Proto-Life

In this blog, I introduce two categories of "life" that may be regarded as controversial or "merely" a matter of definition. "Supermind" is at the "high" end. At the low, primitive, "old" end is "proto-life" - life before (or simply without) DNA ("before" being evolutionary speculation I avoid).

Here is a good presentation on work on "proto-life". I'll try to add more examples as I come across them.

Current work in this field can be regarded as an "existence proof": if there is any way we can make "life" out of non-living molecules, there may be others, one of which presumably actually happened. For my purposes, it's sufficient to see how such systems are possible, at least in theory. I leave the discovery of actual evolutionary processes to others. I avoid using "evolutionary fairy dust" to support the ideas put forward here. This blog does not put forward or support any particular theory about the sequence of events or mechanism of actual evolution here on Earth.

Among serious researchers in the field, "proto-life" is expected to exist in an environment (which can be seen as part of the proto-life system) which is:

• Not in equilibrium - the possibility of change is key;
• Liquid - hard for us to imagine life without some possibility of movement, but I'm not sure about this one ...
• Allowing making and breaking of chemical bonds - "metabolism"

For my purposes, it's sufficient to notice that the programming of this system - the rules that make it do what it does - are physical and chemical. There is no "abstraction" of the rules into some other medium like DNA. It's all chemistry and physics. On the other hand, the laws of physics and chemistry depend on something even deeper, which emerges again at the "top" of the pyramid in the supermind.

This is the subtle point, worth careful consideration. The "laws" of physics and chemistry are known to the supermind. They are a special case of "knowledge" that restricts (or should restrict) the "ideas" that make up the supermind. This means that each level of "mind" contains all the others below it. Another way of seeing it is that the supermind can't act in the world in ways that violate the laws of physics and chemistry.

As soon as we move "up" the pyramid of complexity to the DNA level, there is a separation between the "stuff" of the organism and the "stuff" of the "program" or guiding "software". DNA is a 4-letter code that just happens to be implemented in a huge molecule, but it is the code that matters. At the DNA level and levels above it, the "program" is abstract - "pure" information. It is also, interestingly, a "proto-language" that "talks" mainly about proteins. "Up" the pyramid a different kind of language will emerge that "talks" about a much wider range of things.

"Godel Escher Bach" is the book that made Hofstader famous.  Along the way to illustrating his central point (Godel's Theorem), the book this exposes the absurdity of computer intelligence simply by imagining that we switch the medium or "substrate" of the program from electronics to an ordinary book. He imagined, for example, someone using a huge rule book to translate Engish to Chinese by rote, then asking if this person (or the rulebooks)  "understood" Chinese. Somehow, when you think of the program running on a computer, there is a temptation to answer "yes" to this question. To Hofstadter, we owe the insight that the "substrate" of the "program" matters but not in the way we thought.

In the case of "proto-life", we can, indeed, separate the "meaning" of the "program" from the substrate. This is akin to Dennett's idea of a design without a designer. The "designer" is hidden in the "laws of physics" or, as the ancients would have put it, the "Tao". But, as they would have put it, there is danger in confusing talk about the Tao (even the "math") with the Tao itself. Broadly speaking, "proto-life" seems to emerge directly from the "Tao" with no programming needed.

Mind and Machine - An Outline

The project draws an extensive parallel between computer technology, specifically computer programming languages and the open-ended aspect of culture that includes language but also the wider methods, especially those aspects of technology that are used to explain or communicate culture. Humans interact with computers in many other ways, including paying for them and using them to "make money" (computers become actors in the "real economy" with huge impact on the "economy", which is right-wing word for "society").You can't entirely ignore the broad issue of "automation", which is perhaps the topic of most interest to the average reader. Seen from this angle, Part 1 (below) is a primer on the nature of automation, especially "computerization". Most primers on computers ignore the way computers actually "work" in the world and focus on aspects that most people do not need to know (such as CPU's, disks, RAM etc.)

This project drills down to the history of computation before "computers". Many of the problems we blame on computers are thousands of years old.

I'd like to make some approximate distinction between language and art as means of communicating culture, but there is an overlap and a lot of cross-talk, which should provide material for a chapter. These are not distinct capabilities that you see in discussions of "bicameral" brain (left and right brain). In fact, this project may be seen as documenting the complex relationship between "logic" and "art".

