Having just read USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s book
Self Comes to Mind, I began to think about what it is that makes a mind. I needed to develop an understanding of consciousness that went from an abstract concept to a fully fleshed out idea. I picked up this book after reading an article he had written in
Discover magazine called
Of Two Minds, hoping to determine how consciousness and the mind are related. I am happy to say that these questions were answered in this book, and helped me to further my understanding of how the brain works. Given my proclivity for technology as well, I got to thinking a little about how the brain and modern CPU design are similar, and what shortcomings we will encounter when trying to create an A.I. construct. Read on for my thoughts on what consciousness is and how it relates to technology.
Organisms make minds out of the activity of special cells known as neurons. Neurons are sensitive to changes around them; they are excitable (an interesting property that they share with muscle cells). Thanks to a fibrous prolongation known as the axon, and to the end region of the axon known as the synapse, neurons can send signals to other cells, often quite far away. The number of neurons in each human brain is on the order of billions, and the synaptic contacts that the neurons make among themselves number in the trillions. Neurons are organized in small microscopic circuits, whose combination constitutes progressively larger circuits, which in turn form networks or systems. Minds emerge when the activity of the small circuits is organized across large networks so as to compose momentary patterns. The parallels between the structure of the mind and that of the latest generation of CPU’s is quite interesting. The billions of transistors/neurons in these systems communicate across the system, in ways that are specific to the task at hand. This isn’t new, but the shift that CPU’s have taken (especially with AMD’s Fusion lineup/Intel’s Sandy Bridge) towards forming these transistors into highly functional and specialized networks is an interesting development. This specialization is similar to the different regions of the brain being able to perform certain tasks extremely well. I think that sometime within the next 20 years, the only thing preventing an A.I. from achieving parity from human consciousness will be a limit to our programming capabilities and our ability to provide sensory input. It is important to note that I don’t believe an A.I. can achieve consciousness as we currently define it.
Conscious minds result from the smoothly articulated operation of several, often many, brain sites. The ultimate consciousness product occurs from those numerous brain sites at the same time and not in one site in particular, much as the performance of a symphonic piece does not come from the work of a single musician or even from a whole section of an orchestra. The oddest thing about the upper reaches of a consciousness performance is the conspicuous absence of a conductor before the performance begins, although as the performance unfolds, a conductor comes into being. For all intents and purposes, a conductor is now leading the orchestra, although the performance has created the conductor-the self-not the other way around. The true marvel is that the score and the conductor become reality only as life unfolds. The grand symphonic piece that is consciousness encompasses the foundational contributions of the brain stem, forever hitched to the body, and the wider-than-the-sky imagery created in the cooperation of cerebral cortex and subcortical structures, all harmoniously stitched together, in ceaseless forward motion, interruptible only by sleep, anesthesia, brain dysfunction, or death.
The patterns, or maps, of the mind represent things or events outside the brain, either in the body or in the external world. Ultimately, consciousness allows us to experience maps as images, to manipulate those images, and to apply reasoning to them. Maps are constructed when we interact with objects, such as a person, a machine, or a place, from the outside of the brain towards its interior. Maps are also constructed when we recall objects from inside our brain’s memory banks. The construction of maps never stops, even in our sleep. The human brain maps whatever object sits outside it, whatever action occurs outside it, and all the relationships that objects and actions assume in time and space, relative to each other and to the mother ship known as the organism. The human brain is a mimic of the irrepressible variety. If you think of brain maps as equivalent to their parchment brethren, you begin to realize that the lines in a brain map are not drawn with a pencil; they are, rather, the result of the momentary activity of some neurons and the inactivity of others.
Brain maps are not static like those of classical cartography. Brain maps are mercurial, changing from moment to moment to reflect the changes that are happening in the neurons that feed them, which in turn reflect changes in the interior of our body and the world around us. The changes in brain maps also reflect the fact that we ourselves are in constant motion. We come close to objects or move away from them; we can touch them and then not; we can taste the wine, then the taste goes away; we hear music, but then it comes to an end; our own body changes with different emotions, and different feelings ensue. The corresponding brain maps change accordingly. A spectacular consequence of the brain’s incessant and dynamic mapping is the mind. The mapped patterns constitute what we, as conscious creatures, have come to know as sights, sounds, touches, smells, tastes, pains, pleasures, and the like-in brief, images. The images in our minds are the brain’s momentary maps of everything and of anything, inside our body and around it, concrete as well as abstract, actual or previously recorded in memory. Perception, in whatever sensory modality, is the result of the brain’s cartographic skill.
