INTRODUCTION TO THE FORUM: Digital Mind

Forum: Digital Mind

davide
Moderator

The mind remains a great mystery. After more than 2000 years of reasoning and theorising about its nature, structure and functioning, we haven't still achieved a satisfactory model and explanation for it - even when possessing a detailed anatomical knowledge of the brain's neuronal structure and physiology.

Modern psychology has certainly made progresses, bringing the studies into more scientific and less philosophical grounds. During last century we have assisted to the emergence of different schools of thought, each of them giving emphasis to different aspects of the mind; sometimes even solving the imperviousness of certain enigmas by ignoring the mind altogether and solely focusing on observable phenomena. Unfortunately the result has mostly been a set of disconnected conclusions, whose details and truisms are still disputed by different psychological schools. For instance, both experimental psychology and psychoanalysis gave us important insights into our minds but, nevertheless, still remains a clear lack of convergence toward the definition of a common subject matter. Interestingly one of the most prominent American schools of thought of the last century, behaviourism, solved the problem "mind" by ignoring it, and focusing instead on the stimulus-response (S-R) processes. Here the mind is seen as a switcher, commuting stimulus into response; all happening in-between it is not necessarily considered as relevant to understand human behaviour. Give a bone to the dog and see if it wags the tail.

With the exclusion of introspective analytical methods, which are regarded with distrust by many psychologists, most of the methods used by scientific research are probably the same that an alien race would use to study human mind. For them, as for us, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to avoid the appearance of that - not too subtle - hermetic aura that still permeate psychology. In this sense we will find similarities with all research done on animal behaviour. Animals remain aliens to us, a psychological mystery. How could we ever be certain of the how and what an animal thinks or feel? We can only make observations starting from cognitive, structural and functional assumptions... then make more assumptions on the basis of the observations so done. I know this has the taste of a naïve statement but, it seems like, here is exactly where all discussions in psychology bring us to. The sheer amount of arguments within psychology doesn't certainly prove me wrong. Moreover, also in regards to humans, many questions have yet to be answered.

Going back to the brain we shouldn't be led to believe that its more material nature has made it ungenerous of fundamental enigmas, some of which we are still far from solving. Here I would like to focus on one in particular, often bringing about a long lasting debate, a clash of factions and faiths: mere machine Vs transcendent mind. On these grounds I would also like to create a starting point for reflection on various aspects related to contemporary cultural phenomena.

For instance it is interesting to notice that, even though the differences in this dichotomy is bigger than it may seem, not only scientifically but also philosophically, by following certain lines of thought both of them can bring us to a specific type of machines and cultural icons: computers. The difference stays in the fact that each different view brings us to two different perspectives and approaches to the topic and its related digital world. While the 'mechanical' approach would bring us to the kind of standard personal computers that rest on our desk (hardware and serial-task programs) the other would lead us to less orthodox realities such as Artificial Intelligence, A-life, bio-computers and all sort of these things.

The path bringing us from brain to computer is at times more intuitive than logic, therefore, in its full extend, I would invite people to reconstruct their own. Whichever approach we might choose the path of analogy is everything but new:

In the mechanical view of the brain it is easy to make analogies with computers: if the brain is nothing more than a switcher, then computers are just an extremely simplified version of it. Yet, with time, we can expect to create new machines more and more capable of performing tasks in a brain-like fashion. The challenge is to create the components and assemble them in the right order.
In the transcendent view - seeing the brain as a non-rigid adaptive system (avoiding sci-fictional hypothesis) - the focus shifts on general dynamics rather than components. Often the discussions become more adventurous. Here organisation is the key element: the knowledge of the single components is not enough to fully understand complex phenomena. We could dissect a processor - as we could do with a brain - we could precisely know the ensemble of components - as we do - but this wouldn't necessary gives us a complete insight of the way it works.

Observable behaviour doesn't tell us the all story neither: we can train animals in a similar way we program computers. This means the creation of predictable stimulus-response relations, the creation of a sort of "behaviour". Yet, would this predictability reward us with a real and exhausting knowledge of the internal processes connecting input to output?

Knowledge is not only dependent on the amount of information we have to learn in regard to a specific context, but it also depends on the nature of the questions we ask. If the choice falls, let's say, on establishing the types of stimulus-response that we can teach to an animal, then all we need to know is what happens when certain conditions are applied, with no regard for other internal processes.

This is the only way we can "know". We are forced to choose a context of observation, otherwise each single question would have to be answered in terms of elementary particles and laws of physics. The chosen context in this case includes mind and digital world, drawing parallels and outlining differences, giving space to hard thoughts and light hearted considerations.