Now 5 cantos into Paradiso, in the Divine Comedy.
Today, with decades of experience building mindless mechanical servitors, it seems that the more we learn about endowing an artificial construct with even a common lizard's level of free will, the more daunting that task seems.
And so it truly amazes me that, in the early 14th Century, before anybody in Western Civilization had even built a steam engine capable of useful work, centuries before anybody built a mechanical contrivance capable of moving under its own power, at a time when the only mechanical contrivance capable of making a decision was the lock-and-key, Dante could have realized that God's greatest gift is free will. And yet, there it is, in Canto V of Paradiso. The reason why vows are taken so seriously in the Bible, and why foolish vows (like the one Jephthah makes in Judges 11) are so roundly (and so rightly) deprecated: because by their nature, they involve surrendering some portion of free will.
Dante nailed the immense value of free will without ever seeing how much easier it is to construct a mindless servitor.
Today, with decades of experience building mindless mechanical servitors, it seems that the more we learn about endowing an artificial construct with even a common lizard's level of free will, the more daunting that task seems.
And so it truly amazes me that, in the early 14th Century, before anybody in Western Civilization had even built a steam engine capable of useful work, centuries before anybody built a mechanical contrivance capable of moving under its own power, at a time when the only mechanical contrivance capable of making a decision was the lock-and-key, Dante could have realized that God's greatest gift is free will. And yet, there it is, in Canto V of Paradiso. The reason why vows are taken so seriously in the Bible, and why foolish vows (like the one Jephthah makes in Judges 11) are so roundly (and so rightly) deprecated: because by their nature, they involve surrendering some portion of free will.
Dante nailed the immense value of free will without ever seeing how much easier it is to construct a mindless servitor.
