Egoistic we had become, when after centuries upon centuries of accruement of human cognizance, we realized the dichotomy that set us apart from the beasts. We can think: the single most important quality that bestowed upon us the privilege and prerogative to rule over the others. As we utilize our psyche, we can’t help but think how our thinking comes into existence. We are a synthesis of corporeal particles, but intangibly we display such spiritual characteristics. From the brain, the cerebrum, the gray matter, the neurons, the synapses, down to the molecules, each and every one of them is incapable of thinking on its own, but collectively they display intelligent behavior. But what is even more astounding is that they, as a single entity, are aware of their own existence.
We are aware of ourselves. We are aware of our environment. We are mindfully aware that we are aware of what we are aware of. And such meta-thinking shall go on ad infinitum. If we are our own awareness, then what constitutes that awareness? That awareness, uniquely our own, had not existed before we were born, but germinated progressively thereafter. ‘I’ popped into existence, just like that. We began to question what ‘I’ is. If we probe into the earliest juncture of our lives that we can recall, it seems that our awareness started at that point (we are not aware of what happened before that). If our awareness is circumscribed by our memory or knowledge of what occurs around us, does that mean awareness is knowledge and vice-versa?
Nay. Computers can store mountainous amount of data, but that doesn’t make them any more enlightened. Apropos, a brain that can store voluminous amount of knowledge doesn’t make it any more intelligent. To be enlightened, some thing has to be able to make sense of that knowledge. Some thing has to be able to observe. That is the ‘I’ in me. And ‘I’ am my own awareness, and vice-versa. Ultimately, that still hasn’t answered our question of what constitutes awareness. If we try to dissect the process we go through as we realize something, we will still not be able to find the thing that realizes the information. We still come back to ‘I’, yet not knowing what ‘I’ consists of.
Then, can machines think? Ostensibly the answer is no. But as we scrutinize our body anatomically, we find that many of its mechanisms can be emulated by its mechanical counter-parts. Obviously, our nanotechnology is still in its infancy; and even if that isn’t the case, it’s hard to orchestrate billions of miniature artificial devices fit together, not to mention to prognosticate their unpredictable collective behavior. Thus, the only viable method is by means of computational simulation. But even a simulation requires profound comprehension of the modus operandi of a human psyche, which is still too unfathomable an enigma.
Such fastidious introspection as mentioned earlier had not paved much a road as an insight into transcribing our mind computationally. The more we question what constitutes ‘I’, the more we get entangled in this circular catechism. Abjectly desperate, we may resort to panpsychism: every thing in this universe has a mind of its own. The fact that a rock can’t move on its own or that it has too simple a structure doesn’t entitle us to assume that it is not aware of its existence. Incidentally, it suggests to me that there are shades of awareness. We are on the extreme right, fully aware of the demarcation between the macrocosm and our inner microcosm. Animals may have their level of awareness somewhere in the middle, while rocks are on the extreme left, virtually unaware of itself. If this is the case, then there is no definite mechanism for self-awareness. Everything is self-aware, but at different levels.