A while ago I was lucky enough to witness a conversation between the neuroscientist
Antonio Damasio and the biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, on the subject of whether
a human being could ever upload their mind into a computer. Aubrey was of the opinion that,
someday, yes we could; and Antonio was a little bit more sceptical. And I said after that conversation took place
that they had both missed a whole bunch of philosophical points, and it was really basic, and I think I was overly harsh and critical. So
by way of an apology to you, Antonio and Aubrey, I would like today to throw my modest hat in the ring
and weigh in with my opinion on the question, "Could you ever upload your mind into a computer?"
One thing that Aubrey brought up in that fruitful conversation was that our understanding of
the brain is getting better and better. He even mentioned a cool invention called "neural dust."
Neural dust is an idea already in the prototype stage where we build loads and loads of tiny
sensors, which can transmit data wirelessly. The prototype sensors are currently about
3mm long and in time they may get even tinier. The idea is that once we can make them small
enough we can inject thousands of them into somebody's brain and they can tell us all
kinds of cool things about what the brain is doing.
We know that the brain is made up of billions of cells called neurones that can send and
receive chemical and electrical impulses, and Aubrey imagined a scenario in which we
inject a brain with neural dust, and each sensor sends a message to a computer on the
outside every time a neuron next to it fires. With loads and loads of transmitters doing
that we could build up an incredibly accurate map of what's going on inside somebody's brain.
So far so good, but here's where things, for me anyway, start to get slightly fuzzier. Aubrey
seemed to be of the opinion that we could then take that map of the brain and do something with it, play it
run it? Execute it? Write an algorithm to govern it? And that, whatever it was, would
be a mind inside a computer.
Here's where I'm sceptical though, it seems to me that that scenario with the neural dust
is one in which we have an incredibly high-resolution picture of how the brain works. And a picture
of something is not the same as the thing itself. If we take a really high-resolution image
of, say, a muscle, or an eye, and we put that inside a computer it can't do the things that
those tissues can do. Right now you are looking at a pretty high-resolution image of my face, a kind of visual
map, in fact if you go to your YouTube player settings you could even maybe display an even higher
resolution image of my face. Not that I would recommend it: viewing my face is best done
after about three pints if you absolutely have to do it.
Point is though; the image of my face is not the same thing as my face.
I think Aubrey was already conceiving of minds as like software
run on hardware before going down the neural dust route, so if we accept that analogy then of course it sounds
appealing and natural to put a mind inside a computer because they're already basically kinda the same thing, right?
But are brains and minds like computers and software?
Obviously the answer to this question depends on how we look at it because
anything is like anything if you just look hard enough - but for me anyway, minds and computer programs differ in some important ways.
Now fair warning: here we are getting into computer science, which is not
my area of expertise so if I make a mistake please do bring me up on it. But as I understand it, computers that we
are familiar with day to day store data using binary - ones and zeros, on or off. And hey, brain neurones - they
fire, or they don't fire, that's kindof like binary! So isn't it easy to imagine having a binary brain?
Well, not really, because as Antonio pointed out to me on that same day, brain neurones have more
states than just on or off. They aren't really binary. The communication between them
is mediated chemically, which means it's more of a spectrum than a binary.
So, kindof like the earlier point that the image of a brain is not the same as the brain itself
we can store images of the brain using binary but the brain itself is a little bit
woollier than that, which might take some of the wind out of the sails of Aubrey's neural dust scenario
Another thing that Antonio said on the day is that the activity of the brain is not
all there is to consciousness. He thinks that the other parts of the body play a role as well,
not just mechanically sending messages to the brain
but actually manifesting the business of having a mind, whatever that is.
So maybe Aubrey's neural dust scenario might need a lot more dust for the rest of the body! Interestingly,
this embodied consciousness idea is something that I was taught in a very different
way as an actor! I learned that the way the body moves can greatly affect how we feel and how we perceive things.
Another key difference, and here's where things get really tricky, might turn on algorithms.
Aubrey imagined a scenario in which a simulated brain could be executed by an algorithm, but
similar to my first point, something being described by an algorithm is not the same
thing as it being run by an algorithm. The philosopher Herbert Dreyfus argues that
minds are not governed by algorithms, however accurately we can model one using them. We
could write an algorithm that described the routes taken by bus drivers, but the bus drivers
themselves are not controlled by an algorithm because, he says, they don't run on ironclad
rules - they can deviate when they get radically new inputs. If someone on the bus has a heart
attack, if the bus station is on fire, bus drivers' brains don't crash and shut down.
In order to write an algorithm that did everything a bus driver can do we'd have to think of
every possible scenario it might encounter and, crucially, we'd have to tell it what
kind of response it should make ahead of time, again unlike a bus driver who can improvise.
Indeed some bus services, like the X78 out of Eldon Square in Newcastle, operate on absolutely no discernable rules or patterns at all!
