User:Tancre/2/thesis

Thesis

Part 1

Then, just as the frightened technicians felt they could hold their breath no longer, there was a sudden springing to life of the teletype attached to that portion of Multivac. Five words were printed: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

— Isaac Asimov, The Last Question, 1956

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The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Through the standard scientific method the challenge of explaining the mind has been mainly addressed by disassembling it in its functional, dynamical and structural properties. Consciousness has been described as cognition, thought, knowledge, intelligence, self-awareness, agency and so on, with the assumption that explaining the physical brain would resolve the mystery of the mind. . From this perspective, our brain works as a complex mechanism that eventually triggers some sort of behavior. Consciousness is the result of a series of physical processes happening in the cerebral matter and determining our experience of having a body, thinking, and feeling. This view has been able to explain many unknown elements of what happens in our minds.

In 1995 the philosopher of mind David Chalmers published his article Facing up to the problem of consciousness , where he points out that the objective scientific explanation of the brain can solve only an easy problem. If we want to fully explain the mystery of the mind, instead, we have to face up the hard problem of consciousness: How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective experience of the mind and of the world? Why is there a subjective, first-person, experience of having a particular kind of brain?

Explaining the brain as an objective mechanism is a relatively easy problem that eventually could be solved in a matter of time. But a complete understanding of consciousness and its subjective experience is a hard problem that scientific objectivity cannot access directly. Instead, scientists have to develop new methodologies, considering that a hard problem exists — How is it possible that such a thing as the subjective experience of being me, here, now takes place in the brain? .

Echoing the mind-body problem initiated by Descartes subjective experience, also called 'phenomenal consciousness', underlies whatever attempt to investigate the nature of our mind. This problem challenged the physicalist ontology of the scientific method showing the unbridgeable explanatory gap between the latter's dogmatic view and a full understanding of consciousness. This produces the necessity of a paradigm shift allowing new alternative scientific methods to embrace the challenge of investigating phenomenal consciousness .

The reactions to Chalmer's paper range between a total denial of the issue (Ryle 1949, Dennett 1978, 1988, Wilkes 1984, Rey 1997) to panpsychist positions (Nagel 1979, Bohme 1980, Tononi and Koch 2015), with some isolated cases of mysterianism (McGinn 1989, 2012) advocating the impossibility to solve such a mystery. In any case, the last 30 years have seen exponential growth in multidisciplinary researches facing the hard problem with a constant struggle to build the blocks of a science of consciousness finally accepted as a valid field of study. This is a central subject of this thesis and we will regularly return to this contested field later in this text.

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The Machinic Life and Its Discontent (I)

To fully understand the importance and consequences which are involved in exploring consciousness, we must shift our attention towards the evolution of the technological system. In particular, to the attempts of simulating the mechanisms of the mind in order to build autonomous and intelligent machines. In The Allure of the Machinic Life , John Johnston attempts to organize the contemporary discourse on machines under a single framework that he calls machinic life.

By machinic life I mean the forms of nascent life that have been made to emerge in and through technical interactions in human-constructed environments. Thus the webs of connection that sustain machinic life are material (or virtual) but not directly of the natural world. (...) Machinic life, unlike earlier mechanical forms, has a capacity to alter itself and to respond dynamically to changing situations.

Implying the whole attempt to produce life out of artificial hardware and software, the definition of machinic life allows us to re-consider the different experiences of the last century under the common goal of building autonomous adaptive machines and to understand their theoretical backgrounds as a continuum.

The mythological intuition of technology, subsumed in the concept of techné , already shows the main paths of the contemporary discourse. In fact, in the myth of Talos and in Daedalus' labyrinth, we can find the first life-like automaton and the first architectural design reflecting the complexity of existence and outsourcing thought from human dominion. However, only in the 19th century, with the new technological discoveries and a positivistic approach to knowledge , did scientists start building the bearing structures of what would become the two main fields of research on autonomous machines of the 20th century: Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence(AI).

On the one hand, this process begins with the development of the steam engine (Watt 1776) through the study of thermodynamics (Sadi Carnot 1824) joined with the studies of evolutionary biology (Lamark 1809, Darwin 1859). In 1858, Alfred Wallace wrote a letter to Charles Darwin making a specific relation between the 'vapor engine' and the evolutionary process.

The action of this [feedback] principle is exactly like that of the centrifugal governor of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure soon to follow.

