Cabinet of Wisdom II — Brain and Mind
The Cabinet of Wisdom
Part II Brain and Mind
For this essay, we should also distinguish brain from mind, which many of modern philosophers, due to the necromancy of modern secular mesmerism, apparently cannot.
By “brain” in this essay, is meant the physical, empirical, and measurable quantities of matter and energy in motion of human neural and neurochemical activity in the realm of nature. These may include any representative physical manifestation thought to accompany the human thought process in the realm of nature, including the motions of particles in the brain, neurochemical changes, brainwaves, body heat, bloodflow, hormonal and endocrinal changes, and so on.
By “mind” is meant the qualities of conciousness, such a true versus false, valid versus invalid, right versus wrong, beautiful versus ugly, which exist in the realm of reason. These may or may not have any representative physical manifestation thought to accompany them in the realm of nature.
All parts and aspects of a brain can be measured, by definition, because we have defined the brain whatever it is the human nervous system does that can be measured, that is, the bodily aspect, of the mind-body enigma. Nothing of the mind can be measured because we have defined the mind to be the imponderable non-bodily aspect, that is, whatever it is that cannot be measured.
Those Buddhists or students of Bishop Berkley who doubt whether brains exist and have measurable quantities, such as heat, weight, volume, shape, neural and electric properties and so on, must seek elsewhere for the satisfaction of their doubts. That question is outside the scope of this essay.
Those Secularists or Satanists who doubt whether the minds exist cannot entertain doubts without minds, and therefore have no proof more pertinent and more persuasive than their own testimony on this point. Merely wondering whether or not minds exist proves yours does.
What relation of cause and effect, if any, necessarily exists between the brain and the mind is an open question, about which little is known. For philosophical reasons, I submit that the question is not merely unanswered, but is unanswerable. Minds can only be meaningfully described in terms of final or formal cause, by identifying the purpose of human thought or the form of human logic, whereas brains can only be described in terms of mechanical and material cause, which are categories that exclude final and formal causes. If the mind causes the brain, final causes are identical to mechanical causes, and likewise if brain causes mind. But the two categories of final and mechanical cause are irreducibly one to the other, and are mutually exclusive. Final cause deals with aspirations, intentions, or innate purposes; mechanical cause deals with the efficient material pre-conditions. One cannot deduce an ought from an is.
It is not that such statements of cause and effect between mind and brain, or brain and mind are illogical, as much as that they can express nothing but correlation in time.
For example, my saying my wrath causes my face to flush red does not say what is the nature or subjective experience of wrath, nor does any objective measurement of change in my cheek hue say anything about the imponderable internal hence subjective experience I suffer when I was angered.
Likewise, drinking bitter black coffee to sober a man after too much gay wine may indeed (perhaps because of the placebo effect) clear some of the confusion in his thoughts, and sharpen his ability to concentrate. But while the objective properties of the caffeine involved can indeed be measured, but the subjective sensation of clarity of thought cannot be measured, because it is quality, not a quantity.
The number of questions on a standardized IQ test our drunk can answer before versus after his coffee can be counted, but here we are counting nothing but the judgment calls of a whoever wrote the test. That test-writer is in the capacity of a judge adjudicating human behavior, not a scientist measuring an object. The judge judges human nature, nor any measured material thing, to assess the speed or clarity of thought involved. That is not a measured thing properly so called.
From the pinkness of my cheek or the alcohol level of my bloodstream, you can make a guess about the correlative clarity or anger influencing my thoughts, but such correlation does not allow qualities, or subjective mental realities, to be described in terms of quantities, or objective physical realities, or visa versa.
The inside and the outside of the thing are like soul and form. The information about the one cannot be translated into the information about the other, since quantities cannot be expressed as qualities, nor can subjective introspections be perceived as objective sense impressions.
If there is a common ground between subject and object, mind and body, symbol and symbolized, quantity and quality, measurable and imponderable, no sage and nor philosopher and prophet has returned from unknown realms of thought to describe it to mortal man.
Mechanical Man What
If, by this definition, a man is not a mannequin, we must ask whether it is possible, if only the mannequin were constructed with sufficient cunning, for the mannequin to be a mechanical man.
Let me be perfectly clear: by a mechanical man or artificial intelligence I do not mean a man who is partly designed by human engineering, and partly grown by living natural processes. A farmer who grows vegetables is not designing his vegetables, nor is a dog breeder creating a new dog by engineering. Mothers give birth to babies daily, but no one calls the products of the material womb an artificial intelligence or a mechanical man. Whether or not some sort of cyborg or golem or Frankenstein monster can be partly bred and partly made is outside the scope of this essay.
