Conscious Artifact

Biologist Gerald Edelman (1929-2014) was born in America. His early work concentrated on the study of immunology and he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1972 for his work leading to the understanding of the antibody’s chemical structure.

Where in the brain does consciousness lie?

Ah, well, that's of course a mistake that's made broadly by people who've entered into the field in thinking that there are consciousness neurons, whether the consciousness is here rather than there. Consciousness, as [William Bo] James pointed out, is a process not a thing. And it's a dynamic process according to this idea of the dynamic core, which means a huge number of events all over in this re-entrant circuitry and, because it's degenerate, never even for the same experience, twice the same set of events. So the question is essentially in a way meaningless. Yes, it's happening in the brain – that makes me what's called an internalist – and I don't think the thoughts are out in the world but it isn't in one part of the brain per se, although there are parts of the brain that do not contribute to it – for example the cerebellum, for example the basal ganglia, things that are related to movement and episodic things, those may not be related. But you can't say there are consciousness neurons etc., etc. Incidentally, Freud made that mistake forgivably, when in a cocaine fit, after three weeks of taking cocaine... during three weeks of taking cocaine, he wrote what's called the Project for a Scientific Psychology, in which he attacked the problem of consciousness, and he said there were consciousness neurons. That seems to be not really the case. My colleague... former late colleague, Francis Crick, very much pushed for this idea because, in his work in molecular biology, that would be a sensible form of reduction, but I haven't... I don't know if I'd managed to persuade him completely, but I think to some extent that you can't pinpoint it that way.

But what can we say about what a consciousness does, what a knowledge of consciousness would do? Well, that's interesting, because as we said before, ego... people work I think by what philosophers call propositional attitudes: beliefs, desires and intentions. Is it likely, if I know all of how my brain is conscious, that I'm going to stop working by beliefs, desires and intentions, when everybody who's speaking to me is working the same way? Well, I don't think that'll work. It won't change our basic nature, will it? But it will change how we approach psychiatry and psychology. It will change how we do teaching maybe and, above all, it's going to change the whole view of what things are like if we ever make a conscious artifact.

People make a lot of fuss about SETI – intelligence from outer space and all of that, exobiology. The fact is... the fact is supposing we had a conscious artifact. Well, would you be terrified? No, I don't think you should be, because first of all you heard what I said about the body, it would not have our phenotype, it would therefore have a different kind of consciousness; who would have in my opinion philosophically have got to have something equivalent to language so it could report like in that experiment about the blue and the red bars. But imagine what it would be like for the first time to ask another critter, who could correspond with you, what they think the world is like. What are the boundary conditions? Now, they might slice up the world in an entirely different way than you do, and if they did I wouldn't be surprised. And this brings us to a very interesting point I think about all of this promenade I've exposed you to about the pursuit of particular subjects and different subjects in science in different stages of knowledge. And that is: what is the basis of knowledge and how do we know things and how exhaustive is the scientific enterprise? Maybe we can talk about that later but I... the thing that naturally comes from this issue about conscious artifacts. I think I'd put it this way. No-one is going to be changed, I think, by having a truly established or solid or reasonably effective science... scientific theory of consciousness, but if they're told there's a conscious artifact I think they will certainly react, don't you?

https://drive.google.com/file/conscious_artifact.mp4