Evolution : the Computer Systems Engineer Designing Minds = Ewolucja : inżynier systemów komputerowych projektujący umysły

Aaron Sloman: Evolution: The Computer Systems… Avant. The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard Volume II, Number 2/2011 www.avant.edu.pl ISSN: 2082-6710 Evolution: The Computer Systems Engineer Designing Minds8 Aaron Sloman Abstract: What we have learnt in the last six or seven decades about virtual machinery, as a result of a great deal of science and technology, enables us to offer Darwin a new defence against critics who argued that only physical form, not mental capabilities and consciousness could be products of evolution by natural selection. The defence compares the mental phenomena mentioned by Darwin’s opponents with contents of virtual machinery in computing systems. Objects, states, events, and processes in virtual machinery which we have only recently learnt how to design and build, and could not even have been thought about in Darwin’s time, can interact with the physical machinery in which they are implemented, without being identical with their physical implementation, nor mere aggregates of physical structures and processes. The existence of various kinds of virtual machinery (including both “platform” virtual machines that can host other virtual machines, e.g. operating systems, and “application” virtual machines, e.g. spelling checkers, and computer games) depends on complex webs of causal connections involving hardware and software structures, events and processes, where the specification of such causal webs requires concepts that cannot be defined in terms of concepts of the physical sciences. That indefinability, plus the possibility of various kinds of self-monitoring within virtual machinery, seems to explain some of the allegedly mysterious and irreducible features of consciousness that motivated Darwin’s critics and also more recent philosophers criticising AI. There are consequences for philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and robotics. Keywords: Architecture, Causation, Cognition, Consciousness, Control, Darwin, Designer Stance, Evolution, Explanatory Gap, Mind, Self-monitoring, Universal Turing machine, Virtual Machinery. 8 This is a previous version of an invited paper “Evolution of mind as a feat of computer systems engineering: Lessons from decades of development of self-monitoring virtual machinery" presented at: Pierre Duhem Conference (Society for Philosophy of Science),Tuesday 19th July 2011, Nancy, France. 45 AVANT Volume II, Number 2/2011 www.avant.edu.pl Contents: 1. Virtual machines and causation 2. Layers of virtual machinery 3. Virtuality 4. Causation and computation 5. Varieties of virtual machinery 6. Self-monitoring, self-control, and self-modification 7. Implementable but irreducable 8. Darwin’s critics 9. Epigenesis: bodies, behaviours, and minds 10. Self-transformation in biological VMs 11. The evolution of organisms with qualia 12. Towards an understanding of qualia 13. Supervenience, realisation, identity and levels 14. Implications for the future of philosophy 1. Virtual machines and causation Have you ever wondered how a word-processor makes adjustments when you insert a new character in an already full line? If the extra character makes the length of the line exceed the specified text width the line is broken and some of the characters at the end are inserted at the beginning of the next line. This can cause the same thing to happen repeatedly for many more lines. The portion removed from the end of one or more of the affected lines may have to be moved onto the next page, which may cause that in turn to overflow. In some cases every subsequent page of the document, is altered, even if they only acquire new page numbers. Similar things can happen when a spelling checker runs, discovers an error, and corrects it by inserting one or more characters. If the corrected word is shorter, that can cause one or more lines, and possibly pages to shrink, in some cases also absorbing text from the next line or page. The mechanisms producing such changes are generally very effective and reliable (most of the time) insofar as changes that occur in the document lead to required effects in other parts of the document, and also in various parts of the physical machinery, including active memory, hard drives, visual displays, and possibly also printed pages. This all depends on interactions among very different technologies developed since the middle of the last century, some of which are constantly changing (e.g. the materials used and design and construction processes used to make computer processors, memories, interfaces, networks, displays, and other physical components). Some components can change while others remain unaltered – as a result of ingenious use of interfacing specifications that allow developers on one side of an interface to ignore what does or does not change on the other side. In particular, while some things change rapidly others may remain unchanged and still work, for instance the design and program specification of an old text editor, like the one I use, whose core code has been unchanged for nearly a quarter century. 46 Aaron Sloman: Evolution: The Computer Systems… The development of “cloud computing” (really a re-discovery of the usefulness of mechanisms some of us have been using for several decades) can lead to wide geographical dispersal of processes that previously all occurred in one box. As I type this text, sitting at a PC in my study at home I am using a text editor running on another computer some distance away, in my department. The editor was developed in the early 1980s, though much newer technologies (including networking technologies) allow each key I press to cause, almost instantaneously, effects in the remote machine, followed by changes to my screen display. If I switch to working on my own computer, the effects are indistinguishable to me, most of the time, though I then have to arrange my own backup processes, and later transfer the files produced to the university machines. Either way, there is no change in the correct description of what happens to the document when I insert a character or a spelling corrector changes the text. That is because the document exists in a running virtual machine, or more specifically in a specific instance of a type of virtual machine, whose instances may have very different physical implementations. Opening up the computers involved and peering into them with the most sophisticated available physical sensing and measuring devices will not reveal any characters, words, pages, or spelling errors, let alone story plots, heroes, theories, debates, exhortations, arguments, etc. Data-mining processes that detect such things do not measure physical properties of the machines used. Moreover, even the people who design the software will not be able to tell that it is running on these machines by opening them up and looking at patterns of physical activity. Often the core software was developed decades before the physical technology t (...truncated)