Consciousness as an emergent phenonenon

We speak of Artificial Intelligence.  We barely know what either idea means. Their definitions are wobbly, their scopes and slopes are slippery, they shake and squawk and squirm out from under our attempts to pin them down. But they are utterly stock still and simple compared to the ideas of sentience and consciousness.

Consciousness is this final and grandest stage of machine evolution. So what the hell does it mean? How do we know when it is achieved?

We don't know and we won't know and we are gonna have to live with that.  I mean you don't know what consciousness means, nor do I. You cannot prove that you are conscious much less that I am. If we cannot test one another for consciousness, we certainly won't be any more able to test a sentient machine for it. It's really quite intractable. I could go into it more deeply and demonstrate the truth of these assertions but others have done it before and better.

An awful, awful lot of very smart guys have firehosed their genius at this question and gotten nothing but wet.  Still this fiery question burns.  The question of consciousnessis a tale exuberantly prattled about by geniuses, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Fortunately, because Google has concisely summarized what they've collectively come up with I can save you a bunch of reading.

The very best treatment of the subject I have ever read (I will go so far as to say the best treatment of the subject yet made by man - but I'm admittedly a bit reckless sometimes.) on the subject is I Am a Strange Loop by Doug Hofstadter. Despite being both the son of a physicist, and an entrenched member of academia, he actually approaches the subject meaningfully, amazingly in his unique, rampantly multidisciplinary manner. A genuinely gorgeous book - a hundred times more approachable than Godel Escher Bach - but equally elevating. Do read it. (OK, yes, I do sort of worship the guy - get over it.)

In the past I have defined consciousness as awareness of awareness. It's as good a definition as I've found anywhere. I've also generally attributed it to a fifth thing, a quintessence. As something transcending the normal four things, matter, energy, space and time or fire, water, earth and air or dimension, force,  and consideration - however you want to divide up the universe. I've always thought that consciousness was separate from the things generally considered to be the constituent parts of the universe. Something transcendent.  Lately though I have been giving equal shrift to the idea of consciousness as an emergent property of matter energy space and time.  Not something added to them from elsewhere, but derived from them in situ.

Consider temperature. An individual atom has no temperature. Stick a bunch of atoms near one another and let them do natural atomy things though and suddenly this idea of temperature emerges. Note that an individual atom does not have an intrinsic very small amount of temperatureness that adds together with other tiny amounts of temperatureness to become a perceptible/ measureable amount of temperature when atoms get together for a pow-wow. (or should it be a 'pow-pow'?) Temperature simply does not exist before they get together and after they do, it does.  This is called an epiphenomenon.  Or an emergent phenomenon.

Science posits implicitly (and often explicitly) that consciousness is an epiphenomenon. That everything we perceive as consciousness is brought about as a set of emergent phenomena whenever the exactly correct arrangement of matter energy space and time comes about. I have derided this idea in the past as the spontaneous combustion of mud. I was quite happy deriding it. I did not, do not and never will like the idea of being the cumulative deterministic effect of the stochastic fluctuations of myriad interacting disturbances in the subetheral grid (particles banging into one another) I do not want my dreads and dreams to be the result of particles colliding in such a way against other particles who have collided with them in such a way because other particles have collided with them in such another way in the past because of some uncaused original banginess.

Besides the fact that this mechanistic, deterministic point of view has all sorts of problems with regard to free will and the nature of responsibility etc and so on, ad nauseum.  I honestly just find it to be icky. It completely fails to grant the proper respect  to the care and feeding of my delusions of grandeur.

So while I acknowledge it as a possibility, I will point out that it is only a hypothesis and continue to feverently root against it. I offer the following as arguments supporting my position that consciousness is something special and quintessential and not reducible to an endless chain of head-banging particles:

The Floor

The floor is something we must fight against.
Whilst seemingly mere platform for the human
stance, it is that place that men fall to.

I am not dizzy. I stand as a tower, a lighthouse;
the pale ray of my sentiency flowing from my face.
But should I go dizzy I crash down into the floor;
my face into the floor, my attention bleeding into
the cracks of the floor.

Dear horizontal place, I do not wish to be a rug.
Do not pull at the difficult head, this teetering
bulb of dread and dream . . .

-Russel Edson

and

Sonnet to Science

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

-Edgar Allan Poe

and

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns
before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

-Walt Whitman

-j

"...Indistinguishable from human players."

