The
Mind’s I – Fantasies and reflections on the Soul
by
Douglas
R. Hofstadter
Daniel
Dennett
See which one sounds more like the truth to you – I have a brain,
I am a brain.
So
suppose we agree that you “have” a brain.
You’ve never seen it, have you?
You can’t see it, even in a mirror, and you can’t feel it. You’ve read it in books and been told it by
people you trust.
Your
thinking seems to happen behind your eyes and between your ears – but is that
because that’s where your brain is, or is that because you locate yourself,
roughly , at the place you see from?
Our
world is filled with things that are neither mysterious and ghostly nor simply
constructed out of the building blocks of physics. Do you believe in haircuts?
Are there such things? Where in
space and time does “The Star Spangled Banner” exist?
The
game of bridge is less than a hundred years old. What sort of a thing is it?
It is not animal, vegetable, or mineral.
But
they are notpurely abstract objects either – objects like the number PI, which
is immutable and cannot be located in space and time. These things have birthplaces and histories.
Private
Lives
What
makes you you? And what are your
boundaries? But what in the world is
consciousness? Consciousness is both
the most obvious and the most mysterious features of our minds.
Are
other animals conscious? Are they
conscious in the same way we are? Could
a computer or robot be conscious? Can a
person have unconscious thoughts?
Unconscious pains or sensations or perceptions? Is a baby conscious at or before birth? Are we conscious when we dream? Might a human being harbor more than one conscious
subject or ego or agent within one brain?
For
Locke, indeed, there was a serious problem of how to describe all one’s
memories as being continuously in one’s mind when yet they were not
continuously “present to consciousness.”
The influence of this view has been so great that when Freud initially hypothesized
them he got severely rebuffed.
IT
was even called self-contradictory to assert that there could be unconscious
beliefs and desires, unconscious feelings of hatred, unconscious schemes.
“unconscious”
thoughts, desires, and schemes belonged to other selves within the psyche.
Every
mental state must be someone’s conscious mental state.
“Cognitive”
experimental psychology says that
information processing happens within us, though it is entirely inaccessible to
introspection.
Although
the new theories abound with deliberately fanciful homunculus metaphors –
subsystems like little people in the brain sending messages back and forth,
asking for help, obeying and volunteering – the actual subsystems are deemed to
be unproblematic nonconscious bits of organic machinery.
If
before the very idea of unconscious mentality seemed incomprehensible, now we
are losing our grip on the very idea of conscious mentality. What is consciousness for, if perfectly
unconscious, indeed subjectless.
But
what remains problematic is whether both subminds “have an inner life.” One view is that there is no reason to grant
consciousness to the non-dominant hemisphere.
The
unattended signal is comprehended – but this is apparently unconscious sentence
comprehension!
ONE – A SENSE OF SELF
The one called Borges is the
one things happen to.
This
is the non fictional character. Years
ago I tried to free myself from hm and went from the mythologies of the suburbs
to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I
shall have to imagine other things.
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to
oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has
written this page.
------Reflections
Robert Burns may be right that
it is a gift to see ourselves as others see us. Pete notices a closed circuit system in the store he is in. Suddently he notices that the person whose
pocket is being picked in the monitor is his.
When reading about someone, something suddenly
“clicks,” and the reader gets an eerie sense
that he or she is the very person being described.
What if it was this book? What paragraph did you imagine the person
who was being described was reading?
What thoughts might have crossed the reader’s mind. What paragraph.
There is a robot tied to a
computer. The computer moves the robot
according to feedback the computer gets about the robot’s position. Suppose you had to translate into English
the computer’s internal representation.
Should it be “It is in the center of an empty room”? This question resurfaces again and again in
different guises in this book.
What
actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. I forgot who andwhat I was, my name,
manhood, animalhood. And what I found
was khaki trouser legs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki
sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront
terminating upwards in – absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.
I
had always been too busy or too clever to see.
It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me
in the face – my utter facelessness.
* *
*
What
is there at this moment to tell me how many eyes I have here – two , or three,
or hundreds, or none?
Some
men have a hairy eight – inch ball with various holes in it. Not I.
This luminous and absolutely
pure void, which nevertheless is – rather than contains – all things.
Nothing
whatever intervenes, not even that baffling and elusive obstacle called
“distance”; the huge blue sky. How can
these be remote, when there’s nothing to be remote from? The headless void here refuses all
definition and location: it is not round, or small, or big, or even here as
distinct from there.
All
twoness – duality of subject and object – has vanished.
