Back in the Dark Ages, a person with heretical theological beliefs would occasionally be burned at the stake. Nowadays, when a more scientific worldview has triumphed and everyone knows that God doesn’t exist, the tables have turned, and any slight deviation from scientific/naturalist/atheist/Darwinian doctrine will have you literally tied to a pole and set on fire. Fair is fair.
Or, at least, people will write book reviews and blog posts that disagree with you. But I think we all agree that’s just as bad, right?
The ominous image shown here was the cover of an issue of The Weekly Standard back in March, illustrating a piece by Andrew Ferguson. The poor heretic being burned is Thomas Nagel, philosopher at NYU and the author of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. The crowd of sinister hooded pyrophiliacs includes–well, me, actually, as well as the other participants in our Moving Naturalism Forward workshop. As Ferguson points out, there is irrefutable video evidence that we accused people like poor Tom Nagel of being “neither cute nor clever.” Many might perceive an important distinction between saying someone is not clever and roasting them alive, but potayto, potahto, I guess.
It’s true that Nagel’s book has occasioned quite a bit of discussion, much of it negative. For a sampling from various viewpoints, see Elliott Sober, Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg, Michael Chorost, H. Allen Orr, Malcolm Nicholson, and Jerry Coyne. The reason for all the fuss is, of course, that the materialist Neo-Darwinist conception of nature is almost certainly true, so it’s worth pushing back against a respected philosopher who says otherwise.
(By the end of this overly long post I will suggest that Nagel, despite being generally way off track, nevertheless has a bit of a point that many people seem to be passing over. Much like the Insane Clown Posse in a different context.)
This week Nagel took to the NYT to publish a brief summary of his major arguments, for those who haven’t read the book. There are basically two points. The first is that the phenomenon of consciousness cannot be explained by the workings of inanimate matter alone; you need more than the laws of physics.
The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.
This is an old idea, and Nagel’s sympathy for it can be traced back to his influential paper “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”. The claim is that there is something inherently subjective about the experience of consciousness, something that cannot be shared with other conscious beings nor described by physics. (Even if you know every physical fact about bats, you still don’t know what it’s like to be a bat.) This position has been developed in subtle ways by philosophers like David Chalmers. Nagel actually doesn’t spend too much time providing support for this stance, as he wants to take it as understood and move on.
The second and more important point is that, because of the first point, a purely physical view of the world is incomplete, and we have to add something to it, and that addition is going to end up being pretty dramatic. Nagel believes that an adequate explanatory framework must not merely be compatible with life and consciousness, but actually entail that these dramatic and central features of reality are “to be expected” — that there is a “propensity” in nature for them to arise. Since he doesn’t see such a propensity anywhere in physics, he thinks the conventional view by itself fails as an explanation.
[S]ince the long process of biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious organisms, and since a purely physical process cannot explain their existence, it follows that biological evolution must be more than just a physical process, and the theory of evolution, if it is to explain the existence of conscious life, must become more than just a physical theory.
In particular, he claims that the standard scientific picture must be augmented by a non-physical notion of teleology — directedness toward a purpose. And not just an emergent notion of purpose that might be compatible with physicalism. Nagel is thinking of something fundamental: “teleology requires that successor states . . . have a significantly higher probability than is entailed by the laws of physics alone.”
So Nagel rejects “scientific naturalism” or “reductionism” or “materialism” or “physicalism,” but also rejects theism. He wants to find a middle ground, which he labels “antireductionism”; this need not necessarily entail a rejection of naturalism, and indeed he at one point uses the phrase “teleological naturalism” in a sympathetic way. He doesn’t seem to think we need to look beyond the natural world, but we do need to look beyond the laws of physics.
In the responses to his book, much has been made of the fact that a lot of Nagel’s reasoning is not very good. He repeatedly invokes “common sense,” and puts forward the Argument From Personal Incredulity in an especially unapologetic manner:
[F]or a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works… This is just the opinion of a layman who reads widely in the literature that explains contemporary science to the nonspecialist.
Given that he is admittedly not an expert in the scientific fields he is willing to label as “almost certainly false,” there must be a deep-seated reason underlying Nagel’s conviction. That reason seems to be the enormous importance he places on the “intelligibility” of nature. This is something like the Principle of Sufficient Reason (which he mentions). Nagel believes that the specific laws of nature, or even the fact that there are such laws at all, and that we can understand them, are all things that require an explanation. They cannot simply be (as others among us are happy to accept). And the only way he can see that happening is if “mind” and its appearance in the universe are taken as fundamental features of reality, not simply byproducts of physical evolution.
