Article: "Metaphysics: Consciousness"
Nowadays, we are experiencing a boom of work on the topic of artificial intelligence. The most popular question is “when will we create a fully artificial intelligence?”. The general population interested in this topic know almost nothing about it and, therefore, have very high expectations of this field. Before being able to create such a unique system as an artificial intelligence, people have to understand what AI is: do we have a consciousness which helps us to make our own decisions, or do all of us follow some algorithm that we are not aware of?
This motivation of exploring the field, to create an artificial intelligence, is, perhaps, very dangerous for humanity as it is impossible to predict the behavior of the AI and whether it is dangerous for humanity or not. One thing can be said for sure, the existence of the Internet in our world and the fact that more and more devices and houses become “smart”, potentially gives the AI almost ultimate power over humans as it would be able to control almost every aspect of our lives.
Fortunately, not all people are interested in AI as a step to create a controlling AI which would become our driver, guard, and chef. There are those people who are just curious about the idea that people are unique creatures and we don’t follow any sophisticated algorithm of behavior, as well as those who want to prove the opposite, that we are not that unique and that we ourselves can be part of a large simulation.
This idea is called the “Simulation hypothesis”. The main idea of this hypothesis is that all our universe and everything that is inside of it, including humans, is nothing more than a very big and computationally difficult computer simulation (1).
If humans ever succeed in creating such a program that will simulate a consciousness, then it’s possible that our universe, humanity and our consciousness is a larger simulation. Nowadays, scientists are trying to create a digital version of an animal brain from scratch, which is based on studies of real species “First digital animal will be a perfect copy of real worm” (1). So, there is a chance that in a while we will be able to create a real animal and even a human being in a virtual reality (1).
There are two projects that are currently in the process of development: robotics version of the worm, and a full digital copy of the worm. Both of these projects are very interesting from the scientific perspective. The first project resulted in a plastic Lego robot with two wheels which “trundles forward, encounters a wall, stops, reverses” (4). At first sight, there is nothing special in this behavior, except the fact that this robot was never programmed to “tell it when to stop and when to turn” (4). But, this robotic version of a worm has a precise copy of the worm’s brain, it has the same amount of cells as a real nematode brain, the same amount of neurons, and synopsis. The other project is a cell-for-cell digital copy of the worm, living in a virtual reality. Both projects work with the “simplest, smallest brain that we know of – the one that is inside the nematode worm Caenorhabditis Elegans” (4). This is a very unique organism because it has an extremely easy structure, it consists of only 959 cells, yet 80 percent of its genes are the same as humans’ ones. These projects have very specific goals which are “more than just a technical challenge” (4), which is also very important, because as John Long, a roboticist and neuroscientist at Vassar College in New York State, says -- “The mere act of trying to put a working model together causes us to realise what we know and what we don’t know” (4). One of the most important and uncomfortable questions that these projects pose is “if a digital model is an exact replica of a living animal, is it then alive” (4).
According to Anil Ananthaswamy in (1), we will not be able to find out whether we are a part of a simulation or not, because if we are inside of the system, we can’t observe anything outside of it, and therefore the “outside” doesn’t exist for us. But one of the questions that we can possibly try to attack is where a robust experience that “I exist” comes from.
It turned out that an analysis of the Cotard’s syndrome, “in which people are convinced that they do not exist” (1), can shed some light on it. Scientists published their studies of a person with Cotard’s. The results showed that there was an anomaly “in a brain network normally associated with internal awareness, including the awareness of our body and its emotional state” (1). This part of a brain network functioned as if a person was unconscious. The research supposed that this abnormal brain activity caused this perception of non-existence.
