Letters

From the July 2005 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

I was interested to learn in Greg Beato's article "Homeschooling Alone" (April) that on national achievement tests, homeschooled children perform as well as, or slightly better than, their public school counterparts.

In other words, public schools can absorb legions of children with low average IQs, legions of children of dysfunctional parents who cannot in any way assist in the education of their own children, pack them into "overcrowded classrooms with apathetic teachers," and still turn out students with academic parity to those students receiving full-time, one-on-one teaching from a devoted parent. Many would consider that a job well done.

Patricia Shelton
Ojai, CA

Homeschooling has always been a great idea, and states should keep regulation low, but Greg Beato's article goes further, lamenting a lack of financial support for homeschooling. Funding, however, will invite more oversight. Genentech will hardly want to fund the education of students taught that evolution is "just a theory," nor will Exxon seek geologists who believe the earth is 10,000 years old. People with money will have strings attached to that money--and they should. Furthermore, if there were real economic benefit to homeschooling, either in cash or tax credits, the day would be rapidly upon us when homeschoolers were accused of "doing it for the money," for which they cannot be reasonably tarred today.

Freedom from undue regulation is a huge asset for homeschoolers, and we should be vigilant against those who might hobble the movement to make it bigger.

Richard Bellerose
San Francisco, CA

Are We Just Really Smart Robots?

Kenneth Silber ("Are We Just Really Smart Robots?," April) is worried about the encroaching scientific understanding of our brains and behavior. If science shows us to be simply smart biological machines, he believes this undermines liberal democracy, human rights, moral responsibility, and self-worth; all is permitted and authoritarian regimes will flourish.

Fortunately, he argues, John Searle (in Mind: A Brief Introduction) and Jeff Hawkins (in On Intelligence) have shown the mechanistic thesis is false, so we needn't worry. Human beings, although part of nature, nevertheless have a special something that grounds our dignity and value.

The difficulty is that Silber doesn't quite specify what this special something might be. Is it consciousness? Nothing in Searle's biological naturalism or in Hawkins' account of intelligence requires that our capacity for consciousness couldn't be computable and thus a property of a machine, once we understand the functions of the neural processes subserving consciousness. Could it be free will? But even Searle admits that the experience of free will might be an illusion, perhaps an adaptive illusion at that (although it's more likely the result of not being able to see the causal workings of our own brains). Could it be personhood? Personhood rests on physically instantiated capacities for sentience and self-concern. Complex though these are, there's no reason in principle why intelligent machines might not someday have moral claims on us, were they given such capacities.

Although he doesn't establish the existence of a special human something--a soul, perhaps?--Silber needn't worry that the mechanistic thesis poses a threat. Even if it turns out that we're amazingly complex biological machines, we nevertheless remain persons, and our desire to be treated as ends in ourselves won't diminish. After all, that's "hard-wired" into the very neural architecture of our brains, as are the rest of our basic motives and desires. We'd still love and protect our families, fear death, abhor tyranny, and enjoy a good meal. Life would go on, minus the belief in the soul.

So we can relax: There's no moral or political threat stemming from science, should it unmask us as "mere" machines. Even if we are, we'll continue to defend our freedoms with all the resources nature has given us.

Thomas W. Clark, Director
Center for Naturalism
Sommerville, MA

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