Redefining consciousness in order to solve the Big Question

Consciousness is an emergent property of evolution. Like all things that resulted from evolution, we can gather evidence to come up with theories and explanations.

We should avoid (or postpone) the problem of subjective experience (qualia); we should intentionally remove the question of personal experience and switch to scientifically observable evidence.

This idea was proposed by Stanislas Dehaene, in his book Consciousness and the Brain.

(image from http://www.brainfacts.org/neuroscience-in-society/supporting-research/2014/book-review-consciousness-and-the-brain)

A variation/interpretation of this idea is to redefine consciousness to be a property of living things or complex adaptive systems in general where certain common behaviors are exhibited. In the case of a wildcat hunting a rodent, with the implications of recognition, focus, attention, and other factors, we might be able to collect a set of markers of this kind of consciousness. There would not be a single marker, and we would not expect these markers to be consistent in all species, because consciousness could come in varying degrees, kinds, and loci.

In terms of degree, a snake probably has “less consciousness” than a fox. And a fox probably has “less consciousness” than a human. And all of these animals have “more consciousness” than a carrot.

But it may not be a matter of degree – perhaps it is more a matter of kind. (Is it possible to map raccoon-like consciousness to dolphin-like consciousness?)

Or it could be more a matter of locus (if there is anything like consciousness among ants – can it be found in a single ant’s brain? Or is it more likely to be distributed among a swarm of ants?)

Brain imaging has become a powerful tool for using evidence-based science to get at the problem.

(image from https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x4n4jcoDP7xh5LWLq/book-summary-consciousness-and-the-brain)

There’s an old gem of wisdom: if a Big Question defies the Big Answer, you might need to change the Question. Consciousness may need to be unshackled from subjectivity in order to be redefined using scientific evidence. As a consequence, there may be new and better ways to understand subjective experience.

Our subjective experience causes us to resist the act of defining consciousness based on evidence, because subjective experience is precious and tied to the self, which wants to be immortal.

When the answer to the Big Question comes, it might have two possible effects: (1) It might be unsavory and counterintuitive – similar to the way quantum physics is counterintuitive – but nonetheless indisputable and scientifically verified; or (2) It might unleash an orchestra of language, mental tools, metaphors, and intuitions, forming a major advance in human knowledge and understanding – not unlike the theory of natural selection itself.

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Thoughts on Biological Chemistry and Emergence

My dog was licking my face this morning – as he often does in the morning. Many people refuse to let dogs lick their faces. Understandable. I am one of the apparently few people who allow it. There are a few exceptions when I don’t like it, such as right after my dog has eaten stinky dog food. Otherwise, he is a very healthy, tidy and gentle (and smallish) dog. His breath is barely noticeable.

Dog’s lick people’s faces for a number of possible reasons; these are nicely explained in several articles, such as:

https://pets.thenest.com/dogs-lick-humans-faces-5892.html

https://shopus.furbo.com/blogs/knowledge/why-does-dog-lick-my-face

But the proposed reason that most intrigues me is that it is a form of chemical communication. Dogs have such a sophisticated sense of smell that they can actually gather information (dog-like information) about people they are licking. Licking can also have a calming effect on licker and lickee (if you are not a fan of dogs licking your face you may disagree, so just pretend that you’re a dog for a moment).

According to this article:

“Scientists believe that the major source of people’s positive reactions to pets comes from oxytocin, a hormone whose many functions include stimulating social bonding, relaxation and trust, and easing stress. Research has shown that when humans interact with dogs, oxytocin levels increase in both species.”

Even more fascinating is a study that indicates that interacting with dogs can have health benefits for humans:

Beneficial Dog Bacteria Up-Regulate Oxytocin and Lower Risk of Obesity

So, having a dog can reduce obesity? That is certainly new to me!

Chemical Ecology

While my dog was licking my face and kicking up his oxytocin, and consequently making me release the same chemical into my bloodstream, I was thinking about how social animals regulate chemistry within their pack. (Similar with the visible/audible dimension: when my dog sends growling signals, I will sometimes get up and check out the window for intruders. He is modulating my behavior). So, I began to see more clearly how chemical exchange might be important for the cohesion of a group of social animals. I suspect there are many more chemicals involved in regulating the behaviors of pack animals – including humans.

And I realized that the orchestration of chemicals – not only in a single animal body – but among a group of animals – is largely invisible to us. But of course: chemicals are too small to see. They are molecules made of atoms. We experience their signaling effects as behaviors and notions. And we humans may have evolved such complex societal structures that we can hardly even recognize the chemical foundations of so much of our social behavior. This is the nature of emergence.

