Project: Consciousness

Our Current Project

The Mystery of Consciousness

This educational documentary film that we have been working on for almost three years is about consciousness largely with philosophical and neuroscientific bents. The goal of this film is to explore Francis Crick's framework for consciousness, which is the neural correlate(s) of consciousness. We believe that the question of consciousness is an empirical one and has to be unraveled objectively, but we are wondering whether neuroscientific frameworks and discoveries can give us (a) clue(s) about the subjective aspects of consciousness. Many are leery of believing that neuroscience can solve this mystery, saying the problem of consciousness "lies outside our cognitive capacities." Although, a philosophical definition of consciousness is broader than a clinical one, it is very useful to know what happens in the brain when we feel the redness of red, the painfulness of pain, the funniness of a funny joke, and so on. No one has produced any plausible theory or explanation about how subjective experiences arise from over a trillion neurons.

A Small Excerpt of the script (unedited):

INT. DR. CHURCHLAND'S OFFICE

DR. CHURCHLAND

In the context of that sort of work, several major surprises came to light regarding the nature of consciousness. Goodale and Milner studied the woman who as result of oxygen depravation had lost a part of visual processing in cortex. And the part that she lost was what we call the ventral stream.

CUT TO:

INT. DR. KOCH'S OFFICE

DR. KOCH

The part of her brain that was responsible for constructing the precept was destroyed. Yet some other parts of the brain were intact and still working. When you hold up something like this pen, and you ask her, what is this? She would have no idea. She might see the color of the pen, but she couldn't know that this is a pen.

CUT TO:

INT. DR. CHURCHLAND'S OFFICE

DR. CHURCHLAND

If you had a box with a slot in it, and slot could be in various orientations, and if they gave her a card, so to speak, to post that in the slot, she could do it, and she would be very accurate.

CUT TO:

INT. DR. KOCH'S OFFICE

DR. KOCH

And if you asked her that this is horizontal or vertical, she would have no idea. But when you give it to her, she reach out and grab the pen properly. What does it tell us? It tells us that there are at least two visual systems, in fact many of them, one of them was destroyed by oxygen depravation. The one that enables her to consciously recognize orientations and shapes and objects, but another part of the brain that guides her hands and feet was still intact.

CUT TO:

INT. DR. CHURCHLAND'S OFFICE

DR. CHURCHLAND

This was very interesting because it meant that there are certain capacities that we can exercise and do so in scale and accurate ways, even though we are unaware perceptually of events that we think normally necessary. This kind of phenomena suggested to many people that simply analyzing common-sense intuitions about consciousness was not going to be enough. The brain has many surprises for us about the nature of consciousness, about the nature of non-conscious capacities, and what they actually do and about what may be the relationship between two of them.

CUT TO:

Here are the segments of the proposed film:

Segment 1: A brief history of the topic of consciousness

Segment 2: An introduction to "the problem of consciousness"

Segment 3: A review of Cartesian dualism (the theory,its implications, and the views of those who are or were critical of this theory)

Segment 4: A review of Empiricism (the theory, its implications, and the views of those who are or were critical of this theory)

Segment 5: Behaviorism (the theory, its implications, and the views of those who are or were critical of this theory)

Segment 6: Fight over Qualia

Segment 7: Scientific attack on the problem of consciousness

Segment 8: Experiments: questions (whether consciousness is a property of the brain or not; whether consciousness is an epiphenomenon or not; whether consciousness is a process or not; and whether Libet's experiments explain convincingly the discrepancy between the occurrence of an event in the brain and the appearance of that event in the stage of consciousness)

Segment 9: Conclusion

Here are the names of those whom we hope to interview:

1- Daniel Dennett 2- Noam Chomsky 3- Steven Pinker 4- John Searle 5- Antonio Demasio 6- David Chalmers 7- Richard Dawkins 8- Christof Koch 9- Thomas Nagel 10- Ted Honderich 11- David Glanzman 12- Patricia Churchland

Sources:

Chomsky, N. 1959. "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior

Crick, F. and Koch, C. 1990. "Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness, Seminars in the Neuroscience

Damasio, A. R., "Descates' Error: Emotion, Reason,and the Human Brain.

Descartes, R., "Discourse on the Method,"

Descartes, R., "Meditations,"

Dawkins, R. 1976. "The Selfish Gene."

Dennett, D. C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown & Company.