"Intelligence" is embedded in the language and only appears in the individual through a process of assimilation. The parallel to this in the machine world is virtualization, where some part of the class library is loaded into a specific hardware platform for a specific purpose. This "purpose" is ultimately a bridge between the machine and the mind - a "User Interface" in some cases or in others, simply the purpose that a human designer has "baked in" to the program. An important topic is therefore to describe how the machine "mind" maps to the human mind in specific situations. Interesting special cases can be described as a specific human interacts with a specific device, such as a smart phone.

The mapping of the human mind, especially "purposes" to machine design is a particularly interesting facet of the discussion. Russel's ideas are relevant, where he includes the goals of society as a whole along with ideas like "uncertainty" in his ideal AI implementation. A machine can't "learn" unless it knows what it doesn't know - a tricky proposition even for a human.

Part 1: From machine language to AI

• My summer as a computer
• Logic as the free-floating computer. The abacus. Logic as both human and computer language.
• Clay tablets - the first external memory. Written language first used to count and only gradually to "account" - slow acceptance of modern idea of money.
• From machine language to COBOL - surely we can just "talk" to the computer
• Structured programming and the Object model - the role of symmetry, elegance and aesthetics
• Virtual machines and the Cloud - Java. Software floats free from hardware platform.
• The shifting role of the computer - from the math department to sexting
• The emerging role of the computer as generic master of logic games, especially the logic game of money
• Rising anxiety 

Part 2: Models of Mind

• Descartes creates the "mind body problem" by a quaint machine analogy
• Dennett struggles to "explain" the mind as "kinda" like a computer
• Hofstadter and Jaynes hint at how the mind actually works 
• The "cloud" paradigm calls for a total re-think of what we mean by a "computer" and hints that a similar re-definition of "mind" is called for
• Common buried assumptions in language and computer applications
• Models of value. The rocky road to our current assumptions about money and the value of life itself.
• Models of human decision-making
• The bureaucracy as a machine (Dragon Theory)

Part 3: The User Interface

• Primitive user interfaces - switches, paper tape ...
• The smart phone as an example of a 2017 "User Interface". Who is the "user"?
• Who is the "designer"?
• How computers and people are embedded in the logic of money
• How are humans and machines embedded in the same culture, especially when it comes to economics and connectivity?
• Considering the total role of the computer and the individual, in what sense does a computer replace a human being?

Affordances, biology, physics and problems of interfacing logic with biology. A broader definition of the "user" of the machine, including the designer, the "end user", the end user's employer, the designer's boss, the marketing system that connects them all together and so on. Like the individual, the machine is embedded and assimilated into a specific culture with countless points of contact, many of which are deeply buried in long-forgotten assumptions and arbitrary decisions. Modern computers are part of the Internet of "hosts" which has been specifically used to visualize the corresponding network of human connections - the "social network". They are also embedded in the "economy" in a symbiotic relationship with humans - sometimes replacing humans in that role. Possible amusing anecdote about my job as a "computer" in an oil company circa 1967. Focus on the concept of "work" and how automation can "take jobs" from "real people". "jobs", "work" and "money" are all models of the real world where ruthless "logic" competes with art and "quality of life". Money is a language of its own and computers "speak" that language very well.

Part 3: Essential Analogies

• Logic and value
• The brain as a super fast "value computer"
• The Cloud and the Brain
• Is a neuron "like" a bit?
• What is it to "know" something?
• What is "attention"?
• Can value and beauty be computed?
• The problem of accountability

Part 4: Computing Value

We allow machines to make such judgments all the time with the effect that we can forget the assumptions and escape accountability for our errors. For centuries, philosophers have attempted to reduce ethics and value to logic. We must not pretend that this problem has been solved. Ethical and value judgments must be left to human beings, whatever the shortcomings of brains may be. The brain justifies such judgments using language (pseudo-logic) which is prone to rhetorical tricks, selective memory and hidden assumptions "baked in" to our way of talking about the world.

• Does automation tend to boil away value? 
• Does it make sense to sell life itself, one hour at a time? Is this perhaps the root "computation"? If a laborer costs $15 per hour, 100 cost $1,500. How much would 1,000 Paul McCartney's cost? Are we buying millions of cheap robot Pauls?
• Technology itself challenges human values and turns people into machines
• Can current technology reverse the long term trend and allow machines to be machines and people to be people?
• What are the fundamental challenges that face us as we "automate" human choices to maximize value? Whose value? 
• The ultimate role of the machine is to "disappear" and become an extension of human will. Optimizing "value" is the core issue.

