The Multiverse According to Ben

Self is to Long-Term Memory as Awareness is to Short-Term Memory

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Goertzel) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:52:00 +0000

This is a brief addendum to a post I made a while back where I gave a casual but mathematical discussion of will and reflective awareness in terms of self-referential structures ("hypersets").

There, the following recursive definitions are given:

"S is conscious of X" is defined as: The declarative content that {"S is conscious of X" correlates with "X is a pattern in S"}

"S wills X" is defined as: The declarative content that {"S wills X" causally implies "S does X"}

Funky, huh? Chew on that for a while!

My point here is to posit a similar definition for that strange beast called the "phenomenal self" (and for a gloriously, Germanically thorough treatment of this entity, please read Thomas Metzinger's masterwork Being No One):

"X is part of S's self" is defined as: The declarative content that {"X is a part of S's self" correlates with "X is a persistent pattern in S over time"}

One thing that's nice about this definition is the relationship that it applies between self and awareness. In a formula:

Self is to long-term memory as awareness is to short-term memory

Elegant, huh?

Your self is nothing more or less than the awareness of your persistent being.

Your momentary awareness is nothing more or less than the self of your instantaneous being.

(Time-span makes a big difference! Indeed, time is almost equivalent to "difference." But that's a subject for another post, for another late-night fueled by too much green tea and too many weird ideas...)

AGI in Xiamen ... and some rambling on the "creativity economy"

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 03:15:00 +0000

I just returned from 2.5 weeks in the Orient ... a week in Japan, doing biz meetings, going to a virtual worlds conference, seeing an awesome guitarist at a weird bar called BarTube, visiting an old friend, and hanging out w/ my son who is staying there for a month studying Japanese and playing Go ... a day or so in Seoul (visiting a humanoid robotics research group and a virtual pets company) ... a few days in Hong Kong giving a talk at WCCI's Human-Level AI session (on how to make a human-level NLP system by partly cheating, see the paper at http://novamente.net/papers) ... and a week in Xiamen, which is in China right across the water from Taiwan ... here's the beautifully situated Xiamen University ...

My friend Hugo de Garis (inventor of evolvable computing, prophet of the Artilect War and all around creative thinker)

(there's me and Hugo and his wife) ... is now a prof at Xiamen University and he's pulling together a humanoid robotics team, whose goal is to spend 4 years making an intelligent computer brain for a Nao humanoid robot:

Hugo and I have been plotting a way to make a clever Nao via using his evolved neural nets for perception and action, and the OpenCog system for cognition and overall system control. The Xiamen folks seem to like the plan and we're discussing the possibility of me spending a couple months there each summer to collaborate, and them funding some students to work on the OpenCog side of the project. If someone follows ahead with the idea I've been selling, of integrating a robot simulator (like Gazebo) with a virtual world (like OpenSim), this could synergize really nicely with Novamente's AI-in-virtual-worlds stuff....

And Xiamen would be a very nice place to spend summers...

I've been fascinated by China since youth, probably due to my mother doing grad work in Chinese history and philosophy back then. She gave me a bunch of Chinese history books and stories and poetry to read, which made me fascinated with the culture. When I was 17, halfway thru my 3rd year of university, I applied for a scholarship to go to China for a year and do research relating non-well-founded sets (hypersets) to Buddhist cognitive philosophy. But the scholarship required me to know Chinese and I didn't, so I didn't go.... (I've never been able to put much energy into learning languages... too much other interesting stuff to study and think about ... and I find it hard to pick up languages via immersion because of my habit of not paying attention to what anyone is saying or doing around me ... so I'm rarely actually immersed in anything but my own thoughts ;-O ) ...

ANYWAYS ... I met F2F Novamente & OpenCog's Chinese contributors, which was very nice... here we have (back: Lian Ruiting, Guo Junfei, Chen Shuo, Rui Liu, me)

Very smart, interested, ambitious people!

Hugo is convinced that China is the country of the future and America is already obsolete. He foresees a coming century of reverse brain drain, where China recruits smart scientists and engineers from Western nations....

It might happen -- I don't rule it out. Of course, unlike Hugo, I think some sort of technological Singularity is very likely by mid-century and maybe sooner -- but let's ignore that for the moment ... talking just in conventional political/cultural terms, it's not obvious to me that he's right.

No doubt China has very many very smart and ambitious and hardworking people (like the ones pictured above!) ... but the cultural differences w/ the West are profound and I don't think any of us understands what they mean in terms of the future of science and engineering.

One observation I like to make is as follows. People talk about the knowledge economy ... where manual work has long been outsourced to 3rd world countries, leaving 1st world countries increasingly consumed w/ knowledge work.

And more and more so, the US becomes a pragmatic knowledge integration economy -- specialized knowledge like programming and science gets farmed out to 3rd world countries, but the task of integrating together various pieces of knowledge for practical purposes is still done in America. Even in Novamente, which is a damn international company, we do programming and science and project management overseas, but the figuring-out of what programming and science needs to be done to serve business goals, is largely done in the US. Because the US is where our customer companies are -- even if their work is largely done overseas, the high-level staff defining their vision are mostly here. The matching-up of technology and business, where Novamente is concerned, occurs mainly within the arena of US culture. (We do have overseas customers, but they are either run by Americans or following business models that closely copy American ones.)

The next step, I think, is the creativity economy. Even integrative knowledge will become commoditized. Creation of new ideas will be the LAST thing to get commoditized. But this is exactly where America excels. No nation on Earth fosters creativity as well as the USA. And for this reason, I'm not so sure that America's period of dramatic success is over. The more science and technology accelerate, the more critical creativity becomes -- and, lame as American culture and institutions are, they seem better than most alternatives at fostering wide-ranging creativity. (The only cultures I've known that seemed maybe more creativity-friendly were Australia, New Zealand and Hungary. But those are small places, population-wise.)

There is loads of creativity in China, for instance, on a personal level. Very creative people. But I'm not sure the culture fosters creativity in the way that US culture does. Oriental culture seems to favor obedience a lot more than US culture, and creativity is often not compatible with obedience.... The US is probably the most anarchic major developed country -- which has its downsides, especially for those below the poverty line in the US -- but, it seems that anarchy and creativity are inextricably entwined.

If China evolves a culture of creativity, then Hugo will be proved right and this will become the Chinese century ... and maybe the Singularity will get launched in China (hey, maybe it will get launched there anyway via Hugo's and my collaboration!!!)..... But that's a big "if", I suppose. Yet one feature of Chinese history is its tendency toward sudden, radical changes of one sort or another. Time will tell.

Anyway I look forward to returning to Xiamen and other parts of China when my schedule permits (hopefully for a couple months next summer, and a couple weeks in the fall or winter) ... there is a definite energy there that I don't find in developed countries these days, nor in 3rd world countries ... there is a feeling of "waking up" and progress that is exciting...

And, more importantly, there is a possibility of creating a thinking machine and doing other amazing technology projects there more rapidly than in other parts of the world, due to the availability of brilliant scientists and engineers at a relatively low cost (esp. outside the tier 1 cities). Whether or not China develops a culture of creativity allowing it to "own" the next century, there are loads of opportunities for international collaboration ... like what Hugo and I are trying to set up....

But anyway. Enough rambling. I've been sleep-deprived since returning from China, due to jet lag issues ... tonight I'll go to sleep "early" (i.e. maybe by 1AM) and hopefully actually get a full night of sleep.. (yah right...)

Eureeka!! -- The Underlying Logic Unifying Quantum Theory and General Relativity, Revealed Over a Plate of Sour Fish Consumed Over South China

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:43:00 +0000

Eureeka!! -- The Underlying Logic Unifying Quantum Theory and General Relativity, Revealed Over a Plate of Sour Fish Consumed Over South China; Plus Long Digressions on Mark Twain, the Pathetic Woes of Middle Age and the Good Old Mongolian Skin-Peeler

[I wrote this post 2 weeks ago, but didn't get around to posting it due to being in China, with a slow Net connection..]

En route from Seoul to Hong Kong, exhausted from a 5 hour night's sleep following a 4 hour night's sleep, over-jazzed by too much strong coffee (which I rarely drink), stomach-sickened by ordering and consuming random dishes in a Korean restaurant via pointing at random hieroglyphs on the menu and hoping vainly for the best ... head full of Mark Twain's wacky biography which I just finished ... irrationally nervous due to having left my oldest son in Japan to tour around on his own for a week before his Japanese class in Kanazawa starts (yes, he's mature enough to handle himself ... and Japan is a damnably safe place, aside from the risk of spending all your money ... but even I the ultimate anarchist parent can't help a bit of worry) ... dulled almost but not quite to a stupor by a relentless series of software technology oriented business meetings (all with wonderful and interesting people, but still, there's only so much meeting I can take) ... I picked up Lee Smolin's book on quantum gravity, which I bought for my physician-cum-maverick-physics-theorist father-in-law years ago but never read myself ... and while reading a totally irrelevant passage and eating the oddly sour fish that passes for food on Korean Air, some very simple and obvious ideas popped into my mind, and I realized to my surprise that, via converging together several streams that have been tumbling through my head for years, I'd happened upon what appeared to be the correct probabilistic logic of unified quantum gravity.

I'm eager to write up this logic in a paper, but, I've promised myself not to undertake anything serious -- except tasks critical for Novamente as a business, or in order to fulfill obligations already incurred -- until the OpenCog Prime (http://www.opencog.org) wiki pages are done (maybe another 20-30 hours of work, but hours for concentrated writing/editing work are very hard to come by these days due to the combination of business obligations and ongoing research projects needing supervision and/or feedback).... But I'll indulge myself in a brief blog post on the topic as a stopgap - partly to ensure the idea doesn't escape from my mind tonight when I finally slip into the deep sleep my body's been craving for 72 hours or so....

Twain's bio was a fascinating read, by the way. Three things among many others struck me, viewing his life-story from a selfish view in terms of its potential lessons for my own life. One is the way he spent a load of his time on stuff other than writing -- business of various sorts, as well as lecturing, traveling and so forth. But these "distractions" didn't seem to detract from his productivity as a writer as much as I would have thought -- they filled his head with stimulation and ideas, and no doubt made his writing more interesting than if he'd just sat home writing all day. Second is the romance he found in business pursuits ... which reminded me a bit of Rimbaud, who gave up poetry as a very young man after too few years as a writer, and wasted his twenties chasing African gold, ultimately dying from poisoning attained via wearing gold under his undies to hide it from thieves. Rimbaud, due to his premature death among other issues, failed to transform his digressive life experiences into art. I can see in my own psychology the excitement that the business world held for these people: it does stimulate parts of the mind that creative art and science don't touch. Finally I'm struck by the amount of real trash literature Twain produced. I'm reminded of Danilo Kis's (a truly great Serbian writer -- thx to Predrag Janicic for waking me up to him) comment that he didn't write his complete works, only his selected works. Twain was not like that. Twain's best work was awesome, his worst work was terrible. He could have omitted a good 50% of his production and his legacy would be greater not less. Philip K. Dick had the same property: there's Ubik ... and then there's Dr. Futurity.... The lesson for me is, I suppose, not to worry too much about spending time on apparently digressive pursuits (like writing this blog post, um) -- so long as they're feeding the creative engine one way or another -- and given the limited time I have for creative pursuits, to try hard to be more like Kis than Twain or Dick, and filter out crappier works before I take the time to produce them.

Another striking thing about Twain was the way he foresaw the power of machinery to alleviate human suffering. A lesson that seems obvious these days but was surprisingly poorly understood in his times, even though the industrial revolution was in full swing and new mechanical inventions of all sorts were pouring out of human minds at an amazing rate. If you haven't read it, his Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court -- arguably the first American SF novel -- is a hilarious and deeply insightful premonition of the promise and peril of advanced technology. As a time travel fable, it's got Back to the Future beat by a long shot, without need of paradoxical absurdities beyond those intrinsic to human nature.

And now... what about quantum gravity...

Three threads need to be drawn together, into a single mathematical formalism. But there really seems no obstacle to doing so. (Except time of course, which is a distressingly rare commodity for me these days. Must confess to a bit of jealousy of my son as he wandered off from Tokyo to Kyoto, with no specific plan for spending his days, other than to amuse himself. I never intended to accumulate so many obligations -- keep companies running, organize conferences, pay other peoples' college tuition, close a mortgage, finish a book, pay child support each month, drive the kids to and from school, blah blah blah blah blah ... I once actually thought I'd live the life of the "free and easy wanderer" from the Chuang Tzu (on my mind as the flight I'm on approaches China), or maybe of Paul Erdos who freeloaded off one friend after another as he spent his life journeying around the world doing mathematics and taking drugs ... I never envisioned taking on all this responsibility for other people (kids, wife, ex-wife) and organizations (companies, non-profits, egads!) ... yet it's all wonderful, interesting stuff ... people and ideas I really care about ... so I'd really be an ass to complain ... it's a fantastic time to be alive ... yet not quite as fantastic as a few decades hence will likely be, when minds will be far more fully liberated from the horrifying/stultifying constraints of legacy human physiology ... but, well, anyway...)

Quantum gravity!

Thread one was invented by Saul Youssef, and I've written about it before. Check out the lovely bibliography he's assembled at

http://physics.bu.edu/~youssef/quantum/quantum_refs.html

Brilliant, brilliant man. A hero of our time! Someone give that man a muffin!!

The observation here is that if you're willing to take the step of assuming probabilities are complex rather than real numbers, the basic rules of quantum theory fall right out. This is one of those things that seems shocking and weird at first, and then seems tremendously obvious after you read through the math. Three cheers for Saul Youssef!!

Thread two is something I came up with a couple years ago, and wrote up in a paper which I'm in the middle of submitting for publication. I sent the paper to a journal and they sent it back asking me to provide names and mailing addresses of eight referees able to review the paper. I've been lagging on that task along with a huge amount of other stupid paperwork that's accumulated during the last N years. I guess the editor couldn't think of anyone to send it to. The idea, anyway, is infinite order probability.

An ordinary probability is a probability of an event. A probability distribution is a function that assigns a probability to each one of a set of mutually exclusive outcomes of some event (the different values assigned to different exclusive outcomes must sum to one). A second-order probability is a probability distribution over probability distributions ... it's a function that assigns a probability to each one of a set of probability distributions. A third-order probability ... etc.

An infinite-order probability is a function that assigns a probability to each one of a set of infinite-order probability distributions. Sounds odd, but it's a mathematically consistent idea, as I showed in my paper. I also showed that these oddball entities are closely related to some much more familiar and intuitive mathematical entities, Markov matrices.

The third thread is causal networks. A foundational notion in general relativity is causality. The causal network of events, in relativity, tells you for any pair (A, B) of events, which ones have the property that A is causal for B. This has to do with the finitude of the speed of light: if A and B are too close in time and too distant in space, there may be no way for A and B to causally affect each other.

If A and B are not causally related, there may still be some event C so that C is causal for both A and B. In that case we may say that, probabilistically speaking, A and B are independent conditional on C. That is,

P(A & B | C) = P(A | C) P(B |C)

The causal network gives us a set of independence assumptions on the space of events.

General relativity is in essence a dynamic on causal networks: it tells you how a causal network at one time (plus some extra information) gives rise to a different, related causal network at a subsequent time.

Finally let's reflect on what Smolin (see Three Roads to Quantum Gravity) calls the "strong holographic principle." His reasoning for this principle is subtle and involves the Bekenstein bound and related results, which state that all the information about the interior of some physical region, may actually be thought of as being contained on the surface of that regions. (He explains this better than I could, so I'll just refer you to his book.)

What the principle says is: a la Nietzsche, there are only surfaces. Re-read Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols and you'll see that he presaged quantum gravity here, in a similar way to how he presaged quantum theory proper in his vision (in The Will to Power) of the universe as composed of a dancing swarm of discrete interacting quanta. Kant posited phenomena and noumena, Nietzsche saw only noumena. Smolin also. Smolin views the universe as a collection of surfaces, each one defined as a relationship among other surfaces. Put in words like this, it sounds mystical and fuzzy, but there's math to back it up -- the words just hint at the mathematical reality.

But is each of these Smolin surfaces definitively known? No. Each one is probabilistically known. And if each of these surfaces is to be thought of as a relationship between other surfaces, then this means each of these surfaces is most directly modeled as a hyperset (see my prior blog posts on these mathematical constructs). (This is not how Smolin models things mathematically, but I doubt he'd be opposed, as he's used equally recondite math structures such as topoi.) So these surfaces should be modeled as probabilistic hypersets -- aka infinite-order probability distributions.

But what kinds of probabilities should be involved in these distributions? Clearly, Youssef has taught us, these should be complex probability distros -- or in my variation, infinite-order complex probability distributions.

The inescapable conclusion is: The physical universe is a dynamically evolving causal network defined on an infinite-order complex probability distribution.

