Day 23: Zennor to Pendeen

Weather: Driving rain with howling SW headwind
Distance covered today: 14.2 km (8.8 mi)
Last night's B&B: Little Pengelly
% Complete: Cumulative distance: 41.8%:  424.2 km
Total Ascent/Total Descent: 838 m/ 819 m
GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 23(click!)

It wasn’t that I was just being negative last evening. Today’s walk really was more difficult. Again the path was often absent, and when present, often submerged in bog. At times I thought I was back on the Pennines! Also the sadists have discovered a new trick; the instantaneous ups and downs! If you look carefully at the profile below and compare it with earlier profiles you will see what I mean. These short and very sharp bumps in the trail mean that the predicted climb is much less than the actual, because the predictions smooth it all out. I have just worked out that I climbed more per unit distance today than on any other day of the trail. To make matters worse, the weather was appalling, with driving rain, especially to finish and a howling south west headwind that constantly tried to blow me off the cliff.

The net effect was that I could see very little, hear almost nothing above the wind and frankly, taste and smell weren’t much use to me either. Touch was supreme. I was hugging those infernal rocks as if trying to grow roots into them! I could hardly see my gadgets to navigate, but when the path disappeared altogether, they were invaluable! I got to thinking about how reliant we are on our senses (obviously), but somewhat less obviously, how those senses interact with the thing that makes us human; consciousness. I spent my time on the cliffs today worrying about consciousness.

Indulge me a little. There will be those of you who have had grandchildren and you will appreciate my point, but for the rest, I need to explain that my grandson is truly a phenomenon. Apart from of course being perfectly formed, he is also unique, extraordinarily gifted and very well behaved. Given that I have been away walking for a quarter of his life, you may legitimately wonder how I know these things and I can only reply that you have to be a grandfather to understand.

That said, he caused me today to think some more about my ill-formed ideas about consciousness. No series of posts from your correspondent would be complete without a reference to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and this will be no exception. There is much in the press at present about the scraps that are going on in the US as various teams battle for supremacy in the race to produce driverless cars. The battles seem to take place as much in the courtroom as the laboratory, but the progress in reality is simply unprecedented. A fascinating article in a recent edition of the Economist argued that the artificial intelligence community is turning to video games as a much more efficient mechanism for teaching their robots to respond to the real world than the real world itself! It turns out that computers learn faster from other computers than they do from humans or the world around them!

Despite the temptation, I refuse to bore you with the details (I may already have broken that promise!!). My point is, though, that the current rate of progress along this path is accelerating at such a pace that I have my doubts whether we are philosophically in a position to deal with the consequences. At some point along this trajectory, I predict these machines will become conscious.

That of course begs the question about what consciousness is. The dictionary definitions don’t help very much. They all say something like “consciousness is the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings”. A driverless car is aware of and responsive to its surroundings, but in my opinion, it certainly isn’t conscious. At the other extreme, there are many who apply a metaphysical or religious interpretation to this question, in that they believe consciousness is a divine gift. For the few eminently sensible and long-suffering readers of this drivel who are of that ilk, I must again beg your indulgence in that I seek a more scientifically-based explanation.

My grandson however speaks volumes on the issue. Shortly after he was born he was a bit like a driverless car (my sincere hope and trust is that his parents aren’t reading this…). He reacted to stimuli with pre-programmed responses which were calculated to achieve a satisfactory level of welfare, and continued existence. There came though, a time when it was possible to distinguish the difference between a winding grimace and a genuine smile, the latter implying communication with his parents (or even his grandparents!). Certainly this is a phenomenal change, and surely it has to be the beginning of consciousness! Not only is he reacting to stimuli, but there is an argument that he is experiencing a growing sense of self as other than that which he perceives through his senses. Given that nascent perception, he applies an emotional response, possibly imitating the maternal or paternal behaviour that he observes; receives intense positive feedback and feels encouraged to continue the process. So his incredible learning curve develops into proper consciousness.

If this explanation has any legitimacy at all, it suggests that machines will sooner or later be able to make the same almost incredible leap from responsiveness to stimuli, to consciousness itself. It is only a matter of time and technology. It requires multiple feedback loops that enable the organism ultimately to start forming a sense of itself through learning the effect of its responses on the behaviour of the perceived outside world, and ultimately to start to attempt to manipulate that behaviour by adjusting its own responses.

We see this sort of behaviour in animal experiments throughout psychology. In my opinion there is no reason to believe that machines will not soon be ‘clever’ enough to do the same.

Fundamentally though, the question remains;  we are all too quick to anthropomorphise the behaviour of our gorgeous pet dog, but we shy away from suggesting that it is conscious in the way my grandson is. If that dog was just that much brighter, would that leap be so unimaginable?

The fact is that AI is advancing at a rate so much faster than dog evolution, so we should really not be surprised if the machine becomes conscious, and much sooner than we expect. I think we should be devoting our time to thinking how we will react to that possibility, rather than denying that it will become reality.

By the time I finally reached the hill at the top of which I would find the pub and Veronica, into the teeth of a spitefully vicious rain storm propelled by homicidal winds, I was beginning to wish that my own consciousness would just go into hibernation and come back to me in some sylvan summer!

Last night's rain cascading down the slopes

Yours truly. Conscious or just crazy? 

Looking back across Pendour Cove to Zennor Head

Porthglaze Cove

Gurnard's Head appears. Much argument around as to whether the peninsula does indeed resemble a fish's head

Water cascading vertically to the cove below

More industrial archaeology

Gurnard's Head closeup

A lovely house in the very middle of nowhere!

Angry sea on the seaward side of Gurnard's Head

Sea Campion before Robin's Rocks

I have become blase about flowers, but still the bluebells' rule!

Porthmeor Cove

And a granite bridge at its nadir

Industrial archaeology in the impenetrable mist

Pendeen Watch invisible in the conditions

These guys weren't worried!

So where is the path here? Hug those rocks, Kevin!

Portheras Cove, as I headed inland to find my love