This line of thought is continued here

What, if anything, is the "self"?

What is the "self"?

Among proponents of mindfulness and Zen, it is common to say that the "self" is an illusion - that the "self" does not really exist. Such talk leads us immediately into paradox, but Zen loves paradox. Vast amounts of ink are spilled in discussions about how, if the self doesn't exist, who or what it is that knows it doesn't exist. The self seems to be a matter of daily experience. Saying it's an illusion is little more than an attention-getting opinion or a device to sell books.

To me, the problem seems to be a shortcoming of language.

I just read a treatment of this issue that purported to solve it all by claiming that the self is a verb not a noun. This poor individual was trying to tackle one of the hardest problems in the world using his tenuous grip on the grammar he learned in school. He dimly perceives that the "self" is not an ordinary "thing", so he concludes it must be the only other kind of grammatical entity he remembers: a verb. As an amateur philosopher, he imagined that the problem can be solved by re-defining a few terms and then solving the whole issue by talking about it.

If he had been awake in High School physics, he might have heard about other types of "thing" - such as force fields and processes. Since the "self" is obviously connected in some way with living human beings, and life itself is clearly a process, it makes sense that the mind (the self) must be come kind of process. The problem with that is that there are millions of types of process and probably billions more awaiting discovery. Calling the "self" a process doesn't do much for us, but it does free us from "thing think", such as the image that "we" are a "soul" that somehow drives our bodies around durning life and migrates to another plane of existence when our body dies.

My own personal experience is with the "process" described by a computer program. Since very few people are aware of the power of modern computer languages. Let me briefly digress to describe how they work:

• "things" are described as "objects" which can be totally abstract or perhaps an abstract representation of a "thing", such as a person or a bank account. To control an ICBM, the missile would be represented and controlled as a "thing".
• Objects have behaviours that can be as simple as adding numbers together or or as complex as driving down the road without hitting anything
• Objects have a "state", which can be thought of as a kind of memory that influences behaviour. For example, a bank account with zero balance will respond with an "insufficient funds" message if asked to transmit money to another account.
• Objects send messages to each other, which can be instructions, "inputs", "outputs" etc.

While these ideas are almost childishly simple, the elements of object oriented architecture can be used to describe a stunning range of "things" in the world, especially the "things" we build. There are architectural rules and "best practices" that describe how to create design objects that are fairly robust descriptions of "things" that are likely to exist in the "real world" or at least ideas that are "orthogonal" (describing the world with a minimum of non-overlapping concepts).  The idea is to extend the language in a way that the "words" have a meaning outside of the context that lead to them being invented in the first place. This creates such things as the vast zoo of objects underlying the Java language - the language of the Internet. But I digress ...

When you send a line of text (object) to Google, thousands of messages are sent between objects in Google computers, chatting back and forth, to assemble a big long list of links (another type of object) that are displayed on your computer (another object). You can click on one of them (a message), to trigger a server somewhere (another object) to send a message back to you (a web page object).

The underlying language and architecture we are dealing with is incredibly powerful - far more powerful in some ways that any human language. It can, for example, completely describe the operation of a machine that will land on Mars and proceed to explore the place.

On the other hand, we must not slip into thinking that "object oriented" computer languages can describe anything that the human mind can conceive. But we can go a long way to describe the operation of the brain in object oriented terms. For example, neurons are "stacked" in a pattern endlessly repeated in the grey matter of the brain. At least to the first approximation, these "stacks" can be simulated using object-oriented architecture. 

Think of it this way. Suppose the "self" is somehow "like" a giant conventional machine, like a jet aircraft. Now imagine that someone wants to explain this machine in a giant essay. It's easy to see that words will fall short of the task - you need blue prints, graphs, engineering diagrams, demonstrations and a lot of training just to understand any of it. Words will just not cut it. In fact, the more words you use, the less likely it is that the description will make any sense. The human mind is, by definition, exactly as complex as anything anyone can ever possibly know. Any non-trivial description of the operation of one mind, let alone the interactions between multiple minds can be expected require a few powerful descriptive conceptual tools that require specialized knowledge to use.