You read it first here, folks.. ;-O

Or, to put it a bit more conservatively: A useful, perhaps critical language for modeling quantum gravity phenomena is the logic of causal networks on infinite-order complex probability distributions.

There are fun connections here with the psychology of self-awareness and free will, as I've discussed in a couple previous blog posts (follow the links). According to those blog posts, a good way to model reflective awareness would be using infinite-order real probability distributions; and a good way to model will would be using causal networks on these distributions. What quantum theory introduces is the complex-number probability aspect, which makes everything counterintuitive and weird.

I hope I can really find time -- amidst the manifold obligations of middle age plus the not incidental life-task of creating superhuman AI, plus other distractions like bioinformatics and fiction and music and what-not ... and family and the occasional personal entertainment -- to write these ideas up carefully, because I really do think they have deep potential.

There seem to be more connections lurking here: the logic of causal networks seems somehow inescapably tied up with Clifford algebras, providing a tie-in with my algebra of multi-boundary forms (my only publication in a physics journal so far, but it's really a math paper). Presumably one can go from causality somehow straight to discrete Clifford algebras using some kind of axiomatic derivation, and from there to the various beautiful algebraic symmetries underlying modern physics ... Gell-Mann's "Eightfold Path" and its kin ... but anyway, the flight's about to land and the stewardess wants me to put away my laptop, so the blog post is gonna end .. I'll post it online when I get back to the hotel assuming there's functional internet there ... the inimitable Yan King Yin (famous on various AI email lists) is picking me up at the airport and I'm curious to meet him, although I'm so worn out I'm not sure I'll be lucid enough to milk the occasion's potential for lively AI discussions....

How about the bloody Yverse (see previous blog post on this)? Each Smolin surface ... each relation in the network of interdefining hyperrelations ... defines its own multiverse: a quantum multiverse relative to its own perspective. The network of surfaces (aka relationships) is then a Yverse. QED.

Another day, another dozen digressions ... it's SOOOOO tempting to take a few days and formalize the logic of causal nets over complex infinite-order distros, but instead (inbetween biz meetings and AI research meetings and conference speeches and meals with AI colleagues) I'll spend my "spare" hours in the next few weeks on the OpenCogPrime documents ... a very tedious matter of taking about 50 wiki pages from the Novamente wiki site and editing them down into OpenCogPrime rather than Novamente Cognition Engine pages... yecch...

(Any wealthy patrons out there want to hire me a secretary, a housecleaner and a scientific assistant? I can't promise the Singularity will be accelerated by a few years but it's a definite possibility. For sure a lot more fascinating math, art and science would be generated were I to be thus endowed. (And, getting back to Twain, I wonder what additional great works he would have produced if some of his rich friends had decided to fund him, sparing him the financial anxiety that led him to waste years of his life on various harebrained business schemes. Yeah, they provided grist for his creative mill ... but there's such a thing as too much grist and not enough time to mill.) But I can't complain too much (er, OK, wait, I guess I am...) ... whenever I get TOO frustrated at the realization that 50% of my really good ideas and creations will remain forever unarticulated or un-worked-out-in-detail because I've failed to be born rich or become rich (so far), I remind myself of my favorite Haruki Murakami character, the Mongolian Skin-Peeler ... a World War II torture artist who tortured Chinese prisoners of war by slowly peeling their skin off ... as I see Ulaanbaator on the video screen of the plane as it approaches Hong Kong (haha, I'm a bad boy and failed to shut off my laptop when instructed ... how very non-Oriental of me!!) it's hard for me not to feel thankful that I'm not one of his victims ... I've got my epidermis attached to my dermis, woo hoo! ... and I at least have time to work out a nontrivial percentage of the cool ideas and creations that course through my overheated brain...)

(While you're at it, imaginary patron, recruiting Novamente LLC a CEO with lots of game or virtual world industry experience would be nice. I think I'm doing a decent job as CEO, with help from Bruce and Cassio and Wendy and my other wonderful colleagues, but it would be nice to have a sufficiently complete management team that I could spend 80% of my Novamente-time on science rather than business. And you may as well recruit us a kick-ass project manager too, so Cassio can help me out with research and retire from project management. (Ok, dream on, Ben.... And remember the Mongolian Skin-Peeler....). And while you're at it, throw in maybe $1M per year so that I can actually fund a team of kick-ass programmers to build a thinking machine ... in case you haven't heard I have a pretty detailed and well-argued design for one, but it's getting built bloody fucking slowly due to lack of funding, and because it's not the sort of thing where partial progress yields exciting incremental results, any more than building 30% of a human brain would yield a 30% functional human... but I dididididididigress ;_)

(I think my wife is really, really tired of hearing about the Mongolian Skin-Peeler. He seems to occupy an unjustifiably prominent role in my emotional topography. Read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.)

Mark Twain, I add, would have been a hell of a blogger; far more entertaining than me. He wrote a dozen letters each day back then in the pre-digital dark ages.

Time to get off the plane.

Open-Source Robots + Robot Simulators + Virtual Worlds + AI = ???

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:01:00 +0000

I’ve been reading up on the iCub open-source humanoid robot lately, and I think it’s pretty exciting. Given what open source has done for Web browsers, bioinformatics tools and other sorts of software, the possibility of harnessing the same development methodology for robot hardware and software development seems almost irresistably exciting.

I’m no roboticist, but I do know something about the AI software that robots need to understand the world and act in it – and I’ve been doing a lot of work lately on the use of AI to control simulated agents in virtual worlds. In this vein, this blog entry contains some follow-up thoughts about the possibility of building connections between the iCub and various other relevant open-source software systems relevant to AI and virtual worlds.

For starters: What if someone made a detailed simulation of iCub in Gazebo, an open-source 3D robot simulation platform? Then folks around the world could experiment with iCub without even building a robot, simply via writing software and experimenting with the simulation. Experiments with other robots and Gazebo have shown that the simulation generally agrees very closely with real-world robotic experience.

And what if someone integrated Gazebo with OpenSim, the up-and-coming open-source virtual-world platform (which uses an improved version of Second Life’s user interface, but features a more sophisticatedly architected and flexible back end, and best of all it’s free)?

Furthermore, work is underway to integrate OpenSim with OpenCog, an open-source AI platform aimed at advanced machine cognition (yes, I’m one of the organizers of OpenCog); and OpenSim could similarly be integrated with OpenCyc, OpenNARS, and a host of other existing open-source AI platforms. Throngs of diversely customized, simulated iCubs controlled by various AI algorithms could mill around OpenSim, interacting with human-controlled avatars in the simulated world, learning and sharing their knowledge with each other. The behaviors and knowledge learned by the robots in the virtual world could then be transferred immediately back to their physically embodied brethren.

What stands between us and this vision is “just” some software integration work ... but of course, this kind of work isn’t easy and takes time and expertise. For various economic and cultural reasons, this sort of work has not been favored by any of the world’s major R&D funding sources – but the open-source approach seems to have increasingly high odds of getting it done. It seems at least plausible that iCub won’t go the way of OpenPINO and other prior attempts at open-source robotics, and will instead combine with other open-source initiatives to form a key part of a broadly-accepted, dynamically evolving platform for exploring physical and virtual humanoid robotics.

Artificial Wisdom (... episodic memory, general intelligence, the Tao of John Coltrane, and so forth)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:03:00 +0000

Every now and then, someone suggests to me that, alongside the pursuit of Artificial Intelligence, we should also be pursuing "Artificial Wisdom."

I always figured the "artificial wisdom" idea was probably just a bunch of useless English-language wordplay -- but one night last week, while watching Idiocracy with the kids for the second time (great movie exploring a non-Singularity-based future by the way ... highly recommend it!), I spent a while surfing the Web on my laptop refreshing my memory on how others have construed the "wisdom" concept and musing on what it might mean for AI.

Surprisingly enough, this led in some moderately interesting directions -- nothing revolutionary, but enough to justify the couple hours spent musing about it (and another 90 minutes or so synthesizing and writing up my glorious conclusions).

My main conclusion was a perspective in which wisdom is viewed as one of three core aspects of intelligence, associated with three distinct types of memory:

cleverness, associated with declarative memory (and the ability to manipulate abstract, certain or uncertain declarative knowledge)
skillfulness, associated with procedural memory (and the ability to effectively learn and adapt new procedures based on experience)
wisdom, associated with episodic memory (and insightful drawing of large-scale conclusions therefrom)

This being a blog post, though, rather than just presenting my conclusion, I'll start out by recounting some of the winding and mostly irrelevant path that led me there ;-)

Classical Conceptions of Wisdom

I started out with the dictionary, and as usual found it close to useless....

A typical dictionary definition of "wisdom," which is not a heck of a lot of help, is from Wiktionary, which tells us that

wisdom (plural wisdoms)

means

An element of personal character that enables one to distinguish the wise from the unwise.
A piece of wise advice.
The discretionary use of knowledge for the greatest good.
The ability to apply relevant knowledge in an insightful way, especially to different situations from that in which the knowledge was gained.
The ability to make a decision based on the combination of knowledge, experience, and intuitive understanding.
(theology) The ability to know and apply spiritual truths.

and furthermore that

wise

means

Showing good judgement or the benefit of experience.

Hoo haw.

These definitions don't give us any particularly interesting way of distinguishing "wisdom" from "intelligence." Essentially they define wisdom as either intelligence, spiritual insight, or the application of intelligence for ethical ends. Nothing new here.

Wikipedia is slightly more useful (but only slightly). Firstly it notes that

A standard philosophical, (philos-sophia: literally "lover of wisdom"), definition says that wisdom consists of making the best use of available knowledge.

It then notes some psychological research demonstrating that in popular culture, wisdom is considered as different from intelligence. Psychological researchers are quoted as saying that though "there is an overlap of the implicit theory of wisdom with intelligence, perceptiveness, spirituality and shrewdness, it is evident that wisdom is a distinct term and not a composite of other terms."

More interestingly, Wikipedia notes, Erik Erikson and other psychologists have argued that it is, in large part, the imminence of death that gives older human beings wisdom.

The knowledge of imminent death is seen as focusing the mind on concerns beyond its own individual well-being and survival, thus inducing a broader scope of understanding and an identification with the world at large, which are associated with the concept of wisdom.

This is interesting from a transhumanist perspective in that it suggests that the death of death would be the death of wisdom! I have seen some evidence for that in the incredible, shallow-minded selfishness of a certain subset of the transhumanist community -- people who are dead-set on having their own selves live forever, without any real thought as to why this might be valuable or what this might mean in a larger perspective. But of course, I don't really think death is the only or ultimate source of wisdom, though in a human context I can believe it's one of the main forces nudging us toward wisdom.

Paul Graham on Wisdom

One of the more interesting theories of wisdom I've run across (I found it a while ago for some random reason I've forgotten, and dug it up again last week) came from a contemporary blogger, Paul Graham:

http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html

who distinguishes wisdom from intelligence in the following way:

"Wise" and "smart" are both ways of saying someone knows what to do. The difference is that "wise" means one has a high average outcome across all situations, and "smart" means one does spectacularly well in a few.

This explanation also suggests why wisdom is such an elusive concept: there's no such thing. "Wise" means something—that one is on average good at making the right choice. But giving the name "wisdom" to the supposed quality that enables one to do that doesn't mean such a thing exists. To the extent "wisdom" means anything, it refers to a grab-bag of qualities as various as self-discipline, experience, and empathy

Graham considers wisdom as partly a kind of de-biasing and cleansing of the mind, a notion that has some resonance with the modern notion of "Bayesian calibration" of the mind:

Recipes for wisdom, particularly ancient ones, tend to have a remedial character. To achieve wisdom one must cut away all the debris that fills one's head on emergence from childhood, leaving only the important stuff. Both self-control and experience have this effect: to eliminate the random biases that come from your own nature and from the circumstances of your upbringing respectively. That's not all wisdom is, but it's a large part of it. Much of what's in the sage's head is also in the head of every twelve year old. The difference is that in the head of the twelve year old it's mixed together with a lot of random junk.

Provocatively, Graham also posits that intelligence is quite different from wisdom, in that it has to do with accentuating rather than avoiding biases:

The path to intelligence seems to be through working on hard problems. You develop intelligence as you might develop muscles, through exercise. But there can't be too much compulsion here. No amount of discipline can replace genuine curiosity. So cultivating intelligence seems to be a matter of identifying some bias in one's character -— some tendency to be interested in certain types of things—- and nurturing it. Instead of obliterating your idiosyncrasies in an effort to make yourself a neutral vessel for the truth, you select one and try to grow it from a seedling into a tree.

To avoid confusion, from here on I'll sometimes refer to Graham's interpretation of these concepts as Graham-style wisdom and Graham-style intelligence, respectively.

There is an unclarity in Graham's essay as to the extent to which he thinks the kind of focusing and bias-accentuation that's part of Graham-style intelligence has to involve irrationality. My own view is that Graham-style intelligence definitely does NOT require an individual to be irrational, in the sense of making suboptimal judgments about a particular problem given the resources devoted to thinking about the problem. However, a finite system in a complex environment is always going to be irrational to some measure, due to not having enough resources to make a fully analysis of any complex situation. To the extent that Graham-style intelligence involves heavy focus on some particular set of topic areas, it's going to drain resources from other areas, thus making the mind less intelligent regarding these other areas.

So, in Graham's view, intelligence has to do with focusing loads of resources on processing in a handful of narrow domains that match one's innate biases, whereas wisdom has to do with evenly distributing processing across all the different domains in one's environment.

Along these lines Graham also notes (correctly, I think) that:

The wise are all much alike in their wisdom, but very smart people tend to be smart in distinctive ways.

As Graham conceives it, wisdom is basically equivalent to general intelligence: it's intelligence averaged across a variety of situations. In mathematics there exist various sorts of averages, some of which weight extreme values more heavily than others (these are p'th power averages). Graham's view would be that "wisdom" and "intelligence" are both estimates of general intelligence (defined as intelligence averaged over different domains/tasks), but with different sorts of averaging: in the case of intelligence, an averaging that pays especial attention to extremes (say a p-power average with p=5, or whatever); and in the case of wisdom, a more typical arithmetic averaging.

This is all sort of nice, but (as will become clear as the essay unfolds) I don't really think it gets at the crux of the matter.

Wisdom Goes Beyond the Individual

Another interesting perspective (that I also think doesn't get at the crux of the matter) is given in the paper "Meaning generation and artificial wisdom" with abstract

We propose an interpretation of wisdom in terms of meaning generation in social groups. Sapient agents are able to generate useful meanings for other agents beyond their own capability of generation of self-meanings. This makes sapient agents specially valuable entities in agent societies because they provide interagent reliable third-person meaning generation that provides some functional redundancy that contributes to enhance individual and social robustness and global performance.

Here wisdom is identified with the ability to generate meaning in the social group, going beyond meaning that is perceptible by the individual doing the meaning-generating. This harks back to Erikson's understanding of wisdom as related to identification with the world at large, beyond the mind/body.

This view also reminds me vaguely of Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy, an attempt to distill the "wisdom teachings" of all the world's religions. In the Perennial Philosophy, wisdom teaches that the individual self is an illusion and all of us are one with the universe (and yet in a sense still distinct and individual.)

Mulling over all this, none of it really satisfied me. Of course, a folks concept like "wisdom" can't be expected to have a crisp and sensible formalistic definition ... but it still seemed to me that all the attempts at systematization and formalization I'd read about were missing some really essential aspects of the folk concept.

Wisdom, Cleverness and Skillfulness

And so, I came up with a totally different idea....

After a fair bit of musing, my mind kept drifting to the familiar distinction between declarative, procedural and episodic memory (drawn from textbook cognitive psych).

Remember:

Declarative knowledge = knowledge of facts, conjectures, hypotheses (abstract or concrete)
Procedural knowledge = knowledge of how to do things (could be physical, mental, social, etc.)
Episodic knowledge = knowledge of stories that have occurred in the history of intelligent beings (oneself, others one knows, others one has heard about,...)

One interesting thought that popped into my head is: The concept of wisdom, in its folk-psychology sense, has a lot to do with the ability to solve problems that are heavily dependent on context, using intuition that's based on large-scale analysis of one's episodic-memory store.

Or, less geekily: Wisdom consists of making intelligent use of experience.

A subtlety here is that this need not be one's own experience. Direct experience may be the best way to acquire wisdom (and surely this is part of the reason that wisdom is commonly associated with age) but some rare folks are remarkably gifted at absorbing wisdom from the experience of others -- absorbed via observation, via reading, or conversation, or whatever.

More broadly, this train of thought leads me to a sort of fundamental trinity of aspects of intelligence: cleverness, skillfulness and wisdom.

There's cleverness, which is the ability to appropriately manipulate, create and absorb declarative knowledge toward one's goals. This declarative knowledge may be abstract, or it may be concrete facts. Declarative knowledge is largely symbolic in nature, and cleverness is largely founded on adeptness at symbol-manipulation.

