Michio Kaku’s ‘Future of the Mind’

The book that I read this month is 'The Future of the Mind_ The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind-Doubleday' Michio Kaku.

In his book, “Physics of the Future,” Kaku took readers on a whirlwind tour of science fictions he believes are poised to become science realities: space travel and nanotech medical robots. In “The Future of the Mind,” Kaku ushers us to even stranger territory — the science of consciousness. Kaku claims the mysteries of the mind will soon be mysteries no more. It’s an audacious assertion backed up, he says, by a flood of new neuroscience technologies. But behind his buoyant optimism lie questions that threaten the enterprise he describes so skillfully. What does a science of the mind, rather than the brain, look like? Does such a science require reducing the mind to “just neurons,” or are there other paths to understanding the phenomena of consciousness?

For Kaku, the brain is a computer made of meat, and understanding the mind is just a really, really hard engineering problem. The fundamental laws are already known, and Kaku tells us we’ll soon be manipulating the stuff of consciousness with the same acuity we push electrons around in our digital devices. This singular confidence is both strength and weakness as Kaku unspools his narrative, and doubts about his core convictions begin to trail the reader like a parade of ghosts.

Kaku takes us to laboratories where researchers are studying the microscopic dynamics of the brain’s wiring. For example, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks neural activity, researchers have recorded how the brain lights up when shown fragments of a video. Scientists can then determine a subject’s neural response to seeing various things. Comparing this dictionary of neural responses to the observed fMRI patterns in a person viewing a different film, researchers can reconstruct a reasonable facsimile of the film based purely on brain activity. With this kind of technique it may even be possible for scientists to crudely identify what people hooked to fMRI machines are dreaming about.

From these developments, Kaku imagines an era when memories can be recorded and then played back into someone else’s head by stimulating the same pattern of neural activity. Going one step further, machines wired directly to brains will be able to read and transmit our thoughts instantaneously.

Minds made of meat (ours) are just one of Kaku’s concerns. He is also interested in the possibilities of silicon and even alien minds. A compelling chapter on artificial intelligence describes the explosion in robotics and the new research that seeks to broaden the requirements for silicon self-consciousness, including a capacity to feel emotion.

Like the futurist Ray Kurzweil, Kaku believes the most important advances in silicon computing will still serve our needs and not the coming robot overlords (if we do create them). By mapping out the “connectome” — the explicit account of every neural connection in your head — Kaku tells us it should be possible to reverse-engineer each and every person’s brain. Reconstruct this connectome in a computer and you will have downloaded yourself into that machine. In this way the future of the mind, your mind in particular, might last as long as there are computers to run your connectome.

But are you nothing more than the sum of your brain’s connections? Here’s where Kaku stumbles. It’s been almost 20 years since the philosopher David Chalmers introduced the distinction between “easy” and “hard” problems in the study of consciousness. Easy problems, according to Chalmers, were things like figuring out how the brain cycles through signals from the arm allowing you to pick up an object. Researchers developing the next generation of prosthetics will tell you this “easy” problem remains pretty hard, but as Chalmers rightly pointed out, control of the arm is nothing compared with developing a scientific account of the vividness of our own experience. It’s the internal luminosity — the “being” of our being — that constitutes Chalmers’s hard problem and that eludes Kaku’s engineering-­based perspective.

The problem is that we still don’t have much in the way of a working model of consciousness. With a physicist’s eye for economy, Kaku tries to provide one through what he calls a “space-time theory.” It’s a model of consciousness with a graded scale of awareness based on the number of feedback loops between environment and organism. Thus, in Kaku’s view, a thermostat has the lowest possible level of consciousness while humans, with our ability to move through space and project ourselves mentally backward and forward in time, represent the highest level currently known.

I’ve spent most of my professional life running supercomputer simulations of events like the collapsing of interstellar gas clouds to form new stars, and it seems to me that Kaku has taken a metaphor and mistaken it for a mechanism. There has always been the temptation to take the latest technology, like clockworks in the 17th century, and see it as a model for the mechanics of thought. But simulations are not a self, and information is not experience. Kaku acknowledges the existence of the hard problem but waves it away. “There is no such thing as the Hard Problem,” he writes.

Thus the essential mystery of our lives — the strange sense of presence to which we’re bound till death and that lies at the heart of so much poetry, art and music — is dismissed as a non-problem when it’s exactly the problem we can’t ignore. If we’re to have anything like a final theory of consciousness, we had better be attentive to the complexity of how we experience our being.

When Kaku quotes the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky telling us that “minds are simply what brains do,” he assumes that scientific accounts of consciousness must reduce to discussions of circuitry and programming alone. But there are other options. For those pursuing ideas of “emergence,” descriptions of lower-level structures, like neurons, don’t exhaust nature’s creative potential. There’s also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things the world is built of, like mass or electric charge.

On the ethical front, Kaku does an admirable job of at least raising the troubling issues inherent in the technologies he describes, but there’s one critical question he misses entirely. The deployment of new technologies tends to create their own realities and values. If we treat minds like meat-computers, we may end up in a world where that’s the only aspect of their nature we perceive or value.

Keeping these questions in mind, however, only enhances the enjoyment of this wide-ranging book. Kaku thinks with great breadth, and the vistas he presents us are worth the trip even if some of them turn out to be only dreamscapes.

THE FUTURE OF THE MIND

The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

By Michio Kaku