Stages Of Consciousness Revisited

See Three Stages Of Consciousness...

I skipped past one stage, didn't I? Between organic, neuronic and post-organic, electrophotonic stages of consciousness, there are the artificial neural networks. This intermediate stage is where human personalities are downloaded before being organically resurrected. However, the artificial neural networks can be of lengthy duration in their own right. Anson Guthrie endures indefinitely as a download, or even as a number of downloads, before, when this becomes possible, he is also organically resurrected.

To complicate matters further, human personalities can also be incorporated into electrophotonic consciousness but that remains the third stage as outlined in the previous post. I had downplayed the artificial neural stage by skipping past it to the organic resurrection stage.

Neural Networks

Artificial neural networks exist in Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars. I have just read something relevant in Mortimer J. Adler's The Difference of Man And The Difference It Makes (New York, 1967). Neurologists had said, first, that not enough is yet known about the central nervous system for it to be replicated and, secondly, that there is an important difference between electrochemical interactions in organisms and electrical interactions in machines. Another factor is the very large quantitative difference between the numbers of neurons and of neuronic interactions in a human brain and the numbers of transistors and of their interactions in a machine.

Any artifact that did exactly duplicate a human brain would be conscious and would be able both to reason and to converse. (This is a tautology: any artifact that was unable to do these things would not exactly duplicate a human brain.) Thus, works like Harvest Of Stars are valid speculative fiction. The future will be different. Wellsian sf writers like Anderson speculate about how it will differ from past and present.

Cosmic Life

In his History of Technic Civilization, Poul Anderson imagined abundant galactic life, including planets where human beings could breathe and walk without having to transform either themselves or the environment first. His Harvest Of Stars (New York, 1993) has the opposite premise. Life is rare and cosmically insignificant until it spreads from Earth.

When human personalities have been downloaded into artificial neural networks, then carried at near light speeds across interstellar distances, one download directs terraforming even of an initially lifeless planet while others are incarnated in newly grown human bodies. Thus, a single personality:

"...won't ever have to end..." but "...can have life after life, on world after world...Bringing life to the universe..." (p. 528)

Life triumphs against all the odds. Despite inhospitable environments, the light speed limit and the impossibility of transporting many human organisms across long interstellar distances, the downloads will spread organic life throughout the stellar universe whereas the Solar "sophotects," self-evolving artificial intelligences incorporating human minds but not independent downloads, endlessly refine their own inorganic intelligence, contemplating pure mathematics instead of the material universe.

It follows that the sophotects were wrong to think either that life was insignificant or that their theory enabled them to model all its possible forms. The leading download, Anson Guthrie, has:

"'...a gut feeling that the universe isn't as lifeless as the sophotects on Earth claim.'" (p. 508)

But the universe, or what we see of it, was lifeless until Guthrie and his companions started to remake it, perhaps the ultimate achievement of Andersonian characters.

Olaf Stapledon had anticipated Anderson's download-sophotect dichotomy. In his future history, Last And First Men, successive human species inhabit Earth, Venus, then Neptune. Later species can direct evolution, thus create their successors. Some Third Men, valuing intellect, create, as the Fourth Men, disembodied, artificially maintained Great Brains, like conscious organic computers, which become hostile to organic life but which eventually realize that their merely cerebral understanding is frustratingly limited because they themselves lack insight into values and that they in their turn must be replaced by normally constructed though thoroughly perfected Fifth Men with brains as large as possible, though no larger, in a bipedal form. Unfortunately, however, Anderson's sophotects never do realize the limitation of their own merely intellectual approach. Consequently, conflict between them and free human beings continues throughout the Tetralogy, of which I have started to reread the second volume, The Stars Are Also Fire.

Guthries, Computers And A Psalm

Harvest Of Stars, 44.