In the 1870s Samuel Butler speculated on the evolution of machines. . The autoregulation of animals (evolution) and machines (feedback mechanism) found their equivalence in the concept of adaptation. These theories reflect the effort to reintroduce the idea of teleology (purpose) which, strictly related to free will and choice, was denied in the debate regarding the origin of humankind contended between creationism's vitalism of the purposeful design (Paley 1802) and the blind chance of Darwin's mechanism. These developments made it possible to theorize, as Butler did, a framework where machines can auto-regulate and reproduce themselves, evolving exactly as biological organisms. In the twentieth century, Wallace and Butler's speculative theories will find their scientific correlative in the process of homeostasis. The biological autoregulatory system was described by biologist Walter B. Cannon , making its closer study and its simulation in mechanical machines by cybernetics possible. It is worth remembering that this was defined as: control and communication in the animal and machine.

Parallel to these developments, the study of mathematics and logic, along with the revolution of Jacquard's loom (1804), led to the construction of advanced discrete-state machines and the first practical translation of elementary logical function into binary algebra. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace's effort to develop and program the 'analytical' (1837) engine, together with Boolean logic (1854), introduced a new computational era in which mental labor was not exclusively the prerogative of humans but could be performed by an economy of machines . The idea of formalizing thought in a set of rules (algorithm) can be traced back to Plato and was theorized in the 17th century by Leibniz as a universal symbolical system capable to solve every possible problem. Alan Turing and Alonzo Church will [later] demonstrate this speculation mathematically, in 1936, leading to the formalization of the theory of computation . Along with the formalization of computers' architecture by John Von Neumann in 1945 and Claude Shannon's information theory in 1948, was born the digital computer establishing the framework for the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

If the classical world had the intuition of the sentient machine, and the modern the realization of its possibility, it is only with the practical experience of cybernetics and AI that the contemporary discourse of machinic life can be formulated. Nonetheless, the dual nature of contemporary discourse embodies the convergence of different theories in biological, mechanical and computational systems within a multidisciplinary approach to knowledge and life, driven by complexity and information. However, this already shows some of the weaknesses and biases that will become the limits of 'machinic life' in understanding and building working models of consciousness. For example, the idea that a). life can be reproduced outside of biological systems and b). the assumption that the human mind works as a symbolic computer, topics which will be discussed in the next chapter.

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The Machinic Life and Its Discontent (II)

Gaining its identity at the Macy conference (NYC 1946 ) , Cybernetics has been the first framework capable of generating a working theory of machines. Its influence spreads in different disciplines such as sociology, psychology, ecology, economics as well as in popular culture (cyber-culture). The prefix cyber-, in fact, will become emblematic of a new understanding of the human condition as profoundly connected with machines. Researchers earlier involved in technological development during World War II, met to discuss and experiment with a new idea of life. Supported by statistical information theory, experimental psychology, behaviorism and Norbert Wiener's control theory, biological organisms were understood as self-regulating machines, thanks to their embodied homeostatic processes. This machinic behavior can be formalized in models and simulated in artificial organisms, conceptually leading to the dissolution of boundaries between natural and artificial, mens and machines, bodies and minds. Life becomes a complex adaptive system made by an organism adapting to its environment through long and short feedback loops (homeostasis). Human beings becomes machines and vice-versa. Cybernetic subjects sharing the new critical idea of life, no longer a matter of substance but of structural complexity. The implications of this astonishing view, broke the boundaries of human identity, leading theorists to talk about post-humanism and explore new realms of control and speculations on the nature of simulation.

Despite the variety of subfields developed by Cybernetics , the parallel advent of the digital computer obscured most of its paths for decades. The focus of researchers and national funding shifted into the framework of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This new focus on intelligence, to which consciousness is a feature, was made possible by establishing a strict relation between the mind/brain and the digital computer. In fact, another revolution was taking place in the field of psychology. The incapacity of Behaviorism to include mental processes in understanding humans and animals, was opening the doors to the 'cognitive revolution'. Comparing the mind, intended as the cradle of cognitive processes, with computers' information processing, some researchers began to see the possibility of testing psychological theories on the digital computer envisioned as an artificial brain. .

