Gerry Gleason responds in the comment area to my blogging on Kurzweil’s fallacious (well, I think so anyway) reasoning about the self. Kurzweil thinks that consciousness is a pattern of neural states caused by the “software” that runs the brain. If we instantiate that pattern and its rules on a computer, that computer should be considered conscious, according to Kurzweil. Gerry wonders:

But following [Buckminister] Fuller, the essence of this particular “pattern integrity” is something related to emergence through evolutionary linking of system and environment; by what argument do you exclude this evolution based pattern of development and emergence from all possible complex synthetic systems?

Great question. Too hard. But I don’t think the argument against Kurzweil, as put forward brilliantly by Searle, rules out all synthetic systems. The argument is against considering symbolic processors — today’s computers — as conscious. And the reason is that they are only instantiations of the patterns of consciousness because we take them as such.

Let’s say we did the Kurzweilian experiment successfully: through advanced science, we model his 100 billion neurons and their states and we figure out the rules by which they work. The computer chugs along and answers questions as if it were Kurzweil. We can grant all that and still say that the computer isn’t conscious. Let’s say it takes a byte of information to represent one neuron. The fact that memory address 100-107 represents neuron #212 in Ray’s brain is completely arbitrary. The pattern of high and low voltages in those transitors only represent a neuron because we say so. The relationship between the computer and Ray’s brain is symbolic.

Consider a different scenario. You’re getting a tour of the M&M factory. There are 20 huge bins that together hold 2 trillion M&M’s. Giant paddle arms are stirring them to randomize the mix. By freakish luck, if you count an M&M with the M showing on top to be “on” (or 1) and one with the M on bottom to be “off” (or 0), the paddles stirring the first 10 bins — which hold 100 billion M&M’s — happen to be producing a series of brain states identical to what’s going on in the computer. (We’ll have to slow the computer down or speed the paddles up to get them in sync.) Are those bins conscious? No, because the pattern is only there because we chose to see up-facing M&M’s as on and because we happen to be looking at the first ten bins: we could just as sensibly look at every second bin or count down-facing M&M’s as on. Or maybe if we count raindrops larger than n to be on and ones smaller than n to be off, yesterday’s rainstorm was also conscious.

You want the formal proof? If the candy bin is conscious because we take up-facing as meaning on, then it is simultaneously unconscious if someone else takes up-facing as meaning off or as meaning nothing. Thus, the candy bins are both conscious and non-conscious in the same way at the same time, which is a contradiction. QED.

Now, because the computer is running a program rather than acting randomly, we can probably learn stuff about Kurzweil that we can’t from the candy bins. But so long as the pattern exists only because we see it as a pattern, it can’t be conscious.

This doesn’t mean that only carbon-based flesh like ours can be conscious. But it does mean that patterns aren’t enough and that there’s something special — not necessarily unique — about flesh.

If this is right, what does it mean for theories that stipulate that the universe is itself a computer? What does it mean for Wolfram’s attempt to explain It All through a few simple programs?

Categories: Uncategorized dw