the mentally controlled robotic arm

Headline:

Paralyzed Man Controls a Robotic Arm With The Power of His Mind

A newly developed system combining AI and robotics has been helping a man with tetraplegia turn his thoughts into mechanical arm movements – including clutching and releasing objects – with the system working for seven months without major readjustment.

That's way beyond the handful of days that these setups typically last for before they have to be recalibrated – which shows the promise and potential of the tech, according to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) research team.

Crucial to the brain-computer interface (BCI) system are the AI algorithms used to match specific brain signals to specific movements. The man was able to watch the robot arm movements in real time while imagining them, which meant errors could be quickly rectified, and greater accuracy could be achieved with the robotic actions.

Read the rest.

Substance dualists: res cogitans (mind, mental phenomena) and res extensa (matter, material phenomena) are substantially different. Thoughts are not material things. If someone thinks of a horse, and you dig into his brain, you won't find a horse in there.

Scientific materialists (nothing to do with the Marxist principle of dialectical materialism!): the mind is what the brain does. It's function, action, and structure, all rooted in the material substrate of the brain. As for thoughts not being material: on a DVD, there's no visible image of a horse, and the DVD's encoding is just a bunch of 1s and 0s. But put in the DVD in the right apparatus, and watch the horse's image play across a screen. Something material obviously underlies the image of the horse.

If the dualists are right, the above mentally controlled robotic arm shouldn't be possible: the mind is substantially different from matter (hence substance dualism)—a totally different thing down to its roots, its essence, its fundamental nature. But dualists have no plausible explanation for why the mind follows around a physical brain, no satisfactory explanation for the tight linkage between brain and consciousness, for why a mind would be "housed" inside a skull. What's the point of contact between two supposedly fundamentally different substances? If they don't interact at all, how do you explain changes in personality from brain tumors and gunshot wounds to the head? But the above article absolutely makes sense from a materialistic framework: it's the brain that expresses one's will, and the robot arm can be seen as an articulation of the brain. This isn't to say there's no mind or consciousness at all; eliminativism is crazy. But it is to say that the case for the mind's materiality gets stronger and stronger as technology continues to improve.

But the materialists aren't out of the woods. Even as explorations into artificial intelligence go forward, science as a whole hasn't produced a satisfactory definition of what core terms like intelligence, mind, and consciousness even mean. Dualists also mock the materialist promise of some future—always future—technology that will solve the riddle once and for all. Most importantly, dualists cite the "hard problem" of consciousness: how can materialism explain the move from third-person objectivity to first-person subjectivity? How do you go from "electric impulses" and "nerve cells" to "This orange is both tart and sweet" or "She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen"? The components of experience are called qualia in philosophy, and science can't explain (or even confirm, really) their existence. But despite these objections, the materialistic theory still seems the more viable path to me: it's producing greater and greater results while the dualists stand stubbornly off to the side, contributing nothing to the progress of humanity, utterly stuck in the mud of their rigid ideology, unable to do anything more than gainsay. Name one substance-dualist contribution to AI research.

How deep does the mind/tech link have to go before the dualists finally concede? Why are dualists unable to see that the deterioration of the mind is mirrored in the deterioration of the brain (e.g., via senescence or my mother's brain cancer)? What better way to explain all of this than by saying that the mind is what the brain does? No, I suspect the dualists are so emotionally committed to their position that, in the future, you can rip their nervous systems right out of their bodies without damaging their consciousness—thus preserving their minds—and they'll go right on believing that mind is its own separate—almost spiritual—thing, independent of nervous systems. We can currently use drugs and tech to influence, in predictable ways, what minds experience: we can produce visions, sounds, smells, pain, etc., all through chemical or electrode-on-brain stimuli. We're already at that stage. But the dualists refuse to see it. For them, the brain is at best a "gateway" to the mind; it's not the mind itself. So where is the mind located, then? If the reply is that the mind doesn't have a where, a location, then we're back to the original question, posed above, about why a mind would be "housed" inside a skull. A challenge for dualists: don't say another word until you explain tight linkage.

I come down firmly on the side of the materialists. There's no need to invoke spirit-stuff or res cogitans: mind/consciousness arises from a particular arrangement of matter, which makes matter its base. I'm a supervenientist in the most basic sense: I do think mind arises from matter and is utterly dependent on it as a substrate. I don't, however, see mind as arising from matter but not affecting anything around it (epiphenomenalism), nor do I see mind as having only the properties of its material substrate.* And I freely admit the substance dualists have a point about the still-unexplained hard problem of consciousness. All that said, it strikes me as utterly absurd to see mind as totally divorced from, and utterly different from, matter. 

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*Imagine a pyramid/tetrahedron composed of four atoms. Tiny. Now imagine a geometrically similar pyramid composed of the same type of atoms, but scaled up to be a square mile at the bottom and a mile high. With this bigger pyramid, a new, supervenient property exists: heaviness. But heaviness isn't something you can attribute to any single, individual atom: it's a result of the aggregate. By the same token, then, mind might have ultimately material components, each of which is "dumb" unto itself, but the aggregate (and arrangement) of those components is something else entirely, yet still utterly dependent upon those components. This shouldn't be that hard to see, but some people will insist on denying it.