Dennett, D.C. 1996. Facing backwards on the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3:4-6."Brianstorms" & "Intentional System in Cognitive Ethology: The 'Panglossian Paradigm' Defended,"

Dennett, D. C. 1996. Facing backward on the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3:4-6.

Dennett, D. C. 2001. The fantasy of first-person science. Forthcoming.
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chalmersdeb3dft.htm.

McGinn, C. 1996. Review of The Conscious Mind. Times Higher Educational Supplement, April 5 1996

Baars, B.J. 1996. Understanding subjectivity: Global workspace theory and the resurrection of the observing self. Journal of Consciousness Studies

Fodor, I. 1988. "Connectionism and Cognitive Arthitecture: A Critical Analysis."

Freud, S. 1962. "The ego and the Id." Hobbes, T. 1651. "Leviathan."

Honderich, T. 1984. "The Time of a Conscious Sensory Experience and Mind-Brian Theories." & "On Benjamin Libet: Is the Mind Ahead of the Brian? Behind It?"

Jackson, F. 1982. "Epiphenomenal Qualia,"

Libet, B. 1965. "Cortical Activation in Conscious and Unconscious Experience."

Locke, J. 1690. "Essay Concerning Human Understanding."

Nagel, T. 1974. "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"

Pinker, S. "The Blank Slate" Russell, B. The Analysis of Matter

Searle, J. 1980. "Minds, Brians, and Programs" & The Problem of Consciousness

Kandel, R. Eric 2006. "In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind"

Ridley, Matt. (2006). Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. Harrper Perennial, New York.

Chomsky, Noam. (1975). Language and Responsibility & Reflection on Language. The New Press, Canada

Chalmers, J. David. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford.

Chomsky, Noam. (2003). On Nature and Language. Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom.

Chomsky, Noam. (2000). New Horizons in the study of language and Mind. Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom.

Pinker, Steven. (2007). The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Viking Penguin, USA.

Pinker, Steven. (1997). How the Mind Works. W.W. Norton, New York, London.

Dawkins, Richard. (2006). The God Delusion. A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, New York.

Alper, Matthew. (2006). The God Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God. SourcebBooks, Naperville, Illinois.

Doidge, Norman. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself. Penguin Books, USA.

Chalmers, J. David. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford.

Chalmers, J. David. (?). On the Search for the Neural Correlate of Consciousness

Darwin, Charles. (2004). The Origin of Species. Barns & Noble Classic, New York

Huxley, T. 1874. On the hypothesis that animals are automata, and its history. Fortnightly
Review 95:555-80. Reprinted in Collected Essays. London, 1893.

Watson, D. James. (2006). DNA: The Secret of Life. Alfred A. Knopf, New York

Churchland, P.S. 1996. The Hornswoggle Problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3:402-8

Churchland, P.S. (2002).?#060;I>Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy Bradford Book/MIT Press, Cambridge MA

Churchland, P.S. (1996).?#060;I>The mind-brain continuum: sensory processes , edited by Rodolfo R. Lli�as and Patricia Smith Churchland. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Jackson, F. 1982. Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quarterly

COUSINS

"That which is most incomprehensible of all is not a distant planet but the human mind itself."

(Norman Cousins, an American journalist and biochemist)

CRICK:

Until the problem [of consciousness] is understood much better, any attempt at a formal definition is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both.

(Francis Crick)

WEINBERG

We don't know in advance what are the right questions to ask, and we often do not find out until we are close to the answer.

(Steven Weinberg)

DESCARTES

I think, therefore I am.

(Rene Descartes)

DESCARTES

"I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine's organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels."

(Descartes, Treatise on Man, p.108 (Descartes)

HUXLEY

Would Descartes not have been justified in asking why we need deny that animals are machines, when men, in a state of unconsciousness, perform, mechanically, actions as complicated and as seemingly rational as those of any animals?

(Thomas Huxley)

DESCARTES

[Machines] could never use speech or other signs as we do when placing our thoughts on record for the benefit of others. It never happens that it arranges its speech in various ways, in order to reply appropriately to everything that may be said in its presence, as even the lowest type of man can do.

(Rene Descartes)

DESCARTES

Although machines can perform certain things as well as or perhaps better than any of us can do, they infallibly fall short in others, by the which means we may discover that they did not act from knowledge, but only from the disposition of their organs.

