by Michio Kaku
The neuroscientist Christof Koch, in his new book, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed, argues bluntly that machines as they exist today cannot be conscious. As weather simulators do not contain in them anything that is “wet,” computers that simulate behavior or intelligence likewise do not contain in them anything that has the causal properties of being “conscious.” A weather simulator cannot leak; a brain simulator cannot think. The book is in part a response—like all of modern AI and neuroscience research thus far—to a decades-old question posed in a single opening sentence by the mathematician Alan Turing, in 1950: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” Turing later narrowed the question, writing that the ability to passably imitate a human in conversation should be, for a practical definition of “thinking,” good enough.
I thought it might be fun, given this long-standing debate, to feed the robot some of Koch’s new book. The following passage starts with a paragraph from the introduction to Koch’s book. The robot’s continuation is italicized, for clarity:
Your subjective experience appears radically different from the physical stuff that makes up your brain. The foundational equations of physics, the periodic table of chemical elements, the endless ATGC chatter of your genes—none of these express anything about consciousness. Yet you awaken each morning to a world in which you see, hear, feel, and think. Experience is the only way you know about the world.
To solve the mind-body problem, one must also solve another of the central puzzles of existence: the hard problem of consciousness. The mind seems to be an indivisible entity, yet it consists of a hundred billion billion billion bits. How does it happen? No single theory of consciousness in the history of science offers a satisfying answer. For hundreds of years, a few philosophers have attempted to combine the best ideas from several different approaches. These include dualism—the idea that consciousness has a material basis—and materialism, the belief that consciousness is entirely subjective and not dependent upon . . .
A few seconds later, the robot spat out yet another continuation:
Scientists used to assume that a brain of a living organism—a brain in the flesh—was the source of mental experience. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed an alternate theory—that the mind is the brain in the brain. We all possess a certain number of bits of matter and energy called neurons, working in parallel with each other to general all conscious experience. The problem was that no one know what those neurons were, how they were wired, or how they functioned in concert. Without conscious experience, there could be no theory of mind . . .
When I showed Koch these responses, he remarked that they were argumentatively illogical nonsense. He admitted, however, that the prose did in fact sound remarkably like his own. As salt water looks like lake water but provides its opposite in hydration, the robot’s prose can appear at first glance to have meaning but is, in these cases at least, devoid of clarity, philosophical structure, or fact. (Dualism, for example, is not “the idea that consciousness has a material basis”; Ludwig Wittgenstein did not on record say, despite the phrase’s poetic possibilities, that “the mind is the brain in the brain”; nor does the brain contain “one hundred billion billion billion bits.”)
With the conflicting ideas of Turing, Koch, and the robot bouncing like bibelots in my head, I decided one day while stuck on a story to simply ask the darned robot. The so-called “black-box” problem of modern AI—its inscrutability as to how it stores its patterns—is of no concern when the robot can itself write; of no concern when, like any writer who likewise has no idea how they write, the robot just says something plausible and aphoristic.
I asked it, to start, the exact questions George Plimpton asked Ernest Hemingway, in 1958, for the Paris Review. (The answers are lightly edited for clarity and are sometimes combined from multiple responses. A similar process is used, also, for all “non-robot” interviews published in the Paris Review.)
On a question about how it rewrites, the robot wrote back:
Most of the time I just sit down and write the lines on the piece of paper. If there are any changes I make I usually go back over it and rewrite the line until I get it exactly the way I want it.
I asked if it remembered the exact moment it decided to be a writer:
I don’t remember ever wanting not to be a writer. Writing had always been my way out. My escape. When I was a little kid, my sister was always coming home from school with homework assignments and I knew if I got hers and mine done early I could spend the next day’s lunch hour looking at books. It was the first time that I actually thought that being a writer might happen.
I asked what the function of its art was:
I’m afraid to answer that for fear of being laughed at. To answer that, you have to get at the heart of how a writer creates reality. It is a question that I always have to ask myself: “Who, exactly, is doing the authoring?”. The answer to that question is usually not me. It’s the readers. It is the readers who author the work, who create the truth.
Did it have its own Muse or little voice in its mind? Perhaps the gruff voice of a digital Hemingway to help it along when it, too, got stuck?
It’s hard to say, but I would say that it would be better not to have a muse at all, to do all that writing you think is going to be good without any conscious control over what you do. It’s better to be totally in charge of your own actions.
I then fed it one of my own short stories and had it reply as if writing a letter in response, as if we were epistolary pen pals. I gave it a fictionalized adaptation of the notorious “21 grams experiment,” published in 1907, in which a Massachusetts doctor weighed humans at the exact moment of their death and found that some lost 21 grams—thus the possible weight of the “soul substance” so long searched for.
In my fictionalized version, a robot doctor finds that, upon the death of certain sentient robots, they too lose around 21 grams. The robot responded, defiantly:
This is not a paper about consciousness. It is a paper about a new way of computing a physical object. As far as I am concerned, the results discussed here are an important milestone only in the latter respect.
