The Hawkins Frame - 1

In the long run, Hawkins abandons his initial description of "Frame" and (to my mind) wanders into simple Object Oriented Design and Mathematical constructs that lie behind Quantum Mechanics. I'm not sure gets this, but he starts with a frame-based description of consciousness, which is a fine example of putting this phenomenon on the test bench. Many philosophers claim this is not possible. Daniel Dennet is happy to allow what we say about our experience to be evidence of what that experience is. The problem with Dennet is that he was writing decades before Hawkins used the powerful frame language to speak of what it "feels like" to be in the world. Armed with Hawkins' way of speaking, it may be a good idea to loop back and read Dennet again.

With apologies to Hawkins, this is what I think a frame is:

• It is a frame of reference like Cartesian space
• It contains objects, each of which has a location in the space - for example, (x,y,z) coordinates.
• In object-oriented terms, coordinates are attributes of the object within the space. Other attributes include orientation (such as an (x,y,z) vector).
• Although it is not entirely clear, it seems that these objects also have a "velocity" vector - they may be moving through the reference frame.
• The observer occupies a position in the framework and has a complex set of objects that can be used to interrogate objects in the space. In a sense, the observer experiences this set of objects as "self". An example would be fingers exploring his beloved coffee cup. We will call these objects "sensors".
• A key element of Hawkins' account is the interaction between sensors and objects in the space to determine (or guess) the attributes of the objects. This interrogation results in an updated version of the frame itself - as modeled by the brain.
• All this is experienced dynamically - there is time in Hawkin's frame. When we speak of our experience, we call it "now", but "now" is always changing. This is the flow of time. We can be grateful for any model that makes an attempt to explain this most important aspect of the experience.
• Unlike an abstract mathematical "object", a frame is an experience. When we describe it as a mathematical object, we rely on analogy. This is the entire point of the Hawkins "frame". It is claimed to be the fundamental unit of experience, not the actual "God's Eye" view of the world, nor an abstract description of the world "as it is". It is a mental model, presumably implemented with neurons and synapses. As far as I know, this is the only attempt to formalize experience itself.

Some elements here remind me of Einstein's insight - particularly placing the observer in space and making observations relative to the frame of reference. In both cases, there is no "God's eye" view of the space, only the observations of the observer and the conclusions the observer reaches, such as the position and velocity of objects in the frame of reference. If you are familiar with Einstein's view of the world, Hawkins' "frames" are easy to picture.

Along the same line, Einstein was interested in the ability to interrogate objects to determine their properties. It turns out that it is not possible to learn certain pairs of properties exactly, say a and b. Precision in the measurement of a loses precision in b. Worst yet, counterintuitive, certain objects' properties don't exist until they are measured. But that is a different subject.

The point is that Einstein's mental picture of the Universe is a frame. A very powerful one. What it lacks is a sense of "now". Time is just another dimension, like the x,y,z of space.

Hawkins is shy about generalizing this model - sticking to our familiar 3-dimensional world. He could have escaped this a little by referring to the attributes of an object, which can be more or less unlimited. It would have been clearer (to me at least) if his model included the interrogation of the object, returning another frame since the object itself has all the attributes of a reference frame. Certain sensors are limited to certain queries - "touch" returns information that "look at" does not.

Anyone familiar with Object-Oriented design would wish to add (at least) object states which add some complexity to the result coming back from a query sensor. Other things like the concept of "interface" would be helpful to isolate the "experience" of the object from any secret and unobservable properties that may or may not produce the experience. The whole of OOD* seems applicable, and for good reason: OOD* has been developed precisely to describe (at least) the real world.

That said, there are aspects of the world where OOD doesn't seem very helpful, such as chemistry, cosmology, logic, mathematics, and Quantum Mechanics. Hawkins runs into these limitations since he claims his theory covers all we can know. His theory is only a re-invention or application of OOD - a special case. OOD covers a lot more of what we can know. It underlies the design of virtually all modern computer systems, including the Internet. But we must turn to other ways of "knowing" when leaving the familiar 3-dimensional world described in Hawkins' examples.

To be fair, the areas of knowledge where the Hawkins frames start to break down are precisely those that many find difficult to understand. We are also left with the biggest and most urgent things we need to understand: human-to-human interactions.

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* OOD = Object-Oriented Design

Computers as Models of Mind - The OOD Meme

Computers model our minds in two ways. We are tempted to think of our own mental processes in terms of what we know about computers. Conversely, we attempt to implement our mental processes using computers.

Over the last 50 years, these two processes have converged, providing us with a more robust analogy for human thinking while constantly improving our ability to implement human thought processes in silicon.

The best model of "mind" is based on memes [1]. These are the "atoms" of the mind. For the purpose of this note, let me focus on two types of meme: category and behaviour.

Computer programmers don't think about electronics or silicon [2]. They think about "objects" which are instances of "classes" (OOD-Object Oriented Design). Objects inherit from their classes the ability to "know" certain things and behave in certain ways (methods), especially the ability to communicate with other objects. A good computer program will implement classes that mirror robust categories. For example, a computer model (collection of classes) that is "about" a university will have a class that implements "student" which is a special case of "person". A course is taught by an instructor (another special case of person) and attended by a collection of students. You can speak of the "instructor of a student", which is a way for the class of "person" to refer to itself, in the way that memes can form "strange loops". The relationship between "person", "student" and "instructor" illustrates the ability of Object Oriented design to use analogy (According to Hofstader, the very engine of the mind), even though these analogies are being formed, for the present, entirely by the human designer.

"Perception" is modelled in computer systems within the "Object Oriented" paradigm. For example, keys on the keyboard all inherit the ability to detect being pressed and all send their information up to the "keyboard" object in the same way, notifying the operating system that "knows" which program is expecting input from the keyboard. Even a "self driving" car is just another object.

One kind of object that is implemented in modern computer languages is the "Lambda Expression", which is a string (sequence of characters) that represents a program. Such expression can be built by the computer program at "run time"  itself and executed. This is one particularly interesting example of self-reference, since lambda expressions can implement whole new classes.

Applications can fail when they fail to map the "real world" into their set of classes. Older programs were a tangle of algorithms (a rats nest of instructions), that implemented narrow business processes, like "pay this invoice". If they failed to model objects in the real world (implementing classes like vendor, bank, bank account ...) they would require constant revision and be vulnerable to small changes in the "outside world". New applications that work in the same "world" should be easy to implement since statements about the "real world" naturally map to the object-oriented model of that world.

