Why Our Consciousness (Sense of Self) Will Never Live in a Machine

There is a faction of the transhumanist camp that is absolutely convinced we will one day upload our conscious sense of self into a computer network and become seemingly immortal (barring a power failure).

Here is an example of that form of thinking (while admitting it's only a theory at this point, they do believe it is possible and are working toward its creation) from one of the leading sites in the field of new technology, the IEEE, by Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi:

You'll be able to upload your mind--your thoughts, memories, and personality--to a computer. And once you've reduced your consciousness to patterns of electrons, others will be able to copy it, edit it, sell it, or pirate it. It might be bundled with other electronic minds. And, of course, it could be deleted.

That's quite a scenario, considering that at the moment, nobody really knows exactly what consciousness is. Pressed for a pithy definition, we might call it the ineffable and enigmatic inner life of the mind. But that hardly captures the whirl of thought and sensation that blossoms when you see a loved one after a long absence, hear an exquisite violin solo, or relish an incredible meal. Some of the most brilliant minds in human history have pondered consciousness, and after a few thousand years we still can't say for sure if it is an intangible phenomenon or maybe even a kind of substance different from matter. We know it arises in the brain, but we don't know how or where in the brain. We don't even know if it requires specialized brain cells (or neurons) or some sort of special circuit arrangement of them.

Nevertheless, some in the singularity crowd are confident that we are within a few decades of building a computer, a simulacrum, that can experience the color red, savor the smell of a rose, feel pain and pleasure, and fall in love. It might be a robot with a ”body.” Or it might just be software--a huge, ever-changing cloud of bits that inhabit an immensely complicated and elaborately constructed virtual domain.

We are among the few neuroscientists who have devoted a substantial part of their careers to studying consciousness. Our work has given us a unique perspective on what is arguably the most momentous issue in all of technology: whether consciousness will ever be artificially created.

We think it will--eventually. But perhaps not in the way that the most popular scenarios have envisioned it.

Consciousness is part of the natural world. It depends, we believe, only on mathematics and logic and on the imperfectly known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology; it does not arise from some magical or otherworldly quality. That's good news, because it means there's no reason why consciousness can't be reproduced in a machine--in theory, anyway.

Sounds great, huh? Eternal life, no disease, and no pesky body issues like shaving or menstruation. The Singularity folks are even more convinced that this is possible, and not only possible but desirable - and inevitable.

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is dedicated to creating computer-based, super-human intelligence. Their agenda includes:

The most commonly mentioned is probably Artificial Intelligence, but there are others: direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation.

[Emphasis added.] Computer emulation sounds harmless, but the idea has other names that are more revealing, such as mind uploading, the idea that we can, as mentioned above, upload human consciousness into a computer.

Mind uploading or whole brain emulation (sometimes called mind transfer or electronic transcendence) is the hypothetical process of scanning and mapping a biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer system or another computational device. The computer runs a simulation model so faithful to the original that it will behave in essentially the same way as the original brain, or for all practical purposes, indistinguishably.^[1]

Whole brain emulation is discussed as a logical endpoint^[1] of the topical computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics fields, both about brain simulation for medical research purposes. It is discussed in artificial intelligence research publications^[2] as an approach to strong AI. Among futurists and within the transhumanist movement it is an important proposed life extension technology, originally suggested in biomedical literature in 1971^[3]. It is a central conceptual feature of numerous science fiction novels and films.

Whole brain simulation is considered by some scientists as a theoretical and futuristic but possible technology^[1], although mainstream research funders remain skeptical. Several contradictory and already passed attempts have been made during the years to predict when whole human brain simulation can come true. Substantial mainstream research and development are however being done in relevant areas including development of faster super computers, virtual reality, brain-computer interfaces, animal brain mapping and simulation, and information extraction from dynamically functioning brains^[4]. The question whether an emulated brain can be a human mind is debated by philosophers, and is contradicted by the dualistic view of the human mind that is common in many religions.

The term mind transfer also aims at the transfer of the state of a brain to another biological brain. No current research or development activities are reported in this area.

