Will the non-computational characteristics of Human consciousness be ever be replicated by the digital circuitry? Science which itself is a by-product of such consciousness has still to find its existence amidst the deep mystery of the human mind. How science will achieve this is surely going to be an exciting event to watch in the human history. Witnessing how mind will out perform itself could be the milestone next only to the creation of universe.

In many ways, such as abstract generalization, current computers are fundamentally deficient in comparison to biological organisms. Animal intelligence suggests that one can speak of different style of solving AI problems. In recent years there has been increasing examination of the question of the wholeness associated with intelligent processing. Neural activity in the brain is bound together to represent information; but the nature of this binding is not known [2]. The brain constantly reorganizes itself based on the information task. We know it does, but how’s and why’s of the process is still mysterious. If evolution has led to the development of specialized cognitive circuits in the brain to perform such processing, then one might wish to endow AI machines with similar circuits. As the mind perceives itself to be a unity, the expectations are at all time high to apply the ideas to examine the nature of the mind and of intelligence. [1]

What exactly is human thinking? Isn’t the way present computer process information and produces result similar to the process designed by human? After all, it was human who designed computer to solve their problems the way humans do. Computers are doing it perfectly for years now. What kind of revolution we want in computing thinking so that they can think like the way we do?

Limitations of the present day AI seem to arise from the fact that computers do not really ‘think or utilize meaning’. Therefore, an advanced information-processing machine should think in human fashion. [3]. We want our machines to be more logical. Logical like we humans are and the whole process slow down on the benchmark of these logical abilities. What are the criteria’s of defining the logic of human intelligence? There are no such things like the intelligent ratings, which can find out whether a given process is intelligent or not. We are simply judging the intelligence from our viewpoint, thinking the way we do and expecting the same results. Our thinking is largely dependent on our environment. It is like this not because it should be like this, but because it helped us in surviving our existence and supports those parameters that helped us to face challenges in this environment. Had our requirements were different, the entire thinking process would have radically been different from what it is now. It would therefore be naïve to think that if an entity is not thinking, it is not intelligent or not conscious. It could well be the case that the requirements are such that the entity can survive even without thinking. There could be many such dimensions of intelligence that we still have to find out. It may also be the case that many such intelligent events are in actually happening around us, but we are unable to grasp it because of the limitations and restrictions imposed on ourselves by the supposedly way of our thinking.

But the bigger picture is still missing. How can you identify when a process is intelligent? [6] Or that the signs of intelligence can well actually may not be intelligent at all. [8]. Does intelligence is required to identify an intelligent process or do we need to be conscious to figure out intelligence in process? If we are not conscious, would the process be still intelligent and what will be the deciding factors? Why we think that if an entity is not conscious, it may not be intelligent? Are we conscious that we are intelligent or are we intelligent enough to be conscious about it? The question may evoke a perfect philosophical discussion covering virtually everything on this planet and yet may remain a mystery. The answer certainly lies way beyond the obvious – we really don’t know.

Mind is constantly moving and spins off various interesting phenomenon. The entire process could be very simple but the fact that we need the same mind to identify, track and understand these phenomenon makes the whole process an undaunting task to handle. This constant irregularity of human mind projects the entire process in a very complicated manner, mixing the newly evolved patterns with the existing one to project something alien to us.

Not only this, during the neuronal interaction, the energy interchange between the neurons could well provide a way for the information leakage, which can be accepted as weak inputs to the neuron family nearby to spark off another process, different from the original one. Could this be the precursor to the consciousness evolution? Does our mind know how to handle such leakage signals so that they may not interfere with the main signals? If the entire process repeats for some time, mind can well make adjustments to completely ignore it. If the process continues for centuries, it could well be established as a separate process in the background so as not to affect the main process. But doesn’t it require mind to be conscious before adjusting itself for such situations? A definite Yes would start the whole process of understanding once again. It’s like peeling of the onion, every time a peel is skinned off, the new skin gives it a fresh look.

Consciousness arises when impressions became so numerous as to necessitate their arrangement in a series- when the organism cannot adapt itself to its environment without such a serial arrangement. It is therefore defined as a form of adaptation of serially arranged inner states to outer states. But it is not a mere sum of feelings and ideas; there is substantial something or combining medium behind them, which, however is unknowable for the same reason that all ultimates are unknowable. But we can certainly study the changing states or modifications in which this substance manifests itself. It is the business of psychology to discover the units of consciousness, the element of which it is composed of.

Consciousness is an emergent behavior. During the processing, the complexity of the system give rise to interesting pattern like above and below. Continuous interactions with other entity change the whole mental picture in the consciousness pool (see below). These patterns loss energy in various steps to stabilize themselves giving rise to solutions and other intelligent patterns. The emergent pattern interacts with their parent patterns and other patterns to give birth to endless chain of unpredictable complex behavior.

That makes consciousness an emergent behavior, which evolves and appears out of the complexity of an existing system. It may not be a singular process but could be a generalized form of varied complex, irregular neural interaction. This could be similar to quantum effects, which are present in the human brain and these are important, as they could be responsible for non-algorithmic functions. These effects may not show up in the digital systems [4] and it seems that mind finds its existence through the embodiment of a sufficiently complex algorithm. [5]. The use of physical laws in the decipherment of scientific principle is often done through non-algorithmic processes. Innovation and creative thought can be largely non-verbal, highly imagistic and geometrical, and is thus not susceptible to algorithmic modeling. It is important to recognize that there are a number of systems that organize reality and interact through a series, however complex, of synaptic firings.

