A Random Talk

This is an experimental blog post. The idea was to simply talk about a range of issues with the aim of creating a "mind map", then using the map to create traditional posts that are more structured and focused. But along the way, I wondered if I could post the original voice note

So, to test this, click on the link below, which will show you a LINK to the audio Store that and play it. Your machine will probably have an app that plays audio. In my case, it's iTunes.

This talk can be indexed just like a text essay.

In the long run, the plan is to take notes on my own "rant" in mind map form (which can also be shown in the blog).

A Random Talk

Frames All The Way Down

I have been rather dismissive of Hawkins' "Thousand Brains" idea but I can't help thinking he's on to something, specifically:

• Once you broaden your understanding of what a "frame*" is, it is quite plausible that people think in frames. The most powerful computer system we have built so far, the Internet, runs on a relatively simple "frame language", understood by over a billion "hosts" including the one you are reading this on.
• Hawkins provides a plausible description of human experience in terms of "frames" somehow being the unit of experience.
• It is plausible that the neocortex has some kind of structure that implements frames, including the ability to create frames "on the fly" and use them as a unit of memory and reasoning.
• Thousand Brain is not too dissimilar from the theory presented in Surfaces and Essences, which presents analogy as the "fuel of thought". "Surfaces" is really talking about language, which is a brain-to-brain communication device.  Theories of language, such as Chomsky's use frames to develop a theory of how language works.

Hawkins gets tripped up trying to describe complex frames, especially the ones that don't admit to a spatial interpretation. Object-Oriented Design has a rich language that applies directly. Starting at the simplest example, Hawkin's coffee cup, we can speak of objects as "frames". Object-Oriented concepts are extremely powerful in representing the real world - one reason these concepts underlie the Internet and some of its fundamental tools, such as Java.

Hawkins gets into trouble when he starts to speak as a neuroscientist, which he is not. He doesn't get published in Scientific Journals. In spite of his extensive knowledge of the subject, his ideas about how, exactly, columns in the neocortex create frames are sketchy, to say the least. But even here, he is pointing to a structure that is replicated all over the neocortex (the famous thousand brains). If we assume that we think in frames we may be forgiven to think that some structure in the brain is involved. Due to the enormous parallelism and recursiveness in experience, we would expect a large number of similar structures, not some kind of "organ".

Hawkins is particularly interested in the predictive nature of consciousness. I think he could be challenged on this. The brain is obviously filling in what it "expects" to be there but I am not quite sure we need the "priming" idea. It seems the brain "sees" what it expects to see in a "frame". What needs to be explained is how effortlessly it does this and how we are alerted to aspects of the real frame that are out of place. We know that this mechanism often fails, as in the phenomenon of "Change Blindness". In fact, it seems that change blindness may be the Achilles Heel for this aspect of Hawkins' theory. On the other hand, answering this question could turn out to provide strong extra evidence for the theory. 

Many applications in the Internet are at least attempting to be "predictive" - filling in details before the query is completed. "Type Ahead" is something we all experience. Hawkins seems to think that this is something "AI" can't do.

My thinking on this subject rides off in several directions.

• How it is that certain "virtual" environments, such as Second Life, feel so "real". Hawkins' ideas about felt reality are applicable.
• How do frames work in non-spacial domains, such as language, physics, and mathematics?
• Is the Universe actually built of frames or does it just look that way?
• Hawkins' book is very light on visual examples that would show the nested and recursive nature of the frames he is talking about. I'd like to provide some examples and perhaps shed some doubt on the idea that a "frame" is manifested in a column of the neocortex. 
• I'd like to present an alternative interpretation of the neurological "facts" in Hawkin's book. Specifically, I think a "frame" corresponds to a network of active neurons in the brain. There is an interesting visual example in Second Life, where a "frame" (a specific location in the world) "rezzes" a bit at a time, providing a way to think of how a frame could resolve itself almost instantly even though it is full of nested frames.

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* I use "frame" to refer to Hawkins' "reference frames"

See also

Object Oriented Design

The Languate of Information Science

Your Brain is a Virtual Reality Machine

 

Our ability to experience "virtual" worlds is not something new. Evolution has provided it as basic equipment along with our opposing thumbs. It's not a bug. It's a feature.

On the most fundamental level, we are constantly experiencing the future and the past: the flow of time. This ability is essential to what we call purposeful behavior. We love to debate whether or not other animals have this ability and to what degree, but it's clear that we have it in spades. It is essential to who we are as humans.

I am fascinated by how the brain produces the virtual world that we call "consciousness". It turns out to be quite a trick.

• Sense information arrives at different times. For example, sound and smell arrive with very little processing, but virtual information goes through massive complex analysis. Yet we experience it all at the "same time".
• We experience the decision to move after the brain has sent signals to move.
• Our experience slightly precedes what is going on in the real world - it is a prediction of what is happening. In the words of the Great One: I skate not to where the puck is but where the puck will be.

Careful observation of the phenomenon we call "consciousness" provides endless examples of how we are constantly bombarded with stunningly immersive "virtual" experiences. The smell of apple pie. The voice of a loved one on the phone. A spider crawling on our leg. Our brains instantly and effortlessly supply "virtual" senses to "enhance" the smallest trickle of "real" data.

On top of this, we structure reality into stories and "explanations". We are the story-telling ape. The good stories are embellished and handed on over generations, eventually knitting themselves into systems called "mythology" and "religion". We are quite willing to believe that we live on after death or that there is an old man in the sky behind everything that happens. We love our stories so much that we forget they are "just" stories.

Our brains are made to be fooled. We don't need computers to be plunged into an alternate reality. We can open a book and read: "Call me Ishmael" and suddenly we are whalers. We read "In the beginning" and we walk in the garden with Adam and Eve. If I may be allowed to speculate a bit, it seems that hearing these words rather than reading them creates a more powerful image. In the words of Bishop Pike: "What is too silly to be said can be sung". This points out one essential feature of how we experience virtual worlds: sometimes simplicity is an asset. And worlds that provide auditory input (especially speech) are readily accepted as real. We experience merely visual "worlds" (like a photograph) as "representation" but we are not "immersed".

Finally, in passing, I should note that virtual worlds created by written text must depend on the skill of the reader. Evolution does not provide this skill. It is learned. People vary in their ability to acquire this skill. Similarly, people vary in their ability to be "immersed" in virtual worlds. To some, the computer-generated worlds of VR remain cartoons. To others, they are instantly "real".

Modern "Virtual Worlds", if they are interesting at all, involves a learning curve that can be almost as daunting as learning to read. This aspect of things is often overlooked by prophets of the "metaverse". People are too lazy, preoccupied, or busy to learn a VR application that is more complicated than, say, Zoom. Those who developed VR "superpowers" will always be a tiny minority.

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P.S. "A Thousand Brains" provides a deep and powerful framework for understanding how the brain creates the rich experience we call consciousness. In particular, it doesn't make a lot of difference where the sensations are coming from. Whatever we know about the real world (in a deeply recursive way) is applicable to another "world" where the sensations are coming from, say, a computer screen.

Russian Dolls and The Mind

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019, at 7:30 PM Len Bruton <...> wrote:

There seems little doubt that science looks for explanations by seeking out those physical objects within brains that may yield a closer appreciation of how minds function and maybe just where they are to be found!!  Following your very different approach, my thought experiment is to ask whether Earthly minds and whether Earthly consciousness existed 100 million years ago?  Is it then a valid question to ask whether reality existed prior to minds

This question can send us spiraling down an infinite regress. There seem to be two ways of stopping this. Either accept the reality of "mind" or accept the reality of "the world". Otherwise, you have a problem of reality being something in the mind, which is itself in reality, or a model of reality and so forth ...

Wayne Brown <chillyfinger@gmail.com>to Len
Given that we have a mind, it also makes sense if other living things have a mind or something like it. Such questions can provide insight into our own mind. It even makes sense to ask if Google has a mind. 

I have no doubt that my dog has a mind of sorts. However, she is stuck with a mind that she inherits through her genes (which is why it makes sense for her to circle around before lying down to sleep). Wolves share their minds when they hunt down a moose but within pretty sharp limits. I think neuroscience can provide a lot of insight into mammalian minds and we are mammals. 

Our minds are built up from birth by language, culture, becoming shared minds. Human minds can be fruitfully explored by the experience of sculpture, astronomy, photography and so much more. If our minds were "nothing more" than mammal brains we would not be interested in them at all. 

