All Things Are Full of Gods, page 30
HERMES: Yes, we’ve been over this.
HEPHAISTOS: And you’ve rejected it, I know, because you claim the experience exceeds the function. I’m not yet convinced, however.
EROS: Excuse me. If thought is software and the brain a computer, could the thinking that goes on in my brain be extracted from it, theoretically at least, and then made to run in some other brain, just as software can be run on more than one computer?
HEPHAISTOS: Yes, indeed, if that other brain were structurally compatible with that software. Or, rather, thought can be run on any platform capable of accommodating its functions. It needn’t be a brain at all, perhaps. That’s one of the necessary implications of functionalism, as it happens: that what each of us thinks of as his or her intrinsic inner world is really a kind of data stream and coding, which might just as well be installed on a cybernetic platform composed not of cells and tissues but of silicon and transistors. In practice this may prove an impossible technological achievement; but in principle it’s a logical entailment. And who knows? Maybe it is technologically feasible, or will be.
The philosopher David Chalmers, for instance, has proposed what he calls the “principle of organizational invariance” or—when he’s being less grandiose—“mental structuralism.” He finds it very plausible that thought—consciousness, intentionality, and so forth—is the result not of the physical substance or substrate of the brain, but entirely of a structure of relations and functions. If so, any system of computation structurally isomorphic to the processes in a living brain will produce the same experiences as that brain would, no matter what the platform or physical medium by which that system is enacted. Any simulated brain that precisely mirrored a biological brain would be no less conscious than its organic counterpart. One of his arguments for this is what he calls “fading qualia.” That is, one can imagine one’s brain being gradually transformed into a silicon rather than organic object through the substitution, one at a time, of a computer chip for each neuron; it seems unlikely that in the process our consciousness would gradually disappear along with our original neurons, given that the structure of the emerging silicon brain would produce the same behaviors as the neurological brain it’s replacing. And maybe, in this way, one’s mind could be gradually uploaded into a simulated brain without any loss of personal consciousness; this in fact might be the safest and surest method for transferring one’s mind to a virtual platform.2
PSYCHE: What a very curious supposition. I mean, quite apart from the question of consciousness and whether qualia would persist in a brain gradually transformed from a collection of neurons to one of silicon chips, why does he simply presuppose that the brain is basically a computer and that the mind consists entirely in the electrical impulses passing through its structure? Does he really believe that those impulses convey transcriptions of some kind of operational system, recorded in some form of electrical coding? And is that code something distinct from the electrical impulses themselves, a kind of layer of supervenient digital meaning? Why does he assume that neurons are simple electrical conduits that can be replaced with neural prostheses, so long as the latter allow those electrical transcriptions to continue to flow unimpeded? Don’t bother to answer; the last question probably answers itself. I suppose he must. That’s quite a leap of logic, wouldn’t you say? I mean, it’s only so long as one accepts this odd dogma of organizational invariance, however, that one can confidently assert that all the features of conscious experience would simply emerge or be duplicated within a virtual brain . . . including even the sense of unified, intentional, subjective experience that, as far as our knowledge of nature goes, is uniquely an attribute of living creatures. What’s the evidence, though? Why is he so certain that a brain replaced piecemeal with circuitry would continue to yield the same behaviors as its original neurology? It seems far more likely that the process of replacing one’s neurons with computer chips would be little more than a very slow process of suicide, producing not the same behaviors as a living mind, but only progressive derangement and stupefaction, culminating in an inert mass of diffusely galvanized circuitry. And why think that structures in the abstract are what account for thinking, without regard to the actual physical occasion of thought? This seems to me as sickly a dualism as it’s possible to imagine. Really, does he believe that we need only build a model of a brain and it will conjure consciousness into existence once we turn on the electricity? Structures and systems as such, of their nature, have as far as we can tell no unified and simultaneous view of anything, let alone any of the mental capacities that would be contingent on them.
