CONFERENCE STATEMENT
Artificial Intelligence Turns Deep: Who's in Control?
64th Summer Conference of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that," said HAL in the most famous line in 2001: A Space Odyssey. So Dave had to disable HAL to regain control of the spaceship and dodge annihilation. From early myths of artificially created beings to today, the question "who's in control" has troubled us. Now it looks like we're really going to have to deal with it in our lifetimes. On the 50th anniversary of 2001, IRAS returns to considering the prospects, opportunities and dangers of artificial intelligence (AI), first discussed at an IRAS conference in 1968 by Marvin Minsky, a founder of AI research and a consultant to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke as they directed and created 2001. This conference will address how AI may shape our future and our ability to foresee and control that shaping.
Deep learning neural networks and advances in big data manipulation have led to rapid progress in machine learning and associated capabilities. Investment in AI will grow many-fold between 2016 and 2020, to at least a $50 billion industry. New AI products will enhance sales, data analysis, and diagnostic and predictive services for medicine, government, science and industry. We are on the cusp of creating machines that can operate in fields that require significant autonomy, such as self-driving vehicles and, ominously, weapon systems. AI algorithms will determine who makes parole, is approved for a loan or gets hired for a job by analyzing existing patterns that reflect societal bias and historical prejudice. This growing international commercial and governmental juggernaut, itself subject to concentrated and frequently unaccountable control, presents just one of AI's many challenges. How will humans identify and find meaning in life as the breadth of skills unique to living, sentient beings shrinks? The consequences of the interplay of AI and the human mind, and our very self-concepts, are likely to be equally profound. If we succeed in creating science fiction's "conscious" machine, what would be our duties to it (as well as its duties to us)? The values and orientations fostered by a religion and science perspective will be crucial to the responsible development and utilization of AI technology as it unfolds.
We will review the current state and potential future developments of AI technologies and consider the following questions as seen by AI experts and those in related fields:
• What are the true benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) for the future of society?
• How do we assure ourselves that all of society will truly benefit from AI?
• How can we avoid the various pitfalls that are now being debated concerning the control of AI in the future?
• What are the ethical, social, legal, and religious factors that ought to be considered to assure the benefits of AI for society?
• What is the appropriate role of religious wisdom and traditions in helping to maintain this control when considered in the more secular ethical, social, and legal circumstances?
• How can religious wisdom and traditions, in particular, inform more secular deliberations about controlling the future of AI?
• What are the roles of religion and science in contributing to the dialogue to optimize the benefits of AI to society?
• How can we create an ongoing process to maintain human control of the future of AI?
Terrence Deacon, Program Co-Chair
Sol Katz, Program Co-Chair
Abigail Fuller, Conference Co-Chair
Ted Laurenson, Conference Co-Chair
IRAS MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP FUND
Daniyaal Mustafa Beg is entering his third year as a computer science student at Queen Mary University of London. For his final year, he plans to complete a project that makes heavy use of AI and machine learning. Daniyaal has studied film and video. Coming from a modern religious family, he was exposed to the discussion of science and religion from a very early age. His grandfather has been a regular attendee of IRAS conferences for some time now.
SATURDAY EVENING
Sol Katz
Elliott, 7:30-9:00 pm
ABSTRACT
BIOSKETCH
Solomon H. Katz is emeritus director and professor at the Krogman Center for Child Growth and Development at the University of Pennsylvania. Katz is also a leading expert on the anthropology of food and served as Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (Scribner's, 2003), which was awarded many major awards including the Dartmouth Medal).
His work in the field of science and religion spans more than forty years, with leadership in the Institute for Religion in Age of Science (IRAS), in which he served as president from 1977-79 and 1981-84, president of CASIRAS (1988-2001), and associate editor and co-chair of the Joint Publication Board of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. He also served as secretary of Section H Anthropology of the AAAS and serves on several AAAS-wide committees including the Division of Science, Ethics and Religion.
He served as a Trustee of the Parliament of the World's Religions from 2003-2011 and is an elected fellow of the International Society of Science and Religion. He is an advisory board member of the Ocean Genome Legacy Marine Biodiversity Center of Northeastern University (2014-present). He also serves as the Chair of the American Anthropological Association Task Force on World Food Problems from 2007-present. Most recently, he is co-organizing with Dr. Thomas Reuter a new international program to document and preserve the diversity of indigenous people's traditional food preparation recipes in collaboration with the World Anthropology Association.
SUNDAY MORNING
ARTIFICIAL EVERYTHING
Bruce Naylor
Elliott, 9:15-10:15 am
ABSTRACT
Humans have discovered that we can use computers to simulate most anything in the universe for which we have a good understanding, at least in principal. This currently ranges from simulating the nucleus of atoms up to the birth and evolution of galaxies. This fact is of great significance as it establishes that an essential aspect of nature can be captured by computational mathematics over which we have considerable control.
Does this capacity for computer simulation extend to humans as well? The answer is trending towards YES, and the field of Artificial Intelligence is overtly pursuing that agenda. Although AI has been a sub-field of Computer Science since its inception, it has struggled to engineer practical systems. However, a sea change has occurred recently due to greater computational resources combined with algorithmic innovation.
Concurrent with this advance is comparable progress in virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR). Virtual reality attempts to synthesizes most all input to our senses to induce an experience of worlds which have no material embodiment. Augmented Reality mixes this with camera captured imagery of the real world, as is common in special effects used in movies. This new sensory synthesis technology is being combined with the new AI to provide powerful new capabilities.
What does all this mean for our future? A lot! We have already created specialized AI systems whose performance exceeds humans, such as playing Chess. What impact will AI have on employment? Many leading AI researchers see a super-human machine intelligence being achievable between 10-100 years in the future. What then? Will AI's decide humans are not only superfluous but also a danger to them? How do we make AI safe for us? Will machines achieve consciousness? Might we become hybrids of biology and machines? Much to ponder!
BIOSKETCH
Bruce is a Computer Scientist whose career has been dominated by research on computational simulations of the real world. This includes 3D gaming, wireless communications, computer aided design and manufacturing, and cognitive neuroscience. He has taught courses on AI for games, utilized AI for modeling human brain response to virtual worlds, and is building an Augmented Reality system in which AI vision plays a central role. He has been on the faculty at Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin, as well as spending a decade in research at Bell Labs. He currently is an adjunct Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine.
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Elliott and Porch, 10:15-11:00 am
PLENARY Q&A
Elliott, 11:00-12:15 pm
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
MACHINE ETHICS AND THE SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF MORAL AND SPIRITUAL
TEXTS
Mark Graves, Shapley-Booth Fellow
Elliott, 2:00-3:00 pm
ABSTRACT
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more sophisticated, autonomous, and pervasive, AI systems' ability to act beneficially for people and avoid extraneous harm must account for human values, ways of suffering, and possibilities for flourishing. Although humans become aware of morality and spirituality through culture, computers are not social animals and are better suited to create meaningful models from texts influencing or describing human morality and spirituality. As an initial investigation, I demonstrate using semantic analysis (I) to create a model of the language and topics for Thomas Aquinas's moral theology in Summa Theologica and (ii) to characterize the types of virtue found in World War II Holocaust rescuer interviews as compared with Nazi sympathizers and bystanders. By expanding the sources, methods, and applications of this approach, further work aims to develop more complete models of human morality and spirituality for better human self-understanding and to enable highly attuned machine ethics.
BIOSKETCH
Mark Graves is currently Visiting Research Assistant Professor at University of Notre Dame's Center for Theology, Science & Human Flourishing with his research occurring at the intersection of artificial intelligence, psychology, and theology. He earned his doctorate in computer science at University of Michigan in the area of artificial intelligence and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in genomics at Baylor College of Medicine as one of the first computer scientists to work on the Human Genome Project. He also studied systematic and philosophical theology at Graduate Theological Union (GTU) and Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and completed another postdoctoral fellowship in psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary on the psychology of virtue.
He has published technical and scholarly works in computer science, biology, psychology, and theology, including the books Designing XML Databases (2002), Mind, Brain, and the Elusive Soul (2008) and Insight to Heal: Co-Creating Beauty Amidst Human Suffering (2013) and taught courses engaging the relationship between science and religion at Santa Clara University; the Graduate Theological Union; University of California, Berkeley; and Fuller Theological Seminary. He also has ten years’ experience in biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and healthcare industries leading the development of database and analytics software for bioinformatics, neuroscience, and predictive health.
His current research in cultural analytics and machine ethics uses semantic text analysis to create computational models of human morality and spirituality. The research draws on ancient texts of religious and spiritual significance in Christianity and contemporary interviews with moral exemplars and the general population. This yields new perspectives on ancient questions as well as helps meet the need for computers that understand human morality, as artificial intelligence systems become more powerful and pervasive.
IS ALEXA MY NEIGHBOR?
Randall Reed and Laura Ammon, Shapley-Booth Fellows
Elliott, 3:15-4:15 pm
ABSTRACT
The religious status of artificial intelligence (AI) is an area that has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. In this paper we seek to correct this by analyzing the way that religion has in the past included people who were outside its purview into its circle of influence. We use two historical examples to illustrate this: the Roman Catholic debate over indigenous peoples of the Americas in the 16th century and the modern Christian (Protestant and Catholic) debate about homosexuals in the church. These two examples will act as the grounding for a model of ways Christian theology may confront AI.
BIOSKETCHES
Randall Reed is Associate Professor of Religion at Appalachian State University. He is currently working on the intersection between technology and religion, specifically the religious ramifications of artificial intelligence. He teaches classes on Religion, New Testament, Sociology of Religion, and Religion and Technology and has created the Religion in the Digital Age class which teaches students in the Humanities how to use technology and quantitative data to answer religious studies questions. Previously his work has centered on religious responses of the Millennial generation about which he has published several articles and co-edited the forthcoming book (with Michael Zbaraschuk) The Emerging Church, Millennials and Religion, Vol 1: Problems and Prospects (in press, Cascade Books, 2018). He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School in the Sociology of Religion and a M.A in Religion (New Testament concentration) from the Claremont Graduate University.
Laura Ammon (not present) is Associate Professor of Religion at Appalachian State University. Her work centers on the religious dimensions of Spanish contact with indigenous populations in the 16th century. She is the creator of the immensely popular "Imaginary Worlds and Religion" class at Appalachian State which addresses questions of what constitutes being human in a technological age. She also teaches classes on religion in Latin America. She is the author of Work Useful to Religion and the Humanities: A History of the Comparative Method in the Study of Religion from Las Casas to Tylor, Pickwick Studies in the History of Religions, Book 1 (Pickwick Publications 2013). She is currently coauthoring a book (with archaeologist Cheryl Claassen) on the intersection of Spanish Catholicism and indigenous Mexican religion in the 16th century. She has a Ph.D. in Religion specializing in Global Christianity from the Claremont Graduate University and an M.A. in Religion from the University of Chicago Divinity School.
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SUNDAY EVENING
TITLE
Sol Katz
Elliott, 7:30-9:00 p.m.
ABSTRACT
BIOSKETCH
See Saturday evening.
MONDAY MORNING
DEEP LEARNING
Stefan Leijnen
Elliott, 9:15-10:15 a.m.
ABSTRACT
The recent surge in expectations for artificial intelligence can largely be attributed to the success of deep learning. Although the theories and algorithms that drive these computational multi-layered network models have existed for decades, advances in hardware processing power, combined with abundant data collections, have created a fertile ground for deep learning to establish new benchmarks and expand the reach of automated learning to entirely new domains. In this presentation, we will take a closer look at deep learning mechanisms, consider their benefits and limitations, and reflect on technological and philosophical implications.
BIOSKETCH
Stefan Leijnen is director of the Asimov Institute and lecturer of Artificial Intelligence and Game Development at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. He is interested in the philosophy and practical application of machine learning models for creativity, teleology, and language comprehension, and author of “Creativity and Constraint in Artficial Systems”. In 2016 he founded the Asimov Institute, a collective of artists, scientists and engineers exploring creativity in artificial intelligence. Since 2017 he is CTO for War Child, an international NGO providing game-based educational programs for conflict-affected children in Africa and the Middle-East.
Suggested Reading
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks
http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
The Neural Network Zoo
http://www.asimovinstitute.org/neural-network-zoo/
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Elliott and Porch, 10:15-11:00 am
PLENARY Q&A
Elliott, 11:00-12:15 pm
MONDAY AFTERNOON
SOFTWARE SIMPLICITY BANISHED FOR 45 YEARS
Edward S. Lowry
Elliott, 2:00-3:00 pm
ABSTRACT
Poor language design has made representations of software and other precise textual information
overly complex. A large simplification results from eliminating a false dichotomy separating languages that emphasize rich data structures from languages allowing many plural expressions (e.g., programming language vs. data base language). Profit incentives have obstructed this progress for decades. The solution requires use of a small number of flexible basic information building block structures. Those can be reduced to a single structure and that can be refined toward a practical permanent optimum structure for easily arranged building blocks of information.
A fundamental open problem in designing artificial intelligence systems is choosing the structures that are included in their initial architecture. The practical optimum structure may be a strong candidate for inclusion. Current languages include excess complexity in both the representation of knowledge and the software which operates on it. Deduction in artificial intelligence systems has been hampered by this compounding of layers of excess complexity. The process of eliminating extraneous complexity necessarily comes to an end. Understanding the way that it ends can clarify the long range future of precise language design. The simplicity, stability, design convergence, and subject matter generality point toward an enduring core language for technical literacy.
