Ethics: Subject and Object

I believe my views about ethics are somewhat unique. I say "somewhat" since I agree on several aspects of the subject with what has already been proposed by others. On the other hand, when reading other people's ethical theories, I invariably get to a sticking point. This is not some trivial quarrel with a rarely used maxim, or with special cases meant to illustrate and explicate the writer's meaning. No, a sticking point is quarrel with something fairly fundamental.

Many readers may say I am just obtuse by nature. Conservatives may accuse me of being a whiner. But I deny those allegations. It is just difficult to agree with everything other philosophers advocate, even if I agree with much of what they say. In the following, I summarize my analysis of some of the issues at hand.

Materialism and Evolution
 

I affirm the fundamental metaphysical doctrine of materialism, that there is just one kind of stuff in our Universe. There are no souls, gods or other substantial realities; i.e., there is only one kind of Being, the one which we experience. This is a monistic doctrine, as opposed to the various forms of dualism involved in most religions, superstition and animism. My metaphysical insight ends there, as I have no idea what the material stuff "is." I accept the scientific explanations of the physicists, chemists, etc which inform me how the stuff behaves. To the extent that we know anything about Being ("what is"), it is delimited by its behavior. On that account, we never arrive at an apprehension of "Being in Itself:" Being is just there. To avoid endless questions about the nature of Being, I particularly adhere to the notion, generalized from Quantum Mechanics, that the Universe started from nothing at all. If the Universe started from nothing and, according to conservation of energy, is still nothing, there is nothing to explain about Being, because it is Nothing at all.
 

Our being is like our consciousness, a trompe l'oeil. In the begining, there was nothing, but here we are. That everything is nothing certainly solves a metaphysical problem, for there is no being to explain. On the other hand, there is the stuff of my Being, of the Universe. Quantum Mechanics suggests that our being is just one half of an equation, nullified by the other half. So, from a physical point of view, our being is quite real, it just isn't as solid as we prefer to believe.
 

The peculiar status of Being is only a problem because we notice it. We are presented in our Consciousness with our all-too solid, albeit temporary, self, not with the probablities underlying it. I don't see atoms and electrons whizzing about when I look at my fingers, my feet and what's in between. This is a problem only I have and, by generalization, any other self-consciousness has. I doubt whether this problem is faced by molecules, bacteria, nematodes, turtles or lions. It might be a problem for some of the most recently evolved animals, including some birds and non-human mammals, although I think it unlikely. Having a Mind enables the possibility of recognizing one's own existence, which, in turn, creates the inscrutability of Being. But, metaphysically, having a Mind does not alter the nature of Being. Being is what it is, including Mind.

Arguments about evolution have raged for more than a century. Even so, it is quite clear the science of organic matter is settled: biological evolution is a fact. Further, it is very likely that life forms, even intelligent life, evolved on other worlds, possibly one as close as Mars. What has been established is the notion that life is an ordinary development when the conditions are right. In this sense, living things are no more unusual than the activity of the chemicals which constitute them.

Evolution both takes away and instigates the mystery of Mind. It should be "self-evident" that each of us has a Mind. I know I have one, and I assume others similar to myself know they have one. A moment's reflection should reassure doubters, except zombies who live without comprehension, because having a Mind is a matter of self-declaration. But, if I am aware (self-conscious), how is it that I am aware? This question is really a multitude of questions, only one of which is about origins. It tempts one to propose the basis of awareness (workings of the brain), the features of consciousness (attitudes or states), or its operations (psychology). All these questions take as granted that Mind exists. The origin question is different in asking how this existence came about, not how it presently works. While it is often quietly assumed that knowing the origin of something will reveal its workings, this is not logically so.

The observable operations of computer programs are less and less connected with their immediate creators every year, as software developers recycle old parts and put together pieces of code to achieve this or that purpose. Whereas a decade or two ago, programmers went over their codes with the proverbial fine tooth comb to make them clean, efficient and compact, the advent of cheap massive storage and ultra-high speed processing has put the focus on results, not methods. A programmer can just copy code snippets into another frame to produce a different picture, ignoring whatever the snippets once did or how they did it ("internals"). Purists may have concerns about such unhealthy work habits, but the software industry has evolved to be more concerned with its survival than with academic virtues we were all taught years and years ago. A product or company that does not sell does not survive.