(Rene Descartes)

DESCARTES

The mind can act independent of the brain; for certainly the brain can be of no use in pure thought; its only use is for imagining and perceiving.

(Rene Descartes)

HUME

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I called myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.

(David Hume)

ECCLES

Human beings are irreplaceable; and in being irreplaceable they are clearly very different from machine.

(John Eccles)

NEWTON

To derive two or three general Principle of Motion from Phenomenon, and afterwards to tell us how the properties and Actions of all corporal Things follow from those manifest Principles, would be a very great step in philosophy. Though the Causes of those Principles be not yet discovered."

( Newton)

NEWTON

That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and though which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.

( Newton)

HERBERT

Just as Newton shattered the medieval crystal sphere, modern quantum theory has irreparably smashed Newton's clockwork. We are now certain that the world is not a deterministic mechanism.

(Nick Herbert)

TURING (IMITATATIONGAME)

'I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?' This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms 'machine' and 'think'. The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words 'machine' and 'think' are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, 'Can machines think?' is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game'. It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either 'X is A and Y is B' or 'X is Band Y is A.' The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus: c: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair? Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be: 'My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long.' In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as 'I am the woman, don't listen to him!' to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks. We now ask the question, 'What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?' Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and woman? These questions replace our original, 'Can machines think?'

SIMON

"[M]achines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do"

(H. A. SIMON)

HEISENBERG

"The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realizes that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science."

(Werner Heisenberg)

DAWKINS

The account of the origin of life that I shall give is necessarily speculative, nobody was around to see what happened.

(Richard Dawkins)

HUXLEY

We now believe with confidence, that the whole of reality is one gigantic process of evolution. This produces increased novelty and variety, and ever higher types of organization. In a few spots it has produced life; and, in a few of those spots of life, it has produced mind and consciousness.

(Sir Julian Huxley)

DENNETT

The origin of human mind must be attributed to some process firmly anchored on the solid ground of materialism and natural selection.

(Daniel Dennett)

LEWONTIN

Only two species form the group of our "close" relatives, and only three other, the orangutan, gibbon, and siamang are included in our superfamily, the Hominoidea. All other primates (monkeys, lemurs, etc.) are very far from us indeed. When there are so few forms that are moderately related, it becomes very difficult to trace the successive changes of a trait. The evolutionary space is too sparsely populated to be able to connect the points sensibly.

(Richard Lewontin)

LEWONTIN

Despite the existence of a vast and highly developed mathematical theory of evolutionary processes in general, despite the abundance of knowledge about living and fossil primates, despite the intimate knowledge we have of our own species physiology, morphology, psychology, and social organization, we know essentially nothing about the evolution of our cognitive capacities, and there is a strong possibility that we will never know much about it.

(Richard Lewontin)

HUXLEY

"... consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon it machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes."

(Thomas Huxley)

CRICK

The view of ourselves, as 'persons,' is just as erroneous as the view that the Sun goes around the Earth.

(Francis Crick)

KANT

The "I" that I think is distinct from the I that it, itself, intuits ... I am given to myself beyond that which is given in intuition, and yet know myself, like other phenomena, only as I appear to myself, not as I am...

(Immanuel Kant)

HUME

"For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat and cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."

(David Hume)

RUSSELL

There are, it seems to me, prima facie different kinds of causal laws, one belonging to physics and the other to psychology.

(Bertrand Russell)

DESCARTES

When I consider the mind, that is to say, myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.

(Rene Descartes (Descartes, 1641, p. 196)

HUME

The mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality without forming a precise notion of degrees of each.

(David Hume)

KANT

"The thought that these representations given in intuition all together belong to me means, accordingly, the same as that I unite them in a self-consciousness, or at least can unite them therein, and although it is itself not yet the consciousness of the synthesis of the representations, it still presupposes the possibility of the latter, i.e., only because I can comprehend their manifold in a consciousness do I call them altogether my representations."

(Kant)(B134)

KANT

, "...the mind could never think its identity in the manifoldness of its representations, and indeed think this identity a prior, if it did not have before its eyes the identity of its act, whereby it subordinates all synthesis of apprehension (which is empirical) to a transcendental unity, thereby rendering possible their interconnection according to a prior rules."

(Kant) (A108)

CRICK

A key property of conscious sensations is their integrated nature. You are not aware of isolated percept, but of a single, unifying experience.