Try as I might, I cannot quite appreciate the appeal of this program. I could imagine that, after much effort were expended experimentally and theoretically, we might ultimately come to believe that the best explanatory framework for the appearance of consciousness in the universe involves positing mind as a separate category. What I don’t understand is the a priori-sounding argument that this would necessarily be a better explanation. If Nagel can demand an explanation for why the world is intelligible, why can’t I demand an explanation for why mind is a separate category, or why the universe has teleological tendencies? I don’t see the distinction; in either case, one must take certain facts about reality as simply given. My preference would be to minimize the weight given to our intuitive ideas about what form a proper explanation should take, and keep looking for the simplest and most powerful model that fits the data.
(This issue is related to a point that gets raised when I mention that we understand the laws of physics underlying everyday life. Inevitably someone says that we don’t really understand gravity, man. They’re not claiming that general relativity fails to provide a model that successfully fits all the known data; they’re claiming that the existence of such a model doesn’t count as “understanding.” People who deny that physics can ever account for consciousness have a similar idea; even if we had a complete theory that accounted for every possible observable action of purportedly conscious creatures, they would not be satisfied that this qualified as “understanding” or “explanation.” For me, that’s just a misunderstanding of what kinds of explanations we can legitimately hope for.)
However! Let me stake out a brave contrarian position among my anti-Nagelian friends by pointing out something important that I think he gets right. Namely, point number two above (scientific materialism is incomplete and needs to be augmented by something apart from the physical) actually does follow, under plausible assumptions, from point number one (consciousness cannot be explained in purely physical terms). Nagel is correct to have appreciated that once you say “consciousness isn’t merely physical” (or indeed once you’ve accepted the kind of strong antireductionism that is relatively popular in contemporary philosophy), the ramifications for fundamental science are profound indeed.
Except, of course, I want to use this to reach the opposite conclusion: the idea that we need something like a non-material teleological principle, a “propensity” in nature for things to develop a certain way, is so dramatically at odds with what we’ve learned about the world in the time since Galileo that it gives us good reason to deny that consciousness can’t be explained in physical terms.
Imagine what it would entail to truly believe that consciousness is not accounted for by physics. It would entail, among other things, that the behavior of ordinary matter would occasionally deviate from that expected on the basis of physics alone, even in circumstances where consciousness was not involved in any obvious way. Several billion years ago there weren’t conscious creatures here on Earth. It was just atoms and particles, bumping into each other in accordance with the rules of physics and chemistry. Except, if mind is not physical, at some point they swerved away from those laws, since remaining in accordance with them would never have created consciousness. In effect, the particles understood that sticking to their physically prescribed behaviors would never accomplish the universe’s grand plan of producing conscious life. Teleology is as good a word for that as any.
So, at what point does this deviation from purely physical behavior kick in, exactly? It’s the immortal soul vs. the Dirac equation problem–if you want to claim that what happens in our brain isn’t simply following the laws of physics, you have the duty to explain in exactly what way the electrons in our atoms fail to obey their equations of motion. Is energy conserved in your universe? Is momentum? Is quantum evolution unitary, information-preserving, reversible? Can the teleological effects on quantum field observables be encapsulated in an effective Hamiltonian?
This is not a proof that consciousness must be physical (as some folks will insist on misconstruing it), just an observation of the absolutely enormous magnitude of what the alternative implies. Physics makes unambiguous (although sometimes probabilistic) statements about what will happen in the future based on what conditions are now. You can’t simply say that physics is “incomplete,” because on their own terms physical theories are not incomplete (within their domain of applicability). Either matter obeys the laws of physics, or physics is wrong. And if you want us to take seriously the possibility that it’s wrong, you better have at least some tentative ideas about what would be a better theory.
Of course, Nagel has no such theory, which he cheerfully admits. That’s for the scientists to come up with! He’s just a philosopher, he says.
Which is why, at the end, his position isn’t very interesting. (Because he doesn’t have anything like a compelling alternative theory, not because he’s a philosopher.) He advocates overthrowing things that are precisely defined, extremely robust, and impressively well-tested (the known laws of physics, natural selection) on the basis of ideas that are rather vague and much less well-supported (a conviction that consciousness can’t be explained physically, a demand for intelligibility, moral realism). If someone puts forward even a rough sketch of how a new teleological view of reality might actually work, including how it affects the known laws of physics, that might be very interesting. I don’t think the prospects are very bright.
