The mind is many hundreds of different kinds of computers.
Nobody really knows how the brain works. And so I paint a picture of how you could have a lot of stupid things—because computers are stupid—that could get together and do the kinds of things that we admire in children and people, and the sort of things that we’re used to in a person.
When a person says, “I’m conscious, I’m just something different; it’s different from anything else in the world,” that’s sort of pleasant and boastful, but it doesn’t give you anything to be proud of. It just says, “There’s a little gleaming jewel here, and all my virtue comes from it, and nothing I did earned it.”
The mystery of consciousness, to me, is not, “Isn’t it wonderful that we’re conscious?” but it’s the opposite: “Isn’t it wonderful that we can do things like talk and walk and understand, without having the slightest idea of how it works?” And so that’s the mystery—not that there’s some magic that brings everything together, but that the mind is really incoherent in a sense. We don’t know how we work, and yet the thing works. It’s like a big corporation with no one in charge, and I think it’s wonderful.
Each of these parts of the brain has its own knowledge, and the reason it’s possible for us to function is that we’re like a social organization. One part of the brain, if I wanted a drink of water, I would go over there to get it. But the part of my brain that wants the drink of water doesn’t know anything about walking, but it can exploit the other one. It can sort of request to the walking machine, “Say, you know how to do that. I don’t have the slightest idea about how to move muscles.” And so in your head is something magnificent. It’s like a whole city.
When I say that a person is a machine, I think that’s much better than saying there’s a little spark from which all of your virtue comes, because then you don’t deserve it; it’s just a spark.
Don’t think that you’re being dehumanized when you try to understand yourself as a machine. In the past you’ve thought of yourself as a sort of jelly, a sort of unstructured thing which is just plain good, but no reason for it. I think it’s better, maybe for children, to think of yourself as a package of hundreds of skills.
See, that’s the bad side of the wonderful philosophy that we have a wonderful spark: that there’s a central being in your mind without much structure, and it’s either good or bad, you see.
Thinking of yourself as a society gives you hope. It’s almost the opposite of what people think, that it devitalizes you.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts, all right. The whole is exactly the parts and the way that they communicate with each other.
To understand anything, you have to understand it at many levels. You need a very simple way of looking at the thing as a whole; you need a more complicated way of looking at middle-level parts; and you need a great many very small theories at the bottom.