Understanding Consciousness: What Computers Can and Can’t Do and Why That Matters
Consciousness is defined as the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings. This state is something so deeply mysterious yet so fundamental to people’s views of themselves. When we talk about consciousness, we often describe this state as more than just being alive. Conscious people are capable of original thought, deliberately affecting the world, and questioning the meaning of their existence. But is this state of being and the passion for life it elicits too mysterious to ever be understood? Currently, mainly the information processing, logical side of the human is understood and replicable, but more complexities exist in the subconscious level. However, artificial intelligence has come a long way by replicating what was once considered uniquely human and offering an opportunity to improve our lives by changing or uploading our brains. As we seek to improve our lives through an entirely possible future where robots and humans both have consciousness, we must determine the best possible way to cope with these changes.
There are still large parts of the human mind that are unknown, and these gaps in understanding lead some to think the brains activities are supernatural. Only complex scientific studies can uncover how we think and remember at the most basic level. In her article in the Smithsonian Magazine titled “The Strange and Mysterious History of the Ouija Board”, author Linda Rodriguez McRobbie describes how things like “dowsing rods, Oujia boards, pendulums” are “all devices whereby quite a small muscular movement can cause quite a large effect” and lead people to believe their bodies are controlled supernaturally (McRobbie). The human brain cannot comprehend just how many factors are at play in the body and mind, so we explain this away under the guise of magic. If the brain is so complex and we can’t abstract its various functions, then it seems impossible to replicate it exactly unless we model every atom. Even then, we may not understand the universe well enough at the atomic level for this to work. There is so much more to discover and some things may be impossible to discover.
Furthermore, researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Visual Cognition Lab designed an experiment to test whether individuals would know the answers to more questions if they allowed their subconscious to decide. In the experiment, “when participants were asked, verbally, to guess the answers to the best of their ability, they were right only around 50 percent of the time, a typical result for guessing. But when they answered using the board, believing that the answers were coming from someplace else, they answered correctly upwards of 65 percent of the time” (McRobbie). The unconscious retains more information than humans think that they know. So, perhaps being able to replicate and control it will lead to super human abilities. The possibilties for what computers can do if they have a system like this and if we can modify it is incredible. Also, if we don’t have this feature, perhaps we don’t have consciousness or intelligence at all.
Today, robots are slaves to the human race, enabling our world domination by satisfying our needs for information processing, decision making, and mechanical tasks while we focus on more creative fields. Author Kim Tingley outlines in her article, “Learning to Love our Robot Co-Workers” in the New York Times, the idea that collaborative robots, which are “multifunctional and reprogrammable” without “functions [that] are determined at purchase” offer employees the “power to influence how they will be used to maximize the time [they] spend on the facets of their jobs that they find most fulfilling” (Tingley). There are certain tasks that robots are better at than humans and may have been easily automated for decades. For humans, the best robots are responsive to their input and work alongside them. Humans provide direction and careful instructions for robots to carry out are still necessary for making societies function.
That being said, robots are getting better and better at doing human things like talking to people, driving cars, and being collaborative. If robots approach the level of consciousness that humans have, they may different ideas about the best way to run societies that could be better than ours.
The nuances of human thought and action are much more complex than they seem, so currently we have the idea of humans being masters and computers being slaves, but this may change.
The difference between real and computer simulated reality could fade in the future. The idea of whether consciousness is actually something exclusively human or not is unclear. In Amy Harmon’s article titled “A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future” in the New York Times, a cancer patient, Kim Suozzi says that “the prospect of life in a computer simulation did not faze [her or her husband]: “How do we know we’re not in one now?” (Harmon). We could theoretically have the same illusion of reality and consciousness with either neurons or ones and zeroes. For all we know, machines could be conscious and perfectly aware. The wiring behind both humans and machines is just a way of creating order. But, how can we determine how the order is created and if it can be better if we don’t fully understand either? Ray Kurzweil, the google engineering director and “others who call themselves trans-humanists have argued that exponential increases in computing power will generate an assortment of new technologies that will enable us to transcend our bodies and upload our minds onto a computer” (Harmon). This is the other side of the story: our brains are basically just biological computers. What we perceive as conscious is nothing special, it is just an illusion created by our brains so that we want to survive and reproduce. This point is convincing but also nihilistic: how can there be meaning when we are just matter.
