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IS
THE BRAIN THE ORIGIN OF MAN’S
MIND?
What
is artificial intelligence?
Artificial
Intelligence or AI is among the most
recently advanced scientific concepts.
The associated field of study has been
defined as follows: ‘the study of
mental faculties that encompasses
computational techniques for performing
tasks which apparently require
intelligence when performed by humans’
(M. S. Aksoy, The Fountain, 1993,
No.4, p.10).
Modern
scientific inquiry is directed to
finding analogues for human mental
activities
Besides
searching for new techniques to
substitute man in the fields of labor,
modern scientific inquiry is also
directed to finding analogues for human
mental activities. Since their
assumption is that man is merely a
physical-material entity (a complex of
physical, biological and chemical
processes), many scientists are hopeful
that they can produce a complete copy of
human functions. It is their assertion
that since at least nothing in existing
physical theories accounts for the
existence of non-computable processes in
the brain, all of man’s intellectual
activities can be computed. However,
Roger Penrose, the famous Oxford
mathematician, argues against this
assertion. He argues from Gödel’s
theorem which states that for every
consistent formal system that has the
power to do arithmetic, there will
always be a true statement. That is, a
formal system is a set of logical or
computational rules; termed consistent
if it never produces contradictory
statements. Yet, as human beings can see
that that statement is true, this
constitutes a sign that our minds can go
beyond the powers of any formal system.
However, since Penrose himself (like
many others who share his opinions)
cannot free himself from the confines of
(materialistic) physics and nothing in
existing physical theories accounts for
non-computable processes, in order to be
able to find a physical foundation for
his theory, he pins his hopes on future
elaborations of the theory of quantum
mechanics. In his attempt to explain
human consciousness, Penrose notes that
the biggest mystery of all is how
electrical activity in the brain gives
rise to the experience of consciousness.
It is hard to understand why an inner
life should arise from the mere
enactment of a computation, no matter
how complex. However, his alternative is
not more convincing than what he
rejects. He tries to explain human
consciousness with quantum processes in
microtubules-collapsing quantum wave
functions (the mathematical functions
describing the position and momentum of
a particle) in protein structures found
in the skeletons of neurons.
Is
the physical body the origin of all
activities of man’s intellect?
The
main problem arises from accepting the
physical body as the origin of all
activities of man’s intellect. The
problem is also true for the
expectations from Artificial
Intelligence. Aksoy has a simple but
meaningful objection to the assumptions
underlying those expectations: ‘A
man-made system can be very smart and
artificially very intelligent but no
such system so far has been awarded a
prize for its innovative abilities. It
is the human being who made it who wins
the prize. What is prized, what is of
higher worth, is not the system but its
maker or builder.’ Another more simple
objection can be raised here. For
example, after doing a spell-check on a
word-processor, you may come across many
mistakes which the software has not
recognized. Any sentence can be written
in several ways in which the words are
correctly spelt but are not the words
you intend to use. For example, if we
type the sentence ‘What is prized is
not the system but its maker or builder’
as ‘What is priced is not the system
but its make or build’, most people
who know the language will recognize it
immediately and effortlessly as
nonsense. But the software’s
spell-check and grammar-check will pass
the sentence as OK. Such examples can be
multiplied for a great variety of tasks
requiring experience and understanding
which cannot be analogued or translated
for AI machines but which humans cope
with quite easily.
More
‘developed’ animals must also be
more developed in using their senses and
faculties or their brains but they are
not always so
Another
point to mention concerning man’s
intellectual activities relates to the
issue of learning and education.
Materialistic approaches attribute all
of man’s intellectual activities to
his brain. According to the theory of
evolution, if taken literally, more
developed animals must also be more
developed in using their senses and
faculties or their brains. But this is
not the case.
As
Dr Yilmaz points out (The Fountain,
No. 19, pp. 34-6), compared with a shark
which can smell a drop of blood in the
sea from a distance of about 25,000
feet, man is very much less developed.
