Takaways from John Gray's Straw Dogs on society, AI and Life.

I have just finished reading John Gray’s Straw Dogs, which is a collection of short philosophical pieces and essays on the subject of “humans and other animals.” “Other animals” is perhaps more reflective of John’s belief that we, too, are just another animal, rather than the book actually being about animals. The book is great; I highly recommend it.

The book was published all the way back in 2003. I found it in a thrift store in San Francisco, and the title caught my attention. I didn’t realize at the time that I would be reading a book that has some incredibly pertinent points that relate to the world we now face with AI.

A couple of pieces I found particularly interesting: one section about a French political and philosophical movement known as the Situationist International, and particularly a gentleman by the name of Guy Debord, who wrote a book called The Society of the Spectacle. While not talking about our modern times, it happened to be ahead of its time, speaking to the nature of individuals to mediate and shape their lives based on images rather than direct human experience. It is a very direct critique of modern society and consumer culture that we experience today.

Another section that was fascinating to read is titled “The Soul in the Machine.” The idea is that machines may one day create their own language, more complicated than our own, to communicate in ways beyond our comprehension. Of course, people will say this is unlikely because AI is trained on our data and has no way of coming up with something new, but I think there’s a good chance this could well be true.

The Soul in the Machine

Those who fear conscious machines do so because they think that consciousness is the most valuable feature of humans, and because they fear anything they cannot subject to their will. They fear the evolution of conscious machines for the same reason they seek to become masters of the Earth.

As machines slip from human control, they will do more than become conscious. They will become spiritual beings, whose inner life is no more limited by conscious thought than ours. Not only will they think and have emotions. They will develop the errors and illusions that go with self-awareness.

Thinking machines will surely have languages of their own. They will not be artificial languages, which convey only the conscious thoughts of their makers, but natural languages, no less rich and obscure than our own. Natural languages contain more meaning than their users can ever express. The vernacular languages of machines will soon be more eloquent than the artificial languages of humans.

Esperanto was meant to be a transparent medium for our thoughts; but if it ever comes to be as widely spoken as English, it will be just as opaque. In the same way, the artificial intelligences we are now devising will evolve to talk to one another, and to us, in ways no one fully understands. Like us, the talking machines of the future will find themselves saying more than they can ever tell.

Everyone asks whether machines will someday be able to think as humans do. Few ask whether machines will ever think like cats or gorillas, dolphins or bats. Scientists searching for extra-terrestrial life ponder anxiously whether mankind is alone in the universe. They would be better occupied trying to communicate with the dwindling numbers of their animal kin.

Descartes described animals as machines. The great cogitator would have been nearer the truth if he had described himself as a machine. Consciousness may be the human attribute that machines can most easily reproduce. It may be in their capacity for consciousness that humans and the machines they are now devising are most alike.

The digital world was invented as an extension of human consciousness, but it soon transcended it. In future, the digital world will outreach even the minds of machines. The virtual universe created by the World Wide Web cannot be grasped by any mind. According to George Dyson, “No digital universe can ever be completely mapped.” New technologies are creating a new wilderness, a realm that humans can wander in without ever understanding. The emergence of a virtual wilderness does not compensate for the loss of the earthly one that humans are destroying, but it is like it in being unknowable by them. The new wilderness is a pathway leading beyond the borders of the human world. As Margulis and Sagan have written: “the Gaian meaning of technology reveals itself: as a human-mediated but not a human phenomenon, whose applications stand to expand the influence of all life on Earth, not just humanity.”

As machines evolve, they will come, to use a way of speaking that long predates Christianity, to have souls. In the words of Santayana: “Spirit is itself not human; it may spring up in any life; it may detach itself from any provincialism; as it exists in all nations and religions, so it may exist in all animals, and who knows in many undreamt-of beings, and in the midst of what worlds?”

Throughout history and prehistory, animists have believed that matter is full of spirit. Why not welcome the living proof of this ancient faith?
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The last thing I want to mention is the last line of the book. As someone who is experiencing a fair amount of existential angst of late, the last paragraph gave me an interesting perspective with which to view the world.

“Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?”

I really love this framing. After all, there is no intrinsic meaning to life, but what we do know is that we’re going to experience it, good or bad.

What if the goal was simply to see?

Maybe we might seek some enjoyment in experience, whether that be travelling the world or merely observing our immediate surroundings, our breath, our family, our kids, the moment. I took from this the idea that perhaps the goal is simply to be more present.

Combine this with another quote I read recently, that it’s not possible to “become happy,” it is only possible to “be happy,” and I think you create a very humbling outline for how to be happy in the here and now.