Before AI was officially born, in 1950 Alan Turing published his article 'Computing machinery and intelligence' , where he designed the 'imitation game' best known as 'Turing test'. The computational power of the discrete-state machine was identified with the act of thinking and therefore with intelligence. "The reader must accept it as a fact that digital computers can be constructed, and indeed have been constructed, according to the principles we have described, and that they can in fact, mimic the actions of a human computer very closely." . Because of phrasing the problem as 'can machines think?' can have ambiguous results, to allow computer scientists exploring the possibility of creating intelligent machines Turing reversed the question into a behavioral test. 'Can we say a machine is thinking when imitating a human so well that he thinks he is talking to another human? If you can't recognize that your interlocutor is a machine, it doesn't matter if it is actually thinking because in any case, the result would be the same, a human-level communication. Thinking and mimicking thinking becomes equivalent allowing machines to be said intelligent. In his text, Turing dismisses the argument of phenomenal consciousness and the actual presence of subjective experience by sustaining that such a problem does not necessarily need to be solved before being able to answer his question. Indeed, the Turing test suggests more than a simple game. It is signaling the beginning of a new inquiry on the theoretical and practical possibility of building 'real' intelligent machines. At the same time indicating some possible directions to build a machine capable of passing this test.

Riding the new wave of the cognitive revolution and embracing the cybernetic comparison between men and machines, in 1956 a group of polymaths begins to meet at Dartmouth College , the birthplace of AI. They developed the first working program, called Logic Theorist, exploring the possibility to automatize reasoning through its formalization and manipulation in a symbolic system. This approach, called Symbolic AI, will become the workhorse to pass from programs that are able to reproduce only specific aspects of intelligence (narrow AI) to artificial general intelligence (AGI) capable of doing any task and achieve that human-level AI (HLAI) prospected by Turing. The overstated goal that will lead the fathers of AI to be remembered as the enthusiastic researchers drawn in a spiral of positive predictions and hyperbolic claims mostly failed or not yet achieved.

Infected by the same enthusiasm, philosophers of science already struggling on the possible comparison between the brain and the Turing Machine, started to attempt a serious interpretation of the human mind based on the information processing of new digital computers. The movement called computationalism led to several theories: The Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) (1967) (Putnam, Fodor, Dennet, Pinker, Marr) understands the mind effectively as a linear 'input-processing-output' machine. Jerry Fodor's Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) (1975) claims thinking is only possible in a 'language-like' structure to build thoughts at the top-level. The hypothesis of A. Newell, H. Simon (1976) sees in the physical symbolic system everything needed to build a true intelligence. In the popular culture as well, the same enthusiasm led to a new ideology of the machine with its climax in the fictional character of HAL 9000 of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick.

Despite the great enthusiasm and expectations, the idea that computers can do all the things a human can do, has been heavily criticized. Philosophers such as Hubert Dreyfus (1965, 1972, 1986) and Noam Chomsky (1968) have highlighted the problematics of computationalism in building working theories of the mind. Starting a critical analysis of AI they reveal the simplistic assumptions perpetuated by the unjustified hype and incapacity of auto-criticism of major AI's researchers. They showed the technical limitations of physical symbolic systems that are unable to grasp the value of the context, essential in gaining knowledge and achieving common sense. As well as the impossibility to formalize all the aspects of intelligence as creativity and intuition.

In the same direction, philosopher John Searle, criticizing the comparison of the human mind with computers in understanding things, developed a thought experiment called 'Chinese room' (1980) arguing for an underlining distinction between a 'strong AI' capable to really 'understanding', and a 'weak AI' which just simulates understanding. Searle's argument raises the same problematics of the 'hard problem' of consciousness defining a threshold between the actual AI and the human mind. Other thought experiments, such as Jackson's 'Mary's room' (1986) touch the subjectivity of experience directly, which seems to resist all the efforts of the scientific community to reduce it to a machine and its weak computational intelligence.

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The Machinic Life and Its Discontent (III)

The computational symbolic AI, also called good old-fashioned AI (GOFAI), believes that from a top-down approach you can engineer in digital computers all the aspects of the mind, including consciousness. However, despite the early success (still limited when compared to the actual goals aforementioned) the wrong predictions and their conceptual limitations led to a series of failures resultants in 2 periods of recession best known as AI winters. After these periods, the criticism moved toward symbolic AI and the development of new researches inspired by cybernetics, will lead to find different approaches to understand intelligence and design life.

