You Are an Automaton
On mind-reading machines and digital nature of world
Following the article where I demonstrated the non-existence of soul, let’s now have a look at the claim about non-physical nature of mind espoused by religious believers and naïve spiritualists. Are their objections valid as they frantically shake and vibrate in denial when the existence of their cherished immaterial phenomena comes under attack of ruthless empirical evidence?
If the possibility of reconstruction and decoding of sensory data, which I touched upon in another article, was not enough for some, on May 1st, 2023, Jerry Tang, Amanda LeBel, Shailee Jain, and Alexander G. Huth published a study on their “non-invasive decoder that reconstructs continuous language from cortical semantic representations recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).” In other words, “[g]iven novel brain recordings, this decoder generates intelligible word sequences that recover the meaning of perceived speech, imagined speech and even silent videos.”
As Jon Hamilton writes in his overview of the study, “Participants wore headphones that streamed audio from podcasts. […] Those streams of words produced activity all over the brain, not just in areas associated with speech and language. After participants listened to hours of stories in the scanner, the MRI data was sent to a computer [in order] to match specific patterns of brain activity with certain streams of words.” Furthermore, the system had to be trained for each individual participant separately. That is, each set of scans of every subject had to be correlated separately with those predefined streams of words.
(Now, the reason this was the case may be obvious from the fact that qualitative experience, as I elaborated elsewhere, is a user illusion, indeed. Which, not surprisingly, is also something even ancient traditions are well aware of. Buddhism in particular is famous for its concept of emptiness, positing that not only are phenomena devoid of independent existence, they are also empty of meaning or value. In other words, they lack any particular quality as such — everything is simply as it is and qualities are mere conceptual quantitative constructs subject to socio-biological conditioning. And that is a proposition you can very easily verify for yourself by observing your field of experience, i.e. psyche.)
So, after training the system as described above, the team then conducted three experiments. In first, participants listened to “new stories in the scanner and the computer decoder attempted to reconstruct these stories from each participant’s brain activity.” In second experiment, the system attempted to decode “words a person just imagined saying,” and in the last one, “participants watched videos that told a story without using words.”
While the system is still in its infancy and thus rather crude — it struggles with some specific grammatical features (pronouns, proper nouns such as names and places, etc.) and at times just does not work at all — its accuracy (72–82%) proved to be higher than what would be expected from random chance.
As for actual results, for example, when a participant heard “i got up from the air mattress and pressed my face against the glass of the bedroom window expecting to see eyes staring back at me but instead finding only darkness,” the model’s output was, “i just continued to walk up to the window and open the glass i stood on my toes and peered out i didn’t see anything and looked up again i saw nothing,” or a phrase “I didn’t even have my driver’s license yet,” was decoded as, “she hadn’t even learned to drive yet.”
All in all, and as Alexander Huth, the study’s senior author, said for Scientific American, “What we’re getting is still kind of a ‘gist,’ or more like a paraphrase, of what the original story was.” Still, it’s a definitive proof of concept that even abstract thoughts at large are not only measurable, but it is also possible to (objectively) reconstruct them.
And that, my friends, is another, rather substantial, nail in the coffin of religion, spirituality, body-mind dualism, etc. — basically anything that hinges on existence of immaterial phenomena.
Now, considering the quantum nature of Universe, that is to say that quantum systems transition from one energy level to another in jumps (or quanta — hence “quantum”), and not in infinitely gradual continuous way, it can be said that Universe is digital.
As anyone who ever worked with digital audio (most probably) knows, sound is represented in digital domain in discrete steps called samples. Density of samples in time as well as their data depth, then, determine how smooth the resulting sound perception will be — push both values beyond human sensory limits, and you won’t be able to tell digital from what we call analog. It’s a bit more complex than that, but that’s the basic gist of it. Similarly, it’s only thanks to coarseness of human perception, which is several magnitudes below the quantum resolution, that humans perceive an illusion of smooth, “analog” transitions in phenomena.
That naturally means that thoughts, which are demonstrably physical (see above), are digital in their nature. And since human is a “product” of evolutionary processes, people are firmly in the category of what could be called artificial intelligence. Not in the sense of anomaly or non-naturalness, but in terms of principles we usually apply to human-conceived AI as autonomous agents. Perhaps that’s also the reason why many people entertain the simulation hypothesis, or why a tool in our own image has the shape and attributes of what we denote as digital AI.
Thus, human being is basically a socio-biologically conditioned automaton. An NPC, if you will, fully reactive to stimuli, obeying literal programming, thus, unable to exercise the act of free choice. All because of the power of instincts, habits, and social training that override the actual individual will.
But of course, there is an antidote. In order to liberate the will and be able to choose freely at last, even if only from a narrow set of options as the options are always limited, one must become enlightened. Nothing else will cut it. Only self-realization makes you a genuine player character. To become self-realized, then, you must achieve the impossible — you must choose to reclaim your overpowered will, you must be stronger than yourself and claim victory.