When a new level of emergence takes shape (for instance, when chemistry becomes complex enough to enable replication and variation and therefore genetic-based biology), new, larger structures take on their own agency and begin to regulate their sub-components in turn. Ancient chemistry didn’t just allow an apparatus to emerge that conveys information for replication (genetics); it also allowed a complex network of signaling between organelles, cells, organs, organisms, ecosystems, and societies. Each level gives rise (and gives way) to larger structures.

Emergence and Top-Down Effects

Emergence is a fascinating subject – not only because of the beauty of imagining simple components coming together to make a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts – but because that whole can attain autonomy; it can actually reach down and regulate those components that allowed it to come into existence in the first place. It’s possible that this top-down influence is an innate and necessary property of emergence.

If you are a fan of emergence, like me, you enjoy spinning narratives about how various levels of reality came into existence:

physics
chemistry
biology
intelligence
technology
super intelligence

The name of this blog is “Nature->Brain->Technology” – which is a nod to three of the levels in that list.

Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene – triggered new insights on genetics – and some lively debates. Dawkins coined the term “meme”. And I suspect he may have had a sense that the title of the book itself could turn into a meme. It brought forth ideas about how genes are powerful agents that cause an upward cascade of effects, making us do what we do: from the perspective of the selfish gene, we humans are “lumbering robots” whose purpose is to simply ensure its replication. Everything else is an illusion of human purpose. But it may be more subtle than this. Are genes the only things that are “selfish”? Could there be a lower level of selfishness going on?

My new insight from building oxytocin with my dog is that there is another layer of emergence involved, which is more fundamental to genes, and which gave rise to genes. My insight was echoed by an article called “Forget the selfish gene — the evolution of life is driven by the selfish ribosome“, which states:

“The selfish ribosome model closes a big theoretical gap between, on the one hand, the simple biological molecules that can form on mud flats, oceanic thermal vents or via lightning, and on the other hand LUCA, or the Last Universal Common Ancestor, a single-celled organism.”

Anything that smells of Eve is suspect. It’s more likely that there was a sort of distributed “Eve Soup” with a lot of pseudo-replication happening over a very long period of time. It is possible that the origin of life cannot be pinpointed to a single time and space…specifically because it is emergent.

Besides face-licking, there are probably many more phenomena that we have low-dimensional explanations for. They may someday be revealed as the effects of various selfish agents operating on various levels. Emergence is a scientific tool – a conceptual framework – that helps reveal otherwise invisible forces in nature.

For instance: why do we yawn?

The physiological purpose of a yawn remains a mystery. “The real answer so far is we don’t really know why we yawn,”

It may be more productive to stop looking for “the purpose”, and to look at it through the wide lens of emergence.

Deconstructing Agnosticism

 

Take a random phrase from the left column, a random phrase from the middle column, and a random phrase from the right column. Combine them to construct a question about your belief in God. How many possible questions can you construct?

The answer is 1080. That doesn’t include the many many possible phrases you might want to include in this list. This illustrates the expansiveness of questioning everything. Since “God” is difficult to define, and since there are many ways to represent, understand, and experience God, one can’t truly answer the question “do you believe in God” unless the asker and answerer both share the same sense of what they are talking about

One conclusion from this exploration is that we cannot escape the realm of words and language in the effort to articulate the nature of our beliefs. Can any one think about belief without using some form of (internal or external) language? 

Is belief naturally binary (I do believe vs. I don’t believe)? If it is not binary, can it be called a “belief”? Cultural/social forces and neural structures may cause a predisposition towards binarism in beliefs. In any case, I suspect that it is good to subdue these tendencies, for matters of intelligence as well as for social ease.

In my opinion (which could always change), agnosticism is (1) a good way to exercise one’s own intellectual agility, and (2) socially productive; it helps you hear and accept other people’s many kinds of beliefs, non-beliefs, assumed beliefs and believed assumptions.

True agnostics are not compelled to agree or disagree. In terms of epistemology, they are incapable of doing either.

No doubt, for many people, belief and faith are passionate and deeply-felt, and so it may not be easy to take such a dispassionate attitude. But as long as people are using language to question and express belief, the mechanics of logic necessarily come into play. 

In that case, the art of living may be the wordless expression that escapes the realm of agreement and disagreement.  Thus, God (or the absence of God) is best expressed in terms of how we live rather than what we say.

An intelligent car that can’t communicate with its driver is a dumbass car.

(image from https://www.tribuneindia.com/2014/20141116/spectrum/motor.htm)

Let’s talk about body language.

