Insight in the search for consciousness

"Insight equals intelligence plus consciousness." An insight I had this morning over coffee.

Learning facts at school - whatever subject - physics, geography, history, maths, languages - gives a young mind a structure, a framework of memorised facts which must then be fleshed out by insight.

You can learn without understanding. I can trot out schoolboy facts such as the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 or that the chemical formula for sulphuric acid is H₂SO_4, without understanding the geopolitics of north-west Europe at the time nor the way hydrogen, sulphur and oxygen atoms bond to create a particularly corrosive fluid.

Insight comes later; it comes from thinking, reading, listening, discussing, experiencing. It comes from observation and curiosity, but does not necessarily come immediately from them. 'Eureka moments' come to us throughout our lives, whether we're studying something or not; these moments - big and small - add up to the sum of what we know - and who we are.

From Wiktionary:

Noun insight (countable and uncountable, plural insights)

• A sight or view of the interior of anything; a deep inspection or view; introspection; frequently followed by the preposition 'into'. 
• Power of acute observation and deduction
• Intuitive apprehension of the inner nature of a thing or things; intuition.
• Synonyms: penetration, discernment, perception
• (psychiatry) An individual's awareness of the nature and severity of his or her mental illness
• (marketing) Knowledge (usually derived from consumer understanding) that a company applies in order to make a product or brand perform better and be more appealing to customers
• (artificial intelligence) An extended understanding of a subject resulting from identification of relationships and behaviours within a model, context, or scenario.

Notice that artificial intelligence (AI) has made an appearance. I'd like to focus for a while on AI in the context of 'singularity' - that theoretical moment at which computers come to surpass the human brain in terms of operations per second, at which runaway learning takes off at a unstoppable pace.

There is a profound philosophical divide between AI singularity proponents (who say that computers can develop consciousness, which would emerge from the complexity) and those who believe that computers (being artificial constructs) will never acquire consciousness.

You and I know what the word 'consciousness' means. If you didn't, you wouldn't be reading these words with understanding. Now - can an inanimate object ever acquire consciousness, awareness of its own subjective experience? Qualia (plural of quale) are the building-blocks of consciousness. Your experience of a stubble field on a hot, still August day, flies buzzing; your experience of waiting at a bus stop, anxious that you'll not make an important meeting; your experience of holding a small, scared animal in your hands - is what makes you you. And the cumulative memories of these experiences, these qualia memories, contribute to your sense of self.

Example: in January, recovering from a heavy dose of flu, I wrote a short story [Pt 1 here]. Though the events were purely fictional and set in a place I have never visited, the story lives with me in my mind, and several times since I have had flashbacks to this story. Writing it, I experienced it as intensively as though I was there. This 'flashback to fiction' is a variation of everyday flashbacks. I'm in the bathroom, washing my teeth. Sudden flashback to the mid-1970s, a family visit to Hatfield House, gazing up at the Jacobean chimney stacks. Later than day, I'm by the computer listening to David Bowie singing Lady Stardust. Flashback to the smell of Vim and scouring smoke-blackened cooking utensils on scout camp, early 1970s. But though these flashback experiences are an everyday occurrence, these two above-mentioned flashbacks were new, in that I'd never re-experienced the qualia since the moment I first had them.

Was Lady Stardust going through my mind as I squatted under an army-surplus marquee, removing remains of food burnt onto the bottom of the large cooking pan? The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars came out in February 1972; by the time of the scout camp that summer, the album had been played to death (to the extent that I know every word of every song on it to this day). So it's entirely possible that my flashback yesterday was prompted by sound.

Could a computer - an artificial construct - ever achieve that? Could an artificial intelligence recover from deep within its own neural network a memory of an experience of a feeling, like what it felt like when a new hard drive was plugged in, or an overheating motherboard, or the everyday emotions associated with being booted up or powered down? Could a computer be beset by thoughts of its ageing or its mortality? Could a computer be troubled by an inane tune going round its logic-board?

Personally, I doubt it. The insights we gather about the world about us, based on our learning and our observation, are critical to what it is to be human. Below us are higher-order creatures - other mammalian species, birds or cephalopods, which also exhibit signs of well-developed consciousness.

I would wager than they too experience qualia and memories of qualia; I would expect them to have moments of insight that contribute to the way they intuitively understand the environment around them - something more than instinct.

More insights into learning here.

This time last year:
Loving Vincent - review

This time five years ago:
UFO credibility test

This time six years ago:
Junction ready for road to unbuilt sports centre

This time seven years ago:
Park nad Książecem - Vistula escarpment, beautiful autumn

This time ten years ago:
Obama wins US presidential election