In my earlier article "Nanite Anaesthesia and Electrode Euphoria", I argue that our consciousness is like the Ghost-in-the-Machine or the inner-Homunculus, that observes a 3D holodeck theatre show of images that we perceive or make up out of our imagination. I disagree with the materialistic point of view that consciousness is generated as a function of brain activity and I rather rejoin the panpsychism view of Peter Russell ("The primacy of consciousness") that consciousness is the fundamental nature of everything which exists and that our material universe is embedded therein. In this article I explain why this point of view seems more plausible to me than the materialistic point of view.
Recently it has become clear that even when brain and heart activity are completely stopped, that is when we're supposedly clinically dead, we can be brought back from there if certain conditions are met. This is no science fiction: It's a fact which has recently become applied in modern medicine (see the link at bottom of article)! Patients are brought in a state of hypothermia where brain, heart and metabolic activity are completely brought to a halt. In this precarious state, doctors have been able to operate and cure even very dangerous aneurysms. But there is more to this story: patients which are in a clinical brain-dead state have experienced their own surgery as if looking from above (OBE: out of body experience). They have been able once brought back to life to relate facts of their own surgery that their brains cannot possibly have experienced. Science has no explanation for this.
In other words even when brain activity and perception by the physical senses completely ceases, our consciousness still perceives and experiences independent of the presence of a physical substratum. This proves that our brain and body are merely conduits for processes that take place at a different level. Once free from our physical constraints, we can experience the world from a different viewpoint. This neatly fits into the thousands years old concepts of Vedanta. Thought processes, decision processes etc. do not originate in the brain, but in a shell around the body called the mental body (manomayakosha) and the intellect-body (vijnanamayakosha: intellect, the faculty which discriminates, determines or wills).
Now this does not mean that the brain or the body are useless or that we don't need senses. When consciousness is present within the body it needs these physical conduits, since a material shell now encases and hence veils immediate perception. Without those conduits, we might have been aware of our inner organs, but not of the outside world.
Moreover we need a body to interact with the world. A person having an OBE it is true can perceive a part of the world but it cannot act upon the world.
What our encased consciousness perceives with the sense of vision and the associated brain processes are images; images of the outside world, which give a very neat and precise picture of that world. What you see or what you imagine is an image in which the relationships and distances between the objects in that world correspond to that world in the sense of mathematical congruency. The ratios of the distances in the world are the same ratios as the ones I perceive. You can easily demonstrate that with a ruler.
Well you can counter-argue, that is because our brain accurately interprets computes and feeds back this visual information to some central processing unit, leading to our being aware of the visually observed world.
If this central processing unit in the brain is our consciousness, this seems like a weird way of observation. Given the fact that in principle consciousness can observe an accurate picture of the world, albeit from a different viewpoint as in OBEs, it would make more sense if what is fed to the consciousness in order to be observed is an accurate picture itself. Hence my theory in my article "Nanite anaesthesia": I quote: "Neurons are like electricity transporting wires. When electricity is transported through a wire, an electromagnetic field is induced. Electromagnetic waves are broadcasted. Could it be that the neuronal activity patterns create an interference pattern which is congruent or isomorphous to the object observed?" Modern science does not follow this idea, which resembles the "Picture Theory" or the "Quasi pictorial theory", but rather the so-called "Perceptual Activity Theory", which departs from the point of view that what the retina capture is not really a picture but rather a continuous stream of information. Nevertheless, even in this last theory, somehow the information must be rendered by the brain so that we have the impression of observing a picture. In fact the fact that the retina do not capture a picture and yet we observe one only pleads in favour of my hypothesis that the brain somehow composes a 3D image of the outside world and presents this to the faculty of consciousness. The "conscious percept" in the "Neural correlates of consciousness theory" does not give an adequate explanation either how this percept is rendered as a 2D or 3D picture.
Scientist generally do not like Ghost-in-the-machine like theories as this merely defers a problem to a different level of aggregation, in the present case at a level, which is not measurable. But that is exactly why consciousness cannot be measured: It is not a product or property of the material, physical world, it is its underlying principle (at least this is my conviction).
It is important to note that "Consciousness" as mentioned here above is what I consider to be the absolute consciousness that has only one basic quality: It is and by virtue of its being it observes. This is not the relative consciousness what the Buddhist call "Vijnana". That is already a derivative of consciousness and involves a number of qualities that derive from prakrti. Vijnana enables to act upon the world. Jnana (pure consciousness) can only be and observe, it cannot act and it cannot change.