The idea that this is possible is based in computational neuroscience, a version of cognitive neuroscience that contends - as Dan Dennet has spent a career trying to prove (see Consciousness Explained) - that there is really no such thing as consciousness, and that all neural function can be reduced to mathematical formulas. People in this field see no reason that we cannot, eventually, create a computer-based neural net that is fully conscious in every way that a human being is conscious.

[Dennet] defends a theory known by some as Neural Darwinism. He also presents an argument against qualia; he argues that the concept is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism.

Qualia, for those not versed in consciousness theory, is defined as the subjective quality of conscious experience. From Wikipedia:

The importance of qualia in philosophy of mind comes largely from the fact that they are often seen as posing a fundamental problem for materialist explanations of the mind-body problem. Much of the debate over their existence hinges on the definition of the term that is used, as various philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain properties.

At the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference, held here in Tucson every other year, researchers devote entire presentations to attempting to define how and why qualia arise in consciousness. This is no small issue.

Among the proponents of qualia are some of the biggest names in the philosophy of mind and the neuroscience of consciousness:

• 4.1 David Chalmers
• 4.2 E. J. Lowe
• 4.3 J. B. Maund
• 4.4 Moreland Perkins
• 4.5 Ramachandran and Hirstein
• 4.6 Antti Revonsuo
• 4.7 Howard Robinson and William Robinson
• 4.8 Edmond Wright
• 4.9 Erwin Schrödinger

Among the opponents are Dennet,

• 3.2 Paul Churchland
• 3.3 Gary Drescher
• 3.4 David Lewis
• 3.5 Marvin Minsky
• 3.6 Michael Tye

So this is the hard problem in consciousness studies, explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences. However, new avenues of research are making the "problem" less problematic and redefining how we conceive of being human.

* * * * *

From my perspective - as a student of psychology and consciousness studies - and from the perspective of an integral and integrated understanding of conscious experience, these rejections of qualia and the assertion that we can by-pass the body and upload consciousness into machines, all fail to grasp two main points:

1. Human consciousness, as demonstrated by Antonio Damasio and others (Alva Noe, for example), is not confined to the brain but is deeply dependent on the body.

2. Human consciousness, particularly the experience of self, is socially and culturally embedded and cannot exist as we know it without this interpersonal context - this view is expressed by both interpersonal neurobiology and cultural psychology.

I'll start with Damasio, who has revolutionized our understanding of the mind-body problem, and who I blogged about just the other day. Here is some of what I wrote in the earlier post:

Antonio Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens contends that consciousness is not merely a by-product of brain activity, but is a necessary function of the body as a whole, including the brain.

As an aside, he proposes at least four levels of self, from least complex to most complex:

1. Neural Self (or proto-self) - a short term collection of neural patterns of activity which represent the current state of the organism
2. Core Self - a second-order entity which maps the state of the proto-self in rather the same way the proto-self maps the current state of the body: whenever an encounter with an object impinges on the proto-self, the change is registered by activity in the core self
3. Autobiographical Self - draws on permanent (though modifiable) memories instead of just the immediate experiences which power the core self. At this point, there is a real, though still pre-linguistic, sense of self. Damasio thinks chimpanzees and probably dogs enjoy this level of consciousness
4. Reflective Self - greater use of longer-term memory, delivers the kind of foresighted, reflective consciousness which we typically associate with human beings

In Damasio's view, one which I share, emotions are body states that then are interpreted by the brain to assign a label based on memory and previous learning. The classic example of this was demonstrated years before Damasio wrote his book. In the study, (Schachter & Singer, 1962) researchers gave epinephrine to subjects (telling them it was a vitamin), half of which were told what to expect and half were told nothing or given false information. All subjects were left with a confederate who either acted euphoric or angry. Those told what to expect attributed their arrousal to the injection. Those who were given no information or false information labeled their own experience in line with the behavior of the confederate, not having any other information on which to base their feelings. The researches suggest that emotion is based on arousal + cognition, on the assumption that most emotions share similar body-states.

In general, then, the autobiographical self, or narrative self, creates a story to explain body states based on either environmental cues or previous experience.

In his model, which has gained wide acceptance, Damasio suggests that the greatest portion of our consciousness occurs below the level of our individual awareness, in the neural self, which then may or may not rise to the level of the core self.