Looking closely at the architecture of the brain, cyberneticists were already exploring the possibility to reproduce its networks of neurons in artificial neural networks (ANN) . However, this system will become effective only during the 80s with the development of the parallel distributed processing (PDP) pairing multiple layers of ANNs and the birth of a new approach in AI: connectionism. Instead of an upstream representation of knowledge typical of the symbols manipulation, this bottom-up approach makes possible to design AI systems capable to learn and find useful patterns by inspecting sets of data and reinforcing the connections between its neurons. Thanks to the internet, ANN's can now be fed with a large amount of data increasing drastically their capacity to learn. This new perspective called deep learning has been introduced in 2012 producing a renovated hype in connectionism and AI.

Another relevant approach produced in AI by cybernetics is the intelligent agent paradigm. Reintroducing the discourse on complex systems, the concept of 'rational agent' (borrowed from economics) becomes the neutral way to refer to anything capable to interact with an environment through sensors and actuators. This concept made possible to devel AI systems capable to achieve a goal by keeping track of their environment, learning and improving their performance autonomously. In parallel with the developments in AI, cybernetics led to a new paradigm of machinic life focusing on the simulation of biological evolution through software: Artificial Life (ALife) . Starting from very simple operators and basic laws of interaction in a given environment, complex systems automatically arise creating chaotic interactions, stable loops and astonishing patterns that are impossible to predict.

Despite these new developments, both ALife and AI are encountering their respective boundaries. Life, like intelligence, generates from the interaction with an extremely complex and variegated environment, the noisy physical world made of radiations and electromagnetic phenomena, particles and wavelengths in continuous interaction. A chaotic world that neither contemporary computers' capabilities nor the internet's amount of data can simulate. Furthermore, the companies relying on deep learning are facing up to the problem of understanding why these learning systems make their choices. Their autonomous way of learning through layers of networked neurons creates nested black boxes extremely difficult to unpack rising a whole debate on discriminations and biases embedded in software.

To escape from these limitations, scientists are now working on a more wholistic understanding of intelligence which mixes the sub-symbolic approach of machine learning with the knowledge representation of symbolic AI. In robotics, the situated AI takes robots outside of the labs to interact with the 'noisy' physical world, hoping to find new ways to generate direct knowledge instead of just simulate it. Finally, these new ways of defining life and intelligence, are moving toward a deeper understanding of cognition that instead of being represented only as a symbolic system, also lies on a sub-symbolic level and instead of being a designed product it is part of evolutionary processes . Slowly machinic life is reaching that adaptive unconscious and embodied knowledge which seems the key to simulate the high-level intelligence typical of intuition, creativity and the spontaneous complexity of life. In general, the perspectives of engineering general-purpose systems and populate the world with new forms of life are growing faster.

After almost 70 years from the first AI program, we are still surrounded by only weak-and-narrow AIs. On the one hand, part of the researchers reformulated the goal of building human-level systems, as well as 'strong' AI, on more practical aims. On the other hand, private institutions, such as MIT, tech entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, and many other researchers in AI's related fields, such as Ray Kurzweil, are repeating the same errors of the old fathers. Riding the regenerated hype made possible by the boom of deep learning, a new wave of enthusiasts are calling for the 'big picture' of AI. They daydream a future-oriented techno-utopianist world that reminds the morally dubious neo-liberal Californian Ideology. Passing through the development of general-purpose human-level AIs the technological singularity will realize a strong artificial consciousness and the emancipated, black-boxed, AI will 'think for itself' becoming the dominant, superintelligent, form of life of the future (eventually helping, killing or snubbing human beings).

The AI's 'big picture' sores the nervous system of popular culture. It creates misunderstandings on the actual state of affairs, expectations in the near futures and doubts on positive future perspectives. However, if the plan of machinic life in general, is still to unveil the 'mystery of the mind', it can't continue to pretend their assumptions to be absolutely true and stay silent on the technical issues regarding how consciousness works. In particular, it will have to deal with the 'hard problem' of consciousness to achieve whatever attempt to create a machine really capable of thinking. It will need to engineer that subjective experience, which at this point in time still differentiates humans from machines, allowing to imagine a present-oriented future where the 'big picture' will be resized to its 'weak' actuality. Or in the best case, if machinic life succeeds and as Matteo Pasquinelli hopefully interprets the words of Turing, it will be "that of a new kind of alliance between the two forms of cognition".

Before to proceed with a detailed account of the characteristics of subjective experience, its similarities and differences with the computer, in the next chapter I will briefly introduce other approaches that, instead of the autonomous machine of machinic life, explore different relations between men and his technological system.

