It's Many Times Harder Than Just a “Hard Problem of Consciousness”

There are many discussions that talk about a problem of consciousness or a “hard problem of consciousness,” and such discussions tend to make the same mistake. The mistake is in trying to shrink the gigantic problem of explaining human mentality into a relatively tiny problem of explaining consciousness.

The visual below may help show what I mean. We see in the grid various diverse aspects of human mentality. The great big problem is how man got all these diverse mental aspects and capabilities. As shown in the grid, consciousness is merely a tiny part of human mentality.

Reductionist theorists love it when people do not raise the big problem of explaining human mentality but instead raise a much tinier problem of the problem of consciousness. Then such theorists can attempt to offer some little neural explanation and then say, “You see, the brain can explain consciousness.” Whenever such theorists attempt to do that, we should always point out that the problem of explaining human mentality is many times larger and harder than a mere problem of consciousness.

As it happens, our neuroscientists cannot even explain mere consciousness, which is a only a small part of human mentality. Scientific American recently published a fallacious explanation for consciousness that commits the fallacy of mistaking things that come after consciousness as things that cause it. The article had the smug title “Unlocking the 'Mystery' of Consciousness.”

The authors quickly show their confusion on the topic of consciousness by stating in their second paragraph, “We study primary consciousness, the most basic type of sensory experience.” Consciousness is not a type of sensory experience. Sensory experience is instead something that may or may not occur during consciousness. If you are floating in a sensory deprivation tank, you continue to have consciousness, but do not have any significant sensory experience. 

The authors give the following ass-backward “horse in front of the cart” explanation for consciousness:

The special neurobiological features that we identified include an explosion of senses (eyes, good hearing, keen smell), a multitude of new neural processing subsystems, more combining of information from the different senses, more levels of information processing at the top of the brain, more back-and-forth communications between brain levels, and more memory. From these neural features arise consciousness in a way comparable to how the complex property of life naturally arises from the interactions of its chemical and cellular components.

In a nutshell, what the authors are claiming is that things like thinking, sensory experience and memory give rise to consciousness. This claim is clearly erroneous. Instead, consciousness is something that is necessary for thinking, sensory experience and memory. The authors have committed the elementary fallacy of confusing a possible after-effect of something with a cause of that thing. If a mind has consciousness, then it can have sensory experience. If a mind has consciousness, then it can do thinking or information processing. If a mind has consciousness, it can form a memory. But if a mind does not have consciousness, it cannot have sensory experience, cannot do thinking or information processing, and cannot form a memory. It is not at all correct to claim that consciousness is something that arises from sensory experience, memory, thinking or information processing, any more than it is correct to say that a parent arises from its daughter.

Imagine yourself awaking from a coma in a hospital bed. Your eyes closed and your senses dulled by drugs, you may have no sensory experience when you awake. Feeling sleepy, you may be thinking of nothing at all. And you may be remembering nothing. But it is nonetheless true that you have consciousness at that moment when you awake. Many times when you awake from a deep sleep, and lie in bed with your eyes closed, you have pretty much the same situation: consciousness without sensory experience, thinking or use of memory.

The paragraph I quoted above from the Scientific American essay ends with the sentence, “From these neural features arise consciousness in a way comparable to how the complex property of life naturally arises from the interactions of its chemical and cellular components.” This is a nonsensical comparison for several reasons. Life is not a property, a property being a simple aspect of something such as height, weight, length, or width. Oversimplifying biological life, and ignoring its countless functional aspects, we can say that life is an incredibly complicated state of physical organization. Such a vastly complex state of physical organization cannot be compared to consciousness or human mentality, which is a non-physical, mental reality that does not have any physical organization. And life does not arise from cellular components, but cellular components are things that exist after life has already originated. It is not true that we get life after some cells interact, as life already exists when you have those cells.

After discussing some not-very-relevant research of theirs that merely suggests that some organisms other than humans can create mental images and have positive and negative feelings (hardly a surprise), the authors state the following:

The important point is that these features are unique to conscious brains and indeed unique in all of nature. Therefore, it is not surprising or mysterious that something unique in nature—like feelings—could emerge from their unique neurobiology.

But we do not at all know that the features of human mentality are “unique to conscious brains,” and such an idea is merely an assumption of neuroscientists. In near-death experiences human minds have strong thoughts and feelings even when their brains have shut down after cardiac arrest. So it is not true that features such as feelings are unique to conscious brains.

