Yes, we can't escape metaphysics no matter how we try to deny ourselves in the process. And that's exactly what the materialist-techie types do. They believe “the human mind consists of electrical and chemical components that are unintelligent in themselves”; however, “By using their own minds and consciousness to deny the significance of consciousness in minds, they refute themselves.”
'But you can’t prove consciousness is immaterial', they may say.
Sure, but Gödel already demonstrated that mathematical statements can be true but unprovable. So why deny yourself some Truth too?
This is always the problem with super-AI proponents: they sell up their machines while selling themselves short; when the measure of AI should be the human mind. (Gilder notes: the human mind is “low-power, distributed globally, low-latency in proximity to its environment, inexorably bounded in time and space, and creative in the image of its creator.”)
Such is also the issue with Google. Gilder says,
“The Google system of the world focuses on the material environment rather than on human consciousness, on artificial intelligence rather than human intelligence, on machine learning rather than on human learning, on relativistic search rather than on the search for truth, on copying rather than on creating, on launching human hierarchies in a flat universe rather than on empowering human beings in a hierarchical universe. It seeks singularities in machines rather than in human minds. The new system of the world must reverse these positions, exalting the singularities of creation: mind over matter, human consciousness over mechanism, real intelligence over mere algorithmic search, purposeful learning over mindless evolution, and truth over chance. A new system can open a heroic age of human accomplishment.”In the book, Gilder believes the “new system of the world” will be blockchains. Unlike the Markov chains of disconnected probabilistic states that Google uses, blockchains use hashes to preserve history, enhance trust, and extend truth. We would own our information, instead of it being overly centralized with risk to security, privacy, and actual costs.
Blockchains will be the low-entropy carrier to our high-entropy creativity!
Gilder says, “The inevitable conclusion is that machines based on mathematical logic cannot exhaust the human domain; they can only expand it. Every new mechanism frees the human mind for more creative adventures and accomplishments.” The question is whether or not blockchain will be the new mechanism that frees us evermore going forward.
In the end, I would rather place my bet on a technology that aligns with Gödel than one that tries to play God.
The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful. — Jaron Lanier