BIOSKETCH
Ed Lowry did software research at IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation after studies at University of Toronto and MIT. He has worked on optimizing the fine structure of information to minimize extraneous complexity. He works to apply the result in technical education and language for technical literacy.
Overcoming resistance to software simplicity has been a major challenge. He would like to relate science and religion using an engineering perspective that builds knowledge of how to be careful when risking harm. He has developed pictorial models of electromagnetic fields and pioneered global compiler optimization and multiprogramming. His website is users.rcn.com/eslowry.
TECH SESSION
Bruce Naylor
Elliott, 3:15-4:15 p.m.
ABSTRACT
This 1-hour session will give an introductory explanation of the technology behind artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) to supplement my plenary talk. Familiarity with programming and/or mathematics would be helpful.
BIOSKETCH
See Sunday morning.
STAIRWAY TO THE STARS ON STAR: OCEANIC'S SECRET CODE IN PLAIN SIGHT
James van Pelt
Newton Centre West, 4:30-5:30 pm
ABSTRACT
In the heart of the great Oceanic Hotel, the meaning of a series of odd constructions was recently unraveled, pointing toward Star Island's purpose. For decades, hotel guests and staff have ascended and descended past that coded message, overlooking its symbolism. This short PowerPoint presentation illustrates it in a way intended to illuminate the ups and downs of your experience of The Oceanic.
BIOSKETCH
See Monday evening.
MONDAY EVENING
LIVING WITH GOLEMS: CAN WE ADAPT TO AI?
Terrence W. Deacon
Elliott, 7:30-9:00 pm
ABSTRACT
Despite all our adaptive sophistication, we can be a surprisingly gullible species. We seem to have a natural inclination to project the attribute of personhood and agency into the gaps we find in our world. This bias has served us well over the millennia, but it is potentially disastrous in the face of a future information technology that will inevitably fill the human environment with simulations of intelligence. In this dawning age of "intelligent" machines, we find many of our best minds convinced that we are creating sentient artifacts; that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it must be a duck despite knowing that this is a mere simulacrum of duck behavior produced using radically non-duck components and processes. Artificial intelligence (AI) enthusiasts imagine uploading their personalities into computational software, brilliant neuroscientists imagine themselves to be mere neural nets propagating signals, and influential philosophers confidently tell us that our sense of consciousness is just an illusion. But although I argue that this vision ultimately derives from a form of self-deception, it can nevertheless lead to an unintended self-fulfilling prophecy.
The golem myth from Jewish folklore tells of an intelligent, soulless automaton originally conceived to aid its creator and his people. Yet due to its inevitable absence of discernment and compassion, it ultimately did great harm. The myth is rapidly becoming reality. It is the dawn of the age of golems, and we seem oblivious to their coming. As in the story, it is already too late to prevent their creation. But there is a deeper risk than not controlling these creations. How do you tell a golem from a person, a simulation from a subject, an automaton from an agent? What are the consequences of not being able to discern this difference, or convincing ourselves that there is no difference? Will we eventually discover how to transform Pinocchio into a true boy, or will it be the other way around?
BIOSKETCH
Terrence W. Deacon is professor of anthropology and cognitive science at UC Berkeley. His neurobiological research focuses on determining the nature of the human divergence from typical primate brain anatomy, the cellular-molecular mechanisms producing this difference, and the correlations between these anatomical differences and special human cognitive abilities, particularly language. In pursuit of these questions, he has used a variety of laboratory approaches including the tracing of axonal connections, quantitative analysis of regions of different species brains, and cross-species fetal neural transplantation. The goal is to identify elements of the developmental genetic mechanisms that distinguish human brains from other ape brains, in order to aid the study of the cognitive consequences of human brain evolution.
His theoretical interests include the study of evolution-like processes at many levels, including their role in embryonic development, neural signal processing, language change, and social processes, and how these different processes interact and depend on each other. Currently, his theoretical interests have focused on the problem of explaining emergent phenomena, such as characterize the origin of life, the evolution of language, and the generation of conscious experience by brains.
TUESDAY MORNING
TECHNO-ANXIETY AND THE SCATTERED MIND: CAN WE RECLAIM OUR FREEDOM?
Ilia Delio
Elliott, 9:15-10:15 am
ABSTRACT
Since the advent of the silicon chip and the emergence of Google, we have been on a breathless trajectory of artificial intelligence (AI) development. Culturally blind to our evolution as social cyborgs, we love the speed of information and the capacity to explore infinite cyberworlds. What is it about AI that holds us in its grip? Why do we consistently surrender our personal freedom to the power of Google? Is AI a problem? A solution? Or the deepest reflection of what we are? I will argue for the latter. While prima facie AI seems to be robbing us of personal freedom and thus personal agency, the mere fact that we are enmeshed with our technologies tells us something deeply profound about our present state of existence we are anxious-driven creatures with a desperate need to transcend ourselves. AI offers a quick fix for a way out of this twisted human nature we find ourselves in.
But there is more; there is a cosmic anxiety that reflects a deep division of the human mind. Our knowing centers are scattered and we are, philosophically, all over the place. To reclaim the classic Kantian questions is apropos to our dilemma: What must we know? What must we do? What must we hope for? Because these are internal questions, we no longer know how to answer them, other than to check Google. Thus, I want to explore the bifurcated mind in terms of the loss of interiority and the ground of the soul.
Finally, I want to collate these ideas into the fundamental problem that I think lies at the heart of our technological AI frenzy, and that is, the failed relationship between science and religion. As Alfred Whitehead noted long ago, "the future course of history depends upon...the relations between science and religion."
BIOSKETCH
Ilia Delio, OSF currently holds the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University and has authored or co-authored eighteen books including Care for Creation, which won two Catholic Press Book Awards in 2009. Her recent books include A Hunger for Wholeness: Soul, Space and Transcendence (Paulist 2018), Making All Things New (Orbis 2015), and The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love (Orbis 2013), which received the 2014 Silver Nautilus Book Award. She lectures nationally and internationally in the areas of science, religion, and culture and is the general editor for the series Catholicity in an Evolving Universe published by Orbis Books.
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Elliot, 10:15-11:00 am
PLENARY Q&A
Elliott, 11:00-12:15 pm
TUESDAY AFTERNOON
COULD ROBOTS HAVE A CONSCIENCE? THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY
Albert J. Levis and Paul H. Carr
Elliot, 2:00-3:00 pm
ABSTRACT
Robots can be trained to do skillful tasks using artificial intelligence. Our emerging science of the moral mind might someday be programed into robots to resolve conflicts. The adaptive evolutionary process has programmed our unconscious minds to resolve conflict, from stressful chaos to order. We will trace our understanding of this creative process from medieval theologian Meister Eckhart to psychiatrist Albert Levis. Dr. Levis, born a Jew in Greece in 1937, realized that a purpose of Greek myths and biblical stories was to reduce conflict and murder within the family. This was expanded to society. Levis uses art to model the process as a pendulum that oscillates between extremes, transforming emotional energy into personal and societal change. We will show how this creative process is a measurable, repeatable phenomenon and hence a science, which is emerging from religious stories.
BIOSKETCHES
Albert Levis, MD, is a psychiatrist born in 1937 in Athens, Greece, where he experienced during his childhood World War II, the Holocaust, and the Communist Civil War. Intrigued, he spent his professional career pondering behavior, religions and ideologies. He began his search for meaning at Athens College and continued by studying medicine at the Universities of Geneva and Zurich, completing his psychiatric residency at Yale. He launched the Center for the Study of Normative Behavior in Hamden, Connecticut where he identified what is universal in all stories: their plot. Studying patterns that repeat, he recognized the plot as a natural scientific conflict resolving mechanism. This conflict resolution mechanism became the unit of the social sciences, integrating psychology and morality into the Moral Science, the Science of Conflict Resolution. His first of the seven volume Moral Science series, Conflict Analysis, the Formal Theory of Behavior (Normative Press, 1987), was followed by Conflict Analysis Training: A Program of Emotional Education (Normative Press, 1988) introducing the Conflict Analysis Battery, a personality assessment based on the analysis of creativity for self-discovery and self-help. To promote awareness of this scientific breakthrough, he acquired the historic Wilburton Inn in Manchester, Vermont and installed permanent exhibits of his Gorski collection in the Museum of the Creative Process and published a catalog as VOL. 4: Science Stealing the Fire of the Gods and Healing the World. His next two volumes, Creativity and Power Management: Two Volumes of Case Studies (Normative Publications, 2016/17), demonstrate the effectiveness of the Conflict Analysis Battery as a diagnostic and therapeutic instrument.
Paul H. Carr (B. S., M. S. MIT; Ph.D. Brandeis University, IEEE Life Fellow) championed the 2017 IRAS conference on climate change. The Templeton Foundation awarded him grants for the philosophy course "Science and Religion," taught at UMass-Lowell (1998 2000), inspiring his book Beauty in Science and Spirit (2006). From 1967 to 1995, he led a branch of the AF Research Laboratory, which investigated microwave ultrasound and SAW (surface acoustic waves). His more than eighty scientific papers and ten patents have contributed to new components for radar, TV, and cell phones. He has participated in climate change debates at the American Physical Society and IEEE Conferences and published "Weather Extremes from Anthropogenic Global Warming" in Natural Science (2013). His home page is www.MirrorOfNature.org
MORALS FOR MACHINE LEARNING
Therese Smith
Elliott, 3:15-4:15 pm
ABSTRACT
We wish, in our capacity as moral reasoners, to have an influence on the moral aspect of decisions made by artificial intelligence (AI). We introduce an approach, aimed at an audience of moral reasoners, that enables the expression of moral values to AI. We advocate for in-service testing of AI, roughly comparable to periodic reflection on values and examination of conscience.
AI, especially when implemented in deep neural network technology, is expected to participate in moral reasoning, such as self-driving cars choosing a response to an unavoidable accident situation.
We present a scenario in which machine learning is used to pre-load a machine responsible for moral reasoning, and subsequent learning is checked frequently (perhaps periodically) for its performance against situations involving judgment with a moral dimension. Possible differences in preferred actions arising from different moral traditions are discussed. Establishment of initial priors through input of semantically marked up moral readings are examined as an approach.
The development of an ontology of moral reasoning, showing interaction between religious/moral perspectives and scientific implementation, is one way to enable this method of providing the starting set of priors. This process is illuminated by an example. Differences arising from the order in which moral exemplars are exposed to the deep neural network are considered. As such differences are expected, we wish to raise awareness that the order of presenting moral material for learning is significant. This ordering may be seen to be properly in the domain of religious/ethical leaders.
BIOSKETCH
After thirty years as a designer of circuits and software, for communications, medical and air traffic control applications, Therese Smith returned to graduate school and earned a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering, conferred in 2016. For the past three semesters, she was an instructor at Central Connecticut State University, with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at University of Maryland University College and Adjunct Assistant Professor at University of Connecticut (UCONN). She has taught Ethics in Computer Science at UCONN and at University of Rhode Island (URI) for four semesters altogether. In the URI ethics class, she taught about training artificial intelligence algorithms, both before they begin service life, but also during their service life, and continuing to test them for biases they may acquire during service life. Though most of her publications are in computer science education, she continues to have an interest in medical applications, such as discovery of biomarkers.
WORKSHOP ON ZYGON: JOURNAL ON RELIGION AND SCIENCE
Willem B. Drees and Arthur Peterson
Newton Centre West, 4:30-5:30 pm
ABSTRACT
Arthur Petersen, the incoming editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, and Wim Drees, the outgoing editor, will be happy to speak with who-ever is interested on their experiences with the journal and on its future.
BIOSKETCHES
See Wednesday morning for the biosketch for Willem B. Drees. See Friday morning for the biosketch for Arthur Peterson.
TUESDAY EVENING
“IRAS” (Film) AND DISCUSSION WITH THE FILMMAKERS
Elliott, 7:30- 8:00 pm
ABSTRACT
This is a 25-minute documentary movie about how IRAS came to be and what kind of organization it is. A Serendip Production, www.serendip.tv.
BIOSKETCHES
Huma and Dr. Farooq Beg are the co-founders and co-directors of Serendip Productions, a media and communications company based in Islamabad, Pakistan, which has produced hundreds of development-oriented films that raise vital issues in education, health, human rights, gender, and the environment. Their films have been screened at numerous international film festivals and have won awards from the British Medical Association to the Sony Awards in Japan.
WEDNESDAY MORNING
HUMANS AND HUMANITIES WHEN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TURNS DEEP
Willem B. Drees
Elliott, 9:15-10:15 am
ABSTRACT
In my contribution to this conference, I intend to reflect on humans and the humanities in a time of digitalization, robotics and artificial intelligence. (1) As of 2018, the School of Humanities that I serve as dean has been renamed Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. I intend the name change to signal a focus on questions about human identities and cultures in a time of globalization, digitalization, and artificial intelligence. (2) As a professor of philosophy of the humanities' (since 2015), I seek to understand humans and the humanities, that is, to understand the academic disciplines that seek understanding of human self-understanding and self-expressions. In relation to my current position in academia, I will consider some of the ethical, existential, and anthropological issues AI might give rise to. (3) Ethical issues, as AI often relies on proxies to evaluate the perspectives on humans (see for a critical voice the book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil (2016)). Are we heading for a technological dystopia? (4) Existential issues, as we fear releasing a modern monster of Frankenstein but then, fictions and myths may have many forms (The Scientist as God: A Typological Study of a Literary Motif, 1818 to the Present by Sven Wagner (2012)). (5) Anthropological issues: Will we become a new species, Homo Deus, as Yuval Harari titled his 2015 book? As the explorations intend to show, AI provides new tools and new contexts for living and understanding ourselves, and thereby may be expected to change humanity, for better or for worse.