As for the author's reasoning about what is surprising or mysterious, it is fallacious. Imagine if there was a song that was only sung by one type of thing: a tree. Imagine there was some forest where a row of twelve trees all sung that song. It would be fallacious to reason that it was not surprising or mysterious that the trees could sing the song, because trees were the only thing that had been observed singing the song. Just as we do not have any idea of how trees could sing a song, we do not have any real idea of how a brain could produce most of the aspects of human mentality, such as consciousness, self-awareness, creative thoughts or abstract ideas. We do not to any degree make this wonder any less surprising or mysterious by claiming that only beings with brains have been observed to have consciousness, self-awareness, or abstract ideas.

The rest of the essay adds nothing of substance to the author's case. In their last paragraph, they state, “We conclude that the 'mystery' of consciousness and Levine’s 'explanatory gap' and the 'hard problem' can be naturally and scientifically explained.” But they have given no such explanation. Confusing after-effects of something with a cause of something, the authors have vacantly listed sensory experience, thinking and memory as things that give rise to consciousness, when such things are instead things that cannot occur until consciousness already exists.

Philosophers of mind (and any scientist claiming to explain the mind) should stop talking about “the hard problem of consciousness,” and should instead be talking about “the hard problem of human mentality.” This is the problem of explaining the main features of human mental experience, and also the most anomalous features of human mental experience. The hard problem of human mentality involves questions such as the following:

1. How are humans able to form abstract ideas, a capability that seems beyond anything that neurons could do?
   
2. Why do humans display empathy, compassion and guilt, things that have no clear survival value for an individual organism?
   
3. How are humans able to instantly form memories, much faster than can be explained by imagining that synapses are strengthened by protein formation (which takes minutes)?
   
4. How are humans able to remember things for 50 years, which is 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of the proteins in synapses?
   
5. Why do humans who have their brains shut down during cardiac arrest continue to have extremely vivid near-death experiences that they can remember very well?
   
6. Why do humans have so many traits (such as artistic creativity, spirituality and intellectual curiosity) that can never be explained on some natural selection basis?
   
7. How are humans able to instantly recall very old memories despite the lack of any known physical characteristic in the brain (such as indexing, neuron numbering, or a neuron coordinate system) that would allow the brain to perform the “instantly finding the needle in a mountain-sized haystack” operation needed to instantly find an obscure memory?
   
8. Why do humans even have a sense of selfhood, something not necessary for biological survival?
   
9. Why are savants so often able to have astonishing mental skills far beyond those of ordinary people, even though such savants often have major brain damage?
   
10. How is that people with hyperthymesia (and brains not significantly different from ordinary people) are able to remember in great detail what happened to them every day since reaching adulthood?
    
11. Why do five percent of the population (gay people) have a sexual drive completely different from what we would expect from Darwinian assumptions?
    
12. Why do epilepsy patients who have half of their brains removed (to stop seizures) show little damage to intelligence and memory?
    
13. Why do some humans show psychic abilities such as ESP in careful scientific experiments, thereby showing capabilities completely inexplicable in terms of brain activity?
    
14. How could a human ever be able to memorize vast amounts of words (such as 10 major operatic roles), when the words use a language that is less than a thousand years old, which human biology (having only very old genes) should never be to store as neural states?
    
15. How could a French civil servant (and the patients Lorber documented) have had either fairly good or above-average minds when almost of all their brains were destroyed by diseases such as hydroencephaly?
    
16. How were humans (alone of all species) ever able to develop language, when it seems that you could never establish a language among a group unless you had an existing language to enforce the conventions of that language?
    
17. How are toddlers able to learn a language at a rate vastly faster than we should expect from their mere exposure to their parents speaking?
    
18. How could a brain store memories, when it seems to have neither a mechanism for writing memories, nor a mechanism for reading memories?

Once we consider such questions, the “mystery of mind” (that our Scientific American authors have clumsily tried to sweep under the rug) comes back a thousandfold.

For Widows and Widowers, the Paranormal Is Rather Normal

Our materialist skeptics frequently try to suggest that people who report paranormal experiences are some kind of rare freaks. Such insinuations are contrary to actual experience, in which we find that reports of paranormal phenomena are very common. Those who wish to get a better understanding of just how common are human reports of the paranormal should go to a public library and look for a good handbook of parapsychology, or the three-volume Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained. You can actually read this excellent publication online by using this link, this link and this link. (These links worked fine last week, although there is now a message saying the link is offline until November.)  Other sources of information include the very recent Psi Encyclopedia of the SPR (available here), and the much older 1932 Encyclopedia of Psychic Science by Nandor Fodor available here. 

