computer

Computer might as well refer to a computing human being. So realistically, it is fully possible for computers to steal my lunch using current state of technology.

…The mind is just a complicated machine. When we look at things we think we are just looking out of our eyes like we’re looking out of little windows and there’s a person inside our head, but we’re not. We’re looking at a screen inside our heads, like a computer screen.

There is an experiment which was shown on the TV series "How the Mind Works" where a person’s head is immobilized while viewing a page of writing on a screen. It looks like a normal page of writing and nothing is changing. But after a while it seems that something very strange is occurring when the subject notices that a bit of the page is changed from what it was when seen earlier. This is because when the eye flicks from one point to another it is effectively blind: this avoids the vertigo of disorientation. The flicks are called saccades. In the experiment there is a sensor which tells when the eye is flicking from one place to another which then alters some words on the page where it’s not looking. The momentary blindness of the saccades isn’t noticed because in the gap the brain fills in the screen to make it seem like one is looking out of two little windows in the head. The subject doesn’t notice the words have changed because the brain has filled in a picture where the eye isn’t currently looking. Eventually the subject becomes aware of changes when memory traces don’t correspond to enough new words.

People are different from animals because they can have pictures on the screens in their heads of things which they are not looking at. They can have pictures of someone in another room. Or they can have a picture of what is going to happen tomorrow. Or they can have pictures of themselves as an astronaut, or of really big numbers or chains of reasoning while trying to work out some problem. People think that computers don’t have minds, and that their brains are special and different than computers. They think there is someone in their heads looking at the screen like Captain Kirk of Star Trek sitting in the captain’s seat looking at a big screen. They think that this person is their special human mind, which is called a homunculus—a little man—that computers don’t have.

But this homunculus is just another picture on the screen in their heads. And when it is on the screen (because the person is thinking about a homunculus) there is another bit of the brain watching the screen. When the person then thinks about that bit watching the screen, another bit is then watching the screen. But the brain doesn’t see this happen because it is like the eye flicking from one place to another and people are blind inside their heads when changing from one thought to another while the brain fills the gap in between with a sensation of continuity.

This is why people’s brains are like computers. Not because they are special but because they have to keep turning off for fractions of a second while the screen changes. And because there is something that people can’t see, they think there is something special about it, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or being in the dark when they wake up at night and they’re unnerved by some sound

Also, people think they’re not computers because they have feelings and computers do not. But feelings are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen. If it’s a happy picture they smile; if it’s a sad one they cry….

--from "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" by Mark Haddon (with editing).