I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [24]
The sad truth is that this image is the most ludicrous possible distortion of computer-based research aimed at understanding how cognition and sensation take place in minds. It could be criticized in any number of ways, but the key sleight of hand that I would like to focus on here is how Searle casually states that the experience claimed for this beer-can brain model is localized to one single beer can, and how he carefully avoids any suggestion that one might instead seek the system’s experience of thirst in a more complex, more global, high-level property of the beer cans’ configuration.
When one seriously tries to think of how a beer-can model of thinking or sensation might be implemented, the “thinking” and the “feeling”, no matter how superficial they might be, would not be localized phenomena associated with a single beer can. They would be vast processes involving millions or billions or trillions of beer cans, and the state of “experiencing thirst” would not reside in three English words pre-painted on the side of a single beer can that popped up, but in a very intricate pattern involving huge numbers of beer cans. In short, Searle is merely mocking a trivial target of his own invention. No serious modeler of mental processes would ever propose the idea of one lonely beer can (or neuron) for each sensation or concept, and so Searle’s cheap shot misses the mark by a wide margin.
It’s also worth noting that Searle’s image of the “single beer can as thirst-experiencer” is but a distorted replay of a long-discredited idea in neurology — that of the “grandmother cell”. This is the idea that your visual recognition of your grandmother would take place if and only if one special cell in your brain were activated, that cell constituting your brain’s physical representation of your grandmother. What significant difference is there between a grandmother cell and a thirst can? None at all. And yet, because John Searle has a gift for catchy imagery, his specious ideas have, over the years, had a great deal of impact on many professional colleagues, graduate students, and lay people.
It’s not my aim here to attack Searle in detail (that would take a whole dreary chapter), but to point out how widespread is the tacit assumption that the level of the most primordial physical components of a brain must also be the level at which the brain’s most complex and elusive mental properties reside. Just as many aspects of a mineral (its density, its color, its magnetism or lack thereof, its optical reflectivity, its thermal and electrical conductivity, its elasticity, its heat capacity, how fast sound spreads through it, and on and on) are properties that come from how its billions of atomic constituents interact and form high-level patterns, so mental properties of the brain reside not on the level of a single tiny constituent but on the level of vast abstract patterns involving those constituents.
Dealing with brains as multi-level systems is essential if we are to make even the slightest progress in analyzing elusive mental phenomena such as perception, concepts, thinking, consciousness, “I”, free will, and so forth. Trying to localize a concept or a sensation or a memory (etc.) down to a single neuron makes no sense at all. Even localization to a higher level of structure, such as a column in the cerebral cortex (these are small structures containing on the order of forty neurons, and they exhibit a more complex collective behavior than single neurons do), makes no sense when it comes to aspects of thinking like analogy-making or the spontaneous bubbling-up of episodes from long ago.
Levels and Forces in the Brain
I once saw a book whose title was “Molecular Gods: How Molecules Determine Our Behavior”. Although I didn’t buy it, its title stimulated many thoughts in my brain. (What is a thought in a brain? Is a thought really inside a brain? Is a thought made of molecules?) Indeed, the very fact that I soon placed the book back up on the shelf is a perfect example of the kinds of thoughts that its title triggered