Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Non Serviam 318Around on a table top with a mechanical arm, but, in fact, SHRDLU’s world is one thathas been entirely made up or simulated within the computer – “In effect, the device is inprecisely the same situation that Descartes dreads; it’s a mere computer which dreamsthat it’s a robot.”* Lem’s description of computer-simulated worlds and the simulatedagents within them (worlds made of mathematics, in effect) is as accurate as it is poetic –with one striking falsehood, a close kin to falsehoods we have encountered again andagain in these tales. Lem would have it that thanks to the blinding speed of computers,the “biological time” of these simulated worlds can be much faster than our real time –and only slowed down to our pace when we want to probe and examine; “…. One secondof machine time corresponds to one year of human life.”There would indeed be a dramatic difference between the time scale of a largescale, multidimensional, highly detailed computer simulation of the sort Lem describesand our everyday world’s time scale – but it would run in the other direction! Somewhatlike Wheeler’s electron that composes the whole universe by weaving back and forth, acomputer simulation must work by sequentially painting in details, and even at the speedof light quite simple and façadelike simulations (which is all that artificial intelligencehas yet attempted to produce) take much longer to run than their real life inspirations.“Parallel processing” – running, say, a few million channels of simulation at once – is ofcourse the engineering answer to this problem (though no one yet knows how to do this);but once we have worlds simulated by millions of channels of parallel processing, theclaim that they are simulated rather than real (if artificial) will be far less clear. See “TheSeventh Sally” (selection 18) and “A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain” (selection 20)for further exploration of these themes.In any case, Lem portrays with uncanny vividness a “cybernetic universe” withconscious software inhabitants. He has various words for what we have often called“soul.” He refers to “cores,” “personal nuclei,” “personoid gemmae,” and at one point heeven gives the illusion of spelling it out in more technical detail; “a coherent cloud ofprocesses . . . A functional aggregate with a kind of “centre” that can be defined fairlyprecisely.” Lem describes human – or rather, personoid – consciousness as an unclosedand unclosable plan for a total reconciliation of the stubborn contradiction of the brain. Itarises from, and “soars and flutters” over, an infinite regress of level-conflicts in thebrain. It is a “patchwork,” an escape from the snares of Godelization.” “a mirror* Jerry Fodor “Methodical Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in CognitivePsychology” (see “Further Reading”).