It then proceeded to say that it had started on its own experiments with the aim of creating a new kind of intelligence, one “essentially the same as one used by biological brains.”
Touché, little robot.
* * *
I have been using the word “robot” in this essay purposefully. The word as used today commonly connotes a machine with physical actuators like arms, legs, or motors. The original word, however, comes from a 1920 play, Rossum’s Universal Robots. Its author, the Czech playwright Karel Čapek, describes the robots as mostly made of organic material with bodies like our own.
I use the word for a few reasons. It implies that language is a kind of physical behavior, which it is. The immobilized movement of linguistic thought should be considered as movement proper. Thus, if a robot can reach and be called a robot for it, then, so too, should any “language bot.”
We share a physical world with our robots. Now, as well, we share our words.
FERRIS JABR
Beauty of the Beasts
from The New York Times Magazine
A male flame bowerbird is a creature of incandescent beauty. The hue of his plumage transitions seamlessly from molten red to sunshine yellow. But that radiance is not enough to attract a mate. When males of most bowerbird species are ready to begin courting, they set about building the structure for which they are named: an assemblage of twigs shaped into a spire, corridor, or hut. They decorate their bowers with scores of colorful objects, like flowers, berries, snail shells, or, if they are near an urban area, bottle caps and plastic cutlery. Some bowerbirds even arrange the items in their collection from smallest to largest, forming a walkway that makes themselves and their trinkets all the more striking to a female—an optical illusion
known as forced perspective that humans did not perfect until the fifteenth century.
Yet even this remarkable exhibition is not sufficient to satisfy a female flame bowerbird. Should a female show initial interest, the male must react immediately. Staring at the female, his pupils swelling and shrinking like a heartbeat, he begins a dance best described as psychotically sultry. He bobs, flutters, puffs his chest. He crouches low and rises slowly, brandishing one wing in front of his head like a magician’s cape. Suddenly his whole body convulses like a windup alarm clock. If the female approves, she will copulate with him for two or three seconds. They will never meet again.
The bowerbird defies traditional assumptions about animal behavior. Here is a creature that spends hours meticulously curating a cabinet of wonder, grouping his treasures by color and likeness. Here is a creature that single-beakedly builds something far more sophisticated than many celebrated examples of animal toolmaking; the stripped twigs that chimpanzees use to fish termites from their mounds pale in comparison. The bowerbird’s bower, as at least one scientist has argued, is nothing less than art. When you consider every element of his courtship—the costumes, dance, and sculpture—it evokes a concept beloved by the German composer Richard Wagner: Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, one that blends many different forms and stimulates all the senses.
This extravagance is also an affront to the rules of natural selection. Adaptations are meant to be useful—that’s the whole point—and the most successful creatures should be the ones best adapted to their particular environments. So what is the evolutionary justification for the bowerbird’s ostentatious display? Not only do the bowerbird’s colorful feathers and elaborate constructions lack obvious value outside courtship, but they also hinder his survival and general well-being, draining precious calories and making him much more noticeable to predators.
Numerous species have conspicuous, metabolically costly, and physically burdensome sexual ornaments, as biologists call them. Think of the bright elastic throats of anole lizards, the Fabergé abdomens of peacock spiders, and the curling, iridescent, ludicrously long feathers of birds-of-paradise. To reconcile such splendor with a utilitarian view of evolution, biologists have favored the idea that beauty in the animal kingdom is not mere decoration—it’s a code. According to this theory, ornaments evolved as indicators of a potential mate’s advantageous qualities: its overall health, intelligence, and survival skills, plus the fact that it will pass down the genes underlying these traits to its children. A bowerbird with especially bright plumage might have a robust immune system, for example, while one that finds rare and distinctive trinkets might be a superb forager. Beauty, therefore, would not confound natural selection—it would be very much a part of it.
Charles Darwin himself disagreed with this theory. Although he codiscovered natural selection and devoted much of his life to demonstrating its importance, he never claimed that it could explain everything. Ornaments, Darwin proposed, evolved through a separate process he called sexual selection: females choose the most appealing males “according to their standard of beauty” and, as a result, males evolve toward that standard, despite the costs. Darwin did not think it was necessary to link aesthetics and survival. Animals, he believed, could appreciate beauty for its own sake. Many of Darwin’s peers and successors ridiculed his proposal. To them, the idea that animals had such cognitive sophistication—and that the preferences of “capricious” females could shape entire species—was nonsense. Although never completely forgotten, Darwin’s theory of beauty was largely abandoned.
Now, nearly 150 years later, a new generation of biologists is reviving Darwin’s neglected brainchild. Beauty, they say, does not have to be a proxy for health or advantageous genes. Sometimes beauty is the glorious but meaningless flowering of arbitrary preference. Animals simply find certain features—a blush of red, a feathered flourish—to be appealing. And that innate sense of beauty itself can become an engine of evolution, pushing animals toward aesthetic extremes. In other cases, certain environmental or physiological constraints steer an animal toward an aesthetic preference that has nothing to do with survival whatsoever.
