In her article, "Decoding Consciousness", which first appeared in the souvenir of Dr. Parnekar Life Management Foundation, Singapore, Dr. Sharda Bapat explores and expounds her thoughts about machine learning and "artificial consciousness. She envisions hope that the collective intelligence can be directed towards harmony and synchronized development of human intellect,physical and psychological realities. But cautious, that the challenge is to create appropriate technologies that will restore natural equilibrium.

1. Emergence of the internet and digital technology has
brought about a revolution in the scientic world.
Advances in science and technology invariably bring
with them ethical, spiritual and philosophical
dilemmas. Technology is rapidly changing our lives.
The faster the change, more difcult it is to cope due
to desynchronized developments in mental, physical
and external world.
The internet brought in the information explosion. It
democratized information and made 'knowledge'
more accessible. It also established unprecedented
communication channels. This has facilitated
progress in other elds of science. One of the areas
that rapidly became popular in recent times is the
eld of machine learning. Machine learning/deep
learning techniques have the ability to recognise
patterns from data and learn from them. While
supervised learning is useful for inferring a function
from 'labelled data', unsupervised learning helps infer
a function from unlabelled data. Thus, these
techniques are approaches to 'articial intelligence'
that process data through internal interconnections
creating ability to learn and mimic humanlike actions,
reasoning and problem solving e.g. read and
interpret radiological images. Machine learning is also
helping to gain valuable insights that were out of
reach so far, from huge amount of data generated in
today's digital world. Appropriate use of such
technologies can democratise healthcare. Success
of machine learning/deep learning largely depends
on the quality of data used for training the models.
While our understanding of 'human intelligence' is
incomplete, the data we use to build our models itself
is susceptible to human errors and bias. Therefore,
while acknowledging utility and potential the
technology offers, we must also accept its inherent
limitations at this time.
As we understand some facets of 'human intelligence'
and try to recreate them through technology, we are
already talking about 'articial consciousness'. Do we
understand what 'consciousness' is? I don't know but
itmanifests all around us through living beings made
up of varying number of cells. From a one celled
organism, capable of growth and reproduction; to a
human being trying to decode 'consciousness' itself.
For any living multi-celled organism to live and thrive, a
number of intelligent cells have to co-exist, co-
ordinate, co-operate. In short, they have to live in
harmony with each other and the environment.
Human being is said to be a congregation of over 35
trillion cells by one estimate. Each of these cells has
dened function and it performs that function with
integrity. When you say 'I am so and so', you are
actually talking about this congregation or colony of
trillions of intelligent individual cells, living in harmony
with each other. There are astounding networks,
communication channels and regulating mechanism
for these trillions of cells to communicate and work in
unison as 'you'.However, occasionally something
goes wrong and the harmony is disturbed. When your
own cells start attacking your other cells, you develop
and suffer what is called an 'autoimmune disease'
some examples of which are rheumatoid arthritis,
alopecia areata, multiple sclerosis , type 1 diabetes.
The life cycle of every cell of the body involves growth,
accessing and storage of nutrients, division by
replication of the DNA and death. Each cell interacts
with internal and external environment through
surveillance system and receptors. Although most
cells differentiate into a particular type of cell of a
single organ system, nearly every cell in the body has
the same DNA (the blueprint of life). Depending on
the circumstances, it determines appropriate course
of action and is able to activate appropriate
pathway. It also chooses a pathway to 'apoptosis' at
appropriate time- a pathway to programmed cell
death or in other words, a physiological process of
cell suicide! There are complicated mechanisms to
balance proliferation of cells and cell deaths. When
an error occurs in these mechanisms, some cells start
Decoding Consciousness Dr. Sharda Bapat
Head of AI in Healthcare at
AngloAnalytics Pvt Ltd
Page 10

2. to divide uncontrollably. They proliferate rapidly and
form what is broadly called 'a tumour'. If it has the
ability to spread to distant locations or invade other
tissues, it is called cancer! Cancer cells not only divide
uncontrollably, they usurp body's energy reserves
causing death of other cells leading to death of the
human being.
In short, the survival of a human being as far as the
internal environment is concerned, depends not on
each cell trying to compete, ght and win but
harmonious co-existence of all the individual cells.
Could this be true then in the external environment as
well? Modern civilization seems to be taking us in the
opposite direction. We are residing on a living planet!
Human race seem to be proliferating uncontrollably
and usurping nite resources of the planet. It has also
invaded and altered the habitat of all other species.
Human population growth and proigate
consumption are believed to be the major drivers of
th
climate change and ongoing 6 mass extinction. We
are seeing the devastating effects of broken links in
interconnections between life systems e.g. Pollination
by insects and food production. Before we could
rejoice the victory against infectious diseases, there is
rise of the superbug and other diseases of 'civilization'.
We are waging war against nature, our dwelling
place, in our greed and hubris. We are breaking down
something we have no idea how to reassemble. From
that perspective, animals other than humans seem
more civilized and 'intelligent'.
Human intelligence is perceived largely to be the
function of human brain which we are trying to mimic
in our quest for 'articial intelligence'. The human brain
has some 100 billion cells each one in communication
with tens of thousands of other cells through synapses.
There is evidence to believe that there is genetic
transmission of sophisticated knowledge well-beyond
instincts. Machine learning has considerable potential
for use in coping with data explosion in evolutionary
genomics and other areas of genetics. The internet
itself seems to mimic the synapses in the brain and
therefore, capable of manifesting 'collective
intelligence' and 'collective consciousness' of the
human race. The challenge before the young
entrepreneurs and thought leaders of today is to
direct this collective intelligence towards harmony
and synchronized development of human intellect,
physical and psychological realities. The challenge is
create appropriate technologies that will restore
natural equilibrium. The good news is nature is resilient
and given a chance just might spring back. The good
news is technology has connected whole of the world
and a concerted effort is possible. That will need a
profound change in our ideals, belief systems and
priorities. We must act now since 'window for effective
action is short'. We must prove ourselves to be the
'intelligent' species and survive to pursue our quest for
'articial intelligence'. We will surely evolve in the
process and become excellent data points for that
future super-processor. And then, who knows, the
articial consciousness really might emerge!
With Best Compliments From
Page 11