But your question was about reality, not minds. I think all life is deeply rooted in reality. Life sucks as much information from the real world as possible - information that can be turned to advantage in the struggle for survival. Information that can be stored within the physics and biology of the organism. As it happens, such information, once obtained, can be used for other purposes. 

Humans do even better by obtaining information from each other, through reason and through instruments. Still, it is information about reality and not reality itself. Some would argue that, since we cannot know reality directly, we can't really know that reality exists at all. This type of talk may be suitable to impress half drunk girls at a party, but can't be taken seriously. To follow Descarte's line of thinking just a bit further: to "know" reality implies a knower and the subject of knowledge (knowledge about ...). Our "model" of reality is not reality itself, but it is wonderful, endlessly expansive, explorable and shared. 

It's frustrating when we bump into fundamental limits of observation, such as we do in cosmology and quantum mechanics. In these areas, we must lay aside our tools of observation and rely on pure reason. At that point, it becomes painfully obvious that we are discussing ideas about reality rather than reality itself. In the "real" world, perhaps logic, space and time do not exist or exist in a way we cannot observe. Or perhaps we have the wrong idea of "existence" itself.  

In any case, exploring the model of reality the mind creates is more productive than attempting to create a model of mind in reality (or, more precisely, our mind within our model of reality.). We've been doing this for thousands of years and progress is being made steadily. 

Neuroscience will never discover art or physics in my brain, nor will it discover my model of reality. Building that model is the very purpose of the organ in question. To learn about my model of reality, it's best to explore reality itself.

Roots

I have lately become impressed with the what's going on in the brain. Learning more about the small details, I wind up asking myself about the "big picture" that these details reveal. I'm a visual kind of guy, so I'm thinking about a picture something like this:

Neural network in the brain

That picture is showing main connections only - myelinated "high speed" connections. The actual picture would be a packed tangle of axons and dendrites - for example, the massive wad of connections that make up the "white matter" in the brain, connecting (on average) each neuron in the neocortex with 1,000 other neurons.

White Matter in the Brain is a Wad of Connections

Where else do we see something like that?

Roots in the Forest Floor

There is a tangle of roots under our feet in the forest floor. We usually see the big ones that manage to break the surface and threaten to trip us up, but the network is much more extensive, especially in a thriving "old growth" forest. We have recently found that trees are not just sucking up water and nutrients. They are communicating with each other through their root system.

I'm a sucker for analogy. It's natural for me to ask: what is the brain "sucking up" through its "root" system. Obviously, the nervous system is in the business of conveying information from the world (and inside the organism) to other parts of the organism - especially the central nervous system. Information is also being conveyed in the opposite direction - not only to allow us to wiggle our fingers but also to modify how our eyes "see" the world (roughly helping the eyes see things that "matter").

We, as conscious beings, owe our consciousness to our roots in the real world. Our root system is designed on a very fine level to suck every bit of precious information from that world. To take the example of the ganglia* in the eye, we have 20 different ganglia types, extracting 20 different types of information from the raw information provided by the retina. It's easy to think of a few types of information that might be extracted, such as a 2-dimensional map of 3 different colors plus black and white (that's the 4 different types of photoreceptors--rods and cones--in the eye). We imagine that like the image going from our camera retina to the camera memory. What else? At this point, we can only guess. Maybe something like this:

• Day and night - time to sleep, time to wake
• Faces
• Weather
• Sun location - where am I? What time is it?
• Movement - comparison with one image with another a fraction of a second later
• Repeating shapes 
• Shapes of known objects
• Basic "camera" adjustments such as the need to increase or decrease exposure, image sharpness, saturation ...
• Compensation for the fact that the eyes are always moving 

We are all familiar with the experience that something we are looking for, perhaps our car keys, mysteriously seem to "pop out" from the jumble of other things in our field of view. Just two hops from raw data from the photoreceptors - a few centimeters -- our brains extend neurons that are hungrily extracting "meaning". "Upstream" from the visual system, we find brain systems looking for enemies, mating opportunities and chances to maintain status in the group.

Like a tree, we are sucking up what we need to survive. We have left it to the plants and the animals that eat plants to take care of our nutritional needs. We live or die on our ability to extract information from the world. Being "rooted" in the world is perhaps the best metaphor to help us think of our relationship to the world - the "mind-body problem".

Our "roots" analogy can be applied at another level: DNA and evolution.

We may regard the entire history of evolution as the story of life groping in "reality" to find a niche, a body plan and a pattern of reacting the environment that "works". 

Similarly, we can use the same concept with human languages.

We may think of languages as groping through the world of human experience (E) to find an effective way to share the matrix of experience within a culture. Shared experience is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for what we might call a scientific apprehension of "reality". In any case, this capability seems to be important enough for nature to devote significant parts of our central nervous system to communicate using language.

Of course, the idea applies to the worlds of imagination such as religion, where an entire culture gropes in vain for some kind of sensible, self-consistent way of speaking about a realm that is entirely fictitious.

The Chaotic Imaginary World of Christianity

* You can learn about ganglia in the visual system from Episode 39 of Rob Reid's "After On" Podcast "Restoring Sight to the Blind"

Thoughts on Religion vs. Reality

For the moment, let me talk about the world of human experience as "E".

The world that Science investigates is assumed to exist apart from human experience, although we can only know it through human experience. Without really thinking about it, we imagine the "real world" to be about the shared experience: verifiable, consistent and augmented by what we call "reason". But we have long admitted that Universe, which I will call U, is not the same as "E". In fact, we assume that we can never know "U" entirely, directly or completely.

We all know that "E" is not the same for each of us. In fact, it is quite remarkably different between different cultures and different times or even for a single individual throughout his or her lifetime.

The question at hand is, is there anything "out there" apart from E and U?

In most religious traditions the answer is "yes".  Most religions postulate a universe in which the individual "soul" - the most important part of E  - exists apart from the individual physical body and survives death into a realm that may or may not is occupied by spirits, gods, occult forces and a whole world. Christianity specifically claims that the "soul" always exists apart from the body - an idea that appears in modern Science Fiction in many forms. Mystical traditions claim that some varieties of E (mystical experience) perceive alternate universes or perceive U directly, whatever that may mean. At least in the early days of the "drug culture", drugs like LSD were seen as a means of exploring that alternate reality - not just a way of bending the brain out of shape.

Religions also tend to assume that there is a moral universe that exists beyond the world of mere mortals but applies in some way to the moral choices we make. For example, the fate of our souls depends on the moral choices we make. In such a moral universe, the concept of "free will" is an essential attribute of the soul. If we have no free will, the entire idea of merit and reward beyond death (or even in this world) makes no sense. Religious apologists are well aware of this problem - frequently claiming that in a world without God (or their religion), morality cannot exist.

But if we stick to the evidence available, we are forced to conclude that our minds and therefore all of E are happening between our ears and are therefore embedded in U, like the rest of our bodies. There is no other Universe. Mind, like gravity, however mysterious, is a phenomenon within U.

One of the most impressive bits of evidence for this is the structure of the brain. Brain structure heavily contributes to "character" in the sense that lesions, injuries, tumors, and drugs can dramatically alter moral behavior. What we consider to be "moral" choices - the ones that supposedly chart the progress of the soul - are the work of identifiable brain structures.  If you break down "free will" into components, you wind up with faculties (brain structures, processes and systems) that may or may not work as expected. These faculties may fail individually or in combination as a consequence of specific injury to specific brain systems. For moral decisions to take place:

• You need to be aware of the alternatives for action;
• The alternatives need to be emotionally "tagged" - some "feel" better than others - otherwise you don't care;
• You need to access applicable memory and social "rules";
• You need to feel things like disgust, lust, shame, pride, and empathy;
• You need to be able to hold all this in working memory long enough to work out an action;
• You need to be able to act according to your mental "computation" (many people "know" what is right but behave in alarming, self-destructive ways anyway).

Drastic departures from "normal" capabilities in these areas are labeled with morally-tinged "disorders" such as psychopathy or even mild character judgments such as "laziness" or "impulsiveness". We are just beginning to understand the physical roots of these personality patterns. The field of psychological neurology is gradually stripping away our common sense idea that "bad" people are acting out of free choice - making "bad choices". What's left is a view that "normal" people make "normal" choices using "normal" brain structures. There is no room left for the idea that morality is something that exists outside of E (what we experience) and our bodies (part of U). We may need to toss wickedness onto the same scrap heap as demon possession.

