Conscionable Consciousness Conduction

This is something I wrote a long time ago, but which still bears out, I believe. It is a method I would be willing to employ to transfer my consciousness into another body, or into a computer.

To illustrate why this is important, let me say that I would not be willing to use a teletransporter that copied my entire physical form, sent the data to another terminal which reconstituted me, and then destroyed the original. Although I have no philosophical objections to this happening, I find the idea highly emotionally disturbing and would never go through with it. For that matter, even if the original wasn't destroyed but was rather pulled apart and transferred, I still wouldn't do it for reasons I think are obvious.
 
Likewise, I would not be willing to be, say, put to sleep, have my brain scanned, then be uploaded to a machine and have my body destroyed. I would not object, of course, to having a copy of my mind made, to be run later or used as a sort of back up.

However, there is a way I would be willing to actually abandon my body and live in a virtual world (assuming of course all assurances of liberty and safety, etc). If my various faculties — sight, hearing, language, independent limb motor control — were to be transfered one by one to an emulator running on a computer connected to the various sensors and devices which would temporarily mimic said faculties, I would be able to track the progress of my mind from my head to the computer. I imagine the process something rather like this:

I sit down in the chair, my head shaved and access plugs and sub-cranial scanning mesh installed. The technician behind me takes one long wire and inserts the end of it into the plug square in the back of my head. He asks me if I'm ready. I take a deep breath and then nod. I hear a switch flip, and then I vomit. My body thinks that I'm having a stroke, or have an eyeball knocked out of its socket, or am spinning faster than my eyes can focus on anything. After a few moments, I start to orient myself. I am looking ahead, at a large black box, the size of a television set, with a forest of instruments sticking out of it. I also see my body, sitting in a chair, a host of medical equipment and one technician behind me. I raise my right hand from the arm of the chair, and see it both out the corner of my eye and from across the room simultaneously. Finally, I come to grips with the fact: my brain is getting direct data from a video camera hooked up to a computer. The technician asks me again if I'm ready. I've long ago memorized the sequence of the procedure. I hear another switch flip and a loud humming, and slowly my vision of the computer in front of me fades. However, I can still clearly see my body. Nothing has changed, but that the part of my brain which receives data from my eyes has temporarily stopped working. Luckily, I am hooked up to a camera, which replaces the function of the eyes, and a computer, which now hosts the software needed to interface between eyes and cognitive and reflexive areas of the brain. The technician inserts another wire into the top left of my skull. Now I feel as if I have a third arm. I move the arm on my body, and it responds as it should. Then I move this new appendage, and see something wave in from of my new field of vision. It is a robot arm, identical in shape and construction to my natural arm. When the inhibitor is turned on, it prevents my brain from sending signals to my muscles, and I am no longer able to control my fleshy right arm. But I can still quite easily control both my left arm and the robot arm to the right of my field of vision. This continues — left arm, left leg, right leg, diaphragm — until every part of my brain has been mapped, transferred, and inhibited. Now comes the final moment. Up to now, I have been physically connected to all of my wetware. I could have, at a moment's notice, regained control of any part of my brain. But now the technician removes the first wire he inserted. My visual cortex is completely dormant and no longer connected to the computer, yet I can still see my body — I am still connected to my body — and I can still feel every part of it as if I'm still in my brain.
 
And so on. In this way, there would be no point at which I could feel “myself” “die” or disappear. I would simply phase from one substrate to another, and be awake and (at least nominally) in control the entire time. Of course, none of this might ever be possible, but it’s not completely unreasonable.

Jaynesian Consciousness, or Why Consciousness Is Not What You Think It Is

Many people use the term "consciousness" to mean a huge variety of things. In this talk by John Searle, he attributes consciousness to his golden retriever. I have had conversations with people who say that consciousness is a matter of degree, all the way from plants up to humans. The idea that consciousness is somehow a fundamental and pervasive feature of biology is a very common idea — but is simply wrong.