A key property of body language is that it is almost always unconscious to both giver and receiver.

Image from: https://talbotspy.org/but-his-tail-was-wagging-understanding-dog-body-language-part-1/

This is not a problem in itself – in fact, it’s actually really good that body language happens mostly unconsciously. Body language is necessarily unconscious. The flood of signals from a talking body is vast, high-bandwidth, high-rate, and highly-parallel. It must bypass the higher-brain in order to do its work. The higher brain is too busy making decisions and trying to be rational to be bothered with such things.

The problem with the backchannel nature of body language is that it is often in competition with explicit, linear verbal language, which is a pushy tyrant. There are too many pushy tyrants in the tech industry that are poor at social signaling. Body language tends to be relegated to a lower priority in many areas of digital technology, including the design of software interfaces, productivity tools, kitchen appliances…and cars. This is just one symptom of the lack of diversity in the tech industry.

High tech culture is obsessed with metrics; seeking to measure as much as possible, to be data-driven, to have tangible results and ways of measuring success. This obsession with data is a mistake. Tossing out what can’t be measured or converted into data is a very big mistake. And the digitally-designed world we live in suffers as a result. Let me try to explain what I mean by all this….

A computer on wheels

The automobile was invented in the industrial age – an age defined by energy, force, mechanics, chemistry, electricity, and physicality.

We are  now fumbling through the information age.

Apple Inc. has managed to reduce the thickness of laptop computers – they have become so thin that you can cut steak with them. But it should come as no surprise that the surface areas of laptop screens and keyboards have not been reduced, compared to the degree that computer chips have been miniaturized. There is a simple reason for this: human eyes and hands are still the same size. This will never change.

The same applies to communication. The more digital our machines become, the more we have to communicate with them, and they, in turn, have to communicate with us.

An old-fashioned industrial-age car comes with natural affordances: communication happens simply as a result of the physical nature of knobs, wheels, wires, engine sounds, torques, and forces. There are many sensory stimuli that the driver sees, feels, hears and smells – and often they are unconscious to the driver – or just above the level of consciousness.

Driving is a very different experience now. It is turning into a video game…a simulation. There is a disconnect between driver and car that seems to be growing wider.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But here’s the problem:

Body language between driver and car has become an arbitrary plaything, mediated by cockeyed displays and confusing controls. It is up to the whims of user interface designers – too many of whom have their heads up their asses. Idiots who call themselves designers live under the illusion that they can invent visual language on the fly and shove it into our long-lived lives, expecting their clever interfaces to fall naturally into use.

Or maybe they don’t actually think this – but don’t care anyway, because they are paid well. I’m not sure which is worse.

According to Matt Bubbers:

There’s nothing wrong with the volume knob. It does not need reinvention, nor disruption, nor innovation. The volume knob is perfect the way it is. Or, rather, the way it was.

Get into a new car in 2018 and you’re faced with a multitude of complicated ways to adjust the stereo volume: buttons or dials on the steering wheel, voice commands that rarely work, fiddly non-buttons on the centre panel, touchscreens that take your eyes off the road, even gesture controls that make you wave your hand as if you’re conducting a symphony.

Cars are too complicated. The volume knob is indicative of the problem. Call it feature bloat or mission creep: Cars are trying to do more, but they’re not doing it all well. These infotainment features can be distracting, therefore dangerous, and they cost money.

A new generation of digital designer is out of touch with nature. It is infuriating, because here we are, fumbling to bake a cake, turn on the AC, or change a channel on the TV: “Now, which of these 2,458 buttons on this TV remote do I need to press in order to change the channel?…”

“Oh shit – no wonder I’m confused: this is the remote control for the gas fireplace! Is that why it’s so hot in here?”

Driving under the influence of icons

Britania Rescue, a firm providing a breakdown service in England, conducted a survey, interviewing over 2000 drivers. The revelations are quite startling. It revealed that more than 52 per cent of drivers cannot correctly identify 16 of the most common symbols.

Interpreting a bunch of unfamiliar icons invented by out-of-touch dweebs is not how we should be interacting with our technology – especially as technology sinks deeper into our lives.

Just this morning, my 87-year-old mother and I spent about a half-hour trying to figure out how to set my sister’s high-tech oven to bake. To make matters worse, my mother, who is visually-impaired, can’t even feel the controls – the entire interface consists of a dim visual glow behind slick glass. We eventually had to read a manual. WE HAD TO READ A FUCKING MANUAL TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO TURN ON AN OVEN. How long must this insanity go on?

A car’s manual should be the car itself

Dan Carney, in the article, Complex car controls equal confused drivers, quotes Consumer Reports:  “You shouldn’t have to read the owner’s manual to figure out how to use the shifter.”