Brain structures are stunningly complex in a way that shouts "design". Of course, we put aside the "Santa's Workshop" view of this "design". There is no "designer". But what then? We must say that our brain structures are a result of strong evolutionary pressure.

Our nervous systems extract an astonishing amount of detail from basic sensory information. To cite just one example, there are 20 different types of ganglia in the visual system. These nerve cells extract the "analog" information coming in from the retina. Each type of ganglion "speaks its own digital language" to the deeper structures of the brain. At the moment, we have a vague idea what five of these ganglion types are "talking about". What the others are "saying" remains mysterious. In no case are we in a position to decipher the language that each type speaks.*

There are hundreds of different cell types in the hippocampus - the brain area critical to memory. The complexity of this design is several orders of magnitude beyond anything that has come out of human design efforts. What is motivating this incredible process? It can be nothing but what we call R. The "real world". Our brains are embedded in R and they are a direct consequence of phenomena in R. Specifically, evolutionary "pressure" from events in R have consequences for even subtle differences in the design of our bodies - especially our brains. This applies to the way our brains make "moral" choices. There is no particular need for us to know what these "pressures" are. For example, we have been breathing for millennia before we discovered oxygen.

Evolutionary "pressure" is "adaptive", or "survival of the fittest". But for humans, survival depends on acting together with other humans. Great sections of the brain are specifically devoted to this job, including obvious things like speech but even more sophisticated "circuitry" that computes socially acceptable behavior - that's what we call "morality".

The main business of religion is to help us "compute" our behavior in socially acceptable ways. Religion is the result of many brains "computing" general solutions to the problems of existence, especially existence together with other humans.

We are left with a view of the world and our role in it that departs significantly from virtually all religions, but, at the same time, tells us why we have religions and why there is no particular reason for them to "make sense":

• There is no "soul" apart from the body. Consciousness - and all the mysteries of the self - are created by the brain. The "self" can be disassembled bit by bit or ultimately destroyed by injury to the brain. The fact that we can't "explain" this does not put the phenomenon in a special category. We have no ultimate explanation for anything at all - including gravity.
• "Free will", if it exists at all, is severely constrained by the details of our individual brain structure and health.  Wild departures from "normal" - such as psychopaths - have brain abnormalities not much different from being blind from birth. We must challenge our common-sense idea that others may be regarded as fundamentally "good" or "bad" in some absolute sense. 
• With no "soul" or independent realm that dictates moral choices outside of our minds, the need for anything like "heaven" or "god" vanishes. As Pascal famously noted: "We have no need for that hypothesis".

But does the need for religion itself vanish? Our brains are designed to depend heavily on the input from other brains. To cite a simple example, our courts could not function without laws. Laws could not exist without language and the deep history behind the moral "computations" performed by cultures over the centuries. The fact that different cultures compute different answers to the moral problems presented does not diminish the fact that individuals are not "designed" to make moral choices entirely on their own.

It does seem possible for these insights to inspire something that looks like "morality". For example, perhaps we should back off from our natural tendency to regard people with different moral standards as "evil". Perhaps we should be more skeptical of ideas like deliberation and willfulness in those who offend against our laws. Perhaps we need to re-think our ideas of "justice" entirely - especially when it comes to our systems of punishment and reward that supposedly motivate people to behave in the "right" way. It seems to me that people who accept compassion as a core religious belief are already close to accepting this attitude for simple "scientific" reasons. It is a simple, verifiable fact that E is a creation of the human mind in response to the "real" pressure from R plus our efforts to survive in partnership with others (also playing itself out on a stage in R).

The vast majority of the human race believes or acts "as if" their own cultural standards of morality are absolute and not "invented" by "mere" humans. We want to think that their worldview is not "merely" mythical but in some sense reflecting a special insight into the nature of reality, usually augmented by some kind of "supernatural" (not part of U) history. I don't think it is too much of a leap for such people to accept that their worldview is a special case of "E". Other worldviews - even conflicting worldviews - need to be understood as fundamentally human and not uniquely valid conclusions of the nature of reality. For the individual, morality boils down to what we should do - here and now, in this world. Practical experience tells us that it's quite possible for folks with utterly different worldviews to agree on a wide range of common action.

On the other hand, it should be possible for us to deny "supernatural" justifications for actions that cast others as "evil" - deserving suppression or even death.

It's not too much to ask.

* More on visual system ganglia and the "big picture" posed by the brain here.

Now What?

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. 

T. S. Eliot - Little Gidding

I have been writing for a long time about the concept of "supermind" and the "dragon". Groups of humans - armies, governments - have a life of their own and thrive at the expense of the humans that oppose them - even their own members.  These groups steal our identity and prevent us from thinking for ourselves. It's all true, of course, but what is new is the total acceptance of the situation. Comfort almost. This is the human condition. Our "minds" function as part of a whole. It may be a mistake to "analyze" - to break things down into pieces, but indulge me for a moment while I describe things that make up our "minds" that are usually regarded as something happening between our ears.

• The brain, especially considered as part of the body (Damasio). The function of the brain is primarily to support the organism - the efforts of that organism to thrive. 
• "Reality" - what "scientists" observe and explore. Quantum mechanics has taught us to think of "reality" as a set of shared observations and models - strictly speaking, that is what we "know". Actual "reality" (apart from what we can measure) always seems to be just out of reach.
• "Society" - from birth, we are knit into a human milieu. We parse reality in words we learn as children, we grasp and learn tools that reflect hundreds of thousands of years of invention and ingenuity.  

It is not wise to separate these three except for the purposes of discussion. The brain is "hard-wired" into the body and the body is a real thing - an object in reality. We cannot speak of any of this or learn the simplest task of existence without drawing on what we are told and shown by the people around us.

In short, our minds are not "our own", nor does it make much sense to insist that we "think for ourselves". Our minds are constrained by what they are - or, if you want, the fact that they are embedded in reality in a certain manner - a manner that is inescapable.

So what is new (and perhaps an echo of thoughts I have had for half a century) is to see all this at once.  This leads to experiences that are somehow kissed with new insight. For example, I see scenes of happy congregations hugging and greeting each other in a new way. I would normally harrumph in the background about how silly their beliefs are and shake my head at how amazing it is that so many people can all be so deluded about the core nature of reality. But now I see this as a whole and don't separate what is supposedly going in between the ears of the believer. What is going on is happening to everyone in the room and has roots that go back centuries. The "mind" at work is what I used to call "supermind", but what I have been missing is that the individual experience of mind is just what goes on in our own minds. We are mostly unaware that we are not "thinking" our own thoughts, not being motivated by our own motives, not intending what we individually intend. The process works so smoothly and so naturally that we know as little about it as do bees in a hive.

This perspective puts an end to the "supermind" blog. It is an error to think of mind and supermind separately, just as the behavior of bees makes no sense without reference to the "goals and intentions" of the hive. This insight also marks a new direction for this blog, which started out trying to find a rational, skeptical way forward in a sea of myth and misdirection. In a way, I see the name of this blog (The Christian Skeptic) as a theme to which I must now return, knowing that we are all in a state of tension between our "heritage" and what comes next. Skeptics, like Christians, don't "think for themselves".

Of course there are many, many layers involved in this process.  You can go on splitting and analyzing to your heart's content. For example, in "Behave", Sapolsky analyzes our reasons for doing what we do, going up the ladder of detail from the way nerves move our limbs to the way society tells us what is "right" and "wrong'. If nothing else, Sapolsky ties human behavior into the physical structure of the brain - everything from the chemistry of enzymes to the modular structure of brain "systems". The brain is a thing - an object in reality.

Drilling Down to Motivations

Sapolsky reluctantly concludes that there is no place for "free will" in his analysis. Perhaps that is because he, like others, is stuck with the image of the "self" as being some kind of puppet master between the ears of the individual. The truth is that the borders of "self" are extremely fuzzy, both in time and space. What happens in our heads is the result of an astronomically complex calculation whose inputs go back to the swamps when life first emerged - a point that structures Damasio's story of who we are - the Strange Order of Things. We have motives - feelings - that Damasio sees at the very root of being and Sapolsky confirms are rooted in biology - the term "computation" for this process is misleading. We are not computers.

