The Myth of the Artificial Brain

For a long time, engineers were no more interested in consciousness than philosophers were interested in the steam engine. The typical engineer built supposedly neutral machinery: its ultimate usage would depend on ethical choices based on contemporary views in another domain, that of thought. The techniques of the time related to energy, materials and buildings. A stove, a house, a bicycle, a hammer, all were extensions of the human body, helping to build a better life, but not to think. In a dualist culture, science and technology deal exclusively with matter, while religion and philosophy deal with the soul.

This essentially materialistic technology was neutral in itself. It was judged on the basis of Platonic ideals, rooted in a rigorous transcendentalism, without apparent reference to the society that nurtured them. The developed world lives, and often continues to live, in this dualist scenario, without even realizing it.

We are slowly abandoning this dichotomy, where those that deal with matter leave others to deal with the soul. By inventing the concept of software, information technologists have given material form to the workings of the soul or, on the contrary, breathed a soul into matter. They are more and more obliged to analyze behavior and the function of the brain if they claim to be able to decode speech or compress images. After inventing the pump by modeling it on the heart and the bellows on the lungs, after dreaming up spectacles and the artificial kidney, hearing aids and artificial knees, after providing a host of prostheses for the human body in order to extend its capacity or repair its defects, engineers have now reached the last of the organs that still defy them, the brain.