Agency: Human, Robotic and Divine

The notions of causation and agency are deeply embedded in several fascinating science-and-religion questions: How was the world created? Does God act in the world today, and if so, how? Are persons free? Why does God not prevent evil and suffering? What is life, and when does it begin and end? What is consciousness? Some areas of scientific research that drive the discussion forward are: Quantum Mechanics, Complex and Chaotic systems, Artificial Intelligence, and the Neurosciences. In this essay I offer a brief survey of the main issues as I understand them, focusing on human agency, robotics, and divine action.

The success of methodological reductionism seems to imply that working at ever-smaller scales is a good strategy for all problems. However, such an approach does not give satisfying accounts of everyday phenomena such as agency. When we look at simple systems in the brain, we don't find anything resembling the freely choosing mind we all experience. Instead, we see mindless electro-chemical reactions. Where does this self-reflecting consciousness come from?And for the religious believer, where are the gaps in which the Divine might impart inspiration, or indeed affect outcomes of any kind?

Descartes enhanced the Greek idea that we are made of dual substances: matter and mind/spirit. Unfortunately, the mind substance is not visible under the microscope. Without this divine gift of a mind substance, matter can only ever form machines. More recently, some have turned this conundrum into a thesis; if what we see under the microscope is machinery, and we detect no mind substance, then we must be machines. Our perception of freedom and consciousness is therefore simply illusory. This view is widely held within the AI/Robotics community. As Rodney Brooks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab puts it "On the one hand, I believe myself and my children all to be mere machines. ... But this is not how I treat them. ... Like a religious scientist I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs and act on each of them in different circumstances". Others point to the quantum world where machine-like behaviour gives way to the probabilistic and paradoxical. Physicists John Wheeler has suggested that consciousness may be connected with quantum behaviour. Kevin Sharpe joins Wheeler in wondering if consciousness could somehow affect outcomes at the quantum level,. Still others solve the problem of the missing mind by embedding the material world within revised metaphysical systems. Process thinkers, for example, speculate that matter possesses a mental-like property that is undetectable in simple systems. Followers of Bohm see consciousness as an aspect of the underlying 'implicate order', and our own consciousness as sharing in that.

In the last few decades it has become apparent to some thinkers that it is possible to overuse a reductive approach. If we are willing to leave the micro world and consider more complex scenarios, new properties emerge that cannot be fully explained in terms of the components in isolation. Such an approach allows us to speculate that freedom, mind, and consciousness are in fact 'real' and open to scientific exploration. But many are resistant. As we leave the micro world with its Newtonian simplicity and predictability, and start to deal with the world of complexes, wholes, and probabilistic descriptions, we'll need to work hard to make claims that are as free from subjectivity as possible.

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