Memes are "fuzzy" categories in the human mind. The "classes" of computer science are special cases and generally not "fuzzy". Human beings are expected to supply unambiguous objects as "input". However, in practice, computer programmers can go a long way to removing "fuzziness" and wind up implementing classes that usefully map to memes. The most obvious meme like this is the "class" of itself, along with all the related memes that make up Object Oriented Design.

We can now produce classes such as "all the human faces in this picture" or even "All the human faces that resemble Joe Smith". When the computer fails to properly classify its inputs, this is usually thought of as an error (a face that is not Joe Smith, a collection of pixels that is not a face ...), but it's possible to think of this failure as a sign of "fuzziness" - a step toward implementing something more like the meme of the human mind. We can get a vague sense of how powerful (and creepy) this gets when a surveillance system files away pictures in a "person" file (its model of a person) as a collection of "possible pictures of Joe Smith", or "possible pictures of Joe Smith driving his car on Elm Street at 12:43 PM on Saturday). Thousands of law enforcement officers now spend their days helping their computer systems resolve the "fuzziness" remaining in classes created by their computer systems on CCTV and arial surveillance pictures. One may think of this as extending the perception of the human operator or extending the ability of the computer to "think".

The gap between "meme theory" and object oriented design should not continue to close, but we should not under-estimate the vast extent of the gap. Challenges exist on both sides:

• Theory of mind needs to formalize the meme idea to speak intelligibly and systematically about mapping memes to Object Oriented classes. 
• It is reasonable to expect that an OOD model of the brain would give us an idea of how it works "in principle". I think it would also provide some insight about the possibility in principle of  "strong AI" (creation of a machine mind). Without some completely new structures in computer memory involving dynamic feedback, we seem to be stuck. Even with this hardware, we will be left with neurons being "black boxes", translating input into output with mysterious inner logic. 
• It is impossible to "read out" the state of the brain. In particular, this would involve measuring the gradient of concentration of dozens or hundreds of neurotransmitters at each of trillions of synapses, along with the rate of change of these gradients. This is implies solving trillions of monster dynamic systems of equations, known to be unsolvable in principle, even if all the gradients could be measured precisely, which Quantum Mechanics assures you can't be done. Even so, we can say some useful things about the behavior of such systems. For example, we can get some clues about how to build a "neural net", how big it needs to be and how complex it needs to be to start learning anything useful.
• Computer Science needs to find methods (and applications for them) that require the computer to create and implement new useful classes, along with the ability to learn - to refine the definition of these classes.
• Computer Science has long abandoned the usefulness of thinking in terms of the actual implementation platform (silicon, switches, bits and bytes). A similar revolution needs to happen in mind science, to focus on how the mind works with no undue emphasis on the way it is implemented in the brain.

[1] The "best" model leans heavily on Hofstader's theories (or perhaps we should call them "observations"), plus a whiff of Zen, which insists on a purely subjective view of the Universe. This leads me to think of memes as "implementations" of "real world" classes - effectively an automatic process of Object Oriented design constantly going on in my head. It should be noted that Hofstadter's interest in how the human mind works has become a bit of a backwater in AI research, mainly due to the pressure for quick results by brute force.

[2] I have worked with computers since 1967 and been part of the revolution that took us from "machine language" through "Relational Database Design" to "Object Oriented Design". The current lingua franca of the internet is Java, a thoroughly object-oriented language that would have been inconceivable back in 1967. The multi-layered structure of modern computer applications is closely analogous to he layered structure of the brain--for example the visual cortex. This is no coincidence, since a computer application is, after all, just a collection of memes.

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 ...

The Programmable Ape

FROM SECOND LIFE: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/MetaLES/59/98/21

THE PROGRAMMABLE APE

This post summarizes a synthesis of several lines of thought, bringing together meditations from Diary of a Christian Skeptic, Zen of Value (suspended), and previous posts from this blog, previously called "Dragon Theory".

I will attempt a "quick and dirty" summary of this synthesis, hoping to come back later to provide more detailed links and arguments, but, for the moment, I just want to make sure I capture the most relevant facets of the insights behind "The Programmable Ape".

All the blogs mentioned above are dealing with a single question: What is it to be human? I take it for granted that we are related to the Ape family. I make a serious effort not to go much further than this in my observation that we are apes. I consider most discussions that attempt to justify some theory of human behavour in terms of "adaptive" characteristics sorted out by evolution to be straightforward bullshit - not much different from theological arguments. They seem to be simply attempts to make some theory of human nature to "sound scientific".

ANALOGIES

One of the key inspirations for this blog comes from "Surfaces and Essences" by Hofstadter and Sander -"Surfaces". This argues that thinking is, at least to a large extent, accounted for by the analogies we make. The mind is an analogy making and processing machine.

In "Godel, Escher, Bach" (GEB) Hofstadter asks the impertinent question:

"To what extent are our thoughts channeled by language?"

At the time, in the 1970's, Hofstadter was preoccupied by languages, including computer languages of the time. However, in GEB, he weaves together an elabourate tapestry of analogies that include human language, computer language, languages invented for the purpose of making his point, music (Bach) and art (Escher). In "Surfaces", we see a focus (with the presumed assistance of Sander) on the varieties of analogy in language, but in the final chapters, we see analogies in mathematics and physics (Hofstadter has a Ph. D. in Physics). So, to consider the above "impertinent question", we must extend our idea of "language" to include virtually all symbolic methods humans use to communicate with each other, including the symbolic methods they use to think. For example, a physicist covering the blackboard with symbols and arcane diagrams is "thinking" in a symbolic language and we may ask, To what extent his thoughts are channeled by language"?

A somewhat amusing side-issue can be followed in the case of music - especially "Country Music", which confines itself to three-chord melodies in a major key along with a small subset of human experience - usually to do with romance. The category of "Country Music" (Surfaces) is easily recognized by the family resemblance between its members - especially those who don't like Country Music. I won't carry this argument much further except to say that it illustrates how the ideas in "Surfaces" are easily extended beyond language into other domains such as music - a topic that fits nicely into Hofstadter's earlier thought - in GEB.

GED was written in a time when some sources of analogy were "in the air". As well as the computational idea, we had the powerful idea of evolution - newly energized by the implications of the discovery of DNA, creating (at least in the minds of believers) a mechanical image for life itself. 

We have come a long way since the 70's. Almost everything we know about the brain has been discovered in the decades following 1990. Computer technology has moved far beyond the naive descriptions we find in the mandatory chapters inserted in books like "Consciousness Explained". Even our understanding of genetics and evolution has been immensely refined, leaving behind the facile use of the concept in books like "The Selfish Gene".