Importantly, though, it occurs in the interaction of our bodies (the central nervous system, the brain and spine, and the peripheral nervous system, the sensory neurons, clusters of neurons called ganglia, and nerves connecting them to each other and to the central nervous system - along with the enteric nervous system - the gut brain) with the environment in which we exist. The brain by itself, in his view and mine, lacks any contact with the world and therefore lacks any consciousness. We NEED the body for consciousness to occur.

This poses a serious problem for those who want to upload the "mind" or consciousness into a computer. We do not only have to find a way to simulate the most complex system we know about in the universe [The cerebral cortex of the human brain contains roughly 15–33 billion neurons depending on gender and age,^[2] linked with up to 10,000 synaptic connections each. Each cubic millimeter of cerebral cortex contains roughly one billion synapses.^[3] - there are "hundred billion (10^11) neurons and several hundred trillion synaptic connections" (Marois & Ivanoff, 2005).] None of these numbers include the incredible complex systems of nerves and receptors in the body, all of which feed information to the brain.

When the singularity and transhumanism folks talk about uploading consciousness into a computer, they are talking almost exclusively about Damasio's autobiographical consciousness and the emergent capacity for reflexive self-consciousness (awareness of our awareness).

* * * * *

As damning as Damasio's body-centered explanation of emotion and consciousness is for the Singularity and transhumanist position, I think it pales to that of the interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) folks and the closely related cultural psychology (CP) field.

The Board of Direcors for GAINS, The Global Alliance for Interpersonal Neurobiology Studies includes some of the most important people in neuroscience research:

Daniel J. Siegel, MD
Allan Schore, PhD
Marco Iacoboni, MD, PhD
Stephen Porges, PhD
Pat Ogden, PhD
Diana Fosha, PhD
Diane Ackerman
Carl Marci, MD
Eugene Beresin, MD
Ross M. Ungleider, MD
Louis Cozolino, PhD
Patty Wipfler

Here is are two good overviews of what their mission is:

Overview of Interpersonal Neurobiology: "Interpersonal Neurobiology, a term coined by Dr. Dan Siegel, studies the way the brain grows and is influenced by personal relationships. Recent studies have discovered that brain growth occurs throughout the lifespan. IPNB explores the potential for healing trauma by using positive and secure influences on the brain. Conditions once thought to be permanent now have the bright potential for healing and growth. IPNB has broad applications that are useful for parenting, mental health, addictions, education, health care, business professionals, and more." ~ Excerpt from Vanguard in Action

"Interpersonal Neurobiology, developed by Dr. Daniel Siegel, studies what occurs in the brain as a result of significant life experiences and how the therapeutic relationship can be used to actually change the brain and neurological system. It was once believed that neurological development ceased by late adolescence, but Dr Sigiel's research has determined that neurogenesis and neuroplasticity--the creation of new neurons and new neuronal connections--continue throughout our life spans. MRI's and PET scans, scientific devices that allow us to peer into the workings of the body and brain, verify that meditation, mindfulness, and emotional attachment significantly influence the body where new neuronal pathways are created. Experience alters the brain, even as we age. Whenever we learn something new, including new attitudes, perspectives, or behaviors, we are changing the physical structure of the brain." ~ Excerpt from Familyprocess.org

While the mission of Siegel and others (especially Schore, Fosha, and Cozolino) is to find ways to use IPNB in the consulting room, especially in the treatment of trauma, the technology of IPNB serves as sharp reminder that Selves are not created in a vacuum.

Their basic assumption, which is the foundation of attachment theory (the most important development to come out of the neo-Freudian psychoanalytic school of psychology, the origins can be read about here) is that the human mind and human consciousness arises as the unique combination of inborn neuro-capacities (nature) and interpersonal bonding (nurture) with the attachment figure (generally the mother, though not necessarily). An example of how crucial this early bonding experience is to human development can be seen in the rare, but educational, occurrence of feral children (Genie is the most well documented example of how torture and social isolation in the earliest period of life and prevent the acquisition of "human" capabilities and traits). We need interpersonal, body-based experience to grow a mind.

Here is Dan Siegel's conception of mind and its development:

The Mind:

A Definition – The mind can be defined as an embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information. Regulation is at the heart of mental life, and helping others with this regulatory balance is central to understanding how the mind can change. The brain has selfregulatory circuits that may directly contribute to enhancing how the mind regulates the flow of its two elements, energy and information.

