Ray Kurzweil incessantly dreams of the future. And it's a future he describes as a "human-machine civilization." In How To Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Kurzweil looks forward to a time when technology will have advanced to where it will be possible to gradually replace all the parts of the body and brain with nonbiological parts. And he claims that it will not change people's identities any more than the natural, gradual replacement of the cells in our body does now. All this will come about after scientists and engineers, who are currently working on brain models in many different organizations and areas of the world, succeed in creating a complete model of the human brain. Kurzweil contends that the neocortex functions hierarchically and that it works according to pattern recognition. Therefore, he argues, it is possible to write algorithms that will  simulate how the brain actually works. That, in combination with increasing miniaturization, will make such substitution of nonbiological components possible by the 2030s.

That the human brain is akin to a digital computer is still a big and a very contentious issue in neuroscience and cognitive psychology circles. In the January issue of Scientific American, Yale professor of psychology John Bargh summarizes some of the latest thinking about this problem. Specifically he addresses the major role of the unconscious in how people make decisions, how they behave in various situations, and how they perceive themselves and the world around them. There is a complex dynamic between ourcontrolled conscious thought processes and the unconscious, often automatic, processes of which we are not aware. Nobelist Daniel Kahneman explained this phenomenon in Thinking Fast and Slow. Automatic thought processes happen quickly and do not include planning or deliberation.

Even Daniel Dennett, an eminent philosopher and cognitive scientist who has long held that neurons functioned as simple on-off switches that make them a logical switch similar to a digital bit, has recently changed his mind about the analogy of the human mind to a computer: "We're beginning to come to grips with the idea," he says in a recent Edge talk, "that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order,  . . . In fact, it's much more like anarchy. . . ."  Yet even with this concession Dennett is still inclined to use the computer as a metaphor for the human brain. This leads him to make a curious statement, one which actually begs the question: "The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. The brain's a computer, but it's so different from any computer you're used to. It's not your desktop or your laptop at all."

By his own admission, Dennett's talk is highly speculative: "I'd be thrilled if 20 percent of it was right." What I think he means is that the brain is like a computer that is far more complex than existing machines but that it also has intention. The neurons are "selfish," and they are more like agents than computer instructions, which in turn are more like slaves. "You don't have to worry about one part of your laptop going rogue and trying out something on its own that the rest of the system doesn't want to do." Computers, on  the other hand, are made up of "mindless little robotic slave prisoners." So I'm not sure how helpful it is for Dennett to think of the brain as a computer at all. And Dennett's views on neurons and agents, combined with the more recent thinking about the impact of the unconscious on conscious thought, lead me to conclude that Ray Kurzweil's dream of someday replacing the human brain with robotic switches is just that: a dream.

James Gleick’s The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood undertakes the enormous task of narrating the cultural, technical, and theoretical approaches to information over many centuries, from the basic binary system used by African drummers in ancient times through forms of writing and printing. He discusses the major
developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Morse and the telegraph, Babbage and the analytical engine, and gives special emphasis to the theories of Shannon and Turing and those that followed in their footsteps as theorists began to think about information in more quantitative ways. 
 
Freeman Dyson, in his review of Gleick’s book for The New York Review of Books, observes that this quantification of information actually blurs the line between information and data. In discussing the consequence of Moore’s Law in the growth of cheaper and more capacious information storage capacity, Dyson says that in 1949 Shannon constructed a table of the various existing stores of memory. The largest store in Shannon’s table was the US Library of Congress, estimated to contain one hundred trillion bits of information.  “Today," Dyson says, “a memory disc drive storing that amount of information weighs a few pounds and can be bought for about a thousand dollars. Information, otherwise known as data, pours into memories of that size or larger, in government and business offices and scientific laboratories all over the world.” Dyson in effect implies that when you think about information as bits to be stored and manipulated you are in truth thinking more about discrete pieces of data than
what is commonly thought of as information.

Gleick’s book guides us cogently and neutrally through the vast history and theory of information. Yet as he approaches the end he shares more personal insights and experiences with his readers. As he contemplates the today's exponential growth in the US Library of Congress’s store of information, Gleick expresses the confusion and anxiety such massive growth and amassing of data produced, in one’s sense of identity and experience of life:  “As the train hurtled onward, its passengers sometimes felt the pace foreshortening their sense of their own history. Moore’s law had looked simple on paper, but its consequences left people struggling to find metaphors with which to understand their experience.” One familiar metaphor, he suggests, is “the cloud.” “All that information—all that information capacity—looms over us, not quite visible, not quite tangible, but awfully real; amorphous, spectral; hovering nearby, yet not situated in any one place. Heaven must once have felt this way to the faithful."                                                                                                                           

Many today express wonder and awe at the vast network of interconnectedness in the nodes of the Internet. But what really is the nature  of those connections and their structure? “The network has a structure,” Gleick muses, “and that structure stands upon a paradox. Everything is close, and everything is far, at the same time. This is why cyberspace can feel not just crowded but lonely. You can drop a stone into a well and never hear a splash.” Gleick ends his massive work on a note of gloomy uncertainty about the whole phenomenon. Using the analogy of the library for the Internet, he concludes: ”We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of information.” All this leaves us wondering if there is anything real and vital in that virtual universe.