Let’s start with the most intuitive (I would think) approach for defining the mind. Such an approach states that there are, in a sense, two separate dimensions that make up our person. One such dimension is physical, and the other is non-physical. The physical dimension is, of course, our body—not just our hands, legs, and arms but also our brain. That’s right, we assert that the brain does not influence our mental states and thought process. Very anti-science, but you may see the justification for it soon. Our non-physical or intangible dimension is where these mental states/thought process/emotions instead do occur—which is the mind. We thus say that the mind and body are separate.

It is said that, though separate, the mind and body can interact with each other. We see evidence of this in Lee Sedol, in fact. When battling against an opponent, he uses his the mind to decide where the stone (game piece) should go. Said mind induces an action in the body to actually move the stone from one location extended in space-time to a different location extended in space-time. When Lee Sedol loses the match—which has to first register/observe through his sensory capabilities—emotions such as dismay are invoked in his mind.

So, this notion is called “dualism” (pretty aptly titled). René Descartes, one of the most famous philosophers in the 17th century, created his own theory of dualism—a very popular one today—called “Cartesian dualism”.

I think therefore I am — Descartes, one of the most famous philosophy quotes

Cartesian dualism, like regular dualism, states that the mind and body are separate substances that have a mutually causal relationship. Descartes has a more concrete definition of the two, though. He states that the mind exists on a separate plane (that is, not the same plane/realm of reality that the world is in) that is immaterial, not affected by any laws of physics, and private to the person. The body is obviously the opposite of this.

Descartes was extremely religious. All of his theories really center around this, including Cartesian dualism. Descartes believed that humans were the only creatures in the universe to have minds, with other animals being confined to solely the physical realm. This is supposedly because (and this claim is clearly subject to criticism) God chose it to be that way. Do remember, however, that this was the 17th century and every philosopher must be evaluated in context of the beliefs/scientific development/thinking of their era. Don’t get me wrong—he was definitely a smart guy. Does “Cartesian” ring a bell to you in any other field aside from philosophy? If you guessed mathematics, you’re right! Descartes invented the Cartesian plane.

Descartes would obviously ridicule the notion that AlphaGo might have a mind. To him, AlphaGo is nothing but a bunch of lines of computer programming instructions, which is really just physical (ultimately everything on your computer is stored on your memory/storage as a physical representation).

René Descartes, a famous and brilliant philosopher (and mathematician!)— https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Frans_Hals_-_Portret_van_Ren%C3%A9_Descartes.jpg

I sincerely believe that Descartes’ ability to prosper in philosophy was severely handicapped by these religious constraints he needed to introduce. Because, once you probe deeper, you start to notice some really gaping holes in Cartesian dualism.

First of all, if all animals and AlphaGo alike are purely physical beings without minds awarded by some arbitrary God (apologies for the loaded rhetoric!), what stops humans from being the same? Or, what stops the others from also having minds? Perhaps our mental states are just more advanced than, for example, a gorilla’s, just like a gorilla’s is more advanced than an ant’s. Our more powerful mental faculties cannot and do not imply that we have a completely different makeup to other creatures in the universe.

The scientific evidence is, of course, not present to support any of the claims about an intangible mind existing. With that being said, it’s not like we can scientifically observe anything that lies outside of our physical realm. Either way, the claim is unsubstantiated.

This actually isn’t the biggest flaw, though. Something that Descartes (and almost every dualist out there to be frank) fails to logically assert is how the mind and the body can affect each other and interact. If the mind is on a separate “plane” than the body—one being physical and the other being non-physical—how is it possible for this to occur? When Lee Sedol’s mind is forming the strategy of where to move the next stone, how does it enable his hand and the atomic makeup of his hand to actually move it? Remember that, in a non-physical realm there would be: no laws of physics, no momentum, and no quantities that relate to the functioning of our world at all. So how is this possible? I have no idea. But let’s see what Descartes says.

Descartes points to the “pineal gland”. This gland is an interface for the mind to work with the body and the body to work with the mind—it’s a real gland in our brain! Yet, there is obviously no evidence that this interface exists. The pineal gland serves a completely separate purpose in the brain and I’m not even sure, to be honest, how Descartes came to choose it for his theory.