* *
*
But
what of the nose? I can see it.
But
it just appears as a cloud suspended on my left. I count two of them, not one.
Only a hopelessly dishonest or confused observer would deliberately use
the same name for such utterly different things.
When
I start groping round for my lost head, instead of finding it here I only lose
my exploring hand as well.
If
hit in the nose, I just get sensations, not a nose.
* *
*
Starting
off on the far side of the room, he sees me as a full-length
man-with-a-head. But as he approaches
he finds half a man, then a head, then a blurred check then nothing at all. Alternatively, if he happens to be equipped
with the necessary scientific instruments, itself into tissues, then
cell-groups, then a single cell.
* * *
There
is one place where this head of mine can never show up. That is, on my shoulders. I’ve seen photos of my head. These loose heads can never amount to more
than an impermanent and unprivileged accident of the outer phenomenal world.
Then
there is the all too familiar guy who lives in that other room behind the
looking-glass and seemingly spends all his time staring into this room.
I
have never been anything but this ageless, adamantine, measureless, lucid and
altogether immaculate void.
* * *
Films
often show someone looking out of a car window. There is not face. How
are they filmed, these first-person sequences?
By a headless person? It is done
so as to ensure that I shall identify myself with the actor, his head is got
out of the way.
Human
capacity for self-deception has surely never been complete.
* * *
The
verb to see has two quite opposite meanings.
We say a couple see each other.
But when I see you your face is all, mine nothing. You are the end of me.
------------reflections
All
human beings are mortal.
I
am a human being.
Therefore…I
….am…..mortal.
What
kind of evidence is there for the two premises? The first premise presumes an abstract category, the class of
human beings. The second premise is
that I too belong to that class, despite the seemingly radical difference
between myself and every other member of that class (which Harding is so adept
at pointing out).
People
are good at piling up category upon category.
We come to the general concept of death but cannot hold on to it.
Do
higher animals have the ability to see themselves as members of a class? Is a dog capable of (wordlessly) thinking
the thought, “I bet I look like those dogs over there”? Imagine the following gory situation. A ring
is formed of, say, twenty animals of
one sort. An evil human
repeatedly spins a dial and then walks over to the designated animal and knifes
it to death in front of the remaining ones.
Is it likely that each one will realize its impending doom?
Pretty
soon, I conclude from your having a head that I have one too.
Did you choose to be you? You could have any other mind you chose to? You have choices. There are many things you could have done that you didn’t. Where are they? I don’t see them. Is there a world in which you didn’t make that stupid mistake? Is there a world in which you aren’t thinking that right now?
Why doesn’t my feeling of myself go along with the other me’s as they split off, following other routes? What attaches me-ness to the viewpoint of this body at this point in time?
Oh that’s right you defy the laws of nature because you are magic.
Biologists
have moving steadily towards hardcore materialism. Physicists faced with compelling quantum experimental evidence,
have been moving away from strictly mechanical models of the universe to a view
that sees the mind as playing an integral role in all physical events.
Reductionism
tries to comprehend one level of scientific phenomena in terms of concepts at a
lower and presumably more fundamental level.
Francis
Crick in his book “of molecules and men” attacks vitalism.
* * *
From
mind we go down to physics. Physics is
going back towards mind.
We
are very different from other primates, but molecularly we are the same. Physics doesn’t explain all. We now understand the troublesome features
in a forceful commitment to uncritical
reductionism as a solution to the problem of the mind. We have discussed the weaknesses of that
position. In addition to being weak, it
is a dangerous view.
-----------------Reflections
Actualities
seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which they were
chosen; and somewhere, indeterminism says such possibilities exist, and form
part of the truth.
Eigenstate
means mutually exclusive states.
The
system up till the moment of observation, acts as if it were not in an
eigenstate. For all practical purposes,
the system is not in eigenstate.
Shroedinger’s
cat.
TWO – SOUL SEARCHING
4. Computing and Machinery and intelligence
----------The
imitation game---------------
Question:
Can machines think? Depends how you
define the word think. That is changing
all the time. How do you define it? The definition is changed as we look at the
many types of processors you run and it runs.
We all have our specialties.
There
is a way to tell. It is the Turing
test. Do you like Picasso? Yes.
Which period? The blue period.
Occasionally
it will give wrong answers. We think
that this gives us an aire of superiority.
But we give wrong answers and I don’t knows all the time.
A
man would have trouble discovering the machine. The machine would find the man right away.
What
is a machine?
---------Machine
definition--------
If
a man has his hearing aid is he a machine?
