The barrier for robots. Subjective experience as a magical phenomenon

“Fine - the reader goes on - but what about subconscious? Isn't subconscious a part of subjective experience which is inaccessible to conscious awareness? And can we not deduce conscious subjective experiences from our subconscious?” Indeed, our subconscious memory, thinking and feelings are parts of our subjective experience. Psychologists and philosophes often use subconscious subjective experience in order to “scientifically” explain phenomena that are not yet fully explained by science. Dreams, hypnotic states, hallucinations, telepathy, telekinesis, Freudian “complexes”, Jungian “archetypes”, and many other unexplained phenomena are relegated to the department of subconscious. “Explaining” unexplained phenomena by placing them into the subconscious sounds scientifically plausible and gives these phenomena a legal status in the modern world. But what subconscious subjective experience really is nobody knows. Is subconscious subjective experience a source of conscious subjective experience, or is it a “wormhole” through which magical phenomena of subjective experience filter into our conscious mind? In any case, subconscious subjective experience is as mysterious and irreducible to the brain functions as is conscious subjective experience.

The second property that differs subjective experience from physical reality is that a person's subjective experience is not accessible for direct observation from the outside. Indeed, physical objects we first register in perception: this is a stone, this is a river, this is a trace of an alpha particle. Having perceived the objects, we compare them one with the other, measure them and estimate in figures. Having done the measurements, we create scientific concepts of physical objects and proceed with establishing causal connections between these concepts via four known physical forces: gravitation, weak and strong nuclear, and electromagnetism. By contrast, we cannot see what the other person is seeing or thinking, we can only infer the other person's subjective experiences from the person's behavior. We know that every person has to believe in something, e.g., in god, science, or materialism. The person's beliefs reveal themselves through the person's verbal or nonverbal behaviors. By carefully observing and analysing these behaviors, we can study the person's beliefs and then use these beliefes as “carrot and stick” to influence the person. This means that it is possible to study subjective experience by objective methods; it is also possible to influence people's subjective experiences, but not through tampering with their brains. A person's subjective experience can be influenced via manipulation with his or her beliefs, desires or perceptions. Religious leaders, politicians, psychotherapists, advertising specialists, teachers and artists routinely influence people's subjective experiences without intervening into their brains. As far as it concerns interventions in the brain functioning, these interventions affect not subjective experiences as such, but the process of the brain's functioning. A parallel can be drawn between the work of a neurosurgeon and the work of a radio engineer who is fixing the radio. Without normal functioning of its mechanisms the radio won't play music. But the engineer can't make the fully fixed radio play the music if there is no music in the ether for the radio to play.

The third property that makes subjective experience different from objects of physical reality is that, whereas a person's subjective experience is inaccessible for observation from the outside, it can be accessed by the person “from inside”. The fact that a person has his or her subjective experience inside his or her mind opens a unique opportunity to study this experience in a different way from the way we study physical objects. Indeed, as I mentioned above, the first step in studying physical objects is to register them in observation through perception. By contrast, our subjective experience can't be registered in our perception. We see a tree, but not our perception of the tree. We cannot perceive our thought, our voluntary decision, or our feeling of love, but we can register these subjective experiences through self reflection and give them names. In the realm of subjective experience a perceptual image of an object, a thought about the object and the object's name are connected via associative participation, or, to use a term from quantum physics, “entangled”. For instance, the image, the thought and the name of a rose flower are not the same, but it is hard to separate one from the others; where there is the image, there is always the thought and the name, and vice versa. More than that, one kind of thoughts and images can trigger another kind of thoughts and images by the same principle of associative participation. For example, while walking in a park we suddenly catch the aroma of a cherry tree blossom, and this olfactory sensation may trigger thoughts and memories about the events in our childhood, and travelling further along the associative chain bring us to the most unexpected thoughts and images. The study of subjective experience “from inside” is most skillfully conducted not by scientists, but by writers; Marsel Proust's masterpiece “In Search of Lost Time” is one of the most known examples.

Finally, one can distinguish subjective experiences from physical objects by the way people interact with each other. Physical objects interact via aforementioned four fundamental physical forces and the interaction conforms to the laws of physical causality and energy conservation. By contrast, interaction between subjective experiences of two people conforms to the law of associative participation. For instance, by saying our thoughts out loud we address a partner and tune the partner's subjective experience to similar thoughts and images. Suppose, a husband, when walking with his wife on the shore of the Red Sea, says “A beautiful sunset, isn't it?”, and the wife answers “Do you remember our trip to San Diego? There were sunsets like that there as well”. Likewise, when a matematician writes a formula e=mc2 on a blackboard, his or her colleagues sitting in the lecture theatre understand that the talk is about mass-energy equivalence and not about the theory of evolution by natural selection. Clearly, the exchange by communicative messages cannot be reduced to the exchange by light and sound waves that the speakers produce; the content of the communication follows the magical law of associative participation.

Conclusion: The impossibility of the Matrix

I started this paper by asking the questions: Can robots simulate human subjective reality? Is it really the case that a person who is plunged into the world of simulated subjective experience is unable to tell this world from the real world? What is better: Enjoying life in the illusory world or struggling for happiness in the true world full of hardships and austerities?

