Brain Week: Cogito Ergo Sum

What do you get when you hook up one hundred billion neurons to each other with one thousand trillion different wires? Well, somehow you get something you never paid for: consciousness.

It's hard to define, but we know we have it. Consciousness is awareness, the realization that you're alive, that you're thinking. It's thinking about living, thinking about thinking, knowing you exist, knowing you are you and not me and I am me and not you. Consciousness is "at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives" (-Max Velmans).

We're pretty good judges of whether something is conscious. For example, I know a rock is not, and that elephants are. I know that my computer has a lot of interconnections, and can do some pretty impressive physics calculations much faster than I can, and yet (even though I don't know exactly what consciousness is), I know this netbook hasn't got it.

But then this isn't the most powerful of computers. What about supercomputers that have huge systems of connections, like the brain - are they conscious? Computer scientists and philosophers have tried to devise tests of emergent consciousness and intelligence in computers. The most famous of these is called the Turing test, after pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing. The idea is this: if you have a conversation with a computer and you're fooled into thinking you're talking to a person, then the computer has passed the Turing test.

A whirlwind of controversy surrounds the test. Some complain that it is too anthropocentric. Others argue that it misses the point in an indescribable way, like asking whether a submarine can swim. Nonetheless, the test is considered pragmatic and viable, and so every year since 1991 a contest called the Loebner Prize has been held to see if any computers can pass it.

There are different levels of victory. Each year a "most human-like" computer is chosen and receives a prize, but none has ever won the Loebner gold medal prize of $100,000, which awaits a computer that is considered truly indistinguishable (conversationally) from a human. Still, I was surprised how intelligent some of the competing computers seem; you can read some transcripts of conversations here.

I'll leave you with a stanza of poetry, generated (with no input) by a computer named RACTER. A book of his poetry called The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed can be purchased here.

A hot and torrid bloom which

Fans wise flames and begs to be

Redeemed by forces black and strong

Will now oppose my naked will

And force me into regions of despair.