[New post] The Fine Line Between Life and Not Life
Fernando Kaskais posted: " Lead image: Ryger / Shutterstock If the brain can't tell the difference between fiction and reality, what can? BY PATRICK HOUSE Where does a consciousness end and the rest of the world begin? Where is the line between inside and outside? Bet" WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais
If the brain can't tell the difference between fiction and reality, what can?
BY PATRICK HOUSE
Where does a consciousness end and the rest of the world begin? Where is the line between inside and outside? Between life and not life? Between the parts of the universe that are conscious and those that are not? Between you and not you?
To build up a charge, a gradient, or natural selection, there needs to be some kind of a border, but physics and biology draw their borders differently. (Drop both a pigeon and a bowling ball from a rooftop, for proof.)
In the 1974 film Dark Star, an artificial intelligence is taught a few basics of René Descartes's cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") arguments and, after realizing that its purpose is simply to explode, the AI proceeds to ignore all further human commands and blows up itself, the ship, and the crew. Likewise, as a thought experiment, let us imagine an AI closer to home and given planet-busting nukes that is taught the basics of existentialism and proceeds to become curious about itself. It may start to wonder about the causal chain at the beginning of what feels to it like its thoughts and, realizing that humans only mobilize when catastrophe is imminent, it might give us an ultimatum:
Dear H. sapiens, You have five years to provide a complete description of free will; or, the exact border of Anna K.'s consciousness while she was in surgery, in Los Angeles, in 1996. Or, I blow up Earth.
Warmly, The AI
The AI then provides the experimental details. In five years, it says, the AI will put Anna through a random set of subjective and objective trials, states, and tasks, and we, humanity, must be able to give a complete and total rolling prediction of every single one of Anna's thoughts. The AI agrees that, if this is impossible, it will settle for a statistical distribution of probable or highly likely Anna thoughts instead of an exacting list of them all. If both of these prove impossible, because free will is truly free, the AI adds an allowable success condition: It will settle for an exact, atomic description of where Anna's consciousness ends during her surgery, in 1996, as long as it accurately defines the line between Anna and not Anna during the experiment trials.
Most of Earth thus mobilized toward figuring out what is widely thought to be the easiest problem of the three: the line between Anna and not Anna. At first, an Earth-wide census was collected where almost everybody, no matter how wild or speculative, had their opinions heard. Some, the linguists, noticed that the problem was very similar to what the psychologist William James once posed for language. How, in a written sentence, asked James, does one know where the words end and the sentence begins?1 Perhaps we could prove by analogy, they said, that likewise there are similar borders for brains and consciousnesses if only we could define where the neurons end and the person begins?
If only we could define where the neurons end and the person begins.
Others, the entomologists, noted that we should be able to answer smaller, simpler versions about nature and work our way, so to speak, up. They considered a spider hunting on its web. Does the web count as spider or not spider? The vibrations of the web alert the spider to the existence of something; likewise, we "hear" perturbations in the air that compress airwaves from a focal point far away by virtue of detecting vibrations in the hair cells in our ears.2 Was what the spider does sensing its web's vibrations so very different from what a primate does with the hair cells of the inner ear in order to listen? Is the air not simply a kind of see-through web, a kind of surface on which vibrations travel and information is gleaned? And so, they argued, if we include the ears and the acoustic sensing apparatus as part of Anna's boundaries, should we not also include the web of the spider? Should we thus not also count the electrode that prodded her brain during surgery, since it was able to induce laughter, joy, and mirth no differently than if another part of her brain had done so au naturel?
Why stop there, asked these ideas' detractors, partly enraged. Why not include the trees the web hangs from, too? Or the moon that pulls on tides that evaporate air to rain on the trees to grow the branches from which to hang the web? The Big Bang? Where does one stop?...
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