Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

‘One of Biology’s Biggest Mysteries Solved by Artificial Intelligence’ ran the headline this week – and that science story wasn’t even about the virus! So what is the mystery and what might it tell us about intelligence artificial or otherwise. The ‘mystery’ is astonishing. Imagine a desk-top toy in the form of a multicoloured string that feels good when you scrunch it up in your fist. You do it over and over again. But then you notice something strange – every time, every time you do this, the compacted ball of string is exactly the same. Every fold of the string, every loop, twist and knot are always in exactly the same place and of the same colour no matter how you compress it. Miraculous? Unbelievable? Yet these strings exist, just ten million times smaller than my desk toy. They are the thousands of different protein molecules in all living things, and viruses too. Their perfect folding is essential for life while misfolding is the cause of many life-changing diseases. Although we have known for 50 years that their chemical sequence determines how proteins fold, we haven’t been able to predict the fault ourselves - until now that is. DeepMind, the London-based Artificial Intelligence lab whose program Alpha-Go beats any human Go-player on the planet, has demonstrated in blind trials that their Alpha-fold can make the link correctly. The potential medical impacts are vast, though how any protein find its special fold is still unsolved. Artificial Intelligence poses another challenge, however: what then, are our minds, if a machine can do such a thing? Does the power of Alpha-fold mean that our personhood, freedom of action, our own minds – are just illusions conjured up in our brain tissue? Surprisingly, this question is not new. It was posed in the 4th century by two of its greatest Christian thinkers, Gregory of Nyssa and his older sister Macrina, known to Gregory and his brother Basil the Great as ‘The Teacher’. Macrina suggests, on her death-bed, that she and Gregory debate the reality of mind. In an astonishing final act of love she distracts him from his grief by getting Gregory to argue that our minds are really an illusion of the material brain. Macrina’s final counter-stroke is to point out that human minds don’t just record impressions of the world, they perceive its hidden structure. The moon is not a halfpenny-shaped disk, but a real sphere lit up by the sun. We can’t see the air, but we know it’s there as it bubbles through water. We know we have minds because we understand more than we see. We are allowed to glimpse into the heart of things; just one of the ways, Macrina says, that we are made in the image of God.