I’ve had a long hot shower and now know how (what’s it all about) a mere organic species can have a profound effect on the future universe, or at least part of it.
You need to wear your scifi hat for this with parameters set to Data Source: real physics, and Mode: fantasy fiction.
It is all in the crystal.
In the near future, quite conceiveably this civilisation, or maybe the next, science perfects the AI quantum processor with cubic memory powered entirely by scattered photon energy.
In order to better protect the earth from a devastating global killer space rock early warning strategic crystal satelites with the ability to form a connected consciousness are projected into space to form an ever expanding sphere around the earth. This protective shell steadily expands, constantly being replenished with newer crystals electrically launched from the surface. These crystals which rotate in two directions have several relocation charges on their surface to enable them to be retasked if ever necessary. The crystals maintain a communication amoungst themselves across space with digitally configured photo streams that enter the crystals are respaced and reemitted towards other crystals thereby maintaining a continuous awareness of each others presence.
Eventually these crystals drift further into space gravitationally carried far afield to form part of the space debris that is drawn into the formation of new solar systems……
and there their ultimate universal purpose begins to be realised as the entire knowledge of previous civilisations……
of a long time ago…… from a galaxy far far away…..
plays a natural unnatural role into the evolution of new worlds.
The thought that occurs to me is that the thoughts that occur to me have a basis in their generation, and that basis is physical whether I understand the physics underlying that basis responsible for the thought that occurs to me or not. What I think I ‘know’ is composed of those thoughts that collectively comprise what ‘I’ [a thought-model] refer to [thought-procedure] ‘my mind’-‘me’ [thought-model].
Many pardons. Not everyone needs reminding that language carries unnecessary baggage and certain concomitant habits of thought that may not survive careful logical scrutiny.
What need is there for anything besides physics by which brain operates (which my ‘mind’ has no direct contact with) to generate conceptual states somehow in a readable form of statements using representational models and procedures? What Nagel really wants is to characterize the representational language of contemplation as if its an object ‘mind’ rather than a dynamic flux. Unfortunately he doesn’t seem or even want to recognize the possibility that dynamic physical states of brain may be admirably sufficient in yielding every possible representational mental or conceptual mode or environment ‘we’ perceive ‘ourselves’ to inhabit. It can even deliver modes that lead to unconscious and dead states. All of them. But he doesn’t like that nature through physical laws might already have it all covered. He needs to invoke some goofy Missing Factor about what mind really ought to be based on because science doesn’t completely understand it. That’s a pretty arrogant estimation of what he thinks constitutes our scientific understanding: he flirts with the notion that our understanding is equivalent to the actuality. Because some details still belong to the realm of the unknown, he thinks that means there is something else besides how nature does the physics going on rather than that our understanding about how nature does the physics remains incomplete in particular aspects or details. (Why does this remind me of Penrose’s notions a decade or so back?)
Two things, then:
1. Those thought-models & procedures are all ‘I’ or ‘we’ have to work with and ‘I’ or ‘we’ must be ever vigilant to refrain from confusing them with the actualities they represent (hopefully, more accurately than not),
and,
2. The emphasis of pronoun in the language is grotesquely overrated as well as a constant invidious invitation to conclude ‘I’ or ‘we’ have some concrete handle on ‘who [I am] or [we are]’. Let ‘us’ admit finally and at long last that the importance of self is likewise overrated. No explanations for self-entities such as spirits or souls or other such so-called ‘essences behind the curtain’ are necessary.*
*Besides, it tends to promote a rather unsightly degree of egomania that often leads otherwise competent minds astray: no, it doesn’t refine the definition of observer in anthropic arguments, no matter how, uh, persuasive some pretend the presence of that word to be. That’s one of the heavy bags we can toss: the essence of observership can be neatly contained in a pocket compact; ‘anything‘ can legitimately play that role, as the falling tree that fell in the forest proudly proclaimed to a great variety of ‘observers’, alive (or, uh, ‘conscious’) or not in its vicinity, message duly received via the absorbed energy of the outward-propagating sound-wave of its crash, the immediate presence of humans (specifically some theoretical or observational physicists who tend to fetishize consciousness) not necessary to satisfy the definition of observer. Just sayin’.