Chimpanzees can make tools out of twigs and have probably done so for a million years. They will continue to do so for another million years. But they will never make a telescope out of twigs. Philosophers pretend to discuss the most difficult problems of existence using ordinary words, the bluntest of descriptive tools and the oldest tools available to human beings. In fact, to me, their entire dialogue seems to be about re-defining and mis-using words. They are paid by the word and the more they add to the store of words, the less they describe anything in a useful way. But I digress ...

From the examples of twigs and jet transports, it should be noted that even sophisticated technical tools of description don't cover all we need to know or describe about our subject. For example, many of the aircraft components are made from special alloys using sophisticated manufacturing techniques. Awkwardly, we are not always sure why some alloys have the properties they do. They just do. We are quite sure that the same is true of the mind - it's not just a machine processing information. It's also a chemical reaction of nasty complexity and, of course, it's alive, meaning that its biological nature must be factored in to any useful description of its operation.

Having said that, allow me, for a moment, to imagine that the "self" is an "object" in the sense that a running computer program is an "object". I imagine the "self" as a "program" running in the brain, just like the operating system runs (most of the time) in your computer. It's a process, but a special kind of process. This is a way of thinking of the self as a kind of machine, but a very sophisticated machine. We can then ask a few things about what's going on a "self".

• It's easy to see that sensations are messages received by the senses of the body
• Memories are part of the "state" of the self
• Actions are output messages

That's all pretty obvious, but it gets interesting when you start to ask about what kinds of "things" are "ideas", "beliefs", "intentions", "regrets"  and "thoughts". Those are obviously coming into the mind and popping out of it and running around inside it without obvious external signs. There are very good reasons to suspect that "ideas" cannot be reduced to the kind of formalism that we'd like. The closest we have come so far is the meme, an interesting analogue of the gene. Since meme theory originated in 1976, progress in "memetics" has resembled philosophy more than physics.

In this little note, I don't intend to nail down exactly what it is that the mind "contains" or works on: only to suggest that this metaphor of the mind (the self) is much more productive and probably closer to reality than saying the self is an illusion or a "verb" or a "soul".

We are also free to ask about what aspects of the mind are not covered by this metaphor. For me, the most glaring omission is the fact that human minds work in huge assemblies called "societies" and all the "thoughts" running through individual human minds run through the entire society. It seems to me that interactions that add up to culture are not so easy to think of in object oriented terms. To begin with, machines don't hate, mate, have children, die and fear death.  They are not honest or dishonest, good or evil.

Come to think of it, they don't have theories about their own programming ...

Thoughts on Assimilation August 27, 2015

The original idea behind this blog (Dragon Theory) is that there is a dangerous tendency for human beings to be assimilated into machines, giving up their essentially human nature to serve the nature of the machine. By "machine", I mean a system that operates by impersonal inflexible rules, in contrast to the chaotic, creative behaviour of real human beings. We use "machine" in this way when we talk about an army as a "war machine".

I still love this idea. Like all good ideas, it raises more questions than it answers. Today, I'll consider some of these questions. In some cases, the questions are more interesting than the original thesis, which is a good thing. I have always thought that progress results from asking impertinent questions rather than from the answers we discover.

The theme of a recent issue of Scientific American (August, 2015) is "How we conquered the planet". Curtis W. Marean puts forward the thesis that the key to our world-conquering success is our ability to cooperate, especially on large scales, with individuals who are unrelated. Like any good thesis, it raises more questions than it answers--many of the same questions raised by "Dragon Theory".

Exactly what is meant by "cooperation"? Several threads of cooperation come to mind and all of them promote "assimilation" - surrender of individual human nature to an artificially created entity.

• Trade. There is plenty of evidence that humans are traders by nature, quite willing to barter with strange humans rather than simply stealing what they want. Trade is the mother of "economy" -- a slippery slope leading to the idea of money. The more a person depends on trade the more a person becomes defined by economic principals. A person becomes poor when he measures himself by the degree to which he participates and relies upon the money economy and that participation is slight (the famously large part of the human race that lives on less than a dollar a day).
• Conquest, loot and pillage. A very popular form of human cooperation which is made possible when individuals think and act as members of a gang or army. The degree of coherence and assimilation often determines the "success" of the conquering hoard. In many cases, it defeats enemies who are "weak" only because they are less organized, less assimilated. The Mongol "hoards" are my favourite example of a "war machine", which assimilated most of the civilized world by means of a very short list of operating rules - laws which explicitly overrule such human qualities such as mercy, fallibility and judgement. 

