Conciousness, individuality and intelligence

I read recently in the papers about a study being conducted to gauge the power of the concious and unconcious mind. What they were essentially trying to see was whether our concious mind can overpower the unconcious, and hold it's own. The basis for their concern was the observation, that we don't really think when performing basic everyday tasks. It almost seems like the unconcious mind, the instinct, takes over mostly when we do everyday tasks. If you ever doubt that, try to remember what you just did when you've just finished some routine task. In all probability you won't, and if you do, you'll only remember some sketchy and vague things. Essentially you weren't really thinking when doing those tasks. The researchers tried to change a few things to force the mind to think, and voila! the areas of the brain associated with concious though lit up. So the researchers assume all's well as we do have a concious that is probably unique to each individual, and we're not being controlled by some part of our brain over which we have little control.

Why that's a big deal? we as humans base most arguments of our supremacy over animals and other beings by the argument of complex thought and decision making power. More so, we consider ourselves better than computers because we know we exist, there's a concept of self, and so on. In fact, in artificial intelligence, there's a seminal test given by one of the most influential computer scientists ever, called the Turing test. It determines whether a machine can be classified as "intelligent". The simple test just says that if you are "conversing" with something or someone beyond a wall, and cannot see the thing, if you are unable to distinguish "it" from a human, that "it" is intelligent. Simple, isn't it :D, the only nitty gritty being that I don't think it defines what the conversation method is, I think a chat would do. Getting back, we (meaning most people familiar with computers) only consider computers as a machine running certain software. Almost all computers run as some programs running over an operating system. Now for the slightly creepy part. The operating system takes care of the basic tasks, so that the applications can run with a certain level of abstraction and not care what lies underneath. Different kinds of operating systems can even tolerate certain hardware failure. Why I'm detailing such weird computer babble is that computers bear a startling resemblance to the way we function. Now most of this can obviously be owed to design, we always look to nature for inspiration for designing machines. But no one quite looks to our machines to try to understand ourselves. It's always said that the designer leaves a bit of himself/herself in their creation, making it kinda like their baby. If that's so, it's reasonable to assume, that the subconcious might also be leaving some tracks in our creations for us to follow. Why this becomes relevant is that, modern computers are developing processing units with multiple cores, essentially we're creating a spatial spread in the processing unit. So many designers are trying to design such processors in which certain parts are customized for certain tasks, like our brain does. So where does this leave us? research does point, albeit inconclusively, to the immense power of our subconcious in our functioning. What if our subconcious is our operating system and our concious merely a fledgling program running on it. Doesn't that leave our arguments for supremacy in tatters? why? because that would simply make us an operating system and hardware release by the company called nature. A release that has been around for a long time and could be up for obsoletion. Or it could even give credence to a matrix like scenario, we might simply be programs running on some machine in the future, keeping us alive in a virtual world. Or we could be no better than a program itself, a program in some system solving some problem. The wonderful part is that we would never realise if we were in a simulated environment, simply because we have never seen a "real" environment.

But more than that, an OS and application framework would also explain why most of us can agree on some things, why we have a consensus on certain issues, why we have that gaussian like distribution in nature. Plus, nature is simply not interested in an individual, it only cares about species, it always programs individuals to let a species survive. So it seems sensible on nature's part not to keep the individuality come in way of the collective. Which brings us to an interesting point, whether we're as individualistic as we assume. I mean, don't we always think, the other person doesn't get it, or we're better than the other one. Maybe that's wrong, but then how do we explain intelligent and not-so-intelligent people? The interesting thing about computers is, that manufacturing them is a very wasteful process. Only about 15% of manufactured chips are ok. You could argue that that's hardware, and well, we're "manufactured" differently. Well, in the end, it's all chemical reactions :) . Maybe one person being intelligent is just a stroke of luck, or maybe it's something they did. But whatever it may be, that hunking OS of the unconcious is behind most of it, because research does show that the concious can do very little, it's not that powerful. For example, we can work with only 8 pieces of data at a time. Our unconcious slowly learns what 8 pieces to keep and how they should be organized. It's an interesting concept, because it seems, like our senses tell us what's going on, our unconcious may be getting cues from our concious, on how to improve things. But then trying to find out about our mind is perilously difficult. Why? as any computer engineer will tell you, reverse engineering a program when you don't know the API, is bloody hard. Maybe a simple hacking technique would be interesting to try, give the program an input, and look at the output, and repeat for lots of inputs. Penny for your thoughts, or should I say, your output at time t :)