From Incognito to Singularity!
In his earlier illuminating book ‘Incognito’, David Eagleman
showed us our hidden selves and challenged us to think about ourselves differently.
He continues in that direction in his new book ‘The Brain: The Story of you’
and visualizes the possibilities of the future of the brain and in fact the future of our species. The Singularity is a concept popularized by
the well known futurist scientist Ray Kurzweil (refer his book ‘The Singularity
is Near’ in 2005) where he envisioned a future where we will be able to leave
our bodies and live in a digital world by uploading our brains into a computer
system. Kurzweil was pretty much vague on the details but Eagleman in this book shows us how
challenging that can be.
With over 100 billion neurons and many trillions of
connections among them, the complexity of the brain is unquestionable but
understandable. However the fact that
‘consciousness’ emerges from this is the amazing outcome that leaves us
in awe. Kurzweil had argued that ‘consciousness’ is a rather natural outcome of
a complex interconnected system, and in books like the ‘The Age of Spiritual
machines’ it was assumed that soon computers and robots (and may be the
Internet) would develop a consciousness.
But as we understand more about the biological nature of the
brain and its learning system, we will start doubting whether an artificial
system will ever develop consciousness
on its own. I don’t doubt that when technology is advanced enough we would be
able to create a human like (or a human better) intelligence but I don’t think a machine or AI system can naturally
develop consciousness if its creator
(that is us) did not train it to.
The best parts of David Eagleman’s book are where he
explains (a) how the plasticity of the brain and its self learning ability to
understand patterns can be leveraged in the future to provide different inputs
to the brain (than the normal sensory inputs that we are born with) (b) how
many other inputs that we don’t normally recognize influence our brain – a
beautiful example is on how our emotions are influenced by the input to our brain from our facial muscles when we
witness an event (c) what will be our future – I leave this for you to read and
find out!