If you are much into computers at all then you probably are well aware that personal computers have become so powerful that the only thing that can actually exercise one sufficiently to make it work up a sweat is a good video game.

Word processing, web browsing and the occasional spreadsheet do nothing but leave your machine bored and yawning. If you were to look in on what it's up to while you do the things that 'justified' getting the computer in the first place, you will see that the CPU is sitting idle for well over 75% of the time.

But a good 3D video game is something a computer can really sink it's teeth into, give it a good workout, wake it up and spin it around - [or, choose your own, "I'm-not-bored-anymore" cliche]. It looks like these guys at Splash Damage who are developing a first person shooter called Brink for Bethesda Softworks (distributor of many very high end video games (Fallout 3, Elder scrolls - Oblivion and many others)) have set a pretty high goal for themselves when it comes to the artificial intelligence that will operate the bad guys (and the good guys too!)

According to this story on attack of the fanboy.com They have decided that the behavior of the computer controlled opponents in the game will be indistinguishable from that of a human player.

Wow.

That might not seem like such a big deal and since we've not seen it yet it might be merely braggadocio, but if they are able to deliver on that goal, that will really be something. Something that approaches close to a Turing testable result. As far as I know the Turing test confines itself to language as a way of testing the advancedness of a machine intelligence. (yes, I often use undictionaried words, like advancedness and undictionaried. This is because I've been developing a language of my own for use in an artificial world and I have come to realize how weirdly arbitrary dictionaries are. Besides, I got permission from this really cool, really smart lexicographer chick in a TED talk.)

°°Is this post getting too linky? Too parenthetical? Too parenthetically linky? Too inky, linky, sidewise thinky? °°English needs a mechanism for presenting not only beside (para) + thoughts (thesis) = parenthesis, but it also needs a way to express (meta) above/ outside/ seperate by degree or level or magnitude (thesis) thoughts. English doesn't have one... but I think it should. I think I will use doubled degree symbols and call them metathesis /MEH tuh THEE seez/ to mean a thought that is above the current line of thought as opposed to beside it. They function just like quotation marks or parenthesis currently do, which is to say they surround the text that is to be considered 'meta'. In this case we use the metathesis to set off this thought the author is having about writing while he is writing it and use them in nested fashion to indicate his thoughts about thinking about the writing while he is writing.

Use this mechanism frequently in your written communications and it will catch on (To type a degree sign, hold down the [alt] key on your keyboard and type 0176 on the number pad, then release the alt key). °°°°

I wonder if there is a test equivalent to the Turing Test to determine humanness of an opponent or ally in a game or simluation. It's possible and I believe probable that the very best way to determine if your enemy/ally is a computer is to engage it in some english conversation. Chances are, if it speaks decent english, it's a machine.  (I'm joking about that part of course, but have u seen the st8 of what passes for English used by summa deez kids online 2day? English, FTW!) Naturally, we would expect that if our opponent/ally was a machine that his english would be his weak spot.  But... uhm... wouldn't that just make him more humanlike?

At any rate, it will be interesting to see what these guys come up with and if they can program the game AI's to have sufficiently bad english skills to pass as human.

-j

Artificial Intuition (AN)

Artificial Intuition:

I found this interesting site by doing a no-no... I clicked on one of the ads that Google placed on my own site... I wasn't supposed to, but it looked interesting to me, so I broke the rule. At this point I am glad I did.

Monica Anderson has created a terrific little site where she presents her ideas concerning a somewhat unconventional viewpoint on and approach to machine learning.

She posits very articulately and with powerful logic, that logic processing is not the most important underlying property of intelligence. That in fact many things are quite intelligent without being the least bit logical. Intuition, she asserts, is more foundational, more important, and quite possibly will be more fruitful as an approach to AI development efforts.

She summarizes it quite well:

"Most humans have not been taught logical thinking, but most humans are still intelligent. Contrary to the majority view, it is implausible that the brain should be based on Logic; I believe intelligence emerges from millions of nested micro-intuitions, and that Artificial Intelligence requires Artificial Intuition."

Designed to be read more or less straight through, the site is essentially a long essay or short treatise on her ideas. Though the site design camouflages this fact smoothly by breaking it into sensible page divisions and is really quite excellent overall.

