The phenomenon of man

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We know from experience that man has a mind and consciousness. It is also evident that animals seem to have more mental activities the closer they are to us. Thus, mammals have more minds that reptiles, reptiles more than fish, fish more than invertebrates (possibly excluding cephalopods). All animals except sponges have a nervous system, although some have very little: the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has only 300 neurons. Plants do not have a nervous system, but they have some sensitivity and are able to move slowly. And when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered microorganisms in the seventeenth century, no one doubted that these tiny creatures were alive. True, biologists have not yet agreed on whether viruses, even more tiny beings, are alive or not. I have written about this in another post in this blog.

On intelligence

In his book On intelligence Jeff Hawkins writes this:

Francis Crick wrote a book about brains called The astonishing hypothesis. The astonishing hypothesis was simply that the mind is the creation of the cells in the brain. There is nothing else, no magic, no special sauce, only neurons and a dance of information... In calling this a hypothesis, Crick was being politically correct. That the cells in our brain create the mind is a fact, not a hypothesis. We need to understand what these thirty billion cells do and how they do it.

Wonderful! On the one hand, he states that it is a fact, not a hypothesis, that the neurons of the brain create the mind. On the other, he accepts that we don’t know what they do, or how they do it. How does Hawkins know this for a fact, not a hypothesis? By infused knowledge? How was he able to detect that fact? Are there any arguments to support it? He gives none, he just asserts. Is this good science?

Are we about to become immortal?

Arthur C. Clarke

In 1965 Arthur C. Clarke published a short story, titled Dial F for Frankenstein, later published in the collection The wind from the sun: stories of the space age. In that story Clarke proposed the following scenario:

When all global telephone systems are connected via geostationary satellites, the number of components of the global system will exceed those in the human brain. As such a system will have access to the information in all the computers connected to the network, we’ll have a very complex system with an extremely high amount of information. If conscience arises automatically from such a system, the computer network, connected by telephone, should be conscious and, being far superior to any human brain, will take control of the Earth.