Jaron's World: The Soul of The Machine
Can a random collection of data be conscious?

By Jaron Lanier




There's been a resurgence of discomfort with science, bubbling up from both conservative religious quarters and New Age movements. From the times of Galileo through the 1960s or so, the philosophical debate mostly involved God. Something has changed. We've entered a more selfish era, and with it has come a new challenge. The concern with God has been joined by anxiety over the nature of personhood.

In the mid-20th century, scientists like John von Neumann and Alan Turing presented the world with a new framework for explanation. Suddenly, the mind could be interpreted with a technological metaphor: the computer. The phantasmagorical ideas of Freud have since been replaced by crisper notions supported by personal experiences with a ubiquitous gadget. People are simulated in video games, so it's not too hard to imagine real people as components of a higher-resolution video game. One hears a bit of goading in the way some scientists and technologists, including Steven Pinker, Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, and others, have tried to challenge the notion that individuals are too special to be understood like any other phenomena.

Humility is valuable in science. Even when a scientific idea is true, it can be misused through grandiosity. Your body has a gravitational field, but that doesn't mean that studying physiology can teach you about black holes. It should be uncontroversial to state that the human brain is only partially understood. Certain mental phenomena might be explained and modeled with computers; the most fashionable candidates at the moment envision thoughts competing in the brain like organisms in the wild. But entirely new dynamics may well be needed to explain what brains can do.

The intellectual groundwork for a truce about God was laid down long ago by 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and many others: Everyone who considers the matter carefully and honestly comes to the conclusion that you can't prove anything about God with science or logic. God is a matter of faith. A great many people, however, believe that consciousness exists—that there's some sort of self or singularity that is the beholder of subjective experience. I must say, I experience myself as being this way. But it seems to me that it's almost impossible to say anything more than that. Saying that subjective experience is an illusion says nothing. Consciousness is precisely the only thing that is just as real if it's an illusion.

In other words, consciousness controversies can be finessed in just the same way as arguments about God. You can't reason about consciousness or perform experiments. It therefore presents another awkward but workable opportunity for cultural compromise—for scientists to stop the goading and for people who care about whether the self is "special" to recognize that there's no threat from science.

To make clear the potential for compromise, and to examine the extent to which we can or can't define consciousness, I offer two dueling thought experiments. The first one has been around a long time. While no one seems to be absolutely sure who told it first, the master teller is unquestionably the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who, not coincidentally, is also one of the staunchest critics of religious belief of our time. Here's how it goes:

Imagine a computer program that can simulate a neuron, or even a network of neurons. (Such programs have existed for years and in fact are getting quite good.) Now imagine a tiny wireless device that can send and receive signals to neurons in the brain. Crude devices a little like this already exist; years ago I helped Joe Rosen, a reconstructive plastic surgeon at Dartmouth Medical School, build one—the "nerve chip," which was an early attempt to route around nerve damage using prosthetics.

To get the thought experiment going, hire a neurosurgeon to open your skull. If that's an inconvenience, swallow a nano-robot that can perform neurosurgery. Replace one nerve in your brain with one of those wireless gadgets. (Even if such gadgets were already perfected, connecting them would not be possible today. The artificial neuron would have to engage all the same synapses—around 7,000 on average—as the biological nerve it replaced.)

Next, the artificial neuron will be connected over a wireless link to a simulation of a neuron in a nearby computer. Every neuron has unique chemical and structural characteristics that must be included in the program. Do the same with your remaining neurons. There are between 100 billion and 200 billion neurons in a human brain, so even at only a second per neuron, this will require tens of thousands of years. (Article Continues)

Further Reading


Rethinking the Conscious Mind

A very interesting idea indeed. Amazing how many scientists who are anti-orthodox religion (like me) are also anti-spirituality in general. I think they are going a long way to prove something they won't be able to, and that is that the physical world comes from consciousness and not consciousness from the physical world. Alot of quantum physicists nowadays are also taking this point of view. How do we define consciousness????? That is the question. We cannot isolate it in a lab and dissected. It is in my view to pervading. Consciousness is in everything from the sand at the beach to the complexity of a human brain.