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Beyond humans and machines

Before the 19th century, the technological system was envisioned as a tool extending the organs of the human operator, leader of the intellectual and productive process. This conception started to corrode with the critique of historical materialism pictured by Marx and Engels, to drastically change after War World II. Inverting the dichotomy and confining human beings to a total subaltern level, yet fated to become futile, the intelligent and autonomous artificial organism conceived by cybernetics and AI draw an unsurpassable threshold between human and machine performance. However, in this power play configurations between natural and artificial agents, other possible worlds can be articulated. Worlds where humans and machines not only coexist but melt together achieving that level of close interaction between organisms known as symbiosis and leading to the paradigms of intelligence amplification (IA) and cyborg theory.

On the one hand, in parallel to AI and inverting its acronym, IA claims the possibility of augmenting human intelligence through technological means. Anticipated in 1945 with the prophetic words of Vannevar Bush and theoretically formalized in cybernetics' forgery by Ross W. Ashby, "it seems to follow that intellectual power, like physical power, can be amplified. Let no one say that it cannot be done [...]". Fostered by the visions of J.C.R. Licklider's man-machine symbiosis and Simon Ramo's intellectronics working in strict contact with the United States Department of Defense, the 60s have seen the consolidation of this promising paradigm in the development of interactive computing and the user interface. The work of Douglas Engelbart and his political plan to bootstrap human intelligence automatically affecting society will be remembered as the highest peak of IA before disappearing in the less politicized human-computer interaction (HCI) in the late 70s. Nowadays, a new frontier of amplification/interaction linking directly the brain with the computer is becoming possible. The brain-computer interface (BCI) gets us closer to realize what Turing refers to as the "disturbing phenomena" called extrasensory perception "[which] seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas". The same BCI which Elon Musk is trying to develop in his project Neuralink, among other things, as a universal panacea to communicate with the artificial super-intelligence of the dystopic future.

On the other hand, the disclosure of the cybernetic concept of life dissolves the human-machine dichotomy into an ecosystem of patchworked organisms mixing together artificial and biological parts. This continuum, called machinic phylum by Deleuze and Guattari, is the home of the cybernetic organisms (cyborg), transforming his body in the playground where internal and external assemblages of parts like implants, different in their substance but communicating through feedback loops, coexists. The cyborg society represents all the possible shades articulating the space between what is human and what is a machine. In this direction, hybrid biorobotics are another framework that is backing away from the pure artificial goal of AI and standard robotic exploring the possibility of mixed species. The idea is that we can build artificial hardware running biological software as well as using artificial software to control biological hardware. If the first way tries to deploy patterns emerging in biological neural networks to run in artificial computers, the second finds its example in RoboRoach where the movements of a cockroach are controlled through an artificial implant sending electrical impulses to its nerves. This last technique reconnects to the BCI discussed above, and when used to directly stimulate the brain leads to what Thomas Metzinger called neuro-enhancement, the artificial control of mental states (as the neuro version of psychopharmacology). Hybrid biorobotics seems to be the closest way to synthesize consciousness based on the fact that it seems easier to control the brain instead of building an artificial correspondent of it.

All these different configurations and consequent understanding of the relation between the human and the machinic have a common denominator. The first step seems to be the so acclaimed singularity, intended as a particular moment in time in which there will be a drastic change in how we deal with technologies. It could be the advent of AGI, HLAI or super artificial intelligence (SAI). The construction of an affordable BCI or the rise of a cyborg society and the synthesis of machinic consciousness. But the final point, the farthest moment where theories conflate, is the bio-digital fusion that will follow the exponential growth of humans and machines.

The stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down. One by one Man fused with AC [Automatic Computer], each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain. Man's last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero

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Part 2

I am not advocating that we go back to an animistic way of thinking, but nevertheless, I would propose that we attempt to consider that in the machine, and at the machinic interface, there exists something that would not quite be of the order of the soul, human or animal, anima, but of the order of a proto-subjectivity. This means that there is a function of consistency in the machine, both a relationship to itself and a relationship to alterity. It is along these two axes that I shall endeavour to proceed.

— Felix Guattari, On Machines, 1956

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Here, me, now 925

Subjective experience is phenomenal consciousness and since the standard scientific method relies on an objective account of the mind based on empirical evidence, it can't directly explain it. Philosophy, instead, already developed different methods to look at the phenomena (the things that appear to us) in itself. At the end of the 19th century, Edmund Husserl's phenomenology inquiry the nature of mental content acknowledging the possibility to infer objective knowledge about it and the external world. During the first half of the 20th century, analytic philosophers theorize the sense datum(intext ref), later qualia(intext ref): minimal mind-dependent unities which combined together constitute the whole phenomenal consciousness. These approaches and the description of the mind portrayed by the before mentioned cognitive revolution involves the mental representation of the external world (representational realism) instead of direct contact with it (naive realism). Our perception is deconstructed, processed in different areas of the brain, and recompose in the world as we experience it.

The contents of our phenomenal consciousness accessible through introspection are resumed in the experience of having a first-person perspective (me) on the world (here) in a specific moment in time(now). Generally, our point of view takes place from within our body, which itself is represented as part of the world giving us a sense of ownership and selfhood, location, presence, and agency. On the one hand, the me or self, as experienced by humans and few mammals, is built on a higher-level of consciousness allowing us to access memories and being projected in the future, using language and logico-mathematical thinking. Turning the first-person perspective inward, this extended or secondary consciousness (Damasio 2000; Edelman and Tononi 2000;), makes us particularly self-aware beings able to explore our own mental state and to account and experience 'experience' itself. The lower-level, called core or primary consciousness (Damasio 2000; Edelman and Tononi 2000;) is common in humans, a large number of mammals, and marine organisms such as octopi, and consist of a more basic form of self-awareness. On the other hand, the representation of space and time persist in most of the species as a basic-level called nonconscious protoself (Damasio 2000). I will return later on this argument but it is important to highlight that the absence of a consistent subject capable of inwardness, makes us doubt on which extent certain animals are able to experience emotions and feelings as originating from within themselves. However, the impossibility to know how is it like to be another living being let this argument open to debate.

Given the hypothesis that the brain is the sufficient cause for consciousness to exists , whatever constitutes it, must have a sort of correlation with the physical brain. This is what scientists call the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC) (intext ref), an extremely complex but "coherent island emerging from a less coherent flow of neural activity" that than becomes a more abstract "information cloud hovering above a neurological substrate". . Clinical cases and limit experiences that are directly accountable (neuropsychiatric syndromes, dreams, meditation, altered states of mind and so on) helps to map which part of the brain is activated when the experience of the here, me, now happens in different circumstances. In fact, in spite of an all-or-nothing process, consciousness is graded and non-unitary taking place in different phenomenal worlds. If we manage to link a particular subjective experience with a pattern of chattering neurons, we could get closer to solve the hard problem of consciousness. In particular, the first step to explain subjective experience would be to solve the one-world problem: how different phenomenal facts are merged together (world binding) in a coherent whole, and defining particular NCCs should lead to finding the global NCC and the minimal NCC necessary for phenomenal consciousness to take place.

In his books Ego Tunnel, Thomas Metzinger defines consciousness as the appearance of a world and the brain is understood as a world engine capable of creating a wide variety of explorable phenomenal worlds. He focused in particular on the phenomenal worlds of dreams and out-of-body experiences (OBE) to develop a functionalist, reductionist, theory of consciousness. These limit experiences, where a complete experience of disembodiment can be achieved, led him to develop a particular definition of self, that instead of being a stable instance, is a process running in our brain when we are conscious and turning off when we go to sleep. Exactly like the experience of the here and now is possible because existing as internal mental representation, Metzinger's self is defined as personal self-model (PSM) created for better control over the whole organism. Although the internal modelization of the here, me, now allows a deeper understanding of phenomenal consciousness as simulated virtual reality, Metzinger's claim that no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. This provocatory claim might be misleading in understanding the nature of the ego which, notwithstanding, seems more ontologically rooted when we consider the tangibility of experience itself.

Metzinger, like other researchers, tries to explain why it really looks like we are living in a simulation created by our own brains. While conscious experience seems to take place far away from the physical world, it seems to dwell in a place other than the physical brain, the focus of most of the scientific community. Drawing a liminal space existing in between our brain and the physical world and claiming for a reality of the phenomenal world closer to dreams, Antti Revonsuo calls the experience of being here, me, now reasonably an out-of-brain experience.