There's skillfulness, which is the ability to effectively do stuff in service of one's goals. This covers physical skills but also highly abstract mental skills like writing an essay, proving a theorem, or closing a business deal.

In some domains skillfulness can exist in the total absence of cleverness. The vast majority of shred metal guitarists would seem to fit in this category (to choose a somewhat random example based on what's playing in my headphones at the moment). These guys are so damn skilled, yet there's not much adept manipulation of meaning in their solos, or compositions. Compare the typical shred guitarist to Yngwie Malmsteen or Buckethead, who are also massively skilled (and in similar ways) -- but who are also highly clever in their symbolic manipulation of the abstract patterns characterizing the concrete sonic forms they're so skilled at producing.

In other domains, it's really hard for cleverness and skillfulness to emerge in any way except exquisitely intercombined. Mathematics is an example. Procedural knowledge at doing proofs is needed for fully understanding complex proofs -- because so many steps are left out in proofs as typically written down, if you don't know how to do proofs, you won't be able to fill in all the gaps in your head when you read a proof, so you'll never get more than a general understanding. On the other hand, it's even more obvious that deep declarative understanding and manipulation-ability regarding mathematical content is necessary to do mathematical proofs. Math is a domain where procedural and declarative intelligence have got to work in extremely tight synergy.

Finally, there's wisdom, which as I'm conceiving it here is the ability to intelligently draw conclusions from a vast repository of data regarding specific situations.

Human minds tend to organize data regarding specific situations using story-like, "narrative" structure, so that in human practice, wisdom often takes the form of the ability to mine appropriate abstract patterns from a vast pool of remembered stories.

Of course, the operation of human episodic memory is largely constructive -- we don't actually grab experiential data out of some sort of neurological database; rather, we synthesize stories from fragmentary images, stories, and such. Wisdom is about synthesizing appropriate stories from large databases of partially-remembered, ambiguous, fractional stories -- and then, as appropriate, using these stories to guide the creation of declarative or procedural knowledge.

In mathematics, wisdom is closely related to what's called "mathematical maturity" ... the general sense of how mathematics is done. Mathematical maturity guides the mind to interesting problems and interesting concepts ... and helps you choose an overall proof strategy (whereas it's cleverness and skillfulness that help you carry out the proof).

The transition from {cleverness + skillfulness} to wisdom in music is epitomized to me by the mid-to-late John Coltrane ... the Coltrane of "My Favorite Things" and "A Love Supreme." These are the solos of a man who has listened so much and played so much that he's disassembled thousands of different musical narratives and reassembled them to tell different kinds of stories, like no one ever told before. So much richer than the merely clever, skillful and emotionally moving solos of the early Coltrane. Certain works of great art manage to be intensely personal and dramatically universal at the same time, and
this often results from wisdom in the sense I'm defining it here.

Note that a mature mathematician or a world-changing jazz soloist need not be "wise" in the sense of a Taoist sage. The classical conception of wisdom has to do with making intelligent judgments based on large stores of experience in everyday human life. In the old days this was pretty much the only experience there was -- everyday human life plus various shamanic and psychedelic experiences.... But now the human world has become far more specialized, and it's possible to have a specialized wisdom, because it's possible to have a huge and rich store of episodic knowledge that's restricted to some special domain, like music or mathematics, or even a sufficiently complex game like Go or chess.

This vision of wisdom would seem to contradict Graham's, cited above -- he views wisdom as related to the ability to achieve goals over a broad variety of domains, in contract to intelligence which he conceives as a more narrowly domain-specialized intelligence.

But I don't think the contradiction is total.

I think that within a sufficiently rich and complex domain, one requires wisdom as I've defined it in order to achieve a really high level of intelligence. Learning skills and manipulating symbols is not enough. Direct and intelligent mining of massive experience-stores is needed.

I also think that wisdom, even if achieved initially and primarily within a certain domain, has a striking power to transcend domains. There are a lot of universal patterns among large stores of stories, no matter what the domain.

But even if the wisdom achieved by a great mathematician or chess player or jazz soloist helps that person to intuitively understand the way things work in other domains, this won't necessarily lead them to practical greatness in these other domains -- great achievement seems to require a synthesis of wisdom with either cleverness or skillfulness, and in some domains (like math or jazz improvisation) all three.

Defined-Problem versus Contextual Intelligence

Next, what does all this have to do with artificial intelligence?

One of the lessons learned in the last few decades of AI practice is that there is a pretty big difference between:

Defined-problem intelligence: Problem-solving that occurs "after a crisply-defined problem statement has been identified", versus
Contextual intelligence: problem-solving that is mainly concerned with interpreting general goals in the context of a complex situation, and, "figuring out what the context-specific problem is, in the first place" -- i.e. figuring out what crisply-defined problem, if solved in the relevant context, is likely to work toward the general goals at hand

I think this might be a more useful and more precise distinction than the "narrow AI" versus "general AI" distinction that I've often made before. It's ultimately getting at the same thing, but it's putting the point in a better way, I think.

What's narrow about "narrow AI" systems like chess-playing programs and medical diagnostic expert systems isn't merely that they're focused on specific, narrow domains. It's the fact that they operate based on defined-problem intelligence. It happens, though, that in some sufficiently specialized domains, defined-problem intelligence is enough to yield ass-kicking performance. In other domains it's not -- because in these other domains, figuring out what the problem is, is basically the problem.

I suggest that defined-problem intelligence is focused on declarative and procedural knowledge: i.e. it consists of cleverness or skillfulness or some combination thereof.

Logical reasoning systems, for example, are focused on declarative knowledge, and possess in some cases great facility at manipulating declarative knowledge.

Evolutionary learning systems and neural nets, on the other hand, are mainly focused on procedural knowledge -- on learning how to do stuff, without need for symbolic representations or symbol manipulations.

On the other hand: Contextual intelligence, I suggest, is a matter of knowing how to synthesize declarative and procedural knowledge, that representing problem-statements and problem-solutions, out of the combination of general goals and real-world situations.

I suggest that powerful contextual intelligence always relies upon powerful use of episodic memory, and associated mechanisms for storing, accessing, manipulating and analyzing sets of stories.

Or, briefly getting less geeky again: contextual intelligence requires wisdom.

Not at the level of the Taoist sage, John Coltrane or Riemann ... but at a way higher level than possessed by any currently operational AI system.

Note that defined-problem intelligence may sometimes draw on a wide body of background knowledge -- but it uses this background knowledge in a manner constrained by certain well-defined declarative propositions, or practical constraints on procedure-learning. It uses the background knowledge in a manner that doesn't require the background knowledge to be organized or accessed episodically -- rather, it uses background knowledge as a set of declarative facts, or data items, or constraints on actions, or procedures for doing specific things in specific types of situations.

"How to make a lot of money in Russia" is a problem that requires intense contextual as well as defined-problem intelligence. Whereas, "how to make a lot of money by trading oil futures on the Russian stock exchange" is more heavily weighted toward calculational intelligence, though it could be approached in a contextual-intelligence-heavy manner as well.

For instance, in the domain of bioinformatics, figuring out a rule that can diagnose a disease based on a gene expression microarray dataset, is a well-defined problem -- a problem that can be solved via focusing strictly on a small set of reasonably well-encapsulated information items. Declarative and/or procedural focused AI works well here ... much better than human intelligence.

On the other hand, figuring out which datasets are likely to be reliable, and figuring out how to normalize these datasets in a reasonable way based on the experimental apparatus described in the associated research paper, are tasks that require much more understanding of context, more milking of subtle patterns in episodic memory. I.e., I'm suggesting, more wisdom.

In the current practice of bioinformatic data analysis, human wisdom is needed to craft well-defined problems to feed into the superior (in this domain) declarative and procedural intelligence of narrow-AI bioinformatic data-analysis systems like the ones we've created at Biomind LLC.

Doing Time in the Universal Mind

Getting back to some of the ideas introduced at the start of this essay ... it seems all this ties in moderately closely with Erikson's definition and the Perennial Philosophy definition of "wisdom."

These definitions conceive wisdom as related to an understanding of life situations in a broader context than that of the individual body and mind. Wisdom as these thinkers conceive it, is a higher level of contextual intelligence than average humans display -- an ability to conceive daily situations in a broader-than-usual context.

This corresponds, really, to relying on a kind of collective episodic memory store, rather than just the episodic memory store corresponding to one's own life. By the time one is old, one is reviewing a longer life, and reviewing the past and future lives of one's children and grandchildren, and thinking about the whole scope of stories all these people may be involved in. A much richer contextuality.

Another ingredient of the Perennial Philosophy notion of wisdom is self-understanding, and I think that ties in here very closely too. One's own self is always part of the context, and to carry out really deep contextual understanding or problem-solving, one needs to appreciate how one's own history, knowledge and biases are affecting the situation and affecting one's own judgments. Powerful contextual intelligence -- unlike powerful calculational intelligence -- requires deep and broad self-understanding.

Wrapping Up

Sooo ... if we conceive wisdom as contextual intelligence powered by rich analysis of episodic memory, then it is clear that wisdom is a key aspect of general intelligence -- and is precisely the aspect that the AI research field has most abjectly ignored to date.

And it is also clear that ethical judgment is richly bound up with wisdom, as here conceived. Ethical judgment, in real life, is all about contextual understanding. It's not about following logical principles of ethics -- even when such principles are agreed-upon, real-life application always comes down to tricky context-specific intuitive judgments. Which comes down to understanding a vast pool of different situations, different episodes, that have existed in the lives of different human being and groups.

Defined-problem intelligence can be useful for ethical judgments. For instance in cases where scarce resources need to be divided fairly among a large number of parties with complex interrelationships and constraints, one has a well-defined problem of figuring out the optimally ethical balance, or a reasonable approximation thereof. But this actually seems an exceptional case, and the default case of ethical judgment seems to be to rely much more heavily on contextual than defined-problem intelligence.

Just to be clear: I'm not claiming that the conception of "wisdom" I've outlined here thoroughly captures all aspects of the natural-language/folk-psychology term "wisdom." Like "mind", "intelligence" and so forth, "wisdom" is a fuzzy term that amalgamates various different overlapping meanings ... it's not the kind of thing that CAN be crisply defined and analyzed once and for all.

What I hope to have done is to extract from the folks concept of wisdom some more precise, interesting and productive ideas, that closely relate to this folk concept but don't pretend to exhaust it.

In short...

General intelligence = defined-problem intelligence + contextual (problem-defining) intelligence
Calculational intelligence = cleverness (declarative intelligence) + skillfulness (procedural intelligence)
Contextual intelligence = in the human context, highly reliant on large-scale analysis of episodic memory
Wisdom = interestingly interpreted as contextual intelligence
Ethics = heavily reliant on wisdom

In this view, not surprisingly, the pursuit of Artificial Wisdom emerges as a subtask of the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence. But what's interesting is it emerges as a complementary subtask to the one that most of the AI community is working on at the moment -- narrow-AI, or artificial defined-problem intelligence.

There is a bit of work in the AI community on narrative and story understanding. But most of this work seems, well, overly artificial. It has to do with formalistic systems for representing story structure. That is just not how we do things, in our human minds, and I suspect it's not an effective path at all.

I don't at the moment know any way to give an AGI system a rich understanding of episodes in the world than to actually embed it in the world and let is learn via experiencing. Virtual worlds may be a great start, given the amount of rich social interaction now occurring therein.

Thus I conclude that an excessive focus on narrow-AI research is, well, un-wise ;-)

And physically or virtually embodied AGI may potentially be a wise approach...

And I return again to the apparent wisdom of integrative AI approaches. Cleverness, skillfulness and wisdom are, I suggest, separate aspects of intelligence, which are naturally implemented in an AI system as separate modules -- but modules which must be architected for close inter-operation, because the real crux of general intelligence is the synergetic fusion of the three.

Buckets of Crumbs!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 04:27:00 +0000

I just posted a way deeper and more interesting blog post a couple hours ago (using multiverse theory and Occam's Razor to explain why voting may often be rational after all), but I decided to post this sillier one tonight too because I have a feeling I'll forget if I put it off till tomorrow (late at night I'm willing to devote a little time to blogging in lieu of much-needed sleep ... tomorrow when I wake up there will be loads of work I'll feel obliged to do instead!)

This blog post just re-"prints" part of a post I made to the AGI email list today, which a couple people already asked me if they could quote.

It was made in response to a poster on the AGI list who made the argument that AGI researchers would be more motivated to work on building superhuman AGI if there were more financial gain involved ... and that, in fact, desire for financial gain MUST be a significant part of their motivation ... since AGI researchers are only human too ...

What I said is really simple and shouldn't need to have been said, but still, this sort of thing seems to require constant repetition, due to the nature of the society we live in...

Here goes:

Singularitarian AGI researchers, even if operating largely or partly in the business domain (like myself), value the creation of AGI far more than the obtaining of material profits.

I am very interested in deriving $$ from incremental steps on the path to powerful AGI, because I think this is one of the better methods available for funding AGI R&D work.

But deriving $$ from human-level AGI really is not a big motivator of mine. To me, once human-level AGI is obtained, we have something of dramatically more interest than accumulation of any amount of wealth.

Yes, I assume that if I succeed in creating a human-level AGI, then huge amounts of $$ for research will come my way, along with enough personal $$ to liberate me from needing to manage software development contracts or mop my own floor. That will be very nice. But that's just not the point.

I'm envisioning a population of cockroaches constantly fighting over crumbs of food on the floor. Then a few of the cockroaches -- let's call them the Cockroach Robot Club -- decide to spend their lives focused on creating a superhuman robot which will incidentally allow cockroaches to upload into superhuman form with superhuman intelligence. And the other cockroaches insist that the Cockroach Robot Club's motivation in doing this must be a desire to get more crumbs of food. After all, just **IMAGINE** how many crumbs of food you'll be able to get with that superhuman robot on your side!!! Buckets full of crumbs!!!

(Perhaps after they're resurrected and uploaded, the cockroaches that used to live in my kitchen will come to appreciate the literary inspiration they've provided me! For the near future though I'll need to draw my inspiration elsewhere as Womack Exterminators seems to have successfully vanquished the beasties with large amounts of poisonous gas. Which I can't help feeling guilty about, being a huge fan of the film Twilight of the Cockroaches ... but really, I digress...)

I'm also reminded of a meeting I was in back in 1986, when I was getting trained as a telephone salesman (one of my lamer summer jobs from my grad school days ... actually I think that summer I had given up on grad school and moved to Las Vegas with the idea of becoming a freelance philosopher ... but after a couple months of phone sales, which was necessary because freelance philosophers don't make much money, I reconsidered and went back to grad school in the fall). The trainer, a big fat scary guy who looked and sounded like a meaner version of my ninth grade social studies teacher, was giving us trainee salespeople a big speech about how everyone wanted success, and he asked us how success was defined. Someone in the class answered MONEY and the trainer congratulated him and said: "That's right, in America success means money, and you're going to learn to make a lot of it!" The class cheered (a scene that could have been straight out of Idiocracy ... "I like money!"). Feeling obnoxious (as I usually was in those days), I raised my hand and asked the trainer if Einstein was successful or not ... since Einstein hadn't been particularly rich, I noted, that seemed to me like a counterexample to the principle that had been posited regarding the equivalence of success and financial wealth in the American context. The trainer changed the subject to how the salesman is like a hammer and the customer is like a nail. (By the way I was a mediocre but not horrible phone salesman of "pens, caps and mugs with your company name on them." I had to use the name "Ben Brown" on the phone though because no one could pronounce "Goertzel." If you were a small business owner in summer 1986 and got a phone call from an annoying crap salesman named Ben Brown, it was probably the 19 year old version of me....)

Why Voting May Not be Such a Stupid Idea (A Multiversal Argument)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 01:43:00 +0000

I haven't voted in any election for a heck of a long time ... but, in some conversations a couple years ago, an argument came up that actually seems like a reasonable argument why voting might be a good idea.

I'm not sure why I never blogged this before ... but I didn't ... so here goes ...

Why might voting be worthwhile, even though the chances that your vote breaks a tie in the election are vanishingly small?

Consider this: Would you rather live in a branch of the multiverse where the people like you vote, or where the people like you don't vote?

Obviously, if there are a lot of people like you, then you'll be better off in a branch where the people like you vote.

So: You should vote so as to be sure you're in one of those branches.

But, wait a minute. How do you know you won't end up in a branch where most of the people like you DON'T vote, but you vote anyway?

Well, you can't know that for sure. But, the question to ask is, which of the two swaths of possible universes are more probable overall:

Type 1) Ones in which everyone like you votes

Type 2) Ones in which most people like you don't vote, but you're the exception

Adopting an "Occam prior" that favors simpler possible universes over more complex ones, you arrive at the conclusion that Type 1 universes are more probable.