Two full copies of download Guthrie cooperate with each other and unite with the net. Thus, what is left of Guthrie has gone far beyond its original humanity. The hypercomputers are not aware but we are told that that will change soon. How? Computers will not become conscious by calculating more quickly. They will have to be combined with artificial neural networks like the ones into which Guthrie has been downloaded.

"To the hypercomputers, a thousand years were as a day and a day was as a thousand years..." (p. 402)

See Psalm 90: 4 and 2 Peter 3: 8.

Biblical allusions are becoming like part of the grammar.

Data V

"Suppose non-conscious algorithms could eventually outperform conscious intelligence in all known data-processing tasks - what, if anything, would be lost by replacing conscious intelligence with superior non-conscious algorithms?" (Harari, p.459)

If this question means, "What would be lost if human beings allowed all their data to be processed by unconscious algorithms?," then the answer is, "Nothing," whereas, if the question means, "What would be lost if all conscious beings were replaced by unconscious algorithms?" then the answer is, "Consciousness."

However, if artificial neurons eventually duplicate the functions of organic neurons, then they will generate artificial consciousness. It is artificial neural networks that preserve conscious human memories and personalities in Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars and Genesis. Will it be possible to combine this kind of post-organic consciousness with superior algorithms?

The Fleet Of Stars

Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars, "Harvest Of Stars" Tetralogy Vol IV, is the first real sequel to Harvest Of Stars, Vol I. Its action begins not back in the Solar System during the later events of Harvest Of Stars but in the system of Beta Hydri which, like two other planetary systems, has been colonised from Alpha Centauri considerably later.

On the one hand, the continuing characters, whether downloaded into artificial neural networks or re-incarnated in newly grown human bodies, have moved even further away from Earth. On the other hand, there are first hints of interstellar interaction. A laser message beamed from Proserpina to the Lunarians at Alpha Centauri and relayed to Beta Hydri informs the colonists that the cybercosm on Earth:

may be suppressing data from a solar gravitational lens;
may have sabotaged a Proserpinan lens;
had stopped antimatter production on Mercury as no longer needed by the stabilised Earth-Luna economy;
but has restarted production, possibly to power interstellar craft (the Proserpinans have detected signs of such craft leaving and entering the Solar System).

The incarnate Anson Guthrie of Beta Hydri IV reflects further that the cybercosm may be spying on the extra-solar colonies with mini-robots and would be able to plant cybercosms in the galaxy faster than organic life can proliferate on an interstellar scale. The scene is set for a potentially galactic conflict albeit at sublight speeds. Guthrie has been working on a shipyard project while his partner visits one of their sons, his wife and children on another continent but a download Guthrie will now travel to Sol via Alpha Centauri to investigate.

Of course, this moves the story back to the Solar System after all but, meanwhile, the action has definitely progressed beyond the end of Harvest Of Stars. We are no longer reading of events that are contemporaneous with any that were described in a previous volume. Onward.

A Persistent Puzzle

After reading Poul Anderson on (fictional) artificial neural networks and John Searle on the (real) mystery of consciousness, I am even more puzzled. Scientists can understand how each neuron affects other neurons but not how all the neurons cause consciousness but how would they be able to understand that? Although they are able to observe a cerebral state, scientists are not able to observe either a mental state or the connection between the two kinds of states but how would they be able to observe such things? Is this question answerable? What would scientists have to do to be able to answer it? Should they examine neurons even down to the quantum level? Yes, because quantum particles are one part of the objective realm, which is the subject-matter of scientific inquiry, but will it be possible to deduce how quanta cause consciousness? Maybe somehow but how?

Individual experience is subjective, meaning inaccessible to anyone else. Scientists rightly study the objective, meaning the publicly accessible, because only thus can observations be verified. But, if scientists are able to study only the objective, then are they also able to study the objective-subjective link/connection/causal relationship? Psychologists study subjective states but can they make their study scientific in the sense of objective?

Can the studies of the objective and the subjective become a single study? This is as close as I can come to formulating the question coherently.