OK, let’s continue attacking some of Descartes claims 😛 Perhaps his weakest argument is the logic he proposes for the mind and the body being two separate substances. He does this through the following deduction:

1. The mind is more important than the body is to us 2. Leibniz law is a valid principle in logic that states if Object A has a single different property to Object B, then A ≠ B

Now:

Substitute A for the mind and B for the body. The different property A and B have is their importances to us.

Therefore:

The mind and the body are not equal.

This actually commits a fallacy called the “masked man fallacy”, which is an invalid use of Leibniz law. Let me demonstrate this through another example. Let’s say that a masked man has recently robbed a bank, and some people are speculating that it is your friend Bob (doesn’t matter if you don’t have a friend named Bob, just imagine!) With the same logic Descartes uses, we can quickly “conclude” that Bob must not be the masked man:

Premise 1: I know who Bob is. Premise 2: I do not know who the masked man is Conclusion: Therefore, Bob is not the masked man. The premises may be true and the conclusion false if Bob is the masked man and the speaker does not know that. Thus the argument is a fallacious one.

—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masked-man_fallacy

Yeah, I don’t think so.

Anyways, time to move on from dualism. It really does seem that the main issue is this whole notion of the mind and immaterial, so why not just focus on the body and physical realm?

For that, we turn to eliminative materialism. For many of the computer scientists reading, you’ll finally find some sanity in this whole philosophy thing 😄 Eliminative materialism is very scientific, but perhaps—as you’ll soon find out—painstakingly so. With materialism, we introduce nothing new, unfamiliar, or unfounded (such as a mind) in terms of science. Yes, though we often throw around the term “mind” when referring to our internal mode of thought, we really are just referring to the brain. Because, y’know, let’s not forget that the brain is where all of our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, disposition, etc. is scientifically supposed to originate first.

Here’s the issue though—in doing this, we acknowledge that what is mental is just physical. If you can concede that our mind is really just physical then you’re perfectly okay with that. But are you okay with its implications? If all of our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, disposition, etc. is from the brain, then they are simply the product of a biochemical machine. That’s right—the brain is an organ (I think!). It is controlled, ultimately, by the atoms (and thus quarks/leptons) that make it up and any sort of reactions that occur. Because, in our physical universe, everything that occurs has to be the result of something that occurred before it (the law of causality.) When we think, is that just a bunch of chemical reactions and electrical impulses going crazy? Does that mean that our beliefs are not really ours (as in, our persona) but the cooperation of a bunch of atomic particles? Because of causality, is everything we do and stand for pre-determined?

Yes. If we conform to eliminative materialism, then we start to quickly realize that everything about us just reduces (thus “eliminates”) to the thinks that make us! As a result, we lack any sort of free will or agency. Lee Sedol’s mastery of Go and his emotions after a shocking loss are just the result of neurons, axons, cortices, etc. Lee Sedol, and every other human out there, is no different to AlphaGo; both of us are purely physical beings. AlphaGo has a digital machine powering it, and I have a biochemical machine powering it. In this case, it just so happens that my biochemical machine—through many many years of evolution—is more complex than the digital machine, which we have designed in a short amount of time. For this reason, AlphaGo seemingly has less agency than we do.

That’s the kind of definition of personhood and the human condition that pure scientific reasoning gives you. It makes life meaningless, and our innovations like AlphaGo equally so. Although it really does seem like we have free will, materialists state that the brain creates a very compelling illusion through its years of evolution.

Maybe they’re not wrong; maybe we just have to accept this absurdity. Oh man.

Look into Sisyphus. http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/.a/6a010535ce1cf6970c01901c2e3df5970b-pi

Science has constantly disproved folk theories over the years; one such example is the flat Earth belief (which some lunatics still think is true). Maybe the notion of the mind is just another one that will be even more concretely shut down with advancements in neuroscience.

A visual demonstration of the reductionist/eliminative materialist approach — http://d317hpe4h9vlt8.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Ducks.jpg

But, maybe not. The implications of eliminative materialism cannot be considered a weaknesses—they’re something we just have to deal with. That doesn’t stop us, however, from finding weaknesses in it!