It's time to re-tool our analogies. The main contribution of "Surfaces" is to remind ourselves that they are analogies. The ancient insight of Taoism applies here. The "real world" and our ideas about it are quite different.

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things

I will return later to a closer look at "Surfaces", which is a deep dive into the nature of analogy. First, I'd like to place one particular rich source analogy under the microscope: "Computation".

THE COMPUTER ANALOGY

It's hard to find a book on the mind that doesn't assume that the brain is some kind of computer. In fact, even in ordinary conversation, the analogy is so compelling that it's hard to draw attention to the fact that it is an analogy. What, after all, would be alternative analogies? What's wrong with the analogy?

In GEB, Hofstadter goes to great lengths to discuss the nature of analogies (though, at that stage, he's talking about "Isomorphisms" or "mappings" between one domain and another). Some isomorphisms (analogies between entire systems of ideas) are better than others - chiefly because some mappings map more from one system to the other or vice versa in a way we can, for example, learn about system A by studying an isomorphic system B. As a computer expert, I must say that attempts to "map" properties of the mind into analogous properties of computers have been more or less laughable. They survive only because the general reader is not familiar with the properties of either brains or computers. To a certain extent, the also depend on "cherry picking" - mapping supposed familiar aspects of thought into more-or-less "well known" computational processes but leaving aside the vast amount of what we actually know about brain function.

CLASSES, CATEGORIES AND OBJECT-ORIENTED DESIGN

Modern computer systems are not designed or used according to the quaint system of concepts you will find in philosophical texts like "Consciousness Explained". Such ideas were what we learned about computers in the late 1960's but were still taught to undergraduates decades later. These included the idea that the computer had a CPU that marched through a series of instructions, pulling data out of memory, doing simple operations on the data and shoving results back in memory. Any attempt to describe, for example, how your smart phone works in these terms would be like trying to understand the behavour of your dog in terms of basic physics.

Especially for grad students, like myself, we went through a phase where the idea of computation was formalized with a deep and broad analogy with human language. You can see this influence in GED. Interestingly, "Surfaces" is also preoccupied with language, but the idea that language is some kind of computation that a computer could perform is abandoned. In fact, Surfaces can be read as a convincing refutation of the idea that the mind is some kind of computer. As mentioned, "Surfaces" also marks escape from the tyranny of language as the analogy for the way humans communicate and think. The concept of "language" must, for example, be extended to include mathematics, economics and engineering.

By the 1990's, the "language" analogy was fading from computer systems design. In its place, a new discipline called "Object Oriented Design" emerged. This revolution also arrived in the hands of computer users in the form of "Graphical User Interfaces". Users no longer filled in blanks and read piles of printout. They manipulated ghostly objects on the screen with pointing devices or even their fingers.

There is a two-way analogy going in with Object Oriented Computer design. Examined deeply, the analogy is between the model the computer has of the world and the world itself, which consists of objects that we observe with our eyes and manipulate with our hands. This analogy is extremely "tight" and "isomorphic" (in the GEB sense). It's also an analogy that gets to the "Essence" of things in the sense discussed in "Surfaces". This is why the analogy works so well. I will refer to this analogy as the CLASS/CATEGORY analogy or "CCA"..

But are our minds computers running an "Object Oriented" view of the world. That would be the obvious conclusion and it would repeat all the mistakes made in the 1970's when we forced ourselves to conceive (for example" that neurons were somehow "like" bits of memory or little CPU's.

No, the brain is an object that is "like" no other. Any analogy will be approximate. It will tell us something but not everything. I will get around to showing another analogy between the brain and a hologram that will allow us to "map" certain brain properties to holograms in a way that the computational model cannot. Whatever the merits of the "holographic" analogy, at least it provides a way to shake off the idea that our brains are "really" computers.

CLASSES AND CATEGORIES (CCA)

Two very similar ideas lie at the heart of both Object Oriented Design and the analogies discussed in "Surfaces". "Surfaces" discusses the idea of "category" in breathtaking depth. The central thesis is that the mind forms categories by means of analogy and does so in surprisingly arbitrary ways. There is nothing inherent in categories, although some categories seem like they are "out there" - like "chair", others, like "viral video" are clearly creations of culture.

On the other hand, the "Class" at the heart of Object Oriented Design is a very different kind of animal. This difference becomes apparent to computer systems designers when we attempt to build an "App" which is a little "toy" world full of classes that (more or less" correspond to categories and objects in the real world. Problems include:

• Classes need to be very cut and dried. An object can't be both a member and not a member of a class. Changing an object from one class to another is a dangerous and possibly illegal operation in most systems, but we do it all the time in "real life". 
• Real "categories" are "fuzzy" and arbitrary. 
• Class libraries (like Java) are maintained at great cost to be consistent across platforms (the source of endless update headaches), whereas everyone can walk around with major differences in his or her set of perceived categories. This is most blatant when you look at human languages itself. Great swaths of categories are not common, for example, between Chinese and English, yet both Chinese and English speakers manage to get by perfectly.

CLASSES ARE NOT REAL

Classes are "software". They exist in the world of ideas, like poems and stories. Even instances of classes ("objects") are "materialized" in structures of electronic bits and bytes in a computer that have no meaning apart from the (mental) interpretation of the designer and the user. The mapping between instances and classes is assumed to be perfect and unambiguous. For example, a bit of memory is or is not treated as an integer. Any attempt to treat an object as a member of a class that it doesn't belong to is a "type error". It's interesting to note philosophers have attempted to declare "type errors" as out of bounds in everyday speech. GEB goes to great lengths to expose the futility of this effort.

While categories may be "totally imaginary" (like Leprechauns) with instances that are still "in the mind" of the believer, many are definitely real, 3-D, tangible objects, like chairs, planets and thunder storms. This "binds" our world of categories to the "real world" and accounts for the fact that many of us "think" by "tinkering" with real objects, such as bits of wood or telescopes.

ANALOGIES AND CATEGORIES ARE THE "SOFTWARE" OF THE MIND

Allowing ourselves to use the Computer/Brain analogy (or the Category/Class analogy), we can see that virtually all computer software part of class libraries (like the Java Class Library), whereas our brains use categories that are part of language (as extended above) as their "software". 

This is the central metaphor of this blog: that humans are uniquely capable of being "programmed" by the "software" of language. It must be remembered that this "software" (categories) maps (in some cases) directly to objects in the real world, such as sticks, stones and automobiles.  To a great extent, our "tools" of thought are real things in the world. Our ability to impose categories and analogies on to the real world is, to a great extent, arbitrary. However there are also limits: we must assume that "reality" imposes significant constraints on the analogies that expose the "essence" of things.