In the article "The Sentient Web" (see M.N.Huhns, IEEE Internet Computing, 2003, issue Nov-Dec., pp. 82-84) being conscious is said to be characterised by four qualities:
knowing
having intentions
introspecting
experiencing phenomena
The qualities of "having intentions" and "introspection" are already processes, actions of the prakrti. They do not belong to the non-changing essence of "absolute consciousness". They are only virtual, imaginary illusions. As such these two aspects can potentially be simulated in a robot or other computing device. An artificial mind can potentially be built out of links, a "Glocal memory" (consisting of both local nodes and distributed global links that can be triggered: see Goertzel et al. Neurocomputing 74 (2010), pp. 84-94), an attention broker and some other AI programs. What a computing device cannot generate is consciousness. A robot will never be aware of what it perceives. No image is rendered as a feedback to its consciousness to be observed. This does not mean that a robot cannot simulate the behaviour of a conscious entity. One can counter-argue: But you just said that all matter was embedded within consciousness, so then also the robot must be embedded within consciousness and by that virtue be able to observe and be aware.
Here we come to another interesting issue: the apparent non-homogenous way consciousness appears to be scattered throughout the universe. As explained in my article "It's life Jim, but not as we know it", what is normally considered as lifeless nature, is in the panpsychism view still endowed with an almost infinitely small amount of consciousness, but it is not entirely "dead". At higher aggregation levels especially at the level of what we know as "life", higher levels of consciousness are present. But that does not mean that a table is aware of its being a table. A table has no self-replicating, self-maintaining and metabolising activity at the aggregation level where you call it a table. The individual macromolecules that constitute the table have an almost infinitely small amount of consciousness and that is the same amount of consciousness the table has. It doesn't go further than that.
One can then argue, yes, but artificial intelligence agents (like Alife agents) and robots will at a certain point have the qualities of "life" such as self-replication, self-maintenance and metabolising activity. Well, living organic entities as the sensing tentacles of the omnipresent consciousness evolved over billions of years to levels which we call higher levels of consciousness (here the Vijnana i.e. intellect, not absolute consciousness). In the panpsychism view it was not the structure that created the higher consciousness, but rather the higher consciousness that created a vehicle which was more suitable for conveying an intellect. It is an issue of cause and effect, chicken and egg. If intellect conveyed by consciousness evolves structures that allow its expression, that does not automatically mean that constructing the structures that can mimic intellect can generate consciousness. On a day where people eat more ice-creams, there are more shark attacks: this is a correlation. The shark attacks are not caused by the eating of ice-creams. Rather both phenomena have the same underlying cause: it's a hot day. Similarly, increase in structured links between neurons correlate with a higher intellect in living organic organisms. However, great amount of structured links, like on the World Wide Web, do not necessarily result in intellect let alone consciousness. Highly structured cognitive programs such as Opencog and Novamente may mimic intelligent behaviour. That is because they were constructed by conscious human beings with a great intellect. Although this may evolve further via genetic algorithms AI would never have spontaneously sprouted from a system with many links: the World Wide Web is not conscious (as of yet). It can evolve towards a kind of global brain, that behaves as a single entity, but it will not be aware thereof. Just as the beehive or anthill - despite its uniform emergent action at a higher level than that of the individual insects together - is not sensed by one integrative unit. There is no I-awareness in that unit, although the concerted behaviour may give the impression to an outsider there is.
The mechanical and electronic parts that constitute a computational device do not have a consciousness that goes further than the consciousness of the individual macromolecules. In my view, if a computing device is ever to become conscious, it is because it is inhabited by a conscious entity of organic origin. A cybernetic symbiosis.
This does not mean that it is useless to pursue endowing AI with faculties which mimic intentions and introspection. On the contrary, that will result in more rational actions of the AI agents. But the experiencing of phenomena and knowing are only apparent, as there is no single knower or observer in the artificial system. Perhaps the faculties of introspection can be enhanced if the computer is presented with an image of its content. What we see on the screen when a browser renders a website is the result of joint activity of a stream of zeros and ones at the server and in our terminal. At best the computer could "know" its stream of zeros and ones in the form of electrical activity. I think it is extremely helpful to try to generate AI at a different aggregation level. Not at the level of formal languages and logic operators, but by linking image (and sound) information, that can be fed back to an evaluation device that does not read machine languages, but that gathers information from the picture which is presented to it. It would not result in self-awareness of the system, but it would improve the mimicking of knowing, having intentions, introspection and experiencing phenomena. It would seriously improve the learning capabilities of the system, which would be able to assess its inner states and deduce patterns there from.
So a kind of picture theory or quasi-pictorial theory approach in the development of AI may be a concept worthwhile envisaging, even if it has not been proved that the human mind or brain functions that way.
Here is the link to the BBC broadcast on how surgeons use cold to suspend life.
Antonin Tuynman was born on 22-02-1971 in Amsterdam. He studied Chemistry at the University in Amsterdam (MSc 1995, PhD 1999). Presently he works as a patent examiner at the European Patent Office in the field of clinical diagnostics. Antonin has a developed a strong interest in futurism and the Singularity theory of Kurzweil. In his blog Awwwareness, http://tuynmix.blogspot.com/ Antonin proposes Artificial Intelligence concepts which may lead to the emergence of internet as a pseudo-conscious entity.
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