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We believe that if the “complexity barrier” is to be broken, a major revolution in production
and programming techniques is required, the major heresies of which would mean weak-
ening of machine structural specificity in every possible way. We may as well start with
the notion that with 10 billion parts per cubic foot (approximately equal to the number
and density of neurons in the human brain), there will be no circuit diagram possible, no
parts list (except possibly for the container and the peripheral equipment), not even an exact
parts count, and certainly no free and complete access with tools or electrical probes to the
“innards” of our machine or for possible later repair...Wewould manufacture 'logic by the
pound', using techniques more like those of a bakery than of an electronics factory. (Stewart
1969 )
Such ideas persist today in visions of self-replicating nanobot nanotechnologies
(now with the accompanying spectre of “grey goo” ecological disaster). At various
times there have also existed notions of universal self-organising analog comput-
ers (see discussion of the Russian Gutenmacher project in Carello et al. ( 1984 )).
Such computational systems that physically grow their own hardware would be de-
sirable, but the practical need for such self-expansions has been obviated by human
ingenuity and creativity in the form of fast-evolving Moore's-Law manufacturing
efficiencies. It is simply easier to design and build a yet larger or faster machine
than one that organically grows to become bigger or faster. Today's large, scalable
server arrays that permit simple addition of new modules are perhaps the closest
systems we have to such growing automata.
In any case, these various means of making additional, new material dynamics
accessible to the device lie outside the realm of symbol manipulation—they are
non-computational. Non-computational breakout strategies are therefore required
for computational systems to transcend their own initial primitive symbol sets.
15.2.5 Creation of New Primitives
Classically, “emergence” has concerned those processes that create new primitives,
i.e. properties, behaviours, or functions that are not logical consequences of pre-
existing ones (Broad 1925 ,Morgan 1931 , Bergson 1911 , Alexander 1927 , Clayton
2004 ). How to create such fundamental novelty is the central issue for creative and
transcendent emergence.
The most extreme example of emergence concerns the relationship of conscious
awareness to underlying material process (Kim 1998 , Clayton 2004 ,Rose 2006 ).
All evidence from introspection, behavioural observation, and neurophysiology sug-
gests that awareness and its specific contents is a concomitant of particular organised
patterns of neuronal activity (Koch 2004 ,Rose 2006 ). If all experienced, phenom-
enal states supervene on brain states that are organisations of material processes,
and these states in turn depend on nervous systems that themselves evolved, then it
follows that there was some point in evolutionary history when conscious awareness
did not exist.
This state-of-affairs produces philosophical conundrums. One can deny the ex-
istence of awareness entirely on behaviouristic grounds, because it can only be
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