Stop saying that’s not real
It is all information processing
Abstract
Since the 1950s, computers have been able to play chess with humans (IBM 704, 1958) and compose music (Illiac, 1955). But it was clear: the computer cannot play “real” chess, and the music is not “real” music. Today, things are different. There is no reason to distinguish between real (human) and unreal (computer). In addition to rapid technological development, two fundamental insights in particular have contributed to this: the law of scaling and the dualistic world model, with active information as its second pillar. There is no supernatural basic function missing that only humans possess.
The “mental” rise of the computer
The computer’s career began as what the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss called a “Rechenknecht” (literally, “calculating servant”). This term referred to people who carried out numerical calculations “mindlessly” according to instructions (this is the origin of the English word “computer”). However, the “electronic brain” was superior to human computational ability from the very beginning.
Closely related to straightforward calculations was the adaptation of games for the computer, foremost among them chess. Until around 1990, the prevailing opinion was that the computer would never play chess as well as a human. The same applied to other basic functions, such as speech recognition or transcription, handwriting recognition, translation between languages, and text processing. Around the year 2000, the author considered it the ultimate challenge for a computer to be able to explain the meaning of an incomprehensible joke to him. Today, it can do just that. The prevailing opinion from about 1985 to 2005 was:
“A computer can only perform mental tasks in a clumsy manner. Humans possess abilities — especially in creativity — that a machine cannot have.”
As experienced by the author from the 1960s to the 1980s
A biographical note: The author himself led a small artificial intelligence project around 1985. The project focused on analyzing system errors during the operation of the IBM MVS system. The project failed — there was too much scattered data and too many rules. The integration of vast amounts of real-world data was then successfully achieved surprisingly easy in the last decade.
Thus, the last 75 years have been a race to catch up: Information technology has taken over one human intellectual ability after another.
The cartoon by futurist and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil in Figure 1 is a typical snapshot of the human condition around the turn of the millennium.
Computer vs. Human capabilities around 2000.
From: The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, 1999, Viking, NY.
The belief that human abilities are unique gradually eroded under the pressure of technological advances. The half-hearted excuse — “but it’s not real” — became increasingly artificial. How can one deny a computer’s ability to play a game when it outperforms the world champion, or its ability to translate when it does so better than some professional translators — and across more than 100 languages?
To use a term coined by psychologist Sigmund Freud, the development of IT represents yet another “copernicanization” or Copernican revolution — a displacement of humans from a unique central position. No one can claim anymore that only we humans are intelligent. That would be hypocrisy.
Even nowadays, many people still cling to the last bastions of resistance against computers in human consciousness and souls, believing that “only a human has” still something unique — that they are something different. Not physics, and not a kind of computer.
Why didn’t we — and still don’t — want to be a kind of computer?
We humans have always wanted to be physically unique — at least in terms of being organic. Organic substances were believed to possess a special life force. In 1828, the chemist Friedrich Wöhler synthesized the organic compound urea using only inorganic materials through a standard chemical process. It was “real” urea, just like the “genuine” urea obtained from human or animal urine (Figure 2).
Human urine versus granular urea
Thus, also the living body consists of ordinary matter, and there is a single chemistry that encompasses both inorganic and organic substances.
The spiritual world gives the impression of being superior to the physical world. The antique philosopher Plato held an extreme view, regarding the spiritual world as the essential and eternal reality. The early modern philosophical view of the philosopher René Descartes is one of dualism between body and mind, with the mind conceived as an unknown “subtle” substance. Information technology, by replicating mental abilities and characteristics, shows us the path to understanding: This subtle substance is information, and it always exists alongside matter.
We humans are information-processing machines, but we do not want to be “machines.” Curiously, the word originally comes from the Ancient Greek mechos and does not refer to a physical device at all, but rather to a concept. But we do not want to be machines, because machines are rigid, confined to boxes, can only perform predetermined tasks, learn nothing, and are essentially dead. And computers must be electrical devices with chips containing transistors. All of these statements are all nonsensical and completely wrong. Yet they still shape the attitudes of many people today. Computers can be built in many ways, including even mechanically, but using transistors in nanotechnology works best from a technical standpoint.
We would like to highlight two more significant philosophical paradigm shifts mandatory for understanding: the law of ultra-large systems and the dualistic world model of physics and computer science.
The first paradigm shift: The Scaling Law
The law of ultra-large systems — the Scaling Law — states that very large systems can develop entirely new “living” properties, even if their individual components are trivial.
This contradicts naive intuition and the assertions of many pre-computer-era philosophers.
In 1714, the brilliant philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz vividly described a machine as large as a mill that one could walk into — yet it remains nothing more than a collection of simple parts such as wheels and axles. The philosopher is mistaken: billions or trillions of transistor operations can produce a philosophical treatise.
In 1819, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer correctly recognized that mathematics has its origins in simple counting. Yes, one can do mathematics with a mechanical calculator, and therefore mathematics cannot be a noble art. The philosopher is mistaken: the system of mathematics is of a gigantic and internally consistent complexity.
In 1980, the modern philosopher John Searle attempted to use his “Chinese Room” parable to show that a computer can only “understand” syntax, but not semantics (that is, it does not “truly” understand). The philosopher is mistaken: Today, it is possible to carry on conversations across different languages. In sufficiently large systems, rudimentary knowledge evolves into professional knowledge and, in turn, into ever-better, “real” understanding.
Let’s flip the line of reasoning: Yes, even the best AI system runs on basic computer commands. Ultimately, they are all trivial tiny commands that shift bits around — but when executed millions or billions of times, they produce the result: this is the image of a smiling woman.