The same sort of impersonal rules regulate biological organisms. Eukaryotic cells do not seem to be efficient. They are a melange of DNA, RNA, proteins, sugars and myriads of other chemicals kept together or separate in little bags for billions of years. Mitochondria and chloroplasts are almost certainly bacterial symbionts that became co-dependents of eukaryotic cells. We still don't know exactly how or why that symbiosis happened, and maybe we never will know it, but it is certain we are here on account of that integration. Most of our chromosonal material is unused, "junk" DNA. In the history of life, some of the junk was used and discarded. Some junk is redundant copies of other junk or active genes. Yet other junk is stuff that got incorporated into chromosomes for whatever reason or by accident. In the process of continual mutation and adaptation,.pieces of chromosomes are activated or relocated. Genes are suppressed or used in different processes than their original  function. In other words, cells have used the genome, chemicals and symbionts to meet the challenge of survival, putting this, that and the other thing together. Most of those "experiments," like monkeys typing, fail. We are the result of what worked.

Thus we may take ourselves to be a fairly arbitrary collection of molecules, but a collection with the special qualification that it survived endless death threats. It is a peculiar fact that biological survival depends on adoption of ever better strategies by competing organisms. In the inorganic world, there is no strategic, competitive evolution. When there is evolution in the inorganic world, it is usually determined by physical laws. The Earth's geological structure has changed during the last 4.5 billion years primarilly on account of the flow of heat from the core to the surface. Earthquakes and other atmospheric events are random and, so far, unpredictable in the short run, but conform to the thermodynamic properties of Earth's materials in the long run. Those events do not improve or change their character. What happens on inorganic Earth is predictable, at least in the long run, and does not change its form. Water and chlorine today are the same as they were yesterday and 4 billion years ago. But that is not at all the case with organic creatures. It is generally thought that the original living things disappeared long ago, wiped out, starved out or eaten by their much improved daughters and successors. Thought experiment: it didn't have to be this way, the original living things could have stayed the way they were forever, just like sand and water.

How did evolution get started? Probably for the very simple reason that reproduction is not exact. This problem is not a special characteristic of organic assemblies. It afflicts the inorganic world as well, an effect of the Law of Entropy. In our Universe, there is no 100%. The cost of 100% climbs higher exponentially the nearer one gets to it. All living things fly in the face of Entropy, because they increase local order. Of course, the price of a living thing's existence is the disorder it creates in its environment. The bacteria and other life forms living near ocean floor vents depend on the vented heat and chemicals to supply their energy. Anaerobic bacteria use sulfur instead of oxygen  chemistry to extract  chemical energy, but leave behind lower energy waste products in the same manner as aerobic bacteria. After chloroplasts arrived on the scene, oxygen was the (relatively) low energy waste product of photosynthesis. Oxygen is highly reactive and poisionous to most cells, including human cells, so it was fortunate for early life forms that oxygen is a gas that bubbled out of the water in they lived. Cells that were able to extract energy from oxygen - animals - evolved much later than plants. Animals depend on the incomplete extraction of energy from photons in chloroplasts; i.e., plants use only a small portion of the energy in sunlight, excreting oxygen and other energetic products. Animals owe their existence every day of their lives to the inefficiency of plants.

Thus, evolution is the natural consequence of inefficiency and error, especially in reproduction. The very essence of evolution is imperfection. If organisms could reproduce themselves perfectly, if everything worked 100%, there would be no evolution at all. This may seem a small point, but it is ignored most of them time. While I do not have a philosophical or physical argument (hypothesis) to connect evolution with the quantum nature of matter and energy, such a connection seems appropriate because the inherent inefficiency of Entropy produces indeterminate results. That is, systems ruled by Entropy are not completely determined, since successive states of such systems cannot capture all of the information they inherit. The Third Law of Entropy, that Entropy always increases, can be restated as "disorder increases" or as "information decreases," where information is referenced to disorder = white noise.
 

So, I affirm a peculiar variety of materialism in which the ultimate stuff is nothing at all, but we are nonetheless material beings. Our material existence is, I believe, entirely what we make of it as intelligent, self-conscious beings. Would the material world exist in the same way, apart from our consciousness? This is a nonsensical question, as we cannot know what we cannot experience.

Evolution is the natural order of things, which is simply to say that everything changes. Our Universe has dimensions of Space and Time. The internal flow of energy is governed by Entropy. What is Space, Time and Entropy? I don't know. Can Entropy be reconciled with Conservation?  Maybe, but one has to wonder about the free energy of space. Nonetheless, it is a fact that everything changes, which is attributed to Time and Entropy. Organisms evolve because of Entropy, even though they live in spite of it.