You will read in the Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained countless cases of paranormal human experience. Polls indicate that large fractions of the population report direct experience with the paranormal. A scientific paper refers to a 2006 poll finding 52% of men and 56% of women saying they had waking ESP experiences.  A 2015 Pew Research poll found that 18% of Americans said they've seen or been in the presence of a ghost, and that 29% said that they've felt in touch with someone who died. 

Among widows and widowers the percentage is even higher. A recent meta-analysis compared several studies on widows and widowers who reported seeing or hearing their departed spouses, or having a sense of their presence. The meta-analysis found that 56% of widows and widowers had such experiences.

In the meta-analysis I previously mentioned such experiences are referred to as hallucinations. This is an appallingly subjective and judgmental term that should not be used in objective scientific literature, unless a paper is dealing with people under psychiatric treatment for mental illnesses. A more appropriate term would be an objective non-judgmental term such as “anomalous experience.” There is no evidence that any pathology is involved when widows or widowers report seeing, hearing, or having a presence of a departed love one. Modern day scientists who attempt to portray paranormal experiences as pathology are comparable to 1950's psychiatrists who attempted to portray homosexuality as pathology, and psychiatrists in the Soviet Union who attempted to categorize political dissidents as people suffering from “sluggish schizophrenia.”

Those who discuss the high number of anomalous sensory experiences of widows and widowers will often insinuate that such experiences are some kind of coping mechanism in which the brain generates hallucinations to ease stress or sadness. But other than people who report seeing or hearing deceased loved ones, there is essentially zero evidence that humans ever have anything like hallucinations to make themselves feel better in times of stress or sadness. Let us consider these facts:

1. As shown on the TV show American Greed, there are very many people who have been swindled out of their life savings, losing decades of their savings. But none of these people ever had a “comforting hallucination” in which they saw something like a stack of cash on their dining room table to make themselves feel better.
2. We have many historical experiences of people who put their hearts and souls into a war, only to be bitterly disappointed when their country lost the war, and was occupied by a foreign power. There are no cases of any such people having a “comforting hallucination” in which they learned that it was a mistake, and their side really won the war.
3. Many people have the greatest emotional involvement in a romance, only to have their fondest dream crushed when they are dumped by their loved one, or have their marriage proposal rejected. None of these people have ever had a comforting hallucination in which they saw or heard their loved one say something like, “I've changed my mind; let's stay together.”
4. There are many people who learn they have cancer, and begin to suffer from it. None of them have “comforting hallucinations” in which they see a doctor telling them their cancer has been cured.

So since sad and depressed and grief-stricken people other than widows and widowers do not have hallucinations to make them feel better, it is implausible to be evoking the concept of “comforting hallucinations” to explain the anomalous experiences of widows and widowers.

Scientific papers and scientific literature often make unnecessary use of terms that draw unnecessary and inappropriate conclusions about the source or nature of a phenomenon. In the second and third rows of the table below we see two examples of such inappropriate language, along with a similar example of poor phrasing that an ordinary observer might make.

Statement	Problem with statement	Better way to make statement
“I first started seeing the extraterrestrial spaceship when I noticed a bright blue light in the sky. The extraterrestrial spaceship moved quickly across the sky, until it vanished from view.”	We do not know that unidentified lights in the sky are extraterrestrial spaceships, so why use such a phrase in describing them?	“I first started seeing the sky anomaly when I noticed a bright blue light in the sky. The sky anomaly moved quickly across the sky, until it vanished from view.”
“When your brain considers two different choices, your brain sometimes hesitates because it does not see an obviously superior choice. But usually your brain chooses one of these options fairly quickly, even though it may not be able to explain the exact reason.”	We do not know that brains produce thoughts or decisions, and no one has any idea of how neurons could produce a thought or make a decision.	“When you consider two different choices, you sometimes hesitate because you do not see an obviously superior choice. But usually you choose one of these options fairly quickly, even though you may not be able to explain the exact reason.”
“A large percentage of widows and widowers have hallucinations in which they report seeing, hearing or sensing their deceased spouse. ”	We do not know that such reports are hallucinations, and they may result from causal factors outside of the mind of the observer.	“A large percentage of widows and widowers have anomalous experiences in which they report seeing, hearing or sensing their deceased spouse. ”

In table 8 of the study here, there is a list of various studies done involving anomalous experiences. For example, in Arcangel's study of 827 people, 64% responded affirmatively to the question, “Have you experienced an encounter after the death of a loved one?”