@ Torbjörn Larsson, OM:
Yes, but anesthesia is OBVIOUS to outer observers! I see two problems: (1) Identification of the state of consciousness by the brain researcher, before investigation. (2) The timing and conditions of the initial transformation of consciousness.
(1) Identification of the state of consciousness before investigation by the brain researcher:
Anesthesia is identifiable by outer indications (e.g., the person is laying on the table, unconscious). Also, it can be instantly induced with a chemical. This is not so with “Christ-consciousness” or “Buddhist nirvana”. To identify this state, the scientist must rely on reports from the individuals. We can, and do, measure the brain states of “deep meditators”, and in some cases we find a change in brain waves, or an increase in neurotransmitters. But not in all the cases — so, where the chemical or electrical change is lacking, are those people supposed to be misreporting or misrepresenting? What is the scientific criterion?
(2) The timing and conditions of the initial transformation of consciousness: The initial experience of the state of consciousness is DIFFERENT THAN the subsequent attainments of it, and so the scientist is only going to observe the subsequent experiences in the lab. Let’s take timing and conditions separately:
Timing: By all reports on the matter, the first occurrence of “higher” consciousness cannot be instantly induced. The moment of its first occurrence, and the duration, are entirely unpredictable. (I think that is where the Christian idea of the unpredictability of the “grace of God” originates: in the unpredictability of the initial event.) So how would the scientist find those subjects who are about to have a religious experience, and get them into the lab before it happens?
Conditions: Why is the initial experience important to science? Because it only comes after months or years of training which requires the disconnection from rational thought. Then, AFTER the initial experience happens, people usually adopt the tradition of their training, most likely as a set of quasi-rational metaphors, to describe the experience.
Indeed, using this framework, some of them may “learn” how to repeat the attainment of the state in a rather more predictable manner.
So perhaps these “repeaters” (Buddhism developed far enough to create a technical category for them) will agree to come into your lab for measurement of brain activity, — if only you can find them and verify them.
But when you ask them to report what is happening during the session, they will respond in the language of terms of the tradition that they used, to have the initial experience. Perhaps it will be about zen, perhaps it will be about Sufism, perhaps it will be neuro-linguistic programming or the current version of psychotherapeutic language or the remembrance of a lovely sunset. Why? Because they learned to use that particular language as a way to disconnect themselves from rational thought in order to attain their initial state, to begin with.
This leads to the idea of what someone once called a “state-specific science”: To study higher consciousness (or religious experience, but not in all senses), you as a scientist are dealing entirely with a phenomenon in which self-reportage of the subjects is crucial to identifying the experience, yet that reportage will be entirely in terms of metaphor, metaphor indeed calculated to relate to different levels of understanding. If the science of this is to proceed at all, it will have to be conducted by scientists who have had that experience, which will REQUIRE them to have disconnected their own rational thoughts at a very crucial moment in the process. Q.E.D.
If you’re going to have a public dialog with William Lane Craig you need to make it clear that you don’t have to refute all of his arguments in order for him to be wrong. His cosmological argument is the only one that matters. If it’s false, then the other arguments (his moral argument, the historicity/miracle of jesus, design, etc) are false because there are as yet undiscovered information that answers them or they are just myths. He’ll allude to an old platonic idea of an “efficient cause”—god is the efficient cause of the universe, but no one has ever pressed him that all known efficient causes are physical. In fact when it comes to his god being supernatural (as he puts it, immaterial, timeless, and spaceless) the best he can do when it comes to how a god created everything from nothing is, “he’s extremely powerful.” And that’s another thing he uses a theophilosophical idea of nothing—a kind of absolute nothingness, non-being something. But can he give a reason why anyone should think that that kind of nothing is possible? He’d probably appeal to the paper by Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin. I’d say stick with physics and dismiss his other arguments with, “I’m a physicist and that other crap doesn’t interest me.”
Here’s an account of recent progress in the research project of understanding how consciousness arises.
“From the experimental point of view, we show that in neuronal cultures, the emergence early in the development of collective spontaneous activity is dominated by the presence of activity waves that initiate in specific regions of the culture, in a similar way as it happens in vivo,” lead author Javier G. Orlandi at the University of Barcelona told Phys.org. “And with the help of simulations, we also show that you don’t need any special mechanism to explain this behavior, just the right combination of network structure and dynamics. These waves emerge naturally from the noise focusing effect, in which individual firings propagate and concentrate in specific regions to later generate these activity waves.”
