The Mind is Everywhere
Is our mind nothing but software, or are there other ways of understanding what it means to perceive existence?
"I am, as it were, an eye that the cosmos uses to look at itself. The Mind is not mine alone; the Mind is everywhere."
- Rudy Rucker
It is René Descartes, writing in 1641, who crystalises the idea that our mind is inextricably linked to our brain. With this, Descartes splits everything into divisible matter and indivisible mind, and we are all still recovering from the consequences of this sundering. Thus we say, without a trace of irony, that the brain causes the states of the mind even though it would be equally possible (and no more helpful) to say that the mind causes the states of the brain! It all depends what we mean by ‘mind’, since if we follow Descartes and decide that ‘mind’ is something describing the action of the brain, well, there can’t be any mystery about what we mean by mind because we already decided what this word means.
Yet there are mysteries here, if we want them, and one way of catching a glimpse of the genuine uncertainties about minds is to read Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, the great-great-great grandson of the philosopher Hegel. Rucker was part of the eclectic group of science fiction novelists responsible for the final literary movement in science fiction, known simply as ‘the Movement’. It was these writers - Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, Pat Cadigan, and Rudy Rucker - who gave birth to what is now called ‘cyberpunk’.
Rucker’s major contributions to cyberpunk are the novels Software and Wetware, both of which won Philip K. Dick awards, but even before this Rucker was known for his non-fiction reflections on mind, reality, and spacetime. The quote above is from 1981’s The Fourth Dimension, a tribute to Edwin Abbott’s 1884 mathematical adventure novella Flatland. Rucker’s Software followed a year later, a science fiction novel concerned with the relationship between who we are and our ‘software’, the contents of our minds.
There is a great moment in Software where a key character, Cobb, claims death is impossible. This bold claim follows from the implications of identifying ourselves with the patterns in our mind (whether or not this is understood as a particular configuration of our brain or not, although Rucker does assume this is true for humans). If who we are is a particular configuration of mathematical relations - which is what computer software consists of - then there is no question of death. The possibility of our particular configuration is eternal. It may not have a physical manifestation before you came about or indeed after you die, but the pattern exists as a possibility either way.
Once you accept an understanding of who you are as ‘software’, as a system of mathematical relations - and it is extremely fashionable to do so - it becomes difficult to escape the description that Rucker offers in The Fourth Dimension: why bother distinguishing all these minds as separate...? It is equally valid from a mathematical perspective to treat the set of all such entities as a single construct, at which point there are no ‘minds’ there is just ‘The Mind’: the universe perceiving itself through the myriad nervous systems and all equivalent frameworks capable of perception. Individual minds are just fragments of The Mind, just as neurons are merely components of a particular brain.
And reading this, you will resist. But you can’t have it both ways. Because if it is illegitimate to treat all potentialities of being as a superset, then the analogy between software and hardware (mind and its ‘wetware’, the brain) breaks down and we don’t really know what we mean by ‘mind’. The very fact that the minds of Descartes and Rucker intersect with ours when we read their books is of far greater significance to the question of what ‘mind’ means than we are willing to admit. What obscures this, what makes all this so very difficult to accept is a particular habit, a way of judging that we learned from Descartes and so many others after him, a habit that makes us believe that peering deeper is more real than gazing widely.
To characterize the human brain's property of Mind as "software" is to neglect the contemporary state of understanding of the subject. The human mind is a property of biological neural networks and all the various evolved structures of the brain.