The greatest weakness of any materialist theory is the failure to explain qualia. Qualia is the subjective experiences of every day actions and perceptions. Listening to music is equivalent to the transfer of sound waves from a wire to your eardrums (I’m pretty sure). But, to me — and maybe to you as well — it’s so much more than that; it’s places, atmospheres, moments, and just in general the subjective experience of listening to music. If these sensory events reduce to purely mechanical, replicable actions, how can this uniquely intangible experience emerge? Materialists have not figured out a way to address qualia, with famous philosopher Paul Churchland even outright denying it. The inability to fit the qualia is perhaps one of the biggest flaws in any mind-body theory.

Qualia!

“emerge”… I like that word. This might be a good segue to our next theory (and my favorite one at that): emergentism! Emergentism states that, instead of a mind and a body being distinct substances that originate separately, the mind emerges from the body.

For this emergence to occur, there are basic constraints that have to be satisfied; for example, the brain or heart is needed to facilitate this emergence, but Lee Sedol’s legs aren’t. That’s for a human. For a computer, we could suggest that the CPU and algorithm are examples of the basic constraints.

The substance that emerges is always greater in complexity and abstraction than the collective individual parts that make it up. When we pair a biochemical machine and an organ together, we get… consciousness, speech, and a disposition! We get Lee Sedol! When we pair a computer processor and running code together, we get AlphaGo similarly. Emergent properties are the properties of the emergent substance that do not exist in the individual parts (like consciousness or free will). AlphaGo is not able to achieve either of these, but this can be attributed to its less advanced makeup. Our progression in artificial intelligence over 70+ or so years can’t compensate for the billions of years of human evolution.

With this being said, Lee Sedol and AlphaGo do actually have one similar (but not equal) individual part: neural networks. Neural networks—literally deep, complex networks of neurons and neurotransmitters—is supposedly how our nervous system, most of our sensory perception capabilities, and even thought process (maybe?) works. A digital implementation of neural networks (called “artificial neural networks”) is how most advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence programs like AlphaGo work.

It may be suggested, in fact, that neural networks could be the most fundamental constraint for the emergence of minds. How? Scientific evidence!

Researchers at MIT University, around 16 years ago, hypothesized that neural networks were the basis of mental faculties. People used to believe that the brain was a large volume of separate instructions that coordinated together to power us humans. However, when said researchers found that animal brains could learn to adapt to changes—they could use the auditory cortex to see after signals were redirected as such—neural networks were denoted as the “one learning algorithm”. Without neural networks it’s questionable if we could still have a lot of faculties like language, thought, and autonomy. This hypothesis has continued to stay prominent with the development of programs like AlphaGo that used digital implementations of neural networks

Artificial neural networks — http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/connectionism/net.gif

The mind emerging from the fundamental requirement of neural networks is known as “connectionism”. There’s a lot that we don’t know yet about connectionism, and this mostly stems from the fact that we don’t have a complete comprehension of neural networks either. Also, artificial neural networks are tiny compared to real ones; think tens of thousands of neurons for something like AlphaGo compared to trillions for a human like Lee Sedol. This discrepancy could be a reason for the emergent mind and emergent properties not being equal (in terms of the actual substance and complexity) between humans/Lee Sedol and AlphaGo. Maybe, once we start to introduce much deeper and more complex artificial neural networks we could achieve mild forms of consciousness. A bit of a jump here, but a cool thought nonetheless. Of course, there’s a massive difference between tens of thousands and trillions. Either way, it is strange that, though AlphaGo does not have some of the faculties we do, it is better in some areas (highlighted by beating Lee Sedol in the match) than we are. I wonder if this demonstrates some sort of misunderstanding in the development of digital neural networks.

Connectionism and the whole mind body conundrum are very thought provoking. I hope that, in this article, you not just learned about the potential nature of artificial intelligence but more importantly… the nature of us! This is useful knowledge to have, not just because it makes you question what you are but more importantly because we are on the brink (perhaps within 50+ years) of developing superintelligence and after that maybe even artificial general intelligence. These philosophical issues are only going to get more relevant, and it’s important that we start to dip our toes in.

The day artificial intelligence obtains consciousness, I’ll be sitting here saying: “told ya so!”