(Francis Crick)

BURNS

The persistent failure of synaptic facilitation to explain memory makes one wonder whether neurophysiologists have not been looking for the wrong kind of mechanisms.

(B. Delisle Burns)



	Our Current Project The Mystery of Consciousness This educational documentary film that we have been working on for almost three years is about consciousness largely with philosophical and neuroscientific bents. The goal of this film is to explore Francis Crick's framework for consciousness, which is the neural correlate(s) of consciousness. We believe that the question of consciousness is an empirical one and has to be unraveled objectively, but we are wondering whether neuroscientific frameworks and discoveries can give us (a) clue(s) about the subjective aspects of consciousness. Many are leery of believing that neuroscience can solve this mystery, saying the problem of consciousness "lies outside our cognitive capacities." Although, a philosophical definition of consciousness is broader than a clinical one, it is very useful to know what happens in the brain when we feel the redness of red, the painfulness of pain, the funniness of a funny joke, and so on. No one has produced any plausible theory or explanation about how subjective experiences arise from over a trillion neurons. A Small Excerpt of the script (unedited): INT. DR. CHURCHLAND'S OFFICE DR. CHURCHLAND In the context of that sort of work, several major surprises came to light regarding the nature of consciousness. Goodale and Milner studied the woman who as result of oxygen depravation had lost a part of visual processing in cortex. And the part that she lost was what we call the ventral stream. CUT TO: INT. DR. KOCH'S OFFICE DR. KOCH The part of her brain that was responsible for constructing the precept was destroyed. Yet some other parts of the brain were intact and still working. When you hold up something like this pen, and you ask her, what is this? She would have no idea. She might see the color of the pen, but she couldn't know that this is a pen. CUT TO: INT. DR. CHURCHLAND'S OFFICE DR. CHURCHLAND If you had a box with a slot in it, and slot could be in various orientations, and if they gave her a card, so to speak, to post that in the slot, she could do it, and she would be very accurate. CUT TO: INT. DR. KOCH'S OFFICE DR. KOCH And if you asked her that this is horizontal or vertical, she would have no idea. But when you give it to her, she reach out and grab the pen properly. What does it tell us? It tells us that there are at least two visual systems, in fact many of them, one of them was destroyed by oxygen depravation. The one that enables her to consciously recognize orientations and shapes and objects, but another part of the brain that guides her hands and feet was still intact. CUT TO: INT. DR. CHURCHLAND'S OFFICE DR. CHURCHLAND This was very interesting because it meant that there are certain capacities that we can exercise and do so in scale and accurate ways, even though we are unaware perceptually of events that we think normally necessary. This kind of phenomena suggested to many people that simply analyzing common-sense intuitions about consciousness was not going to be enough. The brain has many surprises for us about the nature of consciousness, about the nature of non-conscious capacities, and what they actually do and about what may be the relationship between two of them. CUT TO: Here are the segments of the proposed film: Segment 1: A brief history of the topic of consciousness Segment 2: An introduction to "the problem of consciousness" Segment 3: A review of Cartesian dualism (the theory,its implications, and the views of those who are or were critical of this theory) Segment 4: A review of Empiricism (the theory, its implications, and the views of those who are or were critical of this theory) Segment 5: Behaviorism (the theory, its implications, and the views of those who are or were critical of this theory) Segment 6: Fight over Qualia Segment 7: Scientific attack on the problem of consciousness Segment 8: Experiments: questions (whether consciousness is a property of the brain or not; whether consciousness is an epiphenomenon or not; whether consciousness is a process or not; and whether Libet's experiments explain convincingly the discrepancy between the occurrence of an event in the brain and the appearance of that event in the stage of consciousness) Segment 9: Conclusion Here are the names of those whom we hope to interview: 1- Daniel Dennett 2- Noam Chomsky 3- Steven Pinker 4- John Searle 5- Antonio Demasio 6- David Chalmers 7- Richard Dawkins 8- Christof Koch 9- Thomas Nagel 10- Ted Honderich 11- David Glanzman 12- Patricia Churchland Sources: Chomsky, N. 1959. "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior Crick, F. and Koch, C. 1990. "Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness, Seminars in the Neuroscience Damasio, A. R., "Descates' Error: Emotion, Reason,and the Human Brain. Descartes, R., "Discourse on the Method," Descartes, R., "Meditations," Dawkins, R. 1976. "The Selfish Gene." Dennett, D. C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. Dennett, D.C. 1996. Facing backwards on the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3:4-6."Brianstorms" & "Intentional System in Cognitive Ethology: The 'Panglossian Paradigm' Defended," Dennett, D. C. 1996. Facing backward on the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3:4-6. Dennett, D. C. 2001. The fantasy of first-person