Here are a few more random thoughts that I’ve had from reading Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained:

• Not only are regions of the brain multi-functional, but so are some of our genes. So when one trait or gene is selected and continued on, other aspects affected by that gene are affected as well, this is called collateral evolution. In Olivia Judson’s blog on the New York Times, she mentions a case were hunters bred foxes to be more friendly to humans, but in addition to that the foxes got shaggier ears and wider heads.
• Color was evolved as an imporatant way for us to spot predators and food. Much more than just the frequency of light reflected by something affect what color we see it as and the ability to see these differences evolved so we could spot a red fruit in a forest of green. But Dennett says that not only did we evolve to see that difference but also the apple evolved to be a color that we could spot (so we could spread its seeds). Dennett says “first there were various reflective properties of surfaces, reactive properties of photopigments, and so forth, and Mother Nature devloped out of these raw materials efficient, mutually adjusted “color”-coding/”color”-vision systems, and amont the properties that settled out of the design process are the properties we normal human beings call colors.” It’s interested to note that there are some humans who are red-green colorblind and there are some other species (some types of birds) who can see things in the UV range. Dennett says “Why is the sky blue? Because apples are red and grapes are purple, not the other way around.”
• The Baldwin effect - Dennett describes another aspect of evolution were “good tricks” are learned. Suppose there is some “good trick” that will help a creature in their environment. Creatures that are born with the trick are better off but others are able to re-wire their brains to learn it as well. If you assume that the amount of re-wiring needed depends on their genes, then animals that have genes that put them closer to learning the trick will be better off than animals that have a difficult time re-wiring for the trick (learning it). So genes that are close to the wiring of the brain for the trick continually get selected until eventually the gene that starts with this brain wiring could be selected. In this way the plasticity of the brain helps to speed up the evolution of the genes (this is known as the Baldwin effect).
• Memes - Memes are similar to genes, but they are instead ideas that try to reproduce themselves. Our brains and our cultures are were memes are stored and they are transferred through communication. Similar to the way life is just a vessel for the propagation of genes, our conscious minds may just be a vessel for memes to propagate. It’s interesting that the memes replicative power is based on its “fitness” rather than its contribution to our fitness. So memes or ideas that are harmful to us but spread easily are good replicators. This is a very interesting way to think about ideas, first proposed by Richard Dawkins.
• The concept of self is very abstract. It is important for us to be able to separate ourselves from the outside world so that we do not eat ourselves, etc. But in reality this is not such a clear line. There are lots of bacteria inside us that help us digest but are they really part of us? Dennett says that each normal person “makes a self. Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds.” He equates it to a snail building a shell or a spider making a web. Its just something we do. It is important for our self-preservation. And with the parallel thoughts (Multiple Drafts) theory of consciousness it is possible that a person could have multiple selves (multiple personality disorder) or even that one self could be spread across two people (in the case of the twins I mentioned in my last post).
• From what I understand about consciousness and the mind now, I find it hard to believe that we actually do have any free will. Our thoughts and mind are completely a result of physical and electro-chemical reactions in the brain. Do we really have any control over these reactions? Any control we would have would just be other electro-chemical reactions. It may eventually be possible to predict these reactions and fully predict the decisions of the brain. Our idea of free will may just be an illusion that these various electro-chemical reactions create for us.  It may seem that we have free will because the process that creates our decisions and thoughts is so complex.  An analogy would be the weather, surely the weather patterns and tornados and hurricanes and things could be predicted if we better understood the system and all the inputs, but since we don’t it seems quite random whether a tornado or hurricane will be created or not.

I’ve been reading Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and specifically looking at how his theory would be applied to creating artificial consciousness in a robot or software program.  Dennett makes a few key points that would have to be taken into account in developing artificial conscsciousness:

1. There is no central meaner, no executive decision maker.  Instead the brain is massively parallel, ideas come and go, actions and words are bubbling up everywhere and the best ones that fit best are the ones that get said or acted on.
2. Consciousness is effectively software running on the brains hardware.  The consciousness is a serial virtual machine running on the parallell architecture of the brain.
3. All of the parts of the brain are multifunction.  And different part’s functions overlap.  As Dennett says: “human engineers … design systems in which each element plays a single role, carefully insulated from interference from outside, in order to minimize the devestation of unforeseen side effects.”  He goes on to say the brain was designed by a process that thrives on “multiple superimposed functionality, something systematically difficult to discern from reverse engineering.”
4. The brain’s memory is not direct access memory (RAM) like a computer’s memory.  Instead things are brought back up and remembered by association and free thinking.  In addition, there is no definite boundary between program and memory as in a computer.
5. Many current researchers are working on modelling and researching the parts of the brain on the periphery, the parts that receive inputs from the vision or hearing.  But by working from the outside in, these researchers leave a lot to be explained by the eventual central point, where a lot of the consciosness may be in these peripheral parts of the brain.
6. The development of the brain and of life is very dependent on chaos.  Evolution depends on random variation in genes for it to select from, the brain was developed out of chaotic processes that hit upon chance processes and “serendipitous side effects.”