To explain this thesis to the general public, it will be necessary to introduce both sides of it. "Surfaces and Essences" does a great job of describing how the "software" of analogy works in real brains. Fortunately, it's much easier to explain object oriented computer systems design to the general public since almost all of us own a smart phone or other product of this design discipline. Our task is much easier than, for example, Dennet's in "Consciousness Explained", where he attempts to communicate his own shaky understanding of computers to an audience wholly unfamiliar with the concepts.

EVOLUTION AND THE CLASS LIBRARY

As mentioned, I make little or no reference to "evolution" in my explanations here. The analogy simply doesn't apply and I feel no need to "sound scientific" by mentioning it. In its place is the concept of the "Class Library", the immensely powerful concept that underlies all of modern information systems design.

Class libraries "evolve" by "intelligent design". The rules that govern their "evolution" have little or nothing to do with Darwinian evolution, but their development follows fascinating rules of its own. Many of these rules turn out to have subtle implications for the analogous system: language as "programming" the human brain.

The Class Library is a concept that will be new to most readers, but is easily explained with a short tour of a smart phone or the desktop being used to read this blog.

THE MOUNTAIN

One of my favorite images of the Zen journey is the mountain. I visualize myself and fellow seekers following a steep, winding path up a mountain. Most of humanity is visualized as semi-asleep in the village below, lacking all curiosity of "higher issues". It is certainly quite clear that the esoteric issues considered in my blogs are of zero concern to the average "Joe Six Pack". Using the Programmable Ape analogy, Joe Six Pack his happy to be programmed. He is empty except for the program. No ideas or goals of his own.

RETURNING TO "DRAGON THEORY"

"Dragon Theory", the previous focus of this blog, proposes that humans are assimilated to large social entities that can be considered to be alive in their own right. Such entities include armies and corporation.

Previous entries hint at where the blog is now heading, including the idea that the language of economics is a powerful force for assimilation, including money as a part of language and language itself, in general, as being a powerful assimilating factor.

In a sense, the view of "Programmable Ape" is even darker than "Dragon Theory" since there seems to be no escape from assimilation through language and culture, whereas "Dragon Theory" held out the slight chance that human beings can avoid assimilation and somehow recover the true nature of humanity.

THE ZEN OF VALUE

I sketched in a previous blog devoted to the analogy we draw between value and money. This can now be seen as a special case of what we're talking about here, since the language of money is deeply embedded in the way we talk and think. The fact that we can all understand a sentence like "This hamburger costs $5" is as remarkable as the fact that (some people) perfectly understand "I have been saved by the blood of Jesus".

The Language of Information Science

 In 2021 we are blessed with a rich vocabulary to describe the world. This has grown over the last few five decades, from describing the format of punch cards to recognizing faces.

It would take a book to describe this language or a year to teach a course in it, but here I'd like to introduce a few ideas that are directly applicable to how we talk about our experience of the world.

About in the middle of this transition, we started talking about stuff in the real world rather than data formats in some kind of computer storage. The idea was for our designs to mirror the real world as much as possible, rather than just pushing bits and bytes around. The first wave was called "Object-oriented programming". Our electronic "OBJECTS" were supposed to represent objects in the world. For example, a program dealing with e-mail would have an "object" in memory representing that object. Sounds simple unless you experienced the world before.

Objects have attributes. Pretty soon we realized they should send MESSAGES to each other and respond to messages they receive. They have "STATES". For example, our piece of e-mail would respond to "send" and have a state of "received".

Already things were getting complicated. More and more ideas crept in as we expanded our language (and our programming language) to cover more situations.

One useful concept is the INTERFACE. Think about the screen on your smartphone. It is an interface between you and the mysteries in the device. You don't need to know anything about how it works, you just need to know how to work with the interface. Indeed they can and do change the "innards" of your phone with every update but (hopefully) the interface is unaffected. Or they can change the interface to provide a more convenient way to access the "innards".

Already we have words that can allow us to escape some philosophical traps that resulted merely from poverty of language.

For example, is the "soul" an object? If so, where is it? What about consciousness? What kind of a "thing" is it?

We can think of the "soul" as sending and receiving messages through the interfaces afforded by our senses to the world out there. The object-oriented design doesn't usually represent people apart from the messages they send and receive. We tend to package these into TRANSACTIONS, which have STATES. For example, this is the message you need to send to the email object to send it (putting it in the SENT state). We don't usually need to wonder "why" somebody would send the message, but we get a picture of the person himself as having states, such as the desire to send the email. We can visualize the mind itself as a kind of interface with the world, having certain states.

What kind of "states" will the mind have? We can assume that such states correspond to states in the brain. In principle, we can imagine that state as the sum of the states of all the neurons in the body - indeed everything about the body, including position, heart beat, alertness, and so forth. To me, this seems pretty obvious but it seems to be an improvement over how philosophers talk about the mind. It is (in principle and in part) observable for one thing. It has been de-mystified. We are still left with the big question of why it feels a certain way to be in a certain state but the state itself doesn't seem so mystical.

The "soul" would seem to be some (very complex) thing that can be in a tremendous number of "states", still leaving aside why it feels like something to be in a certain state.

All these ideas are in the back of my mind when I take up the subject of mind and "self".

Our minds are capable of representing mental objects in the real world using mental "states". These depend very closely on the interface we have with the world. To clarify, I assume my dog has a mind (more on this later) but cannot represent a "door" in her mind. To be sure, she has a very rich interface with the world but it is very different from mine. Her senses are different, her needs are different. Same world, different interfaces, different minds.

The brain can be thought of as a big collection of neurons and synapses. Neurons and synapses have "states" and send messages to each other. The internal details of all this are dauntingly complex but, in the end, we have interfaces between neurons and we can (in principle) imagine the "state" of the whole brain without knowing (for example) the chemical processes within the cell or at the synapse.

The Zen of Value - Creation Myth of Money

This was originally posted in its own "Zen of Value" blog but has been moved here for sake of integration and connection. It turns out that I don't have much more to say about the "Zen of Value".

Discussions about how money originates often start with the fable that it evolved to facilitate trade and "store value". Otherwise, so the story goes, you and I would simultaneously want something somebody else had (say, you have more fish than you need and I have extra sheep).

There is scant evidence that "cash" arose out of this situation. This can be seen when "cash" is in short supply or in small groups (families, neighbors) who exchange goods and services without cash, even indignantly refusing cash when it would be perfectly sensible when interacting with a stranger. We also have times, such as the "Dirty 30's" where, for technical reasons, nobody had "money" but everybody had more than they need of some things and/or spare time available to "work". Rough standards might emerge (eggs for field work), but the underlying sentiment was "we're all in this together".