science. Forthcoming. http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chalmersdeb3dft.htm. McGinn, C. 1996. Review of The Conscious Mind. Times Higher Educational Supplement, April 5 1996 Baars, B.J. 1996. Understanding subjectivity: Global workspace theory and the resurrection of the observing self. Journal of Consciousness Studies Fodor, I. 1988. "Connectionism and Cognitive Arthitecture: A Critical Analysis." Freud, S. 1962. "The ego and the Id." Hobbes, T. 1651. "Leviathan." Honderich, T. 1984. "The Time of a Conscious Sensory Experience and Mind-Brian Theories." & "On Benjamin Libet: Is the Mind Ahead of the Brian? Behind It?" Jackson, F. 1982. "Epiphenomenal Qualia," Libet, B. 1965. "Cortical Activation in Conscious and Unconscious Experience." Locke, J. 1690. "Essay Concerning Human Understanding." Nagel, T. 1974. "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Pinker, S. "The Blank Slate" Russell, B. The Analysis of Matter Searle, J. 1980. "Minds, Brians, and Programs" & The Problem of Consciousness Kandel, R. Eric 2006. "In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind" Ridley, Matt. (2006). Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. Harrper Perennial, New York. Chomsky, Noam. (1975). Language and Responsibility & Reflection on Language. The New Press, Canada Chalmers, J. David. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford. Chomsky, Noam. (2003). On Nature and Language. Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom. Chomsky, Noam. (2000). New Horizons in the study of language and Mind. Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom. Pinker, Steven. (2007). The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Viking Penguin, USA. Pinker, Steven. (1997). How the Mind Works. W.W. Norton, New York, London. Dawkins, Richard. (2006). The God Delusion. A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, New York. Alper, Matthew. (2006). The God Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God. SourcebBooks, Naperville, Illinois. Doidge, Norman. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself. Penguin Books, USA. Chalmers, J. David. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford. Chalmers, J. David. (?). On the Search for the Neural Correlate of Consciousness Darwin, Charles. (2004). The Origin of Species. Barns & Noble Classic, New York Huxley, T. 1874. On the hypothesis that animals are automata, and its history. Fortnightly Review 95:555-80. Reprinted in Collected Essays. London, 1893. Watson, D. James. (2006). DNA: The Secret of Life. Alfred A. Knopf, New York Churchland, P.S. 1996. The Hornswoggle Problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3:402-8 Churchland, P.S. (2002).?#060;I>Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy Bradford Book/MIT Press, Cambridge MA Churchland, P.S. (1996).?#060;I>The mind-brain continuum: sensory processes , edited by Rodolfo R. Lli�as and Patricia Smith Churchland. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Jackson, F. 1982. Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quarterly COUSINS "That which is most incomprehensible of all is not a distant planet but the human mind itself." (Norman Cousins, an American journalist and biochemist) CRICK: Until the problem [of consciousness] is understood much better, any attempt at a formal definition is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both. (Francis Crick) WEINBERG We don't know in advance what are the right questions to ask, and we often do not find out until we are close to the answer. (Steven Weinberg) DESCARTES I think, therefore I am. (Rene Descartes) DESCARTES "I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine's organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels." (Descartes, Treatise on Man, p.108 (Descartes) HUXLEY Would Descartes not have been justified in asking why we need deny that animals are machines, when men, in a state of unconsciousness, perform, mechanically, actions as complicated and as seemingly rational as those of any animals? (Thomas Huxley) DESCARTES [Machines] could never use speech or other signs as we do when placing our thoughts on record for the benefit of others. It never happens that it arranges its speech in various ways, in order to reply appropriately to everything that may be said in its presence, as even the lowest type of man can do. (Rene Descartes) DESCARTES Although machines can perform certain things as well as or perhaps better than any of us can do, they infallibly fall short in others, by the which means we may discover that they did not act from knowledge, but only from the disposition of their organs. (Rene Descartes) DESCARTES The mind can act independent of the brain; for certainly the brain can be of no use in pure thought; its only use is for imagining and perceiving. (Rene Descartes) HUME For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I called myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. (David Hume) ECCLES Human beings are irreplaceable; and in being irreplaceable they are clearly very different from machine. (John Eccles) NEWTON To derive two or three general Principle of Motion from Phenomenon, and afterwards to tell us how the properties and Actions of all corporal Things follow from those manifest Principles, would be a very great step in philosophy. Though the Causes of those Principles be not yet discovered." ( Newton) NEWTON That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and though which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. ( Newton) HERBERT