Where Does Human Consciousness Come From?
January 6th, 2010
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Meet TOPIO 3.0 (TOSY Ping Pong Playing Robot). It’s a big step for AI, but can a machine ever be conscious?
What makes humans conscious? As mere collections of organic matter, it’s pretty impressive that we’re even able to ask ourselves this question. What is it that makes our power of self awareness possible?
Setting aside the task of defining what consciousness really means, where does it come from? Here are the options:
1. Humans are not conscious – it’s just an illusion.
2. Consciousness comes from something physical (the brain).
3. Consciousness comes from something non-physical (a soul).
These are the only possibilities, right? Let’s look at each one.
1. Humans are not conscious – it’s just an illusion.
If this is the case, then we immediately run into an apparent contradiction. How is it possible to think about whether you’re conscious without actually being conscious? This is very similar to the argument behind “I think, therefore I am.”
Still, I don’t think we can rule it out entirely. Sometimes I look into the mirror and wonder, “Are you really me, or do I just think you are? And if the latter, do I really think you are, or do I just think I think you are?”
2. Consciousness comes from something physical (the brain).
This seems like a simple and obvious answer, but it’s really not. Because if consciousness comes from the brain, then there’s no reason we can’t build a conscious machine simply by replicating the brain with mechanical parts.
Sure, we’re currently far from having the technology to interconnect 100 billion artificial neurons with 100 trillion artificial synaptic connections. But technology has improved a lot over the last hundred years. What will happen over the next million?
I wouldn’t be too quick to predict limits on technological progress. When we build semi-intelligent nanobots, won’t they be capable of helping us build more intelligent nanobots? And then won’t it be easy to build a brain far better than what we have now?
But no matter how advanced future technology may be, I still have a hard time seeing the leap from artificial intelligence to artificial consciousness.
Artificial intelligence is easy. Even if a program isn’t truly intelligent, it can easily give the appearance of being so. As an example, consider Harold the tic-tac-toe AI.
Harold is a tic-tac-toe program I wrote the other day to test out an idea. He’s really not intelligent in any sense. For example, he doesn’t understand (nor will he ever learn) that if you put two X’s in a row, he needs to block you. All he does is make arbitrary decisions, then he sees what happens.
If he ends up losing, he knows he made a mistake, so he won’t do that again. And if he ends up tying, he knows to try something different next time, in case a win was possible. It’s a bit agonizing to wait for him to learn by playing out all the different variations, but after he’s made every mistake once, he’ll play perfectly.
Now, if Harold just played out all these games in his head before playing against a human, he’d have the appearance of being intelligent. And given an arbitrarily high processing power, there’s no reason we couldn’t generalize this concept to have him play perfect checkers, chess, or indeed solve any problem that had well-defined rules and goals.
And that’s without having any actual intelligence at all – just brute force and a good memory. The possibilities will become really interesting when we start making significant progress on true AI: deduction, reasoning, problem solving, knowledge representation, planning, perception, creativity, etc.
We still have a long way to go before you can have a conversation with a robot without figuring out he’s a robot. But I don’t think intelligent robots (or at least, robots that appear intelligent for all practical purposes) are much of a stretch at all in the very long term. Last April, a program extrapolated the laws of motion from a pendulum’s swings, including conservation of momentum and Newton’s second law (F = ma), without having been programmed with any knowledge of physics.
Let’s say we get to the point where we have true AI. You can talk to a robot (or really, just a program – an AI doesn’t need a body) and fully enjoy its witty banter, beautiful poetry, insightful Zen koan interpretations, etc. It’s still just a program, right? It has no sense of awareness or subjective experience.
Can you imagine a program being truly conscious? Wondering what its life purpose is, whether this external hard drive makes it look too fat, and when it will finally get the right to vote? Moving it to the recycle bin would be kidnapping, and deleting it would be murder. Ridiculous, right?
3. Consciousness comes from something non-physical (a soul).
This would provide a nice answer to the previous question – a program can’t be conscious, because it doesn’t have a soul. Of course, this option comes with its own problems, not the least of which is that it’s a severe violation of Occam’s razor.
The absence of supernatural phenomena is the simplest possible explanation, and therefore most likely to be the correct one. Unless, of course, it’s too simple to be possible.
When a car shuts down from a dead battery, you just put in a new one and it comes roaring back to life. Why doesn’t the same thing happen with people? If someone dies from a heart attack, why can’t you just repair their heart (and anything else that may need it) and watch them come back to life?
What part of them has really died, if all their organs are completely intact? Why doesn’t Frankenstein work in real life?