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Engines and experiences 1060

If the computer metaphor has its limitations in practice, as a metaphor it helps us to think about many aspects of our own beings. In particular, the difference between hardware and software reflects our struggle to interpret the relation between our body and our mind, our brain and our consciousness. The first part of this text highlight how computers can produce symbolic and sub-symbolic operations, evolutionary dynamics and embodied knowledge, resulting in external behaviors identical to living beings. However, the available thinking machines cannot be said to be conscious. Most evidently computers lack that active individual instance that called self which makes possible a world to appear. But what about the here and the now in computers?

In her book Hamlet on the holodeck, literary criticist Janet H. Murray develops a theory of new media based on their literary nature. She reports a quote from Italo Calvino describing the experience of a writer in front of his typewriter.

Every time I sit down here I read, “It was a dark and stormy night...” and the impersonality of that incipit seems to open the passage from one world to the other, from the time and space of here and now to the time and space of the written word; I feel the thrill of a beginning that can be followed by multiple developments, inexhaustibly.

Murray, explains how the overwhelming capacity of the analog text to project the reader in its world, is reconfigured and augmented in new media. Not only the text can be translated in a digital file, displayed and multiplied, but the whole nature of computers software where the digital text takes shape is textual. Both the stack of layers of programming language and the binary code dwelling at its foundation are text expressing meaning. These computers' backstage has been used in concrete poetry (Goldsmith) and software art (Cramer) to unveil the textual nature and the conceptual realm of the processes undergoing the graphical user interface (GUI) and to compare them to human nature. Referred to as Rorschach metaphor (Nelson, Turkle), the projective character of digital media, is increased by the unique spatial aspects of the software's environment. Often called cyberspace, it represents a geographical space where we can move through, in an interactive process of navigation and exploration. Furthermore, the user/interactor, active part of this process, triggers certain events to happen in a temporal immediacy: You are not just reading about an event that occurred in the past; the event is happening now, and, unlike the action on the stage of a theater, it is happening to you.. Integrating space and time, the software enables a world to be experienced. As the brain described by Metzinger, the computer's hardware works as a world engine. However, because of the absence of an internal experiencing consciousness making the world appear, their here and now is actualized only through the subjective experience of an external me. Similarly to this view of software as potential worlds, Seymour Papert a prominent computer scientist in educational software, developed the concept of microworld:

a little world, a little slice of reality. It's strictly limited, completely defined [...]. But it is rich.

The microworld works as an educational tool helping children to learn how to operate and design multiple contained digital environments. In the long term, this knowledge of different small worlds can be used to create something larger: a macroworld.

What we call software, is a stack of abstractions relying on each other but, in the end, nothing more than electrical impulses happening on the physical level of the hardware. Because of this, Friedrich Kittler suggests that in fact there is no software. The same happens for our consciousness, which scientists are continuously trying to reduce to the brain itself, and, to paraphrase Metzinger, there is no self. However, the influence of software in our society is widespread. The worlds created by software shapes the physical world and in fact, it is increasingly considered a cultural object worthy of being studied in-depth. Something similar happen to the self which actually is experienced as more than an abstract model switching on and off. It contains the means enabling us to transform a meaningless physical world into a meaningful phenomenal universe worth to be explored and giving us the means to create our complex society. When the self interacts with the self-less computer, the projective mechanisms of the textual software activate, transporting the individual to experience a new phenomenal world. From this view, if the hardware represents the physical level, the software represents the possibility of a phenomenal world which actualize only when experienced by a self. This phenomenal dimension that the software acquires can be described as an out-of-hardware experience, exactly because experienced by a conscious subject located outside of the hardware.

However, if the software is experienced out-of-hardware, and consciousness is experienced out-of-brain, where subjective experience exactly is located? The identification of subjectivity within the hardware is typical of that researcher whose scientific approach negates and reduces subjective experience to a brain's mechanism. They easily tend to alienate their own selves idealizing computers as living organisms and predicting their ability to generate consciousness autonomously. Instead, when the problem is posed in these terms, the individual can claim back its power over the machine in shaping the center of phenomenal consciousness. In fact, the "one-world problem" of subjective experience mentioned before, include that one world is first needed to consciousness to take place. A first mental simulation is necessary, then, from this one world, other simulations similar to the microworlds described by Papert can be performed predicting the results of an action or recalling a past event. However, the hardware and the brain are two different kinds of world engine. They are two different systems and, even though producing the same results, they differ precisely in substance, structure, and process. When we experience software, a phenomenal world other than the simulation of our main world, open in front of us. From the inside of the first out-of-brain world, a second out-of-hardware world can appear. In computer science, when a system runs a simulation of another system, this is called emulation. Given this notion, the brain and the hardware can be understood respectively as world simulator and a world emulator when seen from the perspective of subjective experience.