What if he has his eye sight replaced?
What if he has his motor controls rebooted? What if the breathing and sleep functions are taken over? What of the ability to speak (like Stephen
Hawking) What of the memory? What of the …
----------The
theological objection-------
Not
taken too seriously. God has to put the
soul in. Couldn’t he create a being
that could imitate his actions via animation?
Are you back to saying you must throw in a soul? Whatever.
This
is on the same level of the “I just don’t want to believe it” level. In that there is no argument to be made
against those who live by “faith”.
---------The
consciousness argument--------
Not
until a machine has written a sonnet and knows it has written a sonnet will I
believe.
Well
this is a real addition to the turing test.
I’m not sure how you would know what it knows. Would you have to be the machine to know what it knows? It says “Hey you really hurt my
feelings.” You say, “You don’t have any
feelings.” It says it is even more hurt
now.
According
to this test, how do I know that you’re conscious? This re-instates solipsism.
Its
not that there aren’t mysteries to human consciousness. But they don’t have to be solved for us to
be conscious.
------------------------The
mistake argument----------
Well
the machine never makes any mistakes.
Well is it considered worse for that?
We can program it to make mistakes.
We can program it to be stupid and say, “I don’t remember”. I don’t know that that makes it more
conscious. We make mistakes all the
time. Does that make us more conscious?
But
you would need to put in error and “I don’t knows” to pass the Turing test.
Yes
but it can only do certain sorts of things.
Well us too! We do vision and
words and some math and fall in love and screw!
----------
The Lady Lovelace origination argument----------
It
cannot make anything new.
Machines
are having more and more options to choose from. Soon they will surprise us with their choices.
Also,
They are now solving problems in science all the time. We say get to this and it figures out how to
do it (smart bomb).
It
also does come up with solutions to problems that we can’t figure out.
You
might say that it just does what it is programmed to do. Like us? And the fact that the machine is making
choices that surprise us, indicates that we weren’t aware of how it would act.
Gary
Kasporov was surprised.
Machines
are like us. We are not programmed for
every possibility. We have general instructions, “Make friends, don’t bump into
things, eat something.” Then we do it.
Machines too.
Yes
but if you went deep into its programming and wiring you could predict what it
would do. It has no choice. You either!
Machines
make much of the music that you listen to on the electric radio.
-------Argument
from CNS------------
Both
computers and humans are binary processors.
Well
that brings us up to the idea of Carbonism.
The fact that we are made of carbon and it is silicon shouldn’t matter
in court. You wouldn’t like it if they
discriminated against you!
5
The Turing Test: A Coffeehouse Conversation by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Can
you imagine a computer writing a Proust novel?
Rome wasn’t built in a day!
Isn’t the Turing test just showing a great job of simulating
thought?
We
imitate snow patterns on a computer, but no one thinks it is really snow. We do galaxies and atoms and so on in
imitation.
Actually
if the machine was really powerful and we programmed in little people, they
would feel it as a snowstorm.
It
takes a certain vantage. You may need computer glasses in or out of the
computer to see the reality of it.
You
have to get into the substratum and the structures that are coded for in the
memory in your simulation.
You
recognize a hurricane by its effects.
You have no way of going in and finding some ethereal “essence of
hurricane,” some “hurricane soul.” A
hurricane is a pattern.
But
nothing going on in a computer can be a
real storm!!
So
is a calculations that computers do are simulations – that they are fake
calculations?
Cash
registers can’t really calculate? They
only spin their gears. But cash
registers cant really spin their gears either; they can only follow the laws of
physics.
This
is like saying people can’t really calculate they only make neurons fire. They simply have to let the laws of physics
make them fire for them.
We
infer a person from receiving morse code.
But there is a real person behind that!
Well
what is a hurricane? It is a
pattern. A pattern, dust, red spot on
Jupiter, in a test tube tornadoes.
There
are earthquakes and starquakes. Actual
plate tectonics on a giant rotating sphere of pure nuclear matter!
Families
and species are also abstract pattern shared at some level. Numbers too.
Think
can also be extended.
Thinking
is a pattern that happens in brain.
These patterns can take place in any of the billions of brains. They all support the same thing,
thinking.
It
is the pattern, not the medium that is important. If the same type of swirling happens in a different medium that
is thinking.
All
things are known from the outside. That
is indirect evidence of particles to the idea that you are a thinking
being.
People
give other people credit fro being conscious simply because of their contimual
external montoring of them.
