Reception
 | This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (January 2022) |
| Author | John C. Lilly |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Communication Research Institute (1968), Julian Press (1972) |
Publication date | 1968 |
| ISBN | 0-517-52757-X (Julian Press, 1987) |
| OCLC | 656199271 |
| 612/.82 | |
| LC Class | QP376 .L57 1968 |
| Followed by | The Center of the Cyclone |
| Website | www |
Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory and Experiments is a 1968 book by John C. Lilly. In the book, "the doctor imagines the brain as a piece of computer technology." [1] More specifically, he uses "the analogy of brain being the hardware, the mind being the software and consciousness being beyond both." [2]
The term human biocomputer, coined by Lilly, refers to the "hardware" of the human anatomy. This would include the brain, internal organs, and other human organ systems such as cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, immune, integumentary, lymphatic, muscular, nervous, reproductive, respiratory, skeletal, and urinary systems. The biocomputer has stored program properties, and self-metaprogramming properties, with limits determinable and to be determined. [3]
The following definitions are used in the book:
The functional organization of the human biocomputer described in the book is: [8]
| Level | Description | Parts |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | Above and in biocomputer | unknown |
| 10 | Beyond metaprogramming | supra-species-metaprograms |
| 9 | To be metaprogrammed | supra-self-metaprograms |
| 8 | To metaprogram | self-metaprogram awareness |
| 7 | To program sets of programs | metaprograms metaprogram storage |
| 6 | Detailed instructions | programs program storage |
| 5 | Details of instructions | subroutines subroutine storage |
| 4 | Signs of activity | biochemical activity neural activity glial activity vascular activity |
| 3 | Brain | biochemical brain neural brain glial brain vascular brain |
| 2 | Body | biochemical body sensory body motor body vascular body |
| 1 | External reality | biochemical chemical physical |
The levels of the human biocomputer are explained thus: Levels from one to two are the boundaries between external reality and the body. Certain energies and materials (heat, light, sound, food, and secretions) pass through this boundary in special places. Levels two to three are the boundaries of body and brain, in which special structures such as blood vessels, nerve fibers, and cerebrospinal fluid pass. Levels four through eleven are in the brain circuitry, and is the software inside the biocomputer. Levels after ten are termed unknown. This is to allow an openness for future scientific research, and discoveries. This is also to illustrate the unwillingness to subscribe to any dogmatic belief, to encourage creative, courageous and imaginative investigation, to emphasize the necessity for unknown factors on all levels, and to point out the heuristic nature of this schema. [9]
| | This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (January 2022) |
The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot have a "mind", "understanding", or "consciousness", regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was presented by philosopher John Searle in his paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980. Similar arguments were presented by Gottfried Leibniz (1714), Anatoly Dneprov (1961), Lawrence Davis (1974) and Ned Block (1978). Searle's version has been widely discussed in the years since. The centerpiece of Searle's argument is a thought experiment known as the Chinese room.
Sir John Carew Eccles was an Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse. He shared the prize with Andrew Huxley and Alan Lloyd Hodgkin.
Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction-level, data, and task parallelism. Parallelism has long been employed in high-performance computing, but has gained broader interest due to the physical constraints preventing frequency scaling. As power consumption by computers has become a concern in recent years, parallel computing has become the dominant paradigm in computer architecture, mainly in the form of multi-core processors.
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, until June 2019, when his status as professor emeritus was revoked because he was found to have violated the university's sexual harassment policies.
Mind uploading is a speculative process of whole brain emulation in which a brain scan is used to completely emulate the mental state of the individual in a digital computer. The computer would then run a simulation of the brain's information processing, such that it would respond in essentially the same way as the original brain and experience having a sentient conscious mind.
In the philosophy of mind, functionalism is the thesis that each and every mental state is constituted solely by its functional role, which means its causal relation to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs. Functionalism developed largely as an alternative to the identity theory of mind and behaviorism.
The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul is a 1981 collection of essays and other texts about the nature of the mind and the self, edited with commentary by philosophers Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. The texts range from early philosophical and fictional musings on a subject that could seemingly only be examined in the realm of thought, to works from the twentieth century where the nature of the self became a viable topic for scientific study.
Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC), synthetic consciousness or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The same terminology can be used with the term "sentience" instead of "consciousness" when specifically designating phenomenal consciousness.
