Putting the I into i, Robot

Metropolis, 1927

Having spent some time with an alternative model's possible answer to the hard problem of consciousness, let's put it aside and turn to the dominant materialist paradigm's treatment - and current state of investigation - of the problem and the efforts to create consciousness that take for granted that the materialist paradigm is true and complete. Indeed, proponents of this view generally believe that any alternative view is laughable and that they are well along in the quest of both understanding and then being able to replicate the requisite parts necessary for a constructed replica of the human brain to achieve human-equivalent self-aware consciousness.

Tony Prescott, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Sheffield, UK, and director of Sheffield Robotics, offers a stimulating and philosophically aware account of his iCub project in the March 21-27th edition of New Scientist (paid subscription required for full article). The article is worth a read - he posits that of Ulric Neisser's five necessary components to human-equivalent consciousness or selfhood, three of the five have been achieved by their iCub creation.

Behold the somehow endearing - and yet simultaneously deeply creepy - iCub in its early childhood: 

Have an hour or so to contemplate what might perhaps be the most significant mystery of human existence: how our brains might create consciousness and therefore how a physical or virtual replica of the human brain might produce it to complete the achievement of inserting an i into i, Robot? If so, the following short talks might be helpful.

First up, Dan Dennet, the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. Dennett's larger position seems to be that there really is no "hard problem" of consciousness, there is no phenomenon of subjective, willful self-aware consciousness to explain - it is an illusion. His point in the following talk is really just that we can't trust the subjective feeling of consciousness and that our almost innate certainty of its existence is because we "experience" consciousness - but that subjective experience is based on trickery in the same way we can easily be tricked by the magician's clever slight of hand or simple optical illusions:

While it deserves a hearing, I personally find Dennett's argument here to be weak sauce and, like many of his "new atheist" bretheren, Dennett seems to be very busy building and burning straw men, missing the forest for the trees and refuting assertions no one of note from the other side is making. I find the magician's slight of hand metaphor to be a more apt descriptor of his alleged chain of logic and what he proports to be able to demonstrate. Nevertheless, this is the sort of somewhat ridiculous tautology (There is no consciousness because consciousness doesn't exist / I don't have to explain consciousness because we are not really conscious) that must be faced and challenged for anything outside the dominant paradigm to get a fair hearing.

For me, the more compelling arguments for the materialists resort to the evidence that there are specific brain structures that correspond to every aspect of human consciousness - and that altering, injuring and/or destroying these structures have entirely predictable affects on specific functions and qualities of consciousness. V.S. Ramachandran's talk is a good example of the sort of survey that might immediately lead one (though it is important to note that Ramachandran is not making this assertion nor denying it here) to the conclusion that if the phenomenon under consideration is altered or stopped when a physical structure is altered, injured or destroyed that the latter must be the necessary cause or source of the former. That is the natural assumption with the following associations between specific phenomena of consciousness and their corresponding brain structures:

Ironically, I actually think something like Dennett's slight of hand might be more at work in our very natural assumptions about causality, but I'll save that for a subsequent post detailing the more moderate / possibly middle-ground view of another theorist.

I'll end today's rabbit hole adventure by checking out the state of the materialists' quest to create a build-a-brain workshop. Henry Markram, the Israeli neuroscientist and director of the Blue Brain Project and the subsequent Human Brain Project, outlined in 2009 the plan to virtually model the human brain in a supercomputer. This is where the rubber is meeting the road in attempting to achieve full consciousness for an artificially conscious entity or robot, assuming the materialists' assumptions are correct and that they have within their reach the ability to solve the raw and immense technical challenges involved in duplicating the structures and processes involved in the human brain's production of consciousness:

Almost six years later, just this past month, Markram delivered an address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which may provide some good clues as to the status of their quest, the first half of which is reportedly roughly on schedule. If you're like me, you might need to stop and brew a pot of coffee. A stem-winding silver-tongued orator he most certainly is not, but he's very, very smart and he's in charge of one of the most ambitious and potentially important initiatives that may yet prove to be foundational to the achievement of artificial super intelligence in this century. Get ready for human brain chips and Roboy!: