The
HBO remake of Westworld
is
superior TV in a number of ways. But its most intriguing aspect may
be its foundational riff on what makes up consciousness. The basic
premise is that recursive experience plus an emotional occurrence
that anchors memory – especially an episode of painful loss –
ignites (self) consciousness. Intriguing, yet not finally convincing.
The ability to experience emotion itself requires consciousness –
one must be aware
of feeling such-and-such. Westworld’s
premise begs the question of where
that awareness comes from.
There
seems to be no
a
priori
reason to suppose that machines cannot be intelligent.
It may be useful to think about intelligence as existing in more or
less distinct forms. Generically, intelligence might be defined as
the ability to acquire,
process
and
apply
knowledge. (Animals have varying degrees of this kind of intelligence
and so may plants.) Machines have the ability to store and process
information. Machine intelligence is the orderly processing of
information according to governing rules (software). Both the
information and the rules are externally derived and stored within
the machine. The machine itself may be contained in discrete units or
widely distributed (the cloud). Machines can learn – by adding and
elaborating rules based on previous cycles of processing – but they
can’t process information without instructions stored in memory.
Cloud intelligence is machine intelligence taken to a higher level by
accessing massive information from many data sources using more and
many powerful processors and sophisticated software with built in
“learning routines.”
Human
intelligence is what we human beings have. It is what we know as
manifested in thought and action. Our knowledge is stored in two
places, our heads and in our culture. Culture is contained in
language, traditions, techniques, art and artifacts, beliefs and
whatever else carries collective knowledge across time and
generations. The basic unit of human intelligence, however, remains
the individual mind, which itself can be thought of as an
organically based “machine.”
But there seems to be a
ghost in the human machine
that we experience as consciousness. Mere machines cannot feel
emotion – or pleasure and pain – no matter how massive the memory
and computing power. And the movies Matrix
and Terminator
aside, machines do not inherently strive for self-preservation.
Machines are not alive nor
do they have “souls.”
Whether because humans are organic life forms evolved over hundreds
of millions of years after having crossed-over
somehow from an inorganic strata or
from deeper principle of the universe,
we feel and experience pleasure and pain. Why
is the unknown. Westworld,
for all its brave speculation, sidesteps this question.
