Wandering with questions, and not caring for the answer

As a graduate student, I was in heaven in the libraries.  I had never seen so many books, magazines, and newspapers in my life in the old country.  And now I had a much bigger problem than ever before: How to decide what to read and what to skip?

I suspect that this situation was the proverbial necessity for which I had to invent a whole new way of reading and understanding.  I had to figure out what was the most important message that I had to quickly scan for and know.  I am not sure if what I have since developed is the best approach to acquiring knowledge and wisdom, but it seems to work good enough for me.

So, I would wander by the book-stacks and smell those papers and pick up something to read.  I always scanned the new arrivals.  And, of course, the journals and the magazines.  Somehow, I never developed the instinct to want to write.  I merely wanted to read, and I enjoyed it.

Those were the bad old days before the web.  Now, more than two decades into the world of web, I have access to even more books, magazines, and newspapers than I could have ever dreamed about.  I continue with my habit of wandering through the cyberspace and hoovering up whatever interests me.

Which is how I ended up at this essay in which a neurologist writes about consciousness:

Over my career, I’ve gathered a neurologist’s working knowledge of the physiology of sensations. I realize neuroscientists have identified neural correlates for emotional responses. Yet I remain ignorant of what sensations and responses are at the level of experience. I know the brain creates a sense of self, but that tells me little about the nature of the sensation of “I-ness.” If the self is a brain-generated construct, I’m still left wondering who or what is experiencing the illusion of being me. Similarly, if the feeling of agency is an illusion, as some philosophers of mind insist, that doesn’t help me understand the essence of my experience of willfully typing this sentence.
Slowly, and with much resistance, it’s dawned on me that the pursuit of the nature of consciousness, no matter how cleverly couched in scientific language, is more like metaphysics and theology. It is driven by the same urges that made us dream up gods and demons, souls and afterlife. The human urge to understand ourselves is eternal, and how we frame our musings always depends upon prevailing cultural mythology. In a scientific era, we should expect philosophical and theological ruminations to be couched in the language of physical processes. We argue by inference and analogy, dragging explanations from other areas of science such as quantum physics, complexity, information theory, and math into a subjective domain. Theories of consciousness are how we wish to see ourselves in the world, and how we wish the world might be.

We continue to struggle with those questions that our ancestors struggled with: How did this all come about? Who am I? How do I know all this is for real and not an illusion? What happens after this "I" that I recognize dies?

Science does not have an answer.  We might want to add "yet" to that previous sentence, but, come on, we won't have a definitive answer for a long, long, long time.  Which means, " in the absence of scientific evidence, all opinions about the mind are in the realm of belief and religion."

What amazes me is that the essay does not even casually mention the Hindu philosophical idea of maya.  Yet, the very idea of maya is explored in the following paragraph in that essay:

According to Daniel Dennett, professor of philosophy at Tufts University and author of Consciousness Explained and many other books on science and philosophy, consciousness is nothing more than a “user-illusion” arising out of underlying brain mechanisms. He argues that believing consciousness plays a major role in our thoughts and actions is the biological equivalent of being duped into believing that the icons of a smartphone app are doing the work of the underlying computer programs represented by the icons. He feels no need to postulate any additional physical component to explain the intrinsic qualities of our subjective experience.

Illusions. Maya.

For his part, Dennett is an outspoken atheist and fervent critic of the excesses of religion. “I have absolutely no doubt that secular and scientific vision is right and deserves to be endorsed by everybody, and as we have seen over the last few thousand years, superstitious and religious doctrines will just have to give way.” As the basic premise of atheism is to deny that for which there is no objective evidence, he is forced to avoid directly considering the nature of purely subjective phenomena. Instead he settles on describing the contents of consciousness as illusions, resulting in the circularity of using the definition of mental states (illusions) to describe the general nature of these states.

