The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (13 page)

THE VIEW FROM QUANTUM MECHANICS

 

I often dream about falling. Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock, but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.

—Heinz Pagels, physicist and quantum mechanics researcher before his death in a 1988 climbing accident

 

 

 

The Western
objective
view states that after billions of years of swirling around, matter and energy evolved to create life-forms-complex self-replicating patterns of matter and energy-that became sufficiently advanced to reflect on their own existence, on the nature of matter and energy, on their own consciousness. In contrast, the Eastern
subjective
view states that consciousness came first-matter and energy are merely the complex thoughts of conscious beings, ideas that have no reality without a thinker. As noted above, the objective and subjective views of reality have been at odds since the dawn of recorted history. There is often merit, however, in combining seemingly irreconcilable views to achieve a deeper understanding. Such was the case with the adoption of quantum mechanics fifty years ago. Rather than reconcile the views that electromagnetic radiation (for example, light) was either a stream of particles (that is, photons) or a vibration (that is, light waves), both views were fused into an irreducible duality. While this idea is impossible to grasp using only our intuitive models of nature, we are unable to explain the world without accepting this apparent contradiction. Other paradoxes of quantum mechanics (for example, electron “tunneling” in which electrons in a transistor appear on both sides of a barrier) helped create the age of computation, and may unleash a new revolution in the form of the quantum computer,
¹²
but more about that later. Once we accept such a paradox, wonderful things happen. In postulating the duality of light, quantum mechanics has discovered an essential nexus between matter and consciousness. Particles apparently do not make up their minds as to which way they are going or even where they have been until the are forced to do so by the observations of a conscious observer. We might say that they appear not really to exist at all retroactively until and unless we notice them.

 

So twentieth-century Western science has come around to the Eastern view. The Universe is sufficiently sublime that the essentially Western objective view of consciousness arising from matter and the essentially Eastern subjective view of matter arising from consciousness apparently coexist as another irreducible duality. Clearly, consciousness, matter, and energy are inextricably linked.

We may note here a similarity of quantum mechanics to the computer simulation of a virtual world. In today’s software games that display images of a virtual world, the portions of the environment not currently being interacted with by the user (that is, those offscreen) are usually not computed in detail, if at all. The limited resources of the computer are directed toward rendering the portion of the world that the user is currently viewing. As the user focuses in on some other aspect, the computational resources are then immediately directed toward creating and displaying that new perspective. It thus seems as if the portions of the virtual world that are offscreen are nonetheless still “there,” but the software designers figure there is no point wasting valuable computer cycles on regions of their simulated world that no one is watching.

I would say that quantum theory implies a similar efficiency in the physical world. Particles appear not to decide where they have been until forced to do so by being observed. The implication is that portions of the world we live in are not actually “rendered” until some conscious observer turns her attention toward them. After all, there’s no point wasting valuable “computes” of the celestial computer that renders our Universe. This gives new meaning to the question about the unheard tree that falls in the forest.

 

ON THIS MULTIPLE-CONSCIOUSNESS IDEA, WOULDN’T I NOTICE THAT—I MEAN IF I HAD DECIDED TO DO ONE THING AND THIS OTHER CONSCIOUSNESS IN MY HEAD WENT AHEAD AND DECIDED SOMETHING ELSE?

I thought you had decided not to finish that muffin you just devoured.

 

 

TOUCHE. OKAY, IS THAT AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT?

 

It is a better example of Marvin Minsky’s
Society of Mind,
in which he conceives of our mind as a society of other minds—some like muffins, some are vain, some are health conscious, some make resolutions, others break them. Each of these in turn is made up of other societies. At the bottom of this hierarchy are little mechanisms Minsky calls agents with little or no intelligence. It is a compelling vision of the organization of intelligence, including such phenomena as mixed emotions and conflicting values.

 

SOUNDS LIKE A GREAT LEGAL DEFENSE. “No, JUDGE, IT WASN’T ME. IT WAS THIS OTHER GAL IN MY HEAD WHO DID THE DEED!”

 

That’s not going to do you much good if the judge decides to lock up the other gal in your head.

 

THEN HOPEFULLY THE WHOLE SOCIETY IN MY HEAD WILL STAY OUT OF TROUBLE. BUT WHICH MINDS IN MY SOCIETY OF MIND ARE CONSCIOUS?

 

We could imagine that each of these minds in the society of mind is conscious, albeit that the lowest-ranking ones have relatively little to be conscious of. Or perhaps consciousness is reserved for the higher-ranking minds. Or perhaps only certain combinations of higher-ranking minds are conscious, whereas others are not. Or perhaps—

 

NOW WAIT A SECOND, HOW CAN WE TELL WHAT THE ANSWER IS?

 

I believe there’s really no way to tell. What possible experiment can we run that would conclusively prove whether an entity or process is conscious? If the entity says, “Hey, I’m really conscious,” does that settle the matter? If the entity is very compelling when it expresses a professed emotion, is that definitive? If we look carefully at its internal methods and see feedback loops in which the process examines and responds to itself, does that mean it’s conscious? If we see certain types of patterns in its neural firings, is that convincing? Contemporary philosophers such as Daniel Dennett appear to believe that the consciousness of an entity is a testable and measurable attribute. But I think science is inherently about objective reality. I don’t see how it can break through to the subjective level.

 

MAYBE IF THE THING PASSES THE TURING TEST?

 

That is what Turing had in mind. Lacking any conceivable way of building a consciousness detector, he settled on a practical approach, one that emphasizes our unique human proclivity for language. And I do think that Turing is right in a way—if a machine can pass a valid Turing Test, I believe that we will believe that it is conscious. Of course, that’s still not a scientific demonstration.

The converse proposition, however, is not compelling. Whales and elephants have bigger brains than we do and exhibit a wide range of behaviors that knowledgeable observers consider intelligent. I regard them as conscious creatures, but they are in no position to pass the Turing Test.

 

THEY WOULD HAVE TROUBLE TYPING ON THESE SMALL KEYS OF MY COMPUTER.

 

Indeed, they have no fingers. They are also not proficient in human languages. The Turing Test is clearly a human-centric measurement.

 

IS THERE A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THIS CONSCIOUSNESS STUFF AND THE ISSUE OF TIME THAT WE SPOKE ABOUT EARLIER?

 

Yes, we clearly have an awareness of time. Our subjective experience of time passage—and remember that
subjective
is just another word for
conscious—
is governed by the speed of our objective processes. If we change this speed by altering our computational substrate, we affect our perception of time.

 

RUN THAT BY ME AGAIN.

 

Let’s take an example. If I scan your brain and nervous system with a suitably advanced noninvasive-scanning technology of the early twenty-first century—a very-high-resolution, high-bandwidth magnetic resonance imaging, perhaps—ascertain all the salient information processes and then download that information to my suitably advanced neural computer, I’ll have a little you or at least someone very much like you right here in my personal computer.

If my personal computer is a neural net of simulated neurons made of electronic stuff rather than human stuff, the version of you in my computer will run about a million times faster. So an hour for me would be a million hours for you, which is about a century.

 

OH, THAT’S GREAT, YOU’LL DUMP ME IN YOUR PERSONAL COMPUTER, AND THEN FORGET ABOUT ME FOR A SUBJECTIVE MILLENNIUM OR TWO.

 

We’ll have to be careful about that, won’t we.

What if these theories are really true, and we were magically shrunk and put into someone’s brain while he was thinking. We would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers!