On consciousness, we have John Horgan, whose book The Undiscovered Mind describes how the mind resists explanation. We also have Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi, neuroscientists who specialize in consciousness. Rodney Brooks, of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, weighs in on the future of machine intelligence. IEEE Spectrum journalism intern Sally Adee reports on a wildly ambitious effort, just gathering steam now, to map the human brain in enough detail to learn its secrets—and eventually re-create it. Robin Hanson, an economist, describes a future in which capitalist imperatives and technological capabilities drive each other toward a society that the word weird doesn’t even begin to describe. Nanotechnology researcher Richard Jones, philosopher Alfred Nordmann, and semiconductor researcher Bill Arnold all consider aspects of singularitarian visions and explain where they’re myopic.
For the last word in this issue, we turned to the computer scientist and science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge. It was Vinge’s 1993 essay ”The Coming Technological Singularity” that launched the modern singularity movement.
That movement has evolved since then into an array of competing hypotheses and scenarios [for a rundown, see ”Who’s Who in the Singularity,” in this issue]. But central to them all is the paradoxical yet weirdly compelling idea of a conscious machine. Arguably, no other technology-related concept resonates with such intellectual and philosophical force.
Consciousness seems mystical and inextricably linked to organisms. What happens in the cerebral cortex that turns objective information into subjective experience—that turns chemical and neuronal activity in the mouth and nose into the taste of watermelon? pressure waves into the sound of an oboe? We don’t know, but we will someday. No one argues that consciousness arises from anything but biological processes in the brain.
The brain is nothing more, and nothing less, than a very powerful and very odd computer. Evolution has honed it over millions of years to do a fantastic job at certain things, such as pattern recognition and fine control of muscles. The brain is deterministic, meaning that its reactions and responses, including the sensations and behavior of its ”owner,” are determined completely by how it is stimulated and by its own internal biophysics and biochemistry. Given those facts, most mathematical philosophers conclude that all the brain’s functions, including consciousness, can be re-created in a machine. It’s a matter of time.
Ah, but let’s face it—time is what really matters. If you’re obsessed with your own mortality, the idea of a computer blinking into consciousness 400 years from now isn’t going to rock your world. You want the magic moment to come, say, 25 years from now at most. Unfortunately, that timetable grossly overestimates the speed of technical progress. And it underestimates the brain’s awesome intricacy, as Horgan argues in his article. He, Koch, Tononi, and Adee all agree that everything we know about the central issue of brain research—how it creates consciousness, and therefore the universe each one of us inhabits—adds up to almost nothing.
What we do know is that the brain’s complexity dwarfs anything we’ve managed to fully understand, let alone build. Koch, Tononi, and Brooks are all confident that consciousness will arise in a machine, but they are less sanguine about death-defying uploading, and especially about it happening in time to allow people alive now to preserve their minds in some sort of digitally created Eden.
Still, if you encounter my uploaded consciousness in a virtual paradise 50 years from now, feel free to tell me, ”I told you so.”
I won’t mind a bit.
For more articles, videos, and special features, go to The Singularity Special Report.