He says, “The BMW iDrive had a controller for functions like the radio and air conditioning that was so baffling that it forced drivers to take their eyes off the road.”

My Prius experience

My first experience with a Prius was not pleasant. Now, I am not expecting many of you to agree with my criticism, and I know that there are many happy Prius owners, who claim that you can just ignore the geeky stuff if you don’t like it.

I don’t like it, and I can’t ignore it.

I have found that most people have a higher tolerance for figuring-out technology than I. It’s not for lack intelligence or education; it’s more that I am impatient with stupid design. It makes me irate, because these fumblings are entirely unnecessary.

We all suffer because of the whims of irresponsible designers, supposedly working in teams which include human factors engineers and ergonomics engineers, whom I assume are asleep on the job.

I place the blame for my impatience squarely on Donald Norman, whose book, “The Design of Everyday Things” implored readers to stop blaming themselves for their constant fumbling with technology. The source of the problem is irresponsible design. He converted me profoundly. And now I am a tech curmudgeon. Thanks Don.

I once had to borrow a friend’s Prius because my Honda Fit was in the shop. I liked the energy-saving aspects and the overall comfort, but the dashboard was unfamiliar. My hippocampi threw up their hands in despair. What’s worse: after parking the car in a parking lot, I put the key in my pocket and decided to check the doors to make sure they were locked. The doors were not locking. Why? I tried locking the doors many times but every time I walked around to the other side, the opposite door would unlock. I called the owner, and told her that I am not able to lock the car. She said, “Oh – that’s because the doors automatically – and magically – unlock when you walk up to them. Smart, eh?”

Hello? Discoverability? 

Thank you Prius for not telling me about your clever trick. You are one step ahead of me! Perhaps I should just stop trying to understand what the fuck you are doing and just bow to your vast intelligence. You win, Prius.

My Honda Fit is relatively simple, compared to many cars these days. But it does things that infuriate me. It decides that I want the back window wipers to turn on when the front wipers are on, and I happen to be backing up. It took my car mechanic to explain the non-brilliance of this behavior. Thanks Honda for taking away my choice in the matter. My car also decides to turn on the interior light at night after I have parked the car. I have to wait a long time for the light to go out. My car knows how long. I am not privy to this duration. What if I don’t want strangers to see me – because I’d like to finish picking my nose before getting out?

Whether or not strangers can see me picking my nose is no longer my choice. My car has made this decision for me. Sure: I could reach up to the ceiling and turn off the light – but then I will forget to turn it on again when I actually need it. This never used to be so complicated.

Smart = dumb

I have come to the conclusion that a car without any computers is neither smart nor dumb. It has no brain and so it cannot even try to be intelligent. On the other hand, if a car has computational processing then it has an opportunity to be either smart or dumb. Most cars these days are poor communicators, I call them dumb.

The decider

Another gripe: sometimes my door locks when I’m driving, and then I have to unlock it to get out – but not always. There is no rhyme or reason (that I am aware of) for when and why this happens. Yes…I know – some of you will probably offer to enlighten me with a comment. But the fact that this has to be learned in the first place is what bugs me. I would prefer one of two things: (1) My car makes it apparent to me why it is making decisions for me, or (2) it stays out of the way and lets me be the decision-maker.

Am I old-fashioned? If wanting to be in charge of basic things like locking doors and turning on lights makes me old-fashioned, then…yes, I’m old-fashioned.

(image from http://www.thehogring.com/2013/07/31/10-most-ridiculous-dashboards-of-all-time/

Confessions of a MIT luddite

People confuse me for a techy because of my degree. And then they are shocked at how critical I am of technology. The truth is that I am a design nerd rather than a computer nerd. I have nothing against information technology – after all, I write software – and love it. I just want the technology that I rely on to be better at communicating. For example: why do gas pumps still have a one-word vocabulary? ….

Beep.

Okay, I’m a neo-luddite. There, I said it. And I will remain a neo-luddite as long as the tech industry continues to ignore a billion years of evolution, which gave us – and the rest of the living world – the means to generate signals and interpret signals – the body language of the biosphere that keeps the living world buzzing along.

This natural flow of communication among organisms is a wonderful thing to behold. It happens on a level of sophistication that makes ovens and VCR’s look like retardation in a box.

But then again, the evolution of information technology is extremely short compared to the evolution of natural language, which has kept the social ecosystems of Homo Sapiens running for a very long time.

Perhaps I am thrashing in the midst of the Singularity, and I should just give up – because that’s what you do in the Singularity.