Say, you go fishing and catch 5 nice big salmon. It would not be unusual at all for you to show up at my door and offer me a fresh salmon "for free". On the other hand, we would tacitly understand that this establishes a debt. Perhaps at some point, I'd mow your lawn or give you a basket of berries, or jam from my last berry picking trip. The math doesn't need to work out. If I'm in bad shape and have nothing to give in return, it would not be unusual for the fish to keep appearing at my door (perhaps even more frequently).

Such a system is not "communism", where all goods are held in common, no matter how and by whom they were produced. It's based on sharing, generosity and reciprocity between friends and neighbors. It is embedded in a wider set of customs that add up to encouragement of behaviors that tend to bind he community together while discouraging freeloaders and cheaters. All the great apes seem to behave in this way to some degree.

Bringing the discussion into the 21st century, we see that money is just a standardized form of an "IOU". A dollar bill is an IOU from the Government. If I give you a dollar, the Government owes you one more dollar and me one dollar less. Most of my "dollars" are actually numbers in a bank account, which record an IOU from the bank to me. One function of banks is to make it possible for you and me to consider our IOU's as equivalent even though they are owed by different banks or the government. The other important function of banks is to create money by saddling someone with an equal and opposite debt. They don't have a pile of cash in the vault to lend you - the money they lend is created out of thin air, or, if you like, from the skin off your back.

If there were no banks and all cash magically vanished, we could instantly go back to an IOU-based economy. This apparently happened in Ireland during a 6 month strike of bank employees. Magically, the economy boomed without "money". We would see some difficulties in re-inventing money this way that essentially re-play the problems with its introduction in the first place. For example, saving someone's life or finding a suitable husband for a friend's daughter creates a debt  but not one that can be repaid in any ways subject to monetary calculation. These are not wild exceptions - in practice, everything is like this. Spend some time in a thrift shop or garage sale if you think the price of something is an intrinsic property like it's weight.

Money based on specie (such as gold) is actually a step backward from the natural system. Gold quickly converts itself back into an IOU system. Gold certificates (IOU gold) replace actual gold for all but the smallest transactions. Banks naturally step in to the void to "do the math" in a complex web of who owes what to whom. Quite naturally, we evolve into a system where most debts directly or indirectly are owed to or from a bank. Nations establish "central" banks and currency that is, in effect, an IOU from the central bank (the Nation).

Of course, "official" money has a serious drawback. The assumption is that all things traded (or "owed") can be measured in money. This flies in the face of both everyday experience and the way our "great ape" minds work. Value is based on what one individual perceives to be needed at a particular time. The system works because any two people will have wildly different valuations of any particular object at any given time. Such needs are not subject to the rules of arithmetic. Failure of money as a proxy for value results in all kinds of distortions, including the illusion that

1. The more money you have, the more goods and services of value you will be able to access.
2. If you don't have enough money for food and shelter, you are allowed to die, establishing a rather precise money "value" of a human life (typically poorly estimated as "minimum wage")
3. Any given object has the same value to anyone at any time
4. Anything of value has a price

There is also a hidden assumption that needs to stay hidden for the whole thing to work:

     5. It's all about shuffling debt around -- not the pretty things you buy but how much you borrow 

Violation of rule 3 results in the common situation where person A values the same object less than person B, resulting in his willingness to "sell" the object to B. We sometimes forget that the result of this transaction is an increase in total value, while the amount of money in the system remains constant. The increase is a direct consequence of the fact that money is not a proxy for value. Did I lose you? OK here's an example. I sell you the useless rusty bike that has been hanging in my garage for 10 years. You pay $10. I have more space, you have a bike. $10 IOU moved from you to me. No change in the total amount of "money" in the system. In fact, situations where a transaction results in a decrease of value are usually associated with some kind of crime.

Trouble starts to come up when we separate the role of the "social IOU" from the context of community. Modern money is an abstract IOU from an imaginary "person" - a debt that no longer contributes to strengthening the social fabric. Our money transitions that  buy and sell, hire and work are conducted with strangers or even completely abstract theoretical "persons" such as banks and governments.

Another symptom of value distortion is the mountain of useless crap that fills the homes of all but the poorest citizen. All this garbage cost money at some point but has somehow lost value over time - in fact, when we consider the cost of storing this junk, its value is negative. That snow blower you never use is just like a hamburger that you paid for but can't flush down the toilet. The money we paid for this stuff is still in circulation (it's immortal unless the debt is repaid) but the value has vanished. How can this be? Debt is handed around like a hot potato until repaid. Somebody, somewhere owes somebody the full price of that rusty bike you have hanging in your garage. A powerful metaphor for this situation is thinking of value as slowly evaporating unless it's replenished with constant inflow of money (new debt) which is retired much more slowly than value evaporates, if ever. This is a problem created by money itself - it's not a law of physics that we must sink further and further into debt.

I am surrounded by obscenely bloated houses and streets full of leased new cars. It is debt that makes all this possible. It's not a sign of "prosperity". Lots of money around is mathematically and absolutely equal to lots of debt - to the penny. For me, real prosperity is symbolized by sensible, paid-off houses and practical old cars in good condition.

The idea that debt will actually be repaid has slowly disappeared from Government policy and the financial plans of most citizens. Thus, money-based theories of economics increasingly float free from any grounding in the actual world we live in. Somewhere along the line, the idea of "balancing the budget" (the conservative mantra but never the conservative policy) has become completely unrealistic. From time to time (such as in 2008), trillions of dollars of debt simply vanishes from the system with catastrophic effects on real people. We really just move from one fairy tale version of reality to another but the consequences are quite real (I lost my job in 2008 and never found another).

There is evidence that we are shifting to a new economy that goes under names like "Attention Economy". The idea is that relationships are what's worthwhile - cash transactions are secondary. This can easily take a sinister turn but, as a challenge to "money=value", it's a change in the right direction. But maybe not. If I sit back and listen to marketing efforts with my "man from Mars" hat on, what I hear is "Pay attention: let me sell you more debt".

Later consideration would see money and economics as an example of paradigm - a whole way of speaking about society that "makes sense" to generations. As with many paradigms, challenges are unintelligible.  For example, Donald Trump's recent decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Change accords was justified in economic terms. More jobs. Bad trade deals. For conservatives, this makes perfect sense. How else to talk about policy? For those who think that way and subscribe to the economic paradigm (including the idea that they are somehow disadvantaged because of stagnant wages, lack of jobs) asking about other things (such as the long term survival of the human race) makes no sense. In a more narrow sense, in the economic paradigm, money is seen as real like phogiston and luminous aether. It is the real, tangible medium in which human well being "swims".