All of the foregoing are questions to be answered by our sciences, not philosophers. What science can tell us is how the Universe works, not what it is. My philosophical materialism amounts to an claim that what is, is, or, at least, so it seems to me. If I grant ontological status to Time, Space, Entropy, Conservation or Consciousness; that is, if I grant they exist, they are primitives or premises, not properties. In explaining the operation of the Universe, I have to start from premises, posit certain quantities and values, and allege certain connections among these proposed objects. In other words, I have to start with data and proposed relationships among the data, and transformations of the data and relationships. I have to believe in those primitives because they allow operationn of the machine which is the model, the explanation, of what is. I might eventually find even "more" primitive than the ones originally proposed, but, to be valid, those more primitive premises must explain, or explain away, the premises in current use.

The main point here is that what the premises represent, the "what is," is impenetrable. In Euclidean geometry, we are asked to accept a certain parallel postulate. Parallels are defined in terms of a relationship between straight lines. But what is a straight line? I can draw a line with a pencil and ruler, but is it straight? Close or microscopic inspection has always revealed the lines I draw as not straight. So, I believe "straight line" is a concept, the conjunction of other concepts, "straight" and "line." Those concepts are something in my mind, and not at all something found in the world. It's the same with Space, Time, etc. We abstract from our experiences and from other abstractions, but the specific interaction which is the experience is fleeting and ineffable.

Self and Other

All of these reflections are instigated by the hidden culprit of our existence, the reflexive nature of consciousness. If, somehow, the grapevine in my patio was able to record what was happening to it without thinking about it, would it worry about the world of its happenings? In fact, the grapevine does make some records, such as growth rings and annual layers of leaves shed. In fact, all living things leave records of their existence, however poorly kept, otherwise life and paleontology would not be possible. The presumption we have about those records is that they were simply made, not considered. The philosophical assumption underlying that presumption is that we observe records, not just arbitrary assemblages of stuff. The same assumption justifies geology and other sciences in which observations are considered as traces of the past. Oddly enough, the same assumption misleads superstitious people into making claims about a supernatural world. Such claims are based on the confusion that the records are "real," not simply an interpretation. So, we must be careful in using this philosophical assumption: that we believe such is the case, or we experienced it,  is not proof that it is the case.
 

Making an observation is something a conscious agent does. An unconscious agent might leave a record, but that is an inadvertent feature of its existence. Observation entails intent to do something, something planned. But, is it not possible to do something without consciousness? The answer must be "Yes," which also entails a difference between mere intelligence and self-conscious intelligence; i.e., self-conscious intelligence is the sort of intelligence involved in the being each of us calls "I." The intelligent creature which plans something and then does it could be machine-like; it may have no "I." There is no prohibition of very smart programs that take account of large numbers of circumstances and apply principled solutions to them. We have built such machines and sent them to explore our Solar System. An unbiased observer might find it very difficult to tell the difference between such machines and a self-conscious being making a voluntary choice. After all, I assume intelligence is an important component of self-consciousness, so the more pre-programmed cases and rules are built into a machine, the more like us (intelligent and self-conscious beings) it will seem. But, of course, we know it is "only" a machine.
 

Why should I believe that you are not a machine? The problem of The Other comes down to this: I believe you are a personality, just like me. It is not that you are the same as me, but that you are sufficiently similar. What is 'sufficiently similar?' I don't know exactly. What I do know is that people seem to behave as I do, and they have similar biological appearances. They talk and they walk. When people laugh or cry, I have some idea of what's going on in their Minds. On the other hand, I don't know any of those things about creatures I experience as not having a Mind.
 

Like observation, The Other creates a problem. Were I alone, or if I believed I was the only Mind around, a fully solipcistic Universe would be satisfactory. It is the irksome presence of Others that destroys that notion, or at least makes it difficult to put into operation. The fact the world and its peoples seem to go on independently of my wishes creates a problem of self-consciousness.
 

At this point, I have introduced several problems. I would like to discuss them, but, first, I have to present a metaphysical theory. Again, I affirm materialism because it does seem to me that world is all one kind of substance. I don't think there are any other substances, such as eidos, souls, spirits, gods, etc, as I have not heard any argument or had any experience which even remotely suggests such existences. Traditionally, this monistic materialist starting point stumbles over issues of psychology and consciousness, which is why Twentieth Century Analytical (English-speaking) Philosophy is preoccupied with the problem of Mind. Bishop Berkeley famously went all the way two centuries ago, making everything subjective: 'it's all in one's Mind.'. Hume and the Empiricists went the other way, reducing Mind to matter, thus leading to Reductionism, Behaviorism, etc.
 

