Chapter 1: What is the Mind? What is Randomness?

I trained as an electrical engineer, so the claim that machines might possess minds struck me as naive. I had built the programs, written the algorithms, tuned the parameters, assembled the databases. I knew why they behaved as they did. A system whose operations I can trace end to end does not think; it executes. A mind, by contrast, should generate its own thoughts.

The author anticipates this objection and reframes it. Intelligence, he argues, is not computation per se but the capacity to adapt (to produce responses not specified in advance). Adaptation requires randomness: the injection of variation that lets a system encounter problems its designer never foresaw. The two most powerful random systems we know are biological evolution and the human mind. Both generate novelty through stochastic processes (genetic crossover and mutation in one case, the unpredictable recombination of beliefs, memories, and perceptions in the other)

But what is randomness? Engineers and psychologists talk past each other here because they define predictability differently. For the engineer, a deterministic program is transparent: input determines output. Randomness, on this view, is mere ignorance (events appear stochastic only because we lack information). A coin toss is computable if you know the coin's mass, the force applied, the surface it strikes. By extension, human behavior is computable in principle: given full knowledge of neural architecture, sensory input, and cognitive history, the output follows.

This deterministic framing carries an uncomfortable implication. Our beliefs shift daily. We generate thoughts that surprise even ourselves. Evolution equips populations with the combinatorial machinery (crossover, mutation) to meet challenges no ancestor encountered. Programmed machines, by contrast, fail the moment conditions exceed their designer's foresight. Yet if neuroscience one day maps every synapse, every signal pathway, every causal chain from stimulus to response (if the randomness dissolves into mechanism) does autonomy survive? Can we call a fully transparent mind free?

Next: Chapter 2: Symbolism and Connectionism

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