1947 and the Birth of Consciousness
I know what you were about to say with lots of footnotes
Book Club — 1947: When Now Begins
Consciousness — Sometimes the simplest explanation takes 200,000 years to emerge — A simpleton’s explanation (conjecture / guess)
The Excitement of Today
Today we start with a book and connect it with consciousness. On July 11th, my history book club met on a pleasant evening. Nineteen diverse souls met to discuss “1947: When Now Begins by Elisabeth Åsbrink. So what does this have to do with consciousness?
The Pandemic is Over
The 2nd Tuesday evening of the month book club meeting is reserved in my Google Calendar in the color green. The green stuff is reserved for the hobbies I enjoy. When I sat down, nearly every spare slot was taken! Our 90 minutes of book club would be split 19 ways! This was our largest group since before the pandemic.
A Year Is Just 12 Months
Elisabeth Åsbrink tells a story in a novel way. 1947 certainly meets the criteria of a pivotal year. Elisabeth tells the story by month. Sometimes, the process matters. I entered the meeting three minutes late and sat next to the first person sharing his review which was 10/10. I wish I had heard his complete take.
My Take On The Book
My sense of history books from a period in time is they often have a bias around the location. The book was well-written and informative. The blindspot in the book for me is the world is a big place and the lack of focus on Asia is too large of a blindspot. The book was an interesting amalgamation of topics. Some of them did not feel like history to me. The book had elements I valued as takeaways. The birth of Israel and the backroom actions that contributed to it were interesting and enlightening to me.
While I could not articulate my exact reasoning, the mix of topics and their juxtaposition was a bit too novel for me. The book, finally, was too Eurocentric so I rated it a 6/10.
Things Are True Until They Aren’t
The best part of the club is listening to the comments from everyone. We have a few members who often have an opinion I don’t expect. One member captured what I could not articulate. The mix of topics I questioned made more sense when I heard his opinion. Seeing the book as more than non-fiction and a piece of literature tied it together in a different way. I’m not sure it would change my OVERALL rating but I think I will reread the bits I had trouble with in a new light. The final average rating for our book of the month came to 7.4/10. Hearing so many opinions on the same book is just great.
Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?
I rarely reread books. This one I plan to reread partially in a new light. I think, especially for those who enjoy a wide range of books and shy away from purely non-fiction history, this book might be a great book to enjoy. 1947, for the record, was a watershed year. It is time to pivot to part two of this essay. In my opinion, the invention of the transistor in 1947 was one of the MOST PIVOTAL developments in human history. Part two piggybacks on this critical invention.
Inspiration Plus Showing Up
I believe the transistor is the beginning of the road to today and the angst over Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Friday before this post, a long-planned activity of my creative writing group helped direct me to the rest of the story. Our plans changed at the last minute due to a forecast of a severe thunderstorm. We were going to have dinner and then watch a baseball game together. Tonight it wasn’t going to the Minnesota Twins nor their Minor League affiliate the St. Paul Saints. Rather it would be throwback baseball. Sometimes referred to as Town Ball as described in the iconic Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams. Tonight it would be the Miesville Mudhens.
We changed our plans and had dinner at a pub-style restaurant closer to home. When I arrived, I sat down at one end of the table. I was destined this evening to get to know the husband of one of our group members. He is a retired university writing teacher. I enjoyed the conversation immensely. We talked about all sorts of things even including the fun of “pulling on the thread” of an idea like the book about 1947.
Artificial Intelligence is an over-hyped topic so I will take care to at least choose a new angle. One of my favorite observations about the topic is one of the very first recognized instances of artificial intelligence is the autopilot. It has been around for just a bit longer than the Income Tax (1912 vs 1913). Steady readers of my eclectic posts know my topics can meander at times. I confess one of my favorite parts of this new writing experience is the exploration of a topic and hoping it leads to what I write next. Today is a bit like that with 1947 and the transistor. I did the final edits on this post on Friday evening.
Refraining From Talking About AI
I thought long and hard about writing about AI. My favorite satire site “TheOnion“ is even writing too much about AI. The humble transistor of 1947 seems inconsequential in its scale. Today an iPhone A16 Bionic chip packs 3B transistors on a chip the size of your fingernail. I’m not sure when electronic thought exceeds the modest blob in our heads but we are getting perilously close. How close? I don’t think it matters because it is growing so fast the timing is very soon. Today I’m going for a short-order premise. I hope you all enjoy it and tell me in the comments why I’m all wet. I teased this week’s post without knowing it as I carried on about Orcas last week. While consciousness seems the most intractable of things to understand, what if it is much simpler than we realized? Perhaps communication (we tend to focus on speech and language) and its development from birth to death as we accumulate more experience is a dandy explanation of consciousness. Here’s my hopeful premise from A-Z:
I am a fan of Occam’s Razor — the simplest explanation is often the best.
