Duh: What Happened To Theoretical AI?
by David Gelernter, 06.22.09, 06:00 PM EDT, Forbes
The two major mystery-boxes of mind-science (each decorated with an intriguing question mark) are "consciousness" and "thought." Both mysteries are notoriously hard to unravel, but computing ought to help us understand thought, which is (on one level) a process or series of actions--like computing itself. Consciousness, on the other hand, is a state of being--and, despite the best efforts of theoretical AI, there is no reason to believe that a computer will ever achieve this state, or that software can bring it about.
As far as we know, consciousness can only be created by a mind, and a mind can only be realized by a human's (or some other advanced creature's) brain and body working together. If, in the near future, a grinning robot should walk up to you at a party and say, "Hi, my name is Bob; pleased to meet you," you'd be apt to cut it some slack and assume that it really is--on some level and in some way--"pleased." But in fact there's no reason to believe that any robot is pleased to meet you or ever will be, has ever been pleased to meet anybody, or has ever experienced the state of mind we call "pleasure" under any circumstances at all. So far as we know, software cannot re-create the sort of inner mental world human beings inhabit.___________
Unbelievably, Gelernter is on the right track, up to the point where he writes "there's no reason to believe that any robot is pleased to meet you or ever will be, has ever been pleased."
Why is there "no reason"? What makes this proposition -- and many others like it -- so high a wall?
Well, because it's the highest wall of that box everybody's trying to think outside of -- where science is concerned, at any rate. It is the single greatest unexamined premise of our traditional worldview or paradigm (to use a word now out of fashion, a victim of its own success).
That wall is the dusty barrier between primary and secondary qualities, bequeathed to us by Democritus and the other atomists of Greek antiquity. Reinforced by Galileo, Newton and several of their most famous philosophical contemporaries, this division is so much a part of our thinking that we are typically unconscious of it.
Locke gets the credit for having named the distinction:
These I call original or primary qualities of the body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz., solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number.
Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e. by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colour, sounds, tastes, etc., these I call secondary qualities.
And yet colors behave like vectors and so do the photons which bring them to us: SPECTRA
But I have gone into all that at length on too many occasions and I am not eager to rehearse my ideas here, but will be content to point the way.
History teaches us
Quanta & Consciousness
Field Effect Technologies



