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" Smee worked both in theory and in the laboratory to explain the electrochemical basis of vision, sensation, memory, logic, and the origination and recombination of ideas. He believed that the mental powers of animals, human beings, and mechanisms were different not in kind but in degree. His definition of consciousness has seen scant improvement in 150 years. “When an image is produced by an action upon the external senses, the actions on the organs of sense concur with the actions in the brain; and the image is then a Reality. When an image occurs to the mind without a corresponding simultaneous action of the body, it is called a Thought. The power to distinguish between a thought and a reality is called Consciousness,” he wrote in his Principles of the Human Mind deduced from Physical Laws, published in 1849. "
― George Dyson , Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence
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" Smee understood the inescapable bureaucracy and rigidly enforced assumptions of formal systems. He suggested, with an unspoken nod to the thirteenth-century Ars Magna of Ramon Lull, that one of his differential machines “might be beneficially brought into use by those who use fixed and unchangeable creeds; for if they be arranged correctly then any deviation from them would be immediately registered. It must be apparent that such a machine would not estimate the quality of the creed, but only show whether any new creed, or portion of creed, coincided or not with the former creed. For whether the creed inferred a belief in the true God, in Mohammed, in ibises, crocodiles, or saints, in the power of the Virgin, or winking pictures of her, or the qualities of relics, or the virtues of images, or in the parties’ own inspiration, the effect would be the same.”42 "
― George Dyson , Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence
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" The emergence of life and intelligence from less-alive and less-intelligent components has happened at least once. Emergent behavior is that which cannot be predicted through analysis at any level simpler than that of the system as a whole. Explanations of emergence, like simplifications of complexity, are inherently illusory and can only be achieved by sleight of hand. This does not mean that emergence is not real. Emergent behavior, by definition, is what’s left after everything else has been explained. “Emergence offers a way to believe in physical causality while simultaneously maintaining the impossibility of a reductionist explanation of thought,” wrote W. Daniel Hillis, a computer architect who believes that architecture and programming can only go so far, after which intelligence has to be allowed to evolve on its own. “For those who fear mechanistic explanations of the human mind, our ignorance of how local interactions produce emergent behavior offers a reassuring fog in which to hide the soul.”33 Although individual computers and individual computer programs are developing the elements of artificial intelligence, it is in the larger networks (or the network at large) that we are developing a more likely medium for the emergence of the Leviathan of artificial mind. "
― George Dyson , Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence
