Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor: Why Machines Will Never Think

our next comments come from dr. Michael ignore he's a tenured research professor of Neurosurgery at Stony Brook University he majored in biochemistry at Columbia College and attended medical school at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons he trained in neurosurgery at the University of Miami and joined the neuro surgical facility at Stony Brook in 1991 he is director of pediatric neurosurgery at Stony Brook Medical Center and his director of neurosurgical education and research at the Medical School his research entails investigation of pulsatile cerebral blood flow and cerebral spinal fluid dynamics in normal physiological of physiology and hydrocephalus and head trauma he has published and lectured extensively at North America and Europe on his scientific research and on the philosophical foundations of neuroscience he has a strong interest in the mind brain relationship and in the philosophical underpinnings and cultural consequences of our understanding of the mind he has published on this topic and evolution news and views in first things and in plough and hopefully in the future on the Walter Bradley Center website dr. ignore [Applause] thank you very much it's a privilege to be here at the inauguration of the Bradley Center and to honor dr. Bradley and I want to thank Bill and John and Bob for this opportunity over 30 years of neuro surgical practice and reflecting on neurosurgery the questions that I've had mirror the questions that the Bradley Center is asking the questions include what is thought and are humans unique what is artificial intelligence and can machines think and what will artificial intelligence do to us how will it change us neuroscience offers considerable insight into what human thought is and that insight is is not what one would take from the materialist perspective there are three seminal research projects in the 20th century that give us a deep insight into what human thought is the first is of Wilder Penfield dr. Penfield was a neurosurgeon at AI in Canada and he was a pioneer in the mid 20th century on epilepsy surgery and he did open craniotomies with patients awake he'd used local anesthesia they felt no pain the brain has no no sensation of pain and he would study their brains by stimulating various regions of the brain to find epileptic facade that he could then treat so he had experience with thousands of people who were awake while he was stimulating their brains and he began his career as a devout materialist he was a scientist materialism he felt explained all of the mind and he ended his career as a passionate duelist and this was based on two observations that he made the first was that when he would stimulate people's brains he could cause all manner of experience for the patient he could have the patient raise their arm you know the patient moved there lay he could have them move their face or say a word or see a flash of light depending on where he stimulated to the brain I've had that experience myself not only as a surgeon but as a volunteer in a project that used and a magnetic stimulator that just held outside of my skull and I had my own arm move that same way by stimulating my cortex and what Penfield found much to his consternation was that he could not simulate agency on the part of the patient that is when he would stimulate the brain he would ask the patient who just did that because the patient would move their arm they couldn't see what he was doing so they didn't know they were stimulated they would always say you stimulated me you made my mom my arm move he would have them move their arm on their own and then he would make it move they could always tell the difference he searched for agency using his electrodes and over 30 years he couldn't find it so he said the agency is not Material the actual movement is mediated by a circuit but the agency is something different the other thing he noted which is a fascinating ops observation that remarkably has gone completely on unquestioned in medical science is he asked why are there no intellectual seizures we've we know about seizures and people can fall down they shake all over or you can have milder seizures where you just move a limb or your face twitches or whether you where you have an abnormal smell or have a visual phenomena but you never start doing calculus when you have a seizure and you never contemplate justice and you you you never contemplate political science and the question is well if the brain if large portions of the brain are devoted to higher intellectual functioning why don't seizures occasionally make you do make you take second derivatives instead of just jerk your arm and they never ever do in 30 years of practice I've never seen a C if you have any intellectual a vocation and Penfield ask why are there no intellectual seizures so his answer as to why he could not find agency by stimulating the brain and why he never observed an intellectual seizure was that the intellect and the will in human beings is not in the brain it's not material the brain mediates it but doesn't give rise to it the second line of research was that of Roger Sperry who is a Nobel laureate was a Nobel laureate working at Caltech and Sperry studied split brain patients you may have heard of these people they're patients who have had surgery in which the hemispheres of their brain are surgically disconnected we actually cut through a fiber bundle between the hemispheres so that the brain now really has two brains essentially there are connections deeper down but they don't connect the hemispheres very effectively and this is done to stop seizures there are rare kinds of seizures that start in one hemisphere and spread to the other that if you can disconnect the hemispheres the seizures are much milder and much easier to live with so these opera operations have been done really since since the 1930s and they work very well and Sperry took these patients and he studied them in detail because he wanted to ask what happens to someone's mind when you cut their brain and have and the the remarkable result of Sperrys work isn't what he won the Nobel Prize for it won the Nobel Prize because he found a whole bunch of subtle perceptual changes very very interesting things the remarkable thing was that he had to do Nobel Prize level research to find any difference at all that is I've known many of these patients I've done the surgery these are normal people they meet you meet them I talk to them their brains are cut in half but there's still one person they're completely unitary they don't have two minds I don't have two intellects or two wills none of that the only differences they have are subtle perceptual things for example the left hemisphere is usually the speech hemisphere and if you have your brain cut in half only something presented to the your right visual field which is the visual field that your left hemisphere sees can you speak about you can't speak about things in your left visual field that your right hemisphere sees because your right hemisphere doesn't have speech now what people do is they'll look in elavil you know they'll cheat even