Now, this isn't an ironclad, universal argument for voting. If you're such a freak that all the people like you voting wouldn't make any difference, then this argument shouldn't convince you to vote.

Another counterargument against the above argument is that free will doesn't exist in the multiversal framework. What the heck does it mean to "decide" which branch of the multiverse to go down? That's not the kind of thing you can decide. Your decision process is just some dynamics that occurs on some branches and not others. It's not like your decision process steps out of the branching-process governing the multiverse and chooses which routes you follow....

But the thing is, deciding still feels like deciding from within your own human mind -- whether or not it's REALLY deciding in any fundamental physical sense.

So, I'm not telling you to decide anything. I'm merely (because it's what my internal dynamics are doing, in this branch of the multiverse that we're in) typing in some words that my internal dynamics believe may encourage you to carry out some of your own internal dynamics that may feel to you like you're deciding something. Right? Because, this is simply the way the universe is happening ... in this branch of the multiverse....

Don't decide anything. Just notice that these words are making you reflect on which branch of the multiverse you'd rather be in -- the one where everyone like you votes, or the one where they don't....

And of course it's not just about voting. It's really about any ethical behavior ... any thing such that we'd all be better off if everyone like us did that thing.

It's about compassion, for that matter -- we'd all be better off if everyone was more compassionate.... Would you rather be in the branch of the multiverse where everyone like you is compassionate, or....

Well, you get it.

But am I voting in this year's Presidential elections?

Out of all the candidates available, I'd definitely support Obama ... but nah, I think I'll probably continue my long tradition of lame citizenship and not vote.

I just don't think there are that many people like me out there ;-)

But if I read enough other blog posts like this one, I'd decide there was a large enough population of similar people out there, and I WOULD vote....

Quantum Voodoo in "Classical" Systems?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:03:00 +0000

Way way back in the dark ages, when I was 19 years old and in my second year of grad school, I wrote a paper called "Holistic Indeterminacy" and submitted it to the journal Mind.

The basic idea was that, in some cases, very complex "classical" physical systems might literally display the same kind of indeterminacy associated with quantum systems.

The paper was printed out crappily on a dot matrix printer with dimly printed ink, and written in a not terribly professional way. It got rejected, and I've long since lost the thing. Furthermore, I never since found time to write up the ideas in the paper again. (Had there been a Web back then I would have posted the thing on my website, but this was the mid 1980's ... if I recall correctly, I hadn't even sent an email yet, at that point. I might actually have the paper on some old floppy disk in the basement, but odds are the data's long corrupted even if the disk is still around...).

But anyways ... please pardon these reminisces of an old man!! ... these old ideas of mine came up today in a conversation I was having with a friend over lunch, so I figured I'd take a few minutes to type them into a blog post (way less work than a paper!).

In fact these ideas are far more topical now than in the 1980's, as quantum computing is these days finally becoming a reality ... along with macroscopic quantum systems and all sorts of other fun stuff....

Partly because of these advances, and partly because the ideas have had decades to pervade my brain, I think I can now express the idea a bit more crisply than I did back then.

Still, it's a freaky and speculative train of thought, which I am not fully convinced makes any sense.

But at very least, it's some amusing hi-fi sci-fi.....

The basic idea is as follows.

Premise: Quantum logic is the logic of that which, in principle, cannot be observed. Classical logic is the logic of that which can, in principle, be observed.

The above may sound odd but it's not my idea -- it's the conclusion of a lot of work in quantum physics and the quantum theory of measurement, by serious physicists who understand such things far better than I do. It's way clearer now than it was in the mid 80's, though it was known to all the cool people even then....

Now is where things start to get weird. I want to make the above premise observer-dependent in a manner different from how quantum theory does it. Namely, I want to introduce an observer who, himself, has a finite capacity for understanding and observation -- a finite Kolmogorov complexity, for example.

This leads to my

Modest proposal: An observing system should use quantum logic to reason about anything that it, as a particular system, cannot in principle observe.

There are some things that a worm cannot observe, because it is just a worm; but I can observe. From the perspective of the worm, I suggest, these things should be reasoned about using quantum logic.

Similarly, there are some things that I cannot observe, in principle, because I am just a little old me.

Yes, I could potentially expand myself into a dramatically greater being. But, then that wouldn't help ME (i.e., my current self) to observe these things ... it would just help {some other, greater guy who had evolved out of me} to observe these things.

Of course, you can't step into the same river once ... and there is not really any ME that is persistent beyond an individual moment (and there are no individual moments!). But you can talk about a class of systems, and you can say that some observables are simply NOT observable by any system within that class. So systems within that class need to reason about these observables using quantum logic.

Where does complexity come into the picture? Well, among the things I can't in principle observe, are patterns of more complexity than can fit in my brain.

And among the things my deliberatively conscious mind can't in principle observe, are patterns of more complexity than can fit within its own very limited capacity.

So, if we interpret "quantum logic is the logic of things that can't in principle be observed" subjectively, as applying to particular real-world observing systems (including subsystems like the deliberatively conscious component of a human brain), then we arrive at the funky conclusion that maybe we should reason about each others' minds using quantum logic ... or maybe even, that we should reason about our own unconscious using quantum logic....

Funny idea, hmmm?

Way back when I wrote down some mathematics embodying these notions, but I don't feel like regenerating that right now. Although I'm a bit curious to see whether it had any validity or not ;-)

What made me think of this today was a discussion about consciousness, and the possibility (raised by the friend I was talking to) that some sort of wacky quantum voodoo is necessary to produce consciousness.

Maybe so. On the other hand, it could also be that any system complex enough to display the kind of rich deliberative consciousness we humans do, is complex enough that humans need to reason about it using quantum logic ... because in principle we cannot observe its dynamics (without becoming way more complex than we are, hence losing our self-ness...).

Ahhh... well I'll get back to doing the final edits on the Probabilistic Logic Networks book now ...

A New, Improved, Completely Whacky Theory of Evolution

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:56:00 +0000

This blog posts presents some really weird, speculative science, that I take with multiple proverbial salt-grains ... but, well, wouldn't it be funky if it were true?

The idea came to mind in the context of a conversation with my old friend Allan Combs, with whom I co-edit the online journal Dynamical Psychology.

It basically concerns the potential synergy between two apparently radically different lines of thinking:

Rupert Sheldrake's idea of "morphic fields"
The notion of EDA's (Estimation of Distribution Algorithms) in computer science

Morphic Fields

The basic idea of a morphic field is that, in this universe, patterns tend to continue -- even when there's not any obvious causal mechanism for it. So that, for instance, if you teach thousands of rats worldwide a certain trick, then afterwards it will be easier for additional rats to learn that trick, even though the additional rats have not communicated with the prior one.

Sheldrake and others have gathered a bunch of evidence in favor of this claim. Some say that it's fraudulent or somehow subtly methodologically flawed. It might be. But after my recent foray into studying Ed May's work on precognition, and other references from Damien Broderick's heartily-recommended book Outside the Gates of Science (see my previous blog posts on psi), I'm becoming even more willing than usual to listen to data even when it goes against prevailing ideas.

Regarding morphic fields on the whole, as with psi, I'm still undecided, but interested. The morphic field idea certainly fits naturally with my philosophy that "the domain of pattern is primary, not the domain of spacetime"

Estimation of Distribution Algorithms

EDA's, on the other hand, are a nifty computer science idea aimed at accelerating artificial evolution (that occurs within software processes)

Evolutionary algorithms are a technique in computer science in which, if you want to find/create a certain object satisfying a certain criterion, you interpret the criterion as a "fitness function" and then simulate an "artificial evolution process" to try to evolve objects better and better satisfying the criterion. A population of candidate objects is generated at random, and then, progressively, evolving objects are crossed-over and mutated with each other. The fittest are chosen for further survival, crossover and mutation; the rest are discarded.

Google "genetic algorithms" and "genetic programming" if this is novel to you.

This approach has been used to do a lot of practical stuff -- in my own work, for example, I've evolved classification rules predicting who has cancer or who doesn't based on their genetic data (see Biomind); evolved little programs controlling virtual agents in virtual worlds to carry out particular tasks (see Novamente); etc. (though in both of those cases, we have recently moved beyond standard evolutionary algorithms to use EDA's ... see below...)

EDA's mix evolutionary algorithms with probabilistic modeling. If you want to find/create an object satisfying a certain criterion, you generate a bunch of candidates -- and then, instead of letting them cross over and mutate, you do some probability theory and figure out the patterns distinguishing the fit ones from the unfit ones. Then you generate new babies, new candidates, from this probability distribution -- throw them into the evolving population; lather, rinse, repeat.

It's as if, instead of all this sexual mating bullcrap, the Federal gov't made an index of all our DNA, then did a statistical study of which combinations of genes tended to lead to "fit" individuals, then created new individuals based on this statistical information. Then these new individuals, as they grow up and live, give more statistical data to throw into the probability distribution, etc. (I'd argue that this kind of eugenics is actually a plausible future, if I didn't think that other technological/scientific developments were so likely to render it irrelevant.)

Martin Pelikan's recent book presents the idea quite well, for a technical computer science audience.

Moshe Looks' PhD thesis presents some ideas I co-developed regarding applying EDA's to automated program learning.

There is by now a lot of mathematical/computational evidence that EDA's can solve optimization problems that are "deceptive" (hence very difficult to solve) for pure evolutionary learning. To put it in simple terms, there are many broad classes of fitness functions for which pure neo-Darwinist evolution seems prone to run into dead ends, but for which EDA style evolution can jump out of the dead ends.

Morphic Fields + EDA's = ??

Anyway -- now how do these two ideas fit together?

What occurred to Allan Combs and myself in an email exchange (originating from Allan reading about EDA's in my book The Hidden Pattern) is:

If you assume the morphic field hypothesis is true, then the idea that the morphic field can serve as the "probability distribution" for an EDA (allowing EDA-like accelerated evolution) follows almost immediately...

How might this work?

One argument goes as follows.

Many aspects of evolving systems are underdetermined by their underlying genetics, and arise via self-organization (coupled to the environment and initiated via genetics). A great example is the fetal and early-infancy brain, as analyzed in detail by Edelman (in Neural Darwinism and other writings) and others. Let's take this example as a "paradigm case" for discussion.

If there is a morphic field, then it would store the patterns that occurred most often in brain-moments. The brains that survived longest would get to imprint their long-lasting patterns most heavily on the morphic field. So, the morphic field would contain a pattern P, with a probability proportional to the occurrence of P in recently living brains ... meaning that occurrence of P in the morphogenetic field would correspond roughly to the fitness of organisms containing P.

Then, when young brains were self-organizing, they would be most likely to get imprinted with the morphic-field patterns corresponding to the most-fit recent brains....

So, if one assumes a probabilistically-weighted morphic field (with the weight of a pattern proportional to the number of times it's presented) then one arrives at the conclusion that evolution uses an EDA ...

Interesting to think that the mathematical power of EDA's might underly some of the power of biological evolution!

The Role of Symbiosis?

In computer science there are other approaches than EDAs for jumping out of evolutionary-programming dead ends, though -- one is symbiosis and its potential to explore spaces of forms more efficiently than pure evolution. See e.g. Richard Watson's book from a couple year back --

Compositional Evolution: The Impact of Sex, Symbiosis, and Modularity
on the Gradualist Framework of Evolution

and, also, Google "symbiogenesis." (Marginally relevantly, I wrote a bit about Schwemmler's ideas on symbiogenesis and cancer , a while back.)

But of course, symbiosis and morphic fields are not contradictory notions.

Hypothetically, morphic fields could play a role in helping organisms to find the right symbiotic combinations...

But How Could It Be True?

How the morphic fields would work in terms of physics is a whole other question. I don't know. No one does.

As I emphasized in my posts on psi earlier this year, it's important not to reject data just because one lacks a good theory to explain it.

I do have some interesting speculations to propound, though (I bet you suspected as much ;-). I'll put these off till another blog post ... but if you want a clue of my direction of thinking, mull a bit on

http://www.physics.gatech.edu/schatz/clocks.html

Brief Report on AGI-08

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 16:15:00 +0000

Sooo....

The AGI-08 conference (agi-08.org) occurred last weekend in Memphis...!

I had hoped to write up a real scientific summary of AGI-08, but at the moment it doesn't look like I'll find the time, so instead I'll make do with this briefer and more surface-level summary...

Firstly, the conference went VERY well. The tone was upbeat, the discussions were animated and intelligent, and all in all there was a feel of real excitement about having so many AGI people in one place at one time.

Attendance was good: We originally anticipated 80 registrants but had 120+.

The conference room was a futuristic setting called "The Zone" that looked sorta like the Star Trek bridge -- with an excellent if mildly glitchy video system that, during Q&A sessions, showed the questioner up on a big screen in front of the room.

The unconventional format (brief talks followed by long discussion/Q&A) sessions was both productive and popular. The whole thing was video-ed and at some point the video record will be made available online (I don't know the intended timing of this yet).

The proceedings volume was released by IOS Press a few weeks before the conference and is a thick impressive-looking tome.

The interdisciplinary aspect of the conference seemed to work well -- e.g. the session on virtual-worlds AI was chaired by Sibley Verbeck (CEO of Electric Sheep Company) and the session on neural nets was chaired by Randal Koene (a neuroscientist from Boston University). This definitely made the discussions deeper than if it had been an AI-researchers-only crowd.

Plenty of folks from government agencies and large and small corporations were in attendance, as well as of course many AI academics and non-affiliated AGI enthusiasts. Among the AI academics were some highly-respected stalwarts of the AI community, alongside the new generation...

There seemed to be nearly as many Europeans as Americans there, which was a pleasant surprise, and some Asians as well.

The post-conference workshop on ethical, sociocultural and futurological issues drew about 60 people and was a bit of a free-for-all, with many conflicting perspectives presented quite emphatically and vociferously. I think most of that discussion was NOT captured on video (it took place in a different room where video-ing was less convenient), though the workshop talks themselves were.

The media folks in attendance seemed most energized by the section on AI in virtual worlds, which is because in this section the presenters (me, Andrew Shilliday, and Martin Magnusson) showed movies of cute animated characters doing stuff. This gave the nontechnical observers something to grab onto, which most of the other talks did not.

As at the earlier AGI-06 workshop, one of the most obvious observations after listening to the talks was that a lot of AGI research programs are pursuing fairly similar architectures and ideas but using different languages to describe what they're doing. This suggests that making a systematic effort at finding a common language and really understanding the true overlaps and differences of the various approaches, would be very beneficial. There was some talk of organizing a small, invitation-only workshop among practicing AGI system architects, perhaps in Fall 2008, with a view toward making progress in this direction.

Much enthusiasm was expressed for an AGI-09, and it was decided that this will likely be located in Washington DC, a location that will give us the opportunity to use the conference to help energize various government agencies about AGI.

There was also talk about the possibility of an AGI online technical journal, and a group of folks will be following that up, led by Pei Wang.

An "AGI Roadmap" project was also discussed, which would involve aligning different cognitive architectures currently proposed insofar as possible, but also go beyond that. Another key aspect of the roadmap might be an agreement on certain test environments or tasks that could be used to compare and explore various AGI architectures in more of a common way than is now possible.

Lots of ideas ... lots of enthusiasm ... a strong feeling of community-building ... so, I'm really grateful to Stan Franklin, Pei Wang, Sidney DeMello and Bruce Klein and everyone else who helped to organize the conference.

Finally, an interesting piece of feedback was given by my mother, who knows nothing about AGI research (she runs a social service agency) and who did not attend the conference but read the media coverage afterwards. What she said is that the media seems to be taking a far less skeptical and mocking tone toward AGI these days, as opposed to 7-10 years ago when I first started appearing in the media now and then. I think this is true, and it signifies a real shift in cultural attitude. This shift is what allowed The Singularity Is Near to sell as many copies as it did; and what encouraged so many AI academics to come to a mildly out-of-the-mainstream conference on AGI. Society, including the society of scientists, is starting to wake up to the notion that, given modern technology and science, human-level AGI is no longer a pipe dream but a potential near-term reality. w00t! Of course there is a long way to go in terms of getting this kind of work taken as seriously as it should be, but at least things seem to be going in the right direction.

Balancing concrete work on AGI with community-building work like co-organizing AGI is always a tricky decision for me.... But in this case, the conference went sufficiently well that I think it was worthwhile to deviate some time from the R&D to help out with it. (And now, back to the mass of other work that piled up for me during the conference!)

Yet More Rambling on Will (Beyond the Rules vs. Randomness Dichotomy)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 16:09:00 +0000

A bit more on this nasty issue of will ... complementing rather than contradicting my previously-expressed ideas.

(A lot of these theory-of-mind blog posts are gonna ultimately get revised and make their way into The Web of Pattern, the sequel to The Hidden Pattern that I've been brewing in my mind for a while...)

