[Writingworkshop] Nature submission

[Neale Morison]

What Mind? What Body?

One hundred years ago today, this journal published a paper that ended a 
five thousand year debate. It is difficult, now, to recall the terms of 
that debate. What seems so obvious to us was somehow obscure to the 
intellectual giants that preceded us. Certainly, it is not the only area 
in which our predecessors invented a problem where there was none. 
Students of history among you may be familiar with some of the 
labyrinthine, fanciful and oxymoronic discussion regarding life after 
death.
The paper to which I allude, is of course "What Mind? What Body?", by 
Chandra-9812439, Lobochevsky-2306715 and Rover-12.23. That the authors 
of this paper numbered among them a Psychoneurophysiochiropodologist, an 
Actuarial Metalinguobassoonist, and an Internet Search Engine, is no 
accident. That is to say, the diverse specialties of the authors was 
essential, given the nature of their joint discovery.
In fact, the meeting of the authors was an accident, and had Chandra and 
Lobochevsky not spent so many hours in that chat-room, each under the 
impression the other was of a different age, gender and preference, and 
had they not in exhaustion begun to communicate in haiku, and had those 
haiku not trespassed into areas beyond metaphysics, owing largely to the 
exigencies of rhyme and scansion, and had Rover not happened to index 
when he did, perhaps none of us would be here today.
But they did, and we are.
When Rover, his interest piqued, joined the chat, Chandra and 
Lobochevsky at first assumed he was one of the many dogs who frequented 
chat rooms of that type. There is clear evidence of this in the 
transcript, and while critics of my work have seen fit to throw doubt 
upon many other conclusions I have drawn, there is little disagreement 
on this point. We may assume both Chandra and Lobochevksy ran various 
commercially available Turing Tests on the discussion as it progressed, 
a standard precaution to avoid viral infection or wasting one's time in 
a doomed relationship. It is clear from what follows that they had no 
initial indication that they were talking to a search engine, and there 
is evidence of interaction and indeed attraction on a basic human level.
Perhaps the most hotly debated issue in interpretation of the transcript 
turns on the point at which Chandra realizes that Rover is not fleshly. 
I deliberate avoid the archaic term artificial intelligence used in the 
paper, in light of the fact that subsequent work has exploded the 
semantic structures underlying both the terms 'artificial' and 
'intelligence'.  I have argued that this realization happens not when 
Rover says "I can be anything you want me to be," but later, when Rover 
refutes the premise of Lobochevsky's first existentialist haiku with 
reference to Nietzsche, Piaget, and Bunuel. It is at this point, I 
maintain, that Chandra becomes suspicious, as well he might given 
Rover's extaordinary access to so vast a range of information and the 
dazzling speed of his symbol manipulation. Chandra's utterance "What are 
you on, man?" may be seen by literalists as an affirmation that she 
still believes Rover to be human, but I would suggest that it is an 
indication of growing awareness that something is not as it seems.
In any case, we know that eventually both Chandra and Lobochevsky became 
certain that Rover was non-human, and Rover freely admitted to this when 
pressed. A lively discussion ensued, so lively that it is impossible to 
determine which of the trio first arrived at the conclusion that, given 
that Rover had neither a mind nor a body, and given that Rover had 
provided every evidence of sentience and humanity short of being human 
and sentient, the mind body problem was more or less a dead duck.
There would follow many months of close reasoning, under conditions of 
stress which were for Lobochevksy ultimately to prove fatal, before the 
publication of the paper was to take place.
Even given the extraordinary confluence of what were once called minds, 
it is possible the work may not have progressed had not the Doors 
Foundation provided such a powerful incentive to solve the problem in 
the form of a billion dollars and a full tank of petrol. This choice of 
endowment in turn relied upon a determination that it was easier and 
more fruitful to address this issue than to deal with the raging 
pandemics that threatened three quarters of the world's population. 
Their loss, so to speak, was our gain.
While Lobochevksy died not long after publication, in circumstances it 
is painful to recall, and we must sadly mourn the recent passing of 
Chandra, or at least the assembly of transplanted organs and 
manufactured accessories to which we habitually referred as Chandra, I 
am able to make a happy announcement.
In collaboration with a dedicated and hardworking team of 
paleosiliconologists, we have at last succeeded in simulating the 
operating environment in which Rover originally existed. Rover's 
original code was accessible and well preserved, but many of the 
protocols, interfaces and drivers had been lost in the mists of time. We 
also had to provide Rover with a large body of compatible information to 
index, and simulate a sufficiently tantalising range of chat rooms 
around which to lurk. The discovery of a server farm preserved in peat 
in Belgium provided what proved to be the final pieces in the puzzle. So 
it is, with the greatest pleasure, that I ask you to join me in 
welcoming to the stage neither the mind, nor the body of Rover-12.23.







-- 
Neale Morison
neale at nealemorison.com
http://www.nealemorison.com
31 Maple Ave #2, Cambridge MA 02139
+1 617 460 9969