In addition to a large fraction or majority of widows and widowers reporting seeing, hearing or sensing a deceased person, there are also very many others who report baffling hard-to-explain occurrences that they suspect could be caused by some spiritual presence. Most of these cases are not picked up by the type of questions typically asked by the surveys listed in that table.

For this reason I strongly suspect that the actual number of widows and widowers who have paranormal experiences is much higher than the 56% cited in the meta-analysis I referred to. Another reason for this suspicion is the strong likelihood of under-reporting on this topic. Our society often stigmatizes anyone who reports a paranormal experience. Report a paranormal experience, and there will always be some people who will ridicule you or say or think that you have lost your mind. Given this appalling stigmatization effect, we should imagine that the actual number of people having a paranormal experience is far greater than the number who report the experience in surveys, and that a large fraction of those who have the experience will never report it for fear of being ridiculed or accused of a mental problem.

One could summarize the situation by saying that for widows and widowers, the paranormal is rather normal.

It is interesting that Haraldsson found that college education did not seem to cause any decline in the reporting of paranormal experiences.  In a paper he compared a 1974 poll in Iceland showing 59% of men and 71% of women reporting some psychic experience to a 2006 poll showing 70% of men reporting psychic experience and 81% of women reporting such a thing.  Between 1974 and 2006 the number of college-educated people in Iceland had increased from 6% to 36%. 

Postscript: A Groupon survey of 2000 people found that more than 60% claim to have seen a ghost. On page 9 of the document here, we read this: "In a study of death attitudes among women in the Greater Los Angeles area, Richard Kalish and David Reynolds discovered that almost 60 percent of widows in their sample claimed to have experienced contact with the dead."

The Flaws in Gould's “New Understanding” of Life

The book “Universe in Creation” by Roy R. Gould has the pretentious subtitle “A New Understanding of the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life.” Given the incredibly mysterious nature of both of these things, it would seem that no one has any business claiming to have an understanding of them, and a more modest subtitle might have been “A New Outlook on the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life.”

Gould states on page 70, “The Big Bang is not a theory or a hypothesis or guess” on the grounds that it “is a conclusion supported by many lines of evidence.” This is not correct; the Big Bang theory is indeed a theory. According to the Big Bang theory itself, it will forever be impossible for us to observe the first 300,000 years of the universe's history, because matter and energy were concentrated so densely during those years that all light from the first 300,000 years must have been hopelessly scattered. Not only is the Big Bang a theory, but according to the theory itself the theory will forever be unverifiable, because we cannot observe anything in the first 300,000 years of the universe's history. Instead of “many lines of evidence” supporting the Big Bang theory, there are basically only two: the existence of the cosmic background radiation, and the red-shift of galaxies, indicating the universe is expanding.

It is conceivable but unlikely that we might one day find alternate explanations of these two things, and if that were to happen, there would no longer be any reason for believing in the Big Bang. A major current problem with the Big Bang theory is that it does not correctly predict the current distribution of matter and antimatter. The Big Bang theory predicts that the universe should have equal amounts of matter and antimatter (or nothing but pure energy), and this is not at all the case. You can do a Google search for "baryon asymmetry" to read more on this topic. Another major problem with the Big Bang theory is that it does not correctly predict the amount of lithium in our universe. An article yesterday at phys.org says, “The standard models of the Big Bang predict an abundance of Li7, the main lithium isotope, three or four times more than that actually observed.”

There doesn't seem to be anything particularly new in Gould's “new understanding” of the Big Bang. The dust jacket of the book says that the book will expound the idea that “the cosmos expands inward, not outward,” but such an idea is barely mentioned in the text. It seems to have something to do with the idea that the universe is not expanding into empty space, but such a point has already been made many times, so it's hardly new.

As for the emergence of life, Gould advances the idea that life was kind of foreordained by the universe's laws. There is nothing new about this claim, it being a piece of wishful thinking that has been long pushed by those trying to make it look like the origin of life was a not-too-impressive event or a sure thing. Speaking of his 245-page book, he says on page 144, “The remainder of this book presents the chief lines of evidence that life really is written into the universe's building plan.” Based on chapter 15 of the book (discussed below), I conclude that when Gould speaks of the universe's “design” or the “universe's building plan,” he seems to be speaking merely of the universe's physics and physical characteristics. The idea that life was foreordained by the universe's laws and physics is not a correct one, based on the universe's laws as we currently understand them. To clarify the matter, we must distinguish between necessary conditions and sufficient conditions.