If you've ever driven a car for any length of time, you've almost certainly had the experience of driving for many minutes at a time, and only coming to realize very near the end of your trip that you'd reached your destination. For miles and mile, you monitored traffic, changed lanes, taken turns and exists, all while blissfully daydreaming or listening to your favorite music. The realization that you had arrived might have come as a bit of a shock, a record-skip from the last moment you were conscious of driving to that moment, when you became conscious of it again. The entire time, your brain faithfully carried out all the complex, precise movements required to keep the car on the road and going in the right direction without your conscious awareness.

If consciousness were somehow fundamental to human cognition — or cognition in general — this would not only be impossible, it would not even make sense! However, it is very possible, and extremely common! Nervous habits are often completely outside consciousness until pointed out. The vague recollection of dreams — not to mention their very existence — is another place where consciousness is shown to be fuzzy and transitory. Various drugs that can destroy the ego or cause us to have blackouts are similar. Hypnosis and schizophrenia, phenomena that suppress or eliminate conscious control and replace it with hallucinatory or external control, would be just as absurd. Spirit possession, found in a multitude of cultures, would require actually supernatural explanation, rather than a more prosaic psychological one. The entire notion of inspiration is entirely unrelated to consciousness, in fact! Invention and intellectual discovery, often naively identified with conscious reasoning, is in fact almost always the result of sudden flashes of insight which come upon one in the shower or while taking a walk, rather than consciously worked out piece by piece from premises.

Daniel Dennett is fond of saying that consciousness is an illusion. I think that's too strong. It's more accurate to say that the fundamental and all-encompassing nature of consciousness is an illusion. What seems to us the basic operating principle of the brain is actually a much more limited object. Others subvert reason, logic, memory, understanding and planning to consciousness. However, these are all separate things. The term "consciousness" is best reserved for the self-introspecting ability that seems unique to human. It is that constant stream of language we hear in our heads at all times, almost uninterruptibly, which allows us to form a sort of internal mind-space, and to give ourselves declarative commands in the form of decisions and arguments.

Various animals share almost all the cognitive features of humans in some combination. Dolphins are highly intelligent, playful and social. The other great apes share our sociability, and to some extent our language. Many animals, from chimps to pigeons, can either learn or be taught to recognize themselves is mirrors. Dogs and crows can recognize individual humans and react to each in unique ways. Chimps, crows and some fish make and use tools. Ants, termites, spiders, and birds build homes. In fact, it is extremely difficult to come up with a human faculty which is not also expressed by some animals.

One ability which very probably does distinguish us from all other animals is our ability to model the world around us in certain ways. An important part of brain function in any animal is modeling the world it inhabits. This allows it to plan and execute movement in useful and beneficial ways. Without a mental representation of the world, movement would be meaningless and uncoordinated. An animal's brain must know — that is, represent — the details of its environment and its own body in some way so that it can interact with it. Many intelligent animals, including us, take this a step further. We do not merely build models of our physical environments, but also of our social environments. It must be the case that, up to some point in our evolution, humans went no further than this. But eventually we took it another step further: we made models of mental environments. That is, we created models of how minds work, presumably whenever it was that we figured out that other humans had minds.

And that is exactly what consciousness is. It is the ability to make absract, multi-level models of minds, including our own. This ability is granted to us by the linguistic relationship between sounds and meanings in combination with a cultural focus on self-hood and narrativity ("narrativity" referring to our habit of telling stories about ourselves and events around us regardless of whether such stories actually relate in any way to reality). This ability to simulate the mental world not only lets us generate new ideas and inventions, it also lets us model the inner world of other people, to guess their thoughts and motivations. Here I don't mean empathy, which chimpanzees almost certainly share with us, but rather an ability to very literally read another person's thoughts, to form words in your head which are likely similar in meaning to the words they are forming in theirs.

This analogical mind-space, and the cohesive sense of self that it leads to, was first described by Julian Jaynes in his criminally misinterpreted and completely underappreciated book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Daniel Dennett is one of the few thinkers on consciousness who openly acknowledges Jaynes's influence on his own ideas, but many others have proposed effectively identical characterizations of consciousness, most notably the neuroscientist and philosopher Thomas Metzinger, whose monograph Being No One lays things out in great detail.

