An Expedient Mind: PREFACE

AN EXPEDIENT MIND

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PREFACE

A Note to Student Readers
This book is a personal statement about consciousness. If you are a student, and you are writing an essay on that topic, and you want use some of the material you find here, then you are welcome to do so, provided you observe certain rules.
(1) You must acknowledge the source, including acknowledgement of my copyright.
(2) You must make clear which bits are direct quotes.
(3) If you disagree with my thesis, explain why you disagree.
(4) The views expressed here are the speculations of one person. They are not the received wisdom of the scientific community. It is okay to use the ideas here as the basis for a discussion, but I do not make any claim for it, which is stronger than that, and you should not do so either.

What this book is about
In the first part of the book I will describe a mechanism. This mechanism is something I have invented. The claim I make, is that this mechanism would be able to do certain things, which are also done by the human brain, particularly with regard to being conscious. A daft and presumptuous idea, I know - but wait.
There is no suggestion that the way it does those things, is physically similar to the way the human brain operates. But it gets the same results. In that respect it is rather like a pocket calculator. When a person and a calculator both add two plus two, they get the same result. But no one would suggest that they arrive at that result, in the same way.
In due course, when I have described the mechanism in sufficient detail, I will examine the implications. I will ask the reader to suppose that we could build such a machine and that it would operate as I say it would. We can then consider three alternative views.

(1) It is not possible to construct a machine which could behave exactly like a human being.

(2) Even if a machine like that could be constructed, it would still not be conscious of what it was doing.

(3) If such a machine was constructed, the fact that it behaved exactly like a human being, would be proof positive that it was fully conscious of what it was doing.

Many people will duck the issue raised by options (2) and (3) by opting for position (1). I hope, however, that after reading the account here, of my "consciousness" system, they may be a little less confident on that point. A number of philosophers, who have written extensively in this field, and who are perhaps cautious about what might be achieved by artificial intelligence techniques, have opted instead for the position expressed by (2). I suspect that, for them, it's a kind of insurance policy with which (come what may) they can protect their non-physicalist view of consciousness. If that is their hope, however, they will be disappointed. In the discussion, and in one of the "arguments" sections, later in this book, I have shown that that idea - the separation of the physical mechanism from a supposed non-physical consciousness which plays no causal role in the mechanism - leads directly to a logical contradiction. If that is the case then (2) must be wrong. Furthermore, the negation of (2) implies (3). And as Sherlock Holmes once said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, my dear Watson, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Regardless of whether a consciousness system can be constructed or not, this argument proves that consciousness must be an active part in the physical mechanism of the brain.

Many years ago, the mathematician Alan Turing described what he called the "Universal Turing Machine" (or UTM). So far as I am aware, no one has ever tried to construct a UTM, but it is not hard to imagine what it would look like. It would have a handle to turn. It would have a huge number of cogwheels and an endless stream of paper tape. The machine would be able to pull the tape through itself, in both directions. From that tape (and on to it), the machine could read and write bits of information. It would, I guess, look like the antique mangle with which my mother used to wring the water from the clothes she was washing, as they passed, from a tub full of soap-suds, to one with clean rinsing water. But Turing's machine would be much bigger and much more complicated.
The UTM is not merely quaint. It is also, as Turing demonstrated, astonishing. Because of the way it is designed, a UTM is capable, at a very slow speed, of grinding out any calculation for which the rules can be written down in a sequence of computational steps. That qualification is necessary, even although no one has ever demonstrated conclusively that a computation, which did not meet these requirements, can possibly exist. What Turing gave us, however, was not a practical means of doing these calculations. What he gave us, was the means to examine theoretically, the properties of all well-behaved computations. He gave us the means to discover what is computationally possible and what is not. He gave us the foundations of computer science.
What I am offering in this book, is the description of a mechanism which is, in some ways, a bit like the UTM. Like the UTM it is too complicated and clumsy to be amenable to practical implementation. But like the UTM, it is also a mechanism which makes it easy to understand what it is doing. All of its components are individually very simple. It is the way these components are put together, and the vast amount of information it needs to process, which makes it complicated. It is a theoretical model, which I hope will allow discussion of consciousness, and help clear away the obfuscation which is often associated with the topic and which is often used to hide the false premises and circular logic of some very inadequate arguments.

How the book will be presented
The mechanism comes first. Discussion of its implications comes later. And at the end I will discuss, and refute, some arguments which have been widely publicised. There will also be an appendix which will contain much of the detail which I have omitted from the initial description of the mechanism. Those omissions (and the relegation of some topics to the addendum) is my attempt to avoid the presence of the trees, obscuring a view of the forest.
I choose to describe the mechanism first, without all the detail, for good reason. Having read some popular attempts (by Searle, Penrose and others) to debunk the very idea of artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness, I have become convinced that, underlying these false arguments, is a naive incredulity that any mechanism could achieve the necessary level of sophistication. These writers have, in some cases offered their own version of how an artificial machine might try to tackle the problems of thinking and (appearing to be) conscious. It is scarcely surprising that they are able to show the inadequacy of such systems because the systems which they describe, could never ever be able to perform as they claim. I want to torpedo that lack of understanding before it leaves harbour.

Preparation of the Text
At this time of writing (December 2006) this online book is incomplete. My target date for completion is some time in the autumn of 2007 but I am not sure that it will ever be really complete. Always there will be additional ideas and modifications, because I find it impossible to put this topic down. But what is available now, is, I think, coherent. It comes to a conclusion.
Over the coming months I will add new chapters, edit existing chapters, insert hyperlinks to extra sections, and so on. Inevitably there will be some omissions and some trailing ends. If a reader detects, what he (or she) feels is an oversight or a mistake, then I would be grateful if that reader would send me an email about his/her concern. I promise I will address the problem. The email address is at the bottom of this page.

But why "An Expedient Mind"?
The use of that word "expedient" comes from the pragmatic philosophy of William James who wrote "The true is only the expedient way of our thinking". It also reflects the pragmatic philosophical position, which the development of my consciousness mechanism, has compelled me to adopt. And that is one of the important aspects of this effort to devise a mechanism of consciousness. It forces you to think about what you mean when you use words like "exist" and "truth". You have to come up with an answer to those questions, because if you are trying to teach a computer or similar system to think and understand these concepts, then you have to be able to explain it all very clearly indeed. Computers, bless them, don't understand it when we wave our hands in the air and waffle. Actually, humans don't understand either, but they often pretend that they do, and they often think that they do, even when they do not. All that kind of stuff, however, will be explained at the end of the book.

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