WillSpirit!

In an earlier post, I praised Douglas Hofstadter’s vision of consciousness as a product of recursive and resonant self-reflection. The point of that essay was to highlight the profound value of observing one’s inner life: mindfulness brings one to the threshold of the sacred. Without in any way focusing on meditation, Hofstadter captures the essence of contemplative practice.

There are aspects of his philosophy that trouble me, however. In particular, I mentioned in passing that Hofstadter believes a computer could embody a self if it were sufficiently complex and possessed motivational drive. Although this sounds sensible in theory, in actual fact it seems unlikely that a synthetic consciousness could ever be similar in any meaningful way to a human mind. I’ve been reading a number of authors who write about consciousness, the brain, and the prospects for artificial intelligence. As near as I can tell, they divide fairly neatly into those who think machines will someday emulate the human mind, and those who believe computers will never achieve consciousness. On the whole, it appears that those with primary backgrounds in mathematics or computer science tend toward the former position, while biologists tend toward the latter. Those with religious perspectives also contend that consciousness is uniquely human, but I’m setting their positions aside for the purposes of this post.

Since I am a former research biologist and a trained physician, it should be no surprise that I believe human consciousness lies beyond the capability of machines, no matter how advanced. Hofstadter has made an important contribution in recognizing reflection as the key to an entity having a sense of self. It may be that auto-observing machines will someday be created, and perhaps they will have selves of some sort. But whatever awareness arises will not be human, or even human-like.

The philosopher Alva Noë makes the point that even minute single celled organisms have well-defined agency. They move toward nutrients and away from threats, for instance. In other words, there is a motivated quality to life all the way down to the unicellular level. The fertile yearning and striving characteristic of living things arises at the very trunk of the tree of life.

I think this is a central and important point. Much of our conscious experience comes from our biological imperatives. In fact, some have proposed that even our capacities for art, song, and innovation evolved because early humanoids with such skills were more sexually attractive than those less talented. The patently biological reproductive drive may underly the most rarefied human activities.

Even if a machine could be designed to pursue goals in an internally motivated way, such behavior would be a high-level addition to its programming. The device might look very human-like to an external observer, but its motivation would be an accretion onto a logic-gate architecture; it seems very unlikely that the inner experience of such a machine would resemble human consciousness at all. Semiconductor logic gates do not embody desire, whereas yearning is utterly fundamental to life. Self-reflection may engender the mysterious quality of conscious awareness, but drives establish the core experience of every biological organism.

As we all recognize, biological drives also underpin much of our misery. Who hasn’t been stung by amorous (read: reproductive) yearning? Who hasn’t developed excessive hunger for one or more bodily pleasures? How much of our suffering comes directly from our identities as organisms with powerful instinctive desires? The same is true for our joy, at least in its less refined forms. Isn’t it the case that passion and excitement come directly or indirectly from biological currents? In some sense or another, these currents can be detected in every living cell.

So although self-reflection may be central to our feelings of self-identity and conscious awareness, much of our experience originates far below any such complex mental activities. Much of our sense of being human results from the more ancient condition of being a living organism, writ large.

The key to satisfaction is to reconcile the high-level awareness that comes from self-reflection with the surging forces of instinct roiling around our cells, tissues and organs. The watcher may be the product of recursive self-reflection, but what it watches is the moist and messy business of life.