instead of a blind mechanistic object.

Our reality becomes an artifact of beauty and mystery that can be experienced meaningfully. Our world can be enjoyed like a work of art.

"And God said, 'Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good...'" Genesis 1: 3, 4a.

This passage supports the information theory basis for reality. God chooses to permit information to enter his consciousness. He then speaks this information meaningfully which results in the appearance of a world. Finally, he evaluates or experiences it.  Could this progression mean precisely that God's conscious conception of primordial-information is what led to the collapse the wave function and the birth of reality? 

At its core, matter, space, time and fundamental forces rest on divine algorithms that make up universal complexity. But, since the Creator is more like an artist than an engineer he observes that it is good. This is the inner information states of aesthetic experience. The universe as an artifact of the communicative Triune God is embedded with experiential meaning that can be enjoyed by persons. 

The mind of God is then able to contemplate the information as an artist might appreciate his or her handiwork, producing the phenomenological response of subjective knowledge that forms the basis for values and aesthetic appreciation.

Instead of mechanistic, digital processes we might expect in a dead, static cosmos, we find that the universe is a grand thought that rings with analogical information more like cosmic poetry or music than mathematical equations.  God's existential observation become a fountain for all beauty.  And we can drink from this fountain.

We do not confuse the universe for God. Nor do we think of ourselves are part of the divine mind unaware. Rather, the universe is like a house that is inhabited by a charismatic owner. The personality of this owner fills the physical house with immaterial joy. Our mind is like his, just as a child's mind is like a parents -- similar but not identical.

So on one hand there is the measurable information of objective science, physics and psychology, while on the other the subjective appreciation (phenomenology) of beauty, love, truth and religious meaning.  By knowing the mind of Christ, human beings now have a trustworthy path to enter into a knowledge of true values and beauty. This experiential appreciation of the cosmic information then forms the basis for arts and ethics and authentic religious experience. Reality exists because the Triune God speaks it into being in accord with information theory. Since it is highly valued by his omnipresent observation we know that it is a thing of beauty and love.

Accepting Christ as the eternal Son of God and Creator of the Universe provides an infinite reference point upon which meaning can be realized. Instead of a "castle in the sky" without any firm foundation, language has a solid ground in the consciousness of the Creator. The Mind of Christ which exists at every point in space and time then experiences his creation, from the most minute micro level to the cosmic macro level, imbuing it with value. Likewise, God as our Creator knows each person fully, providing the possibility of knowing our true selves as well. We can join in the observations of this divine mind, thus experiencing eternal joy, love, acceptance and purpose.

                                                                                                         
Faith is turning toward God. Away from the absolute cold in the abyss of nothingness, and toward the warmth of God's love. We might turn just a little bit toward God. That may be enough. We can learn to hear the music of the spheres.

Why settle for knowing about God when knowing God is possible? 

An alternative universe is open to us when we say yes to Christ. Everything changes. We find peace, meaning, purpose, freedom from guilt and drink from the headwaters of all beauty. 

Exploring an Alternative Universe

One technique for developing faith is the experiment of "suspension of disbelief". This is a first step toward experiencing reality as a follower of Christ. 

For a set time you may choose to accept the perspective that you are an artifact of a loving, all knowing Being who wants to know and communicate with you. 

Try it out for a while and see if it makes sense. If a communicative God exists behind reality and at every point in time and space, it should be possible to tap into the lines of communication that is flowing in that Being.

Prayer is simply talking to God. Request that he help you believe and reveal himself to you. Then wait for the feedback in some event or inner knowledge to confirm your faith. 

Interaction with Christian friends during this experiment also helps if you know some believers.

An essential part of this experiment in faith is to read up on the Word of God in the bible to get acquainted with the mind of Christ as he interacted with people. Find a bible and read the Book of John and be open to hear the voice of God speak to your inner life.

NOTE: post a comment below and I will pray for you about your new faith journey. 

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