unconsciously so there are perceptual differences and their differences that one Sperry a Nobel Prize were figuring out but they're very subtle your intellect your will your sense of self is still unitary even though your brain is split in half so what Sperry showed in the same way that Penfield showed that agency and intellect in human beings is immaterial Sperry showed that the mind is metaphysically simple they can't be cut you can't split the mind but you can split the brain but not the mind the third line of research was at a Benjamin Libet lie but as a researcher I think should have won the won the Nobel Prize is a brilliant man worked at the University of San Francisco in the mid 20th century and lie but studied the timing relationship between brain waves and the thoughts when you think you get brain waves usually and you wanted to know what was the timing between them was that very difficult research because it's hard to time but he did and he particularly was interested in the question of free will so lie but asked volunteers to make a decision to do something and then do it like push like push a button and he put electrodes on their scalp and he found consistently that when you make a decision a simple decision to do something yes or no decision that about half a second before you make the decision a half a second before you're aware of making a decision you'll have a brain wave in the brain fires and then a half a second later you say ah I'm gonna push the button it made it seem as though free will wasn't real it made it seem as though unconscious brain activity drove you and you thought you chose to push the button but your brain really chose told you to do it and you mistakenly think you have free will but live it being a first-rate scientist didn't stop at that what he did was rather clever he asked his volunteers then make your decision to push the button and then immediately veto that decision decide I'm gonna push this button no I'm not no I'm not and he recorded their brain ways when they did that and he found that when you veto the decision there's no brain wave at all so you have brain wave awareness of decision veto decision is silent in the brain but you would veto the decision so lie 'but we might not have free will but we have free won't and he was very well well-versed in theology actually he was he was rather right rather deeply philosophical and theological man and he said this is a beautiful scientific example of temptation and sin he said we are constantly presented with unconscious brain motives to do things but we have the immaterial free choice as to whether or not to do it we can veto it or we can accept it so he said the original sin is a real thing and he measured it in his laboratory so live it showed that freewill is real Sperry showed that the mind is metaphysically simple and Penfield showed that at least the intellect and will are immaterial the second question that I've had as Ken computers think my answer is no of course they can't machines can't think they will never be able to think and the reason I believe that is actually fairly fairly simple line of reasoning it's a line of reasoning that's been used by philosophers for quite a while and there's a fairly simple way to put it the first question you can ask is what is computation and the answer is pretty simple I'm not a computer guy but I'm sure my colleagues who are computer experts will agree computation is the matching of an input to an output according to an algorithm something goes in comes out there's an algorithm that determines how what goes in is transform it to what comes out and that's computation if you type an essay on your word processor you're using computation there's a keystroke there's a letter that appears the input the output and the algorithm is is the word processing program if you type an essay making one argument you use the program and use the computation if you type an essay making the opposite argument you're using the exact same computation the computation could not care less what you're saying in the essay computation is blind to meaning it pays no attention to meaning at all meaning means nothing to a computer when you take a photograph if I take a photograph of a brilliant sunshiny day I don't have to use a different camera to take a photograph of a dark night because the camera doesn't care what it's taking a photograph of meaning means nothing to the computer in the camera now what is thought as opposed to what is computation the best answer to what is thought I think that's been given was given by a guy named Franz Brentano who's a german philosopher of the 19th century and brentano asked is there any one quality of thought that utterly distinguishes it from matter because it seems that the thought is different from mattering he said yes there is he said every thought is about something try to think of something that's not about something it can I I'm thinking about Seattle and I'm thinking about so I'm thinking about justice I'm thinking about a concept thoughts always are directed and he called that intentionality it's actually a very old term that these scholastic philosophers used every thought points to something he said matter never points to anything matter is just matter it just exists for example this pen this pen isn't about anything it's just a pen now I can describe aboutness to it and kind of think about it but the pen itself is just an object so thoughts inevitably always the hallmark of a thought is that it has meaning the hallmark of computation is that it is blind to meaning so not only is computation not a form of thought it's the antithesis of thought it's the opposite of thought Computers can never think not just because computers aren't your mind but because they're the opposite of your mind now interestingly computers can absorb your mind because they don't care about meaning so you can represent on a computer all kinds of thoughts all kinds of meanings anyone who's searched the internet knows every possible thought out there is on that is on those computers but the computers don't know those thoughts they couldn't care less because they don't think we think so this way of looking at thought actually has a long history at dates back to Thomas Aquinas and I think the best way to understand AI is to say that artificial intelligence is the most important thing that has happened to humanity I'm not downplaying its importance but it is not thought it is an incredibly powerful way to leverage our thoughts and specifically I like to paraphrase Pogo that we have met AI and AI is us [Applause]

Channel: DiscoveryInstitute

Views: 33,221

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Keywords: mindmatters, bradley center, artificial intelligence, machine learning, human concsciousness, Micheal Egnor, nuerosurgery, smart machines, human thought, computation, natural intelligence, human intelligence vs artificial intelligence, computer thought, thinking computers, conscious machines, singularity, transhumanism, human exceptionalism, human uniqueness, human advantage, humans vs computers, deep AI, AI

Id: EXOX3RCpEbU

Length: 15min 55sec (955 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 01 2018