Page 343 - Data Science Algorithms in a Week

324 Bert Olivier

This line of thinking, which has far-reaching implications for current thinking about the
differences – or the presumed similarities – between humans and artificial intelligence, has
been resurrected, perhaps surprisingly, by one of the most brilliant computer-scientists in the
world, namely David Gelernter of Yale University in the United States. In his recent book,
The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness (2016) Gelernter deviates
from what one might expect from a computer scientist, namely, to wax lyrical about the
(putatively) impending ‘Singularity’, when (according to Kurzweil) AI will immeasurably
surpass human intelligence. Gelernter dissents from conventional wisdom in the world of AI-
research by drawing on the work of the father of ‘depth-psychology’, Sigmund Freud, as well
as iconic literary figures such as Shakespeare and Proust, to demonstrate that the mind covers
a “spectrum” of activities, instead of being confined, as most computer scientists and
philosophers of mind appear to believe, to just the high-focus, logical functions of so-called
‘rational’ thinking. Gelernter conceives of the mind across this “spectrum”, from “high focus”
mental activities like strongly self-aware reflection, through “medium” ones such as
experience-oriented thinking (including emotion-accompanied daydreaming) to “low focus”
functions like “drifting” thought, with emotions flourishing, and dreaming (2016: 3; see pp.
241-246 for a more detailed summary of these mental levels). At the “high focus” level of the
mental spectrum, memory is used in a disciplined manner, according to Gelernter, while at
the medium-focus niveau it “ranges freely” and when one reaches the low-focus level
memory “takes off on its own”. The point of delineating this “spectrum” is, as I see it, to
demonstrate as clearly and graphically as possible that the human “mind” is characterised by
different “tides”, all of which belong to it irreducibly, and not only the one that Gelernter
locates at the level of “high focus” (and which conventional AI-research has claimed as its
exclusive province). This enables him to elaborate on the nature of creativity that, according
to him, marks an irreducible difference between human (creative) intelligence and thinking,
on the one hand, and AI, on the other. By contrast, ‘mainstream’ artificial intelligence
research (or the ‘mind sciences’ in general) concentrates on precisely the high-focus level of
mental functions, in the (erroneous) belief that this alone is what ‘mind’ is, and moreover, that
it represents what the human mind has in common with artificial intelligence (Gelernter 2016:
xi-xix).
In short, unlike the majority of his professional colleagues, Gelernter insists on the
difference between “brain” and “mind”, on the distinctive character of free association as
opposed to focused, conscious mental activity, and on the contribution of fantasy and
dreaming to creative thinking. At a time when there is an increasing tendency, ironically, to
use something created by human beings, namely the computer, as a reductive model to grasp
what it is to be human, Gelernter disagrees emphatically: there is a fundamental difference
between the computer as an instance of artificial intelligence and being human, or more
exactly, the human mind in all its variegated roles. In this way he confirms Jonze’s fictionally
projected insight in Her about the divergent character of AI, albeit in a different register,
which precludes playing with the possibility, as Jonze’s film does, that an OS such as the
fictional Samantha could perhaps discover, and explore, a field of artificial intelligence
‘activities’ that human beings could only guess at.