Shades of John Henry and that nasty Steam Drill: IBM’s “Watson” recently defeated two previous Jeopardy champs, evoking not so much a sense of tragedy and the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, as—well—amusement. Also a bit of serious questioning: What does it mean … for artificial intelligence, for the scientific study (and pursuit) of consciousness, and for what it means to be human?
I think there are two serious issues raised here, and one trivial one. First, the trivial: the suggestion that somehow, computers are now smarter than people (or at least, that this computer is). Anyone who has ever Googled anything knows that computers have long been extraordinary at information retrieval. Watson isn’t qualitatively different in this respect; it is simply bigger and faster. It is in fact the people at IBM who have shown themselves to be wonderfully smart, notably by producing a machine that can respond appropriately to human language, with its complexity, elaborate use of metaphor, multiple meanings, and so forth.
The more serious questions may be as much philosophic as scientific, both involving the fraught issue of consciousness. For one, are we getting anywhere with regard to the “hard question of consciousness,” namely, how the brain manages to connect material events—anatomic, physiologic, electrical, chemical, etc.—to subjective experience? I suspect that we are, but don’t ask me how!
Here are the opening lines of Francis Crick’s important book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it, ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’”
In his later years, Crick, one of the towering biologists of the 20th century, turned his attention from unraveling the structure of genes (he was arguably the more creative, and certainly, the more pleasant and entertaining part of the famous Watson & Crick Nobel-winning team), to looking at consciousness—not as a metaphysical phenomenon but a material one. There is a stunningly stubborn and, to my thinking, altogether admirable materialism at the heart of all science, so it is consistent that such a cast of mind leads to a thoroughly material conception of mind itself.
These days, given extraordinary advances in neurobiology, not to mention plain old-fashioned common sense, such a conception is beyond dispute. Scientists as well as any non-mystical non-scientists realize that there is nothing whatsoever astonishing about Francis Crick’s “hypothesis,” which is overwhelmingly recognized as fact. Indeed, it would be astonishing if not true, if mental processes did not derive—wholly and completely—from matter in general and neurons in particular.
Nonetheless, although it is a mundane fact, generally taken for granted among all scientists, that Descartes was wrong and there is no genuine dualism separating mind from body, the reality of embodiment (and thus, the dependence of mind on body), remains, in its own way, astonishing.
Which leads us to the second serious issue touched upon by our new friend Watson: Can machines—i.e., computers—be conscious? Let’s grant that somehow (again, don’t ask me how, at least not yet), matter creates mind. Given that the brain—a biological entity—arrives at consciousness, is this a destination reserved only for “wetware”?
There is something more than a little creepy and counterintuitive about the notion of conscious machines, but I’m not sure it is any more weird than conscious animals, or people, and it has been bothering people for a very long time. (I suspect what’s really disconcerting is when or if said machines grow rebellious, á la HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a space odyssey, or P.K. Dick’s When Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.)
So let’s turn things around, as spectacularly done by Terry Bisson, in his short story, “They’re Made Out Of Meat.” In it, we listen in on a conversation between the robotic commander of an interplanetary expedition and his equally electronic leader, reporting with astonishment that the human inhabitants of Earth are—gasp!—“made out of meat.” “Meat?” “There’s no doubt about it. …” “That’s impossible. … How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.” “I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they’re made out of meat.” … “Do you have any idea of the life span of meat?” “Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. …” “Nope, we thought of that, since they do have meat heads … But … they’re meat all the way through.” “No brain?” “Oh, there is a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat!” “So … what does the thinking?” “You’re not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat.” “Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat?” “”Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Dreaming meat! The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?”
Thanks to the meat-heads (a phrase I use with only the greatest respect and astonishment), at IBM, we’re all starting to do just that.