Mind Emergence – The mind emerges in the transaction of at least neurobiological and interpersonal processes. Energy and information can flow within one brain, or between brains. Naturally other features of our world, nature and our technological environment, can also impact on how the mind emerges. Within psychotherapy, we can see that relationships with another person profoundly shape the flow of energy and information between two people, and within each person.

Mind Development – The mind develops across the lifespan as the genetically programmed maturation of the nervous system is shaped by ongoing experience. We now know that about one third of our genome directly shapes the connections within our brains (4). Though genes are extremely important in development, we also know that experience shapes our neural connections as well. When neurons become active they have the potential to stimulate the growth of new connections among each other. With one hundred billion neurons and an average of ten thousand synaptic connections linking one neuron to others, we have trillions of connections within our brains. These synaptic linkages are created by both genes and by experience. Nature needs nurture. Experience shapes new connections among neurons by how genes are activated, proteins produced, and interconnections established within our spider-web like neural system.

Mental Well-Being – An interpersonal neurobiology view of well-being states that the complex, non-linear system of the mind achieves states of self-organization by balancing the two opposing processes of differentiation and linkage. When separated areas of the brain are allowed to specialize in their function and then to become linked together, the system is said to be integrated. Integration brings with it a special state of functioning of the whole which has the acronym of FACES: Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized, and Stable. This coherent flow (5) is bounded on one side by chaos and on the other by rigidity (6). In this manner we can envision a flow or river of well-being, with the two banks being chaos on the one side, rigidity on the other. One way of viewing the symptoms of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (7) for psychiatric diagnoses is as manifestations of rigidity or of chaos. This flow of well being can be seen to reveal the correlations among an empathic relationship, a coherent mind, and an integrated brain as three points on a triangle depicting well-being.

In this view, the interpersonal is an integral and integrated part of what we call mind, or consciousness. We do not have a mind - as we conceive of it - without the interpersonal context. In essence, we are socially and culturally embedded beings. This is something that we can never upload into a computer.

This view is very similar to that of the cultural psychologists. While IPNB looks specifically at the way mind arises and is shaped by interpersonal experience (between individuals), CP looks at the way mind arises as a result of the interaction between unique neural systems (a very cognitive neuroscience approach) and the environmental and cultural context in which that system exists.

I recently blogged about (here and here) the 2001 book from Ciarán Benson, The Cultural Psychology of the Self. Here is the central thesis of that book:

In this book I want to explore the idea that a primary function of the psychological system which is commonly called ‘self’ is to locate or position the person for themselves in relation to others. I want to suggest that self is a locative system with both evolutionary and cultural antecedents.

We cannot imagine being nowhere. We can visualise ourselves being lost, but that is to be somewhere unfamiliar to us, possibly without the means of getting back to a place we know. Where and when, place and time, are the conditions of existence. Being nowhere is quite simply a contradiction in terms. Without being placed or located I would not be, and where I find myself implaced influences not just the fact of my being but also its nature. Where, when and who are mutually constitutive. Lives, selves, identities are threaded across times and places. Who you are is a function of where you are, of where you have been and of where you hope to arrive. There cannot be a ‘here’ without a ‘you’ or an ‘I’ or a ‘now’. Self, acts of self-location and locations are inextricably linked and mutually constructive.

‘Self’ functions primarily as a locative system, a means of reference and orientation in worlds of space–time (perceptual worlds) and in worlds of meaning and place–time (cultural worlds). This understanding of self as an ongoing, living process of constant auto-referred locating recognises the centrality both of the body and of social relations. The antecedents of bodily location are well understood in evolutionary terms, whereas those of personal location among other persons are best understood culturally.

Selfhood and mentality are the most sophisticated synthetic achievements of body and culture in the universe known to human beings. In addition, as Jerome Bruner reminds us, ‘Perhaps the single most universal thing about human experience is the phenomenon of “Self”.’ (pg. 3-4)

In this view, the Self is essentially a relational system, a process and not a thing. It is constantly in flux. Here is a little more on the autobiographical self (a notion we also found in Damasio).

