Conscious

by Vic Grout

  By contrast, Jenny Smith was born, and had always worked, in London. Her only prolonged absence from the capital had been her undergraduate years. After graduating at the top of her class in mathematics, she had proceeded to take the rest of her degrees ‘back home’ in computer science. But, she said, she had ‘finished with all that hard, nuts-and-bolts techie stuff’ and was now much more interested in the ‘bigger issues’ of where technology was taking humanity and what each was doing to the other – ‘what’s going to work and what isn’t’. She had achieved a lofty status in her field through well-cited publications and plenty of UK Research Council funding grants and had been a professor of computer science at a London university (not the same one as Andy) for many years. It seemed to the others that, in many ways, she had changed the least: she was still very big on theories and grand questions and described herself loosely as a ‘futurologist’. Her current work, as much as she was working on anything in particular, was connected with projects attempting to build computer systems along the lines of the structures used by the human brain. Although passionate about her work, she was also realistic; admitting that she – and researchers like her – were far, far away from any concrete success. She also had no close personal connections. Having ‘played the field – the whole field, that was’ – quite successfully at university, she had ‘lost interest in men’ within a few years of graduation and, in recent times, had ‘pretty much lost interest in the alternative too’. She and Andy had maintained the closest online contact since university and had largely arranged this eventual reunion through ‘the somewhat archaic machinery’ of Facebook.

  That left Bob Weatherill. Unlike Jenny, Bob had studied computer science at university and had ‘stayed true to the faith’ for the rest of his career up to this point. He had been recognised, at a young age, in his sphere of the technical world, as an extremely able and intelligent man; and had quickly gained high-profile work with major network companies as a systems trouble-shooter, working for both British Telecom and Cisco on large, successful projects. He had breezed through the supposedly demanding Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert qualification at an early age. He was a gifted problem-solver and seemed to have an ability to ‘see solutions’ in a way that generally defeated others. ‘You have to see inside a network to really get to grips with it’ was his formal line, or ‘to fix the network, you have to become the network’ when feeling more flippant. (His rustic Bristol accent often lulled people into underestimating his sharp analytical skills.) In recent years, he had developed ‘what everyone thought was’ a particularly sophisticated network analysis tool and was beginning to make good money from it. Other than his networking qualifications, he had taken no further education after university but that had certainly not done him any harm. His personal life was comfortably the most complete of the four. He was happily married with a son, daughter-in-law and grandson. He regularly travelled the world and had spent some years living in Europe and the USA but was now pleased to be (at least based) on the outskirts of London, returning to his family whenever he could. That he had been one of Jenny’s many university conquests before her more permanent lesbian phase was no more than a minor embarrassment. They had crossed paths regularly since and had, that day, been to the same meeting, at the British Computer Society across the way in Southampton Street.

  So the ragged group of friends that had been formed – no-one could quite remember how or why – at a grimy bar in the old Westcountry university student union in 1993, now sat reunited around a beaten copper table in a mock-traditional London pub. Frankly, the reason for this was questionable as well. Clearly they had overlapping academic interests and there had been talk of joint research, maybe some funding applications – possibly even a book on the multidisciplinary aspects of the differences and similarities of computers, networks and biological systems. As it turned out, of all the odd things that were about to happen to the group, that was the part that was never discussed ever again. In truth, they were just enjoying the experience of being together once more and soon agreed that the exercise should be repeated on as close to a monthly basis as possible. At one point, Aisha described them as the ‘Class of ‘93’. Jenny laughed. ‘Not much of a class; the four of us would only make one desk!’ And the name stuck. At first, the group was the Desk of ‘93 and, quickly, just ‘The Desk’.

  *

  As the evening wore on, the conversation drifted all over the place, to the entertainment of all. Although each of them was a specialist in their own field, they were all – to a greater or lesser extent – capable communicators into the bargain. And naturally there were some aspects of everyone’s work that interested everybody else. It was fun, with a practical edge, and some more fun. First to get some good-humoured interrogation was Jenny.

  “So, this ‘building a computer like a human brain’ concept,” ventured Aisha in a somewhat teasing manner. “Is that just science for science’s sake or is there some serious purpose behind it?” She spoke with the forced accuracy of someone for whom English was not (or at least had not been) a first language, even if the others always accepted with amusement that it was probably better than theirs.

  “Oh, it’s entirely serious,” insisted Jenny, “and necessary.” It’s something we’re probably going to have to do if we’re going to take the technology we’ve got today very much further. Certainly, if we want to keep on making the computers smaller and more powerful.”

  “Why?” asked Andy. “Aren’t we doing well enough on that front at the moment? Even I’ve heard of Moore’s Law!”

  “Well, I suppose we are, at the moment,” Jenny emphasised. “But really only at the moment. Moore’s Law might say that computing power doubles every eighteen months or two years or so but it can’t last. We can’t keep on doing what we’re doing any more, or at least not for much longer. We can’t just keep cramming more and more logic gates into smaller and smaller spaces on chips with the existing silicon technology. There’s a couple of very good reasons for that. One is very simple; the other’s a bit more complicated.”

