Laws@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA (Ken Laws) (09/25/86)
Recent philosophical discussions on consciousness and intentionality
have made me wonder about the analogy between Man and Bureaucracy.
Imagine a large corporation. Without knowing the full internal chain of
command, an external observer could still deduce many of the following
characteristics.
1) The corporation is composed of hundreds of nearly identical units
(known as personnel), most of whom perform material-handling
or information-handling tasks. Although the tasks differ, the
processing units are essentially interchangeable.
2) The "intelligence" of this system is distributed -- proper functioning
of the organization requires cooperative action by many rational agents.
Many tasks can be carried out by small cliques of personnel without
coming to the attention of the rest of the system. Other tasks require
the cooperation of all elements.
3) Despite the similarity of the personnel, some are more "central" or
important than others. A reporter trying to discover what the
organization is "doing" or "planning" would not be content to talk
with a janitor or receptionist. Even the internal personnel recognize
this, and most would pass important queries or problems to more central
personnel rather than presume to discuss or set policy themselves.
4) The official corporate spokesman may be in contact with the most
central elements, but is not himself central. The spokesman is only
an output channel for decisions that occur much deeper or perhaps in a
distributed manner. Many other personnel seem to function as inputs or
effectors rather than decision makers.
5) The chief executive officer (CEO) or perhaps the chairman of the board
may regard the corporation as a personal extension. This individual
seems to be the most central, the "consciousness" of the organization.
To paraphrase Louis XV, "I am the state."
It seems, therefore, that the organization has not only a distributed
intelligence but a localized consciousness. Certain processing elements
and their own thought processes control the overall behavior of the
bureaucracy in a special way, even though these elements (e.g., the CEO)
are physiologically indistinguishable from other personnel. They are
regarded as the seat of corporate consciousness by outsiders, insiders,
and themselves.
Consciousness is thus related to organizational function and information
flow rather than to personal function and characteristics. By analogy,
it is quite possible that the human brain contains a cluster of simple
neural "circuits" that constitute the seat of consciousness, even though
these circuits are indistinguishable in form and individual functioning
from all the other circuits in the brain. This central core, because of
its monitoring and control of the whole organism, has the right to
consider itself the sole autonomous agent. Other portions of the brain
would reject their own autonomy if they were equipped to even consider
the matter.
I thus regard consciousness as a natural emergent property of hierarchical
systems (and perhaps of other distributed systems). There is no need to
postulate a mind/body dualism or a separate soul. I can't explain how
this consciousness arises, nor am I comfortable with the paradox. But I
know that it does arise in any hierarchical organization of cooperating
rational agents, and I suspect that it can also arise in similar organizations
of nonrational agents such as neural nets or computer circuitry.
-- Ken Laws
-------segall@CAIP.RUTGERS.EDU (Ed Segall) (09/29/86)
Why must we presume that the seat of consciousness must be in the form of neural "circuits"? What's to prevent it from being a symbolic, logical entity, rather than a physical entity? After all, the "center of control" of most computers is some sort of kernal program, running on the exact same hardware as the other programs. (Don't try to push the analogy too far, you can probably find a hole in it.) Perhaps the hierarchical system referred to is also not structural. Might the brain operate even more like a conventional computer than we realize, taking the role of an extremely sophisticated (self-modifying) interpreter? The "program" that is interpreted is the pattern of firings occurring at any given time. If this is so, then moment-to-moment thought is almost completely in terms of the dynamic information contained in neural signals, rather than the quasi-static information contained in neural interconnections. The neurons simply serve to "run" the thoughts. This seems obvious to me, since I am assuming that neural firings can process information much faster than structural changes in neurons. I'd be interested to know about what rate neuron firings occur in the brain, and if anyone has an intelligent guess as to how much information can be stored at once in the "dynamic" form of firings rather than the "static" form of interconnections. I apologize in advance if what I suggest goes against well-understood knowlege (not theory) of how the brain operates. My information is from the perspective of a lay person, not a cognitive scientist.