This Year, Thus Far, In Your Brain

Slate Magazine has a pretty good list of the top 5 brain-related news stories of 2007. I'd say that's a bit premature, since its only May, but I'm not in the magazine business... They are, in order:

1. Software that can use a MRI to read your mind 71% of the time,
2. You can change what people think is moral by altering their brain chemistry,
3. The ability to genetically predict sexual orientation in mammals,
4. The sedative Ambien wakes people up from a vegetative coma,
5. Generally significant progress in artificial intelligence.

Yikes on the mind reading one...

I like number 5... but the full article missed one of my favorite examples: cognitive researchers at IBM have reproduced 10% of a mouse brain in a computer! They created simple software that behaved like neurons, and painstakingly connected them together in a massively parallel application. They've gotten it to behave like 10% of a mouse for about 10 seconds.

However, if these mouse guys succeeded, it makes the Chinese Room Argument in cognitive science a tiny bit problematic... John Searl argued that by definition a computer cannot have human consciousness, since a computer can only do symbol manipulation. A human who knows Chinese know the meaning of the question 怎么样您, which is "how are you?" Whereas a computer would just see the Chinese symbols, and reply with other symbols like 我很好, which would mean "I am well."

In a computational machine there is no context, therefore no true knowledge, therefore no true consciousness.

But... a neural network of computers might not suffer from this limitation. The binary ones and zeros are just the building blocks upon which neurons are created... and the structure of the digital neurons grant context, and perhaps consciousness. I see this as analogous to how physical neurons are composed of atoms and molecules, and consciousness is just an emergent property.

Of course, we could all just be fooling ourselves, and conscious might not really exist... its merely an illusion of an extremely complex system. Philosophers call this reductionism, and the thought makes most people uncomfortable... but that doesn't make it wrong!