But it would be interesting to note that inspite of all our efforts, we are not able to figure out the exact process of how, why and when a particular piece of information leads to a conclusion. [6] Our definitions of inputs to the processing and the outputs needs to be defined in more systematic manner and therefore can well form the foundation of a concrete Theory of consciousness.

The strong AI projects a formal system having mind as a model, the validity of which is yet to be seen. Roger Penrose attack on strong AI, based on the Godel incompleteness theorem has once again sparkled the issue. Although, some strong AI supporters have claimed that Penrose merely repeats a failed argument of Lucas, this is not the case. Rather, Penrose opens a new line of inquiry by shifting attention from the question of validity to the question of implications. Given some standard, usually unstated assumptions about the nature of mind and the world, the combination of the Godel theorem and strong AI leads to the conclusion that much of the world is not only unknown, but in principle unknowable. This contradicts the fundamental assumption of science that the world can be known by the human reasons.

But isn’t the way mind thinks itself is a science? Or perhaps we should enrich our definitions and redefine our thinking as a whole. This whole science, which is the by-product of human mind, assumes that world can be known by human reasons. Given the contradictory nature of this assumption, one must think whether the thoughts that gave rise to science were simply assumptions of human mind. Can science be the disintegrated system projected by human mind? If yes, the whole idea of science explaining everything in this world can be broken into pieces. As science progresses, it can definitely provide us many answer to our enigmas, but only those solution which it can see as its own byproducts. Since science itself is a byproduct of human mind, it cannot claim itself to be the omniscient heir to human brain. There are many areas which science can possibly never fathom. What we call as simple human reasons are those areas apart from science, which gave us our sole identity as conscious being. It was only after being conscious that science was born or we were being able to recognize science.

Consciousness is just one phenomenon that mind displays and eludes us. Infact, we are still too naïve to comment anything on this behavior. The moment we explore new dimensions to it, it stretches its net wide open. We still need to improve our awareness and the way we perceive mind as an object. Our perception about mind as a functional unit is still far behind the actual mental picture of human mind. Once we know all this, we will find ourselves once again on the same grounds as we are right now. We need consciousness to evaluate consciousness, we need intelligence to counter measure or evaluate our intelligence. We cannot expect the same equations of consciousness and intelligence to give us output to be fed back into them to get the result. We are in a vicious circle, which virtually seems to have no starting or end. The best thing we can do is to the stretch its circumference to infinity to improve our awareness about our consciousness and thinking. Or to reach a stage where we don’t need to be intelligent and conscious about anything, where we don’t need to interact with the environment, where we don’t need to evaluate it and project ourselves into, where we don’t need to know anything, which almost sounds like becoming god??

We don’t need to learn or to teach our future generation about how to see, breath and hear; the automatic programming routines hidden inside the brain are doing this for aegis. We don’t need to learn about how to actually learn- the fact in reality is we don’t need to know it, because our mind is doing this for us constantly learning new tricks and passing it to the zone inside where it can be automated for faster processing. We are simply unaware of how this processing is going on and why it follows the ways it is. Whether we really know the process or we simply assume that we know it is altogether a different topic of discussion. The basic philosophical question of how we think has more complex successor to it in form of why we think and do we actually think?

No one can deny this question, but it needs more than just Yes or No to justify the answer. We have successfully learnt that the environment reflects and affects the way we think. The entire thinking process uses different ingredients from the sensory inputs, transmitting it to the mind, creating an equivalent mental representation of the same, breaking the information and distributing it to the different brain section for processing, compiling the entire result and distributing it to different output units to deliver the results. The entire process isolates the thinking process with the reception and distribution of information [7]. Breaking a link would affect the processing, which in turn will affect the output and the result could be surprisingly interesting.

It would be great to find the source and processes causing consciousness, but we should also be ready not be surprised by finding that consciousness never existed and that it was just another illusion that our mind has projected to keep us involved. Science may not have every answer, but it definitely has a link to our inside world which we can find it one day using the same tool that created it at the very first place. The human mind is destined to be one of the biggest mysteries of the human history, the solution of which may settle all other questions to rest or may well led to the trail of catastrophic episode. Patenting human consciousness isn’t an issue, handling the copyright infrigenment is, and we may not able to pay the price for the trials even. How tampering with the idea is going to help us in the long run is yet to be seen. Ladies and Gentlemen, the show has just begun.

• S.C. Kak. “Why machines cannot be conscious?”
• Hemai Parthasarathy. New Scientist 30 Oct.1999, pp 29-31
• Pentti Haikonen. “An Implementable Architecture for conscious machine”.
• Some of Roger Penrose’s thoughts on AI.
• Roger Penrose “ The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the laws of physics”, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp 429
• Saurabh Kudesia. “Ameliorated Future IV- The Question of Intelligence”,
• Saurabh Kudesia. “Secret of Mind- Time machine”, Information Technology Magazine December 1999, pp 48-53
• Saurabh Kudesia. “Ameliorated Future I - Is thinking only Computational?”