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Non-consciousness and language maze

To better understand the relationship existing between computational media and humans being, it is necessary to understand how the phenomenal here, me, now, the complex of consciousness, differ from the phenomenal here and now, the world of software.

A first intuition is already contained in Erewhon the main novel of Samuel Butler, the before mentioned forerunner of cybernetics. His novel, meant to be read backward as a wanted misspelling of nowhere, contains the book of the machine a compendium of earlier works where based on the Darwinian discourse on evolution consciousness for the first time binds humans and machines. Deleuze and Guattari will turn back many times on Butler's work. Before, Deleuze's critique of representation articulated by his concepts of difference and repetition will develop a particular understanding of Ideas which are also called Erewhon but in particular he will reframe the Erewhon not just as a no-where but as a now-here. Later, in their collaborative work Anti-Oedipus they will relate the same term to their concept of desiring-machine and Butler's understanding of machines to the body without organs. Again, but this time only Guattari, in his late essay On machines written in 1990, two years before his death, he will refer to machines as proto-singularity.

Instead of focusing on the meaning of Deleuze and Guattari's work, I want to draw a line which from this last term proto-singularity arrives at the aforesaid nonconscious proto-self described, 10 years after, by Damasio in the realm of biological cognition.

turns back on the main novel of Samuel Butler before mentioned as the forerunner of cybernetics. Erewhon, which contains the book of the machine, where based on the Darwinian discourse on evolution consciousness becomes for the first time the binding point between humans and machines.

ment to be read reframing his machinic world

explore

, title meant to be read backward inverting the h and w reframe its most famous work 'Erehwon'

, spring of critical forces guiding my approach to enjoy life. Feeling the pressure of a society which first imposes individualism in the process of subjectification to then criticize it. pushing the individual to the boundaries of in a society which hold

understand to what extent it is possible to discuss computers, and software in particular, as enhancers of the existential and intellectual dimension of being an individual. On the one hand, I was contrary to the view idealized by AI and Cybernetics where human nature alienates in the exteriorization of its subjectivity. On the other, a more complex discourse on the relation between the individual and its society, makes me realize

concept

It enables one to immediately increase its mental connections but it can also become a burden.

not be confused with the ending point of the epistemic process.

Not as the ending point of this process but as a tool possibly to let on the table

On the one hand, I was struck by how technand ical systems are idealized in AI as autonomous beings a. On the other hand,

suffered and struggled to identify my self with the social sphere felt more like a prison and components and the process of subjectification

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Conclusion

As Metzinger suggests, our brain is a world engine making possible a world to appear. It filters the noisy outside making a coherent world possible to be experienced. This process is also the cradle of the me which projected in its own simulated world, here and now can make it appear experiencing it as being part of it. Finally, because resulting from this particular configuration of a me and a world (here and now) is not directly identified with the mechanical brain's processes underlying it, it stands out as an out-of-brain experience driven by a self.

Instead of alienating the self in machines emptied of consciousness or call for a cyber-society were claiming a human identity becomes a crime, the subjective dimension can be used as a fundamental key understanding computer. Viceversa, when informed by conscious experience, technology becomes a new dynamical tool necessarily accessible to the individual as meant for it. Instead of being completely determined by the social sphere, the subject of its own experience regains the means through which reassess its intellectual nature.

Jacking-in and out from a new world, software opens up a new frontier in the human exploration of possible phenomenal worlds. created by us. An environment that we built because we possess the means to design its processes and interfaces projecting our phenomenal models of the world into it and observing them as an other world.

From this view, the software exists because we experience it. Because for us, it is an out-of-hardware experience, which means driven by a human self.

giving the means to build and manipulate

However, we just started to explore what consciousness is and further development might lead to a totally different understanding of its nature.

Given the relation between consciousness and software, my proposal is to give some hints on a possible cultural theory of software which instead of being understood as a means to create artificial beings, relies upon subjective experience.

From this view, it can be said that a piece of software is an out-of-hardware experience precisely experienced by a subject interacting with it.

When the theories on phenomenal consciousness and its contents are used as a lens analyzing the relationship between human beings and their technological apparatus, a new light is shed on the nature of computers. In turn, computers