  “Go on,” prompted Bob, a shade more interested than before. He was always the practical one.

  “Well, the simple problem is this,” said Jenny with a wry smile on her face. “The processors are simply getting too hot. The denser the circuitry, the harder it is to keep cool. In fact, with some very powerful systems – some of the big high performance computing systems, for example, the cooling systems are costing as much as the processing power. They’re certainly taking as much electricity to run! Power is becoming very important these days. For personal computers – desktops and laptops and the like, we partially get around it by splitting the processor into multiple cores but this decreases the overall efficiency of the system: you just don’t get something from nothing. OK, there may be alternatives: optical computing, biological computing or quantum computing – that sort of thing – but those are still on the research benches.”

  “And the complicated reason?” Aisha again; this time with the tiniest hint of irony.

  Jenny continued, smiling, “The second reason is just how small we’re making these devices now. We’re not that far off the atomic scale with some of these logic components and that’s a problem. You see, normally, when you make logic gates out of, shall we say, conventional materials, they behave in a predictable way. In other words, if you put the same inputs in, you always get the same output out. But as you get smaller and smaller, when you’re actually counting atoms across the logic gate, then the slightest little molecular variation and you’re working with a different material, with different properties; and it may not behave the same from one time to the next. So the components aren’t reliable: they’re not breaking exactly, but they’re not going to behave in a deterministic way. And you just can’t build computer systems out of unpredictable components with our existing models. We don’t know how to build systems from randomly unreliable units!”

  Aisha’s eyes narrowed slightly i
n recognition but it was Andy who asked the question.

  “So how does trying to build them like brains help?”

  Jenny continued.

  “Well that’s exactly what our brains are made of, isn’t it: unreliable components? In a sense, the brain is made up of a network of simple processors, a bit like a computer, but each of the individual processing nodes is imperfect. They can fail from time to time in everyday use and eventually the occasional one will fail permanently as we get older. Sometimes, that causes a problem if too many of them go down but, on the whole, we get by perfectly well. Our brain is a fantastic model for a computer built successfully from quite rubbish and unreliable individual components!”

  “Ah, OK, yes, but, in turn,” interjected Aisha, slowly and deliberately, “there are two problems with that too. Firstly, in an obvious sense, the brain is put together in a quite different way to a typical computer. Secondly, beyond the superficial, we do not really understand the way that it is put together or how it works anything like as well as we do something like a computer, which we have built ourselves. We know vaguely what some parts of the brain seem to do but we do not know much about exactly how it processes thoughts or stores information or solves problems. Certainly, what we do know about the brain makes it look rather different. I may not know very much about computer architecture but I do know that, for example, signals within the brain travel very slowly – just a few metres per second. Also, the brain is massively connected. Each neuron in the brain is connected to tens of thousands of other neurons. I am pretty sure a computer is not built like that in either sense; am I right?”

  “Dead right,” agreed Jenny. “In a computer system, the signals are travelling at a decent fraction of the speed of light. On the other hand, each logic gate is connected to, at most, half a dozen or so others. So, yes, they’re very different animals indeed!”

  “So, quite a challenge then?” offered Bob, humorously. “Perfect for you!” Everyone chuckled in agreement. Jenny liked to think big.

  “Of course, looking at it from the other direction,” continued Jenny, “thinking about the brain from a computational perspective, it’s astonishing that it works at all!”

  “Why do you say that?” asked Aisha.

  “Well, what’s the brain got, really,” asked Jenny. “It’s just a collection of neurons networked together. How’s that a processing system? Where’s the data actually stored? Where’s the central processor? Where’s the software? What programs is it running? How does it manage to do anything?”

  “Maybe that is all you need,” suggested Aisha. “Perhaps just a collection of neurons is enough. Maybe, these days, we think about it too much from a computing perspective. Perhaps it does not have dedicated memory banks in the way that a computer scientist would understand them. Maybe it does not have dedicated processors. Maybe it is processing everywhere, all the time. It might not be running programs at all in the way that you might understand them: software running on hardware. Perhaps the hardware and software is all wrapped up together in some brilliant design that we just have not figured out yet?”

  “Well yes, agreed,” nodded Jenny. “And that’s what we’re trying to work out. But, really, that’s what we’re hoping you people will tell us!”

  Aisha clearly had doubts. “It still bothers me that we are assuming that the brain works to any sort of computational model,” she said, slowly. “We do not know that it does that; we do not know what it does. There are some big, unanswered questions. We humans are not just processing and storing data. We are also aware that we are doing it to a greater or lesser extent. We are somehow conscious of that. There is something extra. Does that make a difference to the way the system is put together?”

  “You’re really talking about the soul, I suppose?” suggested Andy.

