What makes a mind come alive?
Better yet -- what is a mind? And how might a deeper understanding of its mysteries change the way we make sense of what it means to be human?
Those questions led a young Dan Siegel to enroll at Harvard Medical School and study Psychiatry. Soon after arriving on campus, however, he discovered that neither Harvard nor his chosen future field had any viable definition of the primary thing they were studying -- beyond the vague notion that ‘the mind is what the brain does.’
So Siegel embarked on a lifelong search, one that resulted in the ground-breaking book, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, and the nascent field of interpersonal neurobiology. “If who we are,” Siegel writes, “both in our personal identity and felt experience of life, emerges as a mental process, a mental product, a function of mind, then who we are is who our mind is. Mind is within us -- and between us.”
The essence of mind has also shaped the life and work of Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering and someone who, as his daughter Amy writes and illustrates in her graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story, “became an inventor not only to record human affairs but to change them.”
Kurzweil believes advances in technology are pushing us towards what he calls the Singularity, a period of profound cultural and evolutionary change in which computers will outhink the brain and allow people (or at least their minds) to live forever. To that end, Kurzweil has meticulously saved everything his long-lost father had once recorded, in the hopes he might use those writings to restore the essence of his father’s mind -- and resume a relationship that ended over a half-century ago.
“I’m here to help my father find his father’s writings,” Amy explains. “He’ll feed those words into an algorithm that will bring his father back to life as an artificially intelligent avatar.”
What do you think: good idea?
More to the point: if the human mind is, as Siegel says, both within and between us, is that definition of mind exclusive to the carbon-based beings -- or can the silicon-based beings get in on the action, too?
Now is the time for us to consider a question like this. Yet Kurzweil’s daughter seems unconvinced. After having a lengthy conversation with the first prototype of her grandfather’s artificial recreation, which she calls the “Fredbot,” she’s struck by the emptiness of the responses; they’re factually correct, but devoid of any sort of true . . . feeling.
“Is consciousness like a light that’s either on or off,” she asks herself afterwards. “Can it flicker? Can it dim? And once it’s gone, can it come back?”
Unfortunately for Kurzweil -- at least for now -- the answer would appear to be no. “Bodily awareness is critical for self-consciousness,” explains Moheb Costandi, a neuroscientist and science writer. “Self-consciousness cannot exist without the body. And if the body is crucial for self-consciousness, then it follows that a mind uploaded to a supercomputer could never gain consciousness because it will be nothing more than a disembodied virtual brain.”
As evidence, consider the remarkable project of my friend Jerry Michalski, who has catalogued literally everything he feels is worth remembering over the past 24 years of his life -- some 493,000 items all curated in one giant mind map (and yes, I’m in there somewhere).
It’s a fascinating window into not just Jerry, but also the notion of memory itself. It will tell you a lot about him and what he’s felt, valued, and experienced. But it’s still a poor substitute for the embodied man himself -- which is what Siegel has been trying to tell us all along.
“Who we are is shaped by energy and information flow,” he writes. “What we are is the sharing, embodiment and regulation of that flow. Where we are is both within the body we’re born into and the relationships that connect this body to other people and other places beyond the body itself.” And all of that is part of an inosculated, all-encompassing system that involves our bodies, our brains, our environments, our social relationships, and everything we encounter over the course of our lives.
That system “is both inside and between,” Siegel continues. Inner and inter. One system, whose “basic elements are energy and information flow that happens inside of us, between ourselves and others and the world.”
What we remember, in other words, says so much about who we are. But it’s not the full story. And anyway, as Amy Kurzweil writes in her memoir, “memory is more art than science. I’d like to tell Descartes that I think we only exist through attachment to others.
“I care, therefore I’m real.”
Tyson Yunkaporta's Right Story, Wrong Story offers an angle on this that expresses mind and being even more comprehensively, as a fluid relationship necessarily but not only between embodied humans who are relationally connected, but between them and everything else that sustains and interacts with them. Worth a read as an expansive complement to this line of thought.