The onward march of AI in our lives has been accepted at every turn. In 1947, the birth of the transistor was a pivot wherein computation, certainly one form of thought, began its march into more and more places in our lives. I believe we remained largely comfortable regardless of the breakthrough.
The smarter, and more organized we became, the larger role computing became in our lives. We began to observe in ourselves some fear these technologies blur the line between us and our digital assistants.
The more computation we have (like our iPhones), the more innately human capacities shift to the gray area. I think this makes most of us uncomfortable.
The arrival of ChatGPT is the latest and most unnerving of all for many. ChatGPT is built upon the concept of a large language model. At its simplest a language model is fascinating and has moved me to think about consciousness.
AMATEUR ALERT — THAT’S ME — TODAY IS MEANT AS FUN. I HOPE MY OPINION IS INTERESTING AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING.
So What’s The Conclusion?
Many people assume consciousness is rare and transcendental. What if it is simple? So many of the mysteries of the universe have been reduced to the simple and the elegant. The remaining mysteries, the ones we keep in the “too hard” box seem intractable. However, when they become apparent the explanation can be taught to children if they are attentive. I wrote about the “don’t know” box in one of my favorite posts titled “It Starts In Your Head”
There are a lot of examples of the mysterious and complex resolving to the simple and elegant. Here are a few. While much of this larger list is not simple, EVERY ONE of them is understood by a surprising subset of the upright walking apes that populate this planet. They were all mysteries and now they explain so much of how the world works. My premise here is if a former mystery can be reduced to a handful of characters, elegance surrounds us. With the hyperlink above, I made the equations optional — I still want you to consider voting in the poll and enjoying the music so I am sticking to the no-equation rule.
Is Consciousness Simple
We throw around a lot of words to justify our special nature. Each time I explore some aspect of the wonders of all sorts of living things I become less tied to the special nature of us. Pigs are sentient, they feel pain and even secrete hormones before slaughter that “spoil the meat”. In 70 million years, their hearts are the same as ours save for a SMALL HANDFUL of genes.1 Large trees look out for small trees amid a network of mushrooms ensuring the small trees can thrive.2 The very worst of us (revenge) might just be a product of a certain amount of neurons in the cortex. Perhaps it is not surprising the apex predator on land (humans) and at sea (orcas) might share this “feature” as a consequence of a big brain.3
This all began to emerge when I investigated the amazing panoply of senses across the animal kingdom.4 Our senses are amazing but limited. They feed our brains whether primitive or advanced and drive decision-making. Maybe neurons (and their analog in the plant kingdom) just do what neurons do. A surprisingly small number of them can accomplish amazing things.5
Maybe the simple, but consequential emergence of some sort of language is EXACTLY what consciousness is.6 I was shaken to think differently when I explored the emergence of an alphabet for us. What’s the big deal? Well, the part of that post that shook my considerations was that 90% of ALL OF OUR SPEECH is in our heads and is not verbal at all. We meandered 200,000 years and have had an alphabet for about 4000. My sense is we’ve been conscious a long time before we started with the printing press. About 99.8% of our lives with no alphabet maybe doesn’t matter AT ALL!!! Maybe a lot of the living things among us are conscious and we are too full of ourselves to recognize it.
The arrival of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT might be the steamroller that collapses everything we believe. Perhaps our brains’ ability to present the next word in a sentence (based on what we’ve heard before) is all there is to it. I think this means a whole lot of mysteries, based mostly on sensory patterns, and what comes next is consciousness. This might mean a creature of any sort is conscious because:
an orca or dolphin responds based upon a sentence or phrase of clicks
a bird responds based on a linear pattern of sounds or chirps
an ant responds based upon a pattern of air reaching its antennas that define the following distance
a human can couple all of these wonderful senses to know what’s coming next — maybe this is what we call intuition
Predictions Based on the Thesis
Things like Babylonian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and cave wall paintings have met their secret decoder ring. A large language model (a sampling of what has been said before by EVERYONE) might be all that is needed to predict what comes next. When the novel new phrase reaches our ears, maybe that is why we go to the dictionary to understand what we just heard. The same could be said for a new sound, a new face, a new sensation via touch, or a new smell.
The Poll & Music
Wow, the little things can excite me!!! Substack polls continue to be anonymous but now they support never expiring. This means randos who find this post in 2025 can still vote!!!
Today, since this was all about thought I get to sneak in one of my favorite songs about those thoughts which enter our heads at times and it is fun to let them settle in for a bit. Our fleeting thoughts we do not control. It is fun when we are in a state of mind when we enjoy them.
“Elegance surrounds us” such a beautiful statement! And true!
Hi Mark-- would love to know examples from the 1947 book that drew you to your conclusions and review.