The second approach, perhaps to avoid the above problem, is called “reverse engineering of the brain” and it confronted problems of even greater magnitude since it consisted of dissecting the entire system of neurons in the brain into miniscule slices no more than 50 nanometers wide (a nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter) in order to examine each of them under an electron microscope to “reconstruct” their function. Illustrating the enormity of the task, after producing a million slices
a scanning electron microscope takes a photograph of each, with a speed and resolution approaching a billion pixels per second. The amount of data spewing from the electron microscope is staggering, about 1,000 trillion bytes of data, enough to fill a storage room just for a single fruit fly brain. Processing this data, by tediously reconstructing the 3-D wiring of every single neuron of the fly brain, would take about five years. To get a more accurate picture of the fly brain, you then have to slice many more fly brains. (p. 107; italics added)
Although “the human brain has 1 billion neurons more than the fruit fly,” it was nevertheless assumed
that sometime by mid-century, we will have both the computer power to simulate the human brain and also crude maps of the brain’s neural architecture. But it may take until late in this century before we fully understand human thought or can create a machine that can duplicate the function of the human brain. (p. 108; italics added)
Here the distinction between ‘simulate’ and ‘duplicate’ seems to be recognized but not considered. Moreover, since we still do not “understand” how the chemical-electrical neural processes of the human brain produce human awareness, perception, memory, emotions, and thought, etc., it is questionable whether “constructing” the brain with a wholly electronic computer would actually create a “duplicate” of the brain that could function as the original brain.
Among those creating robots there is a consensus that, although in an entirely different way, they can be programmed to “exceed us in intelligence.” There is considerable disagreement as to how long this will take, but not that it can be done. According to Kaku a “large part of the problem with these scenarios is that there is no universal consensus as to the meaning of consciousness. . . . Nowhere in science have so many devoted so much to create so little” (pp. 110–11). He then offers what he believes are the three capacities essential for being conscious (p. 111):
l. sensing and recognizing the environment
2. self-awareness
3. planning for the future by setting goals and plans, that is, simulating the future and plotting strategy.
I would agree that these are essential aspects, but I do not see what the difficulty has been in attaining a consensus as to the nature of consciousness. When one considers the difference between being awake and being in a dreamless sleep or being conscious and then made unconscious by a sedative, blow, or death, we have distinct examples of being conscious and unconscious: in the former cases one is completely aware while in the latter cases one is entirely unaware and unconscious.
There is a difference between the awareness (as minimal as it is) of a fruit fly and a worm and the absence of any awareness in a rose or a rock in that the former involves a sensory content while the latter does not. Of course there are degrees of consciousness, but if one is just sensing, smelling, or feeling one is in a state of minimal awareness. Even dreaming is a kind of pseudoconsciousness in which one is aware that the dream is frightening or pleasant, but that one has no control over it because it is entirely a product of the brain disconnected to one’s normal self-awareness and behavioral responses.
That an automaton can be programmed to respond as if it had feelings and conscious awareness or to simulate either is not sufficient to consider it actually having either. That Deep Blue could defeat Gary Kasparov in a chess match was not an indication that Deep Blue was conscious of the moves it took to defeat the world champion, as Kaku acknowledges. I am not sure whether “self awareness is easier to achieve” as a condition of consciousness than his other two criteria as he claims, but I certainly agree with his assessment of the current state of robotics.
Today, AI researchers are clueless about how to duplicate all these processes in a robot. Most throw up their hands and say that somehow huge networks of computers will show “emergent phenomena” in the same way that order sometimes spontaneously coalesces from chaos. When asked precisely how these emergent phenomena will create consciousness, most roll their eyes to the heavens. (p. 114)
As previously stated, since it is still a complete mystery as to how the neural discharges in the brain produce consciousness, it is not surprising that AI researchers do not know how electrical circuits, transistors, and computer chips, without any chemical components or regulators, can duplicate or create consciousness. Moreover, while we know that organic evolution produces “emergent phenomena,” there is no indication that purely electrical circuits do! When discussing the tremendous progress that has been made in computer science the word “evolution” has been used (or misused), although technical advances have none of the emergent features of evolution that is a biological process.
One of the recent breakthroughs in genetics was the discovery of the crucial role the intercellular fluids, composing most of the genome, play in producing the proteins that direct the functions of the individual genes by turning their activities on and off. So is it plausible that even the extraordinary computational advances in artificial intelligence, utilizing only electrical circuits and transistors, can compensate for the lack of these biomolecular, physiochemical, and genetic processes to create robots that will exceed humans in conscious awareness, self-consciousness, intelligence, and creativity? I doubt it.
