Binary Brain

Tonight, as I was pondering the problems of multiple dimensions and proton collisions at CERN, it struck me, what would actually happen if we understood consciousness? I have always been suspicious of ideas like a Grand Unified Theory that the likes of Stephen Hawking promoted because it assumes that there is an ultimate end to knowledge.  And, for some reason, that just doesn’t jive with my way of thinking.

History proves not only what the winners were willing to write about their enemies, but it also shows that knowledge evolves.  Every time we humans figure something out, a new door opens to another set of more complex questions.  It’s like that drawing of the snake eating its own tail.  Knowledge begets questions and questions beget knowledge… all the while my gut grows because I can’t stop eating these cookies while reading this amazing book on black branes.  Ergo, knowledge begets gut aches, too!

I think we’re growing our collective knowledge by leaps and bounds today and you can see this when we look at the momentum of technological change.  In a few days, Apple’s iPad will be released upon the US market and as an observer and obsessive user of technology, it looks like a revolutionary device – much the way the iPhone was and is.  These devices make contact and quick access to important (and obscure) data so easy that a few weeks ago, as I was flying form New York to LA, I learned why popcorn pops because the plane had inflight wifi.  (Now that’s a life altering tidbit of info that was worth the $10 login fee.)  In reality, that little bit of quick, efficient search and seizure of knowledge is analogous to accessing the random and long-term memory that makes the human brain so special.  Things in our world have progressed to the point where we can supplement that massive file-drawer, calculator thingy with über connected devices that let us look up things we’ve forgotten or didn’t even know.  (All assuming the information we access is even accurate – but that’s another problem.)  It doesn’t end there.  Had I really desired something more obscure, I could have gotten on Skype or AIM (or whatever the kids are using these days) and looked up some of my other pointy headed friends to see if they could help solve my latest knowledge crisis, how do airplane toilettes work and why the hell do they use blue water? I could have not only accessed other biological filing cabinets, but utilized their ability to access the non-volatile memory that we know as the net, thus, using a loose sort of distributed processing approach to solve a problem or answer a question

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Who knows what the folks in AI are really doing with artificial brains.  As the bitches (my two female dogs – no, really, they are bitches…) slurped down their last bit of ground up cow heart, I continued my thoughts of CERN and said to myself, let’s say we do figure out how consciousness works.  Then what? Really.  What then?

I don’t think it is that easy, though.  I think it will follow the trend of history that I mentioned above.  Some day, we will open that door to reconstructing the brain with hard wires and solder and then suddenly realize that in the process of commanding such an understanding of how the mind works, we can move objects with our thoughts.  We wonder how the mind works now, think of the questions that will come up when people are stabbing each other with forks from across a restaurant with the power of sheer thought!