Why minds, not machines, make decisions
From Chapter 2 of the book, Searching for Spirit. Searching for Truth about Mind and Morality. By C.R. Lind
(Photo above courtesy of artist Mark Ho. Visit his website at www.zoho.nl)
At each and every step of the way, a pre-existing mind is required to decide ahead of time how a machine should behave…the course of action that should be taken in response to a certain event. Minds, not machines, make decisions.
This rule continues to apply when individual switches are connected together to form logic gates, and these logic gates are connected together to form logic circuits. This rule applies no matter how many switches are connected together, and no matter how complicated the arrangements of these connections become.
From switch, to logic gate, to computer…a pre-existing mind is the cause of all apparent decision making and behavior in these machines…in ANY machine, including your brain (which is a machine).
To understand why this must be so, it is first necessary to understand the nature of a decision.
What is a decision? A decision is a choice between 2 or more possibilities. For example, if you are lost while driving down a one way road and come to a fork in the road, you must make a decision. You must decide whether to turn right or left. The simplest decision you can make is one where a MINIMUM of 2 possible choices are involved (Simple in terms of number of possibilities to choose from, not in terms of the moral or ethical dimensions of a decision).
Consider the decision, “Do I go fishing?” To make the decision, you must do several things. You must:
1) Decide what possible courses of action to be taken. In this example there are two, either
1. I will go fishing
Or 2. I will NOT go fishing.
2) Decide the event or thing that will determine which course of action will be selected. In this example, the event I have selected is “I feel like it”. “I feel like it” is a proposition. A proposition a statement that is either true or false.
A feature of ALL decisions is that the outcome of the event or thing that determines which course of action will be taken can ALWAYS be written in the form of a proposition.
3) Map each possible action listed in step 1 to one of the event’s or proposition’s outcomes listed in step 2. These mappings can take the form of an “IF – THEN” statement. In this example, there are two mappings:
1. IF (I feel like it) THEN (I will go gishing)
And 2. IF (I do not feel like it) THEN (I will not go fishing)
All IF – THEN statements take the form of: IF (This event / proposition is true) THEN (perform this action)
More than one action can be mapped to a single outcome of an event / proposition. For example, IF ( I feel like it) THEN (I will go fishing) AND (I will go swimming).
A switch, the simplest decision automation machine
A switch, like the switch you use to turn a lamp on or off, is a natural candidate for a machine that can automate making a decision. A switch, like a proposition, has two states. A proposition can be either true or false, and a switch can be either open or closed, on or off. You could just as easily label the on and off states of a switch as “True” and “False”, respectively.
Below is an example of what must be done to automate the decision, “Do I sound the alarm?” with a switch. To automate this decision, you must do several things:
1) You must decide what possible courses of action can be taken. In this example there are two, either
1. Sound the alarm
Or 2. Do not sound the alarm
2) You must decide the event or thing that will determine which course of action will be selected. This can always be written as a proposition. In this example, the proposition I have selected is “The window is open”. All propositions can be either true or false, and so this proposition has two possible outcomes:
1. The window is open
2. The window is not open
3) You must map each possible action listed in step 1 to one of the event’s or proposition’s outcomes listed in step 2. These mappings can take the form of an “IF – THEN” statement. In this example, there are two mappings:
1. IF (the window is open) THEN (sound the alarm)
And 2. IF (the window is not open) THEN (do not sound the alarm)
Below is a diagram of a switch that automates this decision. The switch is permanently kept open as long as the window is closed. When the window is opened, a spring beneath the switch pushes the switch closed, closing the electrical circuit and allowing electrical energy to travel through the bell, sounding the alarm.
|
|
|
| IF (the window is closed)
THEN (do not sound the alarm).
|
IF (the window is open)
THEN (sound the alarm).
|
The window alarm switch in this example does not make any decisions (nor does any other switch). All decisions concerning when the window is considered open and what action should be taken if the window is open were decided in advance by a pre-existing mind, the mind that designed the switch.
