The breakdown of consciousness

Confronted by the discoveries of artificial intelligence, some philosophers are questioning the very minds that keep their profession afloat.

By Paige Arthur

Nov 20, 1998 | Remember Deep Blue, the IBM-produced computer that beat Gary Kasparov last year in a chess match? Red-faced and spent from confronting his "opponent" and its team of experts, the frustrated world champion muttered afterwards, "I'm not afraid to admit that I'm afraid. And I'm not even afraid to say why I'm afraid, because sometimes, you know, it definitely goes beyond any known chess program in the world."

Kasparov's somewhat inchoate musing manages to express a deep-seated feeling among humans when confronted with the deeds of artificial intelligence, commonly known as AI. Did Deep Blue exhibit intelligent behavior in defeating Kasparov? Did it "trick" him on occasion and play "humanlike" strategies? Might Deep Blue's performance have demonstrated a proto-conscious intelligence, one that could grow with bigger and faster computers?

Debates around the meaning of consciousness are among the quirkier instances when intense public and academic interest collide. While few outside of the ivory tower would find much of what philosophers and artificial intelligence theorists write to be bearable reading, recent articles about the logic capabilities of brainy "Kanzi the ape" have charmed all those interested in non-human cognition. Displacing Koko as the darling of the ape studies world, Kanzi's purported symbol-using skills once again remind us that humans should not be considered the only standard for determining what thinking, logic and consciousness are.

What accounts for this convergence? Berkeley neurobiologist Walter J. Freeman believes that our fascination with computers and consciousness is deeply embedded in our cultural repository. "The evolution and maturation of computers," he explains, "has rekindled a very old debate about the possibility of creating a machine that not only thinks, but is aware that it thinks. This is an idea that goes back to the image of God creating man from dust and breathing life into the inert matter, to the golem and to 'Pygmalion,' and now to the digital computer in a robot, the 'giant brain' on wheels."

Reformulating an old 1950s science-fiction theme as well, Deep Blue has once again planted the incubus in the popular imagination of the thinking machine -- a conscious intelligence, smarter than its creators, who sometimes menaces the very civilization that brought it into existence.

But what does this really mean, a "conscious" machine? Not so fast, say the gurus of philosophy and artificial intelligence. For many of them, consciousness itself is a trick -- one that a system (for example, the human body) plays on itself. You may be surprised to learn that a dominant strand in philosophy today claims that consciousness doesn't really exist, or at least not the way we commonly think of it.

The main proponents of this idea, such as Tufts University's Daniel Dennett, tell us that our feeling of self-awareness, and our sense of subjective, inner experiences such as pain, are simply physical states, nothing more. Consciousness, which we commonly think of as something having to do with our minds rather than our bodies, is just another physical accessory that makes it easier for us to get around in the world. The old distinction between mind and body is actually thrown out altogether. Against our everyday understanding of the mind as a kind of pilot that commands the body to do things, many philosophers argue that the "mind as pilot" idea is just a fiction -- created by and subject to physical processes in the brain.

Taking an evolutionary view, Dennett argues that this physical state we call "consciousness" is just one among many beneficial adaptations the human species has made in its struggle to perpetuate itself.

Next Page: Are we zombies?

• View blog reactions