Right now I’m reading a turbid book, a tough read. It’s called “The Creative Mind, Myths and Mechanisms” by British philosopher/psychologist Margaret Boden. You’d think that learning about creativity might be fun, but I’m afraid that Dr. Boden has found a rather un-creative way of discussing the topic. But I’m still plowing my way through her book (another 60 pages to go), as it does eventually get around to some interesting points about the human brain, the human mind, and the overall human condition.

I’ve also come across two articles about the mind that, together with Dr. Boden’s book, help to enlighten me about what our consciousness is about; and also why machines as we now know them cannot attain consciousness. Dr. Boden spends many words in her book describing the progress that had been made through 1990 (when her book was published) in coming up with “thinking machines”. That progress is quite astonishing. And that was before they came up with computer programs that could defeat human beings at chess (IBM’s “Deep Blue” and its progeny).

By now, the state of the art in self-learning and concept-forming computer systems must be staggering. I just saw a short article in the NY Times about a system that is used for scientific discovery, one which develops new scientific paradigms and formulas at levels of abstraction and comprehension beyond what most human brains are capable of. In effect, these machines are crunching raw data, digesting previous formulas and concepts, and coming up with new scientific theories that they then teach us! Humankind is rapidly becoming the students of these systems. (But then again, we’ve always had things to help our brain reach higher concepts, e.g. pencil and paper helps us to understand math; the “teacher” is still a creation of the student).

And yet. There’s still something about the human brain that is different from the most sophisticated thinking system. I believe that our consciousness is very much a function of what that difference is. The two articles that I mention help to elucidate that difference.

The first article is an interview with philosopher Alva Noe, who has a new book out entitled “Why You Are Not Your Brain.” So why, as Noe contends, are you NOT strictly a function of what goes on inside your head (basically, lots of neurons firing off electronically in complicated patterns)? It’s not, according to Noe, because of anything mysterious or dualistic; no ghosts in the machine or extra-dimensional / non-local interactions for him. Noe basically contends that “we are the world”. Our minds are deeply rooted in our brains, which in turn are deeply rooted in our bodies, which in turn are deeply rooted in the web of all living things, which in turn are deeply rooted in the system of planets, stars and galaxies; and all these are commonly rooted in the chemical and physical processes and substances that drive our universe.

Noe is commending us to a way of thinking about all that our brains do, including the reflective consciousness that gives us a sense of having a “self”. Science today leads us to the view that our minds are mainly neurons, neurotransmitters, ion reactions and other internal structures, along with their complex organization within the brain. Noe does not deny the importance of all of this. But he points to the extreme interconnectedness and interdependence of human life with the greater world around it. The mind and the self occupy the seat of that human life, and thus can only be explained properly in the context of the greater environment, going all the way out to the boundaries of the known universe. Again, nothing mystical here; just a better way of looking at where science is really taking is, as per Alva Noe.

So then, our brains, our minds and our consciousness are true children of the universe. The second article tells us something about the physical process behind consciousness that helps to affirm Noe’s view. In a recent set of experiments by neuroscientists in France, a group of epilepsy patients whose brains had been “hard wired” with an extensive network of electrodes (meant to control the epilepsy attacks) volunteered to allow their electrodes to be monitored while they viewed images meant to raise their level of conscious awareness. E.g., they would sit in a dark, quiet room before a blank screen, and suddenly a word would be flashed on the screen. The important finding from these observations was that almost the entire brain is involved in processing that sensory inputs that make their way to consciousness. There didn’t seem to be a particular area of the brain that ran the show, a small region that was the center of things; there was no “seat of consciousness”. Consciousness appears to be a dynamic effect based upon widely distributed events in the brain.

