Emergence

I was thinking about coming up with a unifying theme for the history of mind and the history of computation and the term "emergence" seemed appropriate for both. However, my imagination took the wrong off ramp as it often does and I started visualizing the physical emergence of man as it would be seen by a Man from Mars. He would discover evidence of termites or algae not just by finding the "organism" but by discovering their impact, constructions and byproducts. Even if time had erased all direct evidence of human organisms, there would be no problem discovering Man, just as we discovered dinosaurs.

There is a link between this view and the problem we have fining boundaries for "mind". I think that "mind" cannot be seen as "emergent" in one organism but something that happens in a society of organisms, especially in their language or technology. Similarly, what an organism is - what counts as species for all other living things - is about the phenotype: the physical differences between organisms in form and behaviour. In man, the differences between cultures and over time is enormous, far exceeding that between related species. I have long summarized this viewpoint by saying that a man with an axe is, for all intents, a different species than a man who knows nothing about axes. The axe is part of the phenotype of homo-with-axe.

But we can go further. Our automobiles and the roads we build for them are part of "us". Coal and steel are part of our diet. Plastics, carbon dioxide and  PCB's are part of our excrement,  just as computers are part of us, like any other tool.

So the "emergence" of man turns out to be one big picture after all - possibly a bigger picture than I set out to capture. In the attempt to "simplify", I lost the focus and had to stand back all the way to Mars.

What "computer" evidence would the Martian archaeologist about Man? Perhaps it would be the remains of all those "things that count things". Maybe a clue that Man had a mind. Good question.

Daniel Dennett: "From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds"

This talk introduces a recent book by Dennett, rehashing and updating his theories on the mind. I have the hard copy of the book on order. These comments refer to his summary of it delivered as part of the Google Talks series.

It is much to Dennett's credit that, as he goes along, his ideas become more precise and articulate. His examples are more apt, his analogies closer to the "essence". He never seems to say, "I was totally wrong about this", but he does make progress - partly by not taking himself too seriously. It is much to Dennett's credit that he is rarely caught in an "argument" -- he sees an element of truth in almost everything, always putting his own ideas on the table without allowing opposition to get personal. This is good because he gets a lot of opposition.

"Consciousness Explained" (1991) was a serious over-reach. Rather a mess that didn't come close to delivering on the promise in its title.

Yet, in the intervening 25 years or so, Dennett has wrestled with the ideas in "Consciousness" and made them almost work. There are many signs of progress ...

COMPUTERS

His facile understanding (1971) of the way computers work has been replaced by a deeper insight -- especially contrasting the machine with the living cell. Yet he manages to navigate the tricky issue of what is and is not alive ("Animus"). It's about "internationality" - behavour that makes little sense if you don't take into account a future "purpose". He's very good at showing that this behavour does not necessarily involve consciousness. I note that this particular talk was delivered to the folks at Google, who arguably know more about computers than anyone else on the planet. There were not patronizing giggles from the audience. Questions from the audience were respectful - it was a dialogue between peers.

COMPETENCE

He makes it clear that some entities are more "competent" than others even if they don't actually know what they are doing. Increasing competence is happening in evolution even though it is a mindless process. It is, in the end, governed by a close partnership between the entity and its environment. Not all things are possible but "R&D" is required to find out what is actually possible. In a sense, "thinking" takes place in partnership with reality! How very Zen!

It's worth noting that he sees his pet 3D vision of the evolution of mind from blind chance to intelligent design as not a picture of what is real but an arbitrary choice of 3 axes for the purpose of explanation. In other words, he's very aware of the role of analogy (as brilliantly explained in "Surfaces and Essences"). There are good analogies and bad ones. Dennett is aware of these things as "memes" - (thinking tools) things that evolve to become more useful or are discarded as misleading. This applies to the meme of the meme itself, which may become much more useful than it was when it was born in the pages of "Selfish Gene".

REDUCTIONISM

In his early years, Dennett was literally the poster child for "reductionism", the idea that behavour of systems was "merely" the result of the behavour of their constituent parts. Dennett has become very good not only at accepting the idea of emergence (the whole is more than the parts) but explaining how this becomes true. A good theory of emergence (the classic being the theory of gases based on basic Newtonean physics) don't just explain emergent behavour but explicity tie it down to what is going on at a simpler level. This is never easy.

MEMES

Dennett is still very respectful of the ideas of his friend Richard Dawkins and recommends the book that made Dawkins famous (Selfish Gene). It is interesting to note that Dawkins has since downplayed the idea of memes presented in that book. Dennett, on the other hand, has picked up the idea and run with it. Dennett's "memes" are useful and, in fact, it's possible for Dennett to talk about memes without using the word. An echo of the talking points of "four horsemen" of Atheism is still to be found here, as Dennett speaks of the virus-infected ape - the viruses being memes. This is gratifyingly close to my term: "The Programmable Ape". In both cases, we are referring to the fact that our minds consist largely of culturally determined "memes". To understand this idea, it is not necessary to see the genetic evolution theory of memes as literally true (it is hopelessly imprecise) but it's a great analogy and points precisely to what Zen would claim the "mind" is an illusion - there are only "ideas" running around in our heads. No "observer".

It is culture and especially language that is evolving and getting smarter at an exponential rate over the last 100 years or so.

Dennett's little talk is perhaps the clearest explanation I've seen of what is going on and why. My old "Dragon Theory" (now Programmable Ape) blog explores a special case of this insight - especially the darker implications.

LIFE ITSELF AND "ANIMUS"

Dennett does us a big favor by breaking down the concept of "life" (not merely consciousness). We still don't know how life arose but Dennett has provided a way of talking about the emergence of life without the need for mystical language, a mysterious miraculous event or a whole set of new words to describe what is going on.

