Imaginative and applied views of the brain
and the self
A.Ione PO Box 12748, Berkeley, CA 94712, USA email: ione@amyione.com
In 1957, Herbert Simon, one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence,
was quoted as saying we now live in a world where machines can think.
Today, almost fifty years later, many of his critics remain unconvinced that
this is the case. As these critics point out, and I count myself among them, it
would perhaps be more accurate to say that the combination of brain
research and computer technologies has helped us articulate some of the
questions we have about human consciousness. More specifically,
technology has failed to replicate intelligence, the functions of the brain, and
even the 'sense' of self known to humans. Nonetheless, technology has been
useful in fostering some measure of understanding about how symbolic logic
and connectivist dynamics are integrated into our experience of the self.
Technologies have also supplemented our explicit data and thus helped us
re-consider long-standing conclusions about the brain, the mind, and
consciousness.
How technology has helped us re-frame many long-standing questions about
the relationship of machines, mind, and intelligence is germane to this paper,
where I show that the computer revolution, like earlier technological
revolutions, has transformed our ideation process. Building on the work of
diverse thinkers, I detail how emergent and connective views of consciousness inform
the scientific agenda and, by extension, how imagination, physics, biology,
chemistry, mathematics, and technology have combined in the formation of
new personal and cultural ideas and habits. What is key here, as I will
demonstrate, is that innovations do not reside only in the applied and
practical domains. For example, computers, like older technologies, have
given us useful metaphors.
This paper will illustrate these many new metaphors that are illuminating the
dialogue on the mind, the brain, the self, human learning, human action,
human interaction, and how we even define reality. I will also outline how the
comparisons of computer 'intelligence' with the human mind resonate with
earlier couplings of the mechanistic and biological. Among the well known
historical precedents I will draw upon are the British neuroscientist
Sherrington's supposition that the brain worked like a telegraph, Freud
comparison of the mind to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems, Descartes'
machine analogy, and how the Greeks saw the brain in terms of a catapult.
In sum, this paper proposes to show that earlier pairings of the biological and
mechanical have value in evaluating contemporary metaphors and proposals
about the brain and the self. As I explain (by combining historical case
studies with contemporary research), technological innovations have
repeatedly impacted the formulation of cultural conclusions about the brain,
the self, the nature of technology, the relationship between the biological and
the mechanical, and what we mean by human intelligence. Particular attention
will be given to illuminating how imaginative and applied views of
consciousness and technology impact human values and communication, how
technology influences our capacity to think, and how technologies impact our
capacity to 'do' science.