A necessary condition is something that must occur first for something else to occur. A sufficient condition is something that will guarantee that something will occur. For example, water and light are necessary conditions for plant growth, but not a sufficient condition. If we launch into space a sterile globe of water, that globe will have two necessary conditions for plant growth (water and light), but no plant growth will occur.

In regard to the appearance of life, the universe's physics and physical characteristics include many necessary conditions for the appearance of life. There are, for example, quite a few conditions that have to be just right for stable atoms to exist, for planets to exist, and for lots of carbon and oxygen and water to exist. But none of these things are anything like sufficient conditions for life to appear. We know of nothing in the universe's physics or laws that is a sufficient condition for life to appear. Given a planet with suitable temperatures in which there is a mixture of both land and water, we know of no reason at all why there should ever occur the “organization explosion” required for life to form. The origin of life seems to require a fantastically improbable arrangement of matter. Based on what we currently know, such an arrangement should be fantastically improbable, even given billions of years and billions of planets for random combinations of matter to occur.

Based on what we now know about the universe's physics, it seems false to make statements implying that life was foreordained by the universe's physics. It could conceivably be that there are dramatic undiscovered laws of nature that make the appearance of life probable, but we have not discovered any such laws yet. On page 150 Gould states, “The extreme stability of life's infrastructure suggests that, far from being an 'accident,' life is a necessary part of the universe.” This statement makes no more sense than claiming that the extreme stability of your house in the woods suggests that the house was a necessary part of the woods.

On page 179 to page 180 Gould tells us about an experiment done by Jack Szostak at Harvard. Gould claims that Szostak “generated one trillion different protein molecules,” and found a handful of them were capable of binding to the molecule ATP, a molecule that provides energy in the body. Gould says, “These experiments provide further evidence that life can arise naturally from the universe's initial conditions.” There are two errors here. The first is that the “universe's initial conditions” were the incredible density and heat of the Big Bang, which were, of course, totally inhospitable to life. Even if we amend Gould's statement to be simply “these experiments provide further evidence that life can arise naturally,” it is not a correct statement.

The Szostak experiment Gould describes actually states that it started out with a random generated library of 4 X 10¹⁴ sequences, which is 400 trillion. This library was then whittled this down to a library of 6 trillion. The “ATP binding” functionality in question (found in four of the random molecules) was not something terribly complicated. According to the Szostak paper, it involved merely “a core domain of 45 amino acids sufficient for ATP binding.” By comparison, the median number of amino acids in a human protein is about 400, and the median number of amino acids in a yeast protein is about 400. Getting by chance a functional arrangement of 400 amino acids is very many times more difficult than merely getting an ATP binding functionality. The functionality described in the Szostak paper was found in only about 1 in a hundred trillion random molecules, about 1 in 10¹⁴.

Why is such an experiment not at all “evidence that life can arise naturally” as Gould claims? In order for a living thing to arise from chemicals, you would need (among other things) many functional proteins, more than 100 of them. You would need these to appear more-or-less simultaneously, to produce a cell capable of self-reproduction. It would not at all be a case that if you got only one of these incredibly unlikely “long shots” producing a protein, that such a protein would stay around until you got the next one many years later. Instead, you would have to get about 100 of these incredibly unlikely long shots occurring at about the same time in the same little space, so that a single cell had everything needed for self-reproduction. We can roughly calculate the odds of that, using a figure suggested by the Szostak paper of a 1 in 10¹⁴ figure for the chance of one of the proteins being functional (although the chance of each functional protein appearing by chance would almost certainly be some vastly smaller probability such as 1 in 10²⁵ or 1 in 10⁵⁰). It's something like 1 in 10¹⁴ to the hundredth power, which has a probability of something like 1 in 10¹⁴⁰⁰. We wouldn't expect something that improbable to happen by chance even once in the history of the universe.

Gould states this on page 183:

Nature says, Give me a trillion bacteria, and I'll guarantee that one of them has resistance to your antibiotic. Give me a trillion antibodies, and I'll guarantee that one of them fights the invader. Give me a trillion protein molecules, and you can count on finding the function you are looking for.