Because brain maps are the substrate of mental images, map making brains have the power of literally introducing the body as content into the mind. But body-to-brain mapping has a peculiar aspect: although the body is the thing being mapped, it never loses contact with the mapping entity, the brain. Under normal circumstances they are hitched to each other from birth to death. Just as important, the mapped images of the body have a way of permanently influencing the very body they originate in. The brain’s pervasive, exhaustive mapping of the body covers not only what we usually regard as the body proper, but also all of the bodies spying outposts, such as the tactile elements of the skin, the ears, and the eyes.
Emotions are complex, largely automated programs of actions concocted by evolution. The actions are carried out in our bodies, from facial expressions and postures to changes in viscera and internal milieu. Feelings of emotion, on the other hand, are composite perceptions of what happens in our body and mind when we are emoting. As far as the body is concerned, feelings are images of actions rather than the actions themselves. While emotions are actions accompanied by ideas and certain modes of thinking, emotional feelings are mostly perceptions of what our bodies do during the emoting, along with perceptions of our state of mind during that same period of time. Naturally, this would be extremely difficult, likely impossible to replicate in an A.I. entity. We can provide input about the physical manifestation of the A.I. to its CPU, and we can simulate emotional involvement through programming, but the ability to emote is not something that a man-made A.I. construct can achieve.
Consciousness is a state of mind-if there is no mind, there is no consciousness. The conscious state of mind is experienced in the exclusive, first-person perspective of each of our organisms, never observable by anyone else. We can amplify this definition by saying the conscious mind states always have content: they are always about something. Finally, conscious states of mind are possible only when we are awake. Conscious states of mind are felt.
Autobiographies are made of personal memories, the sum total of our life experiences, including the experiences of the plans we have made for the future, specific or vague. Autobiographical selves are autobiographies made conscious. They draw on the entire compass of our memorized history, recent as well as remote. The social experiences of which we were a part (or wish we were) are included in that history, and so are memories that describe the most refined among our emotional experiences, namely, those that might qualify as spiritual. As lived experiences are reconstructed and replayed, their substance is reassessed and inevitably rearranged, modified minimally or very much in terms of their factual composition and emotional accompaniment. Entities and events acquire new emotional weights during this process. Some frames of the recollection are dropped on the mind’s cutting room floor, others are restored and enhanced, and others still are so deftly combined either by our wants or by the vagaries of chance that we create new scenes that were never shot.
Systematic discovery of the drama of human existence and its compensations was arguably possible only after the development of full human consciousness-a mind with an autobiographical self that is capable of guiding reflective deliberation and gathering knowledge. Eventually, given the probable intellectual capability of early humans, it is likely that they would have wondered about their status in the universe, something akin to the “where from” and “where to” questions that still haunt us today. That is when the rebellious self comes of age. That is when myths are developed, when social conventions and rules are elaborated, leading to the beginnings of a true morality. I suggest that the engine behind these cultural developments is the homeostatic impulse-the dynamic process by which the brain regulates life. In one form or another, cultural developments respond to detection of an imbalance in the life process, and they seek to correct it.
These thoughts on consciousness leave no room for an A.I. construct to attain consciousness as we currently think of it. It is too closely tied to biological processes and living organisms. The best that we can hope to attain is an impressive level of mimicry of the human experience.
Traits and functions rise or fall in the history of life depending upon how much they contribute to the success of living organisms. The most direct way of explaining why consciousness has prevailed in evolution is to say that it has contributed significantly to the survival of the species so equipped. Why then, has consciousness flourished? The answer is a large variety of apparent and not so apparent advantages in the management of life. Even at the simplest levels, consciousness helps the optimization of responses to environmental conditions. As processed in the conscious mind, images provide details about the environment, and those details can be used to increase the precision of a much-needed response, for example, the exact movement that will neutralize a threat or guarantee the capture of prey. The lion’s share of the advantage comes from the fact that the conscious mind infuses the exploration of the world outside the brain with a concern for the first and foremost problem facing the organism: the successful regulation of life.
