Brains May Be Biological Computers, But They Still Can't Run Windows

With all the difficulty of simulating a mouse brain on a computer, developing a computer version of a human brain remains a bitpipe dream. (Yes, there's a few other obstacles beyond sheer number-crunching hardware, such as the fact that we really don't understand how human brains work.) But dreams aside, computer science has shaped how we think of thinking. Matt Carter, author of Minds and Computers: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, speaks on ABC Radio National's "The Philosophy Zone" about the nature of mind:

There's a sense in which [artificial intelligence] provides us with not just a metaphor, but an analysis that can be understood through metaphor, of what minds are -- which really helps us understand how we might go about creating artifacts that have minds in this sense, but also helps us understand the properties of our own minds and in particular the relations between brains and minds. This ... currently dominant theory ... sees mentality, sees cognition as analogous to software, and understanding it in these terms, we can get a really good handle on the relation between brains and minds. Brains, on this view, they are cognitive, computational, biological hardware.... We think of minds as the software which runs on this computational hardware. One of the really nice advantages of this view is that it allows for lots of different kinds of things to have minds.

Before this, Carter discusses the fallacy of the mind-body duality -- the idea that a non-physical entity can be "causally efficacious" in the physical realm, thus violating the basic laws physics. There is no separation, he says; a neurological state, as seen in neurological imaging, is the entirety of a mental state.

However, if mind and body can't be separated, it's important to have a clear understanding of their unity -- of, for lack of a better term, the body. If, as Carter says, brains are bodies are mind, then human consciousness is an innate property of its biological hardware. A consciousness based on computational hardware cannot replicate the human -- and trying to understand human consciousness through assumptions underlying a computational model is bound to fail.

*Wired *coverage of artificial intelligence here and here.

Minds and Computers [ABC Radio National]