The Irreducible Immateriality of Meaning and Its Crucial Role for Artificial, Human, and (Maybe) Non-human Intelligence

Musso P. · Integrated Science (2023) · DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-15959-6_25

Resumen

Are there good reasons to believe that meaningMeaning is not reducible to any material object? Some new argumentsArgument in favor are discussed here, which do not depend on any previous specific theoryTheory, but only on factual evidence: we may disagree on how to explain the immaterial natureNature of meaningMeaning and therefore also of the processProcess of thinkingThinking, or even recognize that we cannot explain them at all, but this is not a good reason to accept a reductionist explanationExplanation if it has proved inadequate. First, I will present a new version of the classical Gödelian argumentArgument aimed at proving that meaningMeaning cannot be fully formalized and, therefore, the human mindMind is not a computerComputer. Then, I will argue, also by means of a little experimentExperiment, that, in a sense, not even a computerComputer is a computerComputer, since what we call “computationComputation” is such only for a mindMind able to understand its meaningMeaning, and not in itself. Finally, I will try to explain why, paradoxically, it is precisely thanks to the immaterial natureNature of meaningMeaning that a material object like a computerComputer can imitate human intelligenceIntelligence, at least to some extent, and perhaps human intelligenceIntelligence could one day communicate with some form of non-human intelligenceIntelligence, non-human (if any), as shown by some recent studies carried out in the field of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial IntelligenceIntelligenceprogramProgram that is currently carried out all over the world by means of radio telescopes. iBrain. The work is inspired by the Arc of a Scythe series by Neal Shusterman. (Adapted with permission from the Association of ScienceScience and ArtArt (ASA), Universal Scientific EducationEducation and ResearchResearchNetworkNetwork (USERN); Painting by Saina Adiban Afkham). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.

Instituciones: Universidad Católica Sedes Sapientiae