If we judge the degree of development
according to the sense of smell, in
place of men or monkeys, sharks will be
at the top of the chain. Whereas, with
respect to the sense of seeing, eagles
are much more developed than sharks, as
well as more than men and monkeys: an
eagle can spot a rabbit on the ground
from a height of about 6,000 feet. Would
it not be true for a honey-bee to say of
us: ‘Those clumsy ones can draw with
tools and only after calculations the
hexagons that I can make so easily and
exactly identical to one another. They
cannot make so sweet and healing a
substance as honey that I produce in
great amounts.’ Again, according to
the literal logic of the theory of
evolution, must a more developed animal
not inherit the abilities of one less
developed than itself? In this case,
must man not have the abilities of all
animals and must apes not have the
abilities of all other animals ‘lower’
on the evolutionary ladder than
themselves? Also, if man was evolved
from apes, should the first man evolved
not have inherited all the abilities and
knowledge of all apes? However, we see
that while all other animals are born as
if educated and instructed already in
all the information they will need to
survive, man is born knowing next to
nothing of what he needs to know to
survive. And while all other animals
come to the world with the same
information or knowledge their
predecessors had and there is negligible
(if indeed any) difference between the
amount of knowledge and abilities that
the members of a species have, a man’s
knowledge cannot be inherited by his
progeny. Consequently, human beings vary
hugely in their intellectual and
artistic capacities and the amount or
level of their knowledge.
Behaviorism
and cognitivism in learning
Materialistic
and evolutionist psychology consider
learning either as a matter of
behavioral patterning by reinforcement
or the storage and use of knowledge. The
first view is called behaviorism, while
the latter cognitivisim. However, both
are agreed that it is the brain or
neural systems which learn. That is, the
intellectual dimension of man’s being
consists in his brain. They confuse how
a man learns with what it is that does
the learning. What they want us to
believe with respect to man’s
intellectual faculties is not different
from defining how a factory works.
According to their logic, it is the
factory itself which built itself and
works according to the laws
pre-determined by either itself or the
collective being of factories. Although
they use personal pronouns such as ‘I’
or ‘You’ or ‘We’ in referring to
those who learn, speak, think, reason,
decide and so on, forgetting that the
brain does not know itself or what it is
doing and also forgetting that it is
we-humans-who study, speak about,
comment on and even operate on the
brain, they regard it as scientific to
attribute all man’s intellectual
activities and faculties, and therefore
his conscious existence, to the brain.
If that is so, why do we not concentrate
our efforts merely on the brain and
adjust it as a way of adjusting or
educating individuals rather than go to
the trouble and expense we currently go
through to educate and bring up our
fellow members of society? Again, does
attributing man’s intellectual
activities to the brain mean that
whatever man will need in life and also
his desires, expectations, feelings,
pains of the past and anxieties of the
future, etc. were pre-encoded in his
brain and that according to the
situations or the stimuli coming from
the outer world, the brain brings them
forth as responses? According to what we
are asked to believe, the brain
continually self-organizes, learns and
adapts throughout our lives.
Understanding how millions of neurons
self-organize through non-linear
feedback interactions requires that we
have a full grasp of the mathematics of
neural networks and of how this
mathematics helps us to understand the
link between brain and behavior. Is it
not compounding our ignorance to
attribute to a heap of blind, deaf,
ignorant flesh, blood and neurons
unconscious of themselves, of their
existence and what they are doing or
why, all of man’s intellectual
faculties and activities with all their
complexity, all of our consciousness and
culture, religious life? Does this make
sense? And does not doing so entail a
denial of man’s free will? Although
some psychologists such as Tolman and
Köhler are of the opinion that at least
in some cases learning appears to be
purposeful and animals and people have
an awareness of what is being acquired
and they actively interpret the stimuli
they sense from the environment, since
they too attribute this to the brain by
asserting that there must be more than
one system in the brain involved in
learning, the point on which all
materialistic approaches are agreed
(consciously or unconsciously) is that
man is an animal whose acts consist in
the automatic responses of his brain, an
animal that has no free will to direct
and control his life.
The
activity of learning is remarkably easy
as both behaviorists or cognitivists
assert. Yet it is nevertheless extremely
complex. Besides senses, many human
faculties such as imagination,
conceptualization, reasoning, comparing,
retaining, remembering, confirming and
conviction, have a share in it. Each of
these faculties give its color to what
is learnt. For example, only imagination
gives rise to falsehoods, while
conceptualization is ambiguous as to
what passes through it. Reasoning does
not have an established view of what
comes to it, while capable of confirming
partiality or prejudices pleasing to the
one doing the reasoning. Surely the
materialistic approach has no right to
that degree of conviction achieved by
impartial reasoning and study of real
evidence and which is worthy to be
called scientific knowledge. Rather,
what materialist and evolutionist
psychologists suggest may only be the
product of imagination or partial (i.e.
biased) reasoning.
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