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Information Technology Meets
Global Ecology:
Computer
Unconsciousness
by Cate Gable
Bill Joy is right when he says in his recent Wired article,
"the future doesn't need us."1 Whether or not
Homo Sapiens continue to develop and evolve as a species on this planet, Gaia
will continue; if we haven't already done so much damage to her
macro-systems--air, water, soil, climate--that they are beyond even Gaia's
capacity for equilibrated repair.
In fact, in my gloomiest moods I can only hope that our
species will somehow do itself in, leaving the earth intact before we do too
much more damage. Lester Brown of The WorldWatch Institute believes we have
fifteen years to reverse human ecological devastation that appears now to be
unequivocally causing ozone depletion, global warming, and the most widespread
destruction of species since the atmosphere changed to oxygen. If we haven't
made drastic changes in the next fifteen years, he predicts it will be too
late. Our beautiful blue bubble of a planet in the middle of black, silent
space could turn into another bleak Venus or Mars.2
But one need only look at the grimmest most abandoned
neighborhood in any city to see how quickly Gaia restores herself. Scrubby
'weeds' spring out from the most uninviting cracks in cement; birds find places
to build their nests on the sides of our buildings, under eaves, on telephone
poles; the tiniest crevice holding water invites mosquito larvae; and bacteria
are everywhere, in the most inhospitable cold, dark of the sea, miles down, to
still hot lava at the edge of sulfuric steam vents.
Nature has an inexorable passion to exist.
So there will be a future with or without humans, Joy is
certainly right about that; though the statement he thought he was making was
about the rise of robotics and its eventual domination and extermination of the
human species. It seems that robotics and nanotechnology professionals think of
the body/brain as a machine with simple moving parts; and that simply by
increasing the computational capacity of the computer, we will be able to
replicate, and vastly improve upon, human intelligence and consciousness--as if
computing power alone can provide the agent that does the computing a kind of
consciousness.
It is quite a well-known fact in the field of robotics that
although a robotic-computer may be able to capture or 'see' images (think about
the various Landers sending back to earth exquisitely detailed data-pictures of
the surfaces around them), it has no ability to 'recognize' images. What is a
rock? What is a shadow? What is a ball? Or, even more finite and sophisticated,
whose face is this?
Ray Kurzweil in The Age of Spiritual Machines asks
the same question this way: "Once computers are as complex as the human brain,
and can match the human brain in subtlety and complexity of thought, are we to
consider them conscious?"3 One might wonder
exactly what he means by "subtlety and complexity of thought," but whatever he
means, there is one major difference between computers, robots, and humans that
cannot be argued. Humans have bodies. We have veins, lungs, lymphatic, nervous,
and endocrine systems. We move through the world as sensual beings, touching
with our voices, our eyes, our hands.
Flesh is not simply a container for the mind as Descartes,
who is often held responsible for the dualism of mind and body, argued. When
you ask for a doggie bag in Berkeley you generally get a wax-reinforced
cardboard box. In Oakland or Emeryville you get a Styrofoam box. You might get
a white paper bag or a piece of foil. Whatever container you get for your
take-out food doesn't change the food inside the container.
But the body is not simply a 'box' for the mind: body-mind
is one organism. As my body-mind ages, I develop different ways of thinking,
and I gather perceptions differently. I may feel that 'I' am living somewhere
inside my body but I can be brought up short, quite abruptly, if I think that
my mind will go on 'computing' in the same way if I had a different body. I
need only fall down the steps, or cut my finger, or lose my hearing to
understand the body-mind unity.
Antonio Damasio, an internationally-known neuroscientist and
researcher in consciousness for over thirty years, argues in The Feeling of
What Happens, that "Feelings cannot be duplicated unless flesh is
duplicated, unless the brain's actions on flesh are duplicated, unless the
brain's sensing of flesh after it has been acted upon by the brain is
duplicated."4 And feelings and consciousness are
directly related. They reside in the same places in the brain. Damasio posits
convincingly that "feelings are poised at the very threshold that separates
being from knowing and thus have a privileged connection to consciousness.'5
Damasio articulates levels of consciousness in humans: proto
self, core self, and autobiographical self. These levels of self or
consciousness progress upward in a spiral of more and more sophisticated
life-regulating senses from homeostatic (automatic responses) to the sensory
input of pain or pleasure to the emotional overlay of meaning on those
perceptions to a more complex constructed response to those meanings. This
system, parts of which exist in all lifeforms, evolved over the 5 billion years
of earth's existence. Thus consciousness has evolved within the
biological system of life.
It is this 'biology of consciousness' that obviates the
possibility of computer consciousness. Joy, though he is trying to sound an
alarm, albeit tepidly, about the dangers inherent in this kind of sci-fi
thinking about robotics still makes absurd statements like "A second dream of
robotics is that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic
technology, achieving near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses."6
'Downloading our consciousnesses.' Think about it. Think
about any single moment of your life (let alone the entirety of your
beingness): the delimiter is not even the complex set of synapses that fired in
that moment; it is the contextual background of autobiographical history
residing in your body-mind that created your perceptions about that moment: how
you felt about what she said, what she said, what the light was doing in the
window behind her, the sounds outside on the sidewalk, what you were wearing,
the ache in your tooth, your worrying about the phone call you just received, a
slight anticipation of dinner, your sock falling down slightly inside your left
shoe, an itch on your arm, her eyes, how you felt about her eyes, your sense of
sadness about your father's death last month, the dryness in your throat.
Tell me, how will a computer know anything about that?
b i o :
Cate Gable is a poet and writer (author
of Strategic Action Planning NOW!) , strategic marketing consultant in
e-commerce, teacher, and President of Axioun
Communications International. She divides her time between Berkeley, CA;
the Pacific Northwest; and Paris, France. Send comments to her at
cgable@axioun.com. |
