Inside the black box

Engineers describe a system whose input and output behavior are known and whose inner workings are otherwise mysterious as a black box. Bruno Latour describes the black box as:

the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.

Like most of us, my first encounter with the term “black box” was in the context of flight data recorders. The irony is that those black boxes are usually bright orange so you can spot them in the wreckage more easily. The first prototype flight date recorder was called the Red Egg for some reason. The term ‘black box’ was coined informally by a journalist, and as is so often the case, the nickname is what stuck.

My theory for why steampunk is so fashionable among tech-obsessed nerds is the visible workings. Anyone can figure out how a locomotive works just by looking at the machinery as it operates. If the boiler was transparent, there would be no mystery to the steam engine. Compare that to microchips, very literal black boxes:

Electricity goes in and comes out through the little wires, and what happens to it inside that sinister casing is totally mysterious to nearly all of us. It wouldn’t help if the casing was transparent, because the electricity is invisible and the little transistors inside have no moving parts (except electrons.) Computer programming is a matter of nesting black boxes within black boxes within black boxes, packaging the human-unfriendly strings of ones and zeros in more manageable abstractions.

Black boxing is necessary. Our attention and short-term memory systems are limited. We can only hold seven plus or minus two concepts at a time in our focal consciousness. Fortunately for us, those five to nine items can be black boxes containing much more complicated concepts, or groups of concepts, or groups of groups of groups of concepts.

The human brain is the ultimate black box. How could all of our complex behavior emerge from an organ of the body that evolved by the same processes as our spleens and livers? What makes the puzzle especially intractable is that the only tool we have to comprehend our brains is, well, our brains. A lot of smart people who happily accept biological explanations for every other aspect of our selves continue to believe that there must be something extra producing our consciousness and personalities, something magical or supernatural, something beyond electrical impulses and chemical reactions among a bunch of molecules. Even Kurt Gödel refused to believe that Darwinian evolution was a sufficient explanation for human cognition. I don’t agree. I think we’ll open the lowest-level black box eventually, whether through computer modeling or direct observation, or most likely some combination of the two.