You Think, Therefore I Am

Consciousness. At what point does it occur? And what is it really? The brain observes, assimilates, reflects, stores, responds and reacts. We can't help it, that's just what the brain does. Recognizes patterns. Sometimes. Evaluates. Considers. Includes both positive and negative reinforcement experiences. Stir it all up and out comes The Mind. 

Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock performing the Vulcan Mind Meld. 

Is there really room for more than one?

Growing up, there was no Internet. We had these things called libraries. You either believed what your parents or teachers told you, or you were forced to go look it up. OK sometimes friends were consulted. But if you really wanted to KNOW something, you looked it up, with the understanding that what was written was factual and objective. Newspapers counted. Even the evening news I guess, although I never paid much attention to it. Except the nightly tally of the soldiers killed in Vietnam. And now? Good god.

The Internet starts off with good intentions. And Google made it easily accessible. You no longer had to go to the library to write that paper. Then it dawned on someone - probably a teacher either recognizing plagiarism or outright BS - that you can't believe everything you read. Like, “Wow, you maybe oughta fact-check some of that crap before you put it in your term paper.” And about then was the dawn of the misinformation age. An endless sea of clickbait catering to every ridiculous set of notions imaginable, which is a story for another time.

Well much has been said of what it is to claim one KNOWS something, and what that even means. Is there really such a thing as a priori? OR is it what got processed prior to sentience? Whatever the subject, it has been stored somewhere within and can now be recalled with concrete certainty as to its integrity. It is now BELIEVED to be true. And this collection of beliefs and experiences congeals and combines with a self-awareness that we casually identify as ourselves. Then along comes the Matrix and Harrari's Homo Deus and one starts to wonder just who you are talking to.

In the Turing Test we are charged with determining whether the respondent is human or machine. If we can't say with any certainty, or how can we KNOW whether the respondent has consciousness? Because we ask them. And for that matter, how do we know whether the hamster is still alive within our neighbors? The wheels are turning. They claim to be conscious. We generally take their word for it. So I KNOW I’m conscious, I’m just not sure I believe you are. I’ll have to think about it. As well as the question about whether you exist.

Which brings me to a relevant passage from Philip Roth's American Pastoral: 

"You fight with your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims?...The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we KNOW [emphasis added] we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget about being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you."

So therein is the challenge. Recognize that we get people wrong. That’s life. Try and go along for the ride instead. Believe them when they say they are conscious, but be wary. As Ronald Reagan once said “Trust but verify.” Good luck, and until next time, I’ll be thinking of you.

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