What occurred to me recently was a way out of the old argument that "free will can't exist because the only possibilities are RULES versus RANDOMNESS."

In other words, the old argument goes: Either a given behavior is determined, or it's random. And in either case, where's the will? Granted, a random coin-toss (quantum or otherwise) may be considered "free" in a sense, but it's not willed -- it's just random.

What occurred to me is that this dichotomy is oversimplified because it fails to take two factors into account:

A subjectively experienced moment occurs over a fuzzy span of time, not at a single physical moment
"Random" always means "random with respect to some observer."

To clarify the latter point: "S is random to system X" just means "S contains no patterns that system X could identify."

System Y may be able to recognize some patterns in S, even though X can't.

And, X may later evolve into X1, which can recognize patterns in S.

Something that was random to me thirty years ago, or thirty seconds ago, may be patterned to me now.

Consider the perspective of the deliberative, rational component of my mind, when it needs to make a choice. It can determine something internally, or it can draw on an outside source, whose outcome may not be predictable to it (that is, it may make a "random" choice). Regarding outside sources, options include

a random or pseudorandom number generator
feedback from the external physical world, or from another mind in the vicinity
feedback from the unconscious (or less conscious) non-deliberative part of the mind

Any one of these may introduce a "random" stimulus that is unpatterned from the point of view of the deliberative decision-maker.

But of course, options 2 and 3 have some different properties from option 1. This is because, in options 2 or 3, something that appears random at a certain moment, may appear non-random a little later, once the deliberative mind has learned a little more (and is thus able to recognize more or different patterns).

Specifically, in the case of option 3, it is possible for the deliberative mind to draw on the unconscious mind for a "random" choice, and then a half-moment later, import more information from the unconscious that allows it to see some of the patterns underlying the previously-random choice. We may call this process "internal patternization."

Similarly, in the case of option 2, it is possible for the deliberative mind to draw on another mind for a "random" choice, and then a half-moment later, import more information from the other mind that allows it to see some of the patterns underlying the previously random choice. We may call this process "social patternization."

There's also "physical patternization" where the random choice comes from an orderly (but initially random to the perceiving mind) process in the external world.

These possibilities are interesting to consider in the light of the non-instantaneity of the subjective moment. Because, the process of patternization may occur within a single experienced moment.

The subjective experience of will, I suggest, is closely tied to the process of internal patternization. When we have the feeling of making a willed decision, we are often making a "random" choice (random from the perspective of our deliberative component), and then immediately having the feeling of seeing some of the logic and motivations under that choice (as information passes from unconscious to conscious). But the information passed into the deliberative mind is of course never complete and there's always still some indeterminacy left, due to the limited capacity of deliberative mind as compared to unconscious mind.

So, what is there besides RULES plus RANDOMNESS?

There is the feeling of RANDOMNESS transforming into RULES (i.e. patterns), within a single subjective moment.

When this feeling involves patterns of the form "Willing X is causing {Willing X plus the occurrence of S}", then we have the "free will" experience. (This is the tie-in with my discourse on free will and hypersets, a few blog posts ago.)

That is, the deliberative content of recursive willing is automatized and made part of the unconscious, through repeated enaction. It then plays a role in unconscious action determination, which is perceived as random by the deliberative mind -- until, toward the tail end of a subjective moment, it becomes more patterned (from the view of the deliberative mind) due to receiving more attention.

Getting practical for a moment: None of this, as I see it, is stuff that you should program into an AGI system. Rather it is stuff that should emerge within the system as a part of its ongoing recognition of patterns in the world and itself, oriented toward achieving its goals. In this particular case the dynamics of attention allocation is key -- the process by which low-attention items (unconscious) can rapidly gain attention (become intensely deliberatively conscious) within a single subjective moment, but can also have a decisive causal impact prior to this increase in attention. The nonlinear dynamics of attention, in other words, is one of the underpinnings of the subjective experience of will.

What I'm trying to do here is connect phenomenology, cognitive science and AGI design. It seems to work, conceptually, in terms of according with my own subjective experience and also with known data on human brain/mind and my intuition/experience with AGI design.

Characterizing Consciousness and Will in Terms of Hypersets

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:23:00 +0000

This is another uber-meaty blog post, which reports a train of thought I had while eating dinner with my wife last night, which appears to me to provide a new perspective on two of the thorniest issues in the philosophy of mind: consciousness and will.

(No, I wasn't eating any hallucinogenic mushrooms for dinner; just some grilled chicken with garlic and ginger and soy sauce, on garlic naan. Go figure.)

These are of course very old issues and it may seem every possible perspective on them has already been put forth, without anything fundamentally being resolved.

However, it seems to me that the perspectives on these topics explored so far constitute only a small percentage of the perspectives that may sensibly be taken.

What I'm going to do here is to outline a new approach to these issues, which is based on hyperset theory -- and which ties in with various things I've written on these topics before, inspired by neuropsychology and systems theory and probabilistic logic and so on and so forth.

(A brief digressive personal comment: I've been sooooo overwhelmingly busy with Novamente-related business stuff lately, it's really been a pleasure to take a couple hours to write down some thoughts on these more abstract topics! Of course, no matter what I'm doing with my time as I go through my days, my unconscious is constantly churning on conceptual issues like the ones I talk about in this blog post -- but time to write down my thoughts on such things is so damn scant lately.... One of the next things to get popped off the stack is the relation of the model of will given here with ethical decision-making, as related to the iterated prisoner's dilemma, the voting problem, and so forth. Well, maybe next week ... or next month.... I certainly feel like working toward making a thinking machine for real, is more critical than exploring concepts in the theory of mind; but on a minute-by-minute basis, I have to admit I find the latter more fun....)

Hypersets

One of the intuitions underlying the explorations presented here is that possibly it's worth considering hypersets as an important part of our mathematical and conceptual model of mind -- and consciousness and will in particular.

A useful analogy might be the way that differential equations are an important part of our mathematical and conceptual model of physical reality. Differential equations aren't in the world; and hypersets aren't in the mind; but these sorts of mathematical abstractions may be extremely useful for modeling and understanding what's going on.

In brief, hypersets are sets that allow circular membership structures, e.g. you can have

A = {A}

A = {B,{A}}

and so forth. It follows that you can have functions that take themselves as arguments, and lots of other stuff that doesn't work according to the standard axioms of set theory.

While exotic, hypersets are well-defined mathematical structures, and in fact simple hypersets have fewer conceptual conundrums associated with them than the real number system (which is assumed in nearly all our physics theories).

The best treatment of hypersets for non-mathematicians that I know of is the book The Liar, which I highly recommend.

Anyway, getting down to business, let's start with consciousness, and then after that we'll proceed to will.

Disambiguating Consciousness

Of course the natural language term "consciousness" is heavily polysemous, and I'm not going to try to grapple with every one of its meanings. Specifically, I'm going to focus on the meaning that might be specified as "reflective consciousness." Which is different from the "raw awareness" that, arguably, worms and bugs have, along with us bigger creatures.

Raw awareness is also an interesting topic, though I tend toward a kind of panpsychism, meaning that I tend to believe everything (even a rock or an electron) possesses some level of raw awareness. Which means that raw awareness is then just an aspect of being, rather than a separate quality that some entities possess and not others.

Beyond raw awareness, though, it's clear that different entities in the universe manifest different kinds of awareness. Worms are aware in a different way than rocks; and, I argue, dogs, pigs, pigeons and people are aware in a different way from worms. What I'll (try to) deal with here is the sense in which the latter beasts are conscious whereas worms are not -- i.e. what might be called "reflective consciousness." (Not a great term, but I don't know any great terms in this domain.)

Defining Reflective Consciousness

So, getting down to business.... My starting-point is the old cliche' that

Consciousness is consciousness of consciousness

This is very nice, but doesn't really serve as a definition or precise characterization.

In hyperset theory, one can write an equation

f = f(f)

with complete mathematical consistency. You feed f, as input, f; and you receive, as output, f.

It seems evident, though, that while this sort of anti-foundational recursion may be closely associated with consciousness, this simple equation itself doesn't tell you much about consciousness. We don't really want to say

Consciousness = Consciousness(Consciousness)

I think it's probably more useful to say:

Consciousness is a hyperset, and consciousness is contained in its membership scope

Here by the "membership scope" of a hyperset S, what I mean is the members of S, plus the members of the members of S, etc.

This is no longer a definition of consciousness, merely a characterization.

What is says is that consciousness must be defined anti-foundationally as some sort of construct via which consciousness builds consciousness from consciousness -- but it doesn't specify exactly how.

Next, I want to introduce the observation, which I made in The Hidden Pattern (and in an earlier essay) that the subjective experience of being conscious of some entity X, is correlated with the presence of a very intense pattern in one's overall mind-state, corresponding to X. This idea is also the essence of neuroscientist Susan Greenfield's theory of consciousness (but in her theory, "overall mind-state" is replaced with "brain-state").

Putting these pieces together (hypersets, patterns and correlations), we arrive at the following working definition of consciousness:

"S is conscious of X" is defined as: The declarative content that {"S is conscious of X" correlates with "X is a pattern in S"}

In other words: Being conscious of a pig, means having in one's mind declarative knowledge of the form that one's consciousness of that pig is correlated with that pig being a pattern in one's overall mind-state.

Note that this declarative knowledge must be expressed in some language such as hyperset theory, in which anti-foundational inclusions are permitted. But of course, it doesn't have to be a well-formalized language -- just as pigeons, for instance, can carry out deductive reasoning without having a formalization of the rules of Boolean or probabilistic logic in their brains. All that is required is that the conscious mind has an internal informal language capable of expressing and manipulating simple hypersets.

To make this formal, one requires also a definition of pattern, which I've supplied in The Hidden Pattern.

OK, so much for consciousness. Now, on to our other old friend, will.

Defining Will

The same approach, I suggest, can be used to define the notion of "will," by which I mean the sort of willing process that we carry out in our minds when we subjectively feel like we are deciding to make one choice rather than another.

In brief:

"S wills X" is defined as: The declarative content that {"S wills X" causally implies "S does X"}

To fully explicate this is slightly more complicated than in the case of consciousness, due to the need to unravel what's meant by "causal implication." This is done in my forthcoming book Probabilistic Logic Networks in some detail, but I'll give the basic outline here.

Causal implication may be defined as: Predictive implication combined with the existence of a plausible causal mechanism.

More precisely, if A and B are two classes of events, then A "predictively implies B" if it's probabilistically true that in a situation where A occurs, B often occurs afterwards. (Yes, this is dependent on a model of what is a "situation", which is assumed to be part of the mind assessing the predictive implication.)

And, a "plausible causal mechanism" associated with the assertion "A predictively implies B" means that, if one removed from one's knowledge base all specific instances of situations providing direct evidence for "A predictively implies B", then the inferred evidence for "A predictively implies B" would still be reasonably strong. (In a certain logical lingo, this means there is strong intensional evidence for the predictive implication, along with extensional evidence.)

If X and Y are particular events, then the probability of "X causally implies Y" may be assessed by probabilistic inference based on the classes (A, B, etc.) of events that X and Y belong to.

In What Sense Is Will Free?

But what does this say about the philosophical issues traditionally associated with the notion of "free will"?

Well, it doesn't suggest any validity for the idea that will somehow adds a magical ingredient beyond the familiar ingredients of "rules" plus "randomness." In that sense, it's not a very radical approach. It fits in with the modern understanding that free will is to a certain extent an "illusion."

However, it also suggests that "illusion" is not quite the right word.

The notion that willed actions somehow avoid the apparently-deterministic/stochastic nature of the universe is not really part of the subjective experience of free will ... it's a conceptual add-on that comes from trying to integrate our subjective experience with the modern scientific understanding of the world, in an overly simplistic and partially erroneous way.

An act of will may have causal implication, according to the psychological definition of the latter, without this action of will violating the basic deterministic/stochastic equations of the universe. The key point is that causality is itself a psychological notion (where within "psychological" I include cultural as well as individual psychology). Causality is not a physical notion; there is no branch of science that contains the notion of causation within its formal language.

In the internal language of mind, acts of will have causal impacts -- and this is consistent with the hypothesis that mental actions may potentially be ultimately determined via determistic/stochastic lower-level dynamics. Acts of will exist on a different level of description than these lower-level dynamics.

The lower-level dynamics are part of a theory that compactly explains the behavior of cells, molecules and particles; and some aspects of complex higher-level systems like brains, bodies and societies. Will is part of a theory that compactly explains the decisions of a mind to itself.

My own perspective is that neither the lower-level dynamics (e.g. physics equations) nor will should be considered as "absolutely real" -- there is no such thing as absolute reality. The equations of physics, glorious as they are, are abstractions we've created, and that we accept due to their utility for helping us carry out various goals and recognize various regularities in our own subjective experience.

Connecting Will and Consciousness

Connecting back to our first topic, consciousness, we may say that:

In the domain of reflective conscious experiences, acts of will are experienced as causal.

This of course looks like a perfectly obvious assertion. What's nice is that it seems to fall out of a precise, abstract characterization of consciousness and will.

Free Will and Virtual Multiverse Modeling

In a previous essay, written a few years back and ultimately incorporated into The Hidden Pattern, I gave an analysis of the psychological dynamics underlying free will, the essence of which may be grokked from the following excerpt:

For example, suppose I am trying to decide whether to kiss my beautiful neighbor. One part of my brain is involved in a dynamic which will actually determine whether I kiss her or not. Another part of my brain is modeling that first part, and doesn’t know what’s going to happen. A virtual multiverse occurs in this second part of the brain, one branch in which I kiss her, the other in which I don’t. Finally, the first part comes to a conclusion; and the second part collapses its virtual multiverse model almost instantly thereafter.

The brain uses these virtual multiverse models to plan for multiple contingencies, so that it is prepared in advance, no matter what may happen. In the case that one part of the brain is modeling another part of the brain, sometimes the model produced by the second part may affect the actions taken by the first part. For instance, the part (call it B) modeling the action of kissing my neighbor may come to the conclusion that the branch in which I carry out the action is a bad one. This may affect the part (call it A) actually determining whether to carry out the kiss, causing the kiss not to occur. The dynamic in A which causes the kiss not to occur, is then reflected in B as a collapse in its virtual multiverse model of A.

Now, suppose that the timing of these two causal effects (from B to A and from A to B) is different. Suppose that the effect of B on A (of the model on the action) takes a while to happen (spanning several subjective moments), whereas the effect of A and B (of the action on the model) is nearly instantaneous (occurring within a single subjective moment). Then, another part of the brain, C, may record the fact that a collapse to definiteness in B’s virtual multiverse model of A, preceded an action in A. On the other hand, the other direction of causality, in which the action in A caused a collapse in B’s model of A, may be so fast that no other part of the brain notices that this was anything but simultaneous. In this case, various parts of the brain may gather the mistaken impression that virtual multiverse collapse causes actions; when in fact it’s the other way around. This, I conjecture, is the origin of our mistaken impression that we make “decisions” that cause our actions.

How does this relate to the current analysis in terms of hypersets?

The current analysis adds an extra dimension to the prior one, which has to do with what in the above quote is called the "second part" of the brain involved with the experience of will -- the "virtual multiverse modeler" component.

The extra dimension has to do with the ability of the virtual multiverse modeler to model itself and its own activity.

My previous theory discusses perceived causal implications between actions taken by one part of the brain, and models of the consequences of these actions occurring in another part (the virtual multiverse modeler). It notes that sometimes the mind makes mistakes in perceiving a causal implication between a collapse in the virtual multiverse model and an action, when a more careful understanding of the mental dynamics would reveal a more powerful causal implication in the other direction. There is much evidence for this in the neuropsychology literature, some of which is reviewed in my previous article.

The new ingredient added by the present discussion is an understanding that the virtual multiverse modeler can model its own activity and its relationship with the execution of actions. Specifically, the virtual multiverse modeler can carry out modeling in terms of an intuitive notion of "will" that may be formalized as I described above;

"S wills X" is defined as: The declarative content that {"S wills X" causally implies "S does X"}

where "S" refers specifically to the virtual multiverse modeler component, the nexus of the feeling of will.

And, as noted in my prior essay, it may do so whether or not this causal implication would hold up when the dynamics involved were examined at a finer level of granularity.

Who Cares?

Well, now, that's a whole other question, isn't it....

Personally, I find it interesting to progressively move toward a greater and greater understanding of the processes that occur in my own mind everyday. Since understanding (long ago) that the classical notion of "free will" is full of confusions, I've struggled to figure out the right attitude to take in my own mind, toward decisions that come up in my own life.

Day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, I'm faced with deciding between option A and option B -- yet how seriously can I take this decision process if I know I have no real will anyway?

