You Are Not an Algorithm
Some claim algorithms will soon know us better than we know ourselves. But the truth about being human is not so simple.
What is it like to be a bat?
The philosopher Thomas Nagel asked that question in a now-legendary paper first published in The Philosophical Review in 1974. He wasn’t really asking his readers to imagine a life spent using echolocation to navigate through dark caves. Instead, he wanted them to think about the nature of mind.
Specifically, Nagel wanted to highlight the private, subjective, what it is like-ness of conscious experience, and how it seemingly cannot be reduced to a description of physical brain states.
Nagel’s point was as follows. We could in principle describe exactly the physical structure of a bat brain. We could describe the firing of neurons inside that brain and the consequent passage of electrical signals through it. But after all that, there will still be something about the operations of a bat brain that we would be no closer to knowing. That is, what it is like to be a bat.
People used to think that human beings have souls.
Now our understanding of ourselves is different. We can see that the brain is a highly complex, rule-bound information processing…