HARVEST OF STARS: Summary

Poul Anderson, Harvest The Fire (New York, November 1997).

In Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy, each volume covers a single different period of a future history except Volume II, The Stars Are Also Fire, which covers two periods. Thus, if we read the series in numerical order, then, as we begin Harvest The Fire, PROLOGUE, pp. 9-31, with four pages of illustrations, we are already familiar with the first three of the five periods.

Jesse Nicol, a frustrated poet, seeks inspiration by recounting the future history to date to a simulation of Jorge Luis Borges. Of course the summary in Nicol's mind helps readers whether they have read Volumes I and II or not.

Human beings got into space when the cost of launch had been brought down, mainly by Fireball Enterprises. The Moon was colonized but completion of pregnancy was impossible in Lunar gravity so Lunarians were genetically engineered. Other human species were engineered on Earth and also the Keiki Moana, intelligent seals. 

Robotics became highly developed. Some human personalities, including Anson Guthrie, founder and chief executive of Fireball, were downloaded into artificial neural networks. Lunarians, led by Selenarchs, became independent of the World Federation and colonized Mars, asteroids and outer moons.

Fireball and the Selenarch Rinndalir waged war against the Federation for a reason not stated here. Download Guthrie led dissident Terrans and Lunarians to Alpha Centauri. Terrans colonized Demeter, doomed to be destroyed in a planetary collision in a thousand years, whereas Lunarians colonized Centaurian asteroids. 

The Federation reincorporated Luna and moved an abandoned L-5 colony to Lunar orbit where Terran women from Luna could give birth, thus enabling Terrans to outnumber Lunarians on Luna. The Lahui Kuikawa, comprised of human beings and Keiki Moana, moved to a mid-Pacific island. 

Conscious AI was developed, then developed itself further.

There is some more but I have to go out.

Philosophy And Fiction

When I discuss artificial intelligence, I express the views of John Searle. Today, I bought a copy of his 1984 Reith Lectures.

Searle asks:

"...does the digital computer give us the right picture of the human mind? And why is it that the social sciences in general have not given us insights into ourselves comparable to the insights that the natural sciences have given us into the rest of nature?"
-John Searle, Minds, Brains And Science (London, 1984), ONE, p. 13.

Dominic Flandry converses with a:

"'High-grade central computer - consciousness grade...'"
- Poul Anderson, A Circus Of Hells IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), CHAPTER TWO, p. 210.

Searle argues that any computer, however fast or powerful, merely manipulates symbols according to a programmed set of rules and that this process involves neither consciousness in general nor, more specifically, any knowledge or understanding of the meanings of the symbols. In order to become conscious, an artifact would have to duplicate brain processes.

Liquidity or wetness is a feature of water and is caused by interactions between many water molecules none of which is individually liquid or wet. Similarly, consciousness, including subjectivity, is a feature of a brain and is caused by interactions between many objectively observable neurons none of which is individually conscious. Artificial neural networks would be conscious.

Searle's second question above is relevant to Anderson's Psychotechnic History.

Neanderthals And Computers

Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire, 6-7.

"'...if those geneticists are right who think Neanderthal blood is in us too.'" (6, p. 85)

It is.

In 7, we return to Anderson's use of the word "robot" to mean an unconscious mechanism:

"...a robot was moving across the floor to intercept them.
"Robot or sophotect?" (7, p. 93)

In this text, a robot is unconscious whereas a sophotect is conscious. The passage continues:

"The turret could hold a human-capability computer." (ibid.)

"...human-capability..." means conscious and able to think whereas computers as they currently exist are programmed to manipulate symbols but are unconscious and merely simulate thought. A calculator no more "thinks" that 1+1=2 than does a sheet of paper on which this equation is written. Anderson says elsewhere in this series that human personalities are downloaded into artificial neural networks, not into computers. See here.

The passage continues:

"If it didn't, the body could be remote-controlled by an intelligence." (ibid.)

"Intelligence" has become ambiguous. See here.