Your Brain Is Just A Computer
So, let's build more?
5 MINS READ
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Many people agree that we can have intelligent machines.
We are familiar with the concept: machines with artificial brains leisurely walking their (robot) dogs along the sidewalk or working a blue-collar.
But a debate has been brewing as to how a related concept fits into the picture.
It's the problem of where to put consciousness.
The question some people ask is,
Is consciousness required for intelligence?
My head spun a bit after writing that line.
Darn. A word like consciousness just sounds like philosophical jargon.
And having it in a sentence with intelligence. And with a question mark.
Hard for the head.
I am conscious, I think. But what does that really mean?
So, let's try to break things down.
Trying to define
Intelligence is just the ability to achieve goals.
A thing can be said to be intelligent if it can autonomously achieve some objective.
Well, what about consciousness, and why is it both easy and difficult to define?
A source for confusion is that people use the words, consciousness and a related word, mind in different ways.
For some, consciousness is what they say when they're having a conversation at a restaurant and don't want to mention the soul.
It is like a secular synonym.
You can be talking about say, health, and mention something about the soul in society's lingo.
Without having to explain that you are not pagan or something like that.
Well, for others, like new age thinkers, consciousness is some invisible liquid that flows through a person and the mind.
Science fiction writers often use consciousness with words like sentience and self-awareness to describe the unique, essential characteristic that makes us human.
Well, what is it really?
Thing is, for a large class of scholars, from cognitive scientists to philosophers and neuroscientists, the words mind and consciousness are used to define both precise and even, mundane ideas.
Think about ice cream or anything for a second. Yes. Cold and delicious, right?
Having a thought is seen as a sign of consciousness.
And so is, when we plan, percieve or dream.
The way we see something, know something, and understand something is how we can define consciousness.
But as deceptively simple as it seems, the problem hasn't vanished.
Because what makes the mind and consciousness mysterious is not in what it is.
It is in how it is.
How does it do it?
I mean, our brain.
How does a huge lump of fatty tissue start doing, simply, transcendental stuff, like thinking?
This first problem is the one philosophers call the hard problem of consciousness.
Well, there're two more head-cracking problems that we will discuss in another issue.
Philosophers don't run out of problems, you see.
Humans just going about their lives inevitably generates a lot of these pesky things called problems, that philosopher brains can chew on.
It's the kind of job you get and you're never worried that you might not have work to do.
Can we simulate the brain with a computer?
We have almost every reason to believe that the brain functions on physical processes like the principles of physics and chemistry.
And that is good news. Because that's the stuff that computers work on too. Physics and chemistry.
Maybe, then, we can simulate the brain.
Do we have enough computing power for a full computer simulation of the human brain? Ray Kurzweil thinks we will by 2029.
And even some of the harshest critics of AI, agree that is possible, at least theoretically.
For many thinkers, thinking is just some form of computation.
Maybe, the mind is to the brain, what software is to hardware.
This idea is as old as Hobbes. He claimed in his time that reasoning was "nothing more than reckoning".
Leibniz, Hume and Kant also presented similar, although not direct philosophical ideas alluding to this.
If the brain is just an organic computer, then we can know that computers can be both intelligent and conscious.
Can a computer be self-aware?
When you think of consciousness like a science fiction writer, self-awareness is actually the thing.
Alan Turing made it the most simple to grasp. He just trashed all the other essential qualities of a person and asked,
Can it think about itself?
In other words, can Machine A be the subject of it's own thoughts?
If no, nice piece of metal. If yes, omg. Let's shake hands and broker a peace treaty with robots.
For us programmers, viewing consciousness/self-awareness in this way means that we already have self-aware programs.
They are called debuggers.
And it is what we use to review code.
When you write code, a debugger looks through the code searching for errors and ensuring your code obeys the language of the programming language.
In some way, it is reporting on its own internal states.
Is this a rudimentary form of thinking and consciousness?
Are we getting it all wrong?
Some thinkers say it is ignorant to attempt to simulate the brain in a computer to develop some kind of artificially conscious being.
They say it will achieve nothing.
It's better to understand exactly what the mind is first, before trying to copy it.
When we created planes, we did not photocopy birds' structures from bone to feather.
We got to understand aeronautical engineering.
Speakers don't come with a throat, tongue and larynx.
And someone from the ancient world was so ingenuous that, although he saw two-legged and four-legged mobility everywhere, he decided to build a circle.
A wheel.
And it works better than all the athletes of the animal world.
Let's face it. We don't know what the mind is.
And, although, it is our most persistent and present experience, consciousness is shrouded in mystery.
So, let's at least understand what we want to duplicate, before crudely gifting it to computers.
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Informative.👍