Neither aliens nor animals are biological robots, and we shouldn’t be, either.

Yesterday I bought and started reading the Kindle edition of Whitley Strieber’s latest book, The Fourth Mind. On page 47, he criticizes those who think of Grays as biological robots:

When we call them names like “biorobots” what we are really saying is that we don’t think that it’s necessary, or even possible, to understand them. We must not continue with this, because if we don’t understand them and they are hostile, then they will prevail. If they are not hostile, it is even more important that we attempt to achieve a meaningful understanding of them.

Today, something I was looking up in connection with the Book of Mormon (I no longer remember what specifically) led me to a blog called Science Is True and the Church Is Too, and I clicked around a bit through some of the posts, eventually ending up at one called “Animal Intelligence 2019.” This quotation was prominently featured there, in a large font on a shaded background:

“Animals are biological robots. Very good robots because God programmed them. As with good robots they have the limited ability to adapt.”–Unnamed Ken Ham follower

This of course reminded me of what I had read in Strieber, so I went to look it up. I first put in a bookmark so I wouldn’t lose my place and then ran a search for biorobot. Two hits came back, the first of which was the reference I was looking for. The second one I hadn’t gotten to yet in my reading.

After finding the biorobot reference on p. 47, I tapped to get back to my bookmark, which was on p. 57. At first I thought the bookmark hadn’t worked, because the biorobot passage was still on the screen. Then I realized that the second biorobot reference, the one I hadn’t read yet, was actually on p. 57, precisely where I had put my bookmark! What are the odds? Here’s the second and last use of the word:

When we say the word “biorobot,” we assume something simple, a kind of basic creature there only to do the bidding of its controllers. But that cannot be the case here, the reason being those larger brains. The idea, therefore, that they are simple robots must be approached with caution. They are not simple, and while they are fabricated, they may not be robots in the same sense that we mean the term.

After experiencing these biorobot coincidences, I checked Bruce Charlton’s blog and found a new post titled “The lesson of so-called AI: Most of Man's ‘thinking’ is just ‘thinking-about’, like the abstract symbolic token-juggling of Artificial Intelligence.” The post doesn’t use the word robot, but the point it is making is that most people most of the time (and many people all of the time) are limited to a sort of “thinking” that is essentially no different from what a machine could do. Bruce, too, is talking about “biological robots.” The point he is making is a very Gurdjieffian one, which is another link back to Strieber.