But I would still like to understand what the future of communication will look like. This is especially important as more and more communication is done between people and machines. At the moment, I am still a little hesitant to call it “communication”.

How much negentropy is Earth capable of?

Negentropy is the opposite of entropy. It refers to an increase in order, complexity, and usefulness, while entropy refers to the decay of order or the tendency for a system to become random and useless.

The universe as a whole tends toward total entropy, or heat death. This does not mean that ALL parts of the universe are becoming less ordered. There can be isolated parts of the universe that are actually increasing in order; becoming more organized and workable. The best example of this is our home: planet Earth.

A miracle of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms

I was walking from my bedroom to my bathroom this morning, pondering the miracle of my body purposefully moving itself from one place in the universe to another. Consider the atoms that make up my body; they are assembled in just the right way to construct a human capable of locomotion. It is a miracle. Of course, the atoms themselves are not the driving force of this capability. The driving force is a collaboration of emergent systems (molecules, tissues, electrochemical activity, signals between organs, and of course, a brain – which evolved in the context of a complex planet, with other brains in societies, and with an ever-complexifying backdrop of shared information.

It’s a curious thing: planet Earth – with its vast oceans, atmosphere, ecosystems and organisms – is determined to go against the overall tendency in the universe to decay towards the inevitable doom of heat death.

While walking the seven billion billion billion atoms of my body to the bathroom, I considered how far the negentropic urge of our planet could possibly push itself, in a universe that generally tries to ruin the party; a universe that will ultimately win in the end. The seven billion billion billion atoms currently in my body will eventually be strewn throughout a dead universe. At that point there will be nothing that can re-assemble them into anything useful.

How not to ruin a party

The party is not over; there is ample reason to believe that Earth is not done yet. Earth generated a biosphere – the only spherical ecosystem we know of – which produced animals and humans, and most recently – post-biological systems (technology and AI). I would not dismiss entirely the notion that Earth really wants us to invent AI, and to allow it to take over – because our AI could ultimately help Earth stay healthy, and continue its negentropic party. We humans (in our old, biological manifestation) are not capable of taking care of our own planet. We are only capable of exploiting its resources – left to our own primitive survival devices. It is only through our post-human systems that we will be able to give Earth the leverage it needs to continue its negentropic quest.

This is another way of saying that the solutions to climate change and mass extinction will require massive social movements, corporate and governmental leadership, global-scale technologies, and other trans-human-scale systems that far exceed the mental capacities of a single human brain. It is possible that the ultimate victory of AI will be to save ourselves from an angry Mother on the verge of committing infanticide.

In the meanwhile, Earth may decide that it needs to get rid of the majority of the human population; just another reason to reconsider the urge to make babies.

But just how far can Earth’s negentropic party extend? As Earth’s most potent agents of negentropy, we humans are preparing to tap the moon, asteroids, and other planets for resources. Will we eventually be able to develop energy shields to deflect renegade asteroids? Will our robots continue to colonize the solar system? How far will Earth’s panspermia extend?

There are plenty of science fiction stories and hypothetical explorations that offer exciting and illuminating possible answers to these questions; I will not attempt to venture beyond my level of knowledge in this area. All I will say is…I think there are two possible futures for us humans:

(1) Earth will decide it has had enough of climate change, and smack us down with rising oceans and chaotic storms, causing disease, mass migrations, and war, resulting in our ultimate demise (Earth will be fine after a brief recovery period).

(2) We will evolve a new layer of the biosphere – built of technology and AI – and this will regulate our destructive instincts, thus allowing Earth to stay healthy and to keep complexifying. It will allow Earth to reconsider what it currently sees as a cancer on its skin – and to see us as agents of health.

In the case of future (2), we will lose some of our autonomy – but it just might be a comfortable existence in the long run – because Earth will be better off – and it will want to keep us around. Eventually, the panspermic negentropic party will not be our own – we will be just one of the intermediate layers of emergence emanating from the planet. We will become mere organs of an extended post-Earth ecosystem that continues to defy the general entropy of the universe…at least for a few billion more years.

The feeling of consciousness is an illusion

Stanislaw Dehaene’s book, Consciousness and the Brain, identifies various kinds of consciousness. It helps to separate the various uses of the words “conscious” and “consciousness”. The kind of consciousness that he has studied and reported in his book has measurable effects. This allows the scientific method to be applied.

After reading Dehaene’s book, I am more convinced that science will eventually fully explain how we hold thoughts in our minds, how we recognize things, form ideas, remember things, process our thoughts, and act on them. To be conscious “of” something – whether it be the presence of a person, a thing, or a fleeting thought – is a form of consciousness that can have a particular signature – physiological markers that demonstrate a telltale change in the brain that coincide with a person reporting on becoming aware of something.