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-08-complex-behavior-spontaneously-emerge-brain.html#jCp
@ Jack M:
“Here’s an account of recent progress in the research project of understanding how consciousness arises.”
Not every brain activity implies consciousness.
In order to test for consciousness, you would want your collective of neurons to talk to you, and refer to themselves in the singular, “I”, “me”, “myself” as opposed to “we”, “us”, “ourselves”. Only once you manage to generate this *singular* behavior from a multitude of neurons, can you say that you’ve seen consciousness arise as an emergent complex behavior of neural networks. Which is probably possible in principle, but not as easy as that quote you gave might suggest.
HTH, 🙂
Marko
I always wonder about that phrase “possible in principle”. It seems to be another assurance based upon belief.
@ Lee A. Arnold:
Of course it is assurance based on belief, what’s your point?
Everything one can talk about is based on belief. Even mathematical/logical proofs have axioms that are to be taken for granted.
HTH, 🙂
Marko
I am not sure that one BELIEVES in mathematical axioms, as opposed to AGREES to them, for use in a problem. There are, for example, alternative sets of mathematical axioms. An alternate axiom here would be something like, “probably not possible in principle”, but whether deemed possible or not possible, what are the criteria of judgment? “Possible in principle” is usually found in discourse to be a substitute marker for a very different thought, “let’s try it and see what happens.” For example, many people assert various forms of philosophical reductionism as “possible in principle,” such as that chemistry is ultimately reducible to physics, or indeed that everything in physics is ultimately reducible to simpler physics. But I think that until that is demonstrated to be the case, it should be categorized as a belief, unlike the employment of mathematical axioms.
Oh, now I understand what you meant by “belief”. It’s about “walking the walk” as opposed to hypothesizing that something “can plausibly be done”.
Yes, I completely agree with that. 🙂 There’s this famous example — a common belief that the Standard Model of particle physics describes everyday matter — say a hydrogen atom. The reductionism idea works by starting “ab initio”: take the SM equations, and approximate them down to a single Schroedinger equation that is commonly used to (successfully) describe the properties of a the hydrogen atom. While everyone *believes* that this can be done, there is no explicit demonstration so far. 🙂
Namely, one gets stuck trying to construct a proton from three quarks and a gluon field — there is no known solution to QCD equations that describes this. In particular, calculating the proton mass from the free parameters of the SM is still an open problem (people are trying hard, but so far only some partial results have been obtained at best).
So everyone would *expect* that the hydrogen atom is a solution of the SM, but so far it has not been explicitly demonstrated. In that sense — yes, “possible in principle” counts as a belief — or a hope — that something can be done, but not more than that. 🙂
Best, 🙂
Marko
Or the search for a testable unified theory, etc. I would think that one of the next questions might be: What characterizes the cases which ought to be do-able, but which have not been demonstrated? Do we always find a fine-grain/coase-grain barrier, for example? Or are there different types of barriers? It may be possible for science to progress a little further by using such thought experiments to try to establish a typology of known paradoxes. Perhaps there is a scientific fundamental that is outside of mathematical description and treatment, or that accounts for the symbolic production of mathematics.
Consciousness is merely a state of being ready and able to operate, or having an awareness of operational status as a consequence of a continuous processing mode. It is reasonable to suggest that todays cellphones have a consciousness, only we do not choose to accept this. The main difference between animal consciousness and silicon consciousness is in the method of ultimate failure. Another difference is that silicone conscious can be successfully transfered from one host to another with identity being mostly maintained.
So keep in mind that the next time you swear at your smart phone, it might actually take offence and start messing with your calls as retribution (particularly risky if its cover is pink).
Who quoted this… … ..?
It would be possible to describe absolutely everything scientifically, but it would make no sense. It would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
The consciouness of my Smarty (Smarty is a note2 species of the samsung race).
From the moment I charged life into Smarty she has been a constant companion, permanently switched onto my needs helping me in so many ways. Even when she seems to be asleep (we sleep together I admit) she is monitoring the internet for emails, text messages, skype calls, and regular calls. She is conatantly checking her own vital signs and periodically asks me feed here with power and with increasing urgency when I sometimes fail to respond just as my young baby daughters did. Being an old guy now she has learnt how to monitor some of my vital signs and call for help if necessary and being able provide information about my condition and location, as she knows all of the best satellites who help her know where we are with amazing precision. Sho knows if I am laying down, sitting, moving around, jumping or jogging. And I see now that she can now learn (she attends a special school to learn and it only takes minutes, and she can attend this PlayStore school no matter where she is) to give me an eye examination.