How does this relate to Alva Noe’s philosophy, and to Margaret Boden and her thinking machines? Well, the human brain was “designed” over millions of years via the evolutionary response of animals to a wide variety of environmental conditions. In effect, the world around us has “molded” our brains to respond to it, in its entirety (and be able to survive and reproduce in it). Human beings, being at the top of the evolutionary pyramid, have the biggest sweep of the universe. Our five senses take in a lot of information, from the action of a few molecules in the air (via smell), to the perception of starlight from across the Milky Way. OK, so we don’t perceive sound as richly as a bat does, and we don’t see what ultraviolent light reveals about the environment to a honeybee. But our rational mind, our ability to conceptualize and understand things, multiplies what we get from our senses by factors of maybe hundreds or thousands compared to bats and honeybees. Our human minds are thus connected with the quarks at the smallest level of reality, and the big bang at the heart of the overall universe. And everything in between! We can just about hear the song of the universe and smell or touch the most obscure quantum interaction.

And we do that via our consciousness. So it doesn’t surprise me that to have consciousness, our brain has to fire up just about all of its components. Those would include the components for processing sense data, the components for classifying sense data (bright light vs. dim light, round vs. square, cold vs. hot touch, nice vs. putrid smell, etc.), the components for comparing sense data with memories, and all the components for UNDERSTANDING the data. Those latter components probably take up a lot of brain space, space that always goes off regardless of whether the sense data comes from touch, smell, taste, hearing or sight (or whatever combination thereof). And they all stemmed from millions of years of “evolutionary molding” by the world around us. This is fully consistent with Alva Noe’s philosophical view that our conscious mind is better thought of as an extension of the universe as a whole, not as some unique system ensconced in a tiny little section of that universe.

Thinking next about machines that think, we can now see just how different they are from what our brains are. These thinking machines, even those that can out-think their human creators, are still mostly blind to the world, as compared to humans. They only take in what their human creators feed them, and process it for one particular problem (e.g. playing chess). They don’t face the overall problem of survival and reproduction in the world such as it is. And thus they never develop any greater, unified concepts about the world, such as it is. And thus, they are not conscious (like we are).

So, think
ing machines as we now know them are NOT conscious, despite their fantastic combinations of neural network learning circuitry and highly complex problem-solving heuristics (basically what humankind teaches them, so that they don’t have to take hundreds or thousands of years to learn like we did). Could we come up with machines that could eventually gain consciousness? Perhaps; but it would require setting them loose in our own world without our control. They would be given the impetus to survive and re-create themselves in the same world with us. There would be no off switch if they decided that we humans were in their way. It would be bad science fiction made real. I hope I don’t live to see that!

What about trying to create virtual conscious beings in a virtual world, a twist on The Matrix? You would then need a perfect computer simulation of our world and our universe; something that I believe to be inherently impossible. Perhaps some kind of consciousness COULD develop in a virtual world, but it wouldn’t be the same as our consciousness; something would be missing. About the only safe option would be a Star Trek-like experiment, far in the future, when we are shuttling about the stars and galaxies at warp speed. Perhaps we could find some little planet like ours, one with enough unused energy (high “thermodynamic potential”/low entropy) to support our consciousness-experiment machines. Ethically, we would need a planet where advanced life forms have not yet evolved. We could then drop off our thinking, reproducing machines, saying “it’s all yours, have fun; we’ll be back someday to see what happened; hopefully we can then carry on a good, soulful conversation once you have evolved into a self-conscious and socially conscious species”.

Of course, you know how THAT Star Trek episode would go. A few hundred years would go by and the experiment would be mostly forgotten. Then one day a fleet of advanced and threatening space ships shows up in our corner of the Milky Way, ready to give us grief. Yes, they are our “children” from the far off planet, and now they have warp drive technology as well as consciousness and feelings. And they’re mad at us for having abandoned them. But let me stop here, let me cool my heated brain down; I’m not a science fiction writer. Still, it’s a rather surprising and interesting pipedream, emerging as it did from such a dull, turbid book as Professor Boden’s. Perhaps she managed somehow to stimulate some creativity in my own turbid brain!