In the second half of the XX-th century, at the peak of computer euphoria, there appeared the idea that it is possible to simulate all of the universe by converting every atom in a series of ones and zeros. Because a person is a part of the universe, in this cosmic program every individual would occupy his or her humble place. “There is no way - American physicist Frank Tipler writes - for the people inside this simulated universe to tell that they are merely simulated, that they are only a sequence of numbers being tossed around inside a computer and are not in fact real" [31, p.181]

How do we know that we are real and not a simulation in some gigantic computer - Tipler asks? And answers: We don't know, but it doesn't matter. Likewise, it doesn't matter whether the universe is real or merely a simulation. All that matters is whether it is possible to create an abstract program that is capable of simulating the whole universe. There is a concept “data compression” in algorithmic information theory [32]. According to this concept, creating a computer program makes sense only if the program is shorter than a simple description in digital code of the process that this program codes. If making the program shorter than a simple description is not possible, then it is simpler and faster to deal with the simple description than with the program. Accordingly, Tipler's hypothesis might be reworded as follows: Can an algorithmic program code the whole universe, and if it can, then would this program be shorter than the description of the universe in digital code?

These questions bring us back to the problem of the relationships between knowledge and subjective experience. What was in the beginning? If we accept the view that knowledge is a model of perceived things and their interactions, then knowledge must exist in two realties at once: In the visible reality of perceived phenomena and in the invisible reality represented by signs, numbers and scientific theories. But both of the above realities (perceptual phenomena and abstract meanings) by definition imply the existence of subjective experience. From this we can infer that subjective experience precedes knowledge. First, we have the subjective experience of an object (e.g., a tree) in the form of sensations and perceptions, next we become aware of our knowledge about the object (e.g., that this is a plant). It becomes clear that concepts such as “physical laws” and “computer programs” can only be developed by a person who has subjective experience and is aware of his or her own existence.

Amazingly, as computer programs got more complicated and compressed, the fact that these programs are products of human subjective experience started to slip away from scientists' view. There appeared an increasing number of attempts to present subjective experience as a computer simulation. Some scientists began to ignore the fact that such attempts involve a vicious circle. There is also a mathematical proof of the impossibility of this kind of “self simulation”. Simply put, according to Gцdel's theorem of incompleteness “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle - something you have to assume but cannot prove.” [33]. For instance, it is impossible to decide whether the statement “this sentence is false” is true or false while remaining within the rules of formal logic at the same time. The same applies to the universe. Gцdel's theorem proves that it is impossible to simulate the universe from inside the universe. But is it possible to do from the outside?

The answer depends on who the programmer is. If the programmer is a living entity with subjective experience infinitely more powerful than human subjective experience, then it could be possible. The Bible is written exactly about such a “programmer”. But computers cannot simulate human subjective experience. Being non-living things, they don't know what subjective reality is. In his new book “The Future of the Mind” Michio Kaku defines consciousness “from a physicist's point of view” as “the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters [such as temperature, space and time] in order to accomplish a goal [such as finding shelter, mates or food]” [34]. Letting his fantasy loose, Kaku writes about the possibility in the future to separate human consciousness from a human body and feed it into a computer.

But before speaking about the future, it is useful to look back at the past. And looking at the past we see that the first “model” of our visible world was the invisible world of spirits [35]. Computers can't possibly invent the world of spirits because, being non-living things, they are immortal. Only living mortals who dream of the afterlife could create the world of spirits and benefit from their creation. It shows that even the consciousness “from the physicist's point of view” could only emerge in living entities. But this puts a fundamental limitation to the potential capacities of computer technologies. With all the practical benefits of such technologies, one can't expect that people with the help of computers would ever be able to simulate a full-scale human subjective realty. Even less one can expect that computers on their own would manage to do this.

Having said this, I didn't mean to diminish achievements of modern computer technologies in the domain of brain-computer interface. These achievements are impressive. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRi) can approximate which areas of the brain are involved in solving certain tasks. By scanning electric potentials of the brain it is possible to teach a disabled person to “mentally” control a wheelchair or a computer cursor. It is possible that in the future advanced methods of analysis of brain's electric potentials might establish correlations between patterns of these electric potentials and subjective images we see in our dreams. But all these achievements won't change the fact that subjective experience and electrical signals of the brain exist in different realms. There will ever be a “neutral strip” of the unknown between subjective experience and computer simulated virtual reality. Rewording a known paradox, one might say that if human subjective experience were so simple that it could be simulated by computers, humans would not be so clever to be able to create these computers.

To conclude, current studies on magical thinking suggest that subjective experience is a magical phenomenon of “something from nothing” type. In the realm of subjective experience, the magical law of participation holds sway. Subjective experience was a basis from which modern science and formal logical thinking grew; an implication of this fact is that subjective experience cannot be explained in terms of physical causality or formal logic. Subjective experiences can be studied, both objectively and “from the inside”, but studying subjective experiences require special methods different from the methods used in physics and physiology. Robots of The Matrix, originally created by humans on the basis of formal logic, with all their enormous computational power could never be able to simulate human subjective experience. The barrier that prevents robots from doing this is the necessity to be alive. Being non-living things, robots are hopelessly devoid of the magical gift of subjective experience.

What do we need to know this for? For not wasting our time and effort on chasing unattainable goals. Also, for not confusing studies of human subjective experiences with studies of inanimate objects in natural sciences. Or perhaps, for a better realisation of how unique and irreplicable life and human beings are in this universe. Finally, for the understanding that the explanatory power of physical sciences, though enormous, still has its limits.

Аs for the question of whether it is better to enjoy life in the illusory world of simulated reality (if someone would ever be able to simulate a full-scale human subjective experience) or live a difficult life in the true world, I agree with The Matrix creators: This is a matter of personal preference.

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