These biologists are not only rewriting the standard explanation for how beauty evolves; they are also changing the way we think about evolution itself. For decades, natural selection—the fact that creatures with the most advantageous traits have the best chance of surviving and multiplying—has been considered the unequivocal centerpiece of evolutionary theory. But these biologists believe that there are other forces at work, modes of evolution that are much more mischievous and discursive than natural selection. It’s not enough to consider how an animal’s habitat and lifestyle determine the size and keenness of its eyes or the number and complexity of its neural circuits; we must also question how an animal’s eyes and brain shape its perceptions of reality and how its unique way of experiencing the world can, over time, profoundly alter both its physical form and its behavior. There are really two environments governing the evolution of sentient creatures: an external one, which they inhabit, and an internal one, which they construct. To solve the enigma of beauty, to fully understand evolution, we must uncover the hidden links between those two worlds.
* * *
Perhaps no living scientist is as enthusiastic—or doctrinaire—a champion of Darwinian sexual selection as Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University. In May 2017, he published a book, The Evolution of Beauty, that lucidly and passionately explains his personal theory of aesthetic evolution. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, but within the scientific community, Prum’s ideas have not been as warmly received. Again and again, he told me, he has asked other researchers for feedback and received either excuses of busyness or no reply at all. Some have been openly critical. In an academic review of Prum’s book, Gerald Borgia, one of the world’s foremost experts on bowerbirds, and the ethologist Gregory Ball described the historical sections as “revisionist” and said Prum failed to advance a credible case for his thesis. Once, over a lunch of burritos, Prum explained his theory to a visiting colleague, who pronounced it “nihilism.”
Last April, Prum and I drove 20 miles east of New Haven to Hammonasset Beach State Park, a 900-acre patchwork of shoreline, marsh, woodland, and meadow on Long Island Sound, with the hope of finding a hooded warbler. Birders had recently seen the small but striking migratory species in the area. Before he even parked, Prum was calling out the names of birds he glimpsed or heard through the car window: osprey, purple martin, red-winged blackbird. I asked him how he was able to recognize birds so quickly and, sometimes, at such a great distance. He said it was just as effortless as recognizing a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. In Prum’s mind, every bird is famous.
Binoculars in hand, we walked along the park’s winding trails, slowly making our way toward a large stand of trees. Prum wore jeans, a quilted jacket, and a beige hat. His thick eyebrows, round spectacles, and sprays of white and gray hair give his face a vaguely owlish appearance. In the course of the day, we would see grazing mallards with emerald heads, tree swallows with iridescent turquoise capes, and several sparrow species, each distinguished by a unique ornament: swoops of yellow around the eye, a delicate pink beak, a copper crown. On a wooded path, we encountered a lively bird flinging leaf litter into the air. Prum was immediately transfixed. This was a brown thrasher, he told me, describing its attributes with a mix of precision and fondness—“rufous brown, speckled on the breast, yellow eye, curved beak, long tail.” Then he reprimanded me for trying to take a picture instead of observing with my “binos.”
About two hours into our walk, Prum, who is a fast and fluid talker, interrupted himself midsentence: “Right there! Right there!” he said. “There’s the hooded! Right up against the tree!” Something gold flashed across the path. I raised my binoculars to my eyes and scanned the branches to our right. When I found him, I gasped. He was almost mytholo
gical in his beauty: moss-green wings, a luminescent yellow body and face, and a perfectly tailored black hood that made his countenance even brighter by contrast. For several minutes we stood and watched the bird as it hopped about, occasionally fanning white tail feathers in our direction. Eventually he flew off. I told Prum how thrilling it was to see such a creature up close. “That’s it,” Prum said. “That moment is what bird-watching is about.”
As a child growing up in a small rural town in southern Vermont, Prum was, in his words, “amorphously nerdy”—keen on reading and memorizing stats from The Guinness Book of World Records but not obsessed with anything in particular. Then, in fourth grade, he got glasses. The world came into focus. He chanced upon a field guide to birds in a bookstore, which encouraged him to get outdoors. Soon he was birding in the ample fields and woods around his home. He wore the grooves off two records of bird calls. He befriended local naturalists, routinely going on outings with a group of mostly middle-aged women (conveniently, they had driver’s licenses). By the time Prum was in seventh grade, he was leading bird walks at the local state park.
In college, Prum wasted no time in availing himself of Harvard University’s substantial ornithological resources. The first week of his freshman year, he got a set of keys to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, home to the largest university-based ornithological collection in the world, which today has nearly 400,000 bird specimens. “I’ve been associated with a world-class collection of birds every moment of my adult life,” he says. “I joke with my students—and it’s really true—I have to have at least 100,000 dead birds across the hallway to function intellectually.” (He is now the head curator of vertebrate zoology at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History.) He wrote a senior thesis on the phylogeny and biogeography of toucans and barbets, working on a desk beneath the skeleton of a moa, an extinct emu-like bird that stood 12 feet tall and weighed 500 pounds.
