Ambien Consciousness

This is a blog which was published last year for the Singularity Summit. Since the Summit is over, I decided to post it here for anyone interested who did not read it before.

This is a guest post from Matthew Putman. If you would like to submit a guest post proposal for possible inclusion, please emailadmin@singinst.org.

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The first of the big Ambien stories occurred in 2006 when Congressman Kennedy crashed his car while driving throughout Washington DC in the middle of the night. At first glance, the excuse upon his arrest, that he was driving recklessly due to the fact that he was not awake while driving, seemed absurd. As experts started appearing as well as other people who had strange experiences on Ambien, they realized that this was a possibility. It was possible to be completely asleep at the wheel. It was also around this time that I heard about a young man who had been in a vegetative state for years, who was woken up by Ambien. As long as he took his Ambien, he would be awake. What was the amazing power of this common sleeping pill?When I heard these stories it made me do two things; take Ambien to see what it was like, and to think more deeply about consciousness. What the reports were dealing with was not as simple as being awake or asleep, instead it spoke to a much larger issue, which is the biggest question asked in Philosophy; what triggers consciousness. While consciousness means different things to different philosophers, the layman like myself, thinks of it as the small part of our brains that are making us think we are in control. It is the bit that is associated with choice. That part our brain is not the most active, even if we don't know where it is. We can doze off, and our metabolism keeps working. The only thing we don't do is choose. The Ambien research puts that in the forefront of my consciousness. I realized that if I could do things as complicated as drive a car without this traditional type of conscious wakefulness, then perhaps consciousness wasn’t as complex of an evolutionary trait as we thought. Or as an evolutionary trait, it may be easier to pinpoint the reasons than we previously thought.

This has to do with one aspect of Singularity, which is finding the consciousness trigger for the possibility of a neural upload. Personally, as a technologist, I have always found this option more appealing than other life extension ideas, such as stopping cell aging. The reason is purely statistical. That is, the body will someday be destroyed no matter what. Hurricanes even come to New York these days, and disasters of all kinds will persist despite the reversal of cell aging. The difference is that the death of a 200 year old will be perceived as the death of child is perceived now. It will be a larger tragedy as the potential for a still longer life is larger. Still in cosmic terms the extended lifespan will still be insignificant. Upload is much different. In upload the person is embedded in silicon or another crystal. These crystals were formed billions of years ago. If our minds remained embedded in crystals for the next billion years that is significant. The big question though always becomes whether it is us who are embedded, or just a biography of us.

This is where the Ambien, consciousness thoughts come into play. If by us we mean the conscious us, then I would say the recreation of consciousness should be the easiest part of the extremely complicated upload problem. The ease by which Ambien can toggle consciousness and unconsciousness, and sometimes even blur the two can provide clues to engineers about what part of the human machine is responsible for why we consider ourselves to be human. The neuro receptors that Ambien acts upon have counterparts to other properties of existence not related to consiousness. This is where the engineer needs to take an existentially humbling move. That move is to follow the lead of neuroscience, and naturalism where research shows that it is highly probable that choice is an illusion. If there is no choice, and counter causal free-will does not exist, then the consciousness problem for uploaded human systems can be solved. It is simply a matter of programming  commands, which are  similar to what evolution has programmed into our genomes that say you are now choosing. That means having the ability to move, but have a regression that is active enough to always be able to place that movement in only one direction, at one time. In other, words program the illusion of freewill, and you will have programmed consciousness into an otherwise perfectly well uploaded unconscious human brain.

None of this is yet possible of course, but we can experiment a bit with AI on consciousness, by comparing an Ambien type action without awareness to a completely alert awareness, and place it in terms of choice. The human problem is the enormity of the data. The variables to create a regression analysis to know the next move are just too many to handle for the moment. It would also take the fun out of it all to be able to look at any future point on the regression to see what “choices” you have made. What is more possible is starting with blank slate situations, and evolving them to the point of consciousness. Consider an AI program to drive a car, like Rep. Kennedy. What would be the the algorithmic approach to distinguishing the difference between the Ambien induced driving and the awake driving? It would only be that the awake driver understands at least a series of potential outcomes, where the Ambien driver does not. Both may result in the same thing. The real, or artificial Rep. Kennedy may drive from home to Capital Hill, but only the awake one will know that he is doing it.

Does this shed any light on the possibilities of uploading the human brain or understanding one of the largest questions in philosophy? Most likely not much, but it does get me thinking of the toggle between consciousness and unconsciousness, and how little the difference between the two is. This is a problem as big and as interesting as any for engineers interested in Singularity solutions to pursue.

Putman is an Applied  physicist who is both a researcher and lecturer at Columbia University and the CEO of Nanotronics Imaging,.  He is also a musician, poet and blogger. For more on Matthew go to www.matthewcputman.com.