These days, I rarely get a chance to sneak out for a pint anywhere other than my own lounge, but one night last week I hopped on a bus to Islington in search of a place called the Prince Albert.
When I found it, hidden down an unwelcoming backstreet, it turned out to be surprisingly cosy. It had a good supply of beers on tap and an odd range of board games to play while drinking. It was also packed to the rafters, although I don’t think the atmosphere was the main draw. People were there for the same reason as I was, to witness science and philosophy head-to-head, in the flesh.
The Prince Albert is one of a growing number of pubs to hold regular evenings of philosophical debate or scientific discussion as an alternative to quiz nights or darts competitions. The landlord, Steve Lamb, has a degree in philosophy and not long ago began advertising twice-a-month events, partly as a way of attracting customers on quiet nights.
The idea is to have a philosopher talk for a while on a subject, mix in some alcohol and then throw open the floor to debate, the more heated the better. However, on the evening I visited we were going to listen to a scientist. Igor Aleksander, who describes himself as a “dirty-handed engineer”, was going to spend the evening engaged in the philosophical equivalent of teaching his grandmother to suck eggs by discussing the subject of consciousness.
Aleksander, a dapper man of eastern European heritage who grew up in South Africa, is a professor emeritus at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He has been researching artificial intelligence and consciousness using computers for something like 30 years.
The fact that his talk drew such a large crowd is testament to the enduring fascination of consciousness. Many of the top names in the history of philosophy have given it a crack. But it is also one of those areas where science and philosophy both have something to say. So more recently it has also been tackled by neurologists, psychologists and computer engineers.
Discussions of consciousness can quickly veer into vague abstraction, so Aleksander, pacing the length of the bar with microphone in hand, explained that he was going to try to cut through this obscurity and outline a “rock-bottom view” of consciousness. It’s a practical-minded approach that he describes in a book published in April, The World in my Mind, My Mind in the World.
”The only object that I know for sure is conscious - despite the couple of glasses of wine I’ve had - is me,” he said. “So to examine consciousness, I need to examine me.”
By considering the basic elements of his own consciousness, Aleksander has come up with five axioms to describe it. Put simply, he says consciousness involves: a sense of being an entity in an “out there” world; a concept of having a past and future; attention, which affects our ways of being conscious; a process of making decisions about what to do next; and emotion, which helps us to evaluate our options.
These constituent parts are enough to classify a system - biological, computer-based or otherwise - as conscious. They also make consciousness a phenomenon amenable to scientific investigation.
Armed with these ideas, Aleksander and his colleagues have been generating virtual models to unpick the puzzles that consciousness throws up. In his office at Imperial College, for example, a laptop computer runs a “neural representation modeler” that uses these axioms to study the mechanics of perception and imagination. On another floor of the building, one of his students is using engineering principles to probe the mechanisms of anxiety.
The researchers are essentially constructing simplified, virtual representations of the complex neural networks in animal brains. On the basis of his axioms, Aleksander says it is perfectly possible that a computer simulation can be conscious. It could also have a subconscious, and even have dreams.
However, it is important to distinguish between having the mechanisms required for consciousness and what an “organism” is going to become conscious of. Aleksander argues: “One could make a conscious robot, but that doesn’t make it a human being, and it doesn’t even make it into Terminator 17.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Aleksander’s pub talk generated a snooty put-down from one man propping up a corner of the bar. Consciousness, he said, is surely far more than that which can be explained by the firing of neurons. The computer engineer’s work, he seemed to suggest, was hardly scratching the surface of a subject that is really beyond the scope of science to comprehend.
I can’t help but disagree. As far as I’m concerned, consciousness is a direct product of brain activity.
Aleksander’s approach to understanding isn’t the only one that science has developed, nor should it be. And, of course, no one expects any simple answers to appear any time soon. Nevertheless, consciousness is something that science can and should shed light on.
Naturally, I would be happy to debate the matter over a pint with anyone who cares to.
