Marvin in order to understand consciousness let's start with the basic substrate the human brain and what do we do we think we feel we have cognitive ideas we have emotion now from your background as a great computer scientist artificial intelligence what resources can you bring to this question of human cognition and emotion that a neuroscientist trained and maybe anatomy or physiology might not be able to see initially well a good example of the of what's happened in this century is that computer science appeared around 1950 the first computers were constructed they were rather simple but
they had a property that no previous machines have namely a computer is just a mechanical system of some sort and it's controlled by a sequence of states commands and the difference between a calculator where you just tell it what to do at each step and a computer is that the computer has a set of instructions in its memory and it can change them in other words the big difference between a programmed computer and all machines previous to that were that there was an operation which could enable a one program to change the instructions in another
program and temporarily or permanently change how that machine works so for the first time we had a way to describe processes that can change themselves in almost arbitrarily complicated ways and so at that point from starting in the 1950s people began to think about how could a computer represent knowledge and they found maybe 20 different ways the simplest way to represent knowledge is just as a list of expressions typed in some programming language or another another way is to make things like neurons that each are connected to others and so you're representing the knowledge as
some sort of connected web just think of a lot of little spots with lines between them around 1960 instead of just connecting things either making things either connected or not as in synapses well maybe some synapses between neurons have a certain weight so that if this one fires it sends a signal that's 0.3 volts to that or a point 0.2 volts then that's a little knowledge about the intensity of something but with these new structures that appeared in the 1960s they were called semantic networks you could say this unit it's not a neuron anymore but
this piece of program is connected to that one in a certain way that has a name and to see how this affects its behavior you have to look up that name in another table and that will give you the instructions of another program so now we have this wonderfully complicated set of possibilities of programs that refer to others and can make changes in each other and do things like that it wasn't anything before that so how can that begin to help us understand human cognition or emotion well that's a wonderful question but it's written or
asked in ordinary words and to me the ordinary words of popular psychology like emotion and feeling and thinking and so forth are hundreds of years old and each of them is a clever way Society has developed to not think about what's going on for example what does feeling mean well I think it we use that word to keep ourselves from thinking about 20 or 30 different kinds of processes my favorite one is consciousness people say what is consciousness well if you look at chapter four of my book which is pretty long one it starts out
with a little story there's a woman Joan who is just she's late to a meeting so she comes through a street that has some pretty heavy traffic and she runs across it because she doesn't want to be late and then she's standing there saying that was really stupid of me if I had been killed what would my friends have thought of me not a strange thing so look at what she's doing we could use the word conscious to describe her thoughts but I list about 30 different mental activities which are not very similar one of
them is that she has a model of herself as a creature with a certain certain lifespan and she's grown up to be a professional whatever she is and she has an image of her past in her future and suddenly she's killed by a car and she has an image of her friends thinking to and they see her as a sort of smart social person and she did this idiotic thing how come such an educated person could see and when we say consciousness were taking all sorts of phenomena like that what's what is Joan doing she's
remembering her recent thoughts she's representing them in many different ways she's thinking of a little time series of here I was I did this I did that she's thinking of her the state of her body in the story actually her knee was injured a couple of days ago so this was really a stupid thing to do because certainly might have locked and she was real and so forth so if you say what were the activities in Joan's mind at that time there were dozens of them some of them she doesn't understand at all and can't
articulate like how did she know the cars were coming that's we call that unconscious or automatic or whatever and she hasn't the slightest idea of how she recognized that this was the fast-moving car is something the top level of your brain is informed about from these other levels and each part of the brain knows a little bit about what's happening in some others but there's no single place that knows everything it's like a big corporation so what you're saying is that these were cognition think thought or emotion the the feelings that we have are really
words that are large words but they really they're real meaning as a dozen or several dozen different components all of which we've integrated together artificially and we're still using those words as though they meant something like conscious or emotion as far as I can tell when somebody's angry yeah it's silly to say that's emotional it means that the way I look at the mind is that there are hundreds of different processes that you can engage at any time if you turn the old them all on at once the rete Rafic gem and you'd be paralyzed
or epileptic or something so what happens when someone's angry they turn off their ability to look ahead in the future they turn on a lot of little resources that make you act quickly and you can move more rapidly and with more strength but you don't plan ahead so much you remove most of your diplomatic abilities so and you get red in the face which is a more physical process and if you're lucky it will intimidate the person so that they'll go away it might start a fight so it's risky so anger is a way to
think it's a way to think with short-term processes that are very fast and effective and it's turning off your long ones when someone's in love the book starts out with somebody who says I've met this incredible woman she is unbelievably beautiful and if you look at those words you see that they're all negative incredible means no normal person would believe such a thing unbelievable means this is nonsense what's happened to that person it's not that being in love is adding resources it's removing all your mental critics the things that you would normally use to say
that person is a little klutzy they're they're not very bright they're this and that and so you can get in a state where you turn off your some of your mental processes so Mike the point of the book one of the main points is that this distinction between thinking and oceans has wasted a century of psychologists time because they don't understand that each emotion is a particular way to think and usually one that has less resources than the ones that a mathematician uses to prove a theorem or the physicists used to design an experiment and
so forth most emotions are removing certain aspects of and abilities that you normally would use if you had more time and you you have a model that's called a critic selector model and that deals with these multiple modules and how they interact exactly it seems to me that the most important you said let me interrupt myself I'm interested in what makes people more versatile and resourceful than all other animals put together I'd almost say because each animal species is good can survive in a certain niche has a temperature zone and and it eats a certain
kind of food humans can eat anything if they cook it right they can live anywhere if they make houses or clothing or air conditioners so what makes us so resourceful and I think what happened happened in the last five million years because chimpanzees do a fair number of such things but nothing like us is that we developed a new layer which consists of gadgets that recognize when you're having trouble I call these mental critics because I couldn't think of a better word and a critic might say you've been trying to solve this problem for a
long time and you're not making progress or you had two goals and each time you try to achieve one it interferes with your progress on the other so you keep going back and forth so there are hundreds of different ways that we notice when we're in trouble and what should you do when you're in trouble you should turn off the present mental resources that you're using or some of them and turn on some others so what I think neuroscientists will have to look for in the next 50 years is where are the critics which are
probably in the front part of the brain that recognize when you aren't achieving a when you've run into some obstacle when you're having trouble when you're wasting time where are the things that recognize these and how do they turn on or change the other brain activities so those are called selectors and if you've been wasting time there will be three or four selectors that make different kinds of rearrangements and I hope that neuroscientists will not understand the importance of looking for these sorts of things