In Damasio's account, to live is to thrive, which means that living things don't just "try" to continue their existence, the "try" to push themselves further into the future (persist). They reproduce, grow and grab all the resources they can to do it. In corporate turns (which Damasio hates), living things don't just break even, they make a profit. Damasio walks right up to considering human groups to be alive in their own right (since they satisfy his criteria for being alive), but balks at the conclusion since human groups overlap. For some reason, he feels that a single organism can't be part of two superorganisms at once. There is no particular reason for this criterion, which seems to emerge out of the blue - unconnected to any of his other arguments. In any case, as pointed out by one very early reader of the "Dragon" blog, it's mainly a matter of terminology. What is important is to recognize the actual relationship between the individual human and society, whether you call society "alive" or not.

Strangely, Damasio is quite willing to consider a beehive as alive (and even conscious) in its own right.  His arguments for this are convincing and I really don't see why they would not apply to human society, which is quite happy to "brainwash" its citizens so that they throw their lives away for the sake of their country or even corporate profits - profits that they themselves never see.

But the trick is to see that we are all brainwashed all the time. Otherwise, we could not speak, find our way around or feed ourselves. This is who we are, what we are.

Great sections of our brains are devoted to fitting our individual existence into the group. We have "speech centers" in the (normally) left brain devoted to generating and understanding speech. We have forebrain modules that are constantly doing "social" calculations to determine what is the socially appropriate thing to do (Sapolsky). On a more subtle level, our brains seem to work in such a way as to parse the world in terms of "objects" and "events" that lend themselves to verbal communication.  In other words, "language" is deeply embedded in the way our brains actually work - an insight spelled out in great detail in "Surfaces and Essences" - Hofstadter.

What is often overlooked is the fact that all this functions according to the laws of physics, chemistry, and geometry. We are embedded in a real world. It is commonplace to remark that we only see part of what is "out there". What is overlooked is that what we do see is actually "out there". One image I have in my head is the way our brains are packed into a finite volume but fold the surface to maximize the amount of cortical area. One imagines that we would have had big, spherical brains except that they would be unwieldy. It's just the way I see geometry placing constraints on what and how we think - who we are.

Along these lines, I see "society" and culture as a way of escaping constraints that we inherited from millennia of evolution - the "design concept" of individual organisms, reproduction and all that. Human societies "thrive" by a new mechanism - one involving "information" breaking free of its DNA shackles to exist out in the open as the blood and bones of human society.

My First Introduction To Zen

Key to this insight is the analogy between DNA - the "program" that determines the physical shape and behavior of an organism - with "Information", the physical, real-world "tools" that society uses to thrive. In the latter category are not just what is usually seen as "information" (books and computer files etc) but the physical creations of society, like telescopes, automobiles and language itself. When you sit behind the wheel of a car, you are being absorbed into the skills and thought processes of tens of thousands of people who invented everything from the dash ornaments to the theory of internal combustion. This is an insight that goes back to "Zen and The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance", a book I read when it came out (1974). The book is not about Zen or Motorcycle Maintenance, but I did take away the idea that a motorcycle is an idea cast in metal. I come back to the same place and know the place for the first time ...

It is worth noting that I come back to this idea having absorbed many of the key ideas of Zen. I'd say "motorcycle" actually extends Zen in an exciting way. Perhaps Pirsig, like the rest of us, knew more about Zen than we thought at the time. Specifically, the insights here vastly expand what we think of as "mind", "attention" and "consciousness". These are the central concerns of Zen. There is no particular reason why those who follow the path of self-discovery should be stuck with the metaphors created thousands of years ago.

Back in 1974, I would frequently point out that a man with an ax is as different from a man without an ax as a zebra is from a horse. Our tools accelerate evolution in a new way. But back then I didn't quite grasp that the tool exists in its own "space" - the supermind - that is using the man as much as the man uses the ax.

So it is that today, in 2018, I have the unusual comfort of having a big insight that has been bubbling up from below for half a century. It makes sense.

But now what?

The Brain As an Amazing Symmetry Computer

I have a coffee cup in front of me (I usually do). If I rotate it or move or see it in different light it my brain automatically makes me experience it as the same cup. If you have ever tried to make a computer figure this out, you will see how astonishing this is. What's more, the cup will be seen as the same cup tomorrow and the same as the cup that I washed a week ago (or is it two weeks? The point is, that doesn't matter). This is symmetry under a transformation in time and space. It takes place so automatically that most of us will go through our entire lives without thinking of it at all.

There is another, related, trick that the brain does. It makes me "see" the cup as a form. A form is a bunch of "stuff" that is more or less arbitrarily treated as the "same thing". My dog is quite capable of seeing a flying tennis ball as a "thing" that can be snatched out of the air, but she seems to be uninterested in the "things" shown on our TV screen. This is just to point out that selection and recognition of "things" is a brain function and not "out there" in the real world.

Brains which make an isomorphic transformation (or I suppose a "reverse" transformation) are able to manipulate the "things" of the mind as if they are "things" of the real world. Brains are good at detecting relevant things and picking them out of the hurricane of sensation that presents itself to working memory in every second. You could say this allows working memory to "compress" the world into a very small set of "things". I don't expect the cup to turn into a cat, but I would quickly notice if it did. Otherwise, it can just sit on my desk and play a small part in what I perceive as my surroundings.

From Bacteria To Bach and Back (Dennett) provides a detailed exploration of how our minds come to recognize "things" and how the "thinginess" of the world arises from relevance rather than raw reality. An ant somehow recognizes certain things but presumably doesn't "know" it's doing it or even that it's an ant. "Consciousness" is not required to recognize "things". The brain has inherited this very ancient capability from the dawn of life and has had billions of years to perfect it. That's why it's so good at it. In Dennett's terminology, symmetry computations are a "competence" of brains: a competence without comprehension or, one might say, a pre-condition of comprehension. Dennet makes another subtle point: this competence doesn't depend on any kind of representation of the world in the ant's head or our head. In other words, we need not look for the set of neurons or synapses that "represent" my coffee cup in my brain. I picture the cup as a result of a result of a fantastically nested and fractal computation that the brain does "on the fly", a computation this is best described in Hofstader's"Surfaces and Essences"/ This computation relies mainly on analogy which is a special case of symmetry. This is why I refer to the brain as a "symmetry computer". It uses symmetry to "compress" all experience into "merely" a few billion connected neurons.

Susan Greenfield - Neuronal Assemblies

These slides are taken from Susan Greenfield's presentation concerning visualization of dynamic processes in the brain and her sweeping new theory of consciousness. 

Greenfield tests her model against 5 different ways we think of consciousness,

particularly our sense that there are "degrees" of being conscous

Greenfield points out that Electrophysiology models the brain at tiny resolution and microsecond time intervals versus the commonly seen fMRI scans with poor resolution and long time scales. There is a huge gap between what these two models can say about what is happening in the brain.

Greenfield's method bridges this gap using voltage-sensitive die imaging, 

This method shows a mid-range number of cells ( a few million) at short time interval (18 ms in the above slide).

This gives a mental model of consciousness that she compares to a stone being thrown in a puddle. In this talk, she extends that model in quite a bit of detail. From 1:34:17 onward, she presents striking movies of brain activity using this technology. This is perhaps a fundamental presentation in brain science, so it's a good idea to actually watch it rather than let me summarize it.

There are a few lessons I draw from her model:

• She factors in development of the brain and mind;
• She treats perception and thought (internal, private stimulation) as equivalent;
• She is regrettably in awe of relativity when she talks about space and time. There is no reason for this, since relativity makes no real difference for the phenomena she is discussing;
• She makes a nice distinction between mind and consciousness;
• Her model accounts for how modulators that predispose cells to generate a pulse and the "feeling" of consciousness;
• The model accounts for why neurons "recruit" nearby cells - not just because of local "wiring";
• Her model is rich in predictions about how experiments with consciousness should turn out - it is "testable" and she's quite unique in valuing this particular aspect of her theory;
• 
  

Greenfield model incorporates the effect of neurotransmitters on consciousness

The presentation includes a little "movie" of the brain in action that may stick with you as a totally different image of what is going on in your head. Remember, these "blobs" represent millions of neurons close to each other:

An Effective Field Theory of Consciousness

The wave equation of Quantum Mechanics P'(U') = P(U) completely describes the Universe, or more precisely, what we think we can know about the Universe. I'm leaving out all the usual Greek letters here (P is usually "Phi").

