Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Is astronomy the key to our wellbeing? If we “learn the harmonies and revolutions of the universe,” Plato wrote in the Timaeus, we will attain “the most excellent life offered to humankind by the gods.” The pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras was even more dramatic: And they say that when someone asked Anaxagoras for what reason anyone might choose to come to be born and to live, he replied to the question by saying that it was “to be an observer of the sky and the stars around it, as well as moon and sun,” since everything else at any rate is worth nothing.  For Anaxagoras, stargazing is the only thing worth doing. Without it, we would be better off not existing at all. These days, I’m sure, lots of people would be thrilled to gaze at the stars if the spectacle could offer them respite from what’s going on down here, let alone lead to “the most excellent life.” But can it? In 2020, the Nobel Prize in physics went to three astrophysicists — modern-day stargazers, if you like — for their work on black holes: Roger Penrose for showing that black holes, strange though they are, fit squarely with our theory of the universe; Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for discovering the black hole at the center of our own galaxy. The year before, the first-ever photograph of a black hole was published to great fanfare. Every newspaper showed the dark circle, surrounded by a ring of fire, on the front page. Eight interlinked observatories, from the South Pole to Hawaii to the Chilean desert, turned the earth into a gigantic telescope to capture the supermassive object five hundred million billion kilometres away.  Invariably such events are accompanied by a certain rhetoric celebrating mankind’s curiosity and how it pushes the frontiers of knowledge. But imagine how puzzled we would have been if the laureates had announced from the podium in Stockholm that life is worthless unless we study astronomy. Wouldn’t we have dismissed them as mad? In my own family, the enthusiasm for astronomy runs low. It took my son and me a couple of hours to screw together the telescope that he was given for his sixth birthday. After dinner we aimed it at the sky. We saw mostly darkness with a few fuzzy flashes. Finally we found the moon. On the pale, stained surface we made out craters. It held his attention for about a minute. “Did you see the man on the moon?” I asked. “That’s a fairy tale, dad!” he replied. But if I could get him on a rocket ship, he would have loved to jump around there, like the astronauts in a documentary he had seen. Then came his older sister’s turn. “Cool,” she said. “It really does look like cheese.” That was the end of our space exploration. Since then, the telescope has been collecting dust in a corner of the living room. Clearly we have not been heeding Anaxagoras’s and Plato’s counsel.  The only constellation I can identify is Orion, thanks to the belt. I wouldn’t make a Thracian maid or anyone else laugh the way Thales did. He was the first Greek philosopher, and Plato tells this story about him in the Theaetetus: Thales was studying the stars, and gazing aloft, when he fell into a well; and a witty and amusing Thracian maid made fun of him because, she said, he was so eager to know what was up in the sky, but failed to see what was in front of him and under his feet. “The same joke,” Plato says, “applies to all who spend their lives in philosophy.” Plato is keenly aware that ordinary people see philosophers as ridiculous stargazers. He, of course, thinks that the joke is on ordinary people. They don’t comprehend that stargazing is of much greater value than the things they desire: money, fame, pleasure, or, to take it down a notch, ice cream with friends or a night on the town. I have spent my life in philosophy: borrowing philosophy books from the local library as a teenager, writing a doctoral thesis in the discipline, and teaching it at a university for two