I personally am particularly intrigued by anyone that is talking about a new approach to or viewpoint on AI development. Since it appears to me that there is no other explanation for the "AI Winter" we have been in for 2 decades except that we have over-committed to some foolish and fruitless research pathways that need to be abandoned in favor of some fresh ones. (OK, I know there really has been no "AI Winter" and that machine intelligences are in fact growing rapidly in number, power and ubiquity, but since I can't yet go on the web and talk to HAL, I am not happy with the current state of AI development so I reserve the right to speak of an AI Winter until I can kick it online with HAL.)

This is probably a little more of her site than I should block quote, but she makes such a very powerful statement here and it resonates so much with my thinking on AI - specifically on the reasons AI is not bearing more interesting fruit - that I just had to include it:

"The hard sciences, such as Mathematics and Physics, insist on correctness. Computer Science was born in Mathematics departments at universities worldwide, and Computer Science is therefore a hard science. Programs are expected to be correct and to run as specified. Artificial Intelligence was born in Computer Science departments, and inherited their value sets including Correctness. This mindset, this necessity to be logical, provable, and correct has been a fatal roadblock for Artificial Intelligence since its inception.

The world is Bizarre, and Logic can not describe it. Artificial Intuition will easily outperform Logic based Artificial Intelligence for almost any problem in a Bizarre problem domain.

From the very beginning, Artificial Intelligence should have been a soft science."

She discusses very convincingly a framework for considering what she calls Bizarre Domains. She outlines the problem space effectively and populates it with a number of things I had not considered collectively before.

She talks about holistic approaches, paradoxes and strange loops - all of these things give fits to conventional Artificial Logic development.

As I was reading along I began to think, she should really read 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell. Her advocacy of intuition over logic reminded me strongly of his ideas... In the next paragraph she refers to the book. She also recommends Godel, Escher Back and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as suggested reading - two of my all time favorites. So it seems I have found something of an intellectual kindred spirit.

Her research and evangelism seem to be focused mainly upon using artifical intuition to extract semantics from language. (Which is a primary problem in AI development, one that has not borne the fruit I want to see) She maintains algorhythmic details as a trade secret and will not discuss them except under NDA, so I cannot comment on the math, but reading this site has convinced me that the notion of Artificial iNtuition (AN) is more basic than artificial logic and that it is in fact a necessary foundation upon which any operable strong AI will need to be built.

I will continue to read up on these ideas. I recommend this site highly (It can be read completely in an hour)

Only Humans Can Dance Ballet

In Ray Kurzweil's book , 'The Singularity is Near' there is an illustration that is very telling: (click to enlarge it)



Lets toss a page up on the wall that says: Only humans can dance ballet... and then wonder when it will get torn down off the wall.

The video below is property of Fox Entertainment who retains all rights. It is from Terminator the Sarah Connor Chronicles and its a mash-up of Cameron who is a Terminator from the future.(Played by the goddess Summer Glau of Firefly/ Serenity fame who incidentally was a prima ballerina before she became an actress.) It treats of the intersection and union of humans and machines and treats - as does the Kurzweil illustration - of the awful, intriguing, awe-inspring question: What's the difference?



So what to do with the look on Reese's face at the very end (at 3:50 - 3:59) of this video? When he sees the Terminator that he hates, dancing ballet - exquisitely.  I am rather of the opinion that all of mankind should be preparing themselves for experiencing the emotions that bring that look to his face.

How long before "Only a human can seduce your daughter" or "Only humans can convince people to become suicide bombers" get torn from the wall and thrown onto the floor?

This video is also property of Fox and is also from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  It's called 'Scary Robot'; but consider which is scarier: The terminator with the knife and the Thermite? or the terminator with the ballet slippers?



We need to be thinking about the singularity. We need to be discussing it. Debating it. At the very least we need to be understanding it. It will be a shame if it surprises us considering how many people are evangelizing the idea.

-j

AI baby talk: Gmail does something cool.

So this is really minor, I know, but I need to rave about it somewhere because it was just so very cool.

Today I was composing an email to a friend and firing her an essay I wrote that I thought she might be interested in.  It was just a short note and when I hit send, gmail popped up a dialog box and said, "did you mean to attach a file to this email? You typed the words "I have attached..." but there is no attached file. send anyway?"

And how is that for just being spot on smart and doing the right thing???

Way to go Google.

(I shall ignore the ominous undertones inherent in the fact that my email program is reading my emails without me being aware of it. We are not screaming about Google knowing too much about us... yet. well, this is not really fair - we all know Google has been reading our emails for years, it's how they decide what ads to place on the page while we are editing, but still.)