Why would Bishop Berkeley's God want to create an Other? Does that prove its existence to itself? Why would Hume and others allow for a deity, since, in principle, none is required, not even in  the Newtonian Universe? Was that their way of introducing some sort of consciousness?

Kantian Idealism broke ground for Berkeley's subjectivism, because Kant introduced the noumena, the ding an sich, as unknowable. What we experience are phenomena, supposedly the impact of the noumena on our perceptual systems. On the Phenomenalist account, what we experience is in ourselves, in the observational apparatus, not in the world. Thus, Berkeley: there is just me, no "outside" world. But this is also an account that Hume put forward, except that, for Empiricists, the perceptual system is part of the material world. In that case, the "I" has to be explained away as an epiphenomenon of matter. This last has been the main trend in English philosophy.
 

What I think is this: subjectivism and empiricism are Yin and Yang. I think any account of the Universe must locate both Mind and Body in it, but they are one thing. I take it that subjectivism and objectivism are both true; they are "frames of reference," to steal one of Einstein's phrases. If I offer an explanation of the Universe, taken from the "outside" perspective, I would explain the multitude of Minds as the workings of Matter. In this case, I would describe feelings of love, hate, etc in terms of particular hormonal and neurological states. Ideation would be explained as processes in the brain and related organs. In fact, modern physiology (including neurobiology) is making major advances in explaining human behavior just that way. The current epitome of that research are the real time, computed tomographies of a patient's feelings, qualitative senses, speech activity, etc. In short, modern scientific theories explain the presence of Minds in a materialist Universe.
 

What that science does not explain is my sense of self. That is, I am me, not someone else, even if there is a good, neurophysiological explanation of what is going on when I assert or sense that. The sense of self is not the same thing as those goings-on, even if someone can induce or defeat that sense in me by provoking certain neurons or regions of the brain. Self-consciousness creates a privileged frame of reference. Now, whatever that self-consciousness experiences has to include the world explained by science. That is, even if there is just me (as Bishop Berkeley would have it), even if I am alone in the Universe, I have experiences of others, or stereotypically, The Other. Moreover, I think the Universe works the way the science of my imagination says it does. So, starting from a subjective point of view, I am stuck with coming up with an explanation of the Universe which is the same as the one given by starting from an objective point of view. Since The Other and the observed material world work the way my subjectivity says it does, and the subjectivity works as explained by material causes, there needs be concordance between the two.

What I cannot approve, however, is making of the Mind a substance; i.e., a soul or spirit or real thing that has an existence similar to that of matter. There is simply no proof or evidence that any such thing exists, at least not in the same way observable matter exists. Further, in agreement with Prof. Searle, Mind cannot be a property of matter; i.e., it is not inherent in the matter. I think Searle's claim, that consciousness is a state of the brain, is essentially correct. Those words do not settle everything, because we can argue over 'what is a state?'

When I think of a "state," I normally associate it with static, unchanging, or a meta-stable condition. Thus, the state of a logic array is the particular configuration of 0s and 1s at a given time. But, I also think of consciousness as an active process; as dynamic, not static. If consciousness is dynamic, it is not a state in the sense of  that logic array. For that reason, I tend to think of consciouness as software, which resolves a puzzle. According to Turing's theory of the stored program machine, the program itself is data. I know this to be true in my everday experience with computers, although  they are implemented with the von Neumann, not the Turing, design. (von Neumann computers arre reducible to Turing Machines.)  So, if consciousness is like software, it has both a dynamic and static aspect, the static aspect being what is stored as data in a sequence of 0s and 1s. The dynamic aspect of consciousness is, of course, the sequence of states observed when the data are inserted into an appropriate processor; i.e., when the data are coinsidered as instructions. I take this analogy as fundamental in the explication of consciousness. It is my interpretation of Searle's word "state."
 

The upshot of this line of argument is this: conscious software is not only possible, but already exists. Producing a self-conscious computer is doable. If and when we make such a machine, it forces the conclusion that Self and Other are really one and the same thing, seen from different perspectives, different frames of reference.

Choice is Natural

If we can collapse the difference between Self and Other, some of the underpinnings of old arguments about intelligence, free will, etc are dislodged.
 