The IOUTopia Model

I'm a career computer systems analyst, with a special love for "OOA-object-oriented analysis". OOA is particularly attractive since it comes very close to the way we think in a categorical way. After reading a few books on the economy, especially the "Value of Everything".

Here are some of the key objects in this model:

• Resources, such as corn, fish, wood, fuel. Each of these resources has its own profile as to how much "work" is required to obtain the resource, how much is available etc.
• The Market. This turned out to be the most complex thing to specify. How do you model trades between people? This question is at the heart of economic theory, such as, How does money evolve?
• The Person. Resources are owned and consumed by persons. To make the model work, we'd need thousands of these persons with different "policies" regarding consumption and trade.
• The environment. This object "owns" resources, but also knows about things like limits on these resources and "external" costs such as pollution.
• The "God" object provides the tick of a clock and things like seasonal variation, weather (success of fishing), seasons and outbreaks of disease.

At first, I looked into this as a system of linear equations, but this quickly fell apart. At most, this technique could be used to find initial conditions that satisfy a set of constraints. The need for a dynamic simulation emerged.

I have lots of experience as an IT manager. It became evident that actually creating a working model would require a small team working for a year or so. Another issue was whether this model would tell us anything worthwhile and, if so, how this information would be shared. 

In the end, I decided to shelve the idea. Even so, the model provided me a better image of the "cogs and gears" of the economy - something better than the images you see in an economic textbook and certainly an improvement over the semi-mythological view of the economy that is assumed by everyone in public debate.

The Creation Myth of Money

(Originally posted in "The Zen of Value")

Discussions about how money originates often start with the assumption that it evolved to facilitate trade and "store value". Otherwise, so the story goes, you and I would simultaneously want something somebody else had (say, you have more fish than you need and I have extra sheep).

There is scant evidence for "cash" arising out of this situation. Evidence for another narrative can be found in human behavior that naturally arises when "cash" is in short supply.

Say, you go fishing and catch 5 nice big salmon. It would not be unusual at all for you to show up at my door and offer me a fresh salmon "for free". On the other hand, we would tacitly understand that this establishes a debt. Perhaps at some point, I'd mow your lawn or give you a basket of berries, or jam from my last berry picking trip. The math doesn't need to work out. If I'm in bad shape and have nothing to give in return, it would not be unusual for the fish to keep appearing at my door (perhaps even more frequently).

Such a system is not "communism", where all goods are held in common, no matter how and by whom they were produced. It's based on sharing, generosity and reciprocity between friends and neighbors. It is embedded in a wider set of customs that add up to encouragement of behaviours that tend to bind he community together while discouraging freeloaders and cheaters. All the great apes seem to behave in this way to some degree.

Bringing the discussion into the 21st century, we see that money is just a standardized form of an "IOU". A dollar bill is an IOU from the Government. If I give you a dollar, the Government owes you one more dollar and me one dollar less. Most of my "dollars" are actually numbers in a bank account, which record an IOU from the bank to me.

If there were no banks and all cash magically vanished, we would instantly go back to an IOU-based economy. This apparently happened in Ireland during a 6 month strike of bank employees. Magically, the economy boomed without "money".

Money based on specie (such as gold) is actually a step backward from the natural system. It quickly converts itself back into an IOU system. Gold certificates (IOU gold) replace actual gold for all but the smallest transactions. Banks naturally step in to the void to "do the math" in a complex web of who owes what to whom. Quite naturally, we evolve into a system where most debts directly or indirectly are owed to or from a bank. Nations establish "central" banks and currency that is, in effect, an IOU from the central bank (the Nation).

Of course, "official" money has a serious drawback. The assumption is that all things traded (or "owed") can be measured in money, which flies in the face of both everyday experience and the way our "great ape" minds work. Value is based on what one individual perceives to be needed at a particular time. Such needs are not subject to the rules of arithmetic. Failure of money as a proxy for value results in all kinds of distortions, including the illusion that

1. The more money you have, the more goods and services of value you will be able to access.
2. If you don't have enough money for food and shelter, you are allowed to die, establishing a rather precise money "value" of a human life.
3. Any given object has the same value to anyone at any time
4. Anything of value has a price

Violation of rule 3 results in the common situation where person A values the same object less than person B, resulting in his willingness to "sell" the object to B. We sometimes forget that the result of this transaction is an increase in total value, while the amount of money in the system remains constant. The increase is a direct consequence of the fact that money is not a proxy for value.

The trouble starts to arise when we separate the role of the "social IOU" from the context of community. Money is an abstract IOU from an imaginary "person" - a debt that no longer contributes to strengthening the social fabric. Our money transitions that buy and sell, hire and work are conducted with strangers or even completely abstract theoretical "persons". 

Or are they? Does it make sense to re-introduce the social aspect of money through things like customer loyalty, "nepotism", referring friends to friends ...

It does appear that, as societies grow larger and more complex, there is a tendency to:

• minimize the value of human effort (driving wages to the bottom)
• ignore "externalities" such as the decrease in common values such as clean air, open space, personal choice etc.

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.

=================

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

See also

Object Oriented Design

The Languate of Information Science

Evolution of Mind - Evolution of Machine

I'm wary of the term "evolution" - especially when it is used in a vaguely Darwinian sense to sprinkle scientific fairy dust over wild speculation. I think it makes sense to use "evolution" in a fairly narrow sense, in which we can see that some object, "thing" or situation exhibits the following qualities:

• It's in some "state" of current interest. The analysis of the "state" has some non-trivial explanatory power over the thing in question even when it is considered as a current, static object.
• The "thing" has obviously, necessarily undergone change over time - it wasn't always the same as it is now. It must have been in some other state, usually a simpler state, at some time in the past.
• There is strong evidence that the thing has undergone versions, where one version incorporates design features of previous versions.
• It is legitimate to ask what changes have taken place over time to get from the "simpler" state in the past to the current state.
• Some kind of specific process should be proposed, even if somewhat tentatively. For example, Darwin started with the observation that species are related, asked what we mean by "species" and only gradually came to theorize that species must have emerged over time.  He could only speculate about the mechanism (He liked, but did not use, what we call "survival of the fittest". He didn't know about genetics or DNA). 
• The specific timeline of change will inevitably be speculative. It's nice to establish milestones and approximate dates but this must regarded as secondary to analysis of the change itself. Darwin was famously off by orders of magnitude with his time line but this turned out to be irrelevant to his core ideas.

