I re-watched Total Recall, the 1990 incarnation, the other night. Didn't remember a damn thing about it.
Thankyouthankyouhereallweekdon'tforgettotipyourwaitress...
Sorry. That came out more like a tired sub-Vegas stand-up routine than it was intended to. I meant what I said literally: I re-watched fresh faced Arnie finding out who he was and what Mars meant to him, knowing that I'd seen it before, but not having the slightest idea what was going to happen next, none of the scenes ringing the faintest bell.
When I really, really wring my brain out to establish what little there is in the drawer marked 'Total Recall', all I can muster up is a sort of warm memory of enjoying it. It makes me wonder what sort of memory that is, whether it even counts as a memory. It's more meta than that, a recollection of an opinion of an experience, a footprint in the dust from which I extrapolate where I've been.
I've always found philosophers' analogies for how the mind works unsatisfactory. We used to be told that the mind worked like a library; nowadays it's like a computer. Whatever the technology of the day, it seems to boil down to a big bucket of black and white data that we can dip into. And that seems to sit very uncomfortably with the merry dance my neurons had been engaged in.
On the library analogy, the way I've always seen it presented is that we (our soul? our essence? our ego? what exactly?) are prowling the shelves, pulling down tomes and verifying facts. It strikes me that that's fundamentally flawed. For a start, how do you account for the difficulty, the uncomfortable feeling, at times the impossibility of holding views and opinions that don't quite mesh? For that matter, how do account for views and opinions at all?
If there's any mileage in the analogy, I think we are the library, and it's the library itself that is opening volumes, bringing the knowledge to the fore, but with all the other stuff in the background. But we're also the librarian, having a say over what makes it onto the shelves, making sure that they have an editorial stance that is us. But that all feels like I'm trying to make something fit that was never intended to.
The computer analogy does little other than reduce books to ebooks; same analogy, different technology. Neural nets appears to offer better models for learning, but less so for memories and knowledge - or intelligence and consciousness overall. What exactly are at the junctions in the net in those cases? Or is the net, in effect, your entire personality, memories, attitudes and aptitudes. If I'm a racist who's good at needlework, is it my neural net that pulls me towards doing a damn fine quilt. Just with a swastika in the middle.
Sci-fi has brought the absurdity of the mind as a box of facts to the fore many times over with computer-says-no logic engines like Spock and Data. After all, an orrery is not the universe (I'd like to see that on a t-shirt, please).*
When Babbage thought up his difference engine, one of the key controversies was putting what God had put into Man and Man alone - the ability to reason - into a machine. Where did that leave us? Where was our special status? I think that worry missed a fundamental. Calculations are actually the easy bit, the - pun intended - mechanical bit. The grey area is doubting, misremembering, having an uncanny feeling about, mild bigotry, Machiavellian scheming and the rest.
Whatever model works for all of that I'm sure of two things - it won't be a box of facts, and we we're nowhere near stumbling on it.
* Yes, yes, I know that an orrery is a model of the solar system, not the universe, but somehow that doesn't have the same ring.
Thankyouthankyouhereallweekdon'tforgettotipyourwaitress...
Sorry. That came out more like a tired sub-Vegas stand-up routine than it was intended to. I meant what I said literally: I re-watched fresh faced Arnie finding out who he was and what Mars meant to him, knowing that I'd seen it before, but not having the slightest idea what was going to happen next, none of the scenes ringing the faintest bell.
When I really, really wring my brain out to establish what little there is in the drawer marked 'Total Recall', all I can muster up is a sort of warm memory of enjoying it. It makes me wonder what sort of memory that is, whether it even counts as a memory. It's more meta than that, a recollection of an opinion of an experience, a footprint in the dust from which I extrapolate where I've been.
I've always found philosophers' analogies for how the mind works unsatisfactory. We used to be told that the mind worked like a library; nowadays it's like a computer. Whatever the technology of the day, it seems to boil down to a big bucket of black and white data that we can dip into. And that seems to sit very uncomfortably with the merry dance my neurons had been engaged in.
On the library analogy, the way I've always seen it presented is that we (our soul? our essence? our ego? what exactly?) are prowling the shelves, pulling down tomes and verifying facts. It strikes me that that's fundamentally flawed. For a start, how do you account for the difficulty, the uncomfortable feeling, at times the impossibility of holding views and opinions that don't quite mesh? For that matter, how do account for views and opinions at all?
If there's any mileage in the analogy, I think we are the library, and it's the library itself that is opening volumes, bringing the knowledge to the fore, but with all the other stuff in the background. But we're also the librarian, having a say over what makes it onto the shelves, making sure that they have an editorial stance that is us. But that all feels like I'm trying to make something fit that was never intended to.
The computer analogy does little other than reduce books to ebooks; same analogy, different technology. Neural nets appears to offer better models for learning, but less so for memories and knowledge - or intelligence and consciousness overall. What exactly are at the junctions in the net in those cases? Or is the net, in effect, your entire personality, memories, attitudes and aptitudes. If I'm a racist who's good at needlework, is it my neural net that pulls me towards doing a damn fine quilt. Just with a swastika in the middle.
Sci-fi has brought the absurdity of the mind as a box of facts to the fore many times over with computer-says-no logic engines like Spock and Data. After all, an orrery is not the universe (I'd like to see that on a t-shirt, please).*
When Babbage thought up his difference engine, one of the key controversies was putting what God had put into Man and Man alone - the ability to reason - into a machine. Where did that leave us? Where was our special status? I think that worry missed a fundamental. Calculations are actually the easy bit, the - pun intended - mechanical bit. The grey area is doubting, misremembering, having an uncanny feeling about, mild bigotry, Machiavellian scheming and the rest.
Whatever model works for all of that I'm sure of two things - it won't be a box of facts, and we we're nowhere near stumbling on it.
* Yes, yes, I know that an orrery is a model of the solar system, not the universe, but somehow that doesn't have the same ring.
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