Contemporary people are more or less completely bamboozled by the whole topic of minds, brains, and computers. It’s like in the early days of language, when some people thought that reality was created by a divine breath speaking the true names of things, or that the alphabet existed before the universe alongside God, and so on. Language was the original information technology that was made into an idol and treated like magic because it seemed like magic. The current attitudes to computers and computation are analogous, except that we really can culture neurons and simulate them, so we are going to be creating hybrid entities even more novel, in evolutionary terms, than a primate with a verbalizing stream of consciousness (which was a hybrid of biology and language).
What is the computational paradigm of mind? Often this paradigm floats free of any material description at all, focusing solely on algorithms and information. But if we ask for a physical description of computation, it is as follows: There is an intricate physical object—a brain, a computer. Mostly it is scaffolding. There are also non-computational processes happening in it—blood circulating, fan spinning. But among all the physical events which happen inside this object, there are special localized events which are the elementary computations. A wave of depolarization travels along a cell membrane. The electrons in a transistor rearrange themselves in response to small voltages. In the intricate physical object, billions of these special events occur, in intricate trains of cause and effect. The computational paradigm of mind is that thought, self, experience, identity are all, in some sense, nothing but the pattern of these events.
These days it is commonly acknowledged that this supposed identity is somewhat mysterious or unobvious. I would go much further and say that almost everything that is believed and said about this topic is wrong, just like the language mysticism of an earlier age, but it has a hold on people’s minds because the facts seem so obvious and they don’t have any other way of conceiving of their own relationship to those facts. Yes, it’s mysterious that mere ink on a page has such power over our minds and such practical utility, but the reality of that power and that utility are self-evident, therefore, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Yes, it’s mysterious that a billion separate little events of particles in motion could feel like being a person and being alive, but we know that the brain is made of neural circuitry and that we could in principle simulate it on any computing mechanism, therefore you are a program in your brain, and if we ran that program somewhere new, you would live again.
People try with varying degrees of self-awareness and epistemic modesty to be rational about their beliefs here, but mostly it’s the equivalent of different schools of language mysticism, clashing over whether the meaning-essence only inhabits the voice, or whether it can be found in the written word too. In my estimation, what people say about consciousness, uploads, and personal identity, is similarly far from the reality of how anything works and of what we really are.
If we ever extend human understanding far enough to grasp the truth, it’s going to be something bizarre—that you are a perspective vortex in your cortical quantum fields, something like that, something strange and hardly expressible with our current concepts. And meanwhile, we continue to develop our abilities to analyze the brain materially, to shape it and modify it, and to make computer hardware and software. Those abilities are like riding a bicycle, we can pick them up without really knowing what we are doing or why it works, and we’re in a hurry to use those abilities too.
So most likely, that biolinguistic hybrid, the primate who thinks in words, is going to create its evolutionary successor without really understanding what it’s doing, and perhaps even while it is possessed with a false understanding of what it is doing, a fundamentally untrue image of reality. That’s what I see at work in these discussions of mind uploading and artificial intelligence: computational superstition coupled to material power. The power means that something will be done, this isn’t just talk, there will be new beings; but the superstition means that there will be a false image of what is happening as it happens.
Contemporary people are more or less completely bamboozled by the whole topic of minds, brains, and computers. It’s like in the early days of language, when some people thought that reality was created by a divine breath speaking the true names of things, or that the alphabet existed before the universe alongside God, and so on. Language was the original information technology that was made into an idol and treated like magic because it seemed like magic. The current attitudes to computers and computation are analogous, except that we really can culture neurons and simulate them, so we are going to be creating hybrid entities even more novel, in evolutionary terms, than a primate with a verbalizing stream of consciousness (which was a hybrid of biology and language).
What is the computational paradigm of mind? Often this paradigm floats free of any material description at all, focusing solely on algorithms and information. But if we ask for a physical description of computation, it is as follows: There is an intricate physical object—a brain, a computer. Mostly it is scaffolding. There are also non-computational processes happening in it—blood circulating, fan spinning. But among all the physical events which happen inside this object, there are special localized events which are the elementary computations. A wave of depolarization travels along a cell membrane. The electrons in a transistor rearrange themselves in response to small voltages. In the intricate physical object, billions of these special events occur, in intricate trains of cause and effect. The computational paradigm of mind is that thought, self, experience, identity are all, in some sense, nothing but the pattern of these events.
These days it is commonly acknowledged that this supposed identity is somewhat mysterious or unobvious. I would go much further and say that almost everything that is believed and said about this topic is wrong, just like the language mysticism of an earlier age, but it has a hold on people’s minds because the facts seem so obvious and they don’t have any other way of conceiving of their own relationship to those facts. Yes, it’s mysterious that mere ink on a page has such power over our minds and such practical utility, but the reality of that power and that utility are self-evident, therefore, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Yes, it’s mysterious that a billion separate little events of particles in motion could feel like being a person and being alive, but we know that the brain is made of neural circuitry and that we could in principle simulate it on any computing mechanism, therefore you are a program in your brain, and if we ran that program somewhere new, you would live again.
People try with varying degrees of self-awareness and epistemic modesty to be rational about their beliefs here, but mostly it’s the equivalent of different schools of language mysticism, clashing over whether the meaning-essence only inhabits the voice, or whether it can be found in the written word too. In my estimation, what people say about consciousness, uploads, and personal identity, is similarly far from the reality of how anything works and of what we really are.
If we ever extend human understanding far enough to grasp the truth, it’s going to be something bizarre—that you are a perspective vortex in your cortical quantum fields, something like that, something strange and hardly expressible with our current concepts. And meanwhile, we continue to develop our abilities to analyze the brain materially, to shape it and modify it, and to make computer hardware and software. Those abilities are like riding a bicycle, we can pick them up without really knowing what we are doing or why it works, and we’re in a hurry to use those abilities too.
So most likely, that biolinguistic hybrid, the primate who thinks in words, is going to create its evolutionary successor without really understanding what it’s doing, and perhaps even while it is possessed with a false understanding of what it is doing, a fundamentally untrue image of reality. That’s what I see at work in these discussions of mind uploading and artificial intelligence: computational superstition coupled to material power. The power means that something will be done, this isn’t just talk, there will be new beings; but the superstition means that there will be a false image of what is happening as it happens.