Brain imaging will soon advance to such a degree that we will begin to see signatures of many kinds of thoughts and associate them with outward behaviors and expressions. It it also being used to show that some people who are in a vegetative state are actually aware of what is going on, even if they have no way to express this fact outwardly. So much will be explained. We are at a stage in brain research where consciousness is becoming recognized as a measurable physical phenomenon. It is making its way into the domain of experimental science. Does this mean that consciousness will soon no longer be a subject of philosophy?

Qualia

There is one kind of consciousness which we may never be able to directly measure. And that is the subjective feeling of being alive, of being “me”, and experiencing a self. It is entirely private. Daniel Dennett suggests that these subjective feelings, which are referred to as “qualia”, are ineffable: they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any other means than one’s own direct experience.

This would imply that the deepest and most personal form of consciousness is something that we will never be able to fully understand; it is forever inaccessible to objective observation.

On the other hand, the fact that I can write these words and that you can (hopefully) understand them means that we probably have similar sensations in terms of private consciousness. The vast literature on personal consciousness experience implies a shared experience. But of course it is shared: human brains are very similar to each other (my brain is more similar to your brain than it is to a galaxy, or a tree, or the brain of a chicken or the brain of a chimp). The aggregate of all reports of this inaccessible subjective state constitutes a kind of objective truth – indirect and fuzzy, sure – but nonetheless a source for scientific study.

So I’d like to offer a possible scenario that could unfold over the next several decades. What if brain scientists continue to map out more and more states of mind, gathering more accurate and precise signatures of conscious thoughts. As more scientific data and theories accumulate to explain the measurable effects of consciousness in the brain, we may begin to relegate the most private inexpressible aspects of qualia to an increasingly-smaller status. Neuroscience will enable more precise language to describe subtle private experiences that we have all experienced but may not have had a clear way to express. Science will nibble away at the edges.

An evolved illusion

And here’s an idea that I find hard to internalize, but am beginning to believe:

It’s all an illusion.

…because self is an illusion; a theatre concocted by the evolving brain to help animals become more effective at surviving in the world; to improve their ability to participate in biosemiosis. Throughout evolution, the boundary between an organism’s body and the rest of the world has complexified out of necessity as other organisms complexify themselves – this includes social structures and extended phenotypes. Also, the more autonomous the organisms of an evolving species become, the more self is needed to drive that autonomy.

The idea that we are living in an illusion is gaining ground, as explored in an article called: “The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality“.

Feelings are created by the body/brain as it interacts with the world, with thoughts generated in the brain, and with chemicals that ebb and flow in our bodies. The feeling of consciousness might be just that: a feeling – a sensation – like so many other sensations. Perhaps it was invented by the evolving brain to make it more of a personal matter. The problem is: being so personal is what makes it so difficult to relegate to the status of mere illusion.

The sleeping sponge: on the evolution of waking up

From the book, Wide Awake at 3:00am, I learned that researchers had come up with an answer to a common question, “Why do we sleep”?

It’s a valid question. What’s the actual purpose of sleep? Why would nature favor having the majority of animal species waste several hours each day in a state of unconsciousness, getting nothing done, and becoming vulnerable to predators?

The answer the researchers came up with required turning the question on its head: “Why should any living thing bother waking up at all?” Perhaps sleep is the normal state of all life, and wakefulness is just some aberration – a phenomenon that evolved later – as a part-time activity to more efficiently pursue food and sex.

As a lover of naps and hater of alarm clocks, I kind of like this idea.

I recall reading somewhere that sponges are “always asleep”. But I also read recently that sponges “never sleep”. Rather than go back and do more research to clear up this issue, I shall instead declare that the problem lies the definition of  “sleep”.

If you’re a sponge, you have no neurons. Having no neurons is a good indication that you have no brain. And no brain means no dreaming. Sponges are not like us in that they are sessile: they have no motility (except in the larval stage, when genetic dispersal occurs). If you don’t have to get up and go to work, why bother having a brain? Brains provide inner-representations of the outside world – used to navigate unpredictable terrains. Sponges just sit there at the bottom of the ocean and collect ambient nutrition. A task so easy that anyone can do it in their sleep.

Brains for Movement

The evolution of mobility required not only the direct control of muscles but also representations of reality that determined when and how those muscles get activated. Brains evolved in order for animals to evolve.

