Just finished reading Andrew Smart’s book

Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

It was right up my alley as an informative journey cataloguing the different ways some of the neuroscientists view human consciousness, how A.I. creators seek to replicate consciousness, and how LSD works on the human brain, and what these all might have to do with each other. Are those seeking to create A.I. missing big picture ideas or suffering from reductionism? Might there be more than one way to be conscious, and are we trying to build an airplane A.I. where the human mind flies like a bird? What then would be the concept of ‘lift’ that allows flight / or consciousness in principle that we don’t yet understand?

It’s a great read and well worth your time if you’re interested in these topics. Here’s some quotes I highlighted on my read through.

“Digitalists are still convinced that the digital offers the only way out of what appears to be a problem created by digitalism. The digital itself has become an ideology; it represents the world seen from a very specific perspective.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“But what is the ontology of the digital? Are computation and information natural entities upon which our own consciousness and selves can be built? Ontology is just a fancy word that means “the study of what is.” With the ubiquity of computers, information, and data, few would question whether information or computations are real, or even that our own brains are somehow based on computations. However, upon closer examination, these concepts turn out to be as brittle as the latest version of Windows.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“The dream of Strong Artificial Intelligence—and more specifically the growing interest in the idea that a computer can become conscious and have first-person subjective experiences—has led to a cultural shift. Prophets like Kurzweil believe that we are much closer to cyberconsciousness and superintelligence than most observers acknowledge, while skeptics argue that current AI systems are still extremely primitive and that hopes of conscious machines are pipedreams. Who is right? This book does not attempt to address this question, but points out some philosophical problems and asks some philosophical questions about machine consciousness. One fundamental problem is that we do not understand human consciousness. Many in science and artificial intelligence assume that human consciousness is based on information or computations. Several writers have tried to tackle this assumption, most notably the British physicist Roger Penrose, whose controversial theory suggests that consciousness is based upon noncomputable quantum states in some of the tiniest structures in the brain, called microtubules. Other, perhaps less esoteric thinkers, like Duke’s Miguel Nicolelis and Harvard’s Leonid Perlovsky, are beginning to challenge the idea that the brain is computable. These scientists lead their fields in man-machine interfacing and computer science. The assumption of a computable brain allows artificial intelligence researchers to believe they will create artificial minds. However, despite assuming that the brain is a computational system—what philosopher Riccardo Manzotti calls “the computational stance”—neuroscience is still discovering that human consciousness is nothing like we think it is. For me this is where LSD enters the picture. It turns out that human consciousness is likely itself a form of hallucination. As I have said, it is a very useful hallucination, but a hallucination nonetheless. LSD and psychedelics may help reveal our normal everyday experience for the hallucination that it is. This insight has been argued about for centuries in philosophy in various forms. Immanuel Kant may have been first to articulate it in modern form when he called our perception of the world “synthetic.” The fundamental idea is that we do not have direct knowledge of the external world. This idea will be repeated often in this book, and you will have to get used to it. We only have knowledge of our brain’s creation of that world for us. In other words, what we see, hear, and subsequently think are like movies that our brain plays for us after the fact. These movies are based on perceptions that come into our senses from the external world, but they are still fictions of our brain’s creation. In fact, you might put the disclaimer “based on a true story” in front of each experience you have. I do not wish to imply that I believe in the homunculus argument—what philosopher Daniel Dennett describes as the “Cartesian Theater”—the hypothetical place in the mind where the self becomes aware of the world. I only wish to employ the metaphor to illustrate the idea that there is no direct relationship between the external world and your perception of it.