If we want to understand, and argue about, climate change, well, science and the scientific method is what I will go with.  If we want to understand, and argue about, income inequality, I will lay out my preferred values and, therefore, my version of the social contract.  But, when we want to understand those eternal questions, hey, it turns out that your story is as good--or bad--as mine.

I will continue to wander the virtual book-stacks and contemplate on that big question: Who am I?  I know well that I will never find the answer.  But, the fun is in thinking through the question; it is not really about the answer.

Source

The big question of the year is on ... the machines that think

No, not my question.  Though, I have obsessed enough over it, even right here in this blog.

It is Edge's annual event--the big question for the year.  For 2015, it is: What do you think about machines that think?

As always, it is an impressive lineup of thinkers who respond to that question.  The ideas there are way more than my limited understanding capacity can handle.  So, I picked my way through that intellectual smorgasbord.

I decided that I would read contributions from non-white males.  Why?  This is a field that has been the domain of white males.  Slowly females and other males are cracking through it all and, thus, I figured it might be interesting to read their perspectives.

Even that was one too many people.  I figured I would develop another filter based on the names that I read: there were two Marias and one Mary.  So, hey, responses by three Marys.  There was one Indian name; so, of course, yes to that.  And then one of my all-time favorite polymaths ever: Freeman Dyson.

I had a game plan.  I went in.

First up, the Indian, Satyajit Das, a "former banker."
I read his piece, re-read it, and wondered why he was in the lineup.  A rambling, broad, blah response.

Will Mary save me?
Nope. More blah!

I bet that this Maria will have something profound; after all, I have often read her blog-posts and they have always been insightful.

Thinking is not mere computation—it is also cognition and contemplation, which inevitably lead to imagination. Imagination is how we elevate the real toward the ideal, and this requires a moral framework of what is ideal. Morality is predicated on consciousness and on having a self-conscious inner life rich enough to contemplate the question of what is ideal.
The famous aphorism often attributed to Einstein—"imagination is more important than knowledge"—is thus only interesting because it exposes the real question worth contemplating: not that of artificial intelligence but that of artificial imagination.
Of course, imagination is always "artificial" in the sense of being concerned with the un-real or trans-real—of transcending reality to envision alternatives to it—and this requires a capacity for holding uncertainty. But the algorithms that drive machine computation thrive on goal-oriented executions, in which there is no room for uncertainty—"if this, then that" is the antithesis of the imagination, which lives in the unanswered and often, vitally, unanswerable realm of "what if?" As Hannah Arendt once wrote, to lose our capacity for asking such unanswerable questions would be to "lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded." 

Score!

Off to the other Maria then.  What does the Caltech professor has to say?

I for one, am more concerned about humans who drop thinking or are brainwashed, than smart thinking machines taking over.

I, too, worry about humans who are ready and willing to be brainwashed and do not care to think for themselves.  Go on, professor.

 I foresee the emergence of hybrid human-machine chimeras: human-born beings augmented with new machine abilities that enhance all or most of their human capacities, pleasures and psychological needs. To the point that thinking might be rendered irrelevant and strictly speaking unnecessary. That might provide the ordinary thinking humans a better set of servants they have been looking for in machines. 

Oh, no!  This is the kind of a scenario that worries me.

Finally, Freeman Dyson.  I can always count on him to be clear and direct.  No blah. No unnecessary qualifiers.  No hedging.  A wonderful thinker.  Will he let me down?  I hope not.

Turns out that Dyson had the shortest response of all, which I provide you in its entirety:

I do not believe that machines that think exist, or that they are likely to exist in the foreseeable future. If I am wrong, as I often am, any thoughts I might have about the question are irrelevant.
If I am right, then the whole question is irrelevant.

Awesome!  I knew that they guy would be direct.  Maybe two generations from now, we will find out Dyson was way wrong.  I don't care.  I love the way he clearly articulates his thoughts based on a remarkable knowledge-base.

Here's to hoping that "nature cannot be fooled."

By now, you know where this is from, right?