U is a vector in Hilbert space, essentially an infinite list of "facts", including the value of every field (gravity, electromagnetic etc) at every point in the Universe. What you pay for rent is in there somewhere.

This theory becomes useful if you add another variable, K, which represents a restriction on the wave function to a domain of concern or applicability. The equation then becomes an "effective field theory", P'(U',K) = P(U,K). K will specify things like velocities much less than the speed of light, gravitational fields weaker than in a black hole etc. K may be so restrictive that things like gravity can be entirely ignored (as in a particle accelerator, where the effect of gravity is vanishingly small compared to other forces at work). Particle physicists invented the wave function and are justifiably proud of it but they rarely consider the idea that the wave function must apply to everything, not just the world of quantum mechanics. They call the function the theory of everything but they seem to think that "everything" is just fields and particles. There seems to be no reason to restrict the idea to this level of detail or this type of "fact" about the Universe.

The amazing thing about the wave function is that it takes probability distributions "in" and produces probability distributions "out". Mysteriously, we happen to find ourselves in just one of the probability states described on either side of the equation, but this can sometimes be put down to errors of measurement. We are never quite sure where we are. It's also fundamentally impossible to know exactly where we are (Heisenberg Uncertain Principle) Moreover, we definitely find ourselves in one universe rather than another (the roll of a dice will produce one particular number). This idea is a bit tricky to master, but it seems to resolve the apparent paradox between probability and measurement - the "collapse of the wave function". We all occasionally wonder how different our lives would have been if only X. It is a common perception that we have been dropped into this particular version of reality by "chance". You can gain some insight on this question by regarding the wave function as a "brute fact". It's just "real" and affords no "explanation", such as the "multi-worlds" interpretation.

It's easiest to see this with a slight rewrite : P'(U',K) - P(U,K) = Delta(K), where Delta is a huge list of differences in the Hilbert space components. Introduction of K means that "most" of the components become zero and can be ignored. For example, we can leave out the state of a snowball on Pluto without making any difference to Delta when K is any conceivable experiment performed on Earth.

This is indeed a powerful idea and it should apply to everything, including the phenomenon of consciousness. This means that the "state" of the mind should be a function of the state of the same mind an "instant" earlier whether or not we "know" the function in detail. How long an "instant"? Well we know from bran studies that an "instant" of about 1 millisecond is short enough. Perhaps we can think of our brains "calculating"[1] the wave function once per millisecond, resulting in brain waves of 1,000 Hz or less.

What sort of things go into "U"? What kind of function is P?

Let's let K restrict us to things that could be described as "memes", including memes of perception. So the effective field theory gives us the way that one set of memes produces the next. We can imagine K to be restricted to memes that are "held in the mind at the time" or "perceived". It's interesting to ask if this restriction (K) leaves anything out. This amounts to asking whether P' depends on anything other than P.

According to Hofstadter, P is all about categories and associations. So we expect P to generate a collection of "associated" memes from the collection of memes "in mind" in the previous instant. From brain studies, we know what sort of memes the brain actually produces. For example, "episodic memory" can produce a sequence of mental images - a moving picture in the brain. Our sense of location (relative to reference points) can produce a picture of where we are relative to the reference points, or a picture of where our car is in the parking lot relative to where we think we are.

With a little cleaning up and a few more examples, this may turn out to be a good "imagination pump" to help us think about what is going on in our heads (consciousness). Good examples might include "stream of consciousness" such as what happens when I walk into a room and realize I've forgotten what I'm doing here. Other examples massively provided by Hofstadter can be discussed in the light of "effective field theory of consciousness - EFTC".

EFTC can describe what we mean by the brain states called "memes" with a bit more precision. I was originally outraged by the claims made about the Blue Brain project, making a short list of why such a project hopelessly underestimated the problem of building a brain model. Quite naturally, this lead me to imagine what a brain model in silicon might look like. I think it's more productive to simply imagine that such a model is conceivable, in the same sense that the wave function assumes a lot about what its underlying facts might be with full knowledge that almost all these facts are unknowable. We can still cast our net over what is actually known about brain function to speak intelligibly about P' <= P, meaning "what we can know about the mind at one instant depends on what we can know about the mind an instant previously". The probabilistic aspect of the wave function is reflected in the approximate, fuzzy nature of memes (one of Hofstader's constant themes). What actually pops into our minds (and what we actually do) is a special case of all possible things that might have popped into our minds. The set of memes or images that actually do "pop into" our minds at any one time is not infinite, but over time, the flow of memes explores an infinite set of possible memes, including things we have never thought of before. Even things that nobody has ever thought of before.

It is important to think of "actions" as a special case of memes. Action is a sequence of 3-meme tuples: P=<things as they seem, things as I want them to seem, actions I take>. An instant later, P' is a similar tuple representing the "correction" my action has taken. All these elements have a probabilistic element (none are precise) and, as memes, are embedded in all the other "active" memes. So, for example, "things as I want them to seem" may be associated with the meme of "my job", "actions I take" may be associated with memes of tool use etc.

Hofstader's discussion of the brain as being able to host multiple "mini-minds" lets us consider the possibility that a sequence of actions may be performed without "core" memes "coming to mind". For example, we may drive down the road for a long time without thinking about the action of driving. Yet this complex action must be taking place in the brain somehow and there is no reason to give special status to memes "in mind". Hopefully, Hofstader, Dennett and others will shed some light on this issue.

Can we really know what is "in mind"? If you ask me "what are you thinking", doesn't this automatically push me into the "next instant" and trigger a sequence of memes that get progressively farther and farther from what I had "in mind" when you wondered what I was thinking? How accurate is our memory of what we were thinking? Trying to remember what was happening in a dream seems to irretrievably "burn away" the memory.

Is it possible to retrieve memories formed in the flow of consciousness associated with a "mini-mind"? Suppose I'm driving mindlessly down the road and my wife asks, How fast were you going around that last corner? or, Did you see how close you came to that red truck? Generally speaking it is sometimes possible to answer such questions (usually not). These "mini minds" seem to have their own private short term memory, such as the ability of my "mini-mind" to "keep an eye" on the speedometer, the engine sounds, cars on the road and what lane I'm in.

Returning to the subject of effective field theory, does K refer to what I'm "paying attention to" at the moment and what, if anything, could this mean? I know that it's easy to tell from the outside (watching brain waves) that a subject is "paying attention", but it's hard to define exactly what "attention" is, especially what we are talking about when we say we are "paying attention" to X. What is X?

[1] The idea of "calculating" the wave function is misleading. The wave function describes the difference between P' and P but we cannot assume (and it is generally false) that the function can be "solved" to "compute" P' from P. This is a subtle mathematical concept that becomes obvious when we start looking at the specifics of the dynamic non-linear equations that make up the "real" P of Quantum Mechanics and dynamic phenomena on all the larger scales. The difficulty arises not only in the Universe we happen to inhabit but in all conceivable Universes (it's a mathematical phenomenon).

The changes we observe are consistent with the wave function but that doesn't allow us to calculate any specific P' and P. We are stuck with measuring P' and P. If we make lots of measurements, they will turn out to be consistent with the probability distributions P' and P. What the next measurement will be is an educated guess. If we don't actually have the actual equations for P (as we do in Quantum Field Theory), it's impossible to even say that our measurements are consistent with our field theory.

The whole idea becomes useless unless we introduce some kind of model that at least approximates what we think is going on. For example, there are decent mathematical models that describe the probability that a neuron will "fire", given the state of the neuron an "instant before" and vice versa (the probability that the neuron was in a given state, given that it fired). This is an "effective field theory" that concerns itself just with what is happening in a single cell and systematically excludes a lot of things that are known to be going on within that cell but are hopefully irrelevant. Still, within its domain of applicability (and the domain of things we can measure), our results should yield observations consistent with the theory (the model). This is true even though the actual dynamic equations concerned are non-linear, which means that you can't "solve" them to "calculate" what the neuron will look like in the next instant, given what it looks like now.

It's not necessary to know how to "solve" the equations to produce intelligible and useful statements about how the system behaves over time, such as whether it goes through a repeated sequence of states (like a wave) or whether states are stable or whether they can become chaotic.