John Cunningham Lilly was an American physician, neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, psychonaut, philosopher, writer and inventor. He was a member of a group of counterculture thinkers that included Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and Werner Erhard, all frequent visitors to the Lilly home. He often stirred controversy, especially among mainstream scientists.
The eight-circuit model of consciousness is a holistic model originally presented as psychological philosophy by Timothy Leary in books including Neurologic (1973) and Exo-Psychology (1977), later expanded on by Robert Anton Wilson in his books Cosmic Trigger (1977) and Prometheus Rising (1983), and by Antero Alli in his books Angel Tech (1985) and The Eight-Circuit Brain (2009), that suggests "eight periods [circuits]" within the model. This model has been described as a potential route towards reconciling different interpretations of what it means to be a human being. The eight circuits, or eight systems or "brains", as referred by other authors, operate within the human nervous system. Each corresponds to its own imprint and subjective experience of reality. Leary and Alli include three stages for each circuit, detailing developmental points for each level of consciousness.
Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data. It means that a program can be designed to read, generate, analyse or transform other programs, and even modify itself while running. In some cases, this allows programmers to minimize the number of lines of code to express a solution, in turn reducing development time. It also allows programs a greater flexibility to efficiently handle new situations without recompilation.
Developed in his (1999) book, "The Feeling of What Happens", Antonio Damasio's theory of consciousness proposes that consciousness arises from the interactions between the brain, the body, and the environment. According to this theory, consciousness is not a unitary experience, but rather emerges from the dynamic interplay between different brain regions and their corresponding bodily states. Damasio argues that our conscious experiences are influenced by the emotional responses that are generated by our body's interactions with the environment, and that these emotional responses play a crucial role in shaping our conscious experience. This theory emphasizes the importance of the body and its physiological processes in the emergence of consciousness.
Reality tunnel is a theory that, with a subconscious set of mental filters formed from beliefs and experiences, every individual interprets the same world differently, hence "Truth is in the eye of the beholder". It is similar to the idea of representative realism, and was coined by Timothy Leary (1920–1996). It was further expanded on by Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007), who wrote about the idea extensively in his 1983 book Prometheus Rising.
In the philosophy of mind, the user illusion is a metaphor for a proposed description of consciousness that argues that conscious experience does not directly expose objective reality, but instead provides a simplified version of reality that allows humans to make decisions and act in their environment, akin to a computer desktop. According to this picture, our experience of the world is not immediate, as all sensation requires processing time. It follows that our conscious experience is less a perfect reflection of what is occurring, and more a simulation produced subconsciously by the brain. Therefore, there may be phenomena that exist beyond our peripheries, beyond what consciousness could create to isolate or reduce them.
The philosophy of artificial intelligence is a branch of the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of computer science that explores artificial intelligence and its implications for knowledge and understanding of intelligence, ethics, consciousness, epistemology, and free will. Furthermore, the technology is concerned with the creation of artificial animals or artificial people so the discipline is of considerable interest to philosophers. These factors contributed to the emergence of the philosophy of artificial intelligence.
The concept of uploading a mind into a computer, often into a simulated reality, is a recurring theme in science-fiction novels and films since the 1950s. Some stories describe societies of such minds.
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) refer to the relationships between mental states and neural states and constitute the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for a specific conscious percept. Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correlates of subjective phenomena; that is, neural changes which necessarily and regularly correlate with a specific experience. The set should be minimal because, under the materialist assumption that the brain is sufficient to give rise to any given conscious experience, the question is which of its components are necessary to produce it.
In philosophy of mind, qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in relation to a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific apple — this particular apple now".
In computer science and computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the description may include the instruction set architecture design, microarchitecture design, logic design, and implementation.
Philosophy of psychedelics is the philosophical investigation of the psychedelic experience. While psychedelic, entheogenic or hallucinogenic substances have been used by many traditional cultures throughout history mostly for religious purposes, recorded philosophical speculation and analysis of these substances, their phenomenological effects and the relevance of these altered states of consciousness to philosophical questions is a relatively late phenomenon in the history of philosophy. Traditional cultures who use psychedelic substances such as the Amazonian and Indigenous Mexican peoples hold that ingesting medicinal plants such as Ayahuasca and Peyote allows one to commune with the beings of the spirit world.