A possible dark side to the Enlightenment and the criticisms from the politically correct pundits.

In spite of Wilson's faith in the Enlightenment and its intellectual project in favor of human progress, he is fully aware of its own problems and limitations. It is, in other words, a critical support that he provides:

The Enlightenment gave rise to the modern intellectual tradition of the West and much of its culture. (...) The causes of the Enlightenment's decline, which persist to the present day, illuminate the labyrinthine wellsprings of human motivation. It is worth asking, particularly in the present winter of our cultural discontent, whether the original spirit of the Enlightenment —confidence, optimism, eyes to the horizon— can be regained. And to ask in honest opposition, should it be regained, or did it possess in its first conception, as some have suggested, a dark-angelic flaw?

(...)

It has become fashionable to speak of the Enlightenment as an idiosyncratic construction by European males in a bygone era, one way of thinking among many different contructions generated across time by a legion of other minds in other cultures, each of which deserves careful and respectful attention. To which the only decent response is yes, of course —to a point. Creative thought is forever precious, and all knowledge has value. But what counts most in the long haul of history is seminality, not sentiment.

(Edward O. Wilson: pp. 21-22)

The second paragraph is directly aimed at those who defend the politically correct. Yes, it has been mainly white men who contributed to Western culture but, then, how could it have been otherwise in a traditional society dominated precisely by... well, white men? And what does that mean, exactly? What does it imply? Does a tree still fall in the forst if we don't hear it? Is a particular scientific theory perhaps not correct simply because it was discovered or laid out by an "old white man"? Are we truly so brain-dead that we have managed to politicize every single field of human activity? We can call what happened in 1492 a "discovery", a "meeting point", an "accident", a "crash of civilizations" or whatever anyone sees fit. We can also stress that the Vikings, the Celts or some advanced extraterrestrial culture settled down in America before Chistopher Columbus and his men arrived that year, but that still doesn't change the fact that it wasn't until 1492 that a permanent and continuous relationship between both sides of the Atlantic started. As Wilson points out, it's seminality that matters, and not our sentiments.

Artificial intelligence and complexity arising from simplicity.

Nathan Levin describes Conway's Game of Life in a very excited manner:

At first, his description of the simulation was reasoned, quiet. He told me about the creatures, their interactions with the habitats, how the populations rose and fell in response to the food stores, and how the food stores in turn responded to the presence or absence of creatures. He discussed his plans for migration, so that the creatures could search for food stores on other "island" habitats. Next he turned to the philosophy behind the simulation, the idea that all complex systems were actually nothing more than a collection of simple, "mindless" interactions, complexity not being something built into a system from "on high" by some designer, but something that emerges from "below", as a result of some unexpected interplay among all the underlying simple interactions. A complicated world without a god to oversee it, he called it (or, the idea of God itself was something that emerged from the underlying interactions —I really don't recall which way he put it). All of this took some ten or fifteen minutes, during which time I started to have hope for the night's outcome. I was impressed with what he was attempting, if not for the current results. And he showed philosophical depths I had not suspected were in him.

But as he began describing the elements he would add over time to his world —genders, species, variation in habitats, weather, predators, parasites, viruses, fires, floods, earthquakes, all manner of biblical-scale disasters— a terrible manic energy began to take him over. He started swiping at his hair. His voice rose in pitch and volume, and his legs, splayed out from the sides of the stool, began shaking up and down. It was as if the ideas themselves were banging around furiously in his body, wanting to get out. I had no idea exactly what was causing this reaction, whether it was the drinking or the lateness of the hour or something truly strange in Ethan suddenly showing itself (or the ideas actually battling it out inside him), so there was no recourse for me but to sit quietly and hope that soon come to a conclusion.

(Ullman: pp. 291-292)

Now, these ideas are quite similar to those proposed by Stephen Wolfram in A New Kind of Science, as Ullman herself acknowledges later in the book:

By then he was raving. I'd already spent hours inside his mind —an odd mind, full of tight kinks like his hair. But I was not prepared for this rush of what seemed to be intellectual hysteria. I had no way of knowing that, less than two decades later, a famous computer scientist would be trying to warn the world about the dangers of self-replicating artificial creatures, descendants of Ethan Levin's silly milling O's. No idea I would attend a seminar at which perfectly sane-seeming men would debate not if but only when artificial life-forms, complete in their "humanity", would surpass our poor carbon-based existence, the coming of the "posthuman". What Ethan could only imagine in a fever that night —the notion of human beings as nothing more than a collection of chemical and electrical processes that could be scanned, stored, and replicated in silicon— has already come to be seen as reasonable. And his ideas about complexity arising from simple interactions —now proposed as the basis of an entirely new science. But at the time, I simply thought that Ethan Levin had gone a little crazy —in that hyperlogical way men can get crazy, when they isolate an idea and keep traveling deeper and deeper into it, until they arrive at a place so narrow their little idea seems huge, all-encompassing, an explanation for the world.

(Ullman: p. 293)

Well, that happens, right? How many times have we heard of what we thought was a pretty crazy idea just to find out years later that it slowly became the widely accepted mainstream? Wolfram's theory remains quite controversial, to be fair, but the overall idea that information pervades our whole universe is a whole different story. That other idea is quickly becoming part of the mainstream, if not the main hypothesis of what some might term a new paradigm. Now, from there to Wolfram's hypothesis there is only one more step: the one that assumes that even complex systems can be reduced to small tidbits of information, simple statements —as in a computer program— that, when combined with other statements and interacting with them, can end up building enormously complex systems. I'm by no means an expert on any of this, but it sounds quite reasonable to me, to be honest.

Alan Kay's cellular biology paradigm of software development.

Rosenberg tells us about Alan Kay's wild idea of applying cellular biology to the world of computing:

He is not suggesting, however, that anyone stop at cathedrals. There can be a real science of computing, he believes; we just haven't discovered it yet. "Someday," he says, "we're going to invent software engineering, and we'll be better off." And those discoveries and inventions will take their cues, he thinks, from cellular biology. Ultimately, he says, we need to stop writing software and learn how to grow it instead. We think our computing systems are unmanageably complex, but a biologist —who regularly deals with systems that have many orders of magnitude more moving parts— would see them differently, Kay maintains. To such an observer, "Something like a computer could not possibly be regarded as being particularly complex or large or fast. Slow, small, stupid —that's what computers are."

(Rosenberg: p. 288)

It's the same old idea also expressed by Stephen Wolfram in A New Kind of Science: complexity as something that emerges from simple programs, from simple logic. If we were able to find the smallest snippets of computation needed by the different modules that make up a larger program, all we would have to do to create new applications from that moment on is to combine and recombine these modules. Of course, the problem is how to find about those smallest snippets of computational logic. That's where we all get stuck. Otherwise, the ideas is attractive enough, without any doubt.