Thoughts

This is a drawing I scanned from Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gödel, Escher, Bach. The drawing is done by the author himself, although its philosophically introspective quality is worthy of M.C. Escher. The caption at the bottom reads "The brain is rational; the mind may not be." For those of you too uninterested to click for a closer look: the "2 + 2 = 5" is composed of many dozens of correct arithmetic statements, such as "7 + 16 = 23" and "4 + 1 = 5".

Know that within the brain of even the most math-averse of individuals is a complex web of interconnected neurons, each acting like a reliable calculator for doing floating point sums. A human brain contains on the order one hundred billion neurons, and each neuron has on the order one thousand synaptic connections, and each synaptic connection is capable of signaling on the order ten times per second. This amounts to a quadrillion arithmetic operations per second, which is a speed that continues to trivialize the speed of today's fastest computer processors -- although very improbably for much longer -- and it happens in each of our brains. And yet each of us is all too capable of thinking that 2 + 2 = 5. The brain is rational; the mind may not be.

I love this drawing. There's the neurological interpretation, such as is briefly described in the previous paragraph, and there are additional interpretations. In the book the drawing plays into Hofstadter's theme of holism versus reductionism. Zoom in on the drawing so close that you can see only the details: the math is correct. Zoom out so that you see the big picture but not the details: the math is wrong. This drawing is a celebration of holistic thought.

Hofstadter wasn't aiming to pick a fight with reductionists. He was making the argument that even the simplest and most deterministic of automata can be combined to form a complexity that appears every bit non-deterministic and that possesses qualitatively new behavior. Indeed, sentience and consciousness are nothing but such synergistic aggregates of what is, when perceived reductionistically, rather simple hardware components. There's no magic going on with consciousness, or what we may then define as the soul, but there is a supremely beautiful wondrousness to it. And there's no reason then to suppose that an artificial consciousness cannot be created from rather simple man-made hardware components.