Henry Markham, Ray Kurzweil and the Artificial Brain

A Popular Fairy Tale

Comparing human brains to computers has become something of an industry lately. Like nuclear fusion, an emergent silicon mind seems to be always just around he next corner. The poster boy for this idea is Ray Kurzweil. If you want to watch a movie imagining precisely this vision, take a look at Transcendence. Transcendence is a tolerably good movie but brain capture fails in the movie for truly stupid reasons (plot spoiler) because it apparently fails to capture the "soul" and not due to any fundamental difficulty involved in creating a mind in a machine.

The monstrously expensive and spectacular failure of the Blue Brain project was conceived by Henry Markham. You can view his version of this fairy tale on TED. [1]

So How Big a Computer Do We Need?

The 19 million volumes in the US Library of Congress represent about 10 trillion characters - 10,000,000,000,000 characters. To make the analogy even approximately apt, we need to imagine each character in each book being a tiny, super-powerful computer with an operating system of millions of lines of code. As long as each of these tiny computers is 1,000 times faster than any computer we could ever build, and as long as the computers can communicate with each other at better than internet speed, we are getting into sight of the computational power of the human brain.

The Super Computer Between Your Ears

Let's take a look at how your brain "computes".

The neuron's closest analogue in a computer is the CPU chip (central processing unit), not the memory. Your computer may have terabytes of memory on board but that's almost irrelevant. Bits in memory are "dead". They only become useful when run through the CPU for processing. So we are talking about 100 billion CPU's -- one each per neuron. That's more than the number of CPU's on the planet at the moment. Per brain.

But this isn't quite right either. The neuron has complex behavior based on its genetic "programming", inputs, outputs and a bath of mostly unknown enzymes. Like every cell in the body, the neuron is as complex as a jumbo jet. You could probably model it with reasonable success with a complex program of some sort. So we basically have 100 billion PC's. That's full-scale computers consisting of on or more CPU's, a big chunk of memory (Terabytes),  and a few million lines of code. Each.

Synapse Simulation

But wait!

Active, dynamic "thinking" in the brain is not controlled the neuron. It's about how one neuron is influences another. Each connection is mediated by a synapse. There are about 100 trillion of these in your head. Each synapse connects an "upstream" neuron U with a "downstream" neuron D. Whether or not the connection U,D exists is a dynamic property of the brain. Connections are being formed and broken all the time. What's more, the strength of the connection varies due to processes like "thinking" and "experience". For example, the speed of connection depends on the existence of the myelin sheath around the axon - something that's built up or torn down depending on the dynamic "usefulness" of the connection. These connections are not "dumb" wires - each connection needs to be simulated, probably with a rather simple program, but there are trillions of them.

To make matters more interesting, the synapse is not just a dumb connector. Whether or not it will transmit a signal from U to D depends of a lot of things including the concentration and gradient of dozens of neurotransmitters in the synaptic cleft, the number of receptors for each type of neurotransmitter molecule (ready to pick up a signal from U to D) and the properties of the transmitting "upstream" part of the synapse (axial terminator). All these things are dynamic, changing thousands of times per second. Each factor depends on the others in complex ways.

Simulating all this for a synapse may be feasible, but you'd need 100 trillion powerful PC's to do it. It's hard to imagine how you would connect all these computers together but fortunately for our thought experiment, the connections are not that fast by electronic standards. The number of connections is mind boggling but we don't need to worry about the speed of the connections.

Simulating Synaptic Receptors

Optimistic authors tend to assume that such PC's would have no trouble simulating a synapse in real time (comparing the switching speed of computers to the signalling speed of neurons)  but the speed comparison needs to look at the speed of the chemical processes at the synapse, thousands of which take place in the nanosecond range simultaneously. The problem is that chemical reactions take place on a the "pica" scale, thousands of times smaller and thousands of times faster than silicon logic. We need 100 trillion PC's a thousand times faster than than any computer can be. And then there is the elephant in the room: it is by no means obvious that protein reactions can be simulated. It's a work in progress (to put it mildly). Definitely a day's work on a super computer to simulate just one reaction.

Programming and the Problem of Dynamic Non-Linear Systems

And then we need to program all this! Programming turns out to be not just hard but impossible. It's easy to imagine that the same program might work for 100 trillion synapses, but it could take decades of research to figure out how to approximately model just one synapse. At best, such research would give us a system of a few hundred dynamic non-linear equations. "Solving" such a system to predict or model behavior is known to be impossible. Things like that start to get hard with just three simple equations. Systems of equations that model change through time are called "dynamic". If the variables involved depend on each other in a non-trivial way (rates of change for example), the system is "non-linear". Almost always unsolvable, in the sense that you can't find value of all the variables that satisfy the equations.

And Then There's the Issue of Measurement

Measuring the current state of any particular synapse in a human head is also impossible for Quantum Mechanical reasons, so you have the additional problem of deciding the initial conditions for a few hundred parameters in each of 100 trillion synapses. Finding the initial conditions involves solving a set of dynamic non-linear equations which is impossible.

But Let's Not Give Up Entirely

There is no way to do this, but perhaps we can imagine a start ...

Memory elements (bits) in computers are "dead" and need to be picked up by the CPU to be processed into new memory elements (bits). Like cars that spend 99% of their time parked, almost all the "bits" in the computer sit around waiting to be funnelled through the CPU.

On the other hand, in modern computers, random access memory is refreshed thousands of times per second (it's read out and written back automatically). We could imagine a system that made the write-back a function of more than just the bit being written back. That would be referred to as a massively parallel architecture, orders of magnitude more powerful than today's fastest super computers. But still not beyond he realm of imagination. That would make the memory a "thinking" machine, constantly "unpacking" ideas at thousands of times per second. For this to work, you'd need a way to represent "ideas" in a form that could be quickly and efficiently "unpacked" into new "ideas". I can imagine a structure involving hundreds of thousands of "concepts" (English words for example) where the memory function is to write back concept B if concept A is active and B is "strongly" related to A. That would make "B" active and concepts related to "B" would be activated on the next cycle. In this picture, "A is related to B" is our synapse.

The modern Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is the kind of parallel processor we need but we need one a few billion times bigger (same size, more capacity), thousands of times faster and with the ability to program itself on the fly. Then all we need to do is figure out what an "idea" is ...

But Maybe We Can Design a Better Brain

The one thing that keeps the "strong AI" idea alive is that a human-designed brain may turn out to be many thousands of times more efficient than its meat counterpart. We shouldn't need to simulate the actual brain to produce the "mind". If this is so, we need to understand the architecture of the mind itself (independent of how it "runs" on meat). To put it kindly, this process is in its infancy. Most AI research uses brute force to solve practical problems and has no interest in how the human mind actually works. (Hofstader hardly attends AI conferences any more).

For now, we are stuck with the meat computer between our ears which apparently zips along much faster than 100 trillion super computers. If you ask me, the singularity is not as close as Ray Kurzweil imagines.

The Blue Brain Project

The Blue Brain project is an attempt to model a tiny brain based on actual data on the brain structure of a rat. It is not even an attempt to model the entire rat's brain - just a patch of its tiny neocortex.

Artist's conception-Fractal Cortical Column

The project shows the sweeping simplifications and assumptions that are required, along with the vast computer facilities to model even these assumptions. The project investigates an intermediary structure, larger than the neuron and smaller than brain modules such as the visual cortex. This is the "cortical column". There is no general definition of what, exactly, this "column" is, but the outer surfaces of the brain (neocortex) seem to have a consistent structure of vertically associated neurons in "vertical" columns (stacked inwards from the surface). The "wiring" within the column and between columns is not random (widely considered to be a fractal structure - each column being daughters of a single stem cell). It has long been recognized that the cortical column is promising both as a subject of study (how does it work, what does it do?) and a subject of computer modelling if you happen to own a super computer. 

The Blue Brain Project seems to be the ultimate evidence that Hofstader's line of investigation (at the "meme" level) is sadly far from the mainstream, even though his model of the mind is, so far, the most successful. "Blue Brain" is working on the reductionist assumption that understanding of the mind will "emerge" from a sufficiently detailed understanding of the "fundamental" aspects of the brain, just like Quantum Mechanics is supposed to be a "Theory of Everything". The hopelessness of this idea is illustrated by the goals of the project, which attempt to model a tiny patch of cortical columns based on the brain structure of a rat.