Just as Newton shattered the medieval crystal sphere, modern quantum theory has irreparably smashed Newton's clockwork. We are now certain that the world is not a deterministic mechanism. (Nick Herbert) TURING (IMITATATIONGAME) 'I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?' This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms 'machine' and 'think'. The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words 'machine' and 'think' are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, 'Can machines think?' is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game'. It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either 'X is A and Y is B' or 'X is Band Y is A.' The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus: c: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair? Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be: 'My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long.' In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as 'I am the woman, don't listen to him!' to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks. We now ask the question, 'What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?' Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and woman? These questions replace our original, 'Can machines think?' SIMON "[M]achines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do" (H. A. SIMON) HEISENBERG "The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realizes that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science." (Werner Heisenberg) DAWKINS The account of the origin of life that I shall give is necessarily speculative, nobody was around to see what happened. (Richard Dawkins) HUXLEY We now believe with confidence, that the whole of reality is one gigantic process of evolution. This produces increased novelty and variety, and ever higher types of organization. In a few spots it has produced life; and, in a few of those spots of life, it has produced mind and consciousness. (Sir Julian Huxley) DENNETT The origin of human mind must be attributed to some process firmly anchored on the solid ground of materialism and natural selection. (Daniel Dennett) LEWONTIN Only two species form the group of our "close" relatives, and only three other, the orangutan, gibbon, and siamang are included in our superfamily, the Hominoidea. All other primates (monkeys, lemurs, etc.) are very far from us indeed. When there are so few forms that are moderately related, it becomes very difficult to trace the successive changes of a trait. The evolutionary space is too sparsely populated to be able to connect the points sensibly. (Richard Lewontin) LEWONTIN Despite the existence of a vast and highly developed mathematical theory of evolutionary processes in general, despite the abundance of knowledge about living and fossil primates, despite the intimate knowledge we have of our own species physiology, morphology, psychology, and social organization, we know essentially nothing about the evolution of our cognitive capacities, and there is a strong possibility that we will never know much about it. (Richard Lewontin) HUXLEY "... consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon it machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes." (Thomas Huxley) CRICK The view of ourselves, as 'persons,' is just as erroneous as the view that the Sun goes around the Earth. (Francis Crick) KANT The "I" that I think is distinct from the I that it, itself, intuits ... I am given to myself beyond that which is given in intuition, and yet know myself, like other phenomena, only as I appear to myself, not as I am... (Immanuel Kant) HUME "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat and cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception." (David Hume) RUSSELL There are, it seems to me, prima facie different kinds of causal laws, one belonging to physics and the other to psychology. (Bertrand Russell) DESCARTES When I consider the mind, that is to say, myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire. (Rene Descartes (Descartes, 1641, p. 196) HUME The mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality without forming a precise notion of degrees of each. (David Hume) KANT "The thought that these representations given in intuition all together belong to me means, accordingly, the same as that I unite them in a self-consciousness, or at least can unite them therein, and although it is itself not yet the consciousness of the synthesis of the representations, it still presupposes the possibility of the latter, i.e., only because I can comprehend their manifold in a consciousness do I call them altogether my representations." (Kant)(B134) KANT , "...the mind could never think its identity in the manifoldness of its representations, and indeed think this identity a prior, if it did not have before its eyes the identity of its act, whereby it subordinates all synthesis of apprehension (which is empirical) to a transcendental unity, thereby rendering possible their interconnection according to a prior rules." (Kant) (A108) CRICK A key property of conscious sensations is their integrated nature. You are not aware of isolated percept, but of a single, unifying experience. (Francis Crick) BURNS The persistent failure of synaptic facilitation to explain memory makes one wonder whether neurophysiologists have not been looking for the wrong kind of mechanisms. (B. Delisle Burns)	.
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