The conclusion is that there is no conclusion
Since my last essay, I have been stuck in a funk on how to produce the next piece of coherent work on my chosen topic. By the way, I did not even think of fleshing out what my chosen topic was until recently. As far as I can explain it, I have been writing this series of essays to clear my mind of the fog of what useful knowledge is. Maybe I have just been rambling on Integrated Information Theory all this time without realising.
Many times, with me, it is visceral disagreement with some idea that wakes me up and forces me to push past procrastination. I stumbled on an article (https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer) which aims to be a rebuttal of the computational explanation of the mind. It even ventures that thinking of researching along this premise is leading generations of scientists astray — a bit like the centuries of science wasted on the geocentric model of the cosmos. The article enumerates the many false dawns of mind-science and equates Von Neuman’s understanding of the brain as an information processor (the current consensus) as the latest in that sequence.
I encourage you to read it for context but let me tackle the central argument — the “uniqueness problem” which talks about how one mind experiences the same thing in a unique and non-replicable fashion when compared to another mind. This is then used as a crutch to elevate the mind to a level above contemporary computers which can “exactly” replicate outputs given inputs. As a false dichotomy and, I dare say, pseudo-intellectualism, this line of argument is what leads people astray.
It is easy to understand that information processing has a clear beginning and end in a contemporary “machine-computer” — time-bounded steps that you and I can point to and say that program has ended and here is what we have as result. In a “human-computer” there is a debatable end to processing — is it after each action that the human does, or is it after each “utilisable” action (where utility depends on the subject of the action) or is it after death when we tally the “legacy” of the “human computational process”. Maybe it never ends and centuries after we are still trying to “decolonise” the world from the actions during the life of some arbitrary “human-computer”.
Now, I propose we flip this on the head and instead of jumping to the conclusion that the human mind is not a computer processing information we treat this as a “halting” problem where we are still trying to determine if the human computational process has ended or not. This resolves all the angst here without having to summon some deus ex machina.
As to the engineering problem of housing a human level mind in hardware, the article talks of the complexity of doing that given the astronomical permutations of information at the edges of each neuron inside the brain. This again comes because the author attributes divine status to the “uniqueness problem” but every moment we live, the impulses in the huge neural network that is our brain change and hence the brain is in a different configuration every moment. Any uniqueness is therefore as illusory as the concept of an atomic brain devoid of “moments”.
The program that is the consciousness chains these moments in a coherent and continuous narrative (and probably revises experiential history as a function of future utility). That is just a shallow program that can be recreated in some other substrate given it has the same rough computational power, root memories and external reinforcements to “adjust” the new consciousness. In the end, as long as the interactions with the new consciousness pass the litmus test, the engineering problem would be considered solved.
When we think of the wider environment that houses information processes, we have to see that the environment is itself a process — an evolving network that spins out new processes that in turn terraform over previous terraforming. As this is getting a bit Douglas Adamsy, I come to the conclusion that we won’t have a conclusion as we are processes that will end just at the moment that we eventually produce any conclusion that would satisfy ourselves. However, we have to keep on processing as that’s the only thing we can do!