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“There is no such tiny “Cartesian Theater” in the brain; conscious experience is generated by a vastly complex, distributed network that synchronizes and adjusts its activity by the millisecond. As far as we can tell, certain patterns of activity in this distributed network give rise to conscious experience. But fundamentally, this network’s activity is self-contained and the feeling of a unified flow of consciousness you have is not just from the processing of sensory information. The experience you have right now is a unique creation of your brain that has transformed data from your body into something closer to a hallucination. To break down this seemingly obvious point that we will deal with very often in this book and that I myself struggle to understand: the existence of our experience is real, but the contents of this experience exist only in your brain. Some philosophers call this “irreducible subjectivity,” which means that no totally objective theory of human experience may be possible. The contents of your experience are not representations of the world, but your experience is part of the world. By altering this process with molecules like psilocybin or LSD we can become aware of different aspects of our perceptions. By perturbing consciousness and observing the consequences, we can gain insight into its normal functioning. This is again not to say that consciousness is not real; there can be no doubt that I am conscious as I write this sentence. However, it is the relationship between consciousness and the external world that is more mysterious than one might assume. It is often supposed that cognition and consciousness result from processing the information from our sensory systems (like vision), and that we use neural computations to process this information. However, following Riccardo Manzotti and others such as the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, I will argue that computations are not natural things that can cause a physical phenomenon like consciousness. When I read academic papers on artificial or machine intelligence, or popular books on the subject, I have not found anyone grappling with these strange “facts” about human consciousness. Either consciousness is not mentioned, or if it is, it is assumed to be a computational problem.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“Daniel X. Freedman, a pioneer of psychedelic research on LSD, wrote that LSD enables “portentousness” of the mind, so that it can perceive more than it can tell, experience more than it can explicate, and experience boundlessness and “boundaryless” events. Intense psychedelic experiences often induce what is called “ego dissolution”—where the user is no longer able to distinguish between the self and the outside world.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“Humans have evolved to crave high-calorie sweet food because when it was only available in small quantities in uncertain intervals, this craving was extremely useful in getting our bodies to obtain as much energy as possible from the environment. However, thanks to our rapid cultural development in the West that has led to people having access to unlimited calories at all times, our craving is now extremely dangerous because of the ubiquity and low cost of this type of food. In other words, our brains and bodies have not really learned that excessive calories are dangerous. Your brain, automatically and unconsciously, is still convinced that your next meal may not be coming for another week, so it will try to get you to gorge on whatever calories are available at the moment. We may know now intellectually and scientifically that eating to excess is not necessary and even unhealthy, but how often has your intellectual and scientific knowledge of calories stopped you from eating that piece of cake after dinner? We are blind to the dangers of eating sweet food because over millions of years of evolution, the vast majority of which was spent in calorie-sparse environments, knowledge of the true dangers of sugar for our bodies would have been useless and in fact dangerous because we would have starved. That is why it is so difficult to override our genetically inherited, or a priori, biological impulses to overeat. The broader point is that our knowledge about the world cannot be judged on whether it is true or not, but only on how useful it is to us.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“Albert Hofmann lamented the use of LSD as an inebriating drug rather than a therapeutic treatment or spiritual tool, which made serious research on the drug impossible. He called the recreational use of LSD “careless and irresponsible” and felt it to be a tragic misunderstanding of the nature and meaning of these kinds of substances. He believed that we should treat LSD with the same reverence indigenous peoples have for these substances.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“Many dragonflies, for instance, lay their eggs in water. For millions of years, their visual systems have guided them to bodies of water appropriate for oviposition. This is an impressive feat and might suggest that their visual systems have evolved to report the truth about water. Experiments reveal instead that they have evolved a quick and cheap perceptual trick. Water slightly polarizes the light that reflects from it, and dragonfly visual systems have evolved to detect this polarization. Unfortunately for the dragonfly, Homo sapiens have recently discovered uses for crude oil and asphalt, and these substances polarize light to an even greater degree than does water. Dragonflies find pools of oil even more attractive than bodies of water, and end up dying in large numbers. They also are attracted to asphalt roads. Pools of oil and asphalt roads are now ecological traps for these dragonflies. Apparently their visual system evolved a quick trick to find water: Find something that polarizes light, the more polarization the better. In the environment in which they evolved, this trick was a useful guide to behavior and allowed them to avoid constructing a complex understanding of the truth.