ABSTRACT
Scientists have made great progress on the mechanisms of vision and the other senses, motor control, memory, and attention; nevertheless, as they close in on the remaining big question of how all these mechanisms contribute to consciousness, they find themselves beset by deep conceptual puzzles. Alan Turing saw, of course, that his ideal specification could serve, indirectly, as the blueprint for an actual computing machine. In effect, the universal Turing machine is the perfect mathematical chameleon, capable of imitating any other computing machine and doing, during that period of imitation, exactly what that machine does. The trouble with merely virtual parallel machines running on real von Neumann machines is that they are terribly inefficient and wasteful. The methods of transmission that guarantee a fairly uniform virtual machine operating throughout the culture must be social, highly context-sensitive, and to some degree self-organizing and self-correcting.