The more I come to understand consciousness, the more tentative my grasp on my own consciousness feels. I become more and more aware every day of just how little of my everyday life I am conscious of. Malcom Gladwell's Blink, derided by many as anti-intellectual, is in fact an excellent document on the limits of our conscious thought, and at the same time of the power of our brains as a whole. Thinking, reasoning, learning, talking, inventing, discovering, and, for the most part, acting are all non-conscious events. Consciousness is just a curved mirror held up to our mental world, reflecting itself and its surroundings.

[Edit: Thanks to my friend Rob for pointing out a very important mistake I made, whereby I failed to distinguish modeling the world from modeling the mental.]

Predicting the Future (and Other Abilities We Don't Have): Part 1

Humans are good at lots of things.  This series of two posts is about a number of abilities that are not among those things.  Part 1 discusses the fashionable tendency to make guesses about the future course of society and then heavily imply (without usually stating outright) that these guesses constitute accurate predictions.  Part 2 discusses the trouble we tend to have in viewing ourselves in a historical context.  This makes it easy for us to believe that we happen to live in revolutionary times, or that none of the old rules apply.  These types of charlatanism can have far reaching consequences, as it turns out.

Part 1:  Extrapolation is an Art, not a Science

One of the ways to get people to pay attention to your predictions is by preaching the good news: eternal life.  Ray Kurzweil has made a number of predictions about the bright future that technological growth will bring us, with this being by far the most notorious.  Although his version of immortality, uploading ourselves onto computers, differs somewhat from the standard Christian view, one can't help but notice the religious flavor of this prediction.

Kurzweil's other predictions for this century include, yes, flying cars, but also reverse-engineering the human brain, nearly perfect simulations of reality (for our digital selves to live in), and, crucially, an AI that is more intelligent in every way than all humans combined.  He has freed himself from any responsibility to explain how these things will be accomplished.  Nobody has the slightest idea how to do the interesting ones.

I will defer the actual technical explanation of why these are truly goofy predictions to authors who have basically handled it: Steven Pinker, Douglas Hofstadter, PZ Myers, and many others have noted how technology and scientific discovery don't progress in the way Kurzweil has claimed.  Instead, I want to draw attention to the fact that these attempts to predict the future are actually a very human tendency.

In the early 1960's, progress in programming machines to do certain tasks (like proving theorems), gave researchers supreme confidence that essentially human-like A.I. would be a solved problem within 20 years.  They should have said that at this rate, it would be done.  What actually happened was that computers became more and more sophisticated but left AI behind: the problems they were doing were just much harder than they had anticipated.  Even relatively simple tasks like constructing grammatical sentences proved to be far out of their grasp.  Now, the most successful language tools largely involve throwing our technical understanding of language out the window and using probabilistic models.

Economies are not spared from erroneous predictions about the future.  Kurzweil and others jumped on the tech-boom bandwagon, claiming in 1998 that the boom would last through 2009, bringing untold wealth to all.  Maybe they should have been reading Hyman Minsky instead of Marvin Minsky.

Enough about the good news.

The other way to get people to pay attention to your predictions is by telling them the bad news: social breakdown the end of the world.  Overpopulation is an issue along these lines that receives attention that is disproportionate to the seriousness of the claims made by its scare tacticians.  Among these claims is the belief that we are imminently reaching the carrying capacity of the Earth, at which point starvation, crowding, and wars over scarce resources will tear human civilization to pieces.

This hypothesis relies on progress not happening, the opposite of the singularitarians' reliance.  But the very same question can be asked of both: how do you know?  This is where it becomes apparent that extrapolating patterns is an art for the Kurzweils of the world.  If you extrapolate one variable, you get intelligent machines.  If you extrapolate another, you get the end of the world.  But if you extrapolate yet another, say the total fertility rate (TFR), it doesn't look so scary.  Defined as the average expected number of children born per woman, the world's TFR has been steadily declining in the post-war period, from almost five in 1950 to almost 2.5 today.  As it approaches two, the world population approaches equilibrium.