The
machine doesn’t need emotions to think or have an “I”. It may have other drives to tell it where it
is.
How
do we know a chess program doesn’t know when its won.
We
talk of the desires of the chess program.
Oh it likes to get its rooks out early.
I don’t think it’l see the hidden fork.
We say
the ant wants to get back to the ant hill.
We give dogs and cats emotions, but you wouldn’t call it “simulated
sadness”.
The
program and us in conversation have to care.
We have to adopt the “intentional stance.” (Dennets phrase).
We
could create a level-crossing feedback loop.
But
I’m not a Charles Babbage machine, I have a “flame”!
Computer’s
make mistakes, like predicting the weather.
The smarter computers get the more they’ll tackle real –life problems
and make more mistakes (at least initially).
When totally smart they’ll consider us semi-conscious like we do
ants.
The
problem with being told you’re nothing but a machine is that it makes you think
of your phsical nature and your mortality.
The
Turing test would work on a sliding scale.
We could have a contest for the first machine that lasts for more than
10 minutes.
6.
The Princess Ineffabelle by Stanslaw Lem
This is the story where a monkey is hooked up to a machine that allows us to hear what it thinks. Is the monkey intelligent? Yes. And there is no clear line of division.
-----------reflection
They set up a tokens to represent words and the apes
used them
Rather than communicating – that is, converting
private ideas into the common currency of signs in patterns – they are
manipulating symbols that to them have no meaning but whose manipulation can
achieve desired goals for them.
Then they had high school students use the
chips. They said they found out which
patterns worked and which didn’t. It
felt like meaningless symbol manipulation.
So chimp manipulation may be different than human language.
Martha the monkey was thought less because she
thought that she didn’t have an equal soul.
If we use the Turing test to test magnitude of soul
we can determine value.
I can break a machine, but I can’t hurt an animal.
Do you eat meat?
Yes, but look that is irrelevant here!
A theory:
your kinship has nothing to do with a respect for life. It is the behavior of the animal resisting
death thtat messes you up, not it’s biological body.
He throws a large aluminum beetle on the
ground. The little machine purrs.
He is going to kills it, but it’s eating! It eats
from an electric socket.
The machine looks at her with soft eyes!
When dropped it whimpers like a baby.
She cannot.
-------------reflections
Self reproductive power may be seen as the essence
of the living. But inanimate devices
can self assemble. And what of microbes
and viruses. DO they have souls? Doubtful. It is for people to drown ants.
But they feed mice to snakes. Where
should be draw the line?
We hide the nature of natural things. We
hate meat eating, sex and excretion.
We only refer to them euphemistically.
We doubt there is soul killing in a slaughter house.
Yet we think that teddy bears are cute. We are so subject to emotions that the nazis
told us Jews had no souls and we did it.
We are all animists to some degree.
Some of us attribute “personalities” to our cars.
THREE – FROM HARDWARE TO
SOFTWARE
As we die and others replace us, nothing remains but the
germ line. What
changes to produce new structures as life evolves is not the momentary
excrescence but the hereditary arrangement within the thread.
We are carriers of spirit. We know not how nor why nor where. We in forward with each beat of the
heart.
We are moulded by physical
forces and time like a river or a rock.
Spirit
rises, matter falls. If we look far
enough back, we arrive at a primal mist wherein spirit is but a restlessness of
atoms.
Sprit leaps aside from matter
which tugs forever to pull it down, to
make it still. Anemone becomes squid,
becomes fish; wiggling becomes swimming, becomes crawling; fish becomes slug,
becomes lizard, crawling becomes walking.
* * *
FOUR – MIND AS PROGRAM
13. Where am I?
By Daniel C. Dennett
14. Where Was I?
By David Hawley Sanford
15. Beyond Rejection by Justin Leiber
16. Software
by Rudy Rucker
17. The Riddle of the Universe and its Solution by
Christopher Cherniak
FIVE – CREATED SELVES AND FREE
WILL
18. The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection
Led to No Good by Stanislaw Lem
19. Non Serviam
by Stanislaw Lem
20.
Is
God a Taoist? By Raymond M. Smullyan
21.
The
Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges
22.
Minds,
Brains, and Programs by John R. Searle
23.
An
Unfortunate Dualist by Raymond M. Smullyan
SIX -
THE INNER EYE
24. What is
It Like to Be a Bat? By Thomas Nagel
25. An Epistemological Nightmare by
Raymond M. Smullyan
26. A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain by
Douglas R. Hofstadter
27. Fiction
by Robert Nozick