Literature on the cortical column seems to focus on brain processes at the very origin of perception (such as the visual cortex). The assumption that the same processes are involved in (for example) formation of new concepts is so far not justified by the research.

[1] Recent reports indicate that the Blue Brain project is not going well. Markram pitches the project is here as a TED project. He is stunningly naive about how his "top down" idea of how the brain works. He parades the reductionist assumptions of how this can be "unpacked" by simulating it all on the computer. His talk illustrates a popular technique of "brain talk". Markram talks as if "columns" are well defined, let alone understood, just as others talk about "neurons" as some kind of "explanation" of thought. He mentions "10 million synapses", somehow ignorant of he fact that there are 10 trillion. He lies about "having the math" to describe neurons with a "handful" of equations. He lies by creating the impression that having such equations amounts to solving them. He lies about attempting a "real time" simulation. His bottom line: "It's not impossible to build a human brain and we will do it in 10 years".

Daniel Dennett and His Intuition Pumps

Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" has inspired me, at last, to write a book. Maybe. I'd call it "Better Intuition Pumps" (BIP).

Dennett's book is a lovely "intuition pump" in its own right, but it cries out to be rewritten, refuted or at least challenged.

In other posts, I'll flesh out possible chapters in BIP, but I can outline some main points here.

Dennet champions as "Scientific" discipline for the study of mind, which he calls heterophenomenology "H". The idea is that anything important about the mind can be learned from the "outside", through experiments, interviews etc.  The data "H" works with is the set of observable, documented "observations" along these lines.

My problem with H is that it doesn't actually study the mind. Dennett is making the assumption that the mind is, for all intents and purposes, the brain. But one would think this is exactly what he needs to prove.

"Pumps" sets up a false alternative. Either the mind is the brain or the mind is something "inside" the brain or somehow associated with the body, like a "soul" or "homunculus". Why are those the only alternatives?

His mistake seems to be assuming his conclusion. To escape this mistake, we need to take a closer look at what a "mind" is. I happen to have one that we can examine as closely as time permits. Mine.

Here is the first "Better" Intuition pump. Consider the "mind", M, to be identical to the first-person experience of the Universe. This makes no assumption about the brain or, for that matter, a "soul". Moreover, we can use H techniques to investigate this mind in as much depth as we wish.

My discussion of M will show that it is not possible, even in principle, to determine anything of interest about M using H. In particular, H studies brains not minds.

A second BIP is the "Xombie". This is related to Dennet's "philosophical Zombie", a fascinating creature that is identical in all respects to a human being except he lacks the experience of being human. There is "nobody home". If you think that such a being is impossible, you are, according to Dennet, a victim of the "Zombie Hunch". You think that there must be something other than what shows "from the outside". Dennet challenges the reader by saying that this is "just a hunch" and needs proving. Otherwise, the default view is H, which assumes that we can never tell the difference between a Zombie and a person with "real" experience of the world.

I hold that Dennet's Zombie is interesting only in a rather trivial way, by proposing a way to "build" a Zombie in a particular way - a Xombie. The difference between a Xombie and a Zombie is that we specify in principle how the Xombie manages to "fake" consciousness. In summary, we imagine a robot that is exposed to he totality of human experience of the world from "birth". The Xombie can fake having a "mind" because we maintain that the mind itself is M, the totality of first person experience of the Universe. Thus, our Xombie is, by definition, "conscious".

Then, the question boils down to whether we could, in principle, actually build such a robot. This question veers of into what we might call "garden variety philosophy" as we look into things that make up an "M-like" mind but may be hard to implement, even in principle. Here are a few things in my mind that may be hard to implement:

• I know that fish don't wear hearing aids
• I may mistakenly believe that Napoleon was King of Spain
• I don't understand the math of General Relativity and I know I don't

My suspicion is that the "boundary" between the known Universe of M and the "known unknowns", the "unknown unknowns" and so forth may be hard to model.

IBM's "Deep Blue" tells us that such things may not be as hard as they look.

But of course, we are still left with the suspicion that our robot doesn't have a real experience of the world. He has no real "first person" - he just fakes it. But at least we have a better idea of what he's faking: a deep, intimate, long-term relationship with the Universe. In other words, the Universe itself plays a large (perhaps indispensable) role in a "mind". The brain is just a detail.

There are other things to say about H. What, exactly, are the "results" of H - the theories, generalizations and hypotheses that make H a "Science". A Science is not just a menagerie of curious phenomena. What is H about? If H leaves out what I regard as the most important aspect of M (the Universe), what is it studying? My position is that you can't make generalizations about "minds" because they are by definition unique. Any generalization you make will be about brains, "typical" human behaviour etc. Is it really meaningful to talk about what people on average claim to experience? Haven't you left the baby out with the bath water?

A simple example can suffice. Ask our subjects to describe the first time they made love. It's hard to imagine that that all the "H-data" in the world would come close to "investigating" the real, personal experience of the individual, which is, after all, what we are supposed to be investigating.

I'm sure Dennet is familiar with this objection, but I'm not sure he is aware that there are an infinite number of objections like this. In fact, the infinite "space" of M is precisely the most impressive feature of M itself. This "space" can be explored by H, but such an exploration leaves theories of the brain far behind.

Another BIP is "Object Oriented" design (OOD), which would replace Dennet's lame chapter that tries to explain how computers work.  OOD explains everything about computers from the microscopic structure of memory to the emergent structure of the group mind - the Internet - and everything in between. It is perhaps one of the most powerful set of memes ever invented. It as a subset of human language that has he advantage of being totally unambiguous and "mappable" to the "real world". With OOD in hand, one can ask interesting questions about how the Internet acquires something like an M-type mind. OOD can be used to explore complexity and emergent phenomena.

Another BIP comes from self-organizing structures, which would complement Bennett's chapter on the game of Life. Besides being built entirely out of OOD components, the Internet is also self-organizing. 

So, computers and the Internet are worth including as "imagination pumps" in their own right.

It would be worth discussing whether a living thing is "sorta" an OOD creation. I'd say it's not and the differences may turn out to be fundamental - in other words, it may be impossible to build a carbon-based living thing following only OOD principals. If true, this would be hugely interesting. There seem to be serious problems with any attempt to "model" living cells, organelles, synapses and tissues using OOD ideas. These also happen to reveal some objections to the idea that a living thing is, in some sense, a "machine". Does this mean that there is some fundamental obstacle to building a machine mind.

Finally, Denett's books tend to present a rather simplified view of the brain. His "neurons" and "genes" are almost mythical creatures, no much different from demons. They are philosophical constructions - "memes", with almost all real behavior of brain tissue left out. What do we learn when we introduce real brain structures into Dennet's discussions? Is there a simplified version of the real brain that could serve as an "imagination pump"? Would it be useful to keep in mind that Dennet's discussions that seem to talk about the brain, using words that seem to refer to real things may trick us in the same way that Astrology tricks us by talking about real stars?

There seem to be quite a few publications around that describe real brain function. Worth a look. At first glance, we see a lot of OOD-based concepts.

Authority: The Core of Religion

There are many reasons why humans are attracted to the idea of a spirit-filled Universe.

"Theory of mind", which gives he brain a perception (not just a "theory") that other beings are conscious and act with intent just as we do. These days, we see this as a brain function that does not reflect reality, just as the illusion that things get smaller as they move away from us. Even our modern, scientifically-trained minds make us see life where there is movement.

Another consequence of they way we are built is a survival strategy that involves manipulation of the environment (tool use being the most obvious aspect of it). We expect to control the world around us and we are frustrated at the limitation of our power to do so. It is easy to imagine that the world can be (or actually is) controlled by a mind and a mind can be persuaded to help us do things we can't do for ourselves.

The illusion of time is strong in the human brain. We don't remember the past as well as we think but we're pretty good at using what we do remember to sharpen our survival skills. Almost by accident, in combination with our language skills, this gives us a "racial memory" that we fill with a mythical past that stretches beyond what we remember as individuals.

We are also dimly aware of the future, which is full of peril, especially to our own lives, which seem to be pre-ordained to end as mysteriously as they began. Quite naturally, we think about this a lot and wrap our thoughts with myths and stories.

Finally, language us a curse as well as a blessing. Language is unable to effectively describe its own limitations. We are always susceptible to the fallacy of confusing words with the things they stand for or, in the big picture, confusing stories with life itself.

