Ray Kurzweil - How to Create a Mind - The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

Okay, before continuing to read, try it.

Here is what you probably did: You held the steering wheel. You checked that the right lane is clear. Assuming the lane was clear, you turned the steering wheel to the right for a brief period. Then you straightened it out again. Job done.

It’s a good thing you weren’t in a real car, because you just zoomed across all the lanes of the highway and crashed into a tree. While I probably should have mentioned that you shouldn’t try this in a real moving car (but then I assume you have already mastered the rule that you shouldn’t drive with your eyes closed), that’s not really the key problem here. If you used the procedure I just described—and almost everyone does when doing this thought experiment—you got it wrong. Turning the wheel to the right and then straightening it out causes the car to head in a direction that is diagonal to its original direction. It will cross the lane to the right, as you intended, but it will keep going to the right indefinitely until it zooms off the road. What you needed to do as your car crossed the lane to the right was to then turn the wheel to the left, just as far as you had turned it to the right, and then straighten it out again. This will cause the car to again head straight in the new lane.

Consider the fact that if you’re a regular driver, you’ve done this maneuver thousands of times. Are you not conscious when you do this? Have you never paid attention to what you are actually doing when you change lanes? Assuming that you are not reading this book in a hospital while recovering from a lane-changing accident, you have clearly mastered this skill. Yet you are not conscious of what you did, however many times you’ve accomplished this task.

When people tell stories of their experiences, they describe them as sequences of situations and decisions. But this is not how we experience a story in the first place. Our original experience is as a sequence of high-level patterns, some of which may have triggered feelings. We remember only a small subset of those patterns, if that. Even if we are reasonably accurate in our recounting of a story, we use our powers of confabulation to fill in missing details and convert the sequence into a coherent tale. We cannot be certain what our original conscious experience was from our recollection of it, yet memory is the only access we have to that experience. The present moment is, well, fleeting, and is quickly turned into a memory, or, more often, not. Even if an experience is turned into a memory, it is stored, as the PRTM indicates, as a high-level pattern composed of other patterns in a huge hierarchy. As I have pointed out several times, almost all of the experiences we have (like any of the times we changed lanes) are immediately forgotten. So ascertaining what constitutes our own conscious experience is actually not attainable.

There are two ways to view the questions we have been considering—converse Western and Eastern perspectives on the nature of consciousness and of reality. In the Western perspective, we start with a physical world that evolves patterns of information. After a few billion years of evolution, the entities in that world have evolved sufficiently to become conscious beings. In the Eastern view, consciousness is the fundamental reality; the physical world only comes into existence through the thoughts of conscious beings. The physical world, in other words, is the thoughts of conscious beings made manifest. These are of course simplifications of complex and diverse philosophies, but they represent the principal polarities in the philosophies of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world.

The East-West divide on the issue of consciousness has also found expression in opposing schools of thought in the field of subatomic physics. In quantum mechanics, particles exist as what are called probability fields. Any measurement carried out on them by a measuring device causes what is called a collapse of the wave function, meaning that the particle suddenly assumes a particular location. A popular view is that such a measurement constitutes observation by a conscious observer, because otherwise measurement would be a meaningless concept. Thus the particle assumes a particular location (as well as other properties, such as velocity) only when it is observed. Basically particles figure that if no one is bothering to look at them, they don’t need to decide where they are. I call this the Buddhist school of quantum mechanics, because in it particles essentially don’t exist until they are observed by a conscious person.

There is another interpretation of quantum mechanics that avoids such anthropomorphic terminology. In this analysis, the field representing a particle is not a probability field, but rather just a function that has different values in different locations. The field, therefore, is fundamentally what the particle is. There are constraints on what the values of the field can be in different locations, because the entire field representing a particle represents only a limited amount of information. That is where the word “quantum” comes from. The so-called collapse of the wave function, this view holds, is not a collapse at all. The wave function actually never goes away. It is just that a measurement device is also made up of particles with fields, and the interaction of the particle field being measured and the particle fields of the measuring device results in a reading of the particle being in a particular location. The field, however, is still present. This is the Western interpretation of quantum mechanics, although it is interesting to note that the more popular view among physicists worldwide is what I have called the Eastern interpretation.

There was one philosopher whose work spanned this East-West divide. The Austrian British thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) studied the philosophy of language and knowledge and contemplated the question of what it is that we can really know. He pondered this subject while a soldier in World War I and took notes for what would be his only book published while he was alive, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . The work had an unusual structure, and it was only through the efforts of his former instructor, British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, that it found a publisher in 1921. It became the bible for a major school of philosophy known as logical positivism, which sought to define the limits of science. The book and the movement surrounding it were influential on Turing and the emergence of the theory of computation and linguistics.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus anticipates the insight that all knowledge is inherently hierarchical. The book itself is arranged in nested and numbered statements. For example, the first four statements in the book are:

1 The world is all that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.