For one thing, Turing's Test does not really require the strict conditons he imposed. It doesn't matter whether we put computers and people behind screens and communicate with keyboards. Anyway, we are already doing that on a massive scale on the Internet. How do you know what I write is not the work of some robot? The fact is, as I have previously insisted, once we have an intelligent, self-conscious creature, who or what is then admitted to the circle of intelligent, self-conscious creatures is a matter of voluntary choice. Were I a robot - which I assure you I am not - would you admit me to your circle of intellectual peers? friends? lovers? So, on my view, the key problem is voluntary choice by qualified individuals.
 

"Free Will" has been debated endlessly. For many, it seems an insurmountable obstacle to acceptance of our natural condition. But, I think that is largely an inflationary  result; i.e., the problem is blown up out of proportion. Proponents of some sort of spiritual free will seem to assume that making any choice whatsoever is possible. That is, the cow can jump over the moon, and I can cure myself of my diseases. (Perhaps this sort of thinking is responsible for common belief in spiritual healing: one's illnesses are "all in one's head.")  I, on the other hand, have been a lifelong skeptic of impossible dreams, LaDeDa (Voltaire's Pangloss), fatalism and determinism. Further, there is no necessity to invoke Quantum Mechanics in the brain or elsewhere to explain Free Will. What we call Free Will, the core of which is voluntary choice, is a perfectly natural phenomenon which we see at work everyday. It is neither surprising nor transcendental nor reducible.
 

The starting point in explaining Free Will must be recognition that all choices are limited; i.e., in fact, those said to make voluntary choices do so by selecting among a limited range of alternatives. Cows don't just jump over the Moon, although, obviously, intelligent creatures can imagine such possibilities and human beings have landed there. (Here, there has to be a long detour about intentionality, which I prefer not to take in this essay.) Creatures that choose an undoable alternative simply don't get it done, or they kill themselves in the process. Will E. Coyote may have run off a thousand cliffs and lived to chase another tail, but these days errant runners most often end up as road kill. Thus, what we see are the survivors, those who made voluntary choices that worked out at least well enough to avoid destruction. Of course, that is also what Darwinian evolution is all about. But, evolutionary choices are not the same as voluntary choices, because, as nearly as anyone can determine, there is no thought, no consciousness, going on in evolution. That sort of choice just happens.

Simple, mechanical determinism eliminates any choice from the equation. Everything that happens is the result of some programmed sequence. The program can be a deity or a Newtonian clockwork, but it always goes from A to B without fail. On its face, this is not as impressive a claim as it seems, because the totality of our Universe is finite and we can always assign an ordering to any finite collection. What is impressive is the implied claim of determinists, that the order they propose is the only one possible; i.e., what happens must be so, and cannot be any other way. That sort of claim flies in the face of modern theories of logic, as Godel, Church and others showed that an infinity - or at least a very large number - of orderings can be assigned to any finite collection. The number of orderings is at least as large as the number of permutations, and could be even larger depending on the method of ordering. On this modern view, Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are only two of many logically equivalent theories. Fortunately, we are entitled to pick the one we use by applying principles such as Occam's Razor. The rationale for such a choice is that it makes no logical difference for the outcome. Determinists might mean something like 'this theory is the one that explains the Universe;'  i.e.,  they choose to pick this one. If so, that is trivially true, but I suspect determinists, dualists and spiritualists mean something more by their claim. They impute a necessity beyond the manipulations of logic to or in our Universe. That sort of claim inevitably entails Forces which act according to Principles or Laws to make it so. Invariably, those Forces are themselves unseen, unheard and unfelt; we only know them by their effects. When I am pushed back into my seat during the airplane's takeoff, that is an effect of the Force of acceleration. But, why do we need these invisible intermediaries? Are they not parameters introduced to make our experience comfortable? According to Einstein's Relativity, what happened was a subtle distortion of Space-Time when I felt accelerated. When I explain this feeling to my friends, I tell them the airplane accelerated and climbed really fast. I attrribute that to the airplanes powerful engines. I don't tell my friends about Relativity, etc, and given them a memorial set of worked out equations.
 

Evolution does illustrate a fact important in voluntary choice:  Nature does not prevent it. If the determinist thesis were correct, there would only be one path of evolution. That is, every step of biological evolution would have been predictable from pre-existing conditions using specific laws and methods of calculation. This is the same sort of thinking that must reject Quantum Mechanical randomness. But, we know that evolution is not predictable, or, at least, we have been unable to discover any formula which describes the steps and creates the Tree of Life. Most of the evidence that relates one life form to another is statistical in nature. There have random mass extinctions, resulting from geological and astrophysical events, which have brought about major changes in the network of living things. So, the evolution of both inorganic and living things is at least not easily predictable, which implies that natural processes can take more than one direction at least some of the time. This also suggests that intelligent creatures do not have to be strictly bound computing machines.
 

