Brain vs Computer

The Challenge of the Century

Jean-Pierre Fillard

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9789813145573
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Neuroscience
• Index: Biological Sciences

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It is well known that every animal species obeys Darwin's law of evolution, which requires permanent adaptation of animals to their environment. To be precise, every species except man, who behaves exactly contrariwise, adapting the workplace to himself in order to survive. For that he generally enjoys a particular gift of nature: intelligence.

That reverse adaptation, which accumulated over centuries, led to what we call "progress". This was enhanced by the development of machines which began to be also intelligent and now compete fiercely with humans through the development of an "artificial intelligence".

Some famous people in the world of science and technology recently sounded the alarm about the threats which these improvements are posing. They invoked a possible domination by the machines due to their uncontrolled superior intelligence, potentially leading us into a certain kind of slavery.

In this book we take a look at this new challenge of the human brain versus the computer. The brain is a very complex organ and we are just beginning to understand how it works; many things remain mysterious and can lead to surprises. We will see how current investigations bring new information about this strange organ.

We will also see how the "artificial challenger" plans to win the battle, how computers are getting more and more powerful and subtle as the AI advances. Would a transfer of minds in a machine be possible? Would the computer be capable of a self, nonneuromorphic intelligence? These questions are now open.

Who will win? We do not know yet. But it is certain that many things are going to change in our lives in the very near future.

--> Contents:

• Preface
• Introduction
• About Our Brain: How Does It Work?:
  • The Biological Hardware (Hardmeat)
  • The Biological Software (Softmeat)
  • Be Aware of Consciousness
  • Transcendence
• Towards an Intelligent Computer:
  • The Origins of the Challenge
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Toward an Intelligent Computer
• How to Make All That Stuff Hold Together:
  • How to Make Man and Computer Cooperate
  • Copy the Brain or Search for a Better Solution?
  • Is Transhumanism a Realistic Future?
• Conclusion

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Readership: General public who are interested in the competition between brain and computer, and artificial intelligence.
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Part 1

About Our Brain

How Does It Work?

Not so long ago, almost nothing was known about the brain except for its anatomy and some coarse electrical parameters. Barack Obama recently said: “We are able to see the galaxies or very little things like the atoms but we still have a lot of mystery with these three pounds of nervous tissue between our ears.”

Today, however, experimental means are there (and they get sharper every day) which allow deeper investigations into both the operation of the individual neurons with their global organization (in some way, the “hard”), and their programming (in some way, the “soft”), which has proven to be particularly complex and ever-changing. Does this organization, constantly evolving, result from randomness, some causality, or a superior will? Here we come to the realm of the divine.

A question also arises of knowing if it does make any sense to push ahead with such deep introspection. Already the Greek philosopher said “know thyself”, while exploring the philosophical logic, trying to understand its rationality. But how can an observer be able to consider himself as an object of observation, especially in the immaterial domain of thoughts? Is there some relevance in such an approach? Would the new science of metacognition meet the expectations?

Today, neurocognitivists (as neuro-psycho-electro-physio-cogniticologists are called) strive to identify and decipher the underlying mechanisms of our “self,” in the undeclared aim to get a copy of it. Would it be a vain undertaking or would all of this finally reveal some terrifying truth? We honestly don’t know, but we work with a tough obstinacy to understand what we really are. What is the precise meaning of the word “understand”?

To give the reader an idea of the level of complexity of such an undertaking, one can use an anology: one can compare these researchers to a blindfolded man¹ who is to go shopping in a supermarket where he has never set foot!

The only resource he has is his white stick (which we will identify as “MRI”, “EEG”, etc.). This guinea pig will first have to find his way around and memorize the layout of the supermarket, which we may name “Consciousness.” By trial and error, and also by intuition, he will attempt to analyze his environment and establish benchmarks. He will also meet (neural) employees who push carts around in order to supply the stalls; these employees exit from a huge warehouse (which we will name the “Unconscious”), entry into which is prohibited to customers and which is supplied from the outside by trucks loaded with goods (our five senses and the corresponding nervous system).