Then again, maybe it does. The real problem with a fatal heart attack is probably that it causes brain death, and nerve cells aren’t easy to repair. But is this just a matter of technology?
Can we someday inject nanobots into someone’s bloodstream, having programmed them to repair any and all cell damage, and expect the person to live indefinitely in perfect health, not even aging?
Which of these is the right answer? I have no idea.
January 6th, 2010 at 4:45 am
Here’s what I believe, and I know most people will totally hate this idea. I believe that consciousness (and even personality in some ways) is an emergent phenomenon. In complexity theory, emergence is the idea that “the whole is greater than the mere sum of its parts”.
As we grow from children into adults, our brains grow new neurons, and mirror neurons help us learn. As the brain grows and the neurons multiply, complexity makes for greater emergent phenomena, like imagination and abstract thought.
And, possibly, self-awareness and consciousness.
To top it off, all of this rests on a biological foundation of complexity as well, because of how the human brain, limbic, and endocrine systems have evolved over millions of years. The problem AI and mind upload enthusiasts face is not can thinking be simulated by software and computers, but can the human endocrine and limbic system also be simulated. Because without those, we’re not human. But what would be the benefit for a machine to simulate a human endocrine system? Would that really give the AI “emotions?”
If AI were complex enough, no doubt emergent phenomena would occur. But I don’t think we’d prepared for what that emergent phenomena would be. Could it be consciousness? Or might it be something confoundingly alien?
We will find out, sooner or later.
January 6th, 2010 at 11:42 am
We aren’t the only animal with self-awarness, so we aren’t exceedingly specail…just special. Based on that I don’t see a big jump from AI to artificial conciousnes, as I’m not as convinced they would be trully seperate. Didn’t Deep Blue (or was it Big Blue?) think ahead of time to bring Kasparov to a draw in chess? I’m not sure, I just don’t remember the researchers saying anything about having Blue practice.
I guess I could say I’m on Ray Kurzweil’s side of the argument. I think his prediction for machine intelligence on par with humans is 2025 or 2035…I can’t remember for sure. I bet he isn’t far off.
It also helps that option #3 doesn’t seem like an option to me at all. The “soul” just seems like another way we tried to explain something before we actually had any real knowledge of what we were trying to explain.
One final note I if you want to read an interesting short story on intelligent and conscious machines Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question is very interesting.
January 6th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Great topic!!!
The issue of consciousness is huge. It seems the top scientists who are working on the theory of everything (TOE) base it on consciousness, but I’m not sure exactly how they define consciousness. (The discussion gets too technical for me. Maybe you understand it — I highly recommend checking books like MY Big TOE. Let us know your take of it.)
Now, what is Occam’s razor? And you know some scientists are indeed working on the possibility of injecting nanobots to human body to continuously repair it so we live for a very long time — the scientific approach to immortality?
You probably know I am inclined to choose the third definition, but you have raised some very interesting questions — I will think about them.
January 6th, 2010 at 11:55 pm
@ Michael, now that you mention it, there’s a really fantastic book called Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid that talks about consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten most of it (read it in 1998), but I think one of the examples is that an ant colony shows conscious behavior that isn’t seen in any individual ant.
My understanding is that AI researchers are divided on whether a physically complex structure is necessary for consciousness, or if it was just the easiest way for it to evolve. I agree, we could very well not be prepared for it. I think the most interesting and dangerous stuff will happen after we’re gone though.
@ Chad, it’s Deep Blue you’re thinking of (AFAIK, Big Blue is just a nickname for IBM, the creator of Deep Blue). I was actually just reading about it recently. I’m sure it used lookahead instead of actual practice – I was just giving an example of how game strategy could be implemented without anything resembling intelligence.
BTW, Deep Blue didn’t just draw with Kasparov. In 1989, Kasparov won both games of their match. In 1996, Kasparov (facing an upgraded Deep Blue) won the match 4-2, with 3 wins, 1 loss, and 2 draws (1/2 point each). Although Deep Blue lost the match, it was the first time that a computer had beat the reigning world champion in a game under regular time controls. In 1997, a newly upgraded Deep Blue won their match 3 1/2 – 2 1/2, with 2 wins, 1 loss, and 3 draws.
I think I heard 2025 as the year when desktop computers will have more processing power than the human brain.
@ Akemi, I know that some quantum mechanics theories say that consciousness affects physical reality. Like an electron will be a wave until a conscious being observes it, at which point it will collapse into a particle. But of course people are asking about the definition of a conscious being – does a single-celled organism qualify, or would it have to be someone with a Ph.D.?