But the way I try to think about it is as follows: Within the descriptive language in which my reflective consciousness exists, my will does exist. It may not exist within the descriptive language of physics, but that's OK. None of these descriptive languages has an absolute reality. But, each of these descriptive languages can usefully help us understand the others (as well as helping us to understand the world directly); and having an understanding of the systematic biases made by the virtual multiverse modeler in my brain has certainly been useful to me. It has given me a lot more respect for the underlying unconscious dynamics governing my decisions, and this I believe has helped me to learn to make better decisions.

In terms of my AI work, the main implication of the train of thought reported here is that in order to experience reflective consciousness and will, an AI system needs to possess an informal internal language allowing the expression of basic hyperset constructs. Of course, in different AI designs this could be achieved in different ways, for instance it could be explicitly wired into the formalism of a logic-based AI system, or it could emerge spontaneously from the dynamics of a neural net based AI system. In a recent paper I explored some hypothetical means via which a neural system could give rise to a neural module F that acts as a function taking F as an input; this sort of phenomenon could potentially serve as a substrate for an internal hyperset language in the brain.

There is lots left to explore and understand, of course. But my feeling is that reflective consciousness and will, as described here, are not really so much trickier than other mental phenomena like logical reasoning, language understanding and long-term memory organization. Hypersets are a different formalism than the ones typically used to model these other aspects of cognition, but ultimately they're not so complex or problematic.

Onward!

Psi, Closed-Mindedness and Fear

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:24:00 +0000

Some of the followup (private) emails I've gotten in regard to my just-prior blog post on Damien Broderick's book on psi, have really boggled my mind.

These emails basically present arguments of two forms:

You're nuts, don't you know all the psi experiments are fraud and experimental error, everyone knows that...
Look, even if there's a tiny chance that some psi phenomena are real, you're a fool to damage your reputation by aligning yourself with the kooks who believe in it

What shocks me (though it shouldn't, as I've been around 41 years and seen a lot of human nature already) about arguments of the first form is the irrational degree of skepticism toward this subject, displayed by otherwise highly rational and reflective individuals.

It's not as though these people have read Damien's book or carefully studied the relevant literature. I would welcome debate with suitably informed skeptics. Rather, these people dismiss the experimental literature on psi based on hearsay, and don't consider it worth their while to spend the 3-10 hours (depending on individual reading speed) required to absorb a fairly straightforward nontechnical book on the subject, like Damien's.

What shocks me about arguments of the second form is how often they come from individuals who are publicly aligned with other extremely radical ideas. For instance a few Singularitarians have emailed me and warned me that me talking about psi is bad, because then people will think Singularitarians are kooks.

(Amusingly, one Singularitarian pointed out in their conversation with me that, to them, the best argument for the possibility of psi that they know of is the Simulation Argument, which contends that we probably live in a computer simulation. This is I suppose based on the idea that the laws of physics somehow rule out psi, which they don't; but anyway it's an odd argument because whether we live in a simulation or not, the laws of physics are merely a compact summary of our empirical observations of the world we see, and so if psi data are real, they need to be incorporated into our observation-set and accounted for in our theories, regardless of whether we interpret these theories as being about a "real" world or a "simulated" one.)

Whoa!! So psi is so far out there that people who believe the universe is a simulation and the Singularity is near don't want their reputations poisoned by association with it?

This really baffles me.

I have no personal axe to grind regarding psi.

I have never had any unambiguous, personally convincing psi experiences (except when under the influence of various psychotropic compounds, but that's a whole other story ;-)....

I don't actually care much whether psi is real or not.

About psi and physics ... I am skeptical of attempts to explain psi based on quantum theory, due to not understanding how decoherence would be avoided in the hypothesized long-range quantum nonlocal binding between brains and other systems; but I recognize that quantum theory as such does not actually rule out psi. And, I am acutely aware that modern physics theories are incomplete, even leaving out psi data -- just taking into account well-accepted physics data. Modern physics does not provide a complete, conceptually consistent accounting of all well-accepted physics data. So all in all, our incomplete physics model doesn't rule out psi but makes it hard to explain. This does not seem a strong enough reason to ignore the available psi data on theoretical-physics grounds.

My observation is merely that, after spending a few dozen hours perusing the available data, it seems fascinating and compelling. Ed May's data is not the only good data out there by any means, but it's a great place to start if you want to dig into it.

I do not think we, as a community of thinking and understanding minds, should be ignoring all this high-quality data collected by serious, intelligent, careful scientists.

What is the reason for ignoring it? Presumably the reason is that a bunch of bullshit about psi has been promoted by a bunch of flakes and kooks. It's true. I admit it, Damien admits it, it's obvious. Let's get over that historical and cultural reality and look at the actual data -- quite possibly there's something to be learned from it. I don't know exactly what, but that's how science works -- you investigate and then you find out. What's frustrating is that in this extremely fascinating, important, potentially highly impactful area, research is proceeding so slowly because of excesses of skepticism and fear in the scientific community.

Scientists want to preserve their careers and reputations, so going out on a limb for something perceived as wacky is something very few of them are willing to do. As a consequence our understanding of the universe advances much more slowly than it otherwise could.

Finally, a brief aside.... For those who believe a Singularity is likely but who are highly skeptical of psi (a small percentage of the world, but disproportionately represented in the readership of this blog, I would imagine), I ask you this: Wouldn't it be nice to understand the universe a little better before launching a Singularity? If psi is real that would seem to have various serious implications for what superhuman AI's may be like post-Singularity, for example.

Well, anyway. I'm going to drop this topic for now as I have other stuff to focus on, like building AGI.... And I've been (finally) mixing down some of my music from MIDI to MP3; I'll post some on my website within the next month or so.... I don't have time to push ahead psi research myself nor to actively advocate for funding for those doing the research; but by writing these blog posts and reviewing Damien's book on Amazon.com, I've tried to do what I can (within my limited available time) to nudge the world toward being less closed-minded and less fearful in this regard.

Come on, people! Really! Have some guts and some mental-openness -- it's a big, weird, mysterious world out there, and I'm damn sure we understand only a teensy weensy bit of it. Experience gives us clues, empirical science gives us clues -- and the extent to which we manage to ignore some of the most interesting clues the world provides us, is pretty disappointing...

The Scientific Evidence for Psi (is most likely stronger than you think)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 16:56:00 +0000

My goal in this blog is to convince you to read Damien Broderick's book Outside the Gates of Science: Why It's Time for the Paranormal to Come in From the Cold.

Reviewing a host of research done by others over many decades, the book makes a remarkably and excitingly strong case that psi phenomena are worthy of intensive further investigation....

Let me explain why I'm so excited by Broderick's work.

Having grown up on SF, and being a generally open-minded person but also mathematician/scientist with a strong rationalist and empiricist bent, I've never quite known what to make of psi. (Following Broderick, I'm using "psi" as an umbrella term for ESP, precognition, psychokinesis, and the familiar array of suspects...).

Broderick's book is the first I've read that rationally, scientifically, even-handedly and maturely, reviews what it makes sense to think about psi given the available evidence.

(A quick word on my science background, for those who don't know me and may be new to this blog: I have a math PhD and although my main research areas are AI and cognitive science, I've also spent a lot of time working on empirical biological science as a data analyst. I was a professor for a 8 years but have been doing research in the software industry for the last decade.)

My basic attitude on psi has always been curious but ambivalent. One way to summarize it would be via the following three points....

First: Psi seems, on the face of it, is not wildly scientifically implausible after the fashion of, say, perpetual motion machines built out of wheels and pulleys and spinning chanbers filled with ball bearings. Science, at this point, understands the world only very approximately, and there is plenty of room in our current understanding of the physical universe for psi. Quantum theory's notions of nonlocality and resonance are conceptually somewhat harmonious with some aspects of psi, but that's not the main point. The main point is that science does not rule out psi, in the sense that it rules out various sorts of crackpottery.

Second: Anecdotal evidence for psi is so strong and so prevalent that it's hard to ignore. Yes, people can lie, and they can also be very good at fooling themselves. But the number of serious, self-reflective intelligent people to report various sorts of psi experiences is not something that should be glibly ignored.

Third: There is by now a long history of empirical laboratory work on psi, with results that are complex, perplexing, but in many ways so apparently statistically significant as to indicate that SOMETHING important is almost surely going on in these psi experiments...

Broderick, also being an open-minded rationalist/empiricist, seems to have started out his investigation of psi, as reported in his book, with the same basic intuition as I've described in the above three points. And he covers all three of these points in the book, but the main service he provides is to very carefully address my third point above: the scientific evidence.

His discussion of possible physical mechanisms of psi is competent but not all that complete or imaginative; and he wisely shies away from an extensive treatment of anecdotal evidence (this stuff has been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere). But his treatment of the scientific literature regarding psi is careful, masterful and compellingly presented. And this is no small achievement.

The scientific psi literature is large, complex, multifaceted and subtle -- and in spite of a lifelong peripheral fascination with psi, I have never taken the time to go through all that much it myself. I'm too busy doing other sorts of scientific, mathematical and engineering work. Broderick has read the literature, sifted out the good from the bad, summarized the most important statistical and conceptual results, and presented his conclusions in ordinary English that anyone with a strong high school education should be able to understand.

His reviews of the work on remote viewing and precognition I found particularly fascinating, and convincing. It is hard to see how any fair-minded reader could come away from his treatments of these topics without at least a sharp pang of curiousity regarding what might actually be going on.

Perhaps my most valued discovery, based on Broderick's book, was Edwin May's work on precognition and related phenomena. Anyone with a science background is strongly encouraged to inspect the website of May's Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, which hosts an impressive collection of papers on his team's government-funded psi research.

What is my conclusion about psi after reading Damien's book, and exploring in more depth the work of May's team and others?

Still not definitive -- and indeed, Broderick's own attitude as expressed in the book is not definitive.

I still can't feel absolutely certain whether psi is a real phenomenon; or whether the clearly statistically significant patterns observed across the body of psi experiments bespeak some deep oddities in the scientific method and the statistical paradigm that we don't currently understand.

But after reading Broderick's book, I am much more firmly convinced than before that psi phenomena are worthy of intensive, amply-funded scientific exploration. Psi should not be a fringe topic, it should be a core area of scientific investigation, up there with, say, unified physics, molecular biology, AI and so on and so forth.

Read the book for yourself, and if you're not hopelessly biased in your thinking, I suspect you'll come to a conclusion somewhat similar to mine.

As a bonus, as well as providing a profound intellectual and cultural service, the book is a lot of fun to read, due to Broderick's erudite literary writing style and ironic sense of humor.

My worry -- and I hope it doesn't eventuate -- is that the book is just too far ahead of its time. I wonder if the world is ready for a rational, scientific, even-handed treatment of psi phenomena.

Clearly, Broderick's book is too scientific and even-handed for die-hard psi believers; and too psi-friendly (though in a level-headed, evidence-based way) for the skeptical crowd. My hope is that it will find a market among those who are committed to really understanding the world, apart from the psychological pathologies of dogmatism or excessive skepticism.

I note that Broderick has a history of being ahead of his time as a nonfiction writer. His 1997 book "The Spike" put forth basically the same ideas that Ray Kurzweil later promulgated in his 2005 book "The Singularity Is near." Kurzweil's book is a very good one, but so was Broderick's; yet Kurzweil's got copious media attention whereas Broderick's did not ... for multiple reasons, one of which, however, was simply timing. The world in 1997 wasn't ready to hear about the Singularity. The world in 2006 is.

The question is: is the world in 2008 ready to absorb the complex, fascinating reality of psi research? If so, Broderick's book should strike a powerful chord. It certainly did for me.

Yverse: A New Model of the Universe

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:23:00 +0000

A new model of the universe?

Actually, yeah.

It starts out with the familiar concept of the "multiverse," which is mainly associated with the many-universes interpretation of quantum theory.

According to one verbalization of the multiversal interpretation of quantum theory, every time a quantum-random "choice" is made (say, an electron spins up instead of down), there is a "branching" into two possible universes: one where the electron spins up, another where it spins down.

Similarly, if a bus drives at you while you're walking across the street, there may be two possible universes ahead of you: one where you get flattened, and another where you don't. (Actually, there are a lot of other choices going on in your life too, so it's more accurate to say there is one set of universes where you get flattened and another where you don't).

The collection of all these possible universes is known as the "multiverse."

In fact the language of "choice" used in the above description of the multiverse is a bit suspect. It's more accurate to say that corresponding to each possible state of the electron (up/down) once it is coupled with the external environment (so that it decoheres), there is a set of branches of the multiverse, and leave the ambiguous and misleading language of "choice" out of it.

Anyway, the multiverse is fascinating enough, but it's just the beginning.

It's easy enough to think of multiple possible multiverses. After all, there could be a multiverse in which Ben Goertzel never existed at all, in any of its branches.

One way to think about backwards time travel, for instance, is as a mechanism for selecting between multiverses. If you go back in time and change something, then you're effectively departing your original multiverse and entering a new one.

So, we can think about a multi-multiverse, i.e. a collection of multiverses, with a certain probability distribution over them.

I don't posit this hypothesis all that seriously, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway: It seems possible to conceive of consciousness as a faculty that facilitates movement between multiverses!

Well, I guess you can see where all this is going.

If there's a multi-multiverse, there can also be a multi-multi-multiverse. And so on.

But that is not all -- oh no, that is not all ;-)

What about the multi-multi-...-multi-multiverse?

I.e. the entity Yverse so that

Yverse = multi-Yverse

??

Math wonks will have already inferred that I chose the name Yverse because of the Y-combinator in combinatory logic, which is defined via

Yf = f(Yf)

In other words

Yf = ...ffff...

(where the ... goes on infinitely many times)

So the Yverse is the (Y multi-) universe ...

In the Yverse, there are multiple branches, each one of which is itself a Yverse....

Two Yverses may have two kinds of relationship: sibling (two branches of the same parent Yverse) or parent-child.

Backwards time travel may jolt you from one Yverse to a parent Yverse. Ordinary quantum decoherence events merely correspond to differences between sibling Yverses.

If there is a probability distribution across a set of sibling Yverses, it may be conceived as an infinite-order probability distribution. (A first-order probability distribution is a distribution across some ordinary things like numbers or particles, or universes. A second-order probability distribution is a distribution across a set of first-order probability distributions. Well, you get the picture.... An infinite-order probability distribution is a probability distribution over a set of infinite-order probability distributions. I've worked out some of the math of this kind of probability distribution, and it seems to make sense.)

What use is the Yverse model? I'm not really sure.

It seems to be an interesting way to think about things, though.

If I had more time for pure intellectual entertainment, I'd put some effort into developing a variant of quantum theory based on Yverses and infinite-order probabilities. It seems a notion worth exploring, especially given work by Saul Youssef and others showing that the laws of quantum theory emerge fairly naturally from the laws of probability theory, with a few extra assumptions (for instance, in Youssef's work, the assumption that probabilities are complex rather than real numbers).

And reading Damien Broderick's excellent book on psi, "Outside the Gates of Science," got me thinking a bit about what kinds of models of the universe might be useful for explaining psi phenomena.

Yes, quantum theory is in principle generally compatible with psi, so one doesn't need wacky ideas like Yverses to cope with psi, but it's fun to speculate. It seems to me that for quantum theory to account for psi phenomena would require some really far-out long-range quantum-coherence to exist in the universe, which doesn't seem to be there. So in my view it's at least sensible to speculate about how post-quantum physics might account for psi more sensibly.

This babbling about psi leads back to my wacko speculation above that consciousness could be associated with action in the multi-multiverse. In the Yverse model, the idea becomes that consciousness could be associated with action in the parent Yverse.

Could the difference between physical action and mental action be that the former has to do with movement between sibling Yverses, whereas the latter has to do with movement between parent and child Yverses?

Well I'll leave you on that note --

I've gone pretty far "out there", I guess about as far as it's possible to go ;-> ....

(Unless I could work Elvis into the picture somehow. I thought about it, but didn't come up with anything....)

-- (semi-relevant, rambling) P.S. Those who are interested in my AI work may be interested to know that I don't consider any of these funky speculations contradictory to the idea of creating AI on digital computers. The whole connection between probability, complex probability, quantum theory, determinism and complexity fascinates me -- and I consider it extremely poorly understood. For example, I find the whole notion of "determinism" in very complex systems suspect ... in what sense is a digital computer program determinate relative to me, if I lack the computational capability to understand its state or predict what it will do? If I lack the computational capability to understand some thing X, then relative to my own world-view, should X be modeled according to complex rather than real probabilities, in the vein of Yousseffian quantum probability theory? I suspect so. But I won't pursue this any more here -- I'll leave it for a later blog post. Suffice to say, for now, that I have a feeling that our vocabulary for describing complex systems, with words like "determinate" and "random", is woefully inaccurate and doesn't express the really relevant distinctions.