This work is obviously not easy for our blind researcher, who has to differentiate between a cornflakes box and a similar package containing laundry detergent, and to find the shelves with fresh eggs! And yet that is what he strives to do with patience and determination. What can we find on the shelves? How does the back room work, where the goods are identified, sorted, stored, and organized before being displayed? How are the pallets of merchandise removed from the lorries? How are they unwrapped? That is what we will try to discover, following, step by step, our blind man in this evocative analogy, but knowing well that, in any case, his white stick will never allow him to read the price tag.²

The success of this scientific endeavor is still far from being secured, but there is no other way of proceeding.

Let us follow the white stick!

¹ Throughout this book I will be using the shortcut “man” as a generic word for “human beings.” Of course, women are included — who I dare not forget and whose brains work (to some extent) the same way!

² However we can nevertheless imagine that the price tags are written with Braille characters and the white stick correspond to fingers! In this analogy could the genes in the DNA molecules be comparable to Braille print?

Chapter 1

The Biological Hardware
(Hardmeat)

R.U. Sirius³ (Ken Goffman) wisely uses the word “hardmeat” to refer to the (soft) biological “hardware” which backs the brain’s activity, and “softmeat” to refer to the way our brain is programmed to exchange and process information.

Of course, understanding the hard part of our brain is a tremendous task, but to make a copy also requires deciphering in depth how it works, i.e. the soft part, and that is not for tomorrow.

What About the Brain?

This part of the book is not intended to be an academic course about the neurology of the brain but, more simply, to assemble some indications, some elements of knowledge which could assist the reader in following the twists and turns of the match between the human brain and the computer. However, one cannot avoid asking this central, inescapable question: In this competition, does the computer have to truly mimic the brain, or would it not be better to let it develop its own skills by itself, without the aim of copying the brain?

The brain, as we all know, is encased in a bone box we call the skull, which protects it from external shocks; but this precious and delicate organ has, in addition, to be kept far from direct contact with the bone wall. This is the role of the meninges — membranes which gently wrap the brain and act as a damping protection also with the intermembrane liquids. With all this careful packaging, the brain is ready to do its fantastic and unfathomable job.

The size of the brain is in the range of a liter or so and it weighs, as stated by Barck Obama himself, some three pounds. Then is all said about this box which houses our self, our soul (?), our personality? Humph! Far from it!

Some people thought that our “intelligence” (to start with this word which we will meet all along this book), or our “cleverness” if you have better, is directly related to the size and shape of our skull. Roughly, the rule was: The larger the better!⁴ This assumption gave rise to a wealth of attempts at finding correlations also with the complexity of the structured external shape of the brain in the framework of a “science” known as phrenology. Of course, we get the information after the brain has been removed, and then not any conformity check of the intelligence can be undertaken afterward!

This approach was also tentatively proposed for detecting criminal birth trends. It was later generally agreed that all of that comes to nothing. The mystery of our brain’s shape and size persists.

It must also be said that in that time the only available experimental means were reduced to visual examination. From the prehistoric ages men were curious about what goes on in this box and it is known that, in various regions of the world, people, even with the help of flint tools, opened the box in a tentative trepanation to see what was inside (not yet Intel, assuredly). X-ray radiography was still far from being invented.

Now the situation is quite different and we can benefit from a wealth of investigative techniques which allow us to get precise and noninvasive information about the nature and the activity of the brain.

On top of that, it must be recalled that, as the computer does, the brain consumes a lot of energy; the brain is the more voracious organ concerning energy consumption, way more than the heart, stomach, or muscles. Permanent consumption, throughout the days and the nights! This energy is supplied by the blood, which carries red cells full of hemoglobin and oxygen, which, in its turn, comes from the lungs. Should this permanent supply be stopped for any reason, the brain immediately disengages and you become unconscious before entering an irreversible death process if the oxygen access is not rapidly reactivated.

