The race between AI and Human Mind

When Lee Sedol, the best player of Go, a game played for thousands of years by millions, was defeated by Google’s AlphaGo, the most common quote on Chinese social media was: -

“You lost and you cried, the computer won but it did not smile.”

Today, AI has comprehensively beaten us in what we can call human intelligence. However, they are still well short of being human. What makes us human has little to do with memory, computing and learning though they are an essential part of our intelligence. What sets humans apart from all other inanimate matter is—consciousness, awareness of self and ability to relate to the world around us.

We can experience things, tell stories about them, and feel happy or sad. A robot or an AI can’t experience that. A self-driving car can go around the city, capture all the images but still can’t experience any feelings. When we die—it is our consciousness that is extinguished even though the physical form can stay intact for some time.

What is consciousness?

Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT describes in his book?Life 3.0.

“Consciousness is an?emergent property. It can only be observed as a new phenomenon when certain particles are arranged in specific order. He gives an example with wetness—of water, vapor and ice. He explains that it is just that the arrangement of the molecular changes that creates a new property called wetness. Similarly, it is the integrated behaviour of the particles arranged in a certain order that creates consciousness. However, we don’t know what is that specific arrangement that produces consciousness and if it can be replicated.”

Another school of thought says that consciousness is a subjective property and hence, can’t be objectively studied in science. Apparently, it has more promise in quantum mechanics, but we are far from claiming any success.

In medical science, the study of consciousness is considered a waste of time. Doctors never talk about it much in a deeper sense. The only limited use in medicine is the level of consciousness from coma or brain death at the low end, to full alertness at the other end. The medical science does not focus much on fundamental definition of consciousness and what it means in a larger sense.

Probably the most discussed occurrence of this term is in philosophy. Descartes explained it as Cartesian dualism. He described that consciousness resides within an immaterial domain (realm of thought), in contrast to the domain of material things (realm of extension). He suggested that interaction between these two domains occur inside the brain in an organ called pineal gland. This is called dualist definition. There is a contrary definition called monist definition where both consciousness and matter are different aspects of one realm of being.

And finally, there is a spiritual definition of consciousness, most often practiced as part of?Yoga?or meditation. Consciousness is thought to be a relationship between mind and deeper truth that is more fundamental than the physical world. From time immemorial, the monks have been quoted as rising from self-consciousness to super or cosmic consciousness as an enlightened being.

This range of definition shows how multidisciplinary complex this topic is. One needs to be a neuroscientist, a physicist, a computer engineer, a psychologist and possibly a philosopher at the same time to comprehensively study this topic. However, there is no dispute that consciousness exists, and that’s what primarily makes us human.

When do we get consciousness?

Just as there is no common definition of consciousness, there is little agreement on when it develops in humans. There is no single snapshot in time or an event calendar that we can call out, after which we become conscious. Based on what we call the most important constituent of consciousness, psychologists have differing views on when a child becomes conscious.

For the sake of understanding, let us say there are three important constituents of consciousness (world exists, I exist, I exist because the world exists).

• The world exists (awareness)—the infants build awareness early on, in the first few months. They start recognising others in the universe as objects and people. The sensory organs very much function though they are in the early developmental stage. Though the infant is aware of the world at this stage, it can’t distinguish itself from the world. It sees the world as an extension of the self. For the child, the world and its own existence both are one.

However, slowly the child discovers that the objects and people have independent existence. They exist even when the child is not sensing (e.g., not seeing) them. This is best explained by?‘object constancy principle’ in child development and is the basis of development of most interpersonal relationship skills among adults.

When the child sees the mother walking away from it, it starts crying because it believes that the mother ceases to exist. Only with time, the child knows that the mother has an independent existence and will come back even if she walks out at times. Similarly, the child does not go after a toy if we hide it under the blanket. For the infant, out of sight means out of existence. Most children develop this before they are 7–8 months old.

• I have an independent existence?(development of ego)—this is explained by mirror test (or Rouge test) where the kids are shown a mirror with rouge makeup on their face. The child with no self-awareness, point to the mirror while those with self-awareness point to their own face. By the age of 18 months, half of the children can identify their own image and point successfully to their own face rather than the mirror.
• My existence and the world are intricately related (Theory of mind)—this essentially means that my survival and well-being is dependent on the people and objects around us. This is essentially development of the social brain. This is the time when mind A starts thinking about what mind B is thinking about mind A. This is also the time when mind A thinks what mind B is thinking about mind C. Sometimes, mind A also thinks about itself though with limited success.

To explain whether a child has developed theory of mind, a false belief test is used as exercise—the famous Sally Anne test.

Sally is playing with a marble. She puts the marble in her basket before going to the bathroom. Meanwhile, Anne finds the marble and hides it in her own box. After some time, Sally returns to her room to play with the marble again. Where will she look for the marble first—the basket or the box?

A child who has not yet developed the theory of mind will respond by saying that Sally will look for the marble in the box. The child will fail to understand that Sally has her own mind that has its own copy of truth which is different from the child. The child believes that Sally knows what the child knows. According to psychologists, we develop the theory of mind by the age of 4–5 years.

Even if most humans acquire awareness, self-awareness and sometimes rare cosmic awareness, different adults have different degrees of conscious existence. While some of us have very little awareness, others are highly conscious. Consciousness has several hierarchical layers.

We have not been able to build robots that has awareness, sense of ego or theory of mind because we don’t yet understand the basic principles of these aspects. These topics are so complex that the AI practitioners believe that consciousness is an evolutionary bug in humans and is best left to itself rather than trying to replicate in machines.

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