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Biological anthropologist, Rutgers University; author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love
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The first step to knowledge is naming something, as is often said. So, what is “to think”? To me, thinking has a number of basic components. Foremost, I follow the logic of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who distinguishes two broad basic forms of consciousness: core consciousness and extended consciousness. Many animals display core consciousness: They feel, and they’re aware that they’re feeling. They know they’re cold, or hungry, or sad. But they live in the here and now. Extended consciousness employs the past and future too. The individual has a clear sense of me and you, of yesterday and tomorrow, of when I was a child and when I’m old.
Higher mammals employ some manner of extended consciousness. Our closest relatives, for example, have a clear concept of the self. Koko the gorilla uses a version of American Sign Language to say, “Me, Koko.” And common chimpanzees have a clear concept of the immediate future. When a group of chimps was introduced to their new outdoor enclosure at the Arnhem Zoo, Holland, they rapidly examined it, almost inch by inch. They then waited until the last of their keepers had departed, wedged a long pole against the high wall, and climbed up to freedom, some even helping the less sure-footed. Nevertheless, it’s strikingly apparent that, as Damasio proposes in his book The Feeling of What Happens, this extended consciousness attains its peak in humans. Will machines recall the past and mine their experiences to think about the future? Perhaps.
But extended consciousness isn’t the whole of human thinking. Anthropologists use the term symbolic thinking to describe our ability to arbitrarily bestow an abstract concept on the concrete world. The classic example is the distinction between water and “holy water.” To a chimp, the water sitting in a marble basin in a cathedral is just that, water; to a Catholic it’s an entirely different thing, “holy.” Likewise, the color black is black to any chimp, while it might connote death to you, or the newest fashion. Will machines ever understand the meaning of a cross, a swastika, democracy? I doubt it.
But if they did, would they be able to discuss these things?
There’s no better example of symbolic thinking than the way we use our squeaks and hisses, barks and whines, to produce human language. Take the word dog. English speakers have arbitrarily bestowed the word dog upon this furry, smelly, tail-wagging creature. Even more remarkable, we humans easily break down the word dog into its meaningless component sounds, d, o, and g, and then recombine these sounds (phonemes) to make new words with new arbitrary meanings, such as g-o-d. Will machines ever break down their clicks and hisses into primary sounds or phonemes, then assign different combinations of these sounds to make different words, then give arbitrary meanings to these words, then use these words to describe new abstract phenomena? I doubt it.
And what about emotion? Our emotions guide our thinking. Robots might come to recognize unfairness, for example, but will they feel it? I doubt that too.
I sing the human mind. Our brains contain over 100 billion nerve cells, many with up to 10,000 connections with their neighbors. This three-pound blob is the crowning achievement of life on Earth. Most anthropologists believe the modern human brain had emerged by 200,000 years ago, but all agree that by 40,000 years ago our forebears were making art and burying their dead, thus expressing some notion of an afterlife. Today every healthy adult in every human society can easily break down words into their component sounds, remix these sounds in myriad different ways to make words, grasp the arbitrary meanings of these words, and comprehend abstract concepts such as friendship, sin, purity, and wisdom.
A well-known scientist who builds robots remarked recently, over dinner, that it takes a robot five hours to fold a towel. I agree with one William M. Kelly, who said, “Man is a slow, sloppy, and brilliant thinker; the machine is fast, accurate, and stupid.”