BIOSKETCH
Willem B. Drees (Wim) is a Dutch philosopher. He currently serves as dean of the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. Since 2008, he has served as editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, a responsibility that he is about to transfer to Arthur Petersen. Wim and Zwanet, who served as a prison chaplain, have a son, Johannes, and two daughters, Annelot and Esther, each with a nice partner, a grandson William, and a second grandson near arrival. Wim studied theoretical physics and religious studies. He earned a doctorate in philosophy of religion in 1989 with the dissertation Beyond the Big Bang: Quantum Cosmologies and God (Open Court, 1990). A second dissertation, in philosophy, became Religion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge University Press, 1996). He was Fulbright Scholar with the Center of Theology and the Natural Sciences (1987), the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) in Princeton (1993). At Leiden University, he was extraordinary professor of philosophy of nature and technology from a liberal protestant perspective, and later held the chair in philosophy of religion and ethics (2001-2014). He was president of ESSSAT (European Society for the Study of Science and Theology), 2002-2008. Another sabbatical at CTI resulted in Religion and Science in Context: A Guide to the Debates (Routledge, 2010).
In 2015, he became Dean of the Tilburg School of Humanities, now the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences, where he is also Professor of Philosophy of the Humanities. This year he was elected to the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. He looks forward to another sabbatical in Princeton (January-May 2019), developing his 2015 inaugural address from Tilburg, “Naked Ape or Techno Sapiens: The Relevance of Human Humanities,” into a book. For more information, see www.drees.nl.
Readings on the conference topic
Dave Eggers, The Circle. (Vintage Books/ Penguin, 2013)
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Vintage/Penguin, 2017)
Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Mass Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. (Broadway Books, 2016)
Peter Stone, Rodney Brooks, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ryan Calo, Oren Etzioni, Greg Hager, Julia
Hirschberg, Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, Ece Kamar, Sarit Kraus, Kevin Leyton-Brown, David
Parkes, William Press, AnnaLee Saxenian, Julie Shah, Milind Tambe, and Astro Teller.
Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030. One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence:
Report of the 2015-2016 Study Panel, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, September 2016
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Elliot and Porch, 10:15-11:00 am
PLENARY Q & A
Elliott, 11:00-12:15 pm
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
TURING AND THE TRANSGENDER ZOMBIE
Daniel Johnson
Elliott, 2:00-3:00 pm
ABSTRACT
Artificial intelligence (AI) has deep roots that can be obscured by its recent burgeoning growth. British mathematician Alan M. Turing was an early advocate, and proposed what he called "The Imitation Game" as a test for computer intelligence. It is often forgotten Turing calibrated his test by a man imitating a woman. In a text message interrogation, if a computer can imitate a human as well as a man can imitate a woman, then the computer should be considered intelligent. So passing as transgender is the benchmark for AI. As gender identity has evolved, how should we see this today?
Turing's seminal 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" goes on from the test to consider nine objections to the possibility of AI. He starts his list with "(1) The Theological Objection" and dismisses it along with Galileo-era literalism. Other objections he considers are also relevant to IRAS, especially "(4) The Argument from Consciousness" saying a computer must be able to write a sonnet and "not only write it but know that it had written it." Turing says this is the essence of his test, that observable behavior is the criterion for an intelligent mind, that anything else slips into solipsism and we see each other as zombies.
Critics do not agree on the details of the Turing test, like the competence and intentions of the human participant. Many working in AI dismiss it as a distraction, although they would likely be eager to celebrate if it were convincingly passed. An ongoing prize offer has never been claimed would Turing say there is no AI yet?
This workshop will be an opportunity to look at how much Turing got right, how much he got wrong, and how much our human intelligence has shifted since his 1950 paper.
BIOSKETCH
Daniel Johnson received a Master's degree in Computing Science from the University of Alberta in 1977 with a thesis in AI on "Decision Theory and Automatic Planning," and then had the good sense to return to his career in geophysics. He worked in the oil industry, first in Edmonton, then
Houston, Tulsa, Calgary, and back to Houston in 1998, where he joined IRAS and came to his first conference in 1999. He retired from BP in 2008 and drove alone to Star Island for IRAS, often wishing to come back but unable until now for several years because of teaching English in China. More about him is on his website, http://persjohn.net. He celebrates an eclectic 50+ years in science, from chemistry to cardiology (publications in 1965 and 2015 respectively), and continues to work without (much) pay as a research assistant for his son at the University of Texas medical school in Houston.
Suggested reading
A. M. Turing. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Mind, New Series, Vol. 59, No. 236 (Oct. 1950), pp. 433-460. Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association. Many versions can be found online, but I prefer the Jstor scan of the original publication, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2251299 (costly if you don't have library access).
MICRO CONTROLLERS AND LEDS IN ARTISTIC CREATIONS
Paul Ulbrich
Elliott, 3:15-4:15 pm
ABSTRACT
This workshop will use examples and demonstrations of microcontrollers with LEDs to show how they are being used in many forms of novel and creative art projects. We can also ask questions of who or what is in control of creativity when we used random code to make lighting do what no one has ever experienced before?
BIOSKETCH
Paul has created electronically controlled art projects at Burning Man like decorated mutant vehicles, light talking robots, dynamic party lighting, etc. He has worked with Pam Morris, internationally known glass artist, to produce multiple unique artistic lighting creations that have been shown in several different venues from restaurants to Art Galleries.
RECENT SUPREME COURT OPINIONS
Ted Laurenson
Newton Center West, 4:30-5:30 pm
ABSTRACT
I will review and discuss Supreme Court opinions that have been handed down in the current term, including if possible term-end decisions handed down during the conference week.
BIOSKETCH
Ted Laurenson practices corporate and securities law in California, having relocated there in 2017 after decades of practicing in New York. He is both past president and incoming president of IRAS and currently serves on the IRAS Council. His other roles in IRAS have included responsibility for newsletter conference write-ups, newsletter editor, Council member, secretary and co-chair of the 1999 and 2009 conferences and this conference. He likes to think his intellectual interests have no boundaries, but aside from legal matters they have focused on moral and political philosophy, psychology and hard science fiction.
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WEDNESDAY EVENING
UNDERSTANDING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE THROUGH THE IRAS LENS
James Van Pelt, Shapley-Booth Fellow
Elliott, 7:30-9:00 pm
ABSTRACT
Technology capable of making life-or-death decisions, revealing hidden exoplanets, guiding the driverless car on the Interstate, and on and on has arrived. Alexis, Siri, IoT, and thousands of other applications of artificial intelligence (AI) open the door to an entirely new way of exploring how human ingenuity can approach omnipotence.
The progress that leads to AI begins after World War II and coincides with the founding of IRAS by IRAS founders such as Shapley the scientist, Booth the religionist, and Burlow the synthesizer. Shapley's Science Regards Religion was published in 1960, to be answered five years later by Booth's rejoinder, Religion Regards Science. This presentation begins with a review of those two books, which determined IRAS's identity for decades. Next, we trace the trajectories rooted in those books. Finally, we ask:
• In what ways did the founders of science-religion studies foresee or misperceive how the next half-century would unfold and what humankind might become?
• What can we anticipate by projecting into our own future the trends our founders were mapping to define the unique territory of IRAS?
• And how can we shuffle off our 20th-century thinking to open up to who we are becoming and must become?
BIOSKETCH
James Clement van Pelt serves on the IRAS Board. He holds the Master of Arts in Religion (magna cum laude) from the Yale Divinity School, where he was a research fellow and an instructor/lecturer (2003-2007). At Yale, he co-founded and led the Initiative in Religion, Science & Technology (2003-2012), co-taught science-religion and international relations courses, and co-produced eight international conferences (2008-2017). Since 2000, he has been the Yale presence at many conferences relevant to consciousness studies, culture, synchronicity, the science of religion, and the religion of science. He has authored, coauthored, edited, and contributed to articles and books on these topics, including Different Cultures, One World (2010) and Seeking Home in a Strange Land: True Stories of the Changing Meaning of Home (2016). His most recent publication appears in this month's Zygon, the IRAS academic journal, based on his 2017 Star Island presentation "Climate Change in Context." He is a member of the Society for Consciousness Studies, the Polanyi Society, the American Philosophical Association, and the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
During his technology career, he was the Director of Advanced Solutions for Dun & Bradstreet; developed the first consumer software catalogue for American Express; programmed the first national ski watch for Campbell's Soup; and served as technology advisor to other corporations, nonprofits, and institutions, including the public school districts of south-central Connecticut (1998-2012). He has been the cofounder and leader of alternative institutions such as the Connecticut Folk Festival and Green Expo, Promoting Enduring Peace, the Gandhi Peace Award, and FSU's Center for Participant Education. As a community organizer, he initiated the nation's first co-housing community in Tallahassee for 120 families, celebrating its 45th anniversary this year; he is now a member of the Rocky Corner co-housing community in New Haven.
THURSDAY MORNING
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND LAW
Oliver Goodenough
Elliott, 9:15-10:15 am
ABSTRACT
Law will both use and control the development and application of artificial intelligence. We are already using AI approaches in law. This won’t necessarily squeeze human judgment out of the process – a computational approach to law can include instructions to “ask the person in the robe” or “ask the 12 people in the jury box” when human judgment is desired.
AI can provide predictions based on past experience, and machine leaning approaches are being used to make predictions about recidivism, likelihood of flight, and other factors in bail and sentencing decisions. Because of the “black box” nature of many predictive algorithms, we rightly wonder if they may be embedding bad practices from the existing system. Bias in, bias out. Happily, we are making progress on reverse engineering the black box, in the process highlighting the hidden factors that distort human-delivered justice.
We can also use AI to forecast legal outcomes. Skopos Labs, a company in which I am a director, uses machine learning to make predictions about the enactment of proposed legislation and about the applicability of proposed legislation and regulation to particular companies and sectors of the economy. Finding the “signal in the haystack” helps with decision making around strategy, planning and investing.
Law can also regulate AI processes. This regulation should be carefully fitted to the risks: the law has a nuanced set of tools for balancing innovation with caution. Law can also enable; the corporation is already a vehicle for artificial agency. The “roboco” could be a good vehicle for a bounded recognition of AI in business.
Finally, we will explore the boundaries a bit. There is R&D going on around an AI conscience. We may be able to embed limits not just in law but in the AI processes themselves.
BIOSKETCH
Oliver Goodenough's research, writing, and teaching at the intersection of law, economics, finance, computation theory, neuroscience, and behavioral biology make him an authority in legal innovation. His academic home has been the Vermont Law School, where he has been a Professor of Law and the co-Director of the Center for Legal Innovation. He is also affiliated faculty at Stanford's CodeX Center for Legal Informatics, a Research Fellow of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, and an Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. In the business world, he is a cofounder of Skopos Labs, Inc., which applies advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to questions of law and policy.
His publications include a letter to Nature on mind-viruses (coauthored with Richard Dawkins), an issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on law and neuroscience (co-edited with Semir Zeki) and a Working Paper of the Office of Financial Research of the United States Treasury entitled "Contract as Automaton: The Computational Representation of Financial Agreements" (coauthored with Mark Flood). He served as Co-Director of the Moral Markets initiative of the Gruter Institute, with support from the John Templeton Foundation. A third-generation participant in IRAS, he attended the Star Island conference for the first time as a 13-year-old in 1966.
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Elliot and Porch, 10:15-11:00 am
PLENARY Q & A
Elliott, 11:00-12:15 pm
THURSDAY AFTERNOON
IRAS ANNUAL MEETING
Elliott, 1:45-3:00 pm
All are invited.
WHITER HUMANITY? ONE WAY TO MAKE SURE OF OUR PASTS, PRESENTS, AND
FUTURES
Ruben Nelson
Elliott, 3:15-4:15 pm
ABSTRACT
We know that as a species we are a narrative animal. We are attracted to, influenced by, even suckers for, a "good story." We also know that many (most? virtually all?) of the deep narratives that claim to make sense of history that we have inherited from our past are less credible to us than they once were. And we know that nature abhors a vacuum; that most folks cannot cope for very long without a deep story to make sense of what is, and is not, happening in history and in their lives and the future as they imagine it. For good and ill, we will follow a good storyteller, even unto death including our own, rather than live without a deep narrative that help us makes sense of life.
This session will be part presentation and part workshop. I will explain a simple 2 X 2 matrix that I have used for much of my life to make sense of the human journey. It sheds light on where we have been, where and why we are in the story, and what range of futures are "adjacent possibles." I use the matrix for the same reasons one is drawn to a good hypothesis: it appears to account for more data, more adequately, more suggestively and more elegantly than alternative stories, e.g. Fukuyama's silly claim that our Modern Industrial Culture is "The End of History." Besides, my matrix is good fun to use.