Of course, I have my own prejudices. I see mind, in both its structure and its operation, as being inseparable from life, and so see this metaphor of mind as a kind of software—indifferent to the distinction between organic and inorganic platforms, merely carried along on the living electricity of the brain’s neurology in the way a digital code is carried along on electrical currents in a machine, or from one machine to another—as simply banal. I can fully appreciate the frustration of an old-fashioned materialist like John Searle at the oddly inverted Cartesianism in computational accounts of the mind, and especially at this curious dualism that so easily separates mentality into, on the one hand, a kind of functional software and, on the other, the purely structural hardware or “platform” where it’s realized. Mental agency has never been discovered anywhere except in organisms, where it appears to be associated with brains and nervous systems and nerve tissues and organic cells and all sorts of other biological realities. So what precisely justifies this belief that mental activity resides entirely in code, or that it could be sustained wholly by electrical transcriptions and circuitry? What could unify any of that into an actual “I think”? Wouldn’t it make more sense to assume that the brain’s capacity for mentality has some connection to the cells and tissues and enzymes, synapses and axons and myelin, composing it, and to an organism’s unique history of continuous growth, development, catalysis, regeneration, and constantly developing and changing neural pathways, and to its complex relations with the complete neurology, biology, organs, and history of the body as a whole, as well as to its organic relations to the environment around it? In fact, the very notion of “structural invariance” is an oddly telling one, because organisms aren’t stable structures through which information flows, much less a bare architectonics that can be reproduced in static silicon infrastructures; they themselves are the flow of what informs them. Brains change constantly over time, often in coordination with intentional employments of the mind, forging new neural connections and causeways. Brains may be the physical occasions of mental agency, but they’re also constantly being shaped and refashioned and renewed by that agency; the two are a single inseparable action, at once noetic and corporeal. All organisms are composed by their own continuous narratives; they’re composed of time, in a sense, as processes of learning and expansion and alteration and self-revision, right down to the cellular level, and surely that dynamic flow of retention and protention in relation to various environments is continuous with the affective and intentional processes of mind. It makes much more sense, that is, to think that the dynamism of mind and the dynamism of the living organism are at base one and the same process of . . . well, of rational vitality, let’s say . . . or vital rationality. What sort of neural plasticity, one has to wonder, would a network of silicon chips possess? Why assume that neurophysiology is simply one expression of a more general neurotechnology that might equally well be expressed in some other physical medium, or imagine that mind, rather than being something bound to the unique properties of organic life, is simply a pattern of coded activity that could be realized in a cybernetic simulacrum or digital phantom of a brain? If we take it for granted that thought and experience and all the features of mentality are simply a matter of connections and conductivity, with no relation to the physical ingredients and processes and individual history of the brain and body, we’ve already entered a kind of quasi-Platonic otherworld, albeit a drearily dispirited one: a realm where abstract patterns are all that’s really real, and where structures—rather than organisms or persons—are the seat of mental agency, and where abstract paradigms are more real than their organic instantiations.3
No, no, Phaesty, to me it seems this is nothing more than yet another of the many reductiones ad absurdum that the early modern paradigm of reality has bequeathed those poor mortals down there who labor away over these questions. Ever since their picture of their own humanity was reduced to a comically awkward dualism between the machine of the body and its resident ghost, they’ve been confronted by the false dilemma of trying to determine which of the two is really the seat of the mind. For a short time, the ghost enjoyed that grand eminence; but ghosts are rather ineffectual in the physical order, and the tendency of the modern mind is not to believe in them to begin with, so in fairly short order the mind came to be assigned instead to the machine. But machines don’t think, or experience anything; they possess no inner coherence of any kind; they’re composites of inert parts extrinsically organized to perform functions imposed on them from without by beings who do think and experience things. This is true even of machines that obey coded programs, which are nothing but more sophisticated and flexible mechanical systems, producing results that in themselves are still nothing in excess of the mechanical. Before the modern epoch, no one was aware of this version of the “mind-body problem” as such. No one would have thought it sensible to ask to which part of the living organism—the living person—mental states belonged, not because the prevailing paradigm of human life was dualistic, but precisely because it wasn’t—at least, not in the modern mechanistic sense.
HEPHAISTOS: But you’re not a physicalist because . . . ?
PSYCHE: Because, for the thousandth time, I don’t believe in mechanistic matter. Matter is mindlike—or, rather, matter is one rational relation within the mindlike structure of nature, and physical reality is merely mind as expressed in a certain kind of concrete mode or phase—as you well know to be my opinion. Really, I do think sometimes you’re just trying to provoke me. I believe in . . . well, psychē: at once both the principle of life and the principle of mind, an inherently integral rational structure, informing both the bodies of living organisms and thought itself. Modern dogma, I realize, holds that biological life is reducible to mere chemical interactions, and that surely human beings will one day be able to summon living organisms out of their Petri dishes as though from a magic cauldron. As yet, however, despite all their understanding of biochemistry, whatever that final dash of henbane or last mystic incantation is that has the power to transform chemical volatility into organic vitality continues to elude them. All one can say with certainty for now is that the unity of organic life—with all its “mindlike” order and teleology, its faculties of self-movement and reproduction—is always present, perhaps to the point of identity, wherever the unity of the conscious and intending mind is found; and, so, to assume that organic life and living mind can be physically alienated from one another and continue to exist separately is nothing but a wild leap of fantasy.
HEPHAISTOS: Ah, now, be consistent. I happen to know that you don’t believe the soul or mind or what have you perishes with the body.
