{"id":18284,"date":"2019-10-18T00:43:34","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T00:43:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=18284"},"modified":"2019-10-21T20:00:14","modified_gmt":"2019-10-21T20:00:14","slug":"why-a-computer-will-never-be-truly-conscious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/why-a-computer-will-never-be-truly-conscious\/","title":{"rendered":"Why a computer will never be truly conscious"},"content":{"rendered":"

Subhash Kak<\/a>, Oklahoma State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Many advanced artificial intelligence projects say they are working toward<\/a> building<\/a> a conscious machine<\/a>, based on the idea that brain functions merely encode and process multisensory information<\/a>. The assumption goes, then, that once brain functions are properly understood, it should be possible to program them into a computer. Microsoft recently announced that it would spend US$1 billion on a project<\/a> to do just that.<\/p>\n

So far, though, attempts to build supercomputer brains have not even come close. A multi-billion-dollar European project<\/a> that began in 2013 is now largely understood to have failed<\/a>. That effort has shifted to look more like a similar but less ambitious project<\/a> in the U.S., developing new software tools for researchers<\/a> to study brain data, rather than simulating a brain.<\/p>\n

Some researchers continue to insist that simulating neuroscience with computers<\/a> is the way to go. Others<\/a>, like me, view these efforts as doomed to failure because we do not believe consciousness is computable<\/a>. Our basic argument is that brains integrate and compress multiple components of an experience, including sight and smell \u2013 which simply can\u2019t be handled in the way today\u2019s computers sense, process and store data.<\/p>\n

Brains don\u2019t operate like computers<\/h2>\n

Living organisms store experiences in their brains by adapting neural connections<\/a> in an active process between the subject and the environment<\/a>. By contrast, a computer records data in short-term and long-term memory blocks. That difference means the brain\u2019s information handling must also be different from how computers work.<\/p>\n

The mind actively explores the environment to find elements that guide the performance of one action or another. Perception is not directly related to the sensory data: A person can identify a table from many different angles<\/a>, without having to consciously interpret the data and then ask its memory if that pattern could be created by alternate views of an item identified some time earlier.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Could you identify all of these as a table right away? A computer would likely have real trouble.<\/span>
\nL to R: pashminu\/Pixabay; FDR Presidential Library\/Flickr; David Mellis\/Flickr<\/a>, CC BY<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another perspective on this is that the most mundane memory tasks are associated with multiple areas of the brain \u2013 some of which are quite large<\/a>. Skill learning and expertise involve reorganization and physical changes<\/a>, such as changing the strengths of connections between neurons. Those transformations cannot be replicated fully in a computer with a fixed architecture.<\/p>\n

Computation and awareness<\/h2>\n

In my own recent work, I\u2019ve highlighted some additional reasons that consciousness is not computable<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Werner Heisenberg.<\/span>
\nBundesarchiv, Bild 183-R57262\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a>, CC BY-SA<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger.<\/span>
\nNobel Foundation\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Alan Turing.<\/span>
\nWikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A conscious person is aware of what they\u2019re thinking, and has the ability to stop thinking about one thing and start thinking about another \u2013 no matter where they were in the initial train of thought. But that\u2019s impossible for a computer to do. More than 80 years ago, pioneering British computer scientist Alan Turing showed that there was no way ever to prove that any particular computer program could stop on its own<\/a> \u2013 and yet that ability is central to consciousness.<\/p>\n

His argument is based on a trick of logic in which he creates an inherent contradiction: Imagine there were a general process<\/a> that could determine whether any program it analyzed would stop. The output of that process would be either \u201cyes, it will stop\u201d or \u201cno, it won\u2019t stop.\u201d That\u2019s pretty straightforward. But then Turing imagined that a crafty engineer<\/a> wrote a program that included the stop-checking process, with one crucial element: an instruction to keep the program running if the stop-checker\u2019s answer was \u201cyes, it will stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Running the stop-checking process on this new program would necessarily make the stop-checker wrong<\/a>: If it determined that the program would stop, the program\u2019s instructions would tell it not to stop. On the other hand, if the stop-checker determined that the program would not stop, the program\u2019s instructions would halt everything immediately. That makes no sense \u2013 and the nonsense gave Turing his conclusion, that there can be no way to analyze a program and be entirely absolutely certain that it can stop. So it\u2019s impossible to be certain that any computer can emulate a system that can definitely stop its train of thought and change to another line of thinking \u2013 yet certainty about that capability is an inherent part of being conscious.<\/p>\n

Even before Turing\u2019s work, German quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg showed that there was a distinct difference in the nature of the physical event and an observer\u2019s conscious knowledge<\/a> of it. This was interpreted by Austrian physicist Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger to mean that consciousness cannot come from a physical process, like a computer\u2019s, that reduces all operations to basic logic arguments<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These ideas are confirmed by medical research findings that there are no unique structures in the brain that exclusively handle consciousness. Rather, functional MRI imaging shows that different cognitive tasks happen in different areas<\/a> of the brain. This has led neuroscientist Semir Zeki to conclude that \u201cconsciousness is not a unity<\/a>, and that there are instead many consciousnesses that are distributed in time and space.\u201d That type of limitless brain capacity isn\u2019t the sort of challenge a finite computer can ever handle.<\/p>\n

[ Like what you\u2019ve read? Want more?<\/em> Sign up for The Conversation\u2019s daily newsletter<\/a>. ]\"The<\/p>\n

Subhash Kak<\/a>, Regents Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Oklahoma State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Subhash Kak, Oklahoma State University Many advanced artificial intelligence projects say they are working toward building a conscious machine, based on the idea that brain functions merely encode and process multisensory information. The assumption goes, then, that once brain functions are properly understood, it should be possible to program them into a computer. Microsoft recently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":18283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3410],"tags":[970,401,6233,5433,7091,1161,232,228,7090,3987],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18284"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18284"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18315,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18284\/revisions\/18315"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}