Ursala Franklin - The Real World of Technology

This is a series of Massey Lectures, available on-line through the Ideas archive or as a book.

The lectures are well-worth reading. Franklin is a deep and original thinker. For the purposes of this blog, her most significant idea is the way that technology turns society into a collection of compliant robots - a specific reference to the "Dragon Theory" idea.

How does this work?

Technology demands "work" to be parcelled out into steps or specialized components. Each piece of work needs to "fit" with all the others, so "good" work is basically work that tightly complies with specifications. Human qualities of judgment are ruled out. Any identification with the end product is removed. This in what Marx called "alienation". But Marx traced alienation to the fact that the worker no longer owned the means of production or the product of his labour. Perhaps the deeper reality was the switch to mass production, centralized because the power source was central (first water, then steam).

Ms Franklin provides an almost mathematical proof that technology itself leads to "assimilation". The industrial revolution lead to an emergent structure of society in which people need "jobs" to participate. This re-defines work, what it is to be human and even the physical structure of the city.

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.

Emergence - A Different Universe - Robert B. Laughlin

Laughlin's "A Different Universe" provides a sweeping re-examination of the idea of "emergence", along with a telling criticism of the doctrine of reductionism.  Although I'm not sure Daniel Dennett would admit it, he's a poster child of reductionism. He basically claims that the "mind" can be completely understood by examining a subject (i.e., the brain of the subject) from the "outside". The mind is "nothing more" than the activity of neurons in the brain.

Opposed to this view is the idea of emergence: that a system of "simple" components can spontaneously reorganize itself into something new, specifically something with properties and behavour that cannot be derived, even in principal, from laws governing the components. That's Laughlin.

Laughlin's book is a bit of a disorganized mess, but it's possible to glean some very important ideas from it. He makes some powerful general observations about the nature of emergence, along with a host of examples (most of which require a post-doctoral understanding of physics to understand). Let's assume we have a system S (quantum mechanics for example) and an "emergent" system E (classical physics, for example).

• What we know about S will shed little light or no light on phase transitions in E. For example, quantum physics cannot explain why water freezes into 11 different crystal configurations.
• Attempts to "explain" emergent phenomena in E using the laws of S are often wild goose chases. They tend to absorb huge amounts of time and money, yielding nothing useful. Laughlin uses the example of DNA transcription in the ribozom, where the "alphabet" of DNA is magically transcribed into actual proteins, the building blocks of life. This can be seen as an emergent boundary, where admittedly complex but straightforward DNA chemistry is translated into the domain of biochemistry. Laughlin claims that nobody has the foggiest idea how this works and it's such a huge problem that nobody wants to go near it.
• The boundaries between S and E tend to be chaotic, in the sense that, using what we know about S, we can't predict behavour in E. Characteristically, such efforts produce, at best, multiple "explanations" or "explanations" that could equally well describe behavior other than the one observed.
• Laughlin goes further to guess that this "chaotic" boundary is the doorway to the "higher" state. For example, he thinks that the ribozom depends on chaos to work.

Laughlin's theme is to cast doubt on our idea that there are "fundamental" laws in the universe, such as the "Theory of Everything". This is a serious issue since some scientists and a few science writers think we are on the verge of closing the book on new discoveries. To sustain this view, one must arbitrarily classify some discoveries (usually the laws of quantum mechanics) as "fundamental" and the rest as "derived". This ignores the fact that actual derivation of laws describing behavour of emergent systems famously resist "explanation" in terms of more "fundamental" law.

In fact, Laughlin gives many examples of the fact that "fundamental" law is inferred from experiments at the classical, "human" scale (how could it be otherwise?). Strictly speaking, the world of quantum mechanics does not exist except for the effects it supposedly has on systems of vastly greater scale.

I was particularly interested in Laughlin's offhand dismissal of Evolution as a "law" in the emergent world of biology. It's not that he thinks evolution is not real. He's saying that evolution doesn't explain everything and that biologist tend to regard it as the basis for their entire discipline. This is not so far from the teachings of Stephen J. Gould, a Darwinian fundamentalist, who nonetheless insists that there are many reasons other than evolution to "explain" the morphology and behavior of actual animals.  This is to say that evolution is always at work but it's not the only thing at work.

Another one of Laughlin's one-sentence dismissals refers to "socialism". Laughlin treats human society as a system emergent from the nature of individual human beings. Obviously, many different societies can "emerge" from the same group of humans. Just which society emerges is almost impossible to predict (it can depend on one charismatic person, for example). It's also obvious that the form that emerges is insensitive to a vast array of factors, such as the lives and wishes if most of the people involved. This is typical of an emergent system. What Lauglin is claiming is that "socialism" is not one of these possible arrangements of society. He does so without offering the slightest evidence, but he leaves us with the interesting idea that society is, in fact, an emergent system and that some systems will be "stable" and others not. The "laws" governing an emergent society will depend on exactly which society emerges. Interestingly, the "phase change" - the change from one form to another in the same group of people - is bound to be chaotic. For example, the French revolution flipped around through many configurations, eventually returning to a monarchy. Millions died in the process.

Laughlin has few kind words to say about undergraduate education in his own field. He views the common perception of quantum mechanics as a hoax, leading to apparent paradoxes such as Shrodinger's Cat and collapse of the wave function.  Bottom line, matter is not a "wave" and a "particle". It's just a wave.  Particles lack most of the properties we associate with matter, most notably a specific position.His discussion of how quantum events are detected at the human level is instructive, but leaves the reader hungry for more detail.