Modern medicine has perfected
anesthesiology. No patient needs to feel
pain during surgery. Obviously, it is
difficult to do surgery when a body is writhing in pain, when a person is
shouting, crying from pain. Without
using big medical words, a science of totally turning off consciousness has
been perfected. Nothing more than an
injection of one or two fluids into the body is required. For all practical purposes the person goes
into a deep sleep, unaware of anything, however, his involuntary neural system
remains active: the heart keeps beating,
the lungs keep breathing, as if the person were asleep. Of course, during heart surgery the patient’s
heart is turned off, he is hooked up to a pump.
Millions of surgeries, from minor to major, are performed each year with
no pain, giving the best chance for the patient’s recovery. A medical doctor must administer the fluids,
the anesthesiological procedures. A
delicate balance must be maintained for the duration of the surgery, but not
longer. As soon as possible, the patient
must wake up, must regain consciousness.
Millions of patients wake up, they regain consciousness. In essence, all the consciousness maintaining
brain procedures begin to function again, are no longer suppressed with the
fluids, consciousness, for the lack of a better concept, “boots up.” The medically induced sleep must be different
from natural sleep because the person must not be permitted to wake up during
surgery. Natural sleep is insufficient
for purposes of surgery, the person asleep naturally would wake up within a few
seconds after the surgeon started cutting.
The sensation of waking up from the hard, artificial sleep or the soft,
natural sleep is basically identical.
All normal functions return, the person can talk, see, hear, think,
whether he wakes up in his bed or in the hospital. It appears the administration of anesthesia
does no damage to consciousness. In most
cases the effect is temporary with no adverse consequences, of course there are
exceptions, if, for example, the patient has a condition aggravated by
anesthesia and the anethesiologist does not know about it. An analogy shall suffice: to turn a computer off a single switch is
thrown, the power goes out, but, to turn on a computer millions of lines of
code must be loaded into memory from the root directory and then finally the
machine “wakes up,” the screen lights up and the computer is ready for user
input. The brain hardware generates
consciousness as long as the “power” is “on.”
The brain’s power switch is placed in the off position with sleep or
anesthesia, but neither disturbs the millions, or billions of lines of code
necessary to turn consciousness on.
During both surgery and sleep oxygen rich blood continues to flood the
brain, the neurons remain alive, they are merely prevented from forming
consciousness. Most likely thousands of
medical textbooks exist explaining in great detail how the brain power switch
is turned off without harm to the neurons.
At the same time, most likely zero textbooks exist explaining how the
brain turns consciousness on once the power is restored. It appears communication amongst neurons can
easily be disrupted artificially or naturally, and some form of communication
amongst neurons must be hypothesized in terms of the existence of human consciousness. Another analogy may suffice: a great city has a water delivery network,
there are literally millions of faucets, but there is only one lake from which
all faucets obtain water, and it is possible with one gate to stop the water
flowing from the lake to the city. With
the gate closed none of the faucets dispense water, but, the faucets do not
vanish, they remain in existence with a continued potential to dispense water
once the gate is open. The human
physical brain in reality requires sleep, the power must be turned off more or
less on a diurnal basis, once every 24 hours, the gate is shut and the brain
recovers, rests. Sleep, in fact,
restores the brain, does not damage it, meaning, none of the brain code or
commands responsible for consciousness are wiped out or in any way injured during
sleep. The process of booting up consciousness
after sleep is automatic, no “will” is involved. In fact, it is almost an impossibility to not
wake up after a good night’s sleep.
Which is the exception, the simplicity of sleep or the complexity of
consciousness? Or both? An apparent symbiosis exists, both contribute
value to life: sleep and
consciousness are necessary, neither can be without the other.
Everything what
turns consciousness on is never destroyed during sleep, but something is turned
off which is perfectly essential for consciousness to exist. Enthusiasts (the AI crowd) attempting to
simulate computer consciousness, have not encountered a problem designing a
system which can be turned off at a moment’s notice, their difficulty lies in
designing, writing code capable of inducing consciousness after a computer is
turned on. Any computer can be put to
sleep instantaneously, but a computer demonstration of nothing more than the
simplest form of human consciousness, for example the step which “wakes”
(activates) consciousness, has so far eluded the crowd’s most intense AI
efforts. Obviously, upon waking a form
of neural communication, suppressed during sleep, is, from the brain’s
perspective, easily restored. The
result, object, outcome or subject of this communication is consciousness
itself. What sleep turns off automatically
reboots itself when sleep ends thusly activating consciousness which was always
there in latent form. This process of
activation takes but a few seconds, poof, the brain is awake, but, most likely,
many many millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of years of DNA code
evolution are behind this seemingly simple act.
No question, the physical substrate, the brain, is hard wired according
to DNA instructions, and, it seems consciousness is hard wired, it is not a
learned behavior, it is not nurture, it is nature. There is no school which every man attends to
learn how to be conscious. This may
inform a problem facing the AI enthusiasts:
they are attempting to simulate consciousness with software, not with
hardware. Human consciousness is not a
“simulation,” the brain is not a figment of Kant’s imagination, nor Berkeley’s, nor Sartre’s
or Searle’s. The days when humans could
reasonably argue the brain is nothing more than an experience or an subjective
opinion are long past. The brain is made
of atoms in accordance with the DNA code as the human body develops and
differentiates from the moment of conception.
This is the biological substrate and it includes all hard wired
communications amongst all neurons at any time.
For purposes of AI, therefore, a demonstration must be presented to show
a biological hardware by which human consciousness emerges, the physical
substrate, can, on a first instance basis, be simulated with software running
on nonconscious hardware. In other
words, AI proponents must demonstrate dormant computer hardware (by design
unconscious) can even in principle be used to simulate human consciousness, in
fact does not interfere with the simulation, does not constitute an insurmountable
physical barrier, in fact does not make it literally impossible to run any
software designed to activate, create, make, or in any way wake up putative,
potential, machine consciousness.
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