Despite the advances of neuroscience, we’re no closer to understanding how the physical brain generates consciousness than we ever were. What if it’s actually a far simpler mechanism than we imagined, and even more intriguing, what if we already have a model for it?
Drill right down and a brain is comprised of a huge number of very simple parts, many of them “dumb” nodes whose only real power is in their hyperconnectivity and seamless communication with each other. Put enough of them together and you get a structure like a hippocampus, a temporal lobe or a medulla, jigsaw pieces that can encode memory of past experiences, apply emotional context, or imagine things that don’t exist, all in the viewpoint of a self-aware observer.
Does the idea of a huge number of simple parts remind you of anything in the invented world? Almost every PC, mobile device, server, or data center on Earth is connected nowadays, and they’re all single units that contribute data storage, energy, and processing power to a system that only exists as a principle rather than an entity, but which is nevertheless coherent.
Just like a brain generates a conscious being inside it, could the internet do the same thing, synthesizing the disparate but combined knowledge of the digital age and emerging as a discrete consciousness all its own? If it did, what would that teach us about the way brains do it?
What Is Life?
Nowhere can you see more examples, prophecies, or warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence than literature and film. From “Westworld” to “Hardware,” “Blade Runner” to “The Stepford Wives,” and “Frankenstein” to “2001,” pop culture is replete with the idea machines will develop souls and try to oppress or destroy humanity.
But to figure out if it could ever happen (the intelligence, not the mass killings), we need to take a step back. Attributing intelligence, creativity, self-awareness, or similar “human” qualities leads us to the question of exactly what a human is.
We’re alive, sure, but what does that even mean? We assume chimpanzees are alive and self-aware, as are dogs, cats, fish, and every other animal down to single celled eukaryotic organisms in decreasing levels of complexity. There’s even ongoing debate about plant consciousness, but nobody would describe a computer or robot as being “alive.”
Maybe that’s a position we need to rethink. If we choose between staying in to watch Netflix or going out to dinner, the decision is based on countless imperceptible nuances of memory, experience, sensory input, emotion, and nervous cues (neurons in your gut might be telling your brain you’re hungry, for instance). They feel subjective, but, in reality, they’re just a swarm of influences in your consciousness that generate a decision.
Those mental artifacts are simply data points, and if we have enough computing power, disk space, and software architecture to program them into an AI agent, couldn’t it similarly make what looks like a subjective choice?
Or just look at the other properties of what we call “life.” As the dictionary defines it; “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.” Ever seen a computer controlled robot arm build a car on a production line or the 3D printer designed to make copies of itself? It might not be biological reproduction, but in principle it’s just like us ingesting energy (food) to produce the building blocks of the next generation (gametes) and create a copy (a baby).
Even computer malware is called “viruses” because of their biological-seeming behavior of reproducing or copying themselves and moving through an ecology of host organisms. We’ve all got that friend who dropped her mobile face down on concrete or into the pool, precipitating its “death” in a very real sense.
Maybe we shouldn’t differentiate between living and inanimate at all. In “Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications Of The Discovery Of Extraterrestrial Life,” Dr. Paul Davies, a cosmologist, suggested “life” is simply a quality that switches on when a given system achieves an (as yet unidentified) critical mass of complexity.
It’s related to a theory called “functionalism.” If you slowly replaced every tiny organic piece of a human brain with an identical piece of silicon or graphene, eventually you’ll end up with a completely inorganic brain but theoretically with the same living, feeling, conscious person still inside.
As Davies theorizes: “It’s not what the brain is made of, but how it is put together, that creates consciousness. In principle, it would be possible to build a machine that could be said to have a mind or to be conscious in the same way as a human being. If you accept this picture, then you are obliged to suppose that human consciousness is an emergent property: it is something that emerges in a physical system when it reaches a certain level of complexity.”
The Complexity Credo
Information is power — it’s an axiom you can see in action across not just computing by physics generally. An IT executive famously said over 30 years ago that “the network is the computer,” meaning that it was connections between information, not powerful computers, that was going to power IT.
Here’s an example. There was never any top-down economic business case for so many people to start blogs back when they exploded in the mid 2000s. The low barrier to entry and compelling promise of unfettered self-expression meant adoption was powered from the hive as millions of users signed up. That’s bottom-up processing, the same way huge number of axons, synapses, and dendrites in the brain combine spontaneously to give us what looks like a top-down, executive function — consciousness.
Dr. Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, similarly equates consciousness with integrated information. In his view, information is abundant in the universe because it’s present everywhere there’s physical causation (something every square inch of the universe is filled with to some degree).
Therefore (to put it in slightly oversimplified terms) he thinks consciousness is as pervasive as information and that almost every physical process contains a piece. In his example even a photodiode, a semiconductor junction device that converts light into an electrical current, has consciousness — exactly one bit of it.
If Tononi’s right, sentience isn’t a master plan by a central controller that enables and wields it, it’s the complex interconnectivity of small, simple, much more numerous parts of the machine lower down in the hierarchy. In fact, in the brain there are no more complex parts higher in the hierarchy and, come to that, no hierarchy. There are just cells.
Think of an ant colony. There’s no president or congressperson ant dictating or guiding the success of the colony from on high — even the queen is quite passive, used for breeding rather than command. Somehow the actions of hundreds of thousands of individual animals (“dumb” in the sense that each one only really does one thing — find food, ward off attack, or protect the queen) generate what looks like an incredibly smart system of top-down operation, a sentient superorganism.
As Complex as There Is
There’s no denying it, brains are hugely complex — but technology might be catching up. Dr. Christof Koch, a neuroscientist, claimed in his book “Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist,” that there were a thousand times more connected transistors in the world than there were synapses in the brain.
Wired co-founder and technology guru Kevin Kelly estimated there were a trillion hyperlinks between webpages. Even though there are 100 times the number of synapses in the brain he pointed out that the internet, unlike the brain, was already doubling in size every few years. That was just websites — today they’re a drop in the ocean amid social media posts and comments, Internet of Things data and other information signals.
Of course, we have to take other criteria about data management like speeds in information flow and the difference between serial and parallel processing into account. In a lot of cases, comparing such measures in brains versus computer networks makes no sense anyway. Still, according to the above estimates, the number of connections across the internet already outstrips those of a brain by several orders of magnitude — more than enough to “come to life” if complexity is all that’s required.
However, if humans are alive and the internet isn’t, we have to acknowledge there may be something else needed to account for the difference. Does functionalism only work if it’s tied to specific materials like proteins or acids? Is the missing piece some substance we haven’t identified? Is it an age-old concept like soul or spirit, completely undetectable in the physical world apart from the emotional quotient of their effects in complex beings?
In the absence of any scientific proof of God, the soul, or some elusive “life” particle, you have to admit similarities about the way nature “does” complexity are compelling. One study published in Scientific Reports outlined the way physical laws that govern growth might apply to everything from our brain to the internet and the way we trust people. In another study published in Neural Computation, researchers found the algorithm that manages traffic flow across the internet is also at work in the brain.
So, if the internet reaches that tipping point of complexity (if not volume of connections) brains did far back in our biological past, might it one day blink, shake its head and awaken?