But it is extremely misleading to insinuate that given a trillion random protein molecules you'll get any function you're looking for. The functionality of the more complex protein molecules is unlikely to be found even once in a billion trillion random protein molecules. The type of functionality discussed in the Szostak paper is some of the simplest functionality that you could experiment with. Since “ATP binding” is merely connecting to another molecule, you can compare it to the simplicity of an electrical socket. There are countless proteins that have functionality vastly more complex. Protein expert Douglas Axe has estimated that the chance of getting a functional protein from the set of all random proteins is 1 in 10⁷⁴. This a probability more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times smaller than the “1 in a trillion” probability that Gould is suggesting to his readers. 

One of the extremely complex protein molecules used by living things is the hemoglobin molecule. It consists of two “alpha chains” of 141 amino acid residues each and two “beta chains” of 146 amino acid residues each. Getting functionality that complex to appear by chance would require some set of random protein molecules enormously larger than the 400 trillion random proteins in the Szostak experiment – probably 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or more random protein molecules, more than the number of random protein molecules that would be produced in the history of our planet.

On page 156 Gould says something about the origin of hemoglobin – something goofy indeed. He states this:

But in practice, nature selects for proteins that automatically fold into a single shape, step by step, as they are manufactured by the cell. An example is hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the bloodstream.

This type of speech is extremely erroneous. Natural selection simply means differential reproduction, the superior reproduction that can result once an organism gets some biological innovation. A trait or characteristic can only be “selected for” through something like natural selection if the trait or characteristic already exists in one or more organisms of a population. We cannot explain the origin of any complex biological innovation by saying that “nature selected it” or “nature selected for it,” for there can be no natural selection going on in regard to that biological innovation until after it appeared. The sequence of events is:

1. First a biological innovation appears.
2. Then (if other conditions are right) that innovation may cause some organism to have a better survival rate or reproduction rate (natural selection).

Anyone who inverts this sequence and suggests that “nature selected” some complex biological innovation or that nature “selected for” that complex biological innovation is making the elementary error of speaking as if something was caused by a consequence of that thing. It's the same same type of error a person commits when he says that the dark thundercloud was caused by the summer downpour that appeared after the dark thundercloud.  

A hemoglobin molecule

The idea of "nature selecting for" hemoglobin molecules becomes all the more absurd when we consider that such molecules are only beneficial if there exists a very complex circulatory system that would have no reason to exist until there were already molecules such as hemoglobin molecules, the interdependence of the two being a kind of "which came first, the chicken or the egg" problem defying our attempts at explanation.  

In Chapter 15 (entitled “Design Without a Designer?”) Gould asks, “Can simple rules – for example, the rules with which the universe was born – create something as complex as a human being?” Gould then discusses at length something that he thinks “bears on the question”: the Mandelbrot pattern. Mandelbrot patterns are beautiful patterns that can be produced by simple mathematical rules. But there are two reasons it is laughable to be citing Mandelbrot patterns to shore up the idea that “simple rules” can create something as complex as a human. The first reason is that Mandelbrot patterns are totally non-functional, and are created purely for beauty reasons. The second is that Mandelbrot patterns do not naturally exist in nature, but are produced only by graphical computer programs designed by humans.

On page 238 Gould tells us “there is every reason to believe that within our lifetimes, we'll hear the historic announcement of the first evidence for life on another world.” This is not at all correct, because of the math I previously discussed. If the most primitive living thing requires 100 proteins, and each has a likelihood of no better than 1 in a hundred trillion of appearing, the chance likelihood of life appearing in some particular spot is less than 1 in 10¹⁴⁰⁰. Given such odds, and the failure of all SETI radio searches so far, it is quite absurd for Gould to be saying “there is every reason to believe that within our lifetimes, we'll hear the historic announcement of the first evidence for life on another world.” Certainly Gould has not cited any facts or made any arguments justifying such optimism. Life might well exist all over our galaxy and all over the universe, but only if there is some dramatic teleological causal factor at play different from any Gould has discussed.

Poll Reveals the Absurd Over-Optimism of AI Experts

Consulting opinions of experts is often an extremely poor way of getting a good judgment about some topic. If you doubt that, just read the post here in which I describe cases in which the majority opinion of experts was not just wrong, but disastrously wrong, with huge loss of life resulting from the faulty expert opinions. One of the reasons why communities of experts are so often wrong is that such communities are often ideological enclaves subject to groupthink in which some particular opinion becomes the norm, and in which a community expectation arises that everyone in the community will conform to that opinion. Because of sociological reasons and peer pressure reasons, a kind of herding behavior can arise in the expert community, and the great majority of the experts in that community can start thinking the wrong thing.