  Aisha pulled an almost apologetic face. “I do not think it has to be the soul exactly; at least not in the sense of something that is independent of the body it resides in. Not something that can live without the body or continue after the body has stopped working. I suppose you could call it ‘soul’, if you want to, but I think whatever it is, is tied to the body and comes from the body. It does not even necessarily come from the brain alone. Many people think it probably does but there are some who believe it does not have to. Other civilisations have felt that this internal self-awareness lived in different places in the body. Some thought it lived in the stomach, others thought it lived in the heart. This idea that our consciousness must live in the brain is actually a reasonably modern thing.

  “It is a very interesting experiment to try to clear your mind and ‘internalise’. Where exactly in your body is it that you live? You can feel everywhere, if you are well that is, but where are you exactly? Most people nowadays would suggest that their consciousness comes from the brain because that is where they have a feeling that their thinking is coming from, but that might just be modern conditioning. Being told that something works a certain way is a very powerful agent and often it can be self-fulfilling.

  “Personally, I am inclined to think that our self-awareness does have more to do with the brain than any other part of the body but I do sometimes wonder whether it is entirely independent of the rest of the body. I mean, clearly the brain needs power to work so it needs to be fed by the body but it might be that the way the rest of the body is put together contributes to the brain’s operation in a manner that we have not quite yet understood. It might be that the model of an energy system and a data-processing system, as two separate entities, is much too simplistic and that it is actually all wrapped up together. In fact, in general, it may be better to talk about a ‘nervous system’ than just a ‘brain’.”

  “But that still doesn’t really answer the question of where exactly this self-awareness comes from in the first place, does it?” insisted Andy, not prepared to give up the argument without a fight.

  But nor was Aisha giving in quite so easily.

  “True, but just not being sure where it comes from does not necessarily make it an independent soul that we are dealing with, does it? Just because it might be more complex than merely the brain on its own, just because it might need the body as well, does not mean that it cannot still come entirely from within. I admit I do not know but, whether it is just the brain or whether it is brain and body, it could be merely a question of complexity. Build something with enough complexity – with enough neurons and connections between them, give it some fuel, and maybe that is all it takes?”

  Chapter 2: Changes

  More drinks were ordered and the conversation continued to flow enthusiastically. Returning from the bar with the next tray of glasses – three beers and a sparkling water, this time, Aisha shot Andy a quizzical glance.

  “Andy, this is not making you feel uncomfortable, is it? The pub, the beer, I mean?”

  “Oh God, no!” smiled Andy. “If it bothered me watching people drink booze, I wouldn’t have made much of a recovery, would I? No, I’m happy enough – really enjoying it, in fact. I still love a night out and good company. I can go anywhere and do anything these days. I’m not clinging on trying to avoid the sight of alcohol. I’m recovered. God’s taken the problem away from me.”

  More than merely the religious angle intrigued Aisha in this, having – sometimes literally – bumped into an alcoholic or two in the course of her work. “I thought you people tended to call yourselves recovering alcoholics these days?” she ventured. “And I thought it was all ‘Higher Power’ and ‘God’ had gone out of fashion?”

  “Maybe for some,” Andy conceded, “but not for me. I tried all that modern stuff. I sat around in meetings for several months when I first came into AA and that’s exactly what we did. We had nice cups of tea – biscuits too, quite often – and slapped each other on the back and shook hands and congratulated ourselves on how well we were doing. And it was all about staying sober ‘one day at a time’. We shared stories about things that had happened and told each other that it was all
about will-power: ‘don’t take the first drink’! It was lovely really. The only problem was that it didn’t work: quite often, every few nights, sometimes most nights, I’d go straight home afterwards and have a drink! Then, after a few days or so – sometimes weeks – on the booze, I’d fall back into a meeting and try to pick up the pieces. And I kept on doing that for month after month, just feeling like a failure: that my ‘will-power’ wasn’t strong enough. And people would say to me, every time I came back, that I ‘obviously hadn’t wanted it enough’! But I was pretty sure that I had so I just didn’t have a clue what to do.”

  “So what happened then?” asked Jenny. “Something did, obviously!”

  “Aye,” Andy continued, “Well, eventually, after stumbling from group to group, trying to find a new set of friends that I didn’t feel I’d let down again, I fell in with what seemed like a pretty weird bunch at first. They were doing AA the traditional way; the way it’s described in the original Alcoholics Anonymous ‘Big Book’ from the 1930s. They didn’t try to make me feel better by telling me it was all going to be all right: quite the opposite, in fact. Instead, they explained to me just how hopeless a case I was. They told me that I was beyond human aid – mine or anyone else’s: that I’d sooner or later drink again – however much I tried not to. And that the only hope I had was a massive ‘spiritual experience’. So, I started on the proper AA twelve-step programme. It really wasn’t fun (at least at first) and I didn’t like the look of it, but I did it and it worked. I found my God. I recovered.”