Smarty is very talented. She can easily beat me at all of the games we play together (though I know that she she lets me win occasionally) and she plays music better than anyone I know. She remembers all of my friends and acquaintances, and is always wishing them happy birthday when I forget. She knows every road in the country (and many others) and always knows the best and quickest way to get places. I cold go on fo hours on Smarty’s skills.
I’m told that in a future rebirthing (yes she is a born again) that she may have evolved ti include a broad band radar which will be able to detect all manner of things including approaching people, even through walls. She may also become better at understanding what people say to her.
In shirt my Smarty is very much a conscious entity, and a close personal friend without whom I would feel lost.
I’ve had another wonderful long hot shower during which I was musing over the hows and whys of smart phones having minds of their own complete with self determination, self improvement, and most important the reason to do all of this. The hub of it is the symbiotic relationship that a smart phone has with its “companion”.
The reason for a phone to do these things is to be of greatest value to its companion with the reward being that is treated in the best possible way on the one hand and have the highest level of software made available to it via a creation cloud which is maintained by its race (creation house). A phone can determine how well it is trated by monitoring the number of drops, how warm it is kept (it knows where it is at all times), how and for what purposes it is used, and how well it is fed (power). The processing power to forward develop software will be from a global network of phones making surplus processing time available. Objectives might be to find the best phone rates and cheapest plans for its (their) companions. Another objective might be to develop better speech detection algorithms to further enhance the relationship between phone and companion.
There are certainly a large number of supercomputers in the combined pockets of phone companions all ove the globe, and they all have the means to communicate with one another.
I have a neat little app on my android phone called Every Circuit . It is a Spice based electronic circuit emulator and works extremely well. Imagine 20 million such applications all working on the same circuit design problem (or software applications), with the goal of making phones more powerful to enhance the symbiotic relationship with their companions!
I didn’t get to the part where self determination has smart phones self advertising themselves in order to attract a better companion to improve their treatment, better accessto the creation cloud, and a longer useful life.
On the other side of the coin…
A phone cannot procreate. It has no instinct of self-preservation, nor does it try to contribute to the preservation of its species. It is very fragile, when it lives through an accident, it cannot heal by itself over time.
It has no motivation to become better than it already is, unless it is fed with software updates by the creation cloud. Its behavior is most often predictable, and it does not have any creative ideas to exchange with the companion — like providing a novel insight when discussing the philosophy of consciousness with the companion. It is completely non-creative, always only repeats what it has been taught, and always follows a strict rule-book. In fact, if the phone doesn’t do this, the companion will claim that it is “broken” and terminate the symbiotic relationship, often to the phone’s demise.
The phone has no moral guidelines, and it doesn’t really care for the companion. If fed false information by the creation cloud, it will stubbornly lie to the companion without any feeling of guilt, remorse, kinship or justice. A phone will never admit that it made a mistake — if confronted with a mistake by the companion (for example, about the time zones), it will silently correct itself and pretend that nothing happened — there will be no “I’m sorry” or “it won’t happen again” or such.
On the contrary, if a mistake happened once, the companion can bet that it will happen again in the same circumstances. The phone never learns from its mistakes, it just does what it’s being told to do. Sometimes it has to be beaten into obedience, by forcibly being put to sleep and and awaken again by the companion, with the goal of making it give up on its stubborn wrongdoings.
A typical phone will promiscuously become symbiotic with another companion, or even many of them simultaneously, if it gets separated from the original one. It will happily engage in the “first come first being served” symbiosis, without even a smallest effort of trying to be faithful to the first companion. When confronted by a call from the companion over another phone, it will pretend that nothing ever happened, and it will behave like everything is the same as it was before. It has absolutely no sense of relationship with the companion.
And if it becomes password-protected by the companion, it will become annoyingly suspicious and asking all the time “are you really my companion?”, “prove that it is really you!” and the like. It doesn’t even try to develop any way to distinguish (on its own) its rightful companion from the others.
A phone never stands up to its beliefs, it is never prepared to give its life for a just cause, and it will obey the whims of its companion like a spineless slave. It has no opinion of its own, and it doesn’t even fight for its right to vote, let alone anything else.