If an engineer discovers a set of initial conditions whereby, in the natural course of things, intelligence may arise, this is not different in nature from growing a baby in a test tube.
In such intermediate cases, artifacts are being used to aid in the growth of a grown thing, not itself an artifact. For the purpose of this essay, an artifact is something built by an artificer, part by part, where he understands and designs each part for its designed function. That means, for this essay, an engineer who knows how to create the conditions whereby intelligent life might or might not arise, and, under repeated trials, sometimes intelligent life arises, is not designing a mechanical man properly so called.
For our purposes, if you cannot build a machine able to think intelligently, abstractly, voluntarily, and creatively yet unable to break Asimov’s Three Laws, or any other prime directive you may wish to install, you have not built a mechanical man properly so called.
Here I mean a mechanical man is a mechanism designed and contrived in every part and particular of his intellectual being, including his inmost self as seen from his own point of view.
This inmost self includes all his virtues and vices, tastes, aesthetic sensitivities, desires both base and noble, passions and instincts, drives whether conscious or otherwise, appetites both physical and spiritual. This includes actions of the will and moral predilections.
This includes all thoughts concrete and abstract, his philosophy and his concrete beliefs, and down to the trivial of whether he prefers pie to cake, redheads to blondes, wine to beer.
In sum, the contents of his mind, soul and spirit are deliberately designed by the engineer constructing him, or can be reliably reproduced hence anticipated given the same engineering tolerances: and the engineer uses mechanical means only, that is, pushing bits of matter and energy from one form into another, to accomplish this design, with no magic, no miracles, no spiritual nor supernatural influences forming any part of the process.
What his body looks like need not concern us. For the purpose of this essay, we can assume indifferently he looks like the Tin Woodman of Oz, or Tik-Tok of the Rose Kingdom, or a Jupiter Brain, or the Terminator or Lt. Data or Artoo Detoo.
But no matter in what body he is housed, the man, to be a man properly so called, must be self-aware and morally culpable, possessing faculties of volition, logic, and reason. Volution allows for action of the will. Logic allows him to distinguish coherent from incoherent statements. Reason allows him to know truth, whether empirical and rational.
Whether a being can exist with no faculty of aesthetic perception, no ability to distinguish beauty from ugly, and be called a “man” is an open question, but I ask the kind indulgence of the reader to accept this likewise as a necessary aspect of human nature.
That is, if a mechanical man cannot be created by the engineer of an artificial man or, if I may coin a term, a mansmith, to be able to distinguish fair from foul, sublime from vulgar, healthy from sick, beautiful from ugly, then, for the purposes of this essay, then the man the mansmith is smithing is not a man properly so called.
Hence the question this essay must address is whether a mannequin or homunculus like Disney’s animatronic Mr. Lincoln can be made so cunningly, and mimicking so precisely the exact outward motions of gesture, word, nuances or human behavior, including sighs and eyeblinks and interesting conversation as to create, not just an appearance, but the cause of those appearances: an inner awareness, self awareness, and point of view.
To be sure, we all know the wand of the Fairy with the Azure Hair can turn Pinocchio into an animate boy of wood, able to go to school, trod the boards, drink beer, and gamble, and we know his self-sacrifice in saving Geppetto from the whale can turn him into a real boy.
Nonetheless, a fairy armed with waving wand is not an engineer armed with monkeywrench, so we must be more specific yet.
We are not just asking if a mannequin or homunculi can be made to mimic man, and whether such mimicry can somehow grant him internal reality or self awareness, the question is whether this can be done by engineering, that is, by mechanical operations only without recourse to any miracles or fairy magic.
In sum, we are asking whether, merely by taking inanimate bits of matter and putting them together by mechanical principles alone, following forms of sufficiently cunning engineering, with no supernatural aid, whether a brain can be built which will create and control a mind associated with it.
I submit that, upon examination, we will find this an incoherent question, like asking whether a sufficiently cunning or detailed book can create or recreate the author who wrote it, or a fine enough mirror can create an object from an image.
The question is incoherent because it ignores a basic fact no one, aside from an intellectual, is so foolish as to ignore: a mannequin is not a man, brain is not a mind, and a book is not an author.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