Since a cultural psychological conception favours an understanding of self as a continuously self-integrating process negotiating its stability through all the changes of location and demand that make up a human life, it should come as no surprise that this problem of achieving stability of self should present itself as a core problem for psychology.

William James formulated this with his metaphor of consciousness as a stream. How do I know I am the same self today as I was yesterday? I have after all lost consciousness for about eight hours between then and now while I slept. And what about the links between me as I am now and me as I was twenty years ago? What is the nature of that linkage? As we have seen, James thought that this had to do with each present thought appropriating its predecessor, owning it, as it were, and blending it into the ongoing flow of consciousness. In this way the stream has the subjective quality of being all of a piece, of being a single stream, my stream.

Bruner identifies this problem as lying at the heart of the psychology of autobiography. Notwithstanding what he calls the ‘robustness’ of selves over time, they also exhibit an instability when observed over extended periods. Selves change. Sameness and change must both be accounted for. The universal changes of ordinary human development (infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood and old age), the particular changes of individual lives (personal successes and failures, griefs and joys), and the structural changes of the societies to which people belong (periods of peace and stability, war and terror and dispossession, growths and collapses of economic/ moral/religious systems) must all be accounted for in an adequate psychology of autobiography. (pg 50)

Clearly then, although narratives can incorporate and encompass multiple realms (biological, psychological, cultural, and social), the perspective taken is inherently subjective (a 3rd-person presentation of a 1st-person experience) - ultimately, it is a personal story with an unreliable narrator (to use a term from literary criticism) in that we all have blind spots or unconscious motivations that will impact the content of the narrative. More importantly, however, constructing a narrative and being able to tell it to others requires a certain degree of self-reflexive consciousness - being conscious of being conscious.

What Damasio, Siegel (and the other IPNB folks) and Benson (as well as Jerome Bruner) all have in common is the acceptance and explanation of qualia. The awareness of qualia, which rises from Damasio's neural self to the core self or core consciousness, allows us to construct a narrative about their origin, and this is nearly always within a social and cultural context - which requires a body.

In my opinion, the ability to upload consciousness into a machine will never be based solely on the ability to mimic the human brain in a synthetic neural net - it will require the ability to mimic a fully conscious human body embedded (with subjective experience) in an interpersonal and cultural context - intelligence is distributed:

Originally introduced by Vygotsky and championed by his widening circle of admirers, the new position is that cultural products, like language and other symbolic systems, mediate thought and place their stamp on our representations of reality.[3] In its latest version, it takes the name, after John Seely Brown and Allan Collins, of "distributed intelligence."[4] An individual's working intelligence is never "solo." It cannot be understood without taking into account his or her reference books, notes, computer programs and data bases, or most important of all, the network of friends, colleagues, or mentors on whom one leans for help and advice. (Bruner, pg. 3)

Anything less than this will be less than human.


Selected References:

Benson, C. (2001) Cultural Psychology of the Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds. NY: Routledge.

Bruner, J. The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical Inquiry. 1991 Aut; 18.

Damasio, A. (2000) The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. NY: Harvest Books.

Herman. D. Genette meets Vygotsky: narrative embedding and distributed intelligence. Language and Literature, Vol. 15, No. 4, 357-380 (2006).

Marois R, Ivanoff J. Capacity limits of information processing in the brain. Trends Cogn Sci. 2005 Jun;9(6):296-305.

Siegel, D. (2001) The Developing Mind. NY: The Guilford Press.

Siegel, D. An Interpersonal Neurobiology Approach to Psychotherapy: Awareness, Mirror Neurons, and Neural Plasticity in the Development of Well-Being. Psychiatric Annals 2006 Apr;36(4):

Tags: consciousness, humanity, Transhumanism, mind, self, singularity, neuroscience, mind uploading, whole brain emulation, computers, computer-based consciousness, computational neuroscience, qualia, Dan Dennet, philosophy of mind, Antonio Damasio, embodied consciousness, interpersonal neurobiology, cultural psychology, The Feeling of What Happens, neural self, core self, autobiographical self, self-reflexive consciousness, body, complexity, Daniel J. Siegel, attachment theory, feral children, Ciarán Benson, The Cultural Psychology of the Self, locative system, Jerome Bruner, distributed intelligence, The Narrative Construction of Reality, hard problem of consciousness, Alva Noe