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“From an electrical engineering perspective, the messy stuff in between one and zero does travel down wires, through chips, and in packets. Computer switches are actually not either on or off. Both physically and electrically, computer switches, transistors, or logic circuits just have different levels of voltage to which engineers have assigned the values one or zero. Further up the chain of abstraction to software, one then starts to mean “true” and zero means “false.” But without human beings writing and interpreting software code, the computer itself is merely moving electrically charged ions around. The computer programs that are encoded as ones and zeros and “interpreted” by the circuits and logic gates on the chips do not actually mean anything to the computer. These machine instructions control how electricity moves on the circuits. On the other hand, machine instructions would mean nothing to a human because these are typically what has been termed “machine-readable.” The key is that the compilers, operating systems, memory, and fundamental circuitry of computers can translate human-readable words, software code, and numbers into machine instructions.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“Hofmann says: “Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.” This to me indicates that LSD has the ability to create awareness of different kinds of perceptions, in which we encounter the fact that our perception of everyday life is a creation of our minds. Hofmann continues: “I analyzed the mechanisms involved in the production of the normal world view that we call the ‘everyday reality.’ What are the factors that constitute it? What is inside about what is outside? What comes from the outside in and what is just inside?”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“Leibniz wrote: This way of calculating should not be employed for the practice of ordinary calculation; but it could contribute a great deal to the perfection of science… . Some people have admired in it the surprising analogy between the origin of all numbers out of 1 and 0 and the origin of all things from God and Nothing: from God as the principle of perfections, and from Nothing as the principle of privations or of the voids of essence, without need of any matter independent of God in addition to that.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“This includes the computational stance—the assumption that brains and computers are carrying out computations. This also includes the assumption that consciousness is not important for artificial intelligence or for us. Finally, this includes the assumption that information underlies reality and is a natural entity like mass, which can be used to explain physical phenomena like human consciousness, an idea I call the information theory of everything.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“Neither brains nor computers carry out computations. Consciousness is a hallucination, albeit a very useful one. And information is an epistemic tool that is a cultural invention rather than a natural entity.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“As technology and Big Data advance, they enable the near-total bureaucratization of life—despite the fact that the promise of technology was exactly the opposite, to liberate life from bureaucracy.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“LSD profoundly alters cognitive unity. Many people feel that the separation between the self and world dissolves when on LSD, and they begin to feel at one with everything. Conscious experience as a unified whole also breaks down on LSD, especially during the acute phase at high doses, so that perceptions that originate from inside are difficult to disentangle from those originating from outside. Experience itself becomes like movie frames slowed down so that each frame is perceivable. We know now that there are neurobiological reasons for this; hallucinogens have profound effects on global brain activity. Psilocybin, for example, decreases the connections between visual and sensorimotor networks, while it seems to increase the connectivity between the resting-state networks. Temporal integration is related to one’s sense of the current moment. Conscious experience is somehow located in time. We feel like we occupy an omnipresent widthless temporal point—the now. As Riccardo Manzotti says: Every conscious process is instantiated by patterns of neural activity extended in time. This apparently innocuous hypothesis hides a possible problem. If neural activity spans in time (as it has to do since neural activity consists in trains of temporally distributed spikes), something that takes place in different instants of time has to belong to the same cognitive or conscious process. For instance, what glues together the first and the last spike of neural activity underpinning the perception of a face? We know that neuronal oscillations at different frequencies act as this temporal glue. However, when you’re on LSD, this glue seems to dissolve. As Albert Hofmann and many others report, your normal sense of time vanishes on psychedelics. The famous bicycle trip on acid during which Hofmann reported that he felt he was not moving, and yet he arrived at home somehow, illustrates this distortion of the brain mechanisms that support our normal perception of the flow of time.”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

“A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I’m a rather bad guide.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein”
― Andrew Smart, Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics, and Consciousness