By the way that doesn't mean so-called "self-driving vehicles" are impossible, obviously they are
possible since they exist - just that they would not be the same as a human-driven vehicle.
They would not have a mind, which is what's at stake here. I've done a video
on self-driving cars already; if you'd like to see it you can click on that card that's just appeared in the top right.
In a similar vein to Dreyfus, AI researcher Krisstin Thorisson writes that computers
can't be intelligent as long as they lack an understanding of time and energy. Human
thought takes place with an awareness of the fact that time and energy are finite: we don't
just know what time it is but we know what it is to have a deadline, what it is to miss one,
how to use time more or less effectively. Ditto for energy. By contrast, "Few if any programming languages exist where time is a first-class citizen."
Because computer programming owes so much to the work of Alan Turing, and because Turing's
original definition of computation didn't include time and energy as finite givens,
Thorisson thinks that thinking and computation cannot be the same thing. "Having unbounded
time means that any problem can be solved by a complete search of all possibilities
and outcomes. But if this is the case, intelligence is essentially not needed: Disregarding time renders intelligence essentially irrelevant."
There's a parallel here to what writer Evgeny Morozov says about computers and memory. Morozov
writes that computers can't actually remember anything. They can only record. And as an example,
I'll tell you about my earliest memory. I am two years old. I am outside. I'm standing.
I am watching my mother pick gooseberries off a gooseberry bush, and
I am aware that she is my mother. There's plenty about that episode that I don't actually
recall: I don't remember what time of day it was, I don't know what I
was wearing, I'm not sure what my mother was wearing but I think she might have a sun hat on...
And that's because human memory involves selection. Some bits are more important
than others, and as we go back and revisit out memories they can become romanticized and added to, in a way that computers don't do,
because they record everything perfectly and store all data equally.
Although I side with Antonio in being sceptical about uploading a mind into a computer, there
are some things that Aubrey could come back at us with. For instance, Antonio said that because he thinks
the body plays such an important role in generating consciousness even if we got something from my head
into a computer, because it wouldn't have a body its consciousness would be so radically different
that it wouldn't be recognisably me.
However, the philosopher Derek Parfit has an interesting take on this. He says that when it comes to
minds being the same over time, the issue isn't whether I remain identical through
every transition but whether I survive. In a lot of ways I am very different
from that little baby boy watching his mum pick gooseberries, in a lot of ways you could say I am not the same person
as I was: I have different likes and dislikes, behaviours, memories, attitudes...
And yet, I have in a meaningful way survived, even if I am not identical to that little boy.
Maybe uploading my mind into a computer would change me so much
that I wouldn't recognisably be the same person anymore, "I am now neither the woman who was known as the Major nor am
I the program called the Puppet Master." - but again, maybe some part of me would survive.
And since Aubrey's work is all about extending people's lifespan maybe there is something there he could hold on to.
The philosopher Margaret Boden argues that even though machine consciousness might be
totally different from our own, that doesn't necessarily mean we should or even that we would treat it hugely
differently. Most people believe that animals have some kind of consciousness - certainly
I would regard killing a dog, or a frog, or even a spider very differently than I
regard just turning off my computer. And even though I don't think of spiders or flies
as really aware all that much, interestingly, I personally would take a negative moral view of somebody
who enjoyed pulling spiders and flies apart in a way that I wouldn't take a negative moral view of someone who enjoyed disassembling computers. Boden asks is it really so hard
to believe that someday we might treat machines as if they have some kind of morally relevant consciousness, even if they don't?
Boden isn't the only one to suppose this. In their book "The Man Who Lied to His Laptop,"
communications professor Clifford Nass and design expert Corina Yen argue, based on
studies that they've done, that a lot of people already interact with computers as if they were in some way alive.
If you ask people to use some software on a computer and then answer a questionnaire about what they thought of it,
they will rate it as performing better if you ask them the questionnaire on the same computer
versus if you give them an identical software experience, ask them identical questions, but make them do the
questionnaire on a separate computer. They say that on some level we have an impulse
to be "polite" to the computer that we just used and not "offend" it to its "face."
So even if machines never would have minds like ours is it so unreasonable to suppose that
someday they might become moral patients, like spiders and flies, beings who aren't moral agents
like people but who are nevertheless worthy of moral consideration?
And even if they don't, even if no computer is ever more aware than rocks and stones,
alchemists used to try to turn lead into gold, and they failed, but they learned a lot
about chemistry. A Chinese man called Wang Hongcheng once scammed a whole bunch of people into
believing that he could turn water into fuel, and as a result the Chinese government
decided to invest more in science education. Failure can sometimes be very instructive. So maybe
trying and failing to put our minds inside computers might tell us an enormous amount about machines and about ourselves.
"And where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite."
Patreon.com/PhilosophyTube is what allows me to pay rent and keep making the show. Please
sign up to give whatever you can, or alternatively Paypal.me/PhilosophyTube is where you can
make a one-time donation.