James S. Trefil (born 9/10/1938) is an American physicist (Ph.D. in Physics at Stanford University in 1966) and author of more than thirty books. Much of his published work focuses on science for the general audience. Dr. Trefil has previously served as Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia and he now teaches as Robinson Professor of Physics at George Mason University. Among Trefil's books is Are We Unique?, an argument for human uniqueness in which he questions the comparisons between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Trefil also regularly gives presentations to judges and public officials about the intersections between science and the law.
What Trefil demonstrates here is that we are indeed unique and always will be regardless of how powerful and clever and "conscious" our computers become. He is NOT saying that we will be unsurpassed in intelligence or that we possess souls and computers don't. What Trefil is asserting is something much more modest. We are unique in the sense that there is nothing exactly like us. This is a "unique" akin to the "special" in "special education." We are special. It doesn't matter how filled or unfilled the universe is with intelligent life forms. We are and will be uniquely ourselves.
Trefil's main subsidiary argument, that the difference between animal consciousness and human consciousness is more than just a difference of degree, is more interesting. He asserts that the difference is so great that it constitutes a difference of kind. When things get sufficiently complex we have the "emergent property" phenomenon. As others have said, more is different, and what emerges is something that cannot always be predicted.
I also think he makes a nice argument for the possibility that we will not be able to build a computer more sophisticated than our brain. It could just be, he asserts, that something like Godel's theorem which states that any mathematical system of sufficient complexity includes statements that can't be proven or are contradictory, may be "waiting for us in complex systems" (p. 219) His point is there may be a practical barrier beyond which our very finite minds cannot go. I suspect he is right, and this is something worth pondering.
But there is a problem with the intent of this book. Notice first that the title refers to the "unparalleled" intelligence of the human mind, not the "unsurpassed." One could also say that the intelligence of e.g., a silverfish is "unparalleled." Trefil knows that our intelligence is very likely to be surpassed. This sly use of language is similar to his main assertion that we are "unique." It's true, but so what?
Perhaps Trefil set out to show that human consciousness is something that a computer could never achieve. To this end he surveyed the "landscape of opinion" on consciousness and found the following categories: "Deniers," those who deny that there is a "problem of consciousness at all鈥搕hat once you understand what the neurons are doing, there's nothing else to explain" (pp. 182-183). He puts Daniel Dennett in this category. Next there are the "Mysterians," those who feel that the problem of consciousness will never be solved. And finally there are the "Materialists," like Francis Crick, who in his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994), asserts that we are "in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and the associated molecules."
Trefil (who is a physicist) claims to be a member of this latter group. However I think that he has a lot of the "mysterian" in him. For example, he writes on page 173 that when he was courting his future wife he suddenly realized he loved her, and he realized he knew this with more certainty than he had ever known anything in physics or mathematics. He adds that an algorithm running on a Turing machine is never going to know anything in quite the same way.
I agree, but the knowing he is talking about is hardly just a knowing. It is a near total brain/body experience, and since he is an evolutionary, reproducing human being, it's a profound and extremely important experience. He isn't just "knowing." He is feeling and then some. Computers don't feel. So of course they cannot know something in quite the same way.
There are other (small) problems with Trefil's presentation, but I'll skip them and go straight to what I think is the most glaring: an omission of a category for those who believe that consciousness is simply an illusion, a device of the evolutionary mechanism. This category would include most evolutionary psychologists and Tor Norretranders, who wrote The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (1991, 1998), a book I wish Trefil had read. From this point of view our consciousness is an emergent property of the evolutionary process, a mechanism that forces us to identify with the particular phenotype that we are and to work tirelessly for its advantage and to fear its disadvantage, especially its death. A computer, which has not gone through the same sort of process would not have a similar consciousness. On pages 184-185 Trefil encounters this point of view from the "Illusionists," as I will call them, but misses the significance of what they said to him. He writes that the neuroscientists with whom he was talking were "apt to brush off questions about consciousness with a wave of the hand and, 'Oh, it's just an illusion,' then get back to their work." Trefils claims these people are "deniers," not realizing that there is a world of difference between calling something an illusion and saying it doesn't exist. Illusions exist, and can be very powerful. Our consciousness is an illusion we can't help but believe.
I'd like to add that this idea of consciousness is an old one that can be found in the works of Buddhism, jnana yoga and the Vedas, and probably elsewhere. Our consciousness is an amazing experience, so overwhelming and so overpowering that it dominates all aspects of our existence. But it's just part of the illusion, the maya that separates us from the underlying truth of our existence. Our ego, our subjective sense of self, is also an illusion. Our individual consciousness is no different than the other person's. It is exactly the same: a mechanism of profound identification that fosters the delusion of separateness.
--Dennis Littrell, author of 鈥淭he World Is Not as We Think It Is鈥�
Embarrassingly, I wrote a review for Eve Spoke that may have actually been from my vague memory of this book. I read both a number of years ago and can't remember the specifics of either, beyond that I didn't dislike them. So there you go. "Was this review helpful?" - Indeed not!