First, I will explain my distinction between a "culture" and a "form of civilization." Examples will be given of the kinds of trouble we get into with our present inability to make this distinction routinely. I will then explain the two axes I use to create the 2 X 2 matrix. Then I will use my matrix to identify four quite different spaces within which cultures may develop as exemplars of a "form of civilization." Finally, those who show up will be invited to play with the matrix to generate insights into the stresses, challenges, gifts, and possible futures of our present Modern/Industrial cultures. Finally, I will use the matrix to explain what I mean when I say that "ours is a truly rare time in human history a time when we are, yet again, changing our minds about the nature of reality, the nature of persons, and the nature of the relationship of persons to reality." I will also note the conditions that make this civilizational trajectory change to be a unique, and not yet understood, challenge. Come and stretch your mind, tickle your imagination, and maybe even inspire your heart.
BIOSKETCH
Ruben Nelson has spent his life exploring and seeking to understand the forces that are now reshaping our lives, our world, and our future. He is Executive Director of Foresight Canada. He
is a graduate of Queen's University and Queen's Theological College in Kingston, Canada and has also studied at United Theological College, Bangalore, India and the University of Calgary. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, the World Business Academy, and the Meridian Institute on Leadership, Governance, Change and the Future. He is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists, the World Futures Studies Federation, the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, and the Ralph Connor Memorial United Church in Canmore, Canada. Ruben lives in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta with his wife of 57 years and their three cats. Some of his writings can be found at http://foresightcanada.com/resources/library/.
I LIFT MY LAMP VINTAGE SONGS AND DANCES OF IMMIGRANT AMERICA (Piano
Concert)
Jacqueline Schwab
Oceanic Lobby, 4:30-5:30 pm
ABSTRACT
Pianist Jacqueline Schwab, heard on many of Ken Burns' PBS documentaries, reflects on growing up in Pittsburgh's "melting pot," as well as her later exploration of music from around the world. This program celebrates America's immigrants, their vibrant spirit of community music-making, and their multicultural contributions to our heritage. In the current climate, we are remembering and appreciating the contributions immigrants have made. Jacqueline presents dance tunes and sentimental songs from Scotland, Ireland, Poland, France, Eastern Europe, the African-American community, Cuba, Brazil and Argentina, along with Tin Pan Alley tunes, American anthems, and more.
BIOSKETCH
Pianist Jacqueline Schwab spins heartfelt musical stories, connecting listeners to the rich, multicultural strands of America's musical tapestry. Her distinctive playing infuses the sound tracks of Burns' Grammy-winning The Civil War, Baseball, Lewis and Clark, Mark Twain, The War, and The National Parks, among others. She has performed at the White House for President Clinton, and, with Scottish singer Jean Redpath, on public radio's A Prairie Home Companion and on CBS' Late Show with David Letterman. Jacqueline graduated from the New England Conservatory in Boston, majoring in piano improvisation and has long played for English country and many other styles of dancing. Her work with documentary film maker Ken Burns reacquainted her with (her home town) Pittsburgh's musical hero Stephen Foster and led to her folksy-yet-formal concerts of a diverse array of vintage American music. She has performed in almost every state of the Union. In concert, Jacqueline speaks about the power of music to transport us into our own past and also on to new horizons. She is married to IRAS member Rev. Edmund Robinson, Minister, UU Meeting House, Chatham, MA.
THURSDAY EVENING
TITLE
Arthur Peterson
Elliott, 7:30-8:45 pm
ABSTRACT
BIOSKETCH
Arthur Petersen has recently been appointed as the new Editor-in-Chief of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. Since 2014, he has served as Professor of Science, Technology and Public Policy at University College London, playing various leadership roles in the build-up of the new Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP). Within the department, he continues to fulfill the roles of Director of Doctoral Studies and Departmental Graduate Tutor (Research).
This followed more than thirteen years' work as scientific adviser on environment and infrastructure policy within the Dutch Government. Most recently, he served as Chief Scientist of the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (2011-2014). He is also a Visiting Fellow at Osaka University (2018) and Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (since 2009). He has been Adjunct Professor of Science and Environmental Public Policy at the VU University Amsterdam (2011-2016), Professorial Fellow at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment RIVM (2016-2017), and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2009-2014).
He studied physics and philosophy, obtained doctorate degrees in atmospheric sciences (PhD, Utrecht University, 1999) and philosophy of science (Doctor of Public Administration DPA, VU University Amsterdam, 2006), and now also finds disciplinary homes in anthropology, political science, and science and religion. He is currently working on his third doctorate (DPhil in Science and Religion) at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Prof. Alister McGrath, where he is writing a book on uncertainty in science and religion. He has been a reader of Zygon since he first engaged with the field of science and religion in the early 1990s. He became a member of IRAS and subscriber to the journal in the mid-2000s. This year marks his first visit to Star Island.
FRIDAY MORNING
CONCLUDING PANEL
Jack Dennis, Mladen Turk, and Plenary Speakers
Elliott, 9:15-10:15 am
BIOSKETCHES
Jack B. Dennis is professor of computer science and engineering, emeritus, at M.I.T. Prof. Dennis completed the doctorate in Electrical Engineering at M.I.T. in 1958, joined the M.I.T. faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering, and was appointed full professor in 1969. He is widely known for his contributions in the field of computer system architecture. Since 1987, he has worked as an independent consultant and research scientist on projects primarily in parallel computer hardware and software. In the early days of M.I.T.'s Project MAC, Professor Dennis contributed to specification of the unique segment addressing and paging mechanisms that became a fundamental part of the Multics computer system project. As leader of the Computation Structures Group of the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science, Professor Dennis directed research on computer architecture and programming languages based on data flow models of program execution. These developments led to data flow projects at many universities and research institutes around the world, and earned him the 1984 Eckert-Mauchly Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) /Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Professor Dennis is a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE. In 2013 he was awarded the IEEE John Von Neumann Medal.
Mladen Turk is associate professor of religious studies at Elmhurst College in Illinois. His area of specialization is religion and science with a special focus on scientific theories of religion and methodology of the study of religion, but he teaches broadly in the areas of history of Christianity in 19th and 20th century and religious traditions of South Asia.
Mladen studied philosophy, ethnology, Indology and theology in Zagreb, Croatia, received a Master of Philosophy from University of Bergen, Norway, Master of Theology from Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and Doctor of Philosophy from Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, Zygon Center for Religion and Science. He has published a textbook in philosophy, Logic: Exercises and Solutions (Logika: vjezbe, zadaci, rjesenja. 1995), a theoretical book, Being Religious: Cognitive and Evolutionary Theories in Historical Perspective (2013), and recently edited a volume titled Interactive World, Interactive God: The Basic Reality of Creative Interaction (2017).
Mladen regularly leads students overseas for month-long courses to study the religions of India. He is on the board of Center for Advanced Studies in Religion and Science (CASIRAS) and on the executive committee of the American Theological Society in the Midwest. He is currently the book review editor for Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science.
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Elliot and Porch, 10:15-11:00 am
PLENARY Q & A
Elliott, 11:00-12:15 pm
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW: EXTREME PARADIGM CHANGE
A Metaphysics for Unifying Science, Religion, and Ai, with Infinite Love as the Ultimate Reference
F. Jerry Josties
Elliott, 2:00-3:00 pm
ABSTRACT
At age 25, I was privileged to be in attendance at Thomas Kuhn's talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1963 on "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." This paper is a direct result of that experience, which lead to an Aha experience in 1968 and my own conception of appropriate paradigm change, resulting in a panpsychic metaphysics of moral choice with Infinite Love as its ultimate reference. This is a metanarrative which effects a satisfying unification of science and religion.
My Aha experience led me to conclude that physics had to be reconceptualized in terms of consciousness. I realized that the previously mysterious electromagnetic fields could be explained as consciousness, starkly opposite to the conclusion that others came to. I had the advantage of sufficient philosophical background to realize that nothing whatever in physics had been explained that it was only an abstract descriptive representation which was awaiting explanatory interpretation. So E&M was to be explained as being consciousness rather than vice versa, meaning that consciousness was ubiquitous, and panpsychism was the natural ontology. Contemporary physics and neuroscience are beset with many interpretational problems, which can be expected to arise within a world view which is fundamentally flawed. A panentheistic panpsychism of moral choice, deriving from a kenotic creation story of Infinite Love, provides an explanatory framework for the following: explanation, identity, free will, space, time, physics, laws, emergence, hierarchy, qualitative qualia, beauty, communication, mathematics, the multiverse, Einstein's "failure," and possibly the failure of "Supersymmetry." I will hand out papers on some of these topics, since there will not be time to discuss everything. In addition, I will mention the fascinating possibility that this new worldview may provide a real justification for the project of "Loving AI" at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
BIOSKETCH
Jerry Josties is a retired astronomer, having been at the U.S. Naval Observatory for 42 years. He is a graduate of Swarthmore College (1959/60), and was in graduate school in Physics and Astronomy (part time) for nine years at the University of Chicago, George Washington University, Indiana University, and the University of Maryland. He received no higher degrees due to an astonishing talent for disorganization. He was Swarthmore's exchange student to England's University College of North Staffordshire, also called "the royal college" since Princess Margaret was its formal president, and there he studied philosophy and mathematical logic for one year. He later taught Astronomy and Cosmology for seven years at Hood College in Frederick, MD. Although heavily educated in physics, astronomy, and mathematics, his primary interest at all times was philosophy, and he now frequents meetings on science and religion and neuroscience (IRAS, CTNS, Center for Process Studies, Cosmos and Creation, AAR/ISSR, Washington Theological Consortium, Tucson Science of Consciousness).
INTELLIGENCE AND ENTROPY: A MORAL COMPASS FROM FLATLAND
Davie Sayre (Dayton)
Elliott, 3:15-4:15 pm
ABSTRACT
Our grandchildren stand at the hinge of human evolution, now for the first time in the hands of their generation. What guidance can science offer them? In the picture-book Flatland, award-winning artist Rebecca Emberley draws a universe in which all expressions of intelligent life are made of the same stuff. What is that stuff? On this afternoon, we will review how intelligence itself would be detected anywhere in the universe, and what those evidences say about disintegration and ignorance (the two ways we experience Entropy).
There is something, rather than nothing. That something is orderly; it is not capricious, not magic, not mystical. Werner Heisenberg, the formulator of quantum mechanics and the Uncertainty Principle, called this reality the Central Order. It was his way of thinking about God.
There is in fact a science of order. It supports a finding of self-interest in other-interest, and our trust in diversity.
Rebecca and I wrote Flatland as a metaphor of the human condition and its limited viewpoint. We all walk on Flatland. Senses evolved just to survive here do not perceive all of reality. But we can reach for our more not by a leap of faith, but a rational search (that is, faithful to truth). Intelligent life is all about reducing entropy, in both its thermodynamic and informational forms (which are mathematically equivalent). We’ll discuss the special means available to intelligent beings, wherever evolved or fabricated and how those provide a moral compass and a way to comfort and meaning.
Life doesn't stop at the edges of Flatland. The things we’ve held sacred are real, after all.
BIOSKETCH
David Sayre (Dayton) is the author of four books and several technology companies dealing with the reduction of entropy. He is currently Chairman of Clean Energy Solutions, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in energy efficiency and renewable energy. He began his career as an engineering section leader in a Raytheon laboratory, and was subsequently promoted to the Raytheon Corporate Staff. He left Raytheon to help form Technical Communications Corporation as its Technical Director, working on technologies now familiar in cell phone communications. He published widely on these modulation techniques and patented a swept-fm design for digital communication and navigation.
He turned away from the defense industry to form the nonprofit Technical Development Corporation (TDC) in Boston. TDC performed many innovative projects in energy conservation, criminal justice, and job creation, received gubernatorial appointments to state commissions, and set up other corporations in its fields of interest. He then founded Hospital Efficiency Corporation, one of the first ESCOs in the U.S., which was acquired by Northeast Utilities (now Eversource) in 1990 and renamed Select Energy Services Inc. SESI installed and financed over a billion dollars’ worth of energy efficiency improvements to government and commercial facilities during his tenure.
He also served as president of Energia Global International for two years and on its Board for ten years, leading up to its acquisition by ENEL. EGI is a leading developer of environmentally- prudent renewable energy projects in Latin America. He received a BSEE from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University.
2017 Conference Planning
Terrence Deacon Program Co-chair
Sol Katz Program Co-chair
Abigail Fuller Conference Co-chair
Ted Laurenson Conference Co-chair
Marion Griswold Registrar
Conference Facilitators
Archi Pelagos Staff
Jennifer Whitten, coordinator
Anna Birch, Josephine Dawkins, Meredith Doster, Alison Earnhart, Nina Habibi, Hassaun Jones-Bey, Sylvie Letendre, Sandra Woodworth
Art Workshop Christopher Volpe
Auction Coordinator Jennifer Whitten
Call for Papers Coordinator Emily Austin
Candlelight Coordinators Dan and Lisa Solomon
Choir Director Jane Penfield
Conference Chaplain Edmund Robinson
Memorial Service Edmund Robinson
Music Director Frank Toppa
Program Book (Orange Book) David Klotz
Social Hour Coordinator Mark Kuprych
Star Beacon Editor Emily Austin
Stargazing David Klot, Dan Solomon, and Alison Earnhart
Talent Show Coordinator Joan Hunter-Brody
Shapley-Booth Fellows Mark Graves, Randall Reed and Laura Ammon
IRAS Student Scholar Daniyaal Mustafa Beg
Sponsors and Partners
Zygon
WesleyNexus
Artificial Intelligence Turns Deep: Who's in Control?