Phony overpopulation scares are common in the history of anglophone countries, from Thomas Malthus to American anxiety over the "yellow peril" around the turn of the century (see Jack London's The Unparalleled Invasion for a rosy portrait of the future).  Wealthy people and business interests are often the biggest proponents of the theory that population growth is the largest problem facing the world.  Conveniently, it's one of the only major global issues that isn't their responsibility.  In reality, the only reliable way to lower growth rates is to facilitate the economic growth of poor countries to the point where people there have a decent standard of living.

The danger in blowing the perils of overpopulation out of proportion is that it leads people to prioritize population control above reproductive rights and, more generally, morality.  If it really is that serious, then we have carte blanche to do whatever is necessary.  The bottom line is that, despite the very real possibility of overpopulation becoming an issue, there is no reason to think it is serious or imminent enough to change what our goals would be, were it not imminent.  Our immediate task is still figuring out how to get communities to lift themselves out of poverty while handling climate change and other real crises.

We have a predisposition to weigh the likelihood of possible futures, either good or bad, based on how exciting or terrifying they are instead of how probable they are.  Anyone interested in solving problems should be aware of this bias.

Part 2 covers a second, related bias that people have: the impression that the times we currently live in offer wider and more revolutionary possibilities than existed in the past.  This impression, created by the fact that we live now, not in the past, is the source of huge blunders and the general abandonment of reason.

My Solution to the Fermi Paradox

I think that the most likely solution to the Fermi Paradox is that, while life is exceedingly common in the universe, intelligent life is incredibly rare. In the four and a half billion year lifespan of this planet, life has existed on it from almost the very first moments. However, not until the Cambrian explosion about 530 million years ago did complex multicellular life exist. That means that for nearly four billion years, and starting from nine billion years after the birth of the universe, Earth contained nothing but single-celled organisms and colonies of such. And it is not until about 2 million years ago, 0.04% of the history of life on Earth, that the first technological intelligence emerged. And even that was simply monkeys hitting rocks against each other in a clever way! Anything more complicated than a stone arrowhead was invented in the last ten thousand years!

And let's look at how unlikely it is that humans (or any other hominid) ever even achieved technology. We had access to wheat, barley, and rice, easily domesticable plants that produced high yields and had good nutritional content. We had access to large animals with very particular internal dominance hierarchies which were not so recently evolved alongside us to attack us on sight, but not so distantly separate from us to be completely unwary at the sight of hunters with spears. (Here by "we" I am referring to any subset of humans who had such access — Jared Diamond goes into great detail as to who in fact had access to what.) We had access to workable stone, copious woodlands, and various ore deposits. We had an abundance of fresh water on a planet with an atmosphere suitable for lighting fires. Our luck in the development of our culture and eventual civilization was astounding. We were never subject to an extinction-level impact or eruption (although it seems that we came damn close).

I think that such luck is not only astounding, but is in fact astronomical. While life seems to have no trouble at all finding a place on a planet like the Earth (and perhaps on many other types of planets as well), technological civilization seems like and absolutely ludicrously unlikely event. It has happened exactly once in four and a half billion years (for 0.0002% of that time), or in 530 million years in which complex life has existed on Earth (or 0.0019% of that time). So I would imagine that life is in fact very common in the universe, although almost exclusively in the form of single-celled creatures living on rocks and in oceans. Very, very, very rarely one would find a planet with some sort of multicellular life on it — simple plant-like creatures, or molds of some sort. And once in an unimaginably huge while, one might expect to find a planet where technologically intelligent life once existed. Finding a planet where technologically intelligent life exists concurrently with us seems depressingly close to a fantasy.

[Edit: My percentages were two orders of magnitude off! They were simple ratios, not percentages. Thanks to Scott for pointing this out.]