In fact, it is obvious to me, and I think everyone else as well, that I make little choices every hour of every day. Should I go to the store? Should I get up and go to work? Is it time to eat? Should I really eat that chocolate? Should I work on this essay? In all of those questions lies more than one possible outcome. I can work or not work; i.e., I can do this or that or nothing. Nothing in the natural world forces to any particular action: maybe I go to the store, or maybe I don't. I could be driven to a conclusion by my circumstances; e.g., my desire to eat when I am hungry. But, even then, how I satisfy my hunger is not given in the problem. I could catch a squirrel or a bird, eat ants, chew on wheat or rice, or just go to the store. Which solution I pursue depends on a myriad of factors. Decisions depend critically on circumstances, but they are not forthcoming from those circumstances. That there are squirrrels and crows in my environment does not provoke me into catching and eating them, unless I am desperately hungry and there are no other choices. But, even the absence of choice in some situations does not undermine the notion that choices are normally available.
 

I think it is curiously true, that if the world were strictly determined, writing this essay would not be so difficult. Instead, what would happen is a pouring out of words in a certain fashion. Moreover, it would be impossible for me to change my opinion. I would never have progressed from a young man fascinated by Kantian Idealism to the old man more inclined to some form of relativism and naturalism. I don't see how a determined organism could proceed from the one to the other. So, I take it that some form of choice is implicit in the process of our lives.

Machine Choice

The lure of determinism and other reductionist philosophies is that we can see how decisions are made outside of ourselves. I know this computer performs under control of software, because I installed the software. As a software developer (programmer), I can see the results of my work. There is no question how those results come about. That situation suggests to me that the computer does not think, certainly not in the sense that I think. But that suggestion is false.
 

By the same token, I should think of my human acquaintances as machines. They come to predictable conclusions about most things most of the time. I can "see" what someone I know well is thinking. I can even "see" how the majority of people are thinking, thanks to polls and innumerable media reports of human behavior. Human beings are, for the most part, predictable creatures. So are most other animals and plants. The simpler, less evolved an organism, the more predictable its behavior. (This is not to subscribe to any form of a doctrine of "progress.") To the extent that behavior is unpredictable, it is correlated with the possession of complicated brains and neural cortex. It is only when complex brain tissue takes control that pre-programmed pathways are overridden. "Overriding" is a key idea which allows me to distinguish my undetermined friends from the rest of the active world.
 

Our perception of machines as programmed or otherwise mechanically determined underlies the common denigration of their abilities. Of course that machine cannot think! That machine certainly cannot make a choice! Those predictable features of machines are obvious to us as observers, just as is the predictability of our familiars. We know how the domestic animals and humans in our lives behave. We expect what they are about to do. Thus, in the third person, there is no difference between living things and machines with respect to thinking and choice. Taken further, we make sense of human behavior by investigating operations in brains. It is demonstrable that seeing certain colors or hearing certain things is associated with certain neural activities. It is demonstrable that the frontal lobes of the brain are involved in making choices and conforming to social norms. These days, after decades of neurophysiological research, it is fashionable to say 'your brain caused you to say this.' That is, there is a very high correlation (probability) between externally observable conscious and unconscious behavior and brain activity. Science has advanced to the point that it is sometimes possible to predict behavior based on brain states. Nothing like this knowledge was at hand a century ago, or, in my living memory, three or four decades ago. (Recent science and medicine results from the revolution in biological knowledge that began with the post-WWII generation. Historically, new ideas take about 50 years to take hold and generate new applications.)
 

No one would question the scientific explanation of human behavior were it not for consciousness. The machines we know about do not yell and scream when we turn them off. They do not struggle to survive. They do not seem to exhibit the sort of willed behavior we observe in organic, living things. It is I who declares machines unthinking, because I have an I. Yet, my I is presumably explicable as brain processes. This is the supposed paradox which has driven the Free Will and other controversies for millennia. But it is not a paradox at all: it only seems so because we confuse two different frames of references. We want to think about the world ("outside") in the same terms as the subjective self ("inside"), but cannot, so some of us ascribe two different kinds of being to the self and other. Those who have done that now we have a problem of connecting the two things.
 

