Let us use this as a metaphor for thinking about human souls. Could it be valid to suppose that the “magic” of human consciousness somehow arises from the closing of a loop whereby the brain’s high level—its symbol level—and its low level—its neurophysiological level—are somehow tied together in an exquisite closed loop of causality? Is the “private I” just the eye of a self-referential typhoon?
Let it be clear that we are making not the slightest suggestion here that a television system (camera plus receiver) becomes conscious at the instant that its camera points at its screen! A television system does not satisfy the criteria that were set up earlier for representational systems. The meaning of its image—what we human observers perceive and describe in words—is lost to the television system itself. The system does not divide up the thousands of dots on the screen into “conceptual pieces” that it recognizes as standing for people, dogs, tables, and so forth. Nor do the dots have autonomy from the world they represent. The dots are simply passive reflections of light patterns in front of the camera, and if the lights go out, so do the dots.
The kind of closed loop we are referring to is one where a true representational system perceives its own state in terms of its repertoire of concepts. For instance, we perceive our own brain state not in terms of which neurons are connected to which others, or which ones are firing but in concepts that we articulate in words. Our view of our brain is as a pile of neurons but as a storehouse of beliefs and feelings and ideas. We provide a readout of our brain at that level, by saying such things as “I am a little nervous and confused by her unwillingness to go to the party.” Once articulated, this kind of self-observation then reenters the system as something to think about—but of course the reentry proceeds via the usual perceptual processes—namely, millions of neurons firing. The loop that is closed here is far more complex and level-muddling the television loop, beautiful and intricate though that may seem.
As a digression it is important to mention that much recent progress in artificial intelligence work has centered around the attempt to give a program a set of notions about its own inner structures, and ways, reacting when it detects certain kinds of change occurring inside itself. At present, such self-understanding and self-monitoring abilities of programs are quite rudimentary, but this idea has emerged as one of the prerequisites to the attainment of the deep flexibility that is synonymous with genuine intelligence.
Currently two major bottlenecks exist in the design of an artificial mind: One is the modeling of perception, the other the modeling of learning. Perception we have already talked about as the funneling of a myriad low-level responses into a jointly agreed-upon overall interpretation the conceptual level. Thus it is a level-crossing problem. Learning is a level-crossing problem. Put bluntly, one has to ask, “How do my symbols program my neurons?” How do those finger motions that you execute over and over again in learning to type get converted slowly systematic changes in synaptic structures? How does a once-conscious activity become totally sublimated into complete unconscious oblivion? The thought level, by force of repetition, has somehow “reached downward” and reprogrammed some of the hardware underlying it. The same goes for learning a piece of music or a foreign language.
In fact, at every instant of our lives we are permanently changing synaptic structures: We are “filing” our current situation in our memory under certain “labels” so that we can retrieve it at appropriate timers the future (and our unconscious mind has to be very clever doing since it is very hard to anticipate the kinds of future situations in which we would benefit from recalling the present moment).
The self is, in this view, a continually self-documenting “worldline” (the four-dimensional path traced by an object as it moves through time and space). Not only is a human being a physical object that internally preserves a history of its worldline, but moreover, that stored worldline in turn serves to determine the object’s future worldline. This large-scale harmony among past, present, and future allows you to perceive your self, despite its ever-changing and multifaceted nature, as a unity with some internal logic to it. If the self is likened to a river meandering through spacetime, then it is important to point out that not just the features of the landscape but also the desires of the river act as forces determining the bends in the river.
Not only does our conscious mind’s activity create permanent side effects at the neural level; the inverse holds too: Our conscious thoughts seem to come bubbling up from subterranean caverns of our mind, images flood into our mind’s eye without our having any idea where they came from! Yet when we publish them, we expect that we—not our subconscious structures—will get credit for our thoughts. This dichotomy of the creative self into a conscious part and an unconscious part is one of the most disturbing aspects of trying to understand the mind. If—as was just asserted—our best ideas come burbling up as if from mysterious underground springs, then who really are we? Where does the creative spirit really reside? Is it by an act of will that we create, or are we just automata made out of biological hardware, from birth until death fooling ourselves through idle chatter into thinking that we have “free will”? If we are fooling ourselves about all these matters, then whom—or what—are we fooling?
There is a loop lurking here, one that bears a lot of investigation. Cherniak’s story is light and entertaining, but it nonetheless hits the nail on the head by pointing to Gödel’s work not as an argument against mechanism, but as an illustration of the primal loop that seems somehow deeply implicated in the plot of consciousness.
D.R.H.
V
Created Selves and Free Will
The Universe is infinite but bounded, and therefore a beam of light, in whatever direction it may travel, will after billions of centuries return if powerful enough—to the point of its departure; and it is no different with rumor, that flies about from star to star and makes the rounds of every planet. One day Trurl heard distant reports of two mighty constructor-benefactors, so wise and so accomplished that they had no equal; with this news he ran to Klapaucius, who explained to him that these were not mysterious rivals, but only themselves, for their fame had circumnavigated space. Fame, however, has this fault, that it says nothing of one’s failures, even when those very failures are the product of a great perfection. And he who would doubt this, let him recall the last of the seven sallies of Trurl, which was undertaken without Klapaucius, whom certain urgent duties kept at home at the time.
In those days Trurl was exceedingly vain, receiving all marks of veneration and honor paid to him as his due and a perfectly normal thing. He was heading north in his ship, as he was the least familiar with that region, and had flown through the void for quite some time, passing spheres full of the clamor of war as well as spheres that had finally obtained the perfect peace of desolation, when suddenly a little planet came into view, really more of a stray fragment of matter than a planet.
24
“The seventh Sally” from the