consciousness

consciousness explained (1991) by Daniel Dennett

7.7 The Memes of Consciousness: The Virtual Machine to be Installed

"Here is the hypothesis I will defend:

Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes (or more exactly, meme-effects in brains) that can best be understood as the operation of a "von Neumannesque" virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities. The powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which it runs, but at the same time many of its most curious features, and especially its limitations, can be explained as the by products of the kludges that make possible this curious but effective reuse of an existing organ for novel purposes" (210)

Our brains / Minds think in series - ie. consciousness is a series virtual machine (not hard wired) built on top of the natural parallel processing brain. How do we know this?

"We know there is something at least remotely like a von Neumann machine in the brain, because we know we have conscious minds "by introspection" and the minds we thereby discover are at least this much like von Neumann machines: They were the inspiration for von Neumann machines! This historical fact has left a particularly compelling fossil trace: computer programmers will tell you that it is fiendishly difficult to program the parallel computers currently being developed, and relatively easy to program a serial von Neumann machine. When you program a conventional von Neumann machine, you have a handy crutch: when the going gets tough you ask yourself in effect, "What would I do if I were the machine, trying to solve this problem?" and this leads you to an answer of the form, "Well, first I'd do this and then I'd have to do that, etc." But if you ask yourself "What would I do in this situation if I were a thousand channel wide parallel processor?" you draw a blank; you don't have any personal familiarity with - any "direct access to" - processes happening in a thousand channels at once, even though that is what is going on in your brain. Your only access to what is going on in your brain comes in a sequential "format" that is strikingly reminiscent of the von Neumann architecture - although putting it that way is historically backwards." (215)

This is a very clever and compelling argument IMO!!!

"And how to these programs of millions of neural connection strengths get installed on the brain's computer? In a von Neumann machine, you just "load" the program off a disc into the main memory, and the computer thereby gets an instant set of new habits: with brains, it takes trainining, including especially the repetitive self stimulation of the sort sketched in section 7.5. This is, of course, a major disanalogy ...

... (so) why do I persist in likening human consciousness to software? Because, ... some important and otherwise extremely puzzling features of consciousness get illuminating explanations on the hypothesis that human consciousness (1) is too recent an innovation to be hard wired into the innate machinery, (2) is largely a product of cultural evolution that gets imparted to brains in early training, and (3) its successful installation is determined by myriad microsettings in the plasticity of the brain, which means that its functionally important features are very likely to be invisible to neuroanatomical scrutiny in spite of the extreme salience of the effects ..." (219)