The solution to those problems is simple enough: there is only thing, the brain and the body, the material, biological stuff of our existence. Our brains have become sufficiently clever to present the world to ourselves in more than one "layer;" i.e., there is ourself and the sense of ourself. Self-consciousness is a brain function: how else could it happen? When we take this perspective, the solution of "intentionality" - mental causation - is simple enough. Just as our nerves control our muscles, so our brain (the nerve center) controls the rest of the nerves. This is so blatantly obvious in simple animals that it is taught as a fact in High School. It is only when superstitious people sort through the implications of what is before their eyes that they object. "Absolutely not! I cannot be just a lump of protoplasm! I am more than that!" Yet the third person evidence to the contrary is plain enough for anyone to see. For this reason, we are not different from the machines which most people believe to be unintelligent.
 

I take it as a fact that I have an I. Further, I assume others who seem like me have an I. As long as I have I have thought about it - at least fifty years - I have never been able to prove what goes on in other people's heads involves an independent existence, another self - the other. It's just that they act in the manner I've learned to expect of human beings. But, then so do a number of primates and other animals, all of whom seem to have some sort of personality. It was recently reported in the news media that elephants recognize themselves in the mirror, a crucial test of self-consciousness. Is the existence of self more widespread than previously thought? If so, how would we find out who has it, and who doesn't? There is a glimmer of evidence leaning toward the hypothesis that self-consciousness is not an exclusive human attribute. If so, somewhere in our neurons are the processes that makes me think of myself as One, alone and different.
 

Why shouldn't this be the case? It is commonly believed that animals have a will to live. Unlike plants, which have no neural networks, animals exhibit purposes, intentions. Whereas a tree just stands there and gets chopped down, animals avoid, flee and fight their persecutors. The will to live, I believe, involves some elemental sense of self, at least enough to know that it is I who is in danger. That I is a very useful thing in other ways, because it makes possible individual activities in the context of very complex societies. There are the Bees and Ants, who are presumably highly genetically programmed in all their acts. (However, even they make some choices, such as when to grow a new Queen.) On the hand, many predatory mammals have unique behavior within their clans and tribes. Cats learn how to hunt from their mothers, which leads to considerable variation in techniques even within the same geographical region. Bonobos and chimpanzeees are only surpassed by their human cousins in the complexity of their lives. It is well established that our near relatives among primates are capable of learning elementary languages, and are well able to distinguish themselves from others as well as grasp their particular roles in society. All of that supports the notion that the sense of self is widespread and probably has important evolutionary advantages.
 

A century ago, it was commonly believed that only human beings were capable of voluntary choice. Only people had a self. Only people were self-conscious. Since then, the drift of the evidence and this essay is that those beliefs are just not so. There is a gradation of abilities in nature. Some of us have more of this, less of that, than others.
 

What, then, of "machine choice?" It is the same story. The third person sees the processor and the program, not a choice. But, if those details are hidden from sight, as in the Turing Test, what would we think then? GOOGLE has developed a smart translation software which updates its data base and rules by an analysis of its results and other people's results. The program might, for example, read story in the French newspaper, Le Monde, and compare its translation of a story to another translation. Based on the comparison, and some sort of rating system for successful translation, the program can re-evaluate its methods. Now, in fact, all this goes on in workaday computers located at many different agencies, not just GOOGLE. Do those computers have a self? Do they think?
 

I believe it is too late to answer those questions. Decades ago, people could scoff at "thinking machines," and dismiss such things as science fiction dreams (or nightmares). Today, Stanley Kubrik's paranoid HAL is not far from reality. Whether modern machines are thinking seems a matter of definition, not of possibility. Large computational centers have "thinking" capabilities that far surpass those of any individual I know, and usually exceed even the ability of their programmers to grasp a problem. It is no longer unusual for climate and other models (software) to produce entirely unexpected results. Unlike the past, recent unexpected results are not attributable to machine failure or "bugs" in the software. Different machines running different software very often come up with the same "anomalies," which means they are not anomalies Rather, human brains are simply unable to "see" into those problems deeply enough. It's the same with chess programs, which now routinely beat human players, including Grand Masters. In defensive reaction against those awesome computational powers, it is often said computers only succeed because of brute thought; i.e., they haven't elicted any new principle or idea, but only shown the further consequences of what was programmed. Perhaps, but sometimes the results of calculation force changes in humanly invented theories. Who or what is thinkng about whatever?