64th Summer Conference of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that," said HAL in the most famous line in 2001: A Space Odyssey. So Dave had to disable HAL to regain control of the spaceship and dodge annihilation. From early myths of artificially created beings to today, the question "who's in control" has troubled us. Now it looks like we're really going to have to deal with it in our lifetimes. On the 50th anniversary of 2001, IRAS returns to considering the prospects, opportunities and dangers of artificial intelligence (AI), first discussed at an IRAS conference in 1968 by Marvin Minsky, a founder of AI research and a consultant to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke as they directed and created 2001. This conference will address how AI may shape our future and our ability to foresee and control that shaping.
Deep learning neural networks and advances in big data manipulation have led to rapid progress in machine learning and associated capabilities. Investment in AI will grow many-fold between 2016 and 2020, to at least a $50 billion industry. New AI products will enhance sales, data analysis, and diagnostic and predictive services for medicine, government, science and industry. We are on the cusp of creating machines that can operate in fields that require significant autonomy, such as self-driving vehicles and, ominously, weapon systems. AI algorithms will determine who makes parole, is approved for a loan or gets hired for a job by analyzing existing patterns that reflect societal bias and historical prejudice. This growing international commercial and governmental juggernaut, itself subject to concentrated and frequently unaccountable control, presents just one of AI's many challenges. How will humans identify and find meaning in life as the breadth of skills unique to living, sentient beings shrinks? The consequences of the interplay of AI and the human mind, and our very self-concepts, are likely to be equally profound. If we succeed in creating science fiction's "conscious" machine, what would be our duties to it (as well as its duties to us)? The values and orientations fostered by a religion and science perspective will be crucial to the responsible development and utilization of AI technology as it unfolds.
We will review the current state and potential future developments of AI technologies and consider the following questions as seen by AI experts and those in related fields:
• What are the true benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) for the future of society?
• How do we assure ourselves that all of society will truly benefit from AI?
• How can we avoid the various pitfalls that are now being debated concerning the control of AI in the future?
• What are the ethical, social, legal, and religious factors that ought to be considered to assure the benefits of AI for society?
• What is the appropriate role of religious wisdom and traditions in helping to maintain this control when considered in the more secular ethical, social, and legal circumstances?
• How can religious wisdom and traditions, in particular, inform more secular deliberations about controlling the future of AI?
• What are the roles of religion and science in contributing to the dialogue to optimize the benefits of AI to society?
• How can we create an ongoing process to maintain human control of the future of AI?
Terrence Deacon, Program Co-Chair
Sol Katz, Program Co-Chair
Abigail Fuller, Conference Co-Chair
Ted Laurenson, Conference Co-Chair
IRAS MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP FUND
Daniyaal Mustafa Beg is entering his third year as a computer science student at Queen Mary University of London. For his final year, he plans to complete a project that makes heavy use of AI and machine learning. Daniyaal has studied film and video. Coming from a modern religious family, he was exposed to the discussion of science and religion from a very early age. His grandfather has been a regular attendee of IRAS conferences for some time now.
SATURDAY EVENING
Sol Katz
Elliott, 7:30-9:00 pm
ABSTRACT
BIOSKETCH
Solomon H. Katz is emeritus director and professor at the Krogman Center for Child Growth and Development at the University of Pennsylvania. Katz is also a leading expert on the anthropology of food and served as Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (Scribner's, 2003), which was awarded many major awards including the Dartmouth Medal).
His work in the field of science and religion spans more than forty years, with leadership in the Institute for Religion in Age of Science (IRAS), in which he served as president from 1977-79 and 1981-84, president of CASIRAS (1988-2001), and associate editor and co-chair of the Joint Publication Board of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. He also served as secretary of Section H Anthropology of the AAAS and serves on several AAAS-wide committees including the Division of Science, Ethics and Religion.
He served as a Trustee of the Parliament of the World's Religions from 2003-2011 and is an elected fellow of the International Society of Science and Religion. He is an advisory board member of the Ocean Genome Legacy Marine Biodiversity Center of Northeastern University (2014-present). He also serves as the Chair of the American Anthropological Association Task Force on World Food Problems from 2007-present. Most recently, he is co-organizing with Dr. Thomas Reuter a new international program to document and preserve the diversity of indigenous people's traditional food preparation recipes in collaboration with the World Anthropology Association.
SUNDAY MORNING
ARTIFICIAL EVERYTHING
Bruce Naylor
Elliott, 9:15-10:15 am
ABSTRACT
Humans have discovered that we can use computers to simulate most anything in the universe for which we have a good understanding, at least in principal. This currently ranges from simulating the nucleus of atoms up to the birth and evolution of galaxies. This fact is of great significance as it establishes that an essential aspect of nature can be captured by computational mathematics over which we have considerable control.
Does this capacity for computer simulation extend to humans as well? The answer is trending towards YES, and the field of Artificial Intelligence is overtly pursuing that agenda. Although AI has been a sub-field of Computer Science since its inception, it has struggled to engineer practical systems. However, a sea change has occurred recently due to greater computational resources combined with algorithmic innovation.
Concurrent with this advance is comparable progress in virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR). Virtual reality attempts to synthesizes most all input to our senses to induce an experience of worlds which have no material embodiment. Augmented Reality mixes this with camera captured imagery of the real world, as is common in special effects used in movies. This new sensory synthesis technology is being combined with the new AI to provide powerful new capabilities.
What does all this mean for our future? A lot! We have already created specialized AI systems whose performance exceeds humans, such as playing Chess. What impact will AI have on employment? Many leading AI researchers see a super-human machine intelligence being achievable between 10-100 years in the future. What then? Will AI's decide humans are not only superfluous but also a danger to them? How do we make AI safe for us? Will machines achieve consciousness? Might we become hybrids of biology and machines? Much to ponder!
BIOSKETCH
Bruce is a Computer Scientist whose career has been dominated by research on computational simulations of the real world. This includes 3D gaming, wireless communications, computer aided design and manufacturing, and cognitive neuroscience. He has taught courses on AI for games, utilized AI for modeling human brain response to virtual worlds, and is building an Augmented Reality system in which AI vision plays a central role. He has been on the faculty at Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin, as well as spending a decade in research at Bell Labs. He currently is an adjunct Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine.
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Elliott and Porch, 10:15-11:00 am
PLENARY Q&A
Elliott, 11:00-12:15 pm
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
MACHINE ETHICS AND THE SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF MORAL AND SPIRITUAL
TEXTS
Mark Graves, Shapley-Booth Fellow
Elliott, 2:00-3:00 pm
ABSTRACT
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more sophisticated, autonomous, and pervasive, AI systems' ability to act beneficially for people and avoid extraneous harm must account for human values, ways of suffering, and possibilities for flourishing. Although humans become aware of morality and spirituality through culture, computers are not social animals and are better suited to create meaningful models from texts influencing or describing human morality and spirituality. As an initial investigation, I demonstrate using semantic analysis (I) to create a model of the language and topics for Thomas Aquinas's moral theology in Summa Theologica and (ii) to characterize the types of virtue found in World War II Holocaust rescuer interviews as compared with Nazi sympathizers and bystanders. By expanding the sources, methods, and applications of this approach, further work aims to develop more complete models of human morality and spirituality for better human self-understanding and to enable highly attuned machine ethics.
BIOSKETCH
Mark Graves is currently Visiting Research Assistant Professor at University of Notre Dame's Center for Theology, Science & Human Flourishing with his research occurring at the intersection of artificial intelligence, psychology, and theology. He earned his doctorate in computer science at University of Michigan in the area of artificial intelligence and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in genomics at Baylor College of Medicine as one of the first computer scientists to work on the Human Genome Project. He also studied systematic and philosophical theology at Graduate Theological Union (GTU) and Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and completed another postdoctoral fellowship in psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary on the psychology of virtue.
He has published technical and scholarly works in computer science, biology, psychology, and theology, including the books Designing XML Databases (2002), Mind, Brain, and the Elusive Soul (2008) and Insight to Heal: Co-Creating Beauty Amidst Human Suffering (2013) and taught courses engaging the relationship between science and religion at Santa Clara University; the Graduate Theological Union; University of California, Berkeley; and Fuller Theological Seminary. He also has ten years’ experience in biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and healthcare industries leading the development of database and analytics software for bioinformatics, neuroscience, and predictive health.
His current research in cultural analytics and machine ethics uses semantic text analysis to create computational models of human morality and spirituality. The research draws on ancient texts of religious and spiritual significance in Christianity and contemporary interviews with moral exemplars and the general population. This yields new perspectives on ancient questions as well as helps meet the need for computers that understand human morality, as artificial intelligence systems become more powerful and pervasive.
IS ALEXA MY NEIGHBOR?
Randall Reed and Laura Ammon, Shapley-Booth Fellows
Elliott, 3:15-4:15 pm
ABSTRACT
The religious status of artificial intelligence (AI) is an area that has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. In this paper we seek to correct this by analyzing the way that religion has in the past included people who were outside its purview into its circle of influence. We use two historical examples to illustrate this: the Roman Catholic debate over indigenous peoples of the Americas in the 16th century and the modern Christian (Protestant and Catholic) debate about homosexuals in the church. These two examples will act as the grounding for a model of ways Christian theology may confront AI.
BIOSKETCHES
Randall Reed is Associate Professor of Religion at Appalachian State University. He is currently working on the intersection between technology and religion, specifically the religious ramifications of artificial intelligence. He teaches classes on Religion, New Testament, Sociology of Religion, and Religion and Technology and has created the Religion in the Digital Age class which teaches students in the Humanities how to use technology and quantitative data to answer religious studies questions. Previously his work has centered on religious responses of the Millennial generation about which he has published several articles and co-edited the forthcoming book (with Michael Zbaraschuk) The Emerging Church, Millennials and Religion, Vol 1: Problems and Prospects (in press, Cascade Books, 2018). He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School in the Sociology of Religion and a M.A in Religion (New Testament concentration) from the Claremont Graduate University.
Laura Ammon (not present) is Associate Professor of Religion at Appalachian State University. Her work centers on the religious dimensions of Spanish contact with indigenous populations in the 16th century. She is the creator of the immensely popular "Imaginary Worlds and Religion" class at Appalachian State which addresses questions of what constitutes being human in a technological age. She also teaches classes on religion in Latin America. She is the author of Work Useful to Religion and the Humanities: A History of the Comparative Method in the Study of Religion from Las Casas to Tylor, Pickwick Studies in the History of Religions, Book 1 (Pickwick Publications 2013). She is currently coauthoring a book (with archaeologist Cheryl Claassen) on the intersection of Spanish Catholicism and indigenous Mexican religion in the 16th century. She has a Ph.D. in Religion specializing in Global Christianity from the Claremont Graduate University and an M.A. in Religion from the University of Chicago Divinity School.
-------------------------------------------------
SUNDAY EVENING
TITLE
Sol Katz
Elliott, 7:30-9:00 p.m.
ABSTRACT
BIOSKETCH
See Saturday evening.
MONDAY MORNING
DEEP LEARNING
Stefan Leijnen
Elliott, 9:15-10:15 a.m.
ABSTRACT
The recent surge in expectations for artificial intelligence can largely be attributed to the success of deep learning. Although the theories and algorithms that drive these computational multi-layered network models have existed for decades, advances in hardware processing power, combined with abundant data collections, have created a fertile ground for deep learning to establish new benchmarks and expand the reach of automated learning to entirely new domains. In this presentation, we will take a closer look at deep learning mechanisms, consider their benefits and limitations, and reflect on technological and philosophical implications.
BIOSKETCH
Stefan Leijnen is director of the Asimov Institute and lecturer of Artificial Intelligence and Game Development at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. He is interested in the philosophy and practical application of machine learning models for creativity, teleology, and language comprehension, and author of “Creativity and Constraint in Artficial Systems”. In 2016 he founded the Asimov Institute, a collective of artists, scientists and engineers exploring creativity in artificial intelligence. Since 2017 he is CTO for War Child, an international NGO providing game-based educational programs for conflict-affected children in Africa and the Middle-East.
Suggested Reading
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks
http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
The Neural Network Zoo
http://www.asimovinstitute.org/neural-network-zoo/
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Elliott and Porch, 10:15-11:00 am
PLENARY Q&A
Elliott, 11:00-12:15 pm
MONDAY AFTERNOON
SOFTWARE SIMPLICITY BANISHED FOR 45 YEARS
Edward S. Lowry
Elliott, 2:00-3:00 pm
ABSTRACT
Poor language design has made representations of software and other precise textual information
overly complex. A large simplification results from eliminating a false dichotomy separating languages that emphasize rich data structures from languages allowing many plural expressions (e.g., programming language vs. data base language). Profit incentives have obstructed this progress for decades. The solution requires use of a small number of flexible basic information building block structures. Those can be reduced to a single structure and that can be refined toward a practical permanent optimum structure for easily arranged building blocks of information.
A fundamental open problem in designing artificial intelligence systems is choosing the structures that are included in their initial architecture. The practical optimum structure may be a strong candidate for inclusion. Current languages include excess complexity in both the representation of knowledge and the software which operates on it. Deduction in artificial intelligence systems has been hampered by this compounding of layers of excess complexity. The process of eliminating extraneous complexity necessarily comes to an end. Understanding the way that it ends can clarify the long range future of precise language design. The simplicity, stability, design convergence, and subject matter generality point toward an enduring core language for technical literacy.