There are obviously many other forms of assimilation that humans are good at (religion comes to mind), but I will pass over these to focus on one that has, until today, escaped my notice: language.

It seems that language is the key to the unique degree of cooperation that Marean talks about. Today, I started to wonder if, by learning a language, we automatically become assimilated into something that has a life of its own. This is an idea that is hard to discuss using language itself, like fish discovering water. Do we surrender something of ourselves by learning to describe our experience in the same way as those around us? Without realizing it, do we learn to ignore every aspect of our experience that cannot be communicated and discussed with those around us who speak the same language?

Western philosophers assume that all truth is accessible to language. There are notable exceptions. Wittgenstein claimed that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence. Of course, we can't say just what is passed over. But we can ask if the same things will be passed over by speakers of different languages and whether there are important things that will be passed over by any speaker of any language.

I have been a computer programmer since there were computer programmers, I have seen the evolution of computer languages over half a century. "Languages" like FORTRAN and COBOL barely deserve the name of language. Modern languages, like Java, make it possible to express ideas that could never be expressed in COBOL or FORTRAN - ideas that are, in many cases, very difficult to express in "human" languages. For me, it's quite natural to see that language defines a world of ideas that can be expressed and also a (presumably larger) world of ideas that cannot be expressed. Moreover, as a follower of Zen and Tao, I'm quite aware that the world is larger than the world of human ideas, whether these ideas can be expressed in language or not.

Returning to the issue of assimilation, is language the necessary mechanism of all assimilation? Noam Chomsky famously claims that the ability to form ideas that can be communicated linguistically is an innate quality of the human brain. Does this mean that we are "hard wired" to be assimilated?

Human languages are famously sloppy, fuzzy and ambiguous. Computer languages are none of these things. The use of "language" to describe both systems is an analogy only, but the language of Mathematics is closer to the computer side of the analogy than the human side. What is more, hardly any scientific knowledge is respectable these days unless it can be mathematically described. 

Again, we are faced with the problem of a fish discovering water. It seems that we are totally immersed in a world that is described (or lied about) exclusively in language. If, for the moment, we imagine a world outside of that world of language, we come to understand what we mean by being assimilated by language.

In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination. One example of this can be found in the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. Trump’s popular appeal speaks to not just the boldness of what he says and the shock it provokes, but the inability to respond to shock with informed judgment rather than titillation. Marie Luise Knott is right in noting, “We live our lives with the help of the concepts we form of the world. They enable an author to make the transition from shock to observation to finally creating space for action - for writing and speaking. Just as laws guarantee a public space for political action, conceptual thought ensures the existence of the four walls within which judgment operates.” The concepts that now guide our understanding of US society are dominated by a corporate-induced linguistic and authoritarian model that brings ruin to language, politics and democracy itself.

- Truth Dig

What would be the alternative? How does the fish walk up on the beach? One hint is the idea of aesthetics. Anyone who appreciates art understands the futility of describing its meaning with words. Yet there is meaning. To the Western mind, a "philosophy" is something constructed out of words. This includes Western religions, such as Christianity, whose "theology" rests firmly on centuries of arcane interpretations of ancient stories. Other traditions, especially Tao and Zen, specifically eschew words and even human ideas in general to promote an aesthetic -- a way experiencing the world wordlessly.

This points to a way of escaping assimilation (at least this type of assimilation), which is to cultivate aesthetic sense. This is to value our direct experience of the world and to be skeptical of attempts to draw us into the herd by means of language. We need to be skeptical of "reasons why", interpretation, valuation, analysis and synthesis. Actually this isn't such a huge leap. We have just been sold the idea that things are not "real" or "important" unless they can be boiled down to language. Most of us understand quite clearly that this is wrong but (of course!) we have problems saying just why this is. 

Perhaps the world we "pass over in silence" is the important one. Perhaps it is where we can discover who we really are.

Note to self: comment on "Monkey Sphere and Echo Chamber"