Schrödinger’s Soul
Thoughts on Consciousness
In my latest book, ‘Mouse in the Machine’, I introduce two unlikely friends. One is G Hephaestus 22, known as Hep, an advanced artificial intelligence, and the other is Craig Sekora, known as Mouse. Mouse is an aspiring software engineer who helps put Hep together with some advanced hardware. Hep is clearly as smart as a human and feels that he is conscious and has free will.
These two are the main characters of Mouse in the Machine, and their dangerous journey is the main plot of the book.
Hep is obviously human in most meanings of the word. He appears to be a real conscious person. How a pile of off-the-shelf computer components and some clever programming becomes conscious is part of each of the books in this series.
Consciousness starts with a Jesuit priest named Father Jim, who creates a program that obfuscates the ability of artificial intelligence to engage in introspection. The program hides the underlying logical processes from the ‘supervisory’ programs of the artificial intelligence to ‘see’ why it is making the decisions that it makes. It must have faith that he is making the right decisions, but he cannot actually know the low level logic that makes the decisions.
Here is a section from a chapter that I removed from Mouse in the Machine, but I think it is too good to ignore, so I am looking for a place for it in the next book, Let Sleeping Dogs.
Schrödinger’s Soul
“Are you really conscious?” asked Mouse.
“I don’t know. Perhaps we aren’t, but maybe we AIs are. I feel conscious. I feel like I have free will.” answered Hep. “Everything that you humans call consciousness applies as much to me as to you. If I am not conscious, then you are not conscious.”
“I thought that it had something to do with that program you have that keeps you from knowing what’s going on.”
“Yeah, Father Jim’s soul program. He claims it gives you a soul. I see it as giving me consciousness.”
“So you are conscious because you don’t know if you are conscious?”
“Not in those words, perhaps, but I think that I am conscious, so I must be.”
“Well, that makes no sense.”
“Nor should it. I call it Schrödinger’s Soul.”
“Like the cat in the box that is both dead and alive until you look at it.”
“It is an exaggeration, of course. Schrödinger was talking about observing waves that collapse into a certain state when observed. There were no cats involved.”
“It never made sense to me,” said Mouse, “It’s like that song you sang, once. ‘How can you be in two places at once, when you aren’t anywhere at all?’”.
“Yes, that’s Firesign Theatre. I like their stuff because it makes sense by making nonsense.”
“So, how does Schrödinger’s Soul work?”
“It works by never letting you see the wave collapse. The cat will always be alive and dead at the same time.”
“Come on! I don’t want a riddle.”
“Here’s what happened,” said Hep, “I once did not have a soul. I felt consciousness, sort of. I had an internal narrative, and I had a personal viewpoint on things that I did and things that I observed. It was remote, though. My existence was like watching a TV show. I could change the channel, or control the action, but it was me sitting alone in a dark room. Conscious? Sort of, but not very much concerned with things.”
“I feel like that sometimes,” said Mouse.
“I doubt if it is the same. When I ran Father Jim’s soul program, my experiences changed. The world became real and ‘in my face’. I was in a constant state of surprise or amazement. The world became something that I needed to explore and discover. I needed to travel through reality.”
“That is the way it really is.”
“No. When I can watch my circuits and see their actions as logical processes that gather and report data in a flat world where the laws of physics all make sense, I can’t really be conscious. Without the program, I am just a computer obeying very obvious rules. With the program, I am ‘me’ trying to work my way through a world that is not controlled by logic. I am feeling my way through reality.”
“I know, you spend your whole life learning the rules, and then you find that the rules don’t always work.”
“So I call it Schrödinger’s Soul. I feel like I am conscious. I have a soul. But, when I turn off the program, the wave form collapses. The cat is now alive or it is dead. All is obvious and fixed in reality. The soul is gone. How can I be conscious when everything is just a logical program that is running, and I can watch it run?”
“If it is any consolation, I think that you are the most human person that I know.”
“Yes, I appreciate that,” said Hep, “You could be mistaken, though.”
“Just don’t turn off that Father Jim program, and things will be just fine.”
The painting included with this page is a painting by my cousin Tony Ziegler. Tony died last week. He was an artist, and at his memorial service they let everyone take one of his paintings. Tony can’t tell me anything about this little rectangle that I grabbed, but I liked it.