rationalskepticism.org

The_Metatron wrote:I've been giving this problem the benefit of my insightful and penetrating mind. Here is what I think is going on:

As organisms evolved, those that developed abilities to sense and react to their environment gained a reproductive advantage over those that could not. They could seek or avoid environments, depending on if that environment contained risk or not.

This sort of decision making requires no processing, it can be easily hard wired. And, that works. In it's limited capacity, it works. It works well enough to control satellites in space. That situation isn't very adaptable to changing environments, though. For example, some new thing. Is it a hazard? Is it a danger? If no "pre-wired" logic exists for the new environmental pressure, how does that new pressure affect existing life? Or, what about many new things? How would such basic organisms avoid or take advantage of those new things in their environment?

Here's where I think interesting things started to happen.

Memory. It all comes down to memory. An ability to record events and recall those events. Without memory, an organism can't easily adapt. Such an organism is limited to its wired behavior. But, with memory, an organism can develop a model of its environment, and make decisions about what the organism senses in its environment that are based on comparisons to its internal model... "Red thing in sight. Have I ever eaten a red thing? No? I won't eat this red thing..."

An organism with a mechanism that can store events, recall them later and use them in decision making, is going to have a reproductive advantage over those that cannot.

So. Are we machines? Or, are we machines with routines running in our brains? I'm betting on the latter. What about those routines, though? How did that happen? Back to that evolving organism...

I've already described a basic routine that compares. That routine may be what compares multiple extant situations to order the best behavior from the executive routine. Or, that comparison routine may get information from the memory routine, to arrive at a choice that is based on history as well as current events. That sort of comparison would add a dimension of knowledge to decisions that increases the likelihood of a good decision.

What about these routines? A routine in our world is an abstraction. In our world, a good approximation may be a running executable in a computer. That executable gets loaded into working memory, takes inputs, follows its coded purpose, and produces instructions for the executive to carry out. I propose that the routines running in our brains are quite similar to this idea.

What we lack though, is a means to copy verbatim all of a routine's status in working memory to nonvolatile memory, so we can shut the routine down. When we shut our routines down (die), they can't be restarted. This indicates that these routines are stored in our brains in a fashion that falls apart if the machine shuts off. Not much different from a computer without a hard drive. So long as sufficient working memory exists in a computer, that isn't impossible to do. From my desk, we appear to be the equivalent of computers without hard drives.

What about feelings? Emotions? What's going on there? In the context of reproductive success, how do feelings come into the picture? I don't think this is that difficult a problem, actually. What then, is a feeling? I think it's a judgment of value of a comparison. When the comparator routine produces its output (go/no-go, for example), that output could then be run through a values routine that can prioritize the resulting action. Since we do multiple things at the same time, something needs to sort those things out, prioritize them for the good of the organism. Fear of snakes should drive an action that comes before "pick and eat the strawberry". That feeling, or value judgment, about snakes can save your ass. Pretty useful.

Memory. How, exactly, does that operate in our brains? What is the mechanism by which our brains write, index, and read memories? I have some ideas there, too. I think we're recording all the time. But, we can't read everything we record, forever. I suspect there is some mechanism that records cumulative successes in memory recall. It's possible that a judgment routine affects that "success register" when the memory is laid down. It's also possible that that success register can be incremented as that memory is read. Memories with higher success register indices would be much easier to recall than others. It's also possible that memories with very low success register values eventually become overwritten, though I tend to doubt that (random recall of decades old events, for example).

So, there it is. My best guess is that we are machines. But, machines with routines that were evolved long ago, and those routines emerge as we develop and grow. If we shut the machine off, we are at the mercy of the non-volatile nature of our memories, and the routines, which are us, halt in an unknown state and cannot be restarted.