The Chicken or The Egg
Of course, just having a lot of stuff in a system doesn’t make it alive, it just makes it a data store. Being self-aware means synthesizing and finding meaning in it, and finding meaning is what humans do. In fact, we’re at times too good at it — an evolutionary consequence from a time in which mistaking a rustle in the grass for a hungry sabertooth might have saved our life.
However, the brain has a curious quality. The process that enables that underlying data processing mechanism is consciousness, a process driven by our emotional response to our environment. At the same time consciousness enables the data processing, the data in turn gives rise to consciousness.
On the internet that doesn’t make sense because we can’t rely on consciousness to drive that process — consciousness is what we’re expecting to emerge from the complexity before it can process anything.
You might imagine the blogs, videos, and likes represent part of our collective memory and experience as a species. The mechanics behind each system we think of as “ideas,” “notions,” or even “memes,” reach across networks to connect to similar nodes of information that are decoupled from the actual content of data points themselves. There are a lot of videos of cats doing funny things (content in the data), so we can deduce humans have a particular love for both cats and laughter (knowledge synthesized from the data).
In the brain, whenever a connection like that is made, a memory, experience, or idea forms that might become a little slice of potential consciousness. Those links where synapses deliver content combine until those same connections contain meaning or learning. However, something frustratingly elusive still makes you alive — and the internet not. Something gives you the power to process information and make sense of it.
However, looking for some magic power that separates life from nonlife might be the wrong approach. Instead, the emergent behavior of consciousness might be a lockstep process. As the amount of data grows and generates awareness of it, awareness of it might generate ever richer (and more) data, one driving the other.
Our brains got this large because of the more nuanced way we evolved to navigate our environment, and the more power we evolved to navigate our environment likewise inflated the size of our brains. Each property caused and was caused by the other equally.
It seems obvious the “graded” ability to process information is rudimentary in a roundworm (or a dandelion, or even a rock) and gets more complex the closer to primates and humans you get on the evolutionary tree, generating ever-increasing levels of nuance in self-awareness.
A World Of Distributed Processing
If information processing arises as a natural consequence of data complexity, maybe every laptop, smartphone, or Internet of Things device does its share of information processing just like every other physical process in nature.
Such a phenomenon might even be behind a kind of natural imperative to process information, where complexity spontaneously generates data synthesis just like matter generates the force of gravity.
Why should we think so? Maybe because of evidence that the brain seems to contain a compulsion to work, its ability to do so even when it’s severely damaged or malformed quite astonishing.
A young Chinese woman once went to a hospital with dizziness and nausea; she reported that she had been a late bloomer for walking and speaking as a child but otherwise led a normal life. Doctors were shocked when a CT scan revealed she was completely missing a cerebellum, an area mainly concerned with movement, balance, and our ability to learn motor functions like speech. Without it, the processing of those functions had apparently been taken over and were being performed adequately by other parts of the patient’s brain.
Scientists and engineers designed the internet to do something similar, recruiting whatever widely dispersed resources were available for processing and data transport. By creating a robust network, a Soviet nuclear attack couldn’t bring the whole system to a halt with one strike or by destroying a major data thoroughfare.
A great example of shared data processing in the early web age was SETI@Home. Originally a screen saver, it’s an application you can run on your PC that crunches data from radio satellite readings to look for signs of alien life, reporting the findings back to the University of California, Berkeley-based project.
You don’t know what data it’s crunching or how (and you may not care), what’s important is that instead of UC Berkeley or NASA or anyone else using their own internal computing power to process the massive data set to be sifted through, SETI borrows a little RAM from millions of computers concurrently, harnessing the synapses of the internet to delegate the data processing. As a model, it would outperform even the most advanced and expensive single supercomputer ever built because of sheer volume.
Like the internet, the brain has no central command post. We “feel” executive-level pattern recognition over all that data — that’s the “you” — you recognize inside from moment to moment. Physically, there’s no brain region where all those sparks come together to form a cohesive narrative of what you know. All the functions we associate with both computing and thinking (memory storage and retrieval, data processing and even diagnostic maintenance) are decentralized; everywhere and nowhere.