Japanese Gods Pray for a Positive Singularity

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 20:36:00 +0000

In September 2007 I went on a two week business/science trip to China (Wuhan and Beijing) and Japan (Tokyo). In between some very interesting and productive meetings, I had a bit of free time, and so among other things I wound up formally submitting a prayer to the Japanese gods for a rapid, beneficial technological Singularity. Let's hope they were listening!

I wrote this blog post on the flight home but wasn't in a silly enough mood to post it till now.

(Scroll to the bottom if you're in a hurry; after all the irrelevant rambling beforehand, there's a sort of punchline there, involving the mysterious inscription in the above picture.)

My trip started in Wuhan, where I gave two talks at an AI conference and visited with Hugo de Garis and his students (his apprentice "brain builders"). Their near-term goal is to use genetic algorithms running on field-programmable gate arrays to control a funky little robot.

China was probably the most fascinating place I've ever visited (and I've visited and lived a lot of places), though in this brief trip I hardly got to know it at all. Society there is Westernizing fast (I've never seen anywhere more capitalist than modern China), but, there are still incredibly deep and dramatic differences between the Chinese and Western ways of thinking and living. As soon as I stepped into the airport, I was struck by the collectivist nature of their culture ...

... so very different from my own upbringing in which individuality was always held out as one of the highest values (I remember a book my mother got me as a young child, entitled Dare to Be Different -- a sort of history of famous nonconformists). There are of course many Chinese nonconformists (there are so many Chinese, there are many Chinese everything!), but in so many ways their whole society and culture is based on placing the group above the individual. (Which leads, among other things, to their enthusiasm for importing individualist Western scientists like Hugo de Garis.... But this is a topic for another blog post, some other day ... let me get on with my little story....)

Wuhan was a fascinating slice of "old China", with folks sitting out on the streets cooking weird food in woks, strange old men looking like they lived in 500 BC, and everywhere people, people, people. Alas I forgot to take pictures during my walks through the streets there.

Beijing by comparison was not too interesting -- too much like a modern Western city, but with terrible, yellow, reeking air. But the Great Wall, a bit north of Beijing, was really an amazing place. Too bad you aren't allowed to hike its full distance.

While hiking along the Great Wall, I asked for a sign from the Chinese gods that a positive Singularity was truly near. As if in some kind of response, a sudden gust of wind came up at that point...

I thought maybe the local gods would look more favorably on me if I ate some of the local cuisine, so I filled up on donkey, whole bullfrog, sea cucumber, duck's blood and pig foot fur and so forth. Not so bad as it sounds, but I still preferred the kung pao chicken.

(As well as consuming various recondite foodstuff items, in Beijing I visited the offices of HiPiHi.com, a very exciting Chinese virtual-worlds company ... but that's another story for another time....)

Next, I moved on to Tokyo (after some inordinately unpleasant logistical experiences in Beijing Capital airport, which I'd rather not revisit even in memory). The company I was visiting there was based in Shibuya, a suitably colorful and hypermodern Tokyo neighborhood:

Based on years of looking over my sons' shoulders as they watch anime', I expected all the Japanese people to look like these statues near Shibuya station:

In fact, some of the people I saw weren't so far off:

But more of them looked like this:

The Japanese love robots and cyborgs, and many of them seem to exhibit this love via making their own human selves as robotic as possible -- which is fascinating but odd, from my aging-American-hippy perspective. (I badly want to go beyond the human forms of body and mind, but I suppose that once this becomes possible, the result won't be much like contemporary machines -- rather it'll be something more fluid and flexible and creative than rigid old humanity.)

Toward the end of my stay, I got fed up with the hypermodernity, and I visited an old-time shrine in a beautiful park...

where I happened upon an intriguing site where Japanese go to submit prayers to the gods.

Each prayer is written down on a little piece of wood (which you buy for five dollars), then placed on a special prayer rack with all the others. The gods then presumably sort through them all (maybe with secretarial help from demigods or some such -- I didn't ask for the details), and decide which ones are worth granting, based on whatever godly criteria they utilize.

At first, the very concept caused the sea cucumber, duck's blood and twice-cooked donkey I'd eaten a few days before, much of which was still lingering in my stomach enjoying itself, to surge up through my gastrointestinal tract in a kind of disturbingly pleasing psychedelic can-can dance....

My next reaction was curiosity regarding what everyone else had prayed for. Sure, I could sorta guess, but it would have been nice to know in detail. But as the prayers were nearly all in Japanese, I couldn't really tell what they were all about, though a few gave small clues:

In the end, not wanting to be left out, I plunked down some yen to buy a little piece of wood and submitted my own prayer to the Japanese gods, to be considered along with the multitude of other human wants and needs. Hopefully the Japanese gods were in a generous mood that day -- for all our sakes!

Nincompoopic Neurons, Global Brains and the Potential Sociological Applications of Adaptive Stochastic Resonance

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 22:18:00 +0000

My immediately previous blog post, on the apparently in-large-part nincompoopic nature of the emerging global brain

http://www.goertzel.org/blog/2007/12/global-moron-awakens.html

attracted so many comments (largely on various mailing lists I posted the blog URL to), that I figured I'd post a brief response here, expanding on some of the ideas in the responses and connecting them with some ideas from dynamical systems theory.

Most of the feedback I got was in the general vein of a blog post I wrote a couple months earlier, entitled "On Becoming a Neuron":

http://www.goertzel.org/blog/2007/10/on-becoming-neuron.html

The theme of "Becoming a Neuron" was how dependent we are, these days, on the global communication network and the emerging human group mind.

The theme of "The Global Nincompoop Awakens" was how many of the communications between the "human neurons" comprising the global brain seem completely idiotic in nature.

Reading through the comments on the Global Nincompoop post, I was struck by the theme of Bart Kosko' book Noise

http://www.amazon.com/Noise-Bart-Kosko/dp/0670034959

(a somewhat erratic book, but containing some very interesting ideas). Among other topics he reviews the way the brain's self-organizing cognitive dynamics depend on the high level of noise present in the brain, introducing the general notion of "adaptive stochastic resonance", according to which

Noise can amplify a faint signal in some feedback nonlinear systems even though too much noise can swamp the signal. This implies that a system’s optimal noise level need not be zero

(Google or Wikipedia "adaptive stochastic resonance" for a load of technical papers on the topic, by Kosko and others).

An interesting illustration of this phenomenon is the following figure from Kosko's paper

This picture shows nicely how, in the context of the human perceptual system, adding noise can help make patterns more perceptible.

(What's happening in the picture is that he's adding noise to the pixels in the picture, then applying a threshold rule to decide which pixels are black enough to display. Without enough noise, not enough pixels meet the threshold; with too much noise, too many pixels randomly meet the threshold. But it's worth letting a bunch of pixels randomly meet the threshold, in order to cause ENOUGH pixels to meet the threshold. So to optimize perception by a threshold-based system, you want to have an amount of noise lying in a certain interval -- not too little nor too much.)

Now, Kosko verges on insinuating that this kind of exploitation of noise is somehow a NECESSARY property of intelligent systems, which I doubt. However, it seems plausible that he's right about its role in the human brain and human perception/cognition.

Semi-relatedly, I recall reading somewhere that motion-sensing neurons in the brain are, on average, off by around 80 degrees in their assessment of the direction of motion of a percept at a certain point in the visual field. But we can still assess the direction of motion of an object fairly accurately, because our brains perform averaging, and the noisy data gets washed out in the average.

In other words, brains contain a lot of noise, and they contain mechanisms for working around this fact (e.g. averaging) and creatively exploiting it (e.g. adaptive stochastic resonance).

Now, it's not too surprising if the emerging Global Brain of humanity is more like a brain than like a well-engineered computer program. In other words: most of what goes on in the global brain, like most of what goes on in the human brain, is likely to be noise ... and there are likely to be mechanisms for both working around the noise, and exploiting it.

This brings up the interesting question of what techniques may exist in sociological dynamics for exploiting noise.

How might adaptive stochastic resonance, for example, play a role in sociodynamics? Could it be that the random noise of nincompoopic social interactions serve to make significant sociodynamic patterns stand out more clearly to our minds, thus actually enhancing the ability of the Global Brain to recognize patterns in itself?

I wonder how one would make an experiment to demonstrate or refute this? It would of course be difficult due to the massive number of confounding factors in any social system, and the difficulty of defining things like pattern and noise in the social domain as precisely as is possible in a domain like image processing (where of course these terms are still susceptible to a variety of interpretations).

And surely this simple idea -- obtained by extrapolating Kosko's image-processing example to the sociological domain -- is not the only possible way that social systems could profitably exploit their intrinsic noisiness.

But still, it's an intriguing train of thought....

(P.S. The question of whether this kind of chaotic, noisy, self-organizing system is remotely the best way to carry out creative computation is a whole other question, of course. My own strong suspicion is that human brains are incredibly inefficient at using their computational power, compared to other sorts of intelligent systems that will exist in the future; and the Global Brain likely shares this inefficiency, for similar reasons. However, this inefficiency is partially compensated for in both cases by biological systems' (neurons' and humans') prodigious capability for replication....)

The Global Nincompoop Awakens

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 19:22:00 +0000

On a recent business trip to New York, I found myself sitting for a couple hours in a Starbucks in the midst of the campus of New York University (which is not a walled campus, but rather a collection of buildings strewn semi-haphazardly across a few blocks of Greenwich Village).

While sitting there typing into my laptop, I couldn't help being distracted by the conversations of the students around me. I attended NYU in the mid-80's (doing a bit of graduate study there on the way to my PhD), and I was curious to see how the zeitgest of the student body had changed.

Admittedly, this was a highly nonrepresentative sample, as I was observing only students who chose to hang out in Starbucks. (Most likely all the math and CS grad students were doing as I'd done during my time at NYU, and hanging out in the Courant Institute building, which was a lot quieter than any cafe' ...). And, the population of Starbucks seemed about 65% female, for whatever reason.

The first thing that struck me was the everpresence of technology. The students around me were constantly texting each other -- there was a lot of texting going on between people sitting in different parts of the Starbucks, or people waiting in line and other people sitting down, etc.

And, there was a lot of talk about Facebook. Pretty much anytime someone unfamiliar (to any of the conversation participants) was mentioned in conversation the question was asked "Are they on Facebook?" Of course, plenty of the students had laptops there and could write on each others Facebook walls while texting each other and slipping in the occasional voice phone call or email as well.

All in all I found the density and rapidity of information interchange extremely impressive. The whole social community of the Starbucks started to look like a multi-bodied meta-mind, with information zipping back and forth everywhere by various media. All the individuals comprising parts of the mind were obviously extremely well-attuned to the various component media and able to multiprocess very effectively, e.g. writing on someone's Facebook wall and then texting someone else while holding on an F2F conversation, all while holding a book in their lap and allegedly sort-of studying.

Exciting! The only problem was: The contents of what was being communicated was so amazingly trivial and petty it started to make me feel physically ill.

Pretty much all the electronic back-and-forth was about which guys were cute and might be interested in going to which party with which girls; or, how pathetic it was that a certain group of girls had "outgrown" a certain other group via being accepted into a certain sorority and developing a fuller and more mature appreciation for the compulsive consumption of alcohol ... and so forth.

Which led me to the following thought: Wow! With all our incredible communications technologies, we are creating a global brain! But 99.99% of this global brain's thoughts are going to be completely trite and idiotic.

Are we, perhaps, creating a global moron or at least a global nincompoop?

If taken seriously, this notion becomes a bit frightening.

Let's suppose that, at some point, the global communication network itself achieves some kind of spontaneous, self-organizing sentience.

(Yeah, this is a science-fictional hypothesis, and I don't think it's extremely likely to happen, but it's interesting to think about.)

Won't the contents of its mind somehow reflect the contents of the information being passed around the global communications network?

Say: porn, spam e-mails, endless chit-chat about whose buns are cuter, and so forth?

Won't the emergent global mind of the Internet thus inevitably be a shallow-minded, perverted and ridiculous dipshit?

Is this what we really want for the largest, most powerful mind on the planet?

What happens when this Global Moron asserts its powers over us? Will we all find our thoughts and behaviors subtly or forcibly directed by the Internet Overmind?? -- whose psyche is primarily directed by the contents of the Internet traffic from which it evolved ... which is primarily constituted of ... well... yecchh...

(OK .. fine ... this post is a joke... OR IS IT???)

On Becoming a Neuron

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:22:00 +0000

I was amused and delighted to read the following rather transhumanistic article in the New York Times recently.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/opinion/26brooks.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The writer, who does not appear to be a futurist or transhumanist or Singularitarian or anything like that, is observing the extent to which he has lost his autonomy and outsourced a variety of his cognitive functions to various devices with which he interacts. And he feels he has become stronger rather than weaker because of this -- and not any less of an individual.

This ties in deeply with the theme of the Global Brain

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SUPORGLI.html

which is a concept dear to my heart ... I wrote about it extensively in my 2001 book "Creating Internet Intelligence" and (together with Francis Heylighen) co-organized the 2001 Global Brain 0 workshop in Brussels.

I have had similar thoughts to the above New York Times article many times recently... I can feel myself subjectively becoming far more part of the Global Brain than I was even 5 years ago, let alone 10...

As a prosaic example: Via making extensive use of task lists as described in the "Getting Things Done" methodology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done

I've externalized much of my medium-term memory about my work-life.

And via using Google Calendar extensively I have externalized my long-term memory... I use the calendar not only to record events but also to record information about what I should think about in the future (e.g. "Dec. 10 -- you should have time to start thinking about systems theory in connection to developmental psychology again...")

And, so much of my scientific work these days consists of reading little snippets of things that my colleagues on the Novamente project (or other intellectual collaborators) wrote, and then responding to them.... It's not that common these days that I undertake a large project myself, because I can always think of someone to collaborate with, and then the project becomes in significant part a matter of online back-and-forth....

And the process of doing computer science research is so different now than it was a decade or two ago, due to the ready availability and easy findability of so many research ideas, algorithms, code snippets etc. produced by other people.

Does this mean that I'm no longer an individual? It's certainly different than if I were sitting on a mountain for 10 years with my eagle and my lion like Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

But yet I don't feel like I've lost my distinctiveness and become somehow homogenized --
the way I interface with the synergetic network of machines and people is unique in complexly patterned ways, and constitutes my individuality.

Just as a neuron in the brain does not particularly manifest its individuality any less than a neuron floating by itself in a solution. In fact, the neuron in the brain may manifest its
individuality more greatly, due to having a richer, more complex variety of stimuli to which it may respond individually.

None of these observations are at all surprising from a Global Brain theory perspective. But, they're significant as real-time, subjectively-perceived and objectively-observed inklings of the accelerating emergence of a more and more powerful and coordinated Global Brain, of which we are parts.

And I think this ties in with Ray Kurzweil's point that by the time we have human-level AGI, it may not be "us versus them", it may be a case where it's impossible to draw the line between us and them...

-- Ben

P.S.

As a post-script, I think it's interesting to tie this Global Brain meme in with the possibility of a "controlled ascent" approach to the Singularity and the advent of the transhuman condition.

Looking forward to the stage at which we've created human-leve AGI's -- if these AGI's become smarter and smarter at an intentionally-controlled rate (say a factor of 1.2 per year, just to throw a number out there), and if humans are intimately interlinked with these AGI's in a Global Brain like fashion (as does seem to be occurring, at an accelerating rate), then we have a quite interesting scenario.

Of course I realize that guaranteeing this sort of controlled ascent is a hard problem. And I realize there are ethical issues involved in making sure a controlled ascent like this respects the rights of individuals who choose not to ascend at all. And I realize that those who want to ascend faster may get irritated at the slow pace. All these points need addressing in great detail by an informed and intelligent and relevantly educated community, but they aren't my point right now -- my point in this postcript is the synergetic interrelation of the Global Brain meme with the controlled-ascent meme.

The synergy here is that as the global brain gets smarter and smarter, and we get more and more richly integrated into it, and the AGI's that will increasingly drive the development of the global brain get smarter and smarter -- there is a possibility that we will become more and more richly integrated with a greater whole, while at the same time having greater capability to exercise our uniqueness and individually.

O Brave New Meta-mind, etc. etc. ;-)

The Pigeons of Paraguay (Further Dreams of a Ridiculous Man)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 04:40:00 +0000

In the spirit of my prior dream-description Colors, I have written down another dream ... one I had last night ... it's in the PDF file linked to from

Copy Girl and the Pigeons of Paraguay

I'm not sure why I felt inspired to, but as soon as I woke up from the dream I had the urge to type it in (along with some prefatory and interspersed rambling!) It really wasn't a terribly important dream for me ... but it was interesting as an example of a dream containing a highly realistic psychedelic drug trip inside it. There is also a clear reference to the "Colors" dream within this one, which is not surprising -- my dreams all tend to link into each other, as if they form their own connected universe, separate from and parallel to this one.