From where we have arrived it is not too far to accept machines as making choices. They already do it every time they encounter a branch instruction. Branches aren't new: they've been around for more than 50 years. Check this, then go here or there. These simple programmed choices are probably beneath most people as signifying any sort of intelligent choice, but they are nonetheless choices. Human choices, in outline, are the same. Several different objects are brought to our attention. We examine conditions we believe are associated with the objects. We consider outcomes based on supposed.causal laws.We weigh the positive or negative values (whatever that means!) associated with objects, methods and outcomes. Computer programs do exactly the same sort of thing when evaluating the matrices of partial differential equations which represent turbulent flow, climate change, flying wings and nuclear explosions (including supernovae). We do it when planning a shopping trip, finding a mandatory, but belated, gift for a relative, deciding who to hire or fire, driving a car or casting our ballots oin Election day. We think of ourselves as different from the machines, because most of us do not follow a prepared agenda when deciding, whereas machines typically follow a program. So, as before, it is usual for people to dismiss machines as inferior and unthinking and amoral. But that is the wrong attitude to have about machines, unless one defines choice as something that only happens to creatures that have hormones, chemically mediated synapses and emotional states. But, it doesn't matter as, soon enough, we will have machines with emotional states that make equally irrational decisions.

Correlations

There are gradations of intelligence and choice. Whether a "machine" or biological creature thinks or makes choices is a matter of definition; I think arbitrary definition. If I am right, we need to adjust our usages according to the developing situation. Fifty years ago, even 25 years ago, it was common to separate man from machine, but that is no longer the case. It is becoming increasing difficult to tell the difference in many ordinary activities. Thus, "intelligent" and "voluntary choice" are terms that must rise above their specific implementations.

Many puzzles are more easily solved, if we speak of agents as if they were intelligent and free. I certainly believe I am, so I am inclined to give credence to the existence of self-consciousness, the I which is me. I think others who I credit as self-conscious will assent to the foregoing statement. There may be others yet who are self-conscious, but whom I do not recognize. Most likely, that lack of recognition arises from a lack of communication. I haven't heard any owls tell me they are wise.
 

The metaphysical problem which may arise is the existence of consciousness, the first person. When the material world is configured to produce self-consciousness, it divides into self and other. An important part of self is its relative location - its place - in the world. I defend my little lump of flesh ferociously, because I know when it's gone, I'm gone. Despite my feeling of being separate and independent, I know of no one who survived death, so I believe whatever I am will die with my body. I resent that, it seems unjust, but that is the way the world is. In the end, self and other are united.

The fact of biological individuals does delimit the sense of self. I have a self just because there is a non-self. Self-hood is a state relative to surrounding matter. It is contiguous with the nervous system, as I do not sense stuff as belonging to me unless I can feel it. Since I have problems with my peripheral nerves, I know that my nails are part of me by visual inspection, but I normally cannot feel them. I can sense things that happen to my body as if they were events in the world, out there, not in here. What constitutes myself is not only what I sense, but my bodily reaction to it. I am a pile of chemicals which undergo internal and external reactions for a time. If I were entirely dispassionate, it would not matter whether I lived or died, but that is not the way it is. I care about my self, or so it seems, but that is how the monitoring system works. My "care" is "really" just a bunch of hormones and other chemicals raging around, which cause the monitoring system - my "self" - to feel a certain way.

How does my self-consciousness arise? How does it work? I don't know, but I am sure the neurophysiogists will work it out. Sooner or later, there will be a generally accepted explanation which shows how consciousness works, step by step. Will this somehow reduce or eliminate my sense of self? No, not at all. I will still be me. Do I become incompetent or morally depraved on account of this explanation? No, not at all. I am still as responsible as before.

Although we are, at last, on the threshold of explaining brain processes, that scientific knowledge does not change or wave away the problems of thought or voluntrary choice. Because I think and feel I am, and so do millions of others, I have to treat the self in a special class. It is clearly not a substantial being, as it does not exist apart from matter. It is not a property or quality of matter, as the self cannot be found in any particular place or organization. The self is most like computer software: it is systemic. One reason our philosophical predecessors did not arrive at this answer is they didn't have computers. Treating self as a system, a collection of states, is an entirely new idea. It not be the exactly correct, ultimate answer, but it is close.

It is the operation of everything in the body together which produces a self, an awareness. Someday we will be able to trace our selfhood to this or that brain process, but that won't change the self. When Gilbert Ryle argued against the Ghost in the Machine just over fifty years ago, he had in mind the traditional dualists. It is an odd twist of fate that his phrase suits the actual state of affairs very well.