These are just a few of the ideas that I think need to be taken into account when drawing up a plan for artificial consciousness.

In Iowa this weekend Brad and I were discussing consciousness and the mind-body problem. Brad brought up a point that I had not thought about, that if the mind and consciousness are really all contained within the normal functioning of the brain, then all of our consciousness and our “selves” are created by the physical and chemical reactions of the brain. Not only does this make the boundary between yourself and the outside hard to determine, but it means we should eventually be able to develop a (complex) model of the reactions in the brain just like any other physics reactions (like 2 pool balls colliding). Assuming we know the starting condition of the brain and the experiences it is going to through then we should be able to determine how the brain will end up and the way it will react to said experiences. Which then provides questions about free will and things if we are able to predict how someone will think and act. The only randomness left would seem to be any effect of random quantum fluctuations.

An interesting example of a case of this is brought up in Consciousness Explained. Two twins, Greta and Freda Chaplin, who were in their 40s when the book was written and living in England. They act as one, finishing each other’s sentences, etc.. Dennett explains:

“Since these twins have seen, heard, touched, smelled, and thought about very much the same events throughout their lives, and started, no doubt, with brains quite similarly disposed to react to these stimuli, it might not take enormous channels of communications to keep them homing in on some sort of loose harmony.”

It seems that if two people start with very similar brains and experience the same things then they will end up with very similar brains. Which means that it should be possible to predict how one’s brain is going to develop based on their experiences. Does this mean once we understand the brain we’ll be able to predict the future? Well we can’t even predict weather patterns or the decisions of small animals or anything like that so I doubt its quite that simple. But an interesting idea.

I’ve been reading Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett.  In it he suggets that our perception systems work both ways with one expectation-driven side making hypotheses and the data driven side where senses are input confirming or disconfirming those expectations and hypotheses.  This fits nicely with my post on hallucinations from a few months back, where I suggested that hallucinations come from us fitting our sensory data to the wrong model or hypothesis.  Dennett suggests the same, saying that arbitrary patterns of confirmation and disconfirmation by the data driven side could cause detailed hallucinations.  His analogy is a party game where someone asks each person a question to figure out someone’s dream.  The trick is the people answer yes or no depending on the last letter of his question.  But through a series of arbitrary answers a story is built up based entirely on ideas of his own.

As you know, I’ve been reading Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett. In the book, he posits the theory that the development of language was critical for the development of consciousness. It makes sense, since we seem to “think” in words. I remember that by my last year of French class in high school I was even thinking in French in my next class. He also provides a very intersesting quote from Hellen Keller (from Wrentham, btw):

Before my teacher came to me, I did know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequeately that uncscious, yes conscious time of nothingness… Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another. ~Helen Keller, 1908

So our consciousness is dependent on and shaped by our language. Dennett says:

It is plausible to maintain that the details of a natural language - the vocabulary and grammar of English or Chinese or Spanish - constrain a brain in the manner of a high-level programming language. (p. 302)

The implications of this are very interesting. If a language does not have any words for something, we not only have no way to express it, but we have no way to even THINK it. The language that you speak can have a very profound way on the way you think. Here are two examples recently in the news:

• In yesterday’s New York Times, there was an article about people that speak Aymara. In this language, they describe the past as “ahead of them” and the future as “behind them.” This is apparently because of the importance they place on knowledge: past, known knowledge is in front to be seen, and future unknown knowledge is hidden behind them. But I wonder what other affects this has on their thoughts. Perhaps the one-way motion of time is simply because we have no words to describe it any other way.
• The other example is from the current (June) issue of Scientific American Mind. An article discusses a study where researchers gave personality tests to people that were bilingual. The tested the speakers with personality tests in both English and Spanish. And it turns out their personailities are quite different depending on which language they are speaking at the time!

So our language clearly affects how we think very much. This raises lots of interesting questions. What is our language missing? What things can we not even think about because there are no words for them? How do the thoughts of Spanish or German or Chinese speakers differ from our thoughts? This makes me really feel that I should try to become fluent in a second language, preferably one much different than English.

