Marvin the concept of our consciousness our human consciousness has been looked upon by innumerable generations of people as as indicative of the specialness of human beings certainly theologians have talked about our souls philosophers the the specialness of of human thinking from your background in computer science the the work that you've done in artificial intelligence and thinking about thinking can you say there's anything really special about human consciousness well I think there's something very special about human thinking which I like to call reflectiveness or were self-consciousness if you like and that's the ability to remember what
you've been doing and by remember that's an interesting concept itself because there are many ways to remember things you can remember something as an image or as a sequence of sounds or as a diagram or movie and then there are ways of remembering for which we have no words but just as in a computer we can represent data in maybe 20 different ways called data structures I think the brain has a large number we've evolved a large number of ways to represent our previous mental states or part of them and I don't think any other
animals have this ability to represent in many different ways what you've been doing recently and what were the results and so forth so that you can then not only think about what you've done in the world but you can think about the course that you're thinking proceeded along and you can say well I've wasted a lot of time I'm not doing very well on this problem maybe I should think back and try to think about this using method 4 which is good for this kind of problem and so this is I think what makes us
unique able to imagine situations that haven't happened yet thinking what would happen if I were there and I did this and then this and then that oops that would be terrible I'll think about this and then you come back and deal with the real world as though you had already had several such experiences well that's tremendously valuable and I think were you nakedness and and therefore what we're doing is internalizing and simulating different worlds and testing them out in our inside before we we choose one and do it in the world that's right and because
we have it's only since 1950 or so that we knew how to make computers do such simulations and change them and search and try different possibilities we don't have any ordinary word for those processes in computer science there's thousands of new words but we talk about consciousness or experience or self or identity as though nothing had happened well the term we may be self-reflective because you're thinking about thinking you're thinking about imaging yourself in the past or in the future and testing out these different alternatives so so you're imagining yourself going through a process it's
a it's a self reflection that's right and in my book I also use the another level called self conscious reflection in self conscious reflection you're doing something even stranger which is you're saying are the actions I'm considering or I've recently done do those agree with my ideals and values that I've learned and that's we could use the word conscience as well as conscious so is this behavior up to my standards that I've learned from my culture or business or parents and so forth and I wonder if any animals have anything like that level I really
like this distinction between self-reflection thinking about thinking and self-awareness or self conscience or self conscious whatever you want to say a next level up which you've differentiated but some people don't some people just say the self reflection and self reflection you've divided into two parts one is thinking about thinking and one is this higher level which takes that and I guess integrates it with some values or or some broader concept so how would that work well that reminds me of where I think my technique is a little different for most other people most psychologists are
afflicted with the disease I call physics Envy to paraphrase Freud namely they look at the history of science and they see this incredible discovery Newton has three laws and it explains almost all of the mechanics the law of inertia and the law of equal and opposite reaction and I forget the third one force equals force is mass times acceleration F equals that may those three laws explain the motion of the planets and so forth and then eventually Maxwell comes along with four cute laws and that explains electricity and magnetism and then 50 years later I'm
Stein comes along and he shows that electricity and magnetism are the same thing and knocks out most of Maxwell's laws and now we're down to four or five so the psychologists in around 1900s that we can do that will have a law of recency which says the more recently it happened the more better you'll remember it and the more you're rewarded the more you'll learn it and stupid laws like that which aren't true but they're true for rats and pigeons and all the experimental animals they used for a hundred years and they got into our
educational system and so forth my idea is that you don't want the simplest theory because it'll be wrong you know that the brain has 400 computers so you want a theory that has more boxes than you need philosophers have something called Occam's razor ya always find the smallest most compact theory that explains what's in front of you and that'll be the best theory no not if you know it's wrong so what I have is six levels and the distinction between self reflect self conscious reflection and just plain rough self reflecting thought is there so that
there's a place to put new ideas about values and ideals and religions and beliefs and so forth so I think if you have six levels then you're free to get new ideas if you follow Occam's razor you're putting a straitjacket on yourself and if you get a new idea that doesn't fit well you just forget it personal tragedy but these levels are are really represented in the brain or they are more symbolic structures that are categories that you can place different things in I'd say that they're probably moderately real because the way a brain the
way organs develop in evolution is generally you don't make changes in an organ so much as you make another copy of it and connect it up and then you can mutate it if you mutate an old structure you'll lose too much so I imagine that we do have in the frontal lobes this self-conscious reflexive level but it's not very well defined it uses parts of older ones and copies of so for that's very vague and the boundaries aren't worth studying yet so these two top levels the self-reflection and the self conscience or self consciousness levels
may not be present in any animals either one maybe not much of them but I think probably all of the most mammals have a little bit of self-reflection but of reflection but not much now I think I think some mammals can plan a handle or the next two or three moves but certainly can't see at the self conscience model they can't see themselves in a new situation and imagine what they would do there now if the illusions would come along and say terrific Marvin I'm thrilled you've done that because now you have a vehicle for
my immortal soul that I want a place in a human being mm-hmm well it's not clear that you have a pool you could have a place for an immortal soul but what would you do with it unless you tell me how it works I'm not interested it's like saying that there's an elephant in the next room well I could go and look and it wouldn't be there if it's a soul I could go and look and you're telling me it's invisible and undetectable so I'll stop listening to you