Roboticists describe the use of prosthesis, inserting electronic devises into the body to restore hearing and vision or replacing amputated limbs with artificial limbs, as heralding a new era in robotics that will integrate electronic devises with biology to create robots with more humanlike capabilities. Kaku cites the example of a twenty-two-year-old young man who had his hand amputated and replaced by “four motors and forty sensors” connected to the nerves in his arm that relay the hand signals to his brain enabling him to “feel” that he had sensations in his hand and control of the movements of his fingers (cf., p. 126).
As remarkable as this is, it must not be overlooked that the sensations the young man was feeling in his fingers and his control of them ultimately depended on and occurred in his brain, not in the prosthetic devices that only transmitted the original nerve impulses. People who have had limbs amputated report that they feel sensations in the missing limb, indicating that the sensations are produced by the brain even though felt in the limb—a reminder that the brain is an organ, not a computer.
Yet computer scientists, in a kind of science-fictional world, worry about the day when robots will be produced that are smarter than we are as if computational power were the sole factor in human intelligence. They imagine a world in which the human brain can be duplicated in an electronic system consisting wholly of electrical currents, transistors, and computer chips which, when implanted into a robotic skull, can create a human robot. As reported by Kaku,
Robot pioneer Hans Moravec . . . explained to me how we might merge with our robot creations by undergoing a brain operation that replaces each neuron of our brain with a transistor inside a robot. The operation starts when we lie beside a robot body without a brain. A robotic surgeon takes every cluster of gray matter in our brain, duplicates it transistor by transistor, connects the neurons to the transistors, and puts the transistors into the empty robot skull. As each cluster of neurons is duplicated in the robot, it is discarded. (p. 130)
Although the tremendous advances in artificial intelligence that disproved the original skepticism about its future achievements should make one cautious about denying its present predictions, I still find this projection, based on dubious assumptions, difficult to understand and accept. Even the Oxford Dictionary defines a nerve
impulse as just “a signal transmitted along a nerve fibre consisting of a wave of depolarization,” implying it is simply an electronic process. But that overlooks the role of axons and dendrites in connecting the nerve cells via synapses and the neurophysiological and biochemical conditions that facilitate the processes that hardly seems replicable merely by electric circuits and transistors. (For an excellent description of how the various chemicals, hormones, and glands in our brains influence our brain processes and mental states see Joshua Reynolds’s excellent account in 20/20 Brain Power.)130
According to Kaku’s reported explanation by Hans Moravec, “[a] robotic surgeon takes every cluster of gray matter in our brain, duplicates it transistor by transistor, connects the neurons to the transistors, and puts the transistors into the empty robot skull” while “[we] are fully conscious as this delicate operation takes place.” But maintaining that “we are fully conscious during the process” this makes the unlikely assumption that consciousness can be maintained solely by a set of transistors when we do not even know how the normal brain produces it! Also, if the neurons constituting the grey matter in our brains are duplicated by transistors, why must they be reconnected to neurons?
Continuing the description of the operation, Kaku states that following the operation, our brain has been entirely installed into the body of a robot. “Not only do we have a robotic body, we have also the benefits of a robot: immortality in superhuman bodies that are perfect in appearance. This will not be possible in the twenty-first century, but becomes an option in the twenty-second” (pp. 130–31). But this assumes that all life functions can be duplicated entirely by electrical transistors lacking all our neurophysiological functions. After all, a robotic body is simply made of metal and silicon completely lacking in the life-giving functions that evolution has endowed humans with!
Moreover, since robots are not capable of reproducing sexually, even if we were “perfect in appearance” what would it matter if we do not have to seek mates to reproduce or even have feelings of sexual attraction and love? Not only would we have lost the happiness of having loving parents and a loving wife, we could never experience the joy and tribulation of having children. And since all who became robots would be immortal, eventually there would be the same group of robotic humans existing forever which, rather than appealing, would seem rather boring since it would be lacking any of the experiences that make human life meaningful, as well as despairing at times. He concludes with this bizarre description:
In the ultimate scenario, we discard our clumsy bodies entirely and eventually evolve into pure software programs that encode our personalities. We “download” our entire personalities into a computer . . . [that] behaves as if you are inside its memory, since it has encoded all your personality quirks inside its circuits. We become immortal, but spend our time trapped inside a computer, interacting with other “people” (that is other software programs) in some gigantic cyberspace/virtual reality. (p. 131; [brackets and italics added])
Can one imagine allowing oneself to be reduced to a software program so that one exists inside a computer? What would be the advantage of existing—I can’t say “living” because it would not be living in any recognizable way—under such conditions? As a computer program would one have any freedom or control over one’s existence? How could we react to other people as mutual “software programs”? Apparently some robots would remain existent to do the downloading, but humans would be “trapped,” as Kaku states, in computers. It reads like pure fantasy but roboticists are supposed to be scientists, not fabricators. Being immortal under such conditions would make it even more horrifying. I was relieved when I read Kaku’s conclusion: “Some science fiction writers have relished the idea that we will all become detached from our bodies and exist as immoral beings of pure intelligence living inside some computer, contemplating deep thoughts. But who would want to live like that?” (p. 132). No one I am sure; I couldn’t agree more!