I was thinking the other day about how much I enjoy keeping this blog (even though no one reads it) because it helps me articulate my thoughts and ideas on different things. I have been having so many more interesting conversations about things like consciousness. Then I was just reading in ‘Consciousness Explained’ by Daniel Dennett about how perhaps we dont know what we’re going to say until we say it and perhaps we don’t really know what we think until we say it. Similar to when a writer releases a book and critics say “the author must have been thinking this” and the author thinks “maybe i was thinking that.” Dennett has a good quote from E. M. Forester: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” I think I may take some form of that quote for a sort of subtitle for my blog.

It’s amazing how much better you feel after even just a ten minute bike ride.  I know that exercising releases endorphins which do make you happier.  Which is why runners get what they call the “runner’s high.”  Anyway, it seems like it would probably be a more natural anti-depression remedy than Prozac or whatever doctors prescribe for that sort of thing (Vagus nerve stimulation).

I’ve been thinking about the environment and culture around us affects the way we think.  Our brains get wired based on the way that we use them.  So the expectations of the culture around us, the fact that things fall due to gravity, all these things affect how we think.  Since time flows one way, there is cause and then effect, and I’m sure we would think much different if there were not true.  Another example is how people from different cultures may think differently.  China’s government is actively trying to get their scientists and engineers to have more creativity in their work like Americans.  And now with people growing up with computers, which follow a very ordered logical methodology, were whenever you press this button or click this you will see the same response, our brains are probably getting more tuned to this.  I wonder what the effects are going to be of the new generations growing up with computers and the internet for their entire lives?

It reminds me of a short story I read called “Mimsy were the Borogoves” by Lewis Padgett from 1943.  In it, a boy finds a box of toys from the future.  The toys are meant to train children’s brains to think a certain way.  The analogy Padgett gives is that we have Euclidean geometry and the children playing with the toys are learning “x” geometry.  And they are such different ways of thinking that someone who knows Euclidean can’t understand “x” and vice versa.  Anyway, I dont want ruin the rest of the story, but its an interesting idea that the toys and puzzles and things that we play with as kids can profoundly affect the way we think.

The human brain is the most intelligent thing that we know of. One of the best prospects for developing true artificial intelligence is to reverse-engineer the brain. Reverse-engineering the brain will involve imaging the brain down to every detail, modelling it, and simulating it. There is already a lot of research going on to reverse-engineer the brain from fields like neuroscience, computer science, engineering, and pyschology. We are not able to image the brain at the neuronal level of detail yet, but broad simulations of different brain regions have already been created. Understanding the brain is something scientists have worked at for a long time and we will soon be approaching a time when we can not only understand it, but replicate it.

The biggest current restriction on reverse-engineering the brain is our current imaging technology. Both the spatial and temporal resolution of our best imaging now (MRI) are not good enough to capture individual firings of individual neurons. Still, we are able to get general ideas of which groups of neurons are firing when and what they do, so that much progress has been made in simulating various brain regions. But as our imaging systems get better then we should be able to capture and record every neuronal firing in the brain and develop a complete model of its workings.

The brain is much different from a computer and building a full model of it will provide us with many benefits. The brain’s neurons fire very slowly compared to a computer, but they are huge numbers of neurons and they are all connected in a massively parallel way, providing us with great pattern recognition abilites. The brain is able to rewire itself and grow new neuronal connections to learn new skills and memories. By combining these features with the great speed and perfect memory of a computer, we will develop an incredible artificial intelligence.

There are a number of current projects going on to reverse-engineer parts of the brain. Many of the pattern recognition algorithms used in the field of artificial intelligence and data mining such as neural networks and Bayesian networks were developed from theories of how the brain worked. Researchers have developed detailed models of the cerebellum and parts of the visual cortex. Lloyd Watts at MIT has developed a model of the auditory pathway in the brain that was better at differentiating a voice from a crowd than any program written before.

Current people are working on reverse-engineering the brain from the sensory inputs inward, since the senses are something we can understand easily. As we develop accruate models of the pathways the sensory data follow, we will develop models further in the brain, where the information is combined and stored and decisions are made. Along with the rapidly improving imaging technology, a complete model of the brain will soon become reality.

I was reading an interesting journal article the other day. In it, it was suggested that we have different conceptual models of whats going on. We fit all the sensory information we’re getting to one of these models and we can figure out what is going on. When people are in a sensory deprivation chamber or something of the likes of that, their sensory information fits multiple models and they end up picking a false one (hallucinating). Similarly with drugs that impair your senses, your mind picks a model that is not representative of what’s really happening and you hallucinate. It’s interesting to see the incredible about of sensory information you need to have a basic understanding of what’s really going on around you: huge amounts of visual information, feelings from your skin all over your body, plus hearing, smell, taste, and other things.