BIOSKETCH
Ed Lowry did software research at IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation after studies at University of Toronto and MIT. He has worked on optimizing the fine structure of information to minimize extraneous complexity. He works to apply the result in technical education and language for technical literacy.
Overcoming resistance to software simplicity has been a major challenge. He would like to relate science and religion using an engineering perspective that builds knowledge of how to be careful when risking harm. He has developed pictorial models of electromagnetic fields and pioneered global compiler optimization and multiprogramming. His website is users.rcn.com/eslowry.
TECH SESSION
Bruce Naylor
Elliott, 3:15-4:15 p.m.
ABSTRACT
This 1-hour session will give an introductory explanation of the technology behind artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) to supplement my plenary talk. Familiarity with programming and/or mathematics would be helpful.
BIOSKETCH
See Sunday morning.
STAIRWAY TO THE STARS ON STAR: OCEANIC'S SECRET CODE IN PLAIN SIGHT
James van Pelt
Newton Centre West, 4:30-5:30 pm
ABSTRACT
In the heart of the great Oceanic Hotel, the meaning of a series of odd constructions was recently unraveled, pointing toward Star Island's purpose. For decades, hotel guests and staff have ascended and descended past that coded message, overlooking its symbolism. This short PowerPoint presentation illustrates it in a way intended to illuminate the ups and downs of your experience of The Oceanic.
BIOSKETCH
See Monday evening.
MONDAY EVENING
LIVING WITH GOLEMS: CAN WE ADAPT TO AI?
Terrence W. Deacon
Elliott, 7:30-9:00 pm
ABSTRACT
Despite all our adaptive sophistication, we can be a surprisingly gullible species. We seem to have a natural inclination to project the attribute of personhood and agency into the gaps we find in our world. This bias has served us well over the millennia, but it is potentially disastrous in the face of a future information technology that will inevitably fill the human environment with simulations of intelligence. In this dawning age of "intelligent" machines, we find many of our best minds convinced that we are creating sentient artifacts; that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it must be a duck despite knowing that this is a mere simulacrum of duck behavior produced using radically non-duck components and processes. Artificial intelligence (AI) enthusiasts imagine uploading their personalities into computational software, brilliant neuroscientists imagine themselves to be mere neural nets propagating signals, and influential philosophers confidently tell us that our sense of consciousness is just an illusion. But although I argue that this vision ultimately derives from a form of self-deception, it can nevertheless lead to an unintended self-fulfilling prophecy.
The golem myth from Jewish folklore tells of an intelligent, soulless automaton originally conceived to aid its creator and his people. Yet due to its inevitable absence of discernment and compassion, it ultimately did great harm. The myth is rapidly becoming reality. It is the dawn of the age of golems, and we seem oblivious to their coming. As in the story, it is already too late to prevent their creation. But there is a deeper risk than not controlling these creations. How do you tell a golem from a person, a simulation from a subject, an automaton from an agent? What are the consequences of not being able to discern this difference, or convincing ourselves that there is no difference? Will we eventually discover how to transform Pinocchio into a true boy, or will it be the other way around?
BIOSKETCH
Terrence W. Deacon is professor of anthropology and cognitive science at UC Berkeley. His neurobiological research focuses on determining the nature of the human divergence from typical primate brain anatomy, the cellular-molecular mechanisms producing this difference, and the correlations between these anatomical differences and special human cognitive abilities, particularly language. In pursuit of these questions, he has used a variety of laboratory approaches including the tracing of axonal connections, quantitative analysis of regions of different species brains, and cross-species fetal neural transplantation. The goal is to identify elements of the developmental genetic mechanisms that distinguish human brains from other ape brains, in order to aid the study of the cognitive consequences of human brain evolution.
His theoretical interests include the study of evolution-like processes at many levels, including their role in embryonic development, neural signal processing, language change, and social processes, and how these different processes interact and depend on each other. Currently, his theoretical interests have focused on the problem of explaining emergent phenomena, such as characterize the origin of life, the evolution of language, and the generation of conscious experience by brains.
TUESDAY MORNING
TECHNO-ANXIETY AND THE SCATTERED MIND: CAN WE RECLAIM OUR FREEDOM?
Ilia Delio
Elliott, 9:15-10:15 am
ABSTRACT
Since the advent of the silicon chip and the emergence of Google, we have been on a breathless trajectory of artificial intelligence (AI) development. Culturally blind to our evolution as social cyborgs, we love the speed of information and the capacity to explore infinite cyberworlds. What is it about AI that holds us in its grip? Why do we consistently surrender our personal freedom to the power of Google? Is AI a problem? A solution? Or the deepest reflection of what we are? I will argue for the latter. While prima facie AI seems to be robbing us of personal freedom and thus personal agency, the mere fact that we are enmeshed with our technologies tells us something deeply profound about our present state of existence we are anxious-driven creatures with a desperate need to transcend ourselves. AI offers a quick fix for a way out of this twisted human nature we find ourselves in.
But there is more; there is a cosmic anxiety that reflects a deep division of the human mind. Our knowing centers are scattered and we are, philosophically, all over the place. To reclaim the classic Kantian questions is apropos to our dilemma: What must we know? What must we do? What must we hope for? Because these are internal questions, we no longer know how to answer them, other than to check Google. Thus, I want to explore the bifurcated mind in terms of the loss of interiority and the ground of the soul.
Finally, I want to collate these ideas into the fundamental problem that I think lies at the heart of our technological AI frenzy, and that is, the failed relationship between science and religion. As Alfred Whitehead noted long ago, "the future course of history depends upon...the relations between science and religion."
BIOSKETCH
Ilia Delio, OSF currently holds the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University and has authored or co-authored eighteen books including Care for Creation, which won two Catholic Press Book Awards in 2009. Her recent books include A Hunger for Wholeness: Soul, Space and Transcendence (Paulist 2018), Making All Things New (Orbis 2015), and The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love (Orbis 2013), which received the 2014 Silver Nautilus Book Award. She lectures nationally and internationally in the areas of science, religion, and culture and is the general editor for the series Catholicity in an Evolving Universe published by Orbis Books.
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Elliot, 10:15-11:00 am
PLENARY Q&A
Elliott, 11:00-12:15 pm
TUESDAY AFTERNOON
COULD ROBOTS HAVE A CONSCIENCE? THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY
Albert J. Levis and Paul H. Carr
Elliot, 2:00-3:00 pm
ABSTRACT
Robots can be trained to do skillful tasks using artificial intelligence. Our emerging science of the moral mind might someday be programed into robots to resolve conflicts. The adaptive evolutionary process has programmed our unconscious minds to resolve conflict, from stressful chaos to order. We will trace our understanding of this creative process from medieval theologian Meister Eckhart to psychiatrist Albert Levis. Dr. Levis, born a Jew in Greece in 1937, realized that a purpose of Greek myths and biblical stories was to reduce conflict and murder within the family. This was expanded to society. Levis uses art to model the process as a pendulum that oscillates between extremes, transforming emotional energy into personal and societal change. We will show how this creative process is a measurable, repeatable phenomenon and hence a science, which is emerging from religious stories.
BIOSKETCHES
Albert Levis, MD, is a psychiatrist born in 1937 in Athens, Greece, where he experienced during his childhood World War II, the Holocaust, and the Communist Civil War. Intrigued, he spent his professional career pondering behavior, religions and ideologies. He began his search for meaning at Athens College and continued by studying medicine at the Universities of Geneva and Zurich, completing his psychiatric residency at Yale. He launched the Center for the Study of Normative Behavior in Hamden, Connecticut where he identified what is universal in all stories: their plot. Studying patterns that repeat, he recognized the plot as a natural scientific conflict resolving mechanism. This conflict resolution mechanism became the unit of the social sciences, integrating psychology and morality into the Moral Science, the Science of Conflict Resolution. His first of the seven volume Moral Science series, Conflict Analysis, the Formal Theory of Behavior (Normative Press, 1987), was followed by Conflict Analysis Training: A Program of Emotional Education (Normative Press, 1988) introducing the Conflict Analysis Battery, a personality assessment based on the analysis of creativity for self-discovery and self-help. To promote awareness of this scientific breakthrough, he acquired the historic Wilburton Inn in Manchester, Vermont and installed permanent exhibits of his Gorski collection in the Museum of the Creative Process and published a catalog as VOL. 4: Science Stealing the Fire of the Gods and Healing the World. His next two volumes, Creativity and Power Management: Two Volumes of Case Studies (Normative Publications, 2016/17), demonstrate the effectiveness of the Conflict Analysis Battery as a diagnostic and therapeutic instrument.
Paul H. Carr (B. S., M. S. MIT; Ph.D. Brandeis University, IEEE Life Fellow) championed the 2017 IRAS conference on climate change. The Templeton Foundation awarded him grants for the philosophy course "Science and Religion," taught at UMass-Lowell (1998 2000), inspiring his book Beauty in Science and Spirit (2006). From 1967 to 1995, he led a branch of the AF Research Laboratory, which investigated microwave ultrasound and SAW (surface acoustic waves). His more than eighty scientific papers and ten patents have contributed to new components for radar, TV, and cell phones. He has participated in climate change debates at the American Physical Society and IEEE Conferences and published "Weather Extremes from Anthropogenic Global Warming" in Natural Science (2013). His home page is www.MirrorOfNature.org
MORALS FOR MACHINE LEARNING
Therese Smith
Elliott, 3:15-4:15 pm
ABSTRACT
We wish, in our capacity as moral reasoners, to have an influence on the moral aspect of decisions made by artificial intelligence (AI). We introduce an approach, aimed at an audience of moral reasoners, that enables the expression of moral values to AI. We advocate for in-service testing of AI, roughly comparable to periodic reflection on values and examination of conscience.
AI, especially when implemented in deep neural network technology, is expected to participate in moral reasoning, such as self-driving cars choosing a response to an unavoidable accident situation.
We present a scenario in which machine learning is used to pre-load a machine responsible for moral reasoning, and subsequent learning is checked frequently (perhaps periodically) for its performance against situations involving judgment with a moral dimension. Possible differences in preferred actions arising from different moral traditions are discussed. Establishment of initial priors through input of semantically marked up moral readings are examined as an approach.
The development of an ontology of moral reasoning, showing interaction between religious/moral perspectives and scientific implementation, is one way to enable this method of providing the starting set of priors. This process is illuminated by an example. Differences arising from the order in which moral exemplars are exposed to the deep neural network are considered. As such differences are expected, we wish to raise awareness that the order of presenting moral material for learning is significant. This ordering may be seen to be properly in the domain of religious/ethical leaders.
BIOSKETCH
After thirty years as a designer of circuits and software, for communications, medical and air traffic control applications, Therese Smith returned to graduate school and earned a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering, conferred in 2016. For the past three semesters, she was an instructor at Central Connecticut State University, with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at University of Maryland University College and Adjunct Assistant Professor at University of Connecticut (UCONN). She has taught Ethics in Computer Science at UCONN and at University of Rhode Island (URI) for four semesters altogether. In the URI ethics class, she taught about training artificial intelligence algorithms, both before they begin service life, but also during their service life, and continuing to test them for biases they may acquire during service life. Though most of her publications are in computer science education, she continues to have an interest in medical applications, such as discovery of biomarkers.
WORKSHOP ON ZYGON: JOURNAL ON RELIGION AND SCIENCE
Willem B. Drees and Arthur Peterson
Newton Centre West, 4:30-5:30 pm
ABSTRACT
Arthur Petersen, the incoming editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, and Wim Drees, the outgoing editor, will be happy to speak with who-ever is interested on their experiences with the journal and on its future.
BIOSKETCHES
See Wednesday morning for the biosketch for Willem B. Drees. See Friday morning for the biosketch for Arthur Peterson.
TUESDAY EVENING
“IRAS” (Film) AND DISCUSSION WITH THE FILMMAKERS
Elliott, 7:30- 8:00 pm
ABSTRACT
This is a 25-minute documentary movie about how IRAS came to be and what kind of organization it is. A Serendip Production, www.serendip.tv.
BIOSKETCHES
Huma and Dr. Farooq Beg are the co-founders and co-directors of Serendip Productions, a media and communications company based in Islamabad, Pakistan, which has produced hundreds of development-oriented films that raise vital issues in education, health, human rights, gender, and the environment. Their films have been screened at numerous international film festivals and have won awards from the British Medical Association to the Sony Awards in Japan.
WEDNESDAY MORNING
HUMANS AND HUMANITIES WHEN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TURNS DEEP
Willem B. Drees
Elliott, 9:15-10:15 am
ABSTRACT
In my contribution to this conference, I intend to reflect on humans and the humanities in a time of digitalization, robotics and artificial intelligence. (1) As of 2018, the School of Humanities that I serve as dean has been renamed Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. I intend the name change to signal a focus on questions about human identities and cultures in a time of globalization, digitalization, and artificial intelligence. (2) As a professor of philosophy of the humanities' (since 2015), I seek to understand humans and the humanities, that is, to understand the academic disciplines that seek understanding of human self-understanding and self-expressions. In relation to my current position in academia, I will consider some of the ethical, existential, and anthropological issues AI might give rise to. (3) Ethical issues, as AI often relies on proxies to evaluate the perspectives on humans (see for a critical voice the book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil (2016)). Are we heading for a technological dystopia? (4) Existential issues, as we fear releasing a modern monster of Frankenstein but then, fictions and myths may have many forms (The Scientist as God: A Typological Study of a Literary Motif, 1818 to the Present by Sven Wagner (2012)). (5) Anthropological issues: Will we become a new species, Homo Deus, as Yuval Harari titled his 2015 book? As the explorations intend to show, AI provides new tools and new contexts for living and understanding ourselves, and thereby may be expected to change humanity, for better or for worse.
