2000 David F. AustinEven before people see the details, they often react negatively to the message that they are machines. Sometimes, the reaction has a rational basis. I'll discuss three of the main sources of resistance to the computer model.
The most powerful and prevalent source is belief in Dualism: many people believe that there is more to us than could be contained in any mere physical object or system, no matter how complex; that there must be a non-physical, spiritual component in us that endows us with the ability to think, feel, deliberate, choose, hope, wish, feel, love, and so on. We met a form of dualism in our discussion of phrenology, namely, Cartesian Dualism. In order to give you a reason for looking beyond dualism, I'll alert you to two serious difficulties that face dualism in the section devoted to it.
A second source of resistance to the computer model of the mind is the belief that you can't make a smart thing out of stupid parts. According to the computer model, it seems that all of our individual nerve cells are organic switches, linked together in complex circuits. How, one might wonder, can one get mental activity by wiring switches together? No one switch can think, and it may be hard to imagine how it could help to hook two of them together - or three, or four, or more. Whence:
Stupid Parts Argument
It's not possible to build a thinking thing from unthinking parts
Every possible computer is built from unthinking parts
Therefore, no computer could think
The first premise seems to be based on the following general principle:
Part/Whole Principle: If the parts of a complex whole, W, do not have property F, then W does not have F.
If this is the basis for the first premise, then it is ill-supported, since the principle is false. One brick does not a building make, but a bunch of them does. One person does not make a society, but a group does. And so on. If Part/Whole Principle is not the source for the first premise, then we are owed some other support for it. Is there something special about thinking that prevents it from emerging once the system reaches a high (enough) level of complexity? What could that be?
In an article being published today in the journal Science, [a] U.C.L.A. team [of chemists] says it has succeeded in using a molecule to create an electronic switch that can be reconfigured -- that is, it can be turned on and off, and on again -- like a transistor.
Previous research had produced molecular switches that could change their state only once -- on to off, or vice versa -- or could operate only for a limited time or at very low temperatures.The latest achievement is a significant step toward building a new generation of memory devices and computers that are far more powerful and consume less power than today's microelectronic systems.
The advance is part of a quest for electronic circuits that are perhaps one-thousandth the size of today's transistors, which are made lithographically by etching circuits on silicon with light.
In the future, arrays of billions of circuits would self-assemble by means of chemical reactions, which would make individual circuits far less costly. ...
[-sounds a great deal like a brain]
A third source of resistance to the computer model of the mind is the belief that the kind of unpredictable seeming complexity of behavior that is the hallmark of living and thinking things simply can't be generated by the simple sorts of rules that govern the basic operations of even the most complicated machines. How, one might wonder, can you get the truly amazing repertoire of highly variable, environment-sensitive behavior out of nothing more than the repeated application of rules so simple they are comprehensible even to those who never did get chummy with high school algebra?
To help you overcome this kind of resistance, there is beautiful, recent work in Chaos, fractal geometry and cellular automata. It turns out that even very simple equations and rules may yield truly unpredictable behavior - behavior that is impossible for any physically possible computer that will ever exist ever to predict. So the fractals of Chaos and Paradigms are counterexamples to the claim that unpredictable complexity cannot be generated by the simplest rules.
2000 David F. AustinGo to next section: Dualism and Thinking Things
