I’ve been reading Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow again these days and a chapter titled The Equation of Life reminds me of a TV Series I watched on Channel 4 several years ago. It is called Humans, starred by Gemma Chan (the actress of Soolin Yao in Sherlock Season 1), and Colin Morgan (remember the young Archmage Merlin?). Well, I don’t want to be a spoiler, but I need to touch a little bit on the story. The story brings us to a society where people are living together with synths—man-made, human-like, algorithm-based “machines” competent in most of human jobs yet without self-consciousness or feelings. The founder of the whole synth industry, Prof. David does possess lines of code that can make synths self-conscious and he built it implicitly into his prototypes.

  It is kind of intriguing that synthetic humans have self-consciousness. Let’s imagine that a human-like mind could be evolved in the process of their daily work and interactions with humans, then what would that mind be like? An algorithm? What is OUR mind? Does our mind equate with brain activities?

The Endless Loop

Let us start with the relationship between brain activities and mind. Apparently, these two are not the same: neuron signals in the brain and subjective experiences tell different stories. You are experiencing some kind of feelings, say, happiness, while a doctor has your brain scanned. The doctor would see nothing “happy” in your brain; he is able to, however, know whether you are happy or not just by a glance of your face. Modern psychology also struggles at the term mind and assumes that our mind is inseparable with brain activities, and that we have certain underlying “entities” translating neuron signals into subjective contents. These theoretical entities combined with biological studies give us a much more complete picture of causes of human behaviour and mind.

Biology fancies another story: mind or consciousness is mere avalanches of electrical signals in the brain. There is nothing so far which happens in mind while does not happen in the brain; the more we understand our brain, the more redundant the conception of mind will be. We don’t even know the evolutionary benefits of human mind. Here comes the endless logical loop:

Is there something happens in mind while does not happen in brain? If the answer is no, why do we keep the conception of mind? If the answer is yes, where does it happen? Certainly it happens in the brain. Then we jump to the starting question again. We have no alternatives but to conclude disappointingly that mind might just be a by-product of brain activities.

“Principia Mathematica”

Isaac Newton would readily live in modern societies: revolution of computer science makes us worship and cling to data, mathematical models, and algorithms more than anytime before. Both biology and psychology embrace the algorithm conception: organisms are algorithms aiming at fulfil their functions and can be represented in math formulas; human mind is a data-processing device based on algorithms running in the brain. We do have super computers running algorithms “thinking” like a human: they can play chess, drive cars, analyze data patterns, and offer hard-core investment advices. However, none of these algorithms produce subjective experience which is unnecessary for an algorithm to fulfil its function.

The Misleading Current Model

  Psychologists and biologists viewed mind and body as steam engines a century ago: these two are made of pipes, cylinders, valves and pumps that build and release pressure. Even in Freudian psychology which is absolutely psycho-deterministic, we can still see steam engine analogy in his theory of personality (I will cover his theory in later writings). Why steam engines? Because that was the leading technology of the age. Now we see something more complex and sophisticated—a computer calculating input and offering output through algorithms. We believe life is all about data processing, and that organisms are calculating machines. Great achievements as we have made, this current analogy might be misleading when we attempt to explain mind and brain. We are far from understanding human mind.