Researchers proposed an idea that our brain “generates a feeling of existence”(1) by perceiving our body and all its different states (1). Our brain works, in fact, like a very complicated prediction machine, because it analyzes all signals that the brain permanently receives and simultaneously predicts what caused these signals. Anil Ananthaswamy provides an example of this prediction in (1): “when you are walking by the coast, the brain has to be able to perceive that you are about to come to a cliff – if you don’t, you may fall off the edge”. To be able to achieve this behavior, the brain has to store internal models of the world, body, and the knowledge or prior experience of the world (in the particular example -- physical laws). Moreover, in order to make accurate predictions and computations, the brain has to maintain the integrity of its “virtual” world. “The brain is a system that is continually trying to prove its own existence,” says Metzinger (1).
There is one even more important question that we can possibly try to answer. Cotard’s syndrome eliminates the feeling of existence, but a person still experiences himself as a unique human being, as an “I” (2). Some scientists tend to think that this concept of “I” is the “by-product of consciousness itself” (2). This is a very important topic to explore, because if it is true that the concept of “I” is the by-product of consciousness, then simulating the consciousness, we will be able to simulate the unique personality that will think about itself as “I”.
René Descartes, a famous mathematician of the 17th century, the person who gave birth to the analytical geometry, also influenced neuroscience. One of the most famous of his opinions is the idea that “the body and conscious mind are two different substances: the first is made of matter, the latter is immaterial” (2). The field has moved on since that time, and “nowadays it’s widely accepted by most of the scientists that the brain gives rise to consciousness” (2), it’s not proven though.
David Chalmers at New York University claims this problem as a “hard” one because it is unclear “how physical networks of neurons can produce experiences that appear to fall outside the material world”.
Those people, who are working on this problem are divided into two camps: those, who think, that consciousness is something real, and those who think that it is a mirage and it actually doesn’t exist, and therefore there is no problem (2).
The opinion of the first camp is that consciousness is a fundamental component of the universe and it stands alongside real matter, therefore it “cannot be explained by our present understanding of physics” (2).
Even in this hypothesis, scientists have a few logical problems, because sometimes consciousness can interact with the real matter, e.g. “conscious desire to move your arm results in physical movement” (2). “But the fundamentals of how this happens remain hazy” (2).
Those people from the second camp argue that consciousness is “nothing but a trick of the mind,” (2) and that the mind also creates both an immaterial “I” and the feeling of a conscious experience when these immaterial things don’t exist (2).
Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett and other “materialists” try to explain how the brain performs this trick. One of the opinions is that consciousness is “the brain’s way of describing to itself what it means to pay attention to and deeply process a signal” (2).
Moreover, most materialists think that after the death there is nothing left, which means that our immaterial “I” doesn’t really exist, it’s just an illusion (2).
In sum, it can be concluded that nowadays scientists are working hard in the field of consciousness in order to understand its roots and even simulate it. Although researchers don’t have any bad intentions to create a fully functional AI, their curiosity in the field doesn’t let them think a lot about what consequences can arise if they were to succeed in their work. The project “OpenWorm”, in which researchers try to replicate a particular type of a worm in a virtual environment, resulted in a very promising project, which already gave some very interesting and important results, such as, for example, the ability of the brain to detect borders of the placement where this worm dwells, even though there was no teaching process that would explain such a behavior. Such projects like “OpenWorm”, which explore how animals’ brains work, may help people to better understand how they live and what they think, and maybe use this information for our benefit in some practical applications, for example in medicine, in future.
Even though people have worked on the problem of understanding consciousness since the 17th century with almost no progress in this field, there is still a hope that we will get valuable results studying such diseases like Cotard’s syndrome. There are a lot of problems that humans should answer before we will be able to achieve some serious results in this area, what is the concept of “I” and how it relates to consciousness are examples of such questions that should be answered.
Because a lot of people these days are working hard on this type of problems, there is a chance that we will be able to create a conscious being in a computer environment.
Bibliography
[1] Anil Ananthaswamy -- Metaphysics special: How do I know I exist?
[2] Anil Ananthaswamy -- Metaphysics special: What is consciousness?
[3] Richard Webb -- Metaphysics special: Why is there something rather than nothing?
[4] Catherine Brahic -- First digital animal will be perfect copy of real worm
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