Occam’s razor is a rule of thumb that when there are multiple possible explanations of something, the simplest satisfactory explanation tends to be the best one. A related saying is “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” Which is a good idea (horses are much more common here than zebras), but you have to look out for anything that can’t be explained by horses.
January 8th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
I don’t have a clue either, as this is one of those questions that keep me up a night.
It’s easiest for me to see consciousness as an emergent phenomenon: as the biological world, namely the brain, increases in complexity, consciousness can develop, albeit limited by the physical processes that are there at ground level.
Here’s another question for you: How do you measure a thought?
Love your site by the way. Quirky and fun.
January 9th, 2010 at 3:56 pm
@ Cogiterium, I don’t know how you measure a thought. I hear people saying that thoughts have mass, but I’d be shocked if that turned out to be true. Do you have an answer to the question?
January 14th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
I think Cartesian Duality (The idea that the brain is a physical thing and consciousness is a not physical thing) is pretty well defeated by the fact that a third thing is needed to connect the two. If consciousness exists outside of the brain in a non-physical process then how can it have an effect on physical processes such as movement or breathing? That third thing would need to be able to operate in both a physical and non-physical way and once you create the possibility for that to exist you might as well just concede that the brain is such a thing and that the concept of non-physical entities is unnecessary.
If you haven’t already come across it you might find the Chinese room argument interesting. It takes the concept of software and extrapolates it to a man using books to lookup answers to questions posed to him in chinese, which of course he doesn’t understand. From the outside it appears that he understands chinese to a conversational level, but in fact he is just looking at the symbol he is passed and returning the one that his book tells him to. No matter how complex his books get he will never actually understand what is being passed in or out.
January 15th, 2010 at 1:56 am
@ Andrew, very good point. I’m not sure that a non-physical consciousness couldn’t affect physical processes without a third thing, but the idea does present a complication.
I’ve come across the Chinese room problem recently, and it’s very interesting. So what does it mean to say that an AI program understands Chinese, if a human manually executing the source code could produce the same results without understanding it?
January 15th, 2010 at 3:03 am
The chinese room problem is designed to show that software can never have an understanding in the way that we do. It simply isn’t possible; however lifelike it may appear, because it will always just be following instructions. It is a rejection of the “Brain as a computing machine” idea. Even if you replicate an entire brain, at the end of the day there is still software simulating neurons and converting that into 1s and 0s.
I’m not entirely convinced by it myself, as I am not entirely convinced that our understanding is much more than a massive set of rules governing, if x then y, albeit with a much more sophisticated mechanism. It is a powerful argument nonetheless and one that I don’t think has an answer right now.
January 19th, 2010 at 3:31 am
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February 4th, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Yes… the first option is correct. We (you) are consciousness … you are not an individual with consciousness. The body/mind is a machine but you as consciousness are aware of sensations, thoughts etc. Thoughts happen but there is no thinker… only undifferentiated consciousness.
What usually happens is that we identify with an object (what we see in the mirror, or a thought – as the thinker-) instead of the subject. When you look in the mirror you are seeing exactly what you are not! When you look in the mirror two things become apparent: one, ther is the object being seen, and there is the seer… they are completely different.
For further info check out Douglas Harding (Headlessness) or Peter Dziuban
cheers, kai
June 20th, 2010 at 1:08 am
Does a human have consciousness?
Your current consciousness is made up of absorbed data and experiences.
Does a Computer have consciousness?
A computer Absorbs data through a webcam, collects data through the microphone ect.
Does it think or not think?
The microphone will adjust the level of volume, based apon the level of input. Is that via choice? Did it decide to do that? Is it conscious because it changed its settings? A lot of people would say that a person is different from a computer, because they can think.
Well, defining thinking? I could say that the computer is thinking because its taking my voice and adjusting the volume accordingly. Its no different from a human thinking about having chicken tonight instead of pork. Or thinking about going to go pay there bill, or do whatever. Its ultimately just a more complexed version of a computer. A program response. Functioning under the specific programs, one has accumulated from there upbringing and society.
If you ask someone a question and they give you a response, does that make them conscious? No. its still a function. Based on a programmed thought process.
When the computer adjusts its volume automatically. Who defined what level of sound would be ‘medium’. it was programmed with a opinion of someone’s idea, of what they thought ‘medium’ was.
We are all programmed with different opinions based on our individual life experiences. Ultimately our decision is made by someone else. Parent values/political values ect. Which were programmed into us, though out the years. No different from a computer being programmed.