Surpringly it is to be remarked that if a comparable activity was to be performed by an equivalent computer (current technology) the consumption of electrical energy would be infinitely large.

Gray Matter

The core activity of the brain — this is well known — is concentrated in what we call the “gray matter,” so named because of its particular aspect. This gray matter makes up the superficial layer of the brain and covers the whole external surface; in order to increase this usable area, the brain is provided all over with deep, folded, and complex ridges. A theory was held for a long time that the more the lobes are pleated the more clever the person is, and that idiots have a flat brain! But it was afterward discovered that, as for the size of the skull, the relationship is not so straightforward!

This shallow layer, or “cortex,” contains the body of the neurons which manage the information and convey it through their extensions (axons) to another part of the brain where they meet other neurons. The axons deeply penetrate the brain, sometimes through complicated paths and loops. Some zones are more or less specialized in a particular function, even if the total activity remains globally distributed.

The whole brain — an external view.

The cerebral cortex structures are never identical in the detail but only look similar from one brain to another. The same holds for the brain as for the human face. Everybody has a nose, a chin, two ears, and so on, but these elements make a unique combination: our face. Same thing with our fingerprints, which drastically differ although they are very similar.

The general configuration remains the same from one brain to another; there are two main distinct lobes which are separated by the “corpus callosum,” which places a communication interface between the two lobes and is traversed by the axons.

One also finds specific organs related to the brain, like the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, or the cerebellum, all being necessary for the proper functioning of the entity. Each has its own role.

The hippocampus, for instance, specializes in the establishment of long term memory after managing the short term memory, whereas the hypothalamus, associated with the olfactory bulb and the pituitary gland, is related to the endocrinal system.

Also, the brain cannot be dissociated in its operation from the spinal cord, either from the optical nerves and the retina or from the hearing nerve, which are all intimate extensions of the brain. All of that should be taken into account if one intends to make a realistic electronic copy of the brain.

White Substance

Under the cortex, a white substance occupies almost half the volume of the human brain, much more than for other animals. This volume is larger for men than for women.⁵ This white substance is made up of billions of axons connecting together the neurons in the bulk of the brain and within the two lobes.

These axons, connecting the neurons one by one, as electrical wires are insulated, more or less efficiently, with a myelin envelope; the electrical signals (ionic or electronic) propagate even better along these axons if the myelin layer is thick. This matter is produced by the “glial cells” and so provides an insulating layer for the axon, similar to that around an electrical cable. We still ignore what could be the mechanism which optimizes the thickness of such an insulating layer as a function of the length of the axon fiber in such a way that the signal can reach the very end without being too cumbersome in this limited zone of transfer.

A view from the above of the paths of the axons through the two lobes of the brain as obtained by high resolution MRI. Of course, it is a purely graphical display and nobody yet knows or has afterward verified if it really represents the full reality.

The axons are also packed in “columns,” each with its specificity but respecting a common affinity. This organization has not yet been exactly deciphered. When such a set of axons is collectively stimulated electrically, the transfer of the electric charges generates a more intense electromagnetic signal, and this “coordinated firing” is intense enough to be recorded from the outside (such as a lightning strike).

This body of wiring is constantly evolving following us learning new things and corresponding reconfigurations of the neuronal links. In a healthy 20-year-old man, the cumulative length of these links reaches 176,000 km! That’s a lot! With increasing age this length slowly shortens, particularly with the loss of the neurons whose axons are too short or weakly protected, but we currently know⁶ that new ones are permanently generated from the hypothalamus at a reduced pace, and they are able to find their place in the brain according to their properties. They are especially required in the memory zones. The relationship between the detection of a local gap and the production of the corresponding specialized neuron is still to be discovered.

Physical disturbances which could occur in this volume of the white substance obviously dr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 About Our Brain: How Does It Work?
• Part 2 Toward an Intelligent Computer
• Part 3 How to Make All That Stuff Hold Together
• Conclusion