Since humans don’t understand their own minds, they do not have all the answers for the minds of machines as well. In a TED Radio Hour episode titled “The Unknown Brain” by NPR, David Chalmers explores a new explanation of what consciousness could be.
“If you can't explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals - space, time - the natural thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as something fundamental - a fundamental building block of nature. The second crazy idea is that consciousness might be universal. This view is sometimes called panpsychism - pan, for all - psych, for mind. Every system is conscious. Not just humans, dogs, mice, flies, but even microbes. Even a photon has some degree of consciousness” (Chalmers).
Most people believe something needs a brain to be conscious. Yet, many people do not even believe that most animals have consciousness, even when they see them showing signs of pain, hunger, or affection. If everything is conscious, then we need to think more about taking that consciousness away, since we desire it so much and will do anything to stay alive. If computers are conscious, we have no way of knowing. They could only show consciousness in a way we understand by acting like humans. If everything is conscious, then a conscious, artificial brain could be built, which brings up many more ethical and moral dilemmas and forces us to rethink our role in creating these machines.
As people grow, get older, and have new experiences, the makeup of their brains changes. If people are still the same person when they are forty than when they are three, would the small changes that could happen from uploading a persons consciousness or replicating it still make them the same person? To answer this question, “‘you’d ask yourself how many mistakes could you make and still have the same person,’ [which] Joshua R. Sanes, director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University, said in an interview. ‘The ability of us to keep being ourselves in the face of changes in our nervous system is pretty amazing’” (Harmon). If changes don’t affect our sense of identity, then perhaps consciousness is more to do with memory than with having exactly the same thought processes. If artificial brains have the same memories, and can react to life based on those memories, then they may be the same person. In fact,
With more experimentation comes more knowledge which could potentially help the human race find truth about our purpose and help individuals. In the aforementioned TED Radio Hour episode titled “The unknown Brain” by NPR, Jill Bolte-Taylor, a neuroscientists at Harvard describes how having a stroke changed her brain for the better and allowed her to understand herself: “I see myself as a very different person with a very different value structure than I had before. And there was a lot of pain in my past that got relieved. And wasn't that a lovely thing to be able to hit the reset button on my emotional circuitry so that I'm then capable of functioning fresh and new without any antagonism towards anybody?” (Bolte-Taylor). The only thing that makes her the person she was before is her memories and her body. Her way of behaving is entirely different, and in her view, better. If changing certain brain wiring can help a person so much, scientists should treat manipulation of brain centers like they do other forms of treatment.
Our value in ourselves and feeling of maintaining existence is in memories, so as long as we feel like nothing is lost we could theoretically change our brains in any way, even by uploading them. When Kate’s father refused to fund her cryonics journey, her boyfriend ”called to urge him to reconsider. “What are you saying?” [he] demanded. “Should we just give up on trying to treat her cancer now, too?” (Harmon). We are devoted as a species to trying to preserve consciousness in whatever way we can. So, why not extend that to replicating or prolonging consciousness, especially if the goal of humans is to make the world as good as it can be with the least amount of suffering. Young people like Kate especially have a consciousness that really really wants them to live, so isn’t it worth a try?
In a TED Radio Hour episode titled “The Digital Industrial Revolution” by NPR. Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT When asked if it is possible to create an artificial thing that behaves as a human, he says: “in between your ears is a proof that there's a physical object that can do all those things. And I don't think there's some ghost in there. I think it's made of atoms and obeys the laws of physics” (Brynjolfsson). This revolution is entirely possible, but the results are what we make out of it. Through the human desire to constantly improve our lives with bigger and better things, this digital revolution is going to happen because it has the capacity to help us. As Brynjolfsson says, “Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny.” There’s is incredible potential to fix all of our problems with all of this technology, humans must simply strive to build the technology that helps people the most. There is a societal need for an acceptance of the complexity of consciousness and a desire to push towards the truth of who we are despite our uncertainty of our own minds and the limits of technology. Biology and computers may not be different: the true value is in the connections between different modules and ideas. In the future, shouldn’t we strive for the systems that bring about the most good in the world, whatever combination of human and robotic minds that may be.