PSYCHE: No, as it happens, I don’t—not, however, because it’s a kind of software, but because it’s life and form as such, and gives life and form to the material body, and so doesn’t depend on a strictly material body to exist, even if the material body is its way of being this particular mind here at this moment within the physical continuum. But I don’t want to be drawn off along that path, since my personal beliefs aren’t the issue here; and, anyway, if I’m deceived on that score, I’m still not as guilty of magical thinking as you are. You’ve dwelt so long among those automata of yours that your workshop is becoming a factory of delusions. This is a perfect example of what I called the Narcissean fallacy. Computational models of mind are nonsensical; mental models of computer functions equally so, but computers produce so enchanting a simulacrum of mental agency that sometimes those who use them fall under their spell and begin to think there must really be someone there, just on the other side of that mesmerizingly glowing screen. It’s probably only natural that humans should be so easily seduced by shadows and stupefied by their own beguiling reflections; but you’re a god and should know better. They’re just clever apes, after all, who’ve impressed themselves on the world around them far more intricately and indelibly than any other terrestrial animal could ever do. They’ve mastered countless ways, artistic and technological, of reproducing their images and voices and visions, of giving expression to and preserving their thoughts, and of reshaping their physical environment. And now, in this late modern age of theirs, they’ve come to live at the center of an increasingly inescapable house of mirrors. They’ve even created a technology that seems to reflect not merely their presence in the world, but their very minds. So, like Narcissus bent above the waters, they look down at their computers and, captivated by what they see reflected there, imagine that another gaze has met their own. That’s sad enough, but then many of them go further still and redouble—by inverting—the folly of that young, beautiful Boeotian idiot: rather than mistaking their own shadows for other selves, they instead mistake themselves for other shadows; having first imposed the metaphor of an artificial mind on computers, they now reverse the process and impose the nonsensical notion of a thinking machine on their own minds.
[With a long sigh:] Yet these are all only so many empty figures of speech. One speaks of computer memory, for instance, but of course computers recall nothing. They don’t even store any “remembered” information, in the sense of symbols with real semantic content; they just preserve certain electronic notations for their users. Not only are computers unaware of the information they contain; in themselves, they don’t actually contain any semantic information at all. Those notations—those transient binary traces inscribed on silicon parchment with electrical ink—yield semantic content only in respect to our intentional judgments of their meanings in our minds. A computer no more remembers the files stored in it than the paper and print of a book remembers the contents of its text. Nor can one say that there are “higher order” functions in the computer’s software, at some other mechanical level of functional integration, that transform those notations into coherent meanings. There are no higher functions in the computer; those higher levels exist only in the living minds the computer serves. Even the programs that computers run don’t exist in the computers themselves as intelligible purposive systems. In a computer, considered as a physical object in which physical processes occur, there are neither symbols nor algorithms; there are only inactive material parts, electrical impulses, and binary patterns without reference. A computer programmer can translate meanings or functions into algorithms because, being intentionally conscious, he or she is capable of imposing a semeiotic formality upon all of that intrinsically aimless matter and energy, and is then also capable of representing the operations of the computer not merely as physical events but as intelligible symbolic transcriptions of something else. It’s solely in the consciousness of the person who programs or uses a computer, or in the consciousness that operates through the physical apparatus of the brain, that symbols reside.
It’s all rather silly, when you think about it, this computer analogy. Computational models of the mind might make sense if what a computer does could be characterized as an elementary version of what the mind does, but there isn’t even a remote analogy between them. A computer doesn’t even really compute; it’s the user who does all the computing, using it as an instrument for his or her ends, just as one might do with that abacus we mentioned earlier. A programmer can program a computer so that it will produce an image on a screen that a user reads as meaning 2 + 2 = 4; but those luminescent figures have mathematical content in their minds only, not in the computer itself. In there, 2 + 2 = 4 isn’t a mathematical sum, or any kind of thought at all. One could program the computer reliably to produce figures on its screen declaring that 2 + 2 = 5, and there would be no violation of logic on its part in doing so.
HEPHAISTOS: A brain can produce errors too.
PSYCHE: A mind can produce error; error is a privilege reserved for intending agents, and neither neurons (conceived mechanically) nor circuits enjoy that singular dignity. A purely physical system can be neither right nor wrong, but only efficient or inefficient. Software no more thinks than that abacus thinks, and its coding is only a set of protocols for physical processes. No computer has ever used language, responded to a question, or intended a meaning. No computer has ever played chess or Go. No computer has ever added two numbers together, let alone entertained a thought. The only intelligence or consciousness or even illusion of consciousness in the whole computational process is situated in living minds, and anything in computers that appears to us to be analogous to minds will turn out to be, on closer inspection, pure projection on our parts. [Another sigh:] It’s so simple, really. The problem of mind for us is the correlation within us—within us—of physical and mental actions. There are physical actions in a computer, but all the correlated mental actions that may or may not be associated with them are still in us.