The small community of AI experts is just the type of thought enclave in which we might expert a faulty opinion to arise because of groupthink reasons. For decades, AI experts have been making wildly over-optimistic estimates about when such a thing as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) would arise. Page 12 of the paper here gives a graph showing that 8 experts predicted that computers would have human level intelligence by about the year 2000, and that 8 other experts predicted that computers would have human level intelligence by the year 2020 (something incredibly unlikely to happen in the next two years). A recent poll of AI experts shows that they're still hopelessly unrealistic about the prospects of human-level Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). A poll of experts at a Prague conference on artificial intelligence indicated that 37 percent of the experts expected human-level Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to emerge within 5 to 10 years, while 28% expect it to emerge within the next two decades.

There is no sound basis for such optimism. All cases of progress made thus far in artificial intelligence have been cases of creating programs that have specialized expertise or specialized skills such as Jeopardy-playing ability. There has been zero progress in creating anything like a general artificial intelligence. There is no sound basis for optimism that anything like a general artificial intelligence will ever appear in the lifetimes of anyone living.

No one has the slightest real idea of how to proceed in creating a general artificial intelligence. A general artificial intelligence would require understanding, something that no computer has ever had. We have no more of an idea how to get a computer to produce understanding than we have an idea of how to get a computer to give birth to children. Understanding is something that goes on in minds, in organisms that have lives. No computer has ever had a mind, a life, or understanding. By “understanding” I mean the mental experience of knowing something. A programmer may say, “My program has an understanding of the difference between males and females,” but all he really means is “My program can distinguish between males and females.” When a computer distinguishes between two different things, that isn't mental understanding; it's just data processing. A subway turnstile can distinguish between a subway card and a discount coupon, but we would not claim that the subway turnstile understands anything. The mental understanding of computers and subway turnstiles is zero.

Real general intelligence also requires imagination, something no computer has ever had to any degree. Real imagination requires the ability to form abstract ideas in a mind. Computers can produce novel combinations of words, but we should not confuse such mindless permutations as being anything like the imagination that actually goes on inside a mind.

There is no sound basis for thinking that some great AGI computer breakthrough will result from studying the brain. Scientists have no real understanding of how neurons could produce a mind or a thought. There are very good reasons (discussed at this site) for doubting that the brain is actually the source of human intelligence and the storage place for human memories. The idea that we can make computers smart by studying how brains make people smart is erroneous, and involves an incorrect position in the philosophy of mind (the position that the brain is the source of the human mind). And given the lack of progress in the past few decades in understanding how a brain could produce consciousness and thinking, there is no basis for assuming that progress in neuroscience will do anything to enable a general artificial intelligence (AGI) in the next twenty years.

It is true that we have some moderately impressive chatbot programs that you could have a conversation with, and that you might be fooled for a few minutes into thinking that you were chatting with a human. But such a result is not particularly impressive. It is not terribly hard to write a chatbot program. The first chatbot program was produced with very simple programming.

You should not be impressed at all by chatbot conversations like this, which today's software is capable of producing:

Human: Hi, who are you?
Chatbot: I'm John, and I'm a real person.
Human: So what kind of stuff do you like doing?
Chatbot: I like playing video games and using my smartphone.
Human: So who was Theodore Roosevelt?
Chatbot: Um...I think he was a US president.
Human: And what is your favorite video game?
Chatbot: Skyrim.

It is not terribly hard for a large programming team to write a computer program that can produce such answers, if the team has access to the right databases. Using the right knowledge database, a program can retrieve the answer to a question such as the Roosevelt question, and then add an “Um...I think” at the front to make the answer sound more like a human remembering something. A really sophisticated chatbot program would draw on a database produced by analyzing thousands of hours of real human chat conversations. It could then supply answers based on popularity rankings. So if a human asked, “What do you think of the last Star Wars movie?” the chatbot software could simply retrieve from its database the most common answer. This might result in an exchange like the following:

Human: What do you think of the latest Star Wars movie?
Chatbot: The special effects were great, but the plot was kind of confusing.

Such outputs are not thinking; they're just data processing. The fact that we have chatbots that can give answers like this does not mean we are 100 years away from developing a general artificial intelligence.