With those provisos, there are a few questions in the "evolution" of humans that are interesting:

• Speech
• Language
• Writing
• Money
• Social Structure (small bands to cities, craft to corporation, tribe to Nation State)
• Religion
• Nation States
• War

It is useful to speak of the evolution of computation or perhaps the wider and broader term "information processing" rather than the "evolution" of the computer. The other aspect of this evolution is characterized by "information storage". Clay tablets and fingers have their place in this history. It doesn't begin with Babbage or Turing. I like to avoid terms such as "information processing", which would be perfectly acceptable except that virtually all readers will conjure up an image of modern computers when this phrase is used. It is, in fact, still fashionable to call the Computer Department at a University the "Information Technology" department, even though they don't teach about clay tablets or even money. The common thread seems to be progress in externalizing or delegating the task of computing and remembering to machines that grow in complexity and power over the years. Questions can be asked about the progress of mechanical information processing and they are woven in to the above questions about human society:

• Writing
• Counting
• Money
• Computation
• Stored programs ("software as data")
• Networks
• Virtualization
• Class libraries (divorce of design from platform)
• Social networks - close integration of human and computer "societies"

An important thread of this evolution is the way that we gradually shift attention to aspects of reality that can be computed and stored while pushing other aspects of reality aside. This is perhaps the fundamental way that human evolution is linked to the evolution of computation. Wittgenstein's famous saying pops into mind: What can't be said must be passed over in silence.

Several common themes emerge when discussing the parallel evolution of humans and machines:

• Information processing and the evolving nature of what counts as "information"
• Compression
• Virtualization (platform independence)
• Information embedded in language
• Communication
• Formalization and standardization 
• Efficiency

We gain special insight into these common themes by comparing and contrasting their history in the two streams of evolution. In the case of computation, many of the "landmarks" are very clear and have firm dates. Others, such as the appearance of money, have a more complex and debatable history but there is clearly a time when money did not exist and a time when it did. 

In some cases, important innovations appear in one stream and they are not obvious in the other, at least at first glance. For example, "virtualization" is a very clear and specific engineering concept in the computational field. What, if anything, can it mean to speak of a virtual "mind"? One clue is in the fact that philosophers have always felt free to describe the inner workings of the mind without reference to how the brain "works". When they do make reference, their ideas are remarkably sketchy and dated. Tellingly, their ideas about how the physical mind works are not much affected by the specifics. The ideas are "fairy dust". This leaves us free to propose that the "hardware" doesn't matter at all, leadinging in the extreme case to ideas such as Kursweil's - "uploading the mind to silicon" seem perfectly reasonable. This is an argument firmly based on ignorance, like the idea that humans were created out of nothing by God, which made sense until the facts were known.

The evolution of "society" in computation also exhibits some fascination and non-obvious parallels. One precondition of "society" is standardization of components and protocols. Such standards in human history have lead to sweeping changes in human society, including capitalism, cultural genocide and waves of economic crisis when policy is about "jobs" rather than human well being. Standardization of weapons, protocols and military "jobs" has played a key role in the evolution of modern warfare to the point where a single instruction can now spell the destruction of civilization through a "fan out" through standard protocols to standardized weapons and human beings turned into standard components of the military "machine". In the case of the military "economy" (legalized mass murder), there are many milestones on the road to standardization, along with a rich set of parallels between the kind of society humans can form compared to the kind of structure a computation can take.

Society can be usefully regarded as a machine than as collections of living things. In this sense, our two streams have been steadily converging over recorded history. The evolution of this aspect of society is worth discussion in its own right, as I have done in "The Programmable Ape". By regarding machines and humans as co-evolving along very similar paths, it becomes possible for me to describe the human machine (the "dragon") in more precise and familiar terms. This can possibly overcome the common perception of what a machine is. 

So what is a "machine"?

• Machine "language" is tiny, formal and inflexible. 
• Machines are formed of components which exist for no other purpose than to serve the purpose of the machine.
• Very few machines are "unique". They are themselves "cogs" in a larger system that demands precise standardization of components. 

In contrast, in a human ...

• Language is vast, informal, open-ended and general
• Humans are famously difficult to organize into coherent groups with coherent purpose. In practice, this involves stripping them of what makes them human in the first place.
• Humans are unique. This uniqueness is built in by the way DNA works and the inherent limitations of their nervous system. 

Over time, these differences become blurred:

• Humans become "standardized" into "jobs" in order to fit into the larger economic machine. Unique human qualities are suppressed or even punished.
• Human "machine languages", especially the language of economics, become more and more rich and complex. To many, it starts to sound like talk about the "real world" and not "machine language".
• Machines are more and more frequently referred to in anthropomorphic terms, such as what "Wall Street fears" or what "Germany wants".
• Individuals are increasingly "programmed" by tremendous pressures of living in a man-made world of things and information. Thinking "outside the box" is difficult if all of language - including your inner voice - speaks only about boxes.

You can get a lot of fun out of taking these analogies seriously at face value. There is usually a kernel of truth - a way of seeing that machines and men are really the same in important ways. For example, if someone is talking about "efficiency", they are talking about a machine. Think of the situation they describe in terms of machines, computation and the history of such things. When they talk about "profit", think about computer games. When they talk about what is "best" for a corporation, take them at their word and imagine the corporation to be alive and part of human history. Ask how such an abstract machine can possibly acquire a desire to survive and thrive.

Virtualization and Understanding Consciousness

Virtualization is a huge topic, worthy of a dozen posts, but let me sketch it out here in the hope of making some details clear later.

ARCHITECTURE

I'm no fan of using computers as models of "mind". Our minds are not computers, nor do I expect that the AI dream of making a mind out of computer chips will happen any time soon. However, it is clear that both computers and minds process "information" in some broad sense of the term and we should not be surprised to find that designers of computers and "mother nature", the "designer" of our minds, have face similar problems and come up with similar solutions.

COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

If you know a bit about computers, you know a bit about "virtualization" in computer design. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) of a computer manipulates a very small amount of information very quickly. This information is swapped in and out of the CPU from "on board" memory - Random Access Memory or RAM. RAM has always been relatively expensive, so computers have been swapping RAM in and out of memory to some version of the "hard disk" since the 1960's. So there is a kind of "bucket brigade" or hierarchy of storage, that makes huge amounts of information accessible to the CPU in a fairly painless way. A lot of this swapping takes place more or less invisibly or "under the hood" and does not concern the computer programmer.

