Pheeeeeew. Deep Breath. These first few lines are the very beginning. I sit in my slightly cooler than comfortable bedroom, the drooping pillows threatening my spine with lifelong posture problems, my fingers hover excitedly over the keys. I watch my feet, clad in white socks one run away from the bin, dancing excitedly too and fro. So much un-invested energy! It is about time that I began this blog.
And yet, as I sit here on my bed, music pumping through my ears like morphine through the veins of the injured, soothing my nerves, I still cannot think what to write. What is there? What can I say? What is going on?
Well, where to start. Too much would be a good answer, although I have never been much for the finite explanations. It is Sunday. Grey, and colder than usual. Despite having stayed within the confines of my own room for most of the day, a prisoner of procrastination, plenty has happened.
I awoke with my mind racing, panicked and jumpy, scared and worried, having had one of those dream-filled sleeps (that come so preciously rarely to me) that leave you extraordinarily uncertain over what is real and what is fiction. For starters: Losing my wallet the night before? Fiction. Having gone surfing with work colleagues? Also fiction. Having searched the streets of Totnes all night long for my phone? Fiction. Having lost my phone the night before? Truth, definitely truth.
It is funny, how quickly one is able to laugh at oneself. For having lost the one object that stays in the same room as me for near as makes no difference 24 hours a day, makes me realise how incredibly pathetic my dependence on it is. And this is no flagship IPhone XS Max, no Note 9, this is just a sad old 5S with a few sentimental photos. Needless to say, I got over it in minutes and was already looking at new phones within minutes of waking up. Such is the nature of consumerist culture.
But to the rest of my day, and perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this dull, meaningless and incredibly normal day. I shake my head and roll my eyes at myself in bemusement. “The most intriguing aspect” is of course my philosophy coursework. This is what I have become. Not one thing, actually, but many. Some days I am a passionate academic, thriving for knowledge at every turn, other days I am the boring guy, who declines a night out due to the age-old excuse of ‘revision’, ‘an essay to do’ or of course ‘homework’. I giggle at myself and the way I put as much disgust and malice into the pressing of the keys as I scrawl ‘homework’, mocking the evermore prominent nerd in my character. But enough of my rambling! On to my philosophy coursework and the interesting topic I choose to present here today.
The Mind-Body Problem questions whether or not we humans have some non-physical qualities about ourselves, i.e. a soul, spirit. Naturally, dualism is the more religious and traditionally popular belief that humans are comprised of the physical body, and the non-physical mind, which comprises our consciousness. After all, how can God allow anyone into heaven if there is not some non-physical aspect of us ‘do-gooders’. Dualism is very interesting, I find. It is the natural instinct of most humans today to assume, without wanting or caring enough to put any thought into the matter, that we have souls. It is something that is almost an unwritten rule, an assumption based not merely on Christianity, but on thousands of years of belief in spirituality. It is only when you raise the first questions that people begin to realise the issues.
How can it be that our consciousness is non-physical and yet it control’s the actions of our physical body?
The interaction between the physical and the non-physical is still something that is up for debate among contemporary philosophers. And so elusive is this concept of ‘The Mind’, that I can confidently say that we may never be truly certain of the answer. Sure, science will tell us exactly the opposite to the beliefs of the bible-bashers. “Neurons and chemical processes in the brain, that’s all consciousness really is!” Yes but how can we be sure? We know how the physical body works incredibly well, indeed, we understand out thought processes so well that we have modelled artificially constructed machines to mirror this.
Artificial Intelligence. The next great leap. The next great achievement that we can never truly reach. And here’s why.
John Searle (great guy by the way, watch his inspirational TED Talk on consciousness here) postulated the Chinese Room Argument to explain how we can never truly create AI. The thought experiment imagines a room in which someone with no knowledge of Chinese sits. In this room, there is a manual filled with lists of Chinese phrases in pairs. Outside the room is a fluent speaker of Mandarin, and they write messages on paper before sending these through the letterbox into the room. The role of the person inside is to find the message among the lists of phrases in the manual and write down the corresponding chain of characters. They then send this back out through the letterbox. To the fluent speaker outside, they have just received a perfect reply to their question, and yet the person inside remains entirely ignorant of what they have said.
Quite a cool concept right? Somewhat irrelevant? Of course not. If we imagine the room itself to be an AI, with the same inputs and outputs, we can clearly see that for an AI to seem conscious is not enough for it to actually be conscious. Programmers can code endless algorithms into these things: IF ‘X’ THEN ‘Y’. The only limit is storage space. It does not take consciousness to fool a human, as I’m sure we all are aware.
It’s getting late… Yes. There is room for improvement. That’s what life is about, it’s all a learning curve. And so it is with this final question that I sign off my first blog entry.
If I were to split my brain in two (and there are case studies which show a Hemispherectomy is possible) and placed each half in a new host, which body will I wake up in?
Til next time,
Stay Hydrated.