Just A Matter Of Time?
So, if Davies and others are correct and functionalism is the driving paradigm of consciousness, all we have to do is calculate the magic number — the point at which a system reaches critical complexity and says, “I think, therefore I am” (and hopefully not launching nuclear weapons in the process).
If we knew how many neurons, synapses, and electroreceptors existed in the Cro-Magnon or Australopithecine brain when she first looked down at herself and paraphrased Rodan, wouldn’t we be able to work out the due date? Needn’t we only take account of the PCs, sensors and phones connected to the internet and the amount of data they’re distributing, and the appointed day and time would reveal itself?
Might we then welcome the first true artificial intelligence into the world like a new baby — albeit one with the collected wisdom of a good part of humanity already on instant recall?
Davies himself equates life to a state not unlike a microprocessor, giving further weight to the “spontaneous awakening” of organic life in a complex system. Having wrote about the possibility of life in complex networks decades ago, he agrees the rise of the internet is as likely a candidate as any.
“There are two schools of thought about the origin of life,” he believes. “One is the threshold effect, like a gas bursting into flame at a critical temperature. The other is that there is no clear dividing line between alive and not alive. I’ve always inclined to the former, but identifying the threshold isn’t easy!
“I believe the key to life is digital or discrete information — the cell is a supercomputer. What distinguishes life from nonliving complexity is “autonomy” — an organism must comply with the laws of physics and chemistry, but in a living system it’s able to harness them to pursue an information-encoded agenda.
“So, I think there is a threshold at which the information processing embeds this crucial quality of autonomy. That threshold presumably has something to do with the system encoding a representation of itself and its environment. If the key to life and autonomy is information, then a sufficiently complex information processing system could certainly develop “a life of its own.”
Enter The Digital Brain
All of which leaves us with only more questions. If the internet were suddenly a living organism, a mind spanning the world with an implanted memory and countless nuances of opinions, experience, and information (plenty of it dangerous, conflicting, and just plain wrong), how would we know, and what would the ramifications be? Would it be a well-behaved child with a conscience telling it right from wrong?
Would it be full of mischief, bringing down passenger airliners midflight and causing stock markets to crash for the fun of it? That would depend on its personality. We’re born with a personality in our genes even when the entire contents of our consciousness consist of crying for food and wanting our mother. Where would it get one from?
Even then, the gradual absorption of information from the world around us reshapes and affects our essential personality. How would it affect a self-aware being that switched on with all that information already right there in its circuits?
Would it think drinking bleach was an effective defense against COVID? Look at glossy PR from the oil and coal industries and believe they’re really committed to a greener future? Believe the Kardashians are great ambassadors for humanity simply because of how visible they are in the media?
Even if it was eager for guidance, who’d be responsible (in both senses of the word) enough to do so? How would we teach it right from wrong when we still slaughter each other in the thousands trying to work that very question out for ourselves?
Might it simply confirm that a human is nothing but molecules acting and reacting according to quantum mechanics and general relativity, with emotion, self-awareness, and free will just illusions bubbling up from all that bioelectricity?
Or are we indeed lumps of clay imbued with a mysterious quality we call “life” like the world’s religions suppose, a substance or field of energy we’ll never understand using chemistry or psychology. Has something unknowable been breathed into us by a divine being, properties like “soul” and “love” existing on some other plane no microscope or spectrometer can ever help us see?
If the internet or some other complex system ever comes to life, it’ll prompt the biggest question of all.
What are we?
More From Brain World
- Brain Meets Machine: The Art and Science of BCIs (Brain-Computer Interfaces)
- The Future of Artificial Intelligence
- How We Got Our Conscious Brains: An Interview with Dr. Joseph LeDoux
- Human Brain Transplants — Are They Possible?
- Memories in the Night: How Your Brain Comes Alive While You Sleep
- What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
