Brain Deception - Part 1

Humans are very unique creatures, we have those complex organs we call brains - well at least most of us do. We were born too late to explore earth, and too soon to explore the cosmos, but we are just on time to explore our brains. Accordingly, I'm starting a series of articles -posts- to share my own thoughts, experience, and my own perception of mind. However, I'm not that scientific, I don't have a lab full of rats and elaborate hardware to examine different theories, thus most of my will-be-articles would be based on my own perspective and my humble scientific base, there is no right and wrong, they are just some thoughts; cogitations.

Remember, this is my own blog, this is where I'm supposed to say whatever shit I wanna say. If you are really interested you can share your opinions through comments, but I have the right not to care about any of them.

Let's start from the very beginning, what's a brain? In medicine, you can read books about the anatomy of the organ so-called brain, but philosophically, what's a brain? Imagine that we have created such a device or machine that can understands every human word, expression, or move. And it -that device- can find a proper response or reaction to it, similar to Siri or Cortana but much more massive, can we call it -the device- a brainy? Many would argue yes it's a brainy device and soon computer scientists will be able to build such a device. Here's what I think, having a system that can wittingly respond to any set of inputs doesn't necessarily mean that it has a brain, and the opposite is also true. John Searle, an american philosopher, came up with the Chinese room experiment. John argued that if he was locked in a room, mentioning that he understands no written or spoken Chinese, and he had some instructions in English that shows how to correlate a set of formal symbols (Chinese) to another set of formal symbols, then he will be able to respond to any question or inquiry in Chinese, and people outside the room will have no idea that the person responding to them doesn't understand the Chinese language. In that sense, writing a program that can intelligently answer questions or calculate stuff, doesn't make it brainy, in fact we better call it a zombie machine. John still doesn't understand chinese, and such a machine is just following instructions.

Even living organisms can experience such a no-brainer activity. Imagine that your have touched a hot surface, your oven for example, your hand will instantaneously react, your muscles will move your hand away from the hot surface. In situation like this, your body can not wait to send signals to your brain and wait for the response, contrariwise your muscle reflexes save you from burning your hand, it's all programmed in your muscle memory. Tossing some salt to a fresh corpse of a fish or a frog will make it move, it needs no brain to tell it what to do. Energy stored as ATP in muscle cells will be activated by the absorption of sodium ions from the salt, exactly as if the muscle was controlled by a brain. Zombies in Sci-Fi movies do the same, they can recognize humans, mark them as their next meal, attack them, eat them, and then continue doing that. Arguing that smart AI systems are equal to our brains, is the same as arguing that zombies do have a brain.

After all of this, it's really hard to describe what does it feel to have a brain, in fact it's impossible. For me it's that feeling that I am watching and experiencing everything through that body of mine, and I know that no one will ever be able to view things or experience them exactly as I do. It's me having my own thoughts, dreams, and lusts. All of this is forming my own consciousnesses. But for you, perhaps I'm just a robot, or a smart writer programmed by the smartest programmers out their, I can't prove it. Can you?!