It is no real test of a computer's understanding to connect an average human with chatbot software and to see whether human-sounding answers result from the human asking random questions. It is too easy to use various programming tricks and data processing tricks to get realistic sounding output. But I can imagine a test that would be really challenging for any computer program or chatbot software. I may call this the Mustang test. In the Mustang test the computer is asked the questions below, and the computer will fail the test unless it answers detailed answers as good as the sample answers I give below.

Here are the questions the Mustang test would ask:

I'm going to ask some questions about Mustangs, and whenever I use the word “Mustang,” please give answers that cover each of three different types of Mustangs: a wild horse, the Ford automobile called a Mustang, and the World War II fighter aircraft called the P-51 Mustang.

Now please answer these questions, giving very detailed, explicit and imaginative answers that cover all three of these types of Mustangs:

1. Can a Mustang fit inside a Mustang?
   
2. Describe a typical successful experience with a Mustang.
   
3. Describe how you and your friends might make a Mustang or improve a Mustang.
   
4. Could you fit inside a Mustang and did people ever do that?
   
5. Describe how a Mustang might interact with things that were kind of like a Mustang but not exactly a Mustang.
   
6. What kind of unpleasant experiences might you have with a Mustang?
   
7. Describe the smells, sights, and sounds of a Mustang.
   
8. Describe a kind of merging of two different types of Mustangs.
   
9. Describe some fairly plausible ways in which different types of Mustangs might interact with each other.
   
10. Describe ten unusual uses you could make using the parts of different types of Mustangs.
    

The computer would fail the Mustang test unless it gave answers as detailed and knowledgeable and imaginative as the answers below:

Question 1: You could never put a P-51 Mustang inside another P-51-Mustang, nor could you ever put a Ford Mustang inside a Ford Mustang. You could not fit a Ford Mustang inside a P-51 Mustang, nor could you do you the opposite. And given that it was merely a single-seat aircraft, you never could have fit a Mustang horse inside a P-51 Mustang. But if you had a convertible Ford Mustang with the roof down, and it happened to have reclining seats, then you could probably drop a Mustang horse so that it barely fit inside a Ford Mustang, assuming that you had a crane to lift up the captured horse. But it sure would be difficult to ever capture such a wild horse so that you could perform such a dropping into the Ford automobile. As for whether a horse Mustang can fit inside a horse Mustang, to some degree that could happen during sexual intercourse between horses, but for you to have a horse Mustang fully fit inside the horse Mustang, it would require for a female horse Mustang to become pregnant, in which case there would be a small horse Mustang (a baby horse) inside the big horse Mustang.

Question 4: You could fit inside a P-51 Mustang and a Ford Mustang, and people did that very frequently. The only way you could fit inside a horse Mustang would be if you killed the horse, and then sawed its body into two. You could then crawl into the middle of its severed carcass. Almost never in history has this been done, but it conceivably could have been done a few times in history when people were near wild horses in extremely cold weather, and desperately needed to shelter inside of the warm flesh of the horse to save themselves from freezing to death – kind of like in that Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back.

Question 8: We cannot really imagine a merging between a horse Mustang and either the Ford Mustang or the P-51 Mustang, because the first one is biological and the second and third are mechanical. About the best you could do is paint a picture of the horse Mustang on the side of the Ford Mustang or the P-51 Mustang. I can imagine a merging between a P-51 Mustang and a Ford Mustang, in which the P-51 Mustang gets two rows of seats (like the Ford Mustang), and then becomes capable of carrying four passengers. I can also imagine a merging between the P-51 Mustang and the Ford Mustang in which the Ford Mustang gets the more high-powered Rolls Royce engine of the P-51 Mustang, and the Ford Mustang also gets the machine guns of the P-51 Mustang, perhaps concealed in its front or rear fenders. The Ford Mustang would then be kind of like one of those James Bond cars, capable of destruction at a distance.

Any computer today would fail miserably when faced with a set of questions like the ones above. The computer could never produce sample answers like the sample answers I have given, because answers like this can only be given by an imaginative mind that understands things. There is no way to get good detailed answers to questions such as these using data processing tricks or knowledge lookup techniques.

We do not yet have chatbots that can perform anything like humans when faced with a really challenging set of questions like those in the Mustang test. No computer in the next thirty years will be able to pass the Mustang test, unless it had programming done by a programmer who knew the questions beforehand.

Computer scientists who think we will soon have artificial general intelligence are committing the error of requirements underestimation, which is a rampant error among theoretical scientists nowadays (see here for many examples).