BIOSKETCH
Willem B. Drees (Wim) is a Dutch philosopher. He currently serves as dean of the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. Since 2008, he has served as editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, a responsibility that he is about to transfer to Arthur Petersen. Wim and Zwanet, who served as a prison chaplain, have a son, Johannes, and two daughters, Annelot and Esther, each with a nice partner, a grandson William, and a second grandson near arrival. Wim studied theoretical physics and religious studies. He earned a doctorate in philosophy of religion in 1989 with the dissertation Beyond the Big Bang: Quantum Cosmologies and God (Open Court, 1990). A second dissertation, in philosophy, became Religion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge University Press, 1996). He was Fulbright Scholar with the Center of Theology and the Natural Sciences (1987), the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) in Princeton (1993). At Leiden University, he was extraordinary professor of philosophy of nature and technology from a liberal protestant perspective, and later held the chair in philosophy of religion and ethics (2001-2014). He was president of ESSSAT (European Society for the Study of Science and Theology), 2002-2008. Another sabbatical at CTI resulted in Religion and Science in Context: A Guide to the Debates (Routledge, 2010).
In 2015, he became Dean of the Tilburg School of Humanities, now the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences, where he is also Professor of Philosophy of the Humanities. This year he was elected to the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. He looks forward to another sabbatical in Princeton (January-May 2019), developing his 2015 inaugural address from Tilburg, “Naked Ape or Techno Sapiens: The Relevance of Human Humanities,” into a book. For more information, see www.drees.nl.
Readings on the conference topic
Dave Eggers, The Circle. (Vintage Books/ Penguin, 2013)
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Vintage/Penguin, 2017)
Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Mass Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. (Broadway Books, 2016)
Peter Stone, Rodney Brooks, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ryan Calo, Oren Etzioni, Greg Hager, Julia
Hirschberg, Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, Ece Kamar, Sarit Kraus, Kevin Leyton-Brown, David
Parkes, William Press, AnnaLee Saxenian, Julie Shah, Milind Tambe, and Astro Teller.
Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030. One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence:
Report of the 2015-2016 Study Panel, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, September 2016
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Elliot and Porch, 10:15-11:00 am
PLENARY Q & A
Elliott, 11:00-12:15 pm
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
TURING AND THE TRANSGENDER ZOMBIE
Daniel Johnson
Elliott, 2:00-3:00 pm
ABSTRACT
Artificial intelligence (AI) has deep roots that can be obscured by its recent burgeoning growth. British mathematician Alan M. Turing was an early advocate, and proposed what he called "The Imitation Game" as a test for computer intelligence. It is often forgotten Turing calibrated his test by a man imitating a woman. In a text message interrogation, if a computer can imitate a human as well as a man can imitate a woman, then the computer should be considered intelligent. So passing as transgender is the benchmark for AI. As gender identity has evolved, how should we see this today?
Turing's seminal 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" goes on from the test to consider nine objections to the possibility of AI. He starts his list with "(1) The Theological Objection" and dismisses it along with Galileo-era literalism. Other objections he considers are also relevant to IRAS, especially "(4) The Argument from Consciousness" saying a computer must be able to write a sonnet and "not only write it but know that it had written it." Turing says this is the essence of his test, that observable behavior is the criterion for an intelligent mind, that anything else slips into solipsism and we see each other as zombies.
Critics do not agree on the details of the Turing test, like the competence and intentions of the human participant. Many working in AI dismiss it as a distraction, although they would likely be eager to celebrate if it were convincingly passed. An ongoing prize offer has never been claimed would Turing say there is no AI yet?
This workshop will be an opportunity to look at how much Turing got right, how much he got wrong, and how much our human intelligence has shifted since his 1950 paper.
BIOSKETCH
Daniel Johnson received a Master's degree in Computing Science from the University of Alberta in 1977 with a thesis in AI on "Decision Theory and Automatic Planning," and then had the good sense to return to his career in geophysics. He worked in the oil industry, first in Edmonton, then
Houston, Tulsa, Calgary, and back to Houston in 1998, where he joined IRAS and came to his first conference in 1999. He retired from BP in 2008 and drove alone to Star Island for IRAS, often wishing to come back but unable until now for several years because of teaching English in China. More about him is on his website, http://persjohn.net. He celebrates an eclectic 50+ years in science, from chemistry to cardiology (publications in 1965 and 2015 respectively), and continues to work without (much) pay as a research assistant for his son at the University of Texas medical school in Houston.
Suggested reading
A. M. Turing. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Mind, New Series, Vol. 59, No. 236 (Oct. 1950), pp. 433-460. Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association. Many versions can be found online, but I prefer the Jstor scan of the original publication, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2251299 (costly if you don't have library access).
MICRO CONTROLLERS AND LEDS IN ARTISTIC CREATIONS
Paul Ulbrich
Elliott, 3:15-4:15 pm
ABSTRACT
This workshop will use examples and demonstrations of microcontrollers with LEDs to show how they are being used in many forms of novel and creative art projects. We can also ask questions of who or what is in control of creativity when we used random code to make lighting do what no one has ever experienced before?
BIOSKETCH
Paul has created electronically controlled art projects at Burning Man like decorated mutant vehicles, light talking robots, dynamic party lighting, etc. He has worked with Pam Morris, internationally known glass artist, to produce multiple unique artistic lighting creations that have been shown in several different venues from restaurants to Art Galleries.
RECENT SUPREME COURT OPINIONS
Ted Laurenson
Newton Center West, 4:30-5:30 pm
ABSTRACT
I will review and discuss Supreme Court opinions that have been handed down in the current term, including if possible term-end decisions handed down during the conference week.
BIOSKETCH
Ted Laurenson practices corporate and securities law in California, having relocated there in 2017 after decades of practicing in New York. He is both past president and incoming president of IRAS and currently serves on the IRAS Council. His other roles in IRAS have included responsibility for newsletter conference write-ups, newsletter editor, Council member, secretary and co-chair of the 1999 and 2009 conferences and this conference. He likes to think his intellectual interests have no boundaries, but aside from legal matters they have focused on moral and political philosophy, psychology and hard science fiction.
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WEDNESDAY EVENING
UNDERSTANDING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE THROUGH THE IRAS LENS
James Van Pelt, Shapley-Booth Fellow
Elliott, 7:30-9:00 pm
ABSTRACT
Technology capable of making life-or-death decisions, revealing hidden exoplanets, guiding the driverless car on the Interstate, and on and on has arrived. Alexis, Siri, IoT, and thousands of other applications of artificial intelligence (AI) open the door to an entirely new way of exploring how human ingenuity can approach omnipotence.
The progress that leads to AI begins after World War II and coincides with the founding of IRAS by IRAS founders such as Shapley the scientist, Booth the religionist, and Burlow the synthesizer. Shapley's Science Regards Religion was published in 1960, to be answered five years later by Booth's rejoinder, Religion Regards Science. This presentation begins with a review of those two books, which determined IRAS's identity for decades. Next, we trace the trajectories rooted in those books. Finally, we ask:
• In what ways did the founders of science-religion studies foresee or misperceive how the next half-century would unfold and what humankind might become?
• What can we anticipate by projecting into our own future the trends our founders were mapping to define the unique territory of IRAS?
• And how can we shuffle off our 20th-century thinking to open up to who we are becoming and must become?
BIOSKETCH
James Clement van Pelt serves on the IRAS Board. He holds the Master of Arts in Religion (magna cum laude) from the Yale Divinity School, where he was a research fellow and an instructor/lecturer (2003-2007). At Yale, he co-founded and led the Initiative in Religion, Science & Technology (2003-2012), co-taught science-religion and international relations courses, and co-produced eight international conferences (2008-2017). Since 2000, he has been the Yale presence at many conferences relevant to consciousness studies, culture, synchronicity, the science of religion, and the religion of science. He has authored, coauthored, edited, and contributed to articles and books on these topics, including Different Cultures, One World (2010) and Seeking Home in a Strange Land: True Stories of the Changing Meaning of Home (2016). His most recent publication appears in this month's Zygon, the IRAS academic journal, based on his 2017 Star Island presentation "Climate Change in Context." He is a member of the Society for Consciousness Studies, the Polanyi Society, the American Philosophical Association, and the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
During his technology career, he was the Director of Advanced Solutions for Dun & Bradstreet; developed the first consumer software catalogue for American Express; programmed the first national ski watch for Campbell's Soup; and served as technology advisor to other corporations, nonprofits, and institutions, including the public school districts of south-central Connecticut (1998-2012). He has been the cofounder and leader of alternative institutions such as the Connecticut Folk Festival and Green Expo, Promoting Enduring Peace, the Gandhi Peace Award, and FSU's Center for Participant Education. As a community organizer, he initiated the nation's first co-housing community in Tallahassee for 120 families, celebrating its 45th anniversary this year; he is now a member of the Rocky Corner co-housing community in New Haven.
THURSDAY MORNING
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND LAW
Oliver Goodenough
Elliott, 9:15-10:15 am
ABSTRACT
Law will both use and control the development and application of artificial intelligence. We are already using AI approaches in law. This won’t necessarily squeeze human judgment out of the process – a computational approach to law can include instructions to “ask the person in the robe” or “ask the 12 people in the jury box” when human judgment is desired.
AI can provide predictions based on past experience, and machine leaning approaches are being used to make predictions about recidivism, likelihood of flight, and other factors in bail and sentencing decisions. Because of the “black box” nature of many predictive algorithms, we rightly wonder if they may be embedding bad practices from the existing system. Bias in, bias out. Happily, we are making progress on reverse engineering the black box, in the process highlighting the hidden factors that distort human-delivered justice.
We can also use AI to forecast legal outcomes. Skopos Labs, a company in which I am a director, uses machine learning to make predictions about the enactment of proposed legislation and about the applicability of proposed legislation and regulation to particular companies and sectors of the economy. Finding the “signal in the haystack” helps with decision making around strategy, planning and investing.
Law can also regulate AI processes. This regulation should be carefully fitted to the risks: the law has a nuanced set of tools for balancing innovation with caution. Law can also enable; the corporation is already a vehicle for artificial agency. The “roboco” could be a good vehicle for a bounded recognition of AI in business.
Finally, we will explore the boundaries a bit. There is R&D going on around an AI conscience. We may be able to embed limits not just in law but in the AI processes themselves.
BIOSKETCH
Oliver Goodenough's research, writing, and teaching at the intersection of law, economics, finance, computation theory, neuroscience, and behavioral biology make him an authority in legal innovation. His academic home has been the Vermont Law School, where he has been a Professor of Law and the co-Director of the Center for Legal Innovation. He is also affiliated faculty at Stanford's CodeX Center for Legal Informatics, a Research Fellow of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, and an Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. In the business world, he is a cofounder of Skopos Labs, Inc., which applies advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to questions of law and policy.
His publications include a letter to Nature on mind-viruses (coauthored with Richard Dawkins), an issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on law and neuroscience (co-edited with Semir Zeki) and a Working Paper of the Office of Financial Research of the United States Treasury entitled "Contract as Automaton: The Computational Representation of Financial Agreements" (coauthored with Mark Flood). He served as Co-Director of the Moral Markets initiative of the Gruter Institute, with support from the John Templeton Foundation. A third-generation participant in IRAS, he attended the Star Island conference for the first time as a 13-year-old in 1966.
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Elliot and Porch, 10:15-11:00 am
PLENARY Q & A
Elliott, 11:00-12:15 pm
THURSDAY AFTERNOON
IRAS ANNUAL MEETING
Elliott, 1:45-3:00 pm
All are invited.
WHITER HUMANITY? ONE WAY TO MAKE SURE OF OUR PASTS, PRESENTS, AND
FUTURES
Ruben Nelson
Elliott, 3:15-4:15 pm
ABSTRACT
We know that as a species we are a narrative animal. We are attracted to, influenced by, even suckers for, a "good story." We also know that many (most? virtually all?) of the deep narratives that claim to make sense of history that we have inherited from our past are less credible to us than they once were. And we know that nature abhors a vacuum; that most folks cannot cope for very long without a deep story to make sense of what is, and is not, happening in history and in their lives and the future as they imagine it. For good and ill, we will follow a good storyteller, even unto death including our own, rather than live without a deep narrative that help us makes sense of life.
This session will be part presentation and part workshop. I will explain a simple 2 X 2 matrix that I have used for much of my life to make sense of the human journey. It sheds light on where we have been, where and why we are in the story, and what range of futures are "adjacent possibles." I use the matrix for the same reasons one is drawn to a good hypothesis: it appears to account for more data, more adequately, more suggestively and more elegantly than alternative stories, e.g. Fukuyama's silly claim that our Modern Industrial Culture is "The End of History." Besides, my matrix is good fun to use.