The general formulation of the scaling law stems from an observation made by computer scientist Linda Northrop in 2006 while building very large software systems. Ultra-large systems are no longer deterministic clockworks; rather, they come to life through random events and the emergence of new functions.
Get Walter Hehl’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The second paradigm shift: the dualism of physics and information
For a long time, information led a shadowy existence alongside physics. In extreme cases, information was regarded as physics — as, for example, by the physicist and my colleague Rolf Landauer. But Landauer calculated only the physical aspect of information: How much energy is required to write or erase a mark?
Information is something entirely different and has nothing to do with physics: In the simplest case, it is the specification of how a decision is to be made, “yes” or “no”. In large systems, highly complex structures of complexity arise, featuring feedback loops and branching paths. In the system, this is used to control and execute processes — in particular, the processes of life and thinking.
Combining physics and information processing, as well as physics for information processing, we construct the diagram Figure 3 illustrating the evolution of the universe (Hehl, 2016). This picture should be viewed as an attempt to update the three worlds of the philosopher Karl Popper (Popper, 1978).
World 1: Blue: Physics World 2: Green: Biology Gray: Digital Technology World 3 is fictitious
The inanimate world of physics is represented by a large (blue) “L”, with the vertical line of the “L” depicting the evolution of the inanimate world and the horizontal bar serving as the foundation for all life. The rise of the pillars of information signifies a sequence of emergent phenomena.
The evolution of life is the green pillar of bioinformatics, which rests upon physics. The pillar begins “at the bottom” with the simplest microbes and then extends “upward” to us humans. Parallel to this is the technical development of information technology. At first, there were only mechanical calculating machines (Blaise Pascal in 1642, Philipp Matthäus Hahn from 1776 onward), but then came computers (Charles Babbage in theory around 1832, Konrad Zuse in practice in 1941); the black extension pointing upward is meant to hint at the unknown future of this development.
The green organic tower in the figure developed its IT systems over 3.5 billion years — slowly at first, then more rapidly over the last 100,000 years. The totality of living beings is a vast software library. Our intellectual and mental abilities emerged through a long series of developments. This method of development is called evolution, and it operates without a goal — only in hindsight does it appear as though we humans are the goal.
The gray, technical line is quite different. Here, the development of individual components is driven by purpose (with specifications) — though the development as a whole is full of its own momentum, driven primarily by the forces of capitalism. Over the past 80 years or so, the “gray” has roughly reached the “green” performance level. Until now, the primary goal has been to replicate human capabilities, ranging from bookkeeping to language to philosophy — but machine development is free and not limited to (fixed) human foundations and individual abilities. And further progress seems unrestricted, with prospects that remain unclear.
The diagram in the figure also includes a fictional “World 3” in the sense described by Karl Popper for possible “higher” objects that cannot be constructed from physics or information technology — perhaps “true” art?
A common criticism that persists to this day is that only humans can “truly” understand:
Understanding means being able to integrate a statement (a fact or a process) into a network of statements in such a way that as few contradictions or gaps as possible arise. For an amateur, this network is sparse and full of gaps; for a professional, it is tightly woven and well-established. This definition applies to computers as well as to humans. A human’s network is individual; a computer’s network encompasses the entire chatter of the world, as well as the totality of all published scientific works worldwide. The human intellect is nothing fundamentally different or more capable.
Understanding consciousness requires a third paradigm shift, one that is particularly difficult to grasp.
The third paradigm shift: We are inside
Hardly anyone disputes that humans carry something like a computer within them. But it is a major hurdle to understand: We are the computer. There is nothing spiritual separate from it. We are, above all, a biological operating system that allows the host to assert itself in the environment. Part of the operating system runs in the background; the part that we actively perceive — and which is also connected to language — is our consciousness.
Drawing by physicist Ernst Mach from the year 1886.
Wikimedia Commons
Figure 4 shows a snapshot of the visual input received by the self, which is processed, corrected, and interpreted in conjunction with the other components of the self. It may be one of the “most philosophical” images in existence — created by a physicist.
Philosophically significant is the fact that the operating system can apply its experiences with the environment and other living beings to itself as well. This is consciousness in the narrower sense. There is no visibly missing function that would, in principle, prevent its replication through digital IT.
Human consciousness, however, is closely linked to our bodily sensors and thereby generates specific sensations (embodiment). Artificial “consciousnesses” could utilize signals from additional and entirely different sensors and form close connections with other “consciousnesses” — in extreme cases, with a large portion of humanity.
Summary and Conclusions
We humans, influenced by traditional religion and our own arrogance, are firmly convinced that there is something different, something deeper within us than in the rest of nature — something that even outlasts death.
It takes a few paradigm shifts to understand that, “technically,” we are simply ordinary natural technology. We identify three main barriers:
the scaling law, according to which very large systems become quasi-living,
the dualism of the world as seen through physics and computer science, and
the problem of understanding our own perspective: We are not merely a kind of computer system — we are the system; we are inside it.
Our mental abilities are thus merely special forms of possible execution, implemented in the slimy, limited (yet magnificent) technologies of biology. There is no reason to regard functions within these technologies as superior — as “real” or “more real” — than the capabilities of technical systems. “Real” here simply means resulting from evolution and biologically realized, in a wild state, so to speak.
And be careful: natural abilities are relatively fixed and remain as they are, while technical abilities continue to grow. We —we biological and (our) non-biological systems — will have to coexist in living community in the future.
There’s no shame in being made up solely of physics and computer science. It’s reality. That’s what Hamlet, Faust, and “War and Peace” were created from.
Literature
Hehl, Walter, 2016. A General World Model with Poїesis: Popper’s ‘Three Worlds’ updated with Software. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00360
Popper, Karl, 1978. Three Worlds. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Vol. 1. https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/popper80.pdf