But all this doesn't explain the role of what we refer to as a "religion". It doesn't explain the idea of "heresy" or our willingness to kill those who tell different stories, perceive different spirits behind reality and expect a different future. What I have said about human psychology is far from controversial, yet "religion" uniquely sets itself against Science, vigorously and sometimes violently defending the view that the alternate reality it constructs is not a mere product of human creativity but an account of reality itself. To the "believer", the world we live in is the illusion.

Religion is a byproduct of "civilization". We generally date the rise of civilization (literally, people living in cities) from the approximately 4000 BC, where we start to see fortified towns, kings, armies and writing to tell us what was going on. For thousands of years, the story of civilization is a chronicle of endless war and destruction as the number of "civilizations" dwindled and their power grew, along with the destructive power of their armies. People started dying in these wars by the tens of thousands. Hereditary Kings started to loot their neighbors to increase the wealth and power of their families.

But still, the people in these city-states had the same psychological needs as they had had for at last 30,000 years. They still saw their fortunes controlled by spirits, often the local god of a city or town. Sometimes the spirit behind natural forces (such as the storm or the sea).  Reading the Old Testament, perhaps the oldest volume of ancient history in popular use, we see a new role of God: He is responsible for victory in war (along with the slaughter of the enemy) and, conversely, defeat in war is when we fail to please God by following priestly law. This is a neat equation that keeps the priests in business no matter what happens.

In this context, what was going on in the mind of the citizen - a mind that has not changed since the days when "philosophy" was stories you shared with close relatives around a fire?

"Theory of Mind" has evolved into a complex system of theology.  The alternate universe is populated with an "official" pantheon, including gods who need to be flattered into sponsoring human activity by paying a new class of citizen: the priesthood. Vocabulary expands, the stories are written down and assume the status of what we would now call "history" and "Science". Cultural "memory" is collapsed and simplified, creating the illusion that current mythology is what it has been "forever", obscuring the role of human creativity.

Ability to control the world has expanded in some ways but narrowed in others. Weapons of war have improved to the point where they are more of a threat to the average citizen than a guarantee of survival. While agriculture has provided more calories per person, it has also made the city-state far more vulnerable to natural forces, such as drought and flood. Concentration of wealth has made the city-state attractive plunder for neighbors. Plundering neighbors has become an attractive alternative to finding new "raw" agricultural land. And yet, the illusion of control along with the expectation of control has grown. The fortunes of the city state seem to be in the hands of Kings and Priests. Compared to the freedom of the hunter-gatherer, the control of the individual over his own life has been reduced to the vanishing point.

In these civilizations, we begin to see an alliance between the priesthood and the Kings, which ties the political fortunes of the ruling class to the mythology of the culture. Failure to observe religious rites becomes treason. Acceptance of priestly authority becomes equivalent to acceptance of Kingly authority. For dissenters, it is no longer possible to just pack up and leave, since the whole world is chopped up into territory controlled by Kings.  Challenge to this arrangement is relatively recent. It dominated world politics for the last 2,000 years at least, but the system is still with us. A visit to 21st century Saudi Arabia will provide a modern experience of this kind of culture. No time machine is required.

But the strange thing is that the ordinary citizen has lost his natural relationship with the "spirit world". He still craves some measure of control. He still has a deep urge to influence the future and is still in full possession of the illusion that the spirits may be bribed or flattered into bending he normal course of history. How can this urge be satisfied? Well, you go to the experts: those who claim to know the mind of God. Those who know the rituals that are effective to bend the sympathy of God your way. Why just one God? The reason is simple. More than one God would imply competition for the priests. Even so, minor competition is allowed through the proliferation of thousands of local "saints", who stand in for the ancient Gods who ruled the territory of a single city. You can pick your Saint to make your case before the "one" God. If you can't shake your instinct to plead your case before an idol, you can still get your "fix" by praying to the saint of your choice. Donations appreciated of course.

But how does this work? Why do people accept the dry formulae and wordy constructions as substitutes for their in-bred passion for spiritual experience? The simple answer is "authority". They go to someone who is guaranteed to have the right answer. Not surprisingly, this authority will make sure that you distrust your own judgment, even convincing you that following your own mind is a mortal sin. Priesthood is not a good choice for a small business start-up.

Where does the priest get his authority? The answer (ludicrous as it may seem) is that he got it by "laying on of hands" by priests who had the authority, who got it from other priests, going all the way back to Peter, who got is authority from Jesus. Assuming that "being right" can be passed on like a virus this way, we are left with the obvious question of why we should think Jesus was definitely right about everything.

For Jesus to be right about everything, he needs to be "divine", a God. For this to work, you need to believe in gods, specifically this god and particularly not other gods. That's a huge leap and, historically, it has been opposed literally as soon as it arose. It was heresy punishable by death in Judea (it's why Jesus was crucified) and the "Christians" were being put to death for treason and/or heresy for centuries. Eventually, the divine status of Jesus was decided by committee and enforced by the time-old alliance between the priesthood and the King (Roman Emperor Constantine in this case).

It is important to understand that Jesus needs to be divine so He can claim ultimate authority, not the other way around (i.e. Jesus is not "right" because he's God). Before the era of political religion, the Gods were much more fun. "Infallibility" was not among their powers.

A similar story can be told about Islam, where the authority of Mohammed comes directly from Allah, but requires frequent slaughter of dissenters to this very day.

What about Buddha, who is so innocently portrayed to Western readers as "just a man". Anyone serious about Buddhism will quickly discover that a "real" Buddhist or Zen master traces his authority all the way back to Buddha by a process that's not very different from laying on of hands. The "Dharma", the teachings of Buddha have been elaborated and expanded by these hereditary authorities to create enough variation to fit just about any lifestyle. The Dharma itself is claimed to be eternally true (i.e., not subject to discussion or verification), very much like the "Word" of the Gospel of John, which effectively claimed he teachings of Jesus to be on par with, say, the law of gravity. Buddhist masters don't tend to go around making war on dissenters, but they don't spare scorn for "Westernized" versions of Buddhism that sell books in the West. At least according to the Buddhist masters, heresy is still possible in Buddhism, even though Buddha himself told his followers to be skeptical of everything, including his own teachings.

But what if we reject "religion" wholesale? Are we then able to jettison the workings of our brains that make us see spirits behind every tree and impose "meaning" on every experience.

No.

Our propensity for religion is primary. We invented Gods to satisfy our need to make sense of the world and feel some slight measure of control. Especially for those not blessed with a creative mind, nation states, political leaders and political philosophy will do as well. Even Science can be twisted into a source of authority by those who say things like "the majority of Scientists agree ..." or "Science says ...".

In fact, "Science" only tells us what is not true. Science is perpetually in the business of overturning authority. Attempts to co-opt Science for political reasons tend to come to a bad end, as do political movements that systematically deny Science.

What Science has done is to shoot down all support for any particular version of "God" put up by endless defenders of the concept.  Beginning with the Greeks, philosophy has provided us with an impressive tool kit to defend ourselves against fallacy. We are now able to use language more carefully than ever before if we chose to do so. World Religions, based as they are on a vast tissue of fallacy, cannot survive logical analysis, let alone "real world" verification.

Perhaps for the first time in human history, we can enjoy a complete divorce between what we know about the real world and what is claimed by human authority, especially what is claimed by political authority. We are also more aware than ever about the difference between what we "know" and what is actually happening in the Universe. Paradoxically, this can free our creativity, enjoy our lives and deal with our fears without paying a tax to priests for the privilege. There is no longer a need to judge the fantasies of other people as "false" or worthy of suppression.

In spite of the official claim of Science to provide only negative information, it turns out that we know an incredible amount about the world. So much, in fact, that we are amused by the world view of the "ancients" who, somehow, are regarded as authorities on everything except what turned out to be observably false. What is noticeably different about what we know now is that our knowledge is so impersonal. It's not as useful or apparently relevant as what, for example, the authors of the Bible thought they knew about creation (Genesis is a moral fable. The Big Bang is disturbingly impersonal). For example, astrology pretends to tell us about ourselves and our future but astronomy is almost entirely irrelevant. This illustrates my point that we have divorced knowledge from human fantasy. We are no longer in a position to determine truth by decree or authority.

Truth is now discovered "out there", not in the mind of some creative theologian. But there is also a uniquely human "truth" about our shared hopes and experience. It's important to know and appreciate the difference.