The title is a 3rd attempt as the previous titles generated opprobrium from two Christians. 1st attempt (Reason is the Greatest Enemy that Faith Has) was allegedly a misrepresentation of Martin Luther. A creationist gave me a modified version (Reason can be - and often is - the greatest enemy that faith has) but became angry when I used it. Latest attempt is from Mark Twain.
The posts here describe conversations with Apologists & what I regard as their fallacious arguments.
Why creating a chemical brain will be how we understand consciousness
Rowan Hooper
Unorthodox chemist Lee Cronin is leading a radical quest to use chemistry to explain consciousness and create artificial life
“Consciousness will never be realised in silicon - we need to create chemical brains”
Robert Ormerod
WHEN Lee Cronin was 9 he was given a Sinclair ZX81 computer and a chemistry set. Unlike most children, Cronin imagined how great it would be if the two things could be combined to make a programmable chemical computer.
Now 45 and the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, Cronin leads a research team of more than 50 people, but his childhood obsessions remain. He is constructing chemical brains, and has ambitions to create artificial life – using a radical new approach.
What drives you?
Everything I'm doing now, I've wanted to do since I was a boy. I wanted to discover something new about the universe. It was stressful for my parents because anything they bought, I just took apart. Once I tried to build a carbon dioxide laser. When I was 7 or 8, I ripped the logic unit out of the washing machine and the cathode ray tube from the TV and tried to connect it all up and make my first computer.
Your poor parents. Were they scientists?
No, my father works in construction and my mother was a nurse but they separated when I was 9 and later divorced. I had learning difficulties and was in remedial class at school. I wasn't interested in what the teachers were doing. I taught myself the maths of relativity when I was 7. I'm determined to answer questions now because I was told I wasn't any good.
What are you doing to pursue those childhood dreams?
There are four missions in my lab: to build a robot that can do all of chemistry (and digitise it – we call it the "chemputer"), to create artificial life, to understand information and to make a chemical brain. They're all effectively about the same thing: understanding the interaction of information in chemistry.
What does "information in chemistry" mean?
It is another way of asking how chemical systems can process information, beyond information storage or logic operations or molecular electronics. It's asking how biological cells process information and what the physical principles are that allow this to happen.
And this can help with your ambition of creating artificial life?
Information as a concept refers to data about reality that is encoded and needs an encoder. So I think that information only exists if there is biology, though not everyone agrees with this approach. But, if we create new chemical systems that process information, perhaps that can be viewed as a new type of life form. Making a new type of life form is a vital endeavour if we are to start to understand the missing physics in biology and chemistry, and the missing rules of the universe that allowed the emergence of life in the first place.
Life is a slippery thing to define...
Here's an idea: let's think of living things as machines that can produce complex objects that could not have randomly formed – from DNA to iPhones, they require information to assemble them. By thinking about life in this way, we can design a way to measure whether something is alive and then use that to make a machine to discover the route to life.
I want to do for chemistry what the Large Hadron Collider has done for physics. They had a theory that predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, developed a model to find out what energy range to look in, then built the LHC to look for it. We are developing a new origin-of-life theory and model so we can work out what time is required, what resources are needed and what scale a machine needs to be to find the right route to a new life form.
How far have you got?
In my lab I'm creating a physical model of the world in which you have simple rocks and simple organic molecules and then develop a way of getting from there to genetics. I want to understand what the difference is between stuff that is just complicated to make, such as an arrangement of molecules, and stuff that requires information to make, such as basic cellular machinery.
We're looking for molecules that have high molecular weight, that are abundant and that require more information to make them than just a random mess. If we start to see such molecules forming, what does it mean? It can't be alive according to standard definitions of life, and it's happening through random chemistry, but if the selected molecules direct the creation of the next, increasingly complex molecules... isn't that like life? I don't have proof that this can happen yet, but my guess is that all matter wants to be Darwinian, and we'll get a selfish molecule that will try to convert all the other molecules to be it.
You say you want to make a chemical brain too. Why?
Your brain is made of molecules and you can think. What is it about your brain that allows this? Instead of trying to image a brain to find out, why don't I just make one? There are 100 billion neurons in the brain, each with about 1000 connections. Overall, there are more potential configurations of the neurons and their connections in your brain than there are atoms in the universe. That's why consciousness will never be realised in silicon computers and why Elon Musk is foolish. He keeps going on about strong AI – machines that can think like humans. We'll have improved AI, but silicon doesn't allow enough available states for things to get really interesting. We'll need to create chemical brains to understand consciousness.
What about Google DeepMind? They're doing some amazing stuff.
DeepMind is brilliant, but I doubt they are ever going to understand what human intelligence really is unless they go beyond silicon-based computers. They are able to mimic some aspects, but ultimately I think it is more like a very good simulation tailored for specific jobs.
I don't think it is even possible to simulate the brain on a computer because we are missing so many rules, and the substrate is not complex enough. I want to make a chemical brain not to beat DeepMind, but to uncover the missing science, and perhaps make different types of non-biological or "inorganic" intelligence.
How would you go about making a chemical brain?
We are trying to see how a physical neural network, rather than an electronic circuit, can be used to physically compute and process information within a polymer, so we can make a physical, chemical, "wet" brain. We use a gel with conducting fibres on top of an electrode array. We tickle the bottom with random electrical inputs, or give it the output of a webcam: show it human faces and see if we can train the gel to recognise them. When we've got a brain gel that we've trained for one problem, we'll see if we can solve other ones with it.
Do you think this could affect how we see consciousness?
If we make a brain in the lab, and show that we can generate self-awareness in a certain chemical environment, that might change our view on consciousness. Take the chemical environment inside a jellyfish: they might be conscious on a basic level, or at least aware of their environment, but in a different way to whatever we imagine consciousness to be. That's if consciousness and free will really exist. I have my doubts.
This article appeared in print under the headline "'I want to make a chemical brain'"