Turning now to a another recent development: throughout the past it was thought that nonphysical spiritual entities such as the “soul,” “life force,” Newton’s “subtle spirit,” Henri Bergson’s “élan vitale” were the creative powers in living organisms and thus the force behind evolution culminating in human consciousness, feelings, and thoughts. It wasn’t until 1953 when the biophysicist Francis Crick and the geneticist James Watson, aided by the biophysicist Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin’s revealing X-ray crystallographic images of the double helical structure of the DNA, that they were able to eliminate such spiritual explanations. In an article, “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” they exclaimed that it was the molecular compound, known as DNA, that was the secret of life. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their achievement (Franklin unfortunately dying four years earlier of ovarian cancer, apparently due to overexposure to the radiation involved in her X-ray crystallography, was ineligible to receive the prize).
It was not until the 1980s, when the theory was finally confirmed, that the earlier psychic or spiritual causes could be definitely rejected. Every molecule of DNA within our cells consists of the twisted ladder-like strands forming a double helix each rung of the helical ladder composed of four nucleic acid bases or nucleotides: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G), whose letters convey the genetic code of each individual, along with their ancestral history. Genes are specific sequences in the DNA and RNA that transmit our particular inherited traits and contain the instructions for making proteins. Due to the information processing power of computers, the Human Genome Project, costing 3 billion dollars, succeeded by 2003 in discovering the anatomical blueprint of a human being: the complete sequencing of the genes in each human cell. Since genes are alleged to control about 50% of our neural, physiological, and mental abilities, along with recording our genetic inheritance, they should be considered the “God particles,” along with the Higgs Boson.
Again as a result of the extraordinary advances in computational power, it is now possible to encode one’s genes on a computer chip or CD. Reading our genetic code enables doctors to identify and forecast the liabilities due to the effects of our genes and, if detected early enough, make it possible to avert various physical and mental disorders. A dramatic discovery showing how genetic research, in addition to disclosing inherited traits, helps explain previously unexplained diseases and abnormalities that can be traced to malfunctioning genes, was announced recently by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), a branch of the National Institutes of Health, but involving hundreds of researchers throughout the world.
What they discovered is that the vast amount of intercellular genetic fluids that previously where thought to play no part in the functioning of the genes and thus dismissed as “junk DNA,” actually serve a crucial role in directing and regulating the activities of the genes. Composing 98% of the cell substance, instead of being “junk DNA,” this fluid substance contains “micro-switches” that convey crucial instructions to the individual genes and their transmissions to other genes. Thus by activating or deactivating a gene’s functions they are now considered to be a major factor in producing genetic defects that cause cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, strokes, and heart failure, as well as mental disabilities such as loss of memory, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and senility.
Having located about four million of these DNA switches, this will enable physicians to learn at a much earlier stage how to diagnose, treat, and eventually prevent the infirmities mentioned above. These findings clearly demonstrate the role of the genome containing the proteins that activate or deactivate the genes and also determine how the chemical modifications of DNA affect gene functions and locate the various operative forms of RNA, another form of nucleic acid similar to DNA, that helps regulate the entire system. Supporting what I wrote earlier about the unlikelihood of the nervous system being replicable by transistors alone, Parkinson’s disease is caused
by a deficiency of the chemical neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain having the structure C8 H11NO2.
As a consequence of these enhanced computer investigations a new treatment has been developed, called “tissue engineering,” enabling physicians to “grow skin, blood, blood vessels, heart valves, cartilage, bone, noses, and ears in the lab from your own cells” (p. 144). An even more promising discovery was made that has aroused considerable controversy because it involves the destruction of human embryos, a process opposed by the Catholic Church on the grounds that they are living beings. Called “stem cells,” they are the earliest cells in the developing human embryo that have not yet differentiated into specialized cells (so they hardly can be considered human beings), but have the potential to develop into all the various cells of the body.
By injecting these cells into a person with defective organs or who has suffered certain accidents such as spinal cord injury, one will be able to replace the damaged tissue. Presently there are transplants using another person’s organs, but given the shortage of replacement organs, the capability of replacing or restoring the defective tissue or organ with engendered stem cells is much more promising. A “pixie dust” has even been created with the power of regrowing tissue.
This dust is created not from cells but from the extracellular matrix that exists between cells. This matrix is important because it contains the signals that tell the stem cells to grow in a particular fashion. When this pixie dust is applied to a fingertip that has been cut off, it will stimulate not just the fingertip but also the nail, leaving an almost perfect copy of the original finger. Up to one-third of an inch of tissue and nail has been grown in this fashion. (p. 149)
Three Scientific Revolutions: How They Transformed Our Conceptions of Reality Page 24
