Thomas Edison, who fluctuated between identifying himself as an atheist and some form of non-traditional believer, referred to the brain as being merely a machine. In today’s terms, gray matter is often called a computer. Tomorrow the metaphor will be different. We’ll continue to grasp for these analogies until when and if we can unlock the secrets of consciousness.

Tim Parks of the New York Review of Books conducted a new chapter in his continuing Q&A on the topic with roboticist and philosopher Riccardo Manzotti, an externalist who believes the mind is more than just the actions and reactions of the nervous system. He leads off the introduction with this question: Will we ever really know what, or even where, consciousness is?

I’m not a roboticist nor philosopher, but I’m fairly certain the answer is a definite “yes,” whether the mind is merely neural activity or something more, providing we don’t first become extinct by our own hand or the hand of…whatever. A run as good as the one the dinosaurs enjoyed would likely be enough for us to figure out the matter–the gray matter–and likely replicate consciousness in machines. Not happening in our lifetimes but happening if there are enough lifetimes.

An excerpt:

Tim Parks:

Internalists often mention Wilder Penfield’s experiments. He managed to get people to have hallucinations by stimulating parts of their brains electrically during open brain surgery. Other neuroscientists have even managed to relate stimulation of a particular neuron to “seeing” a particular face, obviously in the absence of that face. Again this suggests that experience is generated by the brain; we don’t need the world around to see something.

Ricardo Manzotti:

Have you checked out the hallucinations Penfield reports?

Tim Parks:

No.

Ricardo Manzotti:

They are all rather everyday ordinary experiences. Seeing one’s wife entering the room. Hearing a friend’s voice.

Tim Parks:

And so?

Ricardo Manzotti:

Well, if experience were actually generated freely by the brain, isn’t it odd that it remains so strictly tied to the world? Why no colors that have never been seen before? Sounds never heard in reality? Why no experiences that clearly have nothing to do with the outer world? Even when we dream we are aware that the bizarre aspects of dreams are due to their superimposition or mixing of different elements of known experience. An elephant that’s pink, or green. A dog that can talk. Whatever.

Tim Parks:

But surely the point is that we’re seeing something that’s not there.

Ricardo Manzotti:

Tim, we discussed this in our conversation on dreams. The question of what’s “there” or what’s “now” is complex. The objects that make up our experience can be milliseconds or years away from our bodies. Photons take time to travel, neurons take time to send electrical signals. We have already suggested that although ongoing ordinary experience of the world follows a privileged neural path that makes it possible for the body to deal with phenomena immediately around it, there are also other paths, eddies as it were, where neural activity mills, or is somehow delayed, then released later in dreams, or when a surgeon stimulates a part of the brain electrically. But this does not mean the brain is creating experience.

Tim Parks:

I’m not entirely convinced by this.•

Will the machines someday rise up and kill us? One can only hope. Soon, please.

Robots needn’t become conscious to murder the lot of us Trump-electing imbeciles, but, wow, it would be so much cooler. I believe, as many do, that human consciousness is understandable (in theory), though we’re likely nowhere near the cusp of cracking the code. Further, consciousness is also probably transferable into non-carbon matter, “containers” of all sorts, though that seems eons away. Long before then, even if we get lucky with asteroids and such, we’ll manage to do ourselves in with our utter stupidity. May the machines fare better.

In the opening part of a smart New York Review of Books dialogue, novelist Tim Parks and philosopher, psychologist, and robotics engineer Riccardo Manzotti, exchange ideas about consciousness. An excerpt:

Tim Parks:

You seem now to be defining consciousness by what it is not, or at least as an area of incomprehension. But can I push you toward a more positive definition? I mean, are we talking about a thing—a physical object or a process? I presume we rule out spirits and souls.

Riccardo Manzotti:

To speak of spirits and souls would amount to an admission of defeat, at least for a scientist or philosopher. The truth is that we just don’t know a priori the nature of physical reality. This is a point Bertrand Russell made very strongly back in the 1920s. The more we investigate the physical, the more varied and complex it appears. Imagine a huge puzzle in which everything must fit together with everything else. When there’s something that doesn’t seem to match up, we turn it this way and that to see if we can make it fit somehow, but if it won’t, we have to assume that we’ve put the other pieces together wrongly, we’ve got a false picture.

That’s how science proceeds. So we have moments of revolution—Copernicus, Galileo, Newton—when all the pieces have to be rearranged, what Thomas Kuhn famously described as paradigm shifts.

There’s no reason why we should approach the problem of consciousness any differently. We have to find how to fit it into our existing understanding of reality, or change our version of reality to have it fit in with consciousness. Until we do that, we risk having a dualistic vision of the world, like the one suggested by Descartes, on the one side the physical, on the other something rather mysterious, call it the spiritual.

Tim Parks:

But again, should we be thinking of consciousness as a thing, or a process?

Riccardo Manzotti:

Well, if the world that surrounds us is made of things, objects, and physical processes, consciousness is likely to be one of them. People tend to be extremely hesitant when approaching consciousness and to treat it as a special case. But I’m not sure that’s helpful. If it is a real phenomenon, and most people agree that it is, why shouldn’t it be like all other physical phenomena, something made of matter and energy whose activity is explicable by its physical properties?•