“…and man will be made dirigible, and let loose the body as a placenta for the soul.” — James Joyce, from The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
What a technological era! Within a few years, our computers will have main brains consisting of central processing units containing hundreds of cores. The calculating potentials for hundreds of parallel, or transactional, processes occurring at one time will greatly speed up and greatly enhance how our external minds will be able to manipulate data. Will they be able to loop outside of their own mental processes and reflect back upon them, as a human being does?
It is not only humans who can strangely loop out of their minds to reflect back upon them and the thoughts that are generated (Thank you, Douglas Hofstadter, i.e., STRANGE LOOPS). Many species can, but humans seem to do it with the great flare of their massive cerebral cortexes. To lesser degrees, animals with minds as simple as insects (still very complex, but simpler than ours) do some looping, and thus make calculated decisions, utilizing varying degrees of fuzzy logic. Where does consciousness come into play here? Is self-referential loopiness the key to consciousness, or is there more to this? Cognitive scientists are still asking the questions, and to this day not enough is known about the neural networks and how they fire electrochemical messages to each other to fully understand what consciousness is.
Suffice to say that some of our loopiness, our fuzzy logic, is now being externailzed into forms of silicone, plastics and metals, fired by electricity, and performing multiple calculations and processes in an instant. We are about to make some quantum leaps forward in this externalization of thought. A massive project by Microsoft is in play to build software for multiple core processors. It is being done in a gothic cathedral on the outskirst of Barcelona, Spain, where a supercomputer running on 10,000 processor cores with twenty terabytes of storage will be the arena for new software production. New ways of performing tasks will be devised. Transactional calculations instead of parallel processes may be devised to create the elaborate programs and multimedia products from software manufacturers.
So, what is it to be human? What makes us distinctly different from other specieis, and is humanness transferrable to the mechanized minds of robots and computers that we are now creating? Such questions have been the topic of many a Phillip K. Dick novel, as well as the basis for movies, such as Steven Spielberg’s AI (artificial intelligence), in which a self-conscious robotic child wants desparately to be loved, and to love, as a real boy (yes, an updated Pinocchio story).
We extend our minds and bodies into plastic and metal forms to explore the planets and beyond in space, into the depths of the oceans, and to zoom into the realm of subatomic worlds. How much of our humanness is contained in these extended minds and bodies? When will such an “extension” be considered as an entity unto itself?
We are, perhaps, decades away from being able to answer these questions, or even to pose them substantially, but it is certain that our humanness contains as much of our externalized dreams that now exist as our synthesized world as it does what is within us. We have created a network of exansive and shared learning through these devices, such as the one on wich I am typing this message, to be sent out over the global airwaves of broadband Internet, and into the minds of others, at least those who can understand my American English, or be able to translate it using a language translating program.
The amazement continues.
Amen.
MH Pathfinder