Humans are not conscious. They Automate through life.
When your on the computer can you see outside of it? The wall behind it? can you feel the chair your sitting on? the tempreture of the room, the breeze as it touches your skin? Are you aware of your body right now?
No, your completely ambsorbed in the reading these words. Your not aware of any of those things, unless its brought to your attention.
Consciousness is a function of the soul.
A human must reflect deeply, have self reflection and ask the big questions ’Who Am I? Is there more to life then what I can see with my eyes. And Touch with my hands?’, ‘ in order to create a soul.
Conciousness is becoming aware that you were automated.
When you realise you were automated, you’ve just woken up and become aware.
November 24th, 2010 at 5:22 am
I think that consciousness may arrive from nature also, i mean, that may be it is fundamental to nature, but we just can experience true ourselves of course. So as an animal, even an insect like a bee it is shown to have it, and other species have their own kind of language, feelings, emotions, so if those are sings of consciousness well may be other living organisms or entities like a star or a planets, even galaxies, or why not, the whole universe ( I think Nature’s imagination is so much greater than man’s that she’s never going to let us relax. – Richard Feynman ), may have some different “degrees” or “levels” of consciousness.
Where is consciousness its located? in wish part of the body? is it really at some point inner our structure, our bodies?
I think that the brain its like a platform or emulator for the consciousness, may be the the more capabilities you have in your brain the more consciousness manifests.
But nevertheless i think consciousness remain outside the body, but at the same time receiving and experimenting all the qualities that all our bodies provide to it. We suffer, we feel joy, some people cant watch, others cant hear, different channels of information take place. Different scenarios for consciousness to take within all kinds of life forms. It would be my guess.
We individualize consciousness but the whole universe may be something like its playground. I mean if consciousness dont have mass, or place in space, therefore consciousness could have the power to transcend even these laws of nature. In these case it would be easy to understand it like consciousness taking over all the times since the big bang, all the galaxies, all the possible ways of life, till this universe of ours run out of time, space and matter to play with it. Our universe is creative, nature (metaphorically speaking) its like an Sculptor, the sculpture its its own body, the universe, trough the times, and consciousness has been there since the beginning i think, and even more, i think its the only thing that its going to remain if the universe ends up in a freeze up or whatever. Again there may be many other universes with plenty of space and matter for consciousness to manifest. And so, endless something and nothing at the same time. :O
Saludos amigos!
June 10th, 2011 at 10:57 pm
In my opinion consciousness comes from physical *and* non-physical (dualism) sources. Consciousness is a shared resource and your thoughts switch between the two modes transparently, meaning that you don’t notice it happening.
D J Wray
August 7th, 2011 at 11:46 pm
The whole issue to be resolved what makes us to feel what we are, what we want and attending to that task. It is a fact that even a baby cries and makes it explicit that he wants something, i.e. milk and based on that expression of cry , the parents feed baby. What I mean to say is that even the new born baby knows what it wants, and we also know that it also wants the comfort and warmth of mother.It means the new born baby is also conscious and has the consciousness before it can actually verbalise it.
So, based on that , it appears consciousness must be there before the actual birth of physical baby takes place. so. may be, the consciousness is separate from physical body and brain. just like, say, air, water,etc. It may be a separate and individual component of universe.
Like this;-RNA+DNA+OXGEN+WATER+PROTEINS+MUSCLES+BRAIN+ CONSCIOUSNESS= Human being. So, accordingly, it appears that consciousness is a separate element of nature,and ,it runs the brain. Like super ego or PARAMATMA. brain with thought process is ATMAN and the the free will which exercises the choice and which decides the point of attention is CONSCIOUSNESS, the PARAMATMA.
SO, there may be a separte and free universal element called CONSCIOUSNESS like air and water. Comments please.
August 8th, 2011 at 8:01 pm
Yes Dr A… I like what you say. My formula for human being is : consciousness appearing as human being (or human doing).
Consciousness is all there is.
Recognize that “consciousness” is just a word… and as Krishnamurti said, “The word is not the thing”
August 10th, 2011 at 3:55 am
The notion that bodily functions are due to a vitalistic principle existing in all living creatures has roots going back at least to ancient Egypt. While vitalist ideas have been commonplace in traditional medicine, attempts to construct workable scientific models date from the 17th century, when it was argued that matter existed in two radically different forms, observable by their behavior with regard to heat. These two forms of matter were termed organic and inorganic. Inorganic matter could be melted, but could also be restored to its former condition by removing the heat. Organic compounds “cooked” when heated, transforming into new forms that could not be restored to the original. It was argued that the essential difference between the two forms of matter was the “vital force”, present only in organic material.
