The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

In fact, if we look beyond just our two hemispheric brains, there are many types of decision-makers within us that could have a free will in the sense described previously. For example, the neocortex, where decision-making happens, consists of many smaller modules.[40] So when we consider a decision, it’s possible that different options are represented by different modules, each trying to precipitate its own perspective. My mentor Marvin Minsky was prescient in seeing the brain not as a single united decision-making machine but rather as a complex network of neural machinery whose individual parts may favor different options when we consider a decision. Minsky described our brains as a “society of mind” (the title of his second book) containing various simpler processes that reflect many different perspectives.[41] Is each of these making a free choice? How could we tell? In recent decades, there has been more experimental support for this idea—but our understanding of exactly how neural processes “bubble up” into the decisions we consciously perceive remains quite limited.