No one knows what consciousness looks like but we know that without it we wouldn't be able to see (or some would argue we could see because that is a process of the brain however they would have to admit that without a sense of "self" which consciousness supplies there would be no one to see and hence no seer), we don't know what it tastes like yet without it we wouldn't be able to taste, we dont know what it sounds like yet we know without it we wouldnt be able to hear, we dont know what it feels like and yet without it we wouldnt be able to feel, we dont know what it smells like yet without it we wouldn't be able to smell.

One cannot go deep into the issue of consciousness without getting spiritual or philosophical, hence why it is a scientific blackhole and why many scientists don't like talking about it. Many think an objective universe will exist here whether there are conscious observers or not, something unfornutately that is out of their power to prove.

I believe that the Buddhist and Hindus thousands of years ago worked out the secrets of consciousness. To them "God" was when one purified their own consciousness and realized that it isnt so personal but universal and not only pervaded the whole universe but was the universe itself. God is often referred to as "the self" in the hindu language and the self is consciousness. Not just ego consciousness but that which gives rise to ego consciousness which is just plain consciousness/awareness itself.

Here are some good examples:

When Svetaketu was twelve years old he was sent to a teacher, with whom he studied until he was twenty-four. After learning all the Vedas, he returned home full of conceit in the belief that he was consummately well educated, and very censorious.
His father said to him, "Svetaketu, my child, you who are so full of your learning and so censorious, have you asked for that knowledge by which we hear the unhearable, by which we perceive what cannot be perceived and know what cannot be known?"
"What is that knowledge, sir?" asked Svetaketu.
His father replied, "As by knowing one lump of clay all that is made of clay is known, the difference being only in name, but the truth being that all is clay---so, my child, is that knowledge, knowing which we know all."
"But surely these venerable teachers of mine are ignorant of this knowledge; for if they possessed it they would have imparted it to me. Do you sir, therefore give me that knowledge."
"So be it," said the father. . . . And he said, "Bring me a fruit of the nyagrodha tree."
"Here is one, sir."
"Break it."
"It is broken, sir."
"What do you see there?"
"Some seeds, sir, exceedingly small."
"Break one of these."
"It is broken, sir."
"What do you see there?"
"Nothing at all."
The father said, "My, son, that very subtle essence which you do not perceive there---in that very essence stands the being of the huge nyagrodha tree. In that which is the subtle essence all that exists has its self. That is the True, that is the Self, and thou, Svetaketu, art That."
"Pray, sir," said the son, "tell me more."
"Be it so, my child," the father replied; and he said, "Place this salt in the water, and come to me tomorrow morning."
The son did as he was told.
Next morning the father said, "Bring me that salt which you put in the water."
The son looked for it, but could not find it; for the salt, of course, had dissolved.
The father said, "Taste some of the water from the surface of the vessel. How is it?'
"Salty."
"Taste some from the middle. How is it?"
"Salty."
"Taste some from the bottom. How is it?"
"Salty."
The father said, "Throw the water away and then come back to me again."
The son did so; but the salt was not lost, for salt exists for ever.
Then the father said, Here likewise is this body of yours, my son, you do not perceive the True; but there in fact it is. In that which is the subtle essence, all that exists has its self. That is the True, that is the Self, and thou, Svetaketu, art That."

----From the Chandogya Upanishad


You are the Self, the infinite Being, the pure, unchanging Consciousness, which pervades everything. Your nature is bliss and your glory is without stain. Because you identify yourself with the ego, you are tied to birth and death. Your bondage has no other cause.

---Shankara

Pleasure and pain are only aspects of the mind. Our essential nature is happiness. We forget the Self and imagine the body or the mind to be the Self. It is this wrong identity that gives rise to misery. --Ramana Maharshi

There is no greater mystery than this: Being Reality ourselves, we seek to gain Reality. ---Ramana Maharshi

When the mind, turning inward, inquires, "Who am I?" and reaches the heart, that which is "I" (the ego) sinks crestfallen, and the One (Self) appears of its own accord as "I-I". Thought it appears thus, it is not the ego; it is the Whole. It is the Self. ---Ramana Maharshi


So in my eyes we don't need to do new scientific experiments in the western sense to find out about consciousness. We need to do experiments of a different scientific nature like mediatation and spiritual practices the Hindus and Buddists did thousands of years ago. This not a new issue here but an old one we have forgotten which has arisen again. Consciousness gives rise to the five senses hence why it defies five sense proof.

Many people out there cannot accept this though.