Vitalism is an ancient doctine found throughout many ancient cultures, a pure vitalistic doctrine however can be traced back to Galen of the second century, a physician who became a surgeon for gladiators at Pergamum. When studying the anatomy of the human body he did not believe that the living organisms could be explained by mindless interplay of atoms, he believed there was a vital force which powered the human body. Like Erasistratus he believed a vital force was absorbed through the lungs from the air.
Vitalism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is
1. a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from biochemical reactions
2. a doctrine that the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry alone and that life is in some part self-determining
Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is often referred to as the “vital spark,” “energy” or “élan vital”, which some equate with the “soul”.
Pasteur demonstrated empirically in 1858 that fermentation only occurs when living cells are present and, further, that cells only carry out fermentation in the absence of oxygen, leading him to describe fermentation as ‘life without air’. Finding no support for claims such as those advanced by Berzelius, Liebig, Traube and other chemists that fermentation resulted from chemical agents or catalysts within cells, Pasteur concluded that fermentation was a ‘vital action’.
In addition to their apparent success in showing that fermentation only occurs in living cells, vitalists like Pasteur also appealed to their demonstration that living organisms always originate from living organisms and that there is no spontaneous generation. The idea of spontaneous generation was inspired in part by the observation of small organisms forming in putrefying matter. The controversy is rooted in the conflict between John Needham (1713–81) and Lazarro Spallanzani. Needham heated closed vessels of meat-broth, discovering that when cooled they still yielded micro-organisms. Spallanzani insisted on longer heating, and in his vessels no micro-organisms developed. In this context, Pasteur showed that heated organic matter remained sterile unless contaminated but that, if contaminated, the previously heated material sustained life. This supported the conclusion that new life-forms only emerge from existing ones and provided additional evidence for the vitalist claim that living organisms are inherently different from non-living entities.
Alfred Russel Wallace believed qualitative novelties could arise through the process of evolution, in particular the phenomena of life and mind, like the vitalists Wallace attributed these novelties to a supernatural agency. Later in his life, Wallace was advocate of spiritualism and believed in a non-material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans, he believed that evolution suggested that the universe had a purpose, and that certain aspects of living organisms are not be explainable in terms of purely materialistic processes, in a 1909 magazine article entitled The World of Life, which he later expanded into a book of the same name.
‘’ Neither Darwinism nor any other theory in science or philosophy can give more than a secondary explanation of phenomena. Some deeper power or cause always has to be postulated. I have here claimed that the known facts, when fully examined and reasoned out, are adequate to explain the [[p. 434]] method of Organic Evolution; yet the underlying fundamental causes are, and will probably ever remain, not only unknown, but even inconceivable by us. The mysterious power we term life, which alone renders possible the production from a few of the chemical elements of such diverse fabrics as bone and skin, horn and hair, muscle and nerve, and brain cells; which from identical soil, water, and air, manufactures all the infinitely varied products of the vegetable kingdom,.. will surely never be explained–as many suppose they will be, in terms of mere matter and motion.
Every attempt to explain these phenomena–even Darwin’s highly complex and difficult theory of Pangenesis–utterly breaks down; so that now, even the extreme monists, such as Haeckel, are driven to the supposition that every ultimate cell is a conscious, intelligent individual, that knows where to go and what to do, goes there and does it!
These unavailing efforts to explain the inexplicable, whether in the details of any one living thing, or in the origin of life itself, seem to me to lead us to the irresistible conclusion that beyond and above all terrestrial agencies there is some great source of energy and guidance, which in unknown ways pervades every form of organised life, and of which we ourselves are the ultimate and fore-ordained outcome’’ (Alfred Russel Wallace)
Joseph C. Keating, Jr., PhD, discusses vitalism’s past and present roles in chiropractic and calls vitalism “a form of bio-theology.” He further explains that:
Vitalism is that rejected tradition in biology which proposes that life is sustained and explained by an unmeasurable, intelligent force or energy. The supposed effects of vitalism are the manifestations of life itself, which in turn are the basis for inferring the concept in the first place. This circular reasoning offers pseudo-explanation, and may deceive us into believing we have explained some aspect of biology when in fact we have only labeled our ignorance.
‘Explaining an unknown (life) with an unknowable (Innate),’ suggests philosopher Joseph Donahue, D.C., ‘is absurd’.