I have always enjoyed writing "dreamlike" fiction, such as my freaky semi-anti-novel Echoes of the Great Farewell ... but lately I've become interested in going straight to the source, and naturalistically recording dreams themselves ... real dreams being distinctly and clearly different from dreamlike fiction. Real dreams have more ordinariness about them, more embarrassing boringness and cliche'-ness; and also more herky-jerky discoordination.... They are not as aesthetic, which of course gives them their own special aesthetic value (on a meta-aesthetic level, blah blah blah...). Their plain-ness and lack of pretension gives them, in some ways, a deeper feel of truth than their more poetized fictional cousins....

The dream I present here has no particular scientific or philosophical value, it's just a dream that amused me. It reminded me toward the end a bit of Dostoevsky's Dream of a Ridiculous Man -- not in any details, but because of (how to put it???) the weird combination of irony and sincerity with which the psychic theme of sympathy and the oneness of humankind is addressed. Yeah yeah yeah. Paraguayan pigeons!! A billion blue blistering barnacles in a thundering typhoon!!!

I'll give you some mathematics in my next blog entry ;-)

-- Ben

Is Google Secretly Creating an AGI? (Reasons Why I Doubt It)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 15:36:00 +0000

From time to time someone suggests to me that Google "must be" developing a powerful Artificial General Intelligence in-house. I recently had the opportunity to visit Google and chat with some of their research staff, including Peter Norvig, their Director of Research. So I thought I'd share my perspective on Google+AGI based on the knowledge currently at my disposal.

First let me say that I definitely see where the Google+AGI speculation comes from. It's not just that they've hired a bunch of AI PhD's and have a lot of money and computers. It's that their business leaders have taken to waxing eloquent about the glorious future of artificial intelligence. For instance, on the blog

http://memepunks.blogspot.com/2006/05/google-ai-twinkle-in-larry-pages-eye.html

we find some quotes from Google co-founder Larry Page:

"People always make the assumption that we're done with search. That's very far from the case. We're probably only 5 percent of the way there. We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything ... some people could call that artificial intelligence.

...

a lot of our systems already use learning techniques

...

The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It would understand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly ... You could ask 'what should I ask Larry?' and it would tell you."

Page, in the same talk quoted there, noted that technology has a tendency to change faster than expected, and that an AI could be a reality in just a few years.

Exciting rhetoric indeed!

Anyway, earlier this week I gave a talk at Google, to a group of in-house researchers and engineers, on the topic of artificial general intelligence. I was rather overtired and sick when I gave the talk, so it wasn't anywhere near one of my best talks on AGI and Novamente. Blecch. Parts of it were well delivered; but I didn't pace myself as well as usual, so I wound up rushing past some of the interesting points and not giving my usual stirring conclusion.... But some of the younger staff were pretty interested anyway; and there were some fun follow-up conversations.

Peter Norvig (their Director of Research), an all-around great researcher and writer and great guy, gave the intro to my talk. I had chatted with Peter a bit earlier; and had mentioned to him that some folks I knew in the AGI community suspected Google to have a top-secret AGI project.

So anyway, Peter gave the following intro to my talk [I am paraphrasing here, not quoting exactly ... but I've tried to stay true to what he said, as accurately as possible given the constraints of my all-too-human memory]:

"There has been some talk about whether Google has a top-secret project aimed at building a thinking machine. Well, I'll tell you what happened. Larry Page came to me and said 'Peter, I've been hearing a lot about this Strong AI stuff. Shouldn't we be doing something in that direction?' So I said, okay. I went back to my desk and logged into our project management software. I had to write some scripts to modify it because it didn't go far enough into the future. But I modified it so that I could put, 'Human-level intelligence' on the row of the planning spreadsheet corresponding to the year 2030. And, that wasn't up there an hour before someone else added another item to the spreadsheet, time-stamped 90 days after that: 'Human-level intelligence: Macintosh port' "

Well ... soooo ... apparently Norvig, at least in a semi-serious tongue-in-cheek moment, thinks we're about 23 years from being able to create a thinking machine....

He may be right of course -- or he may even be over-optimistic, who knows -- but a cynical side of me can't help thinking: "Hey, Ben! Peter Norvig is even older than you are! Maybe placing the end goal 23 years off is just a way of saying 'Somebody else's problem!'."

Norvig says he views himself as building useful tools that will accelerate the work of future AGI researchers, along with everyone else....

Of course, I do appreciate Google's useful tools! Google's various tools have been quite a relief as compared to the incompetently-architected, user-unfriendly software released by some other major software firms.

And, while from a societal perspective I wish Google would put their $$ and hardware behind AGI; from the perspective of my small AGI business Novamente LLC, their current attitude is surely preferable...

[I could discourse a while about Google's ethics slogan "Don't Be Evil" as a philosophy of Friendly AI ... but I'll resist the urge...]

When I shared the above story with one of my AGI researcher friends (who shall here remain anonymous), he agreed with my sentiments, and shared the following story with me..

"In [month deleted] I had an interview in Google's new [location deleted] office
... and they were much more interested in my programming skill than in my research. Of course, we didn't find a match.

Even if Google wants to do AGI, given their current technical culture,
they won't get it right, at least at the beginning. As far as AGI is
concerned, Google has more than enough money and engineers, but less
than enough thinkers. They will produce some cute toolbox with smart
algorithms supported by a huge amount of raw data, which will be
interesting, but far from AGI."

Summing up ... as the above anecdotes suggest, my overall impression was that Google is not making any serious effort at AGI. If they are, then either

they have trained dozens of their scientific staff to be really good actors, or
it is a super-top-secret effort within Google Irkutsk or wherever, that the Google Mountain View research staff don't know about

Of course, neither of these is an impossibility -- "we don't know what we don't know," etc. But honestly, I rate both of those options as pretty unlikely.

Could they launch an AGI effort? Most surely: they could, at any point. The cost to them of doing so would be trivially small, relative to the overall resources at their disposal. Maybe this blog post will egg them into doing so! (yeah, right...)

But I think the point my above-quoted friend made, after his Google interview, was quite astute. Google's technical culture is coding-focused, and their approach to AI is data-focused (textual data, and data regarding clicks on ads, and geospatial data coming into Google Earth, etc.). To get hired at Google you have to be a great coder -- just being a great AGI theorist wouldn't be enough, for example. I don't think AGI is mainly a coding problem, nor mainly a data-based problem ... nor do I think it's a problem that can effectively be solved via a "great coding + lots of data" mentality. I think AGI is a deep conceptual problem that has more to do wth understanding cognition than with churning out great code and effectively utilizing masses of data. Of course, lots of great software engineering will be required to create an AGI (and we're happy to have a few super-engineers within Novamente LLC, for example), and lots of data too (e.g. in the Novamente case we plan to start our systems out with perceptual and social data from virtual worlds like Second Life; and then later on feed them knowledge from Wikipedia and other textual sources). But if the focus of an "AGI" team is on coding and data, rather than on grokking the essence of cognition, AGI is not going to be the result.

So, IMO, for Google to create an AGI would require them not only to bypass the relative AGI skepticism represented by the Peter Norvig story above -- but also to operate an AGI project based on a significantly different culture than the one that has worked for Google so far, in their development of (in some cases, really outstandingly useful) narrow-AI applications.

All in all my impression after getting to know Google's in-house research program a little better, is about the same as it was beforehand. However, I did make an explicit effort to look for evidence disconfirming my prior hypotheses -- and I didn't really find any. If anyone has evidence that the impressions I've given here are mistaken, I'd certainly be happy to hear it.

OK, well, it's time to wind up this blog post and get back to my own effort to create AGI -- with far less money and computers than Google, but -- at least -- a focus on (and, I believe, a clear understanding of) the essence of the problem....

Sure, it would be nice to have the resources of a Google or M$ or IBM backing up Novamente! But, the thing is, you don't become a big company like those by focusing on grokking the essence of cognition -- you become a big company like those by focusing on practical stuff that makes money quickly, like code and data and user interfaces ... and if AI plays a role in this, it's problem-specific narrow-AI, such as Google has done so well with.

As Larry Page recognizes, AGI will certainly have massive business value, due to its incredible potential for delivering useful services to people in a huge number of contexts. But the culture and mentality needed to create AGI seems to be different from the one needed to rapidly create a large and massively profitable company. My prediction is that if Google ever does get an AGI, they will buy it rather than build it.

Pure Silliness

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 25 May 2007 13:41:00 +0000

Ode to the Perplexingness of the Multiverse

A clever chap, just twenty-nine
Found out how to go backwards in time
He went forty years back
Killed his mom with a whack
Then said "How can it be that still I'm?"

On the Dangers of Incautious Research and Development

A scientist, slightly insane
Created a robotic brain
But the brain, on completion
Favored assimilation
His final words: "Damn, what a pain!"

A couple clever followups to the above poem were posted by others on the Singularity email list...

On the Dangers of Emulating Biological Drives in Artificial Intelligences
(by Moshe Looks)

A scientist once shook his head
and exclaimed "My career is now dead;
for although my AI
has an IQ that's high
it insists it exists to be bred!"

By Derek Zahn:

The Provably Friendly AI
Was such a considerate guy!
Upon introspection
And careful reflection,
It shut itself off with a sigh.

And, less interestingly...

On the Benefits of Clarity in Verbal Presentation

There was a prize pig from Penn Station
Who refused to eschew obfuscation
The swine with whom he traveled
Were bedazed by his babble
So they baconed him, out of frustration

Flogging Poor Searle Again

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 20 May 2007 17:27:00 +0000

Someone emailed me recently about Searle's Chinese Room argument,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

a workhorse theme in the philosophy of AI that normally bores me to tears.

But though the Chinese room bores me, part of my reply to the guy's question wound up interesting me slightly so I thought I'd repeat it here.

I won't recapitulate the Chinese room argument here; if you don't know it please follow the above link to Wikipedia.

The issue I'll raise here ties in with the question of whether recent theoretical developments regarding "AI with massive amounts of processing power" have any relevance to pragmatic AI.

As an example of this sort of theoretical research, check out:

http://www.hutter1.net/

which describes among other things an AI system called AIXI that uses infinitely much computational resources and achieves a level of intelligence greater than or equal to that of any other possible AI system. There are also approximations to AIXI such as AIXItl that use only insanely rather than infinitely much computational resources.

My feeling is that one should think about, not just

Intelligence = complexity of goals that a system can achieve

but also

Efficient intelligence = Sum over goals a system can achieve of: (complexity of the goal)/(amount of space and time resources required to achieve the goal)

According to these definitions, AIXI has zero efficient intelligence, and AIXItl has extremely low efficient intelligence. The challenge of AI in the real world is in achieving efficient intelligence not just raw intelligence.

Also, according to these definitions, the Bekenstein bound places a limit on the maximal efficient intelligence of any system in the physical universe.

Now, back to the Chinese room (hmm, writing this blog post is making me hungry ... after I'm done typing it I'm going to head out for some Kung Pao chicken!!)....

A key point is: The scenario Searle describes is likely not physically possible, due to the unrealistically large size of the rulebook.

And even if Searle's scenario somehow comes out physically plausible (e.g. maybe Bekenstein is wrong due to currently unknown physics), it certainly involves systems totally unlike any that we have ever encountered. Our terms like "intelligence" and "understanding" and "mind" were not created for dealing with massive-computational-resources systems of this nature.

The structures that we associate with intelligence (will, focused awareness, etc.) in a human context, all come out of the need to do intelligent processing within modest space and time requirements.

So when someone says the feel like the {Searle+rulebook} system isn't really understanding Chinese, what they really mean (I argue) is: It isn't understanding Chinese according to the methods we are used to, which are methods adapted to deal with modest space and time resources.

This ties in with the relationship between intensity-of-consciousness and degree-of-intelligence.

(Note that I write about intensity of consciousness rather than presence of consciousness. I tend toward panpsychism but I do accept that "while all animals are conscious, some animals are more conscious than others" (to pervert Orwell). I have elaborated on this perspective considerably in my 2006 book The Hidden Pattern.)

In real life, these seem often to be tied together, because the cognitive structures that correlate with intensity of consciousness are useful ones for achieving intelligent behaviors.

However, Searle's scenario is pathological in the sense that it posits a system with a high degree of intelligence associated with a functionality (understanding Chinese) that is NOT associated with any intensity-of-consciousness.

But I suggest that this pathology is due to the unrealistically large amount of computing resources that the rulebook requires.

I.e., it is finitude of resources that causes intelligence and intensity-of-consciousness to be correlated. The fact that this correlation breaks in a pathological, physically-impossible case that requires dramatically much resources, doesn't mean too much...

What it means is that "understanding", as we understand it, has to do with structures and dynamics of mind that arise due to having to manifest efficient intelligence, not just intelligence.

That is really the moral of the Chinese room.

Technological versus Subjective Acceleration

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 15 May 2007 11:06:00 +0000

This post is motivated by an ongoing argument with Phil Goetz, a local friend who believes that all this talk about "accelerating change" and approaching the Singularity is bullshit -- in part because he doesn't see things advancing all that amazingly exponentially rapidly around him.

There is plenty of room for debate about the statistics of accelerating change: clearly some things are advancing way faster than others. Computer chips and brain scanners are advancing more rapidly than forks or refrigerators. In this regard, I think, the key question is whether Singularity-enabling technologies are advancing exponentially (and I think enough of them are to make a critical difference). But that's not the point I want to get at here.

The point I want to make here is: I think it is important to distinguish technological accel eration from subjective acceleration.

This breaks down into a couple sub-points.

First: Already by this point in history, I suggest, advancement in technology has far outpaced the ability of the human brain to figure out new ways to make meaningful use of that technology.

Second: The human brain and body themselves pose limitations regarding how thoroughly we can make use of new technologies, in terms of transforming our subjective experience.

Because of these two points, a very high rate of technological acceleration may not lead to a comparably high rate of subjective acceleration. Which is, I think, the situation we are seeing at present.

Regarding the first point: Note that long ago in history, when new technology was created, it lasted quite a while before being obsoleted, so that each new technology was exploited pretty damn thoroughly before its successor came along.

These days, though, we've just BARELY begun figuring out how to creatively exploit X, when something way better than X comes along.

The example of music may serve to illustrate both of these points.

The invention of the electronic synthesizer/sampler keyboard was a hell of a breakthrough. However, the music we humans actually make has not changed nearly as much as the underlying technology has. By and large we use all this advanced technology to make stuff that sounds harmonically, rhythmically and melodically not that profoundly different from pre-synthesizer music. Certainly, the degree of musical change has not kept up with the degree of technological change: Madonna is not as different from James Brown as a synthesizer keyboard is from an electric guitar.

Why is that?

Well, humans take a while to adapt. People are still learning how to make optimal use of synthesizer/sampling keyboards for making intersting music ... but while people are still relatively early on that learning curve, technology has advanced yet further and computer music software gives us amazing new possibilities ... that we've barely begun to exploit...

Furthermore, our musical tastes are limited by our physiology. I could make fabulously complex music using a sequencer, with 1000's of intersecting melody lines carefully calculated, but no human would be able to understand it (I tried ;-). Maybe superhuman minds will be able to use modern music tech to create music far subtler and more interesting than any human music, for their own consumption.

And, even when acoustic and cognitive physiology isn't relevant, the rate of growth and change in a person's music appreciation is limited by their personality psychology.

To take another example, let's look at bioinformatics. No doubt that technology for measuring biological systems has advanced exponentially. As has technology for analyzing biological data using AI (my part of that story).

But, AI-based methods are very slow to pervade the biology community due to cultural and educational issues ... most biologist can barely deal with stats, let alone AI tech....

And, the most advanced measurement machinery is often not used in the most interesting possible ways. For instance, microarray devices allow biologists to take a whole-genome approach to studying biological systems, but, most biologists use them in a very limited manner, guided by an "archaic" single-gene-focused mentality. So much of the power of the technology is wasted. This situation is improving -- but it's improving at a slower pace than the technology itself.

Human adoption of the affordances of technology has become the main bottleneck, not the technology itself.

So there is a dislocation between the rate of technological acceleration and the rate of subjective acceleration. Both are fast but the former is faster.

Regarding word processing and Internet technology: our capability to record and disseminate knowledge has increased TREMENDOUSLY ... and, our capability to create knowledge worth recording and disseminating has increased a lot too, but not as much...

I think this will continue to be the case until the legacy human cognitive architecture itself is replaced with something cleverer such as an AI or a neuromodified human brain.

At that point, we'll have more flexible and adaptive minds, making better use of all the technologies we've invented plus the new ones they will invent, and embarking on a greater, deeper and richer variety of subjective experiences as well.

Viva la Singularity!

Colors: A Recurring Dream

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 07:38:00 +0000

I took a couple hours and wrote down a recurring dream I've had for years, which is a sort of metaphor for transhumanism and the quest to create AGI...

http://goertzel.org/Colors.pdf