This content was published by Andrew Tomazos and written by several hundred members of the former Internet Knowledge Base project.
Brain / Computer Interaction & Chaos theory
Chaos theory refers to "non-linear thermodynamic systems" or "fundamentally complex systems showing critical dependence on initial conditions and generating 'emergent phenomena' otherwise known as 'strange attractors' ." The classic chaotic system is the weather. A living organism (or any part of a living organism, e.g. the brain) is an emergent phenomenon. Chaos theory predicts that it will never be possible to grow a new liver or a new heart in a laboratory using information available from the human genome project ... because it is not only the gene products that are important but also the ever changing environment in which the gene products interact over time. The greater the complexity, the more organised and stable is the emergent phenomenon. The greater the chaos, the greater the order.
Conciousness is (no doubt) an emergent phenomenon arising from the complexity in the firing of neurons in the brain. When the complexity of computer circuitry begins to mirror the complexity of neuronal firing in the brain, computers will (no doubt) begin to exhibit a kind of conciousness (artifical intelligence?). This may not be recognisable as conciousness in the human sense. Even a sparrow or an aphid or an ant has a kind of conciousness. The intriguing aspect to this whole story is that the "conciousness" that each computer will possess is likely to show "critical dependence on initial conditions" and will vary between different computer architectures / software versions. We are (probably) already seeing the earliest manifestations of this in the different "personalities" of the MacOS and WinOS systems. What kinds of personalities are likely to emerge, I wonder ...
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