Among many interpretations of Babel Tower story there is one about technological independence. It implies that mankind has so advanced in terms of technological sophistication that it can do without God’s help. Today as we move into future full of driverless cars and smart assistants’, it looks we stand on the verge of new rationality. What a lucky chance to witness the new Age of Enlightenment. The Dawn of smart tools. The creation once again looks like a promising set of building blocks, or rather programmable units if you ask a typical Silicon Valley resident. Artificial Intelligence is a perfect candidate for Tower of Babel of our time. The question is: will we build it properly this time around?

The core of the story is “debunking the mystery”. For today’s technology priests there is hardly any mystery to nature that neuroscience and modern genetics cannot explain. Killing the mystery is the same old “killing of God” according to famous Nietzsche stance. Numbers tell it: we are killing the mystery with the speed of 3 million scientific papers published each year. And each new discovery from AI corner persuades us that Mystery loses its ground. After all, isn’t it true that neural networks can learn, solve problems better than us? And if you strip humans of all metaphysical depth, you’ll be left with programmable parts and a set of handy technology metaphors: consciousness that can be downloaded onto a drive, code of existence, God being a coder and us willing to “out-code” him and take his position.

Such “Silicon Valley mentality” is highly contagious, though some sobering voices can be heard. As Jerry Kaplan, an author of many books on Artificial Intelligence writes:

“Transferring consciousness into a machine is a sci-fi meme, not based on anything real, since we don’t know what consciousness is. Can the progress be made in the future? We got to the moon. But if there was a movement that claimed that climbing trees was progress toward that goal, I’d be singing the same tune.”

So far there is no scientific consensus as to what consciousness is and how it relates to the brain. But still, Artificial Intelligence has moved far enough on the line, to persuade many that reality is fundamentally mechanistic or artificial. Among the AI enthusiasts there is a strong feeling that social phenomena are too programmable concepts. You were programmed and conditioned by the family, society, culture, etc thus you too are a robot. Human vs Replicant problem hits us at the core long before 2049 (The Blade Runner movie). So, an ubiquitous Free Will vs Determinism question pops up, and to go further we’ll need to outline a few more parallels or even alternative definitions of the same battle.

Human vs God

Artificial vs Organic

Element vs Whole

Particle vs Wave

Program vs Imagination

Material vs Spiritual

Object vs Process

Known vs Unknown

These classic oppositions are here to show that the Artificial Intelligence problem is only a fancy dress for a centuries-old conundrum. What is the relation between whole and its parts?

As we just saw, what AI enthusiasts believe that there is no magic ingredient to human existence. One problem with that view is that it holds reality as fixed. Yes, the neural networks can learn and create new combinations from initial parts but we’re still in a billiard ball or lego brick universe — is it because it’s easier to build towers that way? Existence is regarded as comprised of neutral strings of code.

On a flip side, quantum physics has successfully proved that the underlying reality of our world is far from fixed. The latter explains the world in terms of probabilities and gives chance for an open future as a savory element of Chaos enters the otherwise deterministic picture. Unlike newtonian physics, quantum physics leaves hope for interconnectedness of all things — Bell’s theorem demonstrates that “the universe is fundamentally interconnected, interdependent, and inseparable.”

Can Functional and Meaningful ever come together? Despite the love for oppositions, Human vs Replicant dilemma, doesn’t make sense from a scientific ground. It’s not that the line between both is blurry. It’s constant re-inventing the balance between two that really counts. On a larger scale, you are both a Replicant and Human at the same time. And the line between two is drawn, as we’ll hope to explain, with a blade of a present moment.

Frankly, if a system is built upon past knowledge it is already leaning towards the mechanical side. Now is the only time where one can dismiss all previous history and exert one’s free will to break schedules or make mistakes, or stop being a robot. The free will has the only one place to dwell, the Now. For example, we may argue that animals act deterministically according to the intensity of their awareness. It has been proved that animals that are more self aware demonstrate more flexibility in their actions. Now is the moment of waking up from past and future schemes. Consciousness is experiencing the present.

You may look at it as “recorded” versus “live on air”: inanimate objects follow the pre-recorded script, whereas living objects vibrate and “improvise” on the fly. An important addition — they do so along with the rest of the world, being included, so to say, to the universal circuit.

According to this view, determinism is partly dissolved in the now. Because consciousness is an active process of experiencing now-ness. Awareness or the process of observation can be viewed as a subjective definition of now. The difference between the classic and the quantum physics is the idea of the Observer, Witness, Conscious agent, while observation or experiencing is by definition only possible in a present moment. And that “blade” from Blade Runner is none other than the blade of an active awareness.

Hence, a chance to resurrect Mystery or a notion of the Divine. The Babel Towers fall because they become too much stuck in the past, rigid, not allowing for unexpected to happen. They betrayed the Now for the already known. Probably, the same reason chatbots can’t tell you much about what’s happening now. Being aware to what happens Now is the window to bigger picture, the channel to communicate with the Universal.

If the balance has shifted too much in favor of order or chaos, respectively, you’ll run into trouble. Life gives us plenty examples of this in a practical sense. Try following a strictly determined plan for some considerable time, like promising yourself to go to the gym you repeat every January. Try it and you’ll soon risk to be torn apart by waves of everyday’s chaos. Try engaging in a party talk with a scripted plan, and not surprisingly, all your ready-made templates will fall flat. True not only for jazz music: improvisation is as just important as your learned note-sheet.

The more we try to eliminate the uncertainty, the more it re-emerges on a different level. Building of Babylon Tower is the attempt to eliminate unpredictability, because God is, in essence, unpredictable. Following a strictly functional scheme or game plan day after day is akin to building your own personal Tower of Babel .