First, I will explain my distinction between a "culture" and a "form of civilization." Examples will be given of the kinds of trouble we get into with our present inability to make this distinction routinely. I will then explain the two axes I use to create the 2 X 2 matrix. Then I will use my matrix to identify four quite different spaces within which cultures may develop as exemplars of a "form of civilization." Finally, those who show up will be invited to play with the matrix to generate insights into the stresses, challenges, gifts, and possible futures of our present Modern/Industrial cultures. Finally, I will use the matrix to explain what I mean when I say that "ours is a truly rare time in human history a time when we are, yet again, changing our minds about the nature of reality, the nature of persons, and the nature of the relationship of persons to reality." I will also note the conditions that make this civilizational trajectory change to be a unique, and not yet understood, challenge. Come and stretch your mind, tickle your imagination, and maybe even inspire your heart.
BIOSKETCH
Ruben Nelson has spent his life exploring and seeking to understand the forces that are now reshaping our lives, our world, and our future. He is Executive Director of Foresight Canada. He
is a graduate of Queen's University and Queen's Theological College in Kingston, Canada and has also studied at United Theological College, Bangalore, India and the University of Calgary. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, the World Business Academy, and the Meridian Institute on Leadership, Governance, Change and the Future. He is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists, the World Futures Studies Federation, the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, and the Ralph Connor Memorial United Church in Canmore, Canada. Ruben lives in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta with his wife of 57 years and their three cats. Some of his writings can be found at http://foresightcanada.com/resources/library/.
I LIFT MY LAMP VINTAGE SONGS AND DANCES OF IMMIGRANT AMERICA (Piano
Concert)
Jacqueline Schwab
Oceanic Lobby, 4:30-5:30 pm
ABSTRACT
Pianist Jacqueline Schwab, heard on many of Ken Burns' PBS documentaries, reflects on growing up in Pittsburgh's "melting pot," as well as her later exploration of music from around the world. This program celebrates America's immigrants, their vibrant spirit of community music-making, and their multicultural contributions to our heritage. In the current climate, we are remembering and appreciating the contributions immigrants have made. Jacqueline presents dance tunes and sentimental songs from Scotland, Ireland, Poland, France, Eastern Europe, the African-American community, Cuba, Brazil and Argentina, along with Tin Pan Alley tunes, American anthems, and more.
BIOSKETCH
Pianist Jacqueline Schwab spins heartfelt musical stories, connecting listeners to the rich, multicultural strands of America's musical tapestry. Her distinctive playing infuses the sound tracks of Burns' Grammy-winning The Civil War, Baseball, Lewis and Clark, Mark Twain, The War, and The National Parks, among others. She has performed at the White House for President Clinton, and, with Scottish singer Jean Redpath, on public radio's A Prairie Home Companion and on CBS' Late Show with David Letterman. Jacqueline graduated from the New England Conservatory in Boston, majoring in piano improvisation and has long played for English country and many other styles of dancing. Her work with documentary film maker Ken Burns reacquainted her with (her home town) Pittsburgh's musical hero Stephen Foster and led to her folksy-yet-formal concerts of a diverse array of vintage American music. She has performed in almost every state of the Union. In concert, Jacqueline speaks about the power of music to transport us into our own past and also on to new horizons. She is married to IRAS member Rev. Edmund Robinson, Minister, UU Meeting House, Chatham, MA.
THURSDAY EVENING
TITLE
Arthur Peterson
Elliott, 7:30-8:45 pm
ABSTRACT
BIOSKETCH
Arthur Petersen has recently been appointed as the new Editor-in-Chief of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. Since 2014, he has served as Professor of Science, Technology and Public Policy at University College London, playing various leadership roles in the build-up of the new Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP). Within the department, he continues to fulfill the roles of Director of Doctoral Studies and Departmental Graduate Tutor (Research).
This followed more than thirteen years' work as scientific adviser on environment and infrastructure policy within the Dutch Government. Most recently, he served as Chief Scientist of the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (2011-2014). He is also a Visiting Fellow at Osaka University (2018) and Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (since 2009). He has been Adjunct Professor of Science and Environmental Public Policy at the VU University Amsterdam (2011-2016), Professorial Fellow at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment RIVM (2016-2017), and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2009-2014).
He studied physics and philosophy, obtained doctorate degrees in atmospheric sciences (PhD, Utrecht University, 1999) and philosophy of science (Doctor of Public Administration DPA, VU University Amsterdam, 2006), and now also finds disciplinary homes in anthropology, political science, and science and religion. He is currently working on his third doctorate (DPhil in Science and Religion) at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Prof. Alister McGrath, where he is writing a book on uncertainty in science and religion. He has been a reader of Zygon since he first engaged with the field of science and religion in the early 1990s. He became a member of IRAS and subscriber to the journal in the mid-2000s. This year marks his first visit to Star Island.
FRIDAY MORNING
CONCLUDING PANEL
Jack Dennis, Mladen Turk, and Plenary Speakers
Elliott, 9:15-10:15 am
BIOSKETCHES
Jack B. Dennis is professor of computer science and engineering, emeritus, at M.I.T. Prof. Dennis completed the doctorate in Electrical Engineering at M.I.T. in 1958, joined the M.I.T. faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering, and was appointed full professor in 1969. He is widely known for his contributions in the field of computer system architecture. Since 1987, he has worked as an independent consultant and research scientist on projects primarily in parallel computer hardware and software. In the early days of M.I.T.'s Project MAC, Professor Dennis contributed to specification of the unique segment addressing and paging mechanisms that became a fundamental part of the Multics computer system project. As leader of the Computation Structures Group of the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science, Professor Dennis directed research on computer architecture and programming languages based on data flow models of program execution. These developments led to data flow projects at many universities and research institutes around the world, and earned him the 1984 Eckert-Mauchly Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) /Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Professor Dennis is a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE. In 2013 he was awarded the IEEE John Von Neumann Medal.
Mladen Turk is associate professor of religious studies at Elmhurst College in Illinois. His area of specialization is religion and science with a special focus on scientific theories of religion and methodology of the study of religion, but he teaches broadly in the areas of history of Christianity in 19th and 20th century and religious traditions of South Asia.
Mladen studied philosophy, ethnology, Indology and theology in Zagreb, Croatia, received a Master of Philosophy from University of Bergen, Norway, Master of Theology from Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and Doctor of Philosophy from Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, Zygon Center for Religion and Science. He has published a textbook in philosophy, Logic: Exercises and Solutions (Logika: vjezbe, zadaci, rjesenja. 1995), a theoretical book, Being Religious: Cognitive and Evolutionary Theories in Historical Perspective (2013), and recently edited a volume titled Interactive World, Interactive God: The Basic Reality of Creative Interaction (2017).
Mladen regularly leads students overseas for month-long courses to study the religions of India. He is on the board of Center for Advanced Studies in Religion and Science (CASIRAS) and on the executive committee of the American Theological Society in the Midwest. He is currently the book review editor for Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science.
SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Elliot and Porch, 10:15-11:00 am
PLENARY Q & A
Elliott, 11:00-12:15 pm
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW: EXTREME PARADIGM CHANGE
A Metaphysics for Unifying Science, Religion, and Ai, with Infinite Love as the Ultimate Reference
F. Jerry Josties
Elliott, 2:00-3:00 pm
ABSTRACT
At age 25, I was privileged to be in attendance at Thomas Kuhn's talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1963 on "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." This paper is a direct result of that experience, which lead to an Aha experience in 1968 and my own conception of appropriate paradigm change, resulting in a panpsychic metaphysics of moral choice with Infinite Love as its ultimate reference. This is a metanarrative which effects a satisfying unification of science and religion.
My Aha experience led me to conclude that physics had to be reconceptualized in terms of consciousness. I realized that the previously mysterious electromagnetic fields could be explained as consciousness, starkly opposite to the conclusion that others came to. I had the advantage of sufficient philosophical background to realize that nothing whatever in physics had been explained that it was only an abstract descriptive representation which was awaiting explanatory interpretation. So E&M was to be explained as being consciousness rather than vice versa, meaning that consciousness was ubiquitous, and panpsychism was the natural ontology. Contemporary physics and neuroscience are beset with many interpretational problems, which can be expected to arise within a world view which is fundamentally flawed. A panentheistic panpsychism of moral choice, deriving from a kenotic creation story of Infinite Love, provides an explanatory framework for the following: explanation, identity, free will, space, time, physics, laws, emergence, hierarchy, qualitative qualia, beauty, communication, mathematics, the multiverse, Einstein's "failure," and possibly the failure of "Supersymmetry." I will hand out papers on some of these topics, since there will not be time to discuss everything. In addition, I will mention the fascinating possibility that this new worldview may provide a real justification for the project of "Loving AI" at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
BIOSKETCH
Jerry Josties is a retired astronomer, having been at the U.S. Naval Observatory for 42 years. He is a graduate of Swarthmore College (1959/60), and was in graduate school in Physics and Astronomy (part time) for nine years at the University of Chicago, George Washington University, Indiana University, and the University of Maryland. He received no higher degrees due to an astonishing talent for disorganization. He was Swarthmore's exchange student to England's University College of North Staffordshire, also called "the royal college" since Princess Margaret was its formal president, and there he studied philosophy and mathematical logic for one year. He later taught Astronomy and Cosmology for seven years at Hood College in Frederick, MD. Although heavily educated in physics, astronomy, and mathematics, his primary interest at all times was philosophy, and he now frequents meetings on science and religion and neuroscience (IRAS, CTNS, Center for Process Studies, Cosmos and Creation, AAR/ISSR, Washington Theological Consortium, Tucson Science of Consciousness).
INTELLIGENCE AND ENTROPY: A MORAL COMPASS FROM FLATLAND
Davie Sayre (Dayton)
Elliott, 3:15-4:15 pm
ABSTRACT
Our grandchildren stand at the hinge of human evolution, now for the first time in the hands of their generation. What guidance can science offer them? In the picture-book Flatland, award-winning artist Rebecca Emberley draws a universe in which all expressions of intelligent life are made of the same stuff. What is that stuff? On this afternoon, we will review how intelligence itself would be detected anywhere in the universe, and what those evidences say about disintegration and ignorance (the two ways we experience Entropy).
There is something, rather than nothing. That something is orderly; it is not capricious, not magic, not mystical. Werner Heisenberg, the formulator of quantum mechanics and the Uncertainty Principle, called this reality the Central Order. It was his way of thinking about God.
There is in fact a science of order. It supports a finding of self-interest in other-interest, and our trust in diversity.
Rebecca and I wrote Flatland as a metaphor of the human condition and its limited viewpoint. We all walk on Flatland. Senses evolved just to survive here do not perceive all of reality. But we can reach for our more not by a leap of faith, but a rational search (that is, faithful to truth). Intelligent life is all about reducing entropy, in both its thermodynamic and informational forms (which are mathematically equivalent). We’ll discuss the special means available to intelligent beings, wherever evolved or fabricated and how those provide a moral compass and a way to comfort and meaning.
Life doesn't stop at the edges of Flatland. The things we’ve held sacred are real, after all.
BIOSKETCH
David Sayre (Dayton) is the author of four books and several technology companies dealing with the reduction of entropy. He is currently Chairman of Clean Energy Solutions, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in energy efficiency and renewable energy. He began his career as an engineering section leader in a Raytheon laboratory, and was subsequently promoted to the Raytheon Corporate Staff. He left Raytheon to help form Technical Communications Corporation as its Technical Director, working on technologies now familiar in cell phone communications. He published widely on these modulation techniques and patented a swept-fm design for digital communication and navigation.
He turned away from the defense industry to form the nonprofit Technical Development Corporation (TDC) in Boston. TDC performed many innovative projects in energy conservation, criminal justice, and job creation, received gubernatorial appointments to state commissions, and set up other corporations in its fields of interest. He then founded Hospital Efficiency Corporation, one of the first ESCOs in the U.S., which was acquired by Northeast Utilities (now Eversource) in 1990 and renamed Select Energy Services Inc. SESI installed and financed over a billion dollars’ worth of energy efficiency improvements to government and commercial facilities during his tenure.
He also served as president of Energia Global International for two years and on its Board for ten years, leading up to its acquisition by ENEL. EGI is a leading developer of environmentally- prudent renewable energy projects in Latin America. He received a BSEE from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University.
2017 Conference Planning
Terrence Deacon Program Co-chair
Sol Katz Program Co-chair
Abigail Fuller Conference Co-chair
Ted Laurenson Conference Co-chair
Marion Griswold Registrar
Conference Facilitators
Archi Pelagos Staff
Jennifer Whitten, coordinator
Anna Birch, Josephine Dawkins, Meredith Doster, Alison Earnhart, Nina Habibi, Hassaun Jones-Bey, Sylvie Letendre, Sandra Woodworth
Art Workshop Christopher Volpe
Auction Coordinator Jennifer Whitten
Call for Papers Coordinator Emily Austin
Candlelight Coordinators Dan and Lisa Solomon
Choir Director Jane Penfield
Conference Chaplain Edmund Robinson
Memorial Service Edmund Robinson
Music Director Frank Toppa
Program Book (Orange Book) David Klotz
Social Hour Coordinator Mark Kuprych
Star Beacon Editor Emily Austin
Stargazing David Klot, Dan Solomon, and Alison Earnhart
Talent Show Coordinator Joan Hunter-Brody
Shapley-Booth Fellows Mark Graves, Randall Reed and Laura Ammon
IRAS Student Scholar Daniyaal Mustafa Beg
Sponsors and Partners
Zygon
WesleyNexus
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