Long ago, there was no such thing as “waking up”. Until brains came along and gave organisms a reason to get off their asses and get a job. Perhaps asses and jobs had to evolve as well. But let’s not get too technical here.

It is possible that the binary states of wakefulness and sleep were not invented by brains themselves, but earlier in evolutionary history, by simple neuronal networks that generate sleep-like dynamics. Given that every location on Earth other than the poles has been cycling between day and night since before life emerged, it makes sense that organic periods would emerge to harmonize with this cycle.

Perhaps the very process of storing representations of reality – no matter how small or simple – requires a periodic cycle – as indicated by research finding that sleep is required for brains to prune useless memories and absorb useful ones.

My takeaway from all of this is that I have an organ that likes to make me do complicated things for many hours each day: sixteen to be exact. That’s a long time each day being on the move and getting worked up about other brains that are wreaking havoc on the world, such as the shriveled-up shitball inside of Donald Trump’s skull.

Before I die, I will thank my brain for collecting a massive library of memories that fueled a lifetime of dreams. And then I will say goodnight to my brain, and get back to sleep.

Trim, Mulch, Compost

It’s a rare warm evening, after a rare hot day. I just got back from a bout of night-time gardening, shirtless. The neighbors gave a few more glances than usual. Some things don’t require precise vision, like breaking twigs into smaller twigs, or forming a donut of dead leaves around the trunk of a young fruit tree. The feel of twigs snapping and the sound of leaves being shoved around is enough to go on.

Gardening, in my tiny little piece of Earth’s surface, consists mostly of trimming dead twigs and overly-ambitious vines, and then breaking them down into smaller bits – like what teeth do to food before passing it on to the stomach.

My love of gardening has grown as I have become more learned about two fascinating places where invisible creatures do wonderful symbiotic work: the colon (large intestine) and the rhrizosphere (the region near the roots of plants). In both of these regions, our invisible friends work busily to transform by-products into valuable nutrition, and then they share it.

My small front yard has become a Zen garden – I am both mindless servant and mindful observer. I wonder if I could apply my gardening approach to other aspects of my life.

The more I understand the things that affect the world swirling around me, the better I will be at knowing where to apply simple, mindless actions that have healthy outcomes. Where to trim a shrub to allow more sunlight in; where to use those trimmings as mulch to keep moisture underground; where to add compost to increase biodiversity and nutrition.

If I never succeed in transferring my gardening skills towards making my life flow more naturally, at least I can say that my gardening skills have improved: my thumbs are greener, and I have learned that most of the work is done underground – invisible to the eye.

Here’s one way to evolve an artificial intelligence

This picture illustrates an idea for how to evolve an AI system. It is derived from the sensor-brain-actuator-world model.

Machine learning algorithms have been doing some impressive things. Simply by crawling through massive oceans of data and finding correlations, some AI systems are able to make unexpected predictions and reveal insights.

Neural nets and evolutionary algorithms constitute a natural pairing of technologies for designing AI systems. But evolutionary algorithms require selection criteria that can be difficult to design. One solution is to use millions of human observers as a Darwinian fitness force to guide an AI towards an optimal state.

Clarifications

Since there is so much discussion (and confusion) on AI these days I want make some clarifications.

• This has nothing to do with consciousness or self. This AI is disembodied.
• The raw data input is (not) curated. It has no added interpretation.
• Any kind of data can be input. The AI will ignore most of it at first.
• The AI presents its innards to humans. I am calling these “simulations”.
• The AI algorithm uses some unspecified form of machine learning.
• The important innovation here is the ability to generate “simulations”.

Mothering

The humanist in me says we need to act as the collective Mother for our brain children by providing continual reinforcement for good behavior and discouraging bad behavior. As a world view emerges in the AI, and as an implicit code of morals comes into focus, the AI will “mature”. Widely-expressed fears of AI run amok could be partially alleviated by imposing a Mothering filter on the AI as it comes of age.

Can Anything Evolve without Selection?

I suppose it is possible for an AI to arrive at every possible good idea, insight, and judgement just by digesting the constant data spew from humanity. But without an implicit learning process (such as back-propagation and other feedback mechanisms used in training AI), the AI cannot truly learn in an ecosystem of continual feedback.

Abstract Simulations 

Abstraction in Modernist painting is about generalizing the visual world into forms and colors that substitute detail for overall impressions. Art historians have charted the transition form realism to abstraction – a kind of freeing-up and opening-up of vision.

Imagine now a new path leading from abstraction to realism. And it doesn’t just apply to images: it also applies to audible signals, texts, movements, and patterns of behavior.