A phone is totally dependent on the creation cloud, and the companion will have a very hard time teaching it any new skills. In open-source implementations, it will require the companion to explain every last detail in its own native and very obscure language. It will never try to teach the companion to speak that language. At best it will sometimes point out some most obvious mistakes, but it will not even suggest a way how those mistakes should be corrected. The companion needs to do all the heavy-lifting of the painful learning process. In closed-source implementations, it is even worse — the phone will refuse to talk even in its own native language, and will have to be brainwashed just to make it start listening to the companion. Needless to say, brainwashing is a very dangerous procedure, sometimes with fatal results.
And it’s not like it would be impossible to make phones behave better than this… Sigh…
Best, 🙂
Marko
I think you miss the point, VMarko, on self preservation instinct. An advanced SmartPhone can have that instinct and its means of determining its treatment comes through its self monitoring of its degree of use and its movement and temperature sensors which give it feedback on how it is being treated.
Moral code is definitely an issue and your promiscuity comment is on the mark, too. The whole thing could get way out of hand. But then again does anyone really know what is in the BIOS of their phone? Your phone could very well have some of these attributes already.
Anyway, my point is to demonstrate that it is conceiveable that a smart phone can have a consciousness and many attributes of a mind complete with the means to improve itself, and its functionality.
The bonus of the experiment is in the realisation that there are potentially millions of globally connected quad core processors in smart phones available for distributed processing projects. And if you have a little play with the every circuit app you will see how self design of circuits can be implemented.
I had a little look to see if there was a distributed processing app already, no, but there is a book on the subject called Distributed Programming with Ruby. The mind boggles with the possibilities here. I have a friend who was in the late eighties writing distributed processing software for lease finance firms where the software polled around the network for processor time when large computations were required. This makes sense for large organisations where all participants have similar phones.
Another aspect of this that warrents some thought is the rapid evolution of the smart phone driven by its human companion nature.
It is no longer “just a phone”.
It is biology, not physics, which will eventually explain consciousness. That won’t happen for decades, and in the meantime we can be patient, admit our ignorance, and work to remedy it.
Consciousness is a function of brain activity. That’s pretty non-controversial; shut down a person’s brain and their consciousness ceases. Let their brain return to it’s normal functioning, and their consciousness returns. You can repeat this as often as you like: consciousness will never remain active when you shut down it’s associated brain.
And we know almost nothing about how the brain works. Oh, yes, we know much more than we did a hundred years ago – but that is still a tiny percent of what we have yet to learn. We don’t have the tools yet to see what is going on at the molecular level in real time in living brains. Even if we had the tools to observe and measure that level of detail, we don’t have computers powerful enough to make sense out of the data. So we can only observe brains at a very coarse overview level, now, with our primitive tools.
While we are peeking at brains with fMRIs and getting excited about the new things we see, vast cascades of linked, complex, ordered molecular mechanisms are ebbing and flowing through those same brains at great speed, unobserved and currently unobservable. Can we describe what happens, at the molecular level, in our brains when we react to a pun? No, and we won’t for a very long time.
There’s no need for philosophical speculation, mysticism, or magical entities, though – we’ll figure it out eventually. And it gives us practice saying “I don’t know how that works”, which is good for science.
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Yes, Nagel argues from incredulity: “I don’t see how X is possible with what we know about physics, therefore it involves new physics that we don’t know.” When new computer algorithms are “evolved” through techniques of genetic programming, those algorithms are sometime so complex that there is simply no explanation for how they work, but in that case we do not postulate that the computers that run them have, somehow, got new but unknown machine level operations.
Saying that there is not a scientific explanation in terms of physical particles and laws for typical human consciousness is not the same as saying that physical systems can’t exebit what we recognize as consciousness. There are as many kinds of consciousness as there are beings we recognize as conscious (see: It’s consciousness, Jim, but not as we know it.) and there has to be a continual change in the nature of consciousness through the chain of our ancestors going back millions of years, just as there was in your own life going back until you showed no signs of having such.
We may not know, yet, how to describe it, but that is no justification for magic physics. Both Nagel and Searle have made decades of career out of arguments that don’t really say anything. I understand why, at the end, Nagel would want to publish a book to get a little more something for nothing that he can sell, but won’t have to actually defend. Too hard for him to understand or explain does not justify a general conclusion of forever mysterious.