The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning by Daniel Bor Page A
Authors: Daniel Bor
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next group follows the same instructions, and so on. Let’s assume for the moment that there are only a few overlaps in most people’s address books, and, for the sheer, unadulterated genius of the wisdom imparted, that everyone obeys the instruction to forward the e-mail within a few seconds. From the starting point of a single send, it actually only takes six steps for the whole multiplied world of 85 billion people to get the message, and a handful of seconds. Indeed, in the human brain it’s thought that no neuron is more than six steps from any other neuron in the family of 85 billion.
Now imagine everyone in the world having such a revelation and everyone e-mailing their 100 address-book contacts about the news each time—and everyone doing this about 10 times an hour. If you didn’t turn on some fantastically effective spam filters, your inbox would receive around a thousand e-mails an hour. Everyone in the entire population each receives a thousand e-mails in that single hour, collectively amounting to 85 trillion messages.
But a neuron may fire 10 times a second, instead of per hour, and send its output to 7,000 other neurons, instead of 100. So a nauseatingly dizzying complexity occurs in your brain every single second, with hundreds of trillions of signals competing in a frenzied, seemingly anarchic competition for prominence.
This massively parallel web of neural activity simply is the propagation of information. In many ways, this spread of data by minuscule parts is unintuitive: A PC stores a single piece of information in only one location, and that location cannot store any other data; in stark contrast, populations of neurons—those, for instance, in the fusiform face area (FFA)—store as an ensemble many different faces, with each neuron only contributing a small fraction of each memory for a particular face, but humbly capable of playing its minute part in supporting hundreds or even thousands of face memories.
But for all these differences, the fact of the matter is that both brains and standard computers are essentially information-processing machines, and are secretly far closer cousins than at first appears. So whatever algorithm a brain uses to process information could be recreated, in principle, on a PC. Indeed, in neuroscience, there are already prominent computer models closely approximating the biological characteristics of a large population of neurons (in one recent case, a million neurons, with half a billion connections), and these are showing interesting emergent trends between groups of pseudo-neurons, such as clusters of organization and waves of activity.
THE CASE FOR ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
To return to the Chinese Room: If the mind is indeed a program, then it’s clear that this “software” occurs first and foremost at a neuronal level. So, it is simply too great a task for a book to represent all the incredible intricacies of human brain activity—the interacting complexities are just too staggering.
No, if we are to have some artificial device that captures the computational workings of a human brain, it needs to be a computer. And it’s not inconceivable that a computer in four hundred years’ time could be fast enough to run a program to represent our massively parallel brains, with their hundreds of trillions of operations a second. Let’s give this computer a pair of cameras and a robotic arm. The arm can manipulate the pieces of paper fed in from the IN box and write new ones for the OUT box. Now, if this computer was able to communicate effectively with a Chinese person, what does our gut tell us about what’s happening inside? I think it would take a brave person to claim with confidence that this immensely complicated computer, with billions of chips and trillions of connections between them, using the same algorithms that govern our brains, has no consciousness and doesn’t know the meaning of every character it reads or writes.
To reinforce this
Now imagine everyone in the world having such a revelation and everyone e-mailing their 100 address-book contacts about the news each time—and everyone doing this about 10 times an hour. If you didn’t turn on some fantastically effective spam filters, your inbox would receive around a thousand e-mails an hour. Everyone in the entire population each receives a thousand e-mails in that single hour, collectively amounting to 85 trillion messages.
But a neuron may fire 10 times a second, instead of per hour, and send its output to 7,000 other neurons, instead of 100. So a nauseatingly dizzying complexity occurs in your brain every single second, with hundreds of trillions of signals competing in a frenzied, seemingly anarchic competition for prominence.
This massively parallel web of neural activity simply is the propagation of information. In many ways, this spread of data by minuscule parts is unintuitive: A PC stores a single piece of information in only one location, and that location cannot store any other data; in stark contrast, populations of neurons—those, for instance, in the fusiform face area (FFA)—store as an ensemble many different faces, with each neuron only contributing a small fraction of each memory for a particular face, but humbly capable of playing its minute part in supporting hundreds or even thousands of face memories.
But for all these differences, the fact of the matter is that both brains and standard computers are essentially information-processing machines, and are secretly far closer cousins than at first appears. So whatever algorithm a brain uses to process information could be recreated, in principle, on a PC. Indeed, in neuroscience, there are already prominent computer models closely approximating the biological characteristics of a large population of neurons (in one recent case, a million neurons, with half a billion connections), and these are showing interesting emergent trends between groups of pseudo-neurons, such as clusters of organization and waves of activity.
THE CASE FOR ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
To return to the Chinese Room: If the mind is indeed a program, then it’s clear that this “software” occurs first and foremost at a neuronal level. So, it is simply too great a task for a book to represent all the incredible intricacies of human brain activity—the interacting complexities are just too staggering.
No, if we are to have some artificial device that captures the computational workings of a human brain, it needs to be a computer. And it’s not inconceivable that a computer in four hundred years’ time could be fast enough to run a program to represent our massively parallel brains, with their hundreds of trillions of operations a second. Let’s give this computer a pair of cameras and a robotic arm. The arm can manipulate the pieces of paper fed in from the IN box and write new ones for the OUT box. Now, if this computer was able to communicate effectively with a Chinese person, what does our gut tell us about what’s happening inside? I think it would take a brave person to claim with confidence that this immensely complicated computer, with billions of chips and trillions of connections between them, using the same algorithms that govern our brains, has no consciousness and doesn’t know the meaning of every character it reads or writes.
To reinforce this
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