Imagine an AI that is set up like the illustration above coming alive for the first time. The inner-life of newborn infant is chaotic, formless, and devoid of meaning, with the exception of reactions to a mother’s smile, her scent, and her breasts.

A newborn AI would produce meaningless simulations. As the first few humans log in to give feedback, they will encounter mostly formless blobs. But eventually, some patterns may emerge – with just enough variation for the human judges to start making selective choices: “this blob is more interesting than that blob”.

As the young but continual stream of raw data accumulates, the AI will start to build impressions and common themes, like what Deep Dream does as it collects images and finds common themes and starts riffing on those themes.

http://theghostdiaries.com/10-most-nightmarish-images-from-googles-deepdream/

The important thing about this process is that it can self-correct if it starts to veer in an unproductive direction – initially with the guidance of humans and eventually on its own. It also maintains a memory of bad decisions, and failed experiments – which are all a part of growing up.

Takeaway

If this idea is interesting to you, just Google “evolving AI” and you will find many many links on the subject.

As far as my modest proposal: the takeaway I’d like to leave you with is this:

Every brain on earth builds inner-simulations of the world and plays parts of those simulations constantly as a matter of course. The simple animals have extremely simple models of reality. We humans have insanely complex models – which often get us into trouble. Trial simulations generated by an evolving AI would start pretty dumb, but with more sensory exposure, and human guidance, who knows what would emerge!

It would be irresponsible to launch AI programs without mothering. The evolved brains of most complex mammals naturally expect this. Our AI brain children are naturally derived from a mammalian brain. Mothering will allow us to evolve AI systems that don’t turn into evil monsters.

Having sex with robots to save the planet

Long long ago, there was an accident in a warm puddle. A particular molecule – through some chance interaction with the soup of surrounding molecules – ended up with a copy of itself. Since the surrounding soup was similar to the original, the copy was more likely to replicate itself. And so it did. The rest is history. We call it evolution.

It is possible that similar accidents happened elsewhere around the same time – not just in one single puddle. One could also say that variations of this accident are still happening – only now at a massive scale.

Every act of every living thing can be seen as an elaboration of this original act. Self-replication is the original impetus of all life. We share a common ancestor with amoebas – who replicate asexually. The invention of sexual reproduction boosted genetic creativity. More recently in the scope of Earth’s history, creativity escaped the confines of genetics. We humans are the primary hosts of this creative engine.

Human beings have contrived all of the resulting aspects of survival to an art-form. This includes – not just the act of sex – but also the act of preparing food (cuisine), the act of making sounds and speaking (music and singing), and the act of altering the environment to create new structure (visual art). The abstractions and representations of the world that the brain generates via the body are derivations and deviations from the original acts of survival. It’s a form of self-replication.

The emergence of abstractions, mental models, and representations is increasing in complexity. This is an inevitable one-way blossoming accelerated by the emergence of the animal brain. The human experience is conflicted; we are oriented toward achieving escape velocity from Original Nature, but we also long for Original Nature. How can we resolve this conflict?

The original act of self-replication has powerful repercussions – billions of years after the original accident – it has taken on many forms. It is the reason we humans have strange phenomena like orgasm. And selfies.

Warming

We are at a crossroads in the history of life on Earth. The current era of global warming is almost certainly the result of the overpopulation and hyperactivity of humans, who have released – and continue to release – too much carbon into the atmosphere. One effective solution to global warming would be to reduce the primary agents of the fever…to reduce human population.

And so, converting that original act of replication into works of art is not just creative and exciting: it may be necessary. Humans must transcend the Earthly act of self-replication in order to preserve the health of the planet.

The future of sex will be…let’s just say…interesting. Every cell in our body contains the blueprint of a desire to replicate. Nature and society are structured around the elaborate machinery that has emerged to ensure self-replication – of human bodies and culture. This desire has made its mark on every aspect of society – even if we don’t recognize it as such. We cannot escape it. And so we need to virtualize it, because self-replication of human beings (physically) has become a threat to the planet that sustains us. It’s our duty to Mother Earth.

I am a living organism and so I have to contend with this crazy desire to replicate. Note: I am childless. I have never replicated my genes and have no intention to do so at this stage in my life. But I am passionate about replicating ideas, art, words, and software.

Now, what about the title of this blog post? Will people eventually start having sex with robots? It will certainly be more subtle than that. In fact, it has been said that by the time we get to that point, WE will be the robots.

Is this the kind of future I want? Strangely, yes. Because I will have long returned to the Earth – my molecules will have been handed down through generations of living things. I will be a part of Earth’s physiology. My tribe will be bigger than humanity.

One of my molecules may even end up in a warm puddle somewhere.