While this is intuitively obvious in the case of a single electric switch, it is far less obvious in the case of a sophisticated computer or a brain, both of which contain millions or billions of switches (millions in the case of computers and billions in the case of human brains).
The number of switches involved, or the way they are connected together, does not change the fact that minds, and not switches, make decisions.
|
The term “decision making machine” is misleading. The term “decision automation machine” more accurately describes the machine’s function…that of automatically carrying out a decision that was made ahead of time by the mind that designed/built the decision automation machine/switch.
|
The scientist Claude Shannon was the first person in the world to recognize that propositions can be physically represented as electrical switches.
With this insight, in his 1938 paper, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay Switching Circuits”, Claude Shannon showed how the branch of mathematics called Propositional Logic could be completely represented by electrical switches. (This paper, and the paper by Alan Turing referenced above, are the two founding papers for ALL of modern computer engineering and computer science).
Propositional Logic is the study of the logical relationships between 2 or more propositions. In his 1858 book titled “The Laws of Thought”, George Boole showed that there are only 3 possible relationships between any two propositions, from which propositional statements of greater and greater complexity can be derived. These are the AND relationship, the OR relationship, and the NOT relationship. On page 11 of his paper, Shannon shows how each of these relationships can be created by connecting switches(propositions) together in series or in parallel.
A circuit containing a single switch that is closed (also called a closed circuit) represents a TRUE proposition.
A circuit containing a single switch that is open (also called an open circuit) represents a false proposition.
|
|
|
|
A closed circuit lighting a light bulb.
IF (the circuit is closed) THEN (turn on the light bulb)
|
An open circuit. The light bulb is off.
IF (the circuit is open) THEN (turn off the light bulb)
|
The AND relationship is represented by two or more switches connected together in series:
For example,
IF (the Garage Door is open)
AND IF (The Close button is pressed)
THEN (Turn on the electric motor that closes the garage door (the down motor))
|
|
When the garage door is open and the close button (a switch) is open, the down motor is off.
|
|
|
When the garage door is open and the close button is pressed, the down motor will turn on, closing the garage door.
|
|
|
When the garage door is closed, the proposition “the Garage door is open” becomes false and the down motor will turn off.
|
The OR relationship is represented by two or more switches connected together in parallel:
For example, IF (the window #1 is open) OR (the window #2 open) then (sound the alarm).
By repositioning the wires in the alarm switch, The NOT relationship can be created:
IF (the window is not open) THEN (sound the alarm)
In computer engineering and computer science, these AND, OR, and NOT circuits are called logic gates.
Ultimately, the switch is the basic building block of a computer. As we have just shown, switches are the building blocks of logic gates. Logic gates are, in turn, connected together to build a computer. A brain is a biological computer, and therefore switches are also the building blocks of brains.
In electronic computers, these switches are called transistors. In brains, these switches are called neurons.
Being switches, both transistors and neurons act as IF – THEN decision making machines. As shown above, by their very nature as machines, a pre-existing mind must decide ahead of time how they will behave(what action they will perform) in response to an event (state of a proposition).
Summary
At each and every step of the way, a pre-existing mind is required to decide ahead of time how a decision automation machine should behave…the course of action that should be taken in response to a certain event. Minds, not machines, make decisions.
This rule continues to apply when individual decision automation machines (switches) are connected together to form logic gates, and these logic gates are connected together to form logic circuits. This rule applies no matter how many switches are connected together, and no matter how complicated the arrangements of these connections become.
From switch, to logic gate, to computer…a pre-existing mind is the cause of all apparent decision making and behavior in these machines…in ANY machine, including your brain (which is a machine).
This rule applies to the individual neurons (biological switches) comprising your brain, as well as to neurons connected together to form a network. The rule applies no matter how many neurons there are or how complicated the arrangement of the connections in the neural network become.
Mind is not the product of a computer or brain, the opposite is true. Computers and brains are the product of pre-existing minds.