You believe the philosopher led us astray. In what way?
He’s the one who argued that the mind couldn’t be just the brain, couldn’t be just the body, that it had to be a different kind of substance altogether. It’s one of the greatest mistakes in the history of thinking. And we have been trying to undo that mistake ever since. Certainly, I have.
Why has it been so hard to overturn this picture of the mind?
Advertisement
There’s a very powerful and ultimately emotional resistance to the idea that our brains are organs for thinking, and that our experience of mind is simply the workings out of some neural machinery. Darwin showed us how all the wonderful “intelligent design” of the universe, and that includes our brains and minds, comes out of a non-intelligent process: evolution. Some people have a lot of trouble with that. Then Alan Turing came along.
What did Alan Turing add to this idea?
that you could launder all the mentality out of computation and make an entirely mechanical computational device, then build that up into artificial intelligence (AI). Both Darwin and Turing were visionary theorists of bottom-up design. One of the great things about a modern computer is that you know to a moral certainty that there is no extrasensory perception in there – it’s just as mechanical as an adding machine.
I call it “” – that’s my bumper sticker. Your basic computer doesn’t understand what arithmetic is or why it’s useful, but it does it perfectly. And evolution by natural selection is a process that’s breathtakingly competent, but has no understanding at all. Yet it has given humans the ability to reason, to understand. And now that we have such thinking tools, we are using them to achieve kinds of comprehension that no other species has. But I don’t think we ended up with the likes of Shakespeare simply through evolution acting on our genes. It took another evolutionary process to join forces with it – cultural evolution. .
How do you define memes?
It’s a way of doing something – including ways of doing something in your mind – that you weren’t born knowing. It’s not in your genes; it’s something you’ve acquired from society, your social environment, and it’s contagious.
What is the basic unit of a meme?
Words. I don’t claim to know how and when human language evolved, but it’s very clear that when it first started, the hominins that were infected with these “mind viruses” didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t know they were talking. They were making sounds to do things that benefited them, in the same way a butterfly uses eye spots on its wings to benefit it but doesn’t need to know why.
How did these mind viruses get us to here?
Gradually, the protolanguage of these hominins turned into a wonderful medium for manipulating others, and manipulating yourself. And as the products of the cultural evolutionary process have accumulated, they have enabled us to become truly intelligent designers, with forethought, planning and so on. Contrast a termite castle with Antoni Gaudí’s wonderful church in Barcelona, . They look similar, but Gaudí’s church is a product of intelligent design; it’s top-down, with a charismatic boss who thought it out in advance. There is no Gaudí in the termite castle.
What has to be explained is how, in one species, we’ve gone from termite-style building to Gaudí-style building, or to Turing-style building or Shakespeare-style building.
And that’s the transformation we need to unpick?
Yes, and it’s particularly thorny when you recognise that what we have between our ears is more like a termite colony than you might be happy thinking. The latest count is 86 billion neurons, each more clueless than a termite, with no boss. How on earth do you organise 86 billion neurons into Gaudí’s mind or Shakespeare’s mind? That’s the puzzle.
As intelligent designers, we build computers. We don’t claim they are able to comprehend, but will they get there?
It’s possible, but we’re not there yet. Take Google Translate. Until just a few years ago, the idea that you could translate from one foreign language to another without comprehending what the words meant was laughable. But today Google Translate does just that, through machine learning and big data. It’s completely parasitic, though. It works because it has a huge database of successful translation and can sift through many millions of little bits of translation that have been endorsed by human translators. It uses them to guide its own translation. Otherwise it’s clueless.
It shows that it is possible to do decent-quality translation without any real comprehension at all. Some people view that as sort of the end of the line. But I don’t think it is.
What do you think is coming next with artificial intelligence?
The new wave is projects to add comprehension to existing machine learning or deep learning systems. There’s a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that is supposed to permit a self-driving car to tell you why it’s doing what it’s doing. And there’s a new initiative at the US military agency DARPA calling for AI that can interact with humans in a reason-giving way.
I think these projects are much, much harder than the people who are doing them think. In any case, I’m not sure it’s a good idea.
Why might it be a bad idea to make AI with the ability to comprehend?
I think it’s better to use AI as a tool than a colleague. As soon as it is a colleague, we will have the problem we have with colleagues: we won’t know for sure what they know, and they may not want to tell us. Trust becomes an issue.
Are you worried about machine superintelligence?
Well, I’m not worried about super-AI that is going to design computers more intelligent than we are and then enslave us. I’m worried that we’ll overestimate the comprehension of our devices and cede authority to them. It’s happening already. In certain areas of medical diagnosis and treatment, there are computer systems that can do a better job than any doctor, and doctors who overrule the software could later be deemed irresponsible or liable for malpractice. This means that, with the best of intentions, doctors will start following the advice of AI advisers. This will substantially diminish the role of doctors: if they are going to be turned into glorified doorkeepers with good bedside manners and an ability to push buttons, what about the rest of us?
“How on earth do you organise 86 billion clueless neurons into Gaudí’s mind?”
In your new book, you also worry about our reliance on technology and that we are becoming “overcivilised”…
I don’t think people realise how incredibly brittle the technology that we depend on is. If the internet goes down today, we’d be in a world of chaos. I’m worried about the first 48 hours, about people just going berserk if they don’t have the internet. They are not going to have TV, they are not going to have radio stations probably, their cellphones will fail. They are going to be plunged into electronic darkness and scared out of their wits. After all, they have just been plunged back into the 19th century, and frankly they don’t have the skills to cope.
Would you survive a digital dark age?
I could be a pretty good survivalist. I’m getting a little old, sore and cranky, and I don’t know what I’d do for my protein exactly, because I’ve never hunted. But I’m pretty good with making fire by flint, at least.
Profile
Daniel Dennett is a cognitive scientist and philosopher at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. His new book is From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The evolution of minds (Allen Lane)
This article appeared in print under the headline “That’s a termite colony between your ears”