THE CLOUD

Most recently, with the advent of languages like JAVA and object-oriented design (which cares not where the object "lives") location of the information (data or program) has become irrelevant as chunks are swapped in and out of the "cloud" and between "hosts" with all the "plumbing" functioning automatically. We wind up with our CPU's manipulating information from all over the world, selected automatically from a vast amount of information made available on hosts all over the planet.

That's virtualization.

VIRTUAL MINDS

Something similar goes on in our minds.

What we call "working memory" is very similar to what we call "attention" or "consciousness". It is what it feels like when a portion of our brain activates a very small subset of what the brain "knows". This process is powerful and mysterious - quite unlike what goes on in a computer - but it works in a similar way to address similar problems that we see in computer design. For example, we can "pay attention" to about half a dozen "things" at once. We can switch things in and out of attention a few times per second, producing the continuing experience we call "consciousness" - the flow of "things" through our CPU of working memory. What's more a "thing" can be as simple as pressing the "E" key on a keyboard of the idea of representative democracy. Our minds are perfectly capable of flipping around "things" very quickly as we type away furiously on the keyboard thinking and writing about political philosophy while trying to remember how to spell "philosophy". Almost magically, "ideas" that we have packed away in our brains pop in and out by means of their connections to ideas held in attention a fraction of a second earlier.

LANGUAGE AS THE GREAT VIRTUALIZER

Language is a great virtualizer.  A word like "Canada" can be used to reference a vast amount of information stored away in the brain awaiting unpacking, resorting and repacking. What's more, such a word can be transmitted via speech to another brain, whereupon it proceeds to unpack "meaning" in the second brain. The equivalent of the "cloud" is what we call "culture". Those plugged in to "culture" have access to a vast ocean of information shared among members of that culture. Most of us belong to more than one culture - for example there is an international culture of Scientists and Intellectuals for whom language differences are a mere inconvenience to sharing of ideas.

Without getting too spooky or mystical, I think it's not entirely wrong to see the cultural equivalent of the "cloud" as a group mind - something that is alive and purposeful and not a mere information store.

BEES

Consider the bees ...

An individual bee is an incredible product of evolutionary engineering. Its ability for controlled flight would be the envy of a veteran helicopter pilot. With a microscopic brain, it is capable of navigation and able to communicate the location of promising flower beds to its hive mates.

But it doesn't know it's a bee. 

Everything the bee does is in the service of the hive. It lives and dies to ensure that the hive will survive through the winter. The hive as a whole seems to "know what it's doing", yet the hive has no mind of its own. Hive "behavour" and hive "knowledge" somehow emerge from the collective, individual behavour of bees. I won't go wandering off into abstract speculation to speculate on how this happens. My point is simply that it does happen. The hive mind is distributed among the minds of tens of thousands of bees, each with a lifetime measured in months at most, each with a remarkable ability to sense the world and act in it, but each totally "unaware" of what it is doing.

It is also important to note that the "hive mind" has been shaped (and is being shaped) over millions of years in a wonderful dance with the flowers, who "use" the bees to reproduce sexually and thereby maximize the chance of evolutionary variation. And of course, a rose doesn't know it's a rose.

DO WE KNOW WE ARE HUMAN?

So we are tempted to ask, do we know we are human beings? Is there a level of reality in human history that is forever beyond our ability to understand, just as a bee will never understand the hive it dies for and a rose doesn't know it smells sweet? This is hardly an original question. Religions pretend to answer it by somehow uncovering the secret thoughts of "God", along with the heavenly "big picture". I don't think I'm alone in thinking these efforts result in little more than childish fairy tales, much smaller than the phenomena they attempt to "explain".

NOT SURE WHAT IT IS, BUT HOW DOES IT WORK?

I think we can step back from telling ourselves mystical stories and learn a lot simply by looking at the architecture. There is a hierarchy of information processing that goes all the way from individual "attention" to cultural knowledge. Indeed, since cultural knowledge relies at least in part on experience of the real world, we can regard physical reality as our ultimate "cloud" storage, just as the story of the bees is incomplete without accounting for the role of the flowers. However, like bees, we are restricted by this architecture from experiencing any of it except through a tiny window of "working memory" - less than a dozen "chunks" at a time. Language itself is our "operating system", providing reasonably efficient ways to "download" chunks from our "cloud", process them and store them back in the form of new "mash ups" of old ideas. Human language plays a similar role in our minds as Java plays in the computer you are looking at now. Ideas are popping into your head through words and it makes no difference where these ideas came from. The only requirement is that both the author (me) and the reader (you) are both human - running the basic operating system, capable of turning ideas into words and vice versa.

Of course, this insight applies far beyond the realm of language and "words", but that's a topic for another essay ...

The Computer as a Model of Mind

I am parking this note in an obscure blog. I think better when I write things down.

The idea is to go back to school at age 70 to get a Ph. D., probably in something like AI or the overlap between psychology, philosophy and computer science. This would have to be by remote study or under local supervision due to the risk of being away from my medical team.

The core idea is to take a good look at computers as a model for the mind.

From one aspect, computer languages are a powerful analogy for human language. The similarities and differences are both worth a long, hard look.

• Computer "classes" and human "categories" share a lot of features but differ in the key aspect that human categories are based arbitrarily on human situations (Hofstadter)
• Computer languages face some very sharp limitations about what can and cannot be "said". Similar restrictions seem to apply to human languages but only when we are looking at human language "pared down" to what amounts to a computer language. Can we say anything about what a human can "know" that a computer cannot know?
• Language is only part of human cognition. It is interesting to see what happens when the computer needs a capability that is not intrinsically "linguistic" (can't be expressed in a computer program, no matter how long or sophisticated), such as the ability to "see" objects and detect "situations" in the real world. It could be useful to describe and explore this boundary in detail. It would be interesting to explore alternate "object and situation" detectors such as analog devices that do instant reverse Fourier transforms or quantum computers that "solve" equations beyond the reach of digital methods.

Another important aspect of the subject is the way we can say a lot about how human language works to create a common "gestalt" using the example of computer language (which is, after all, a subset of human language). For example, the "wisdom" of Java is in the language itself rather than any particular installation of it on any particular platform. Issues such as portability, virtualization play a role in human language. The rich structure of Object Oriented Analysis can be illustrated in the way human language is structured and used.

A traditional treatment of computer "intelligence" would say that it's all based ultimately on bits and bytes: what a CPU can really do which boils down to what a Turing Machine can do (Dennett). Perhaps another way of looking at it is to show how the language of human categories is the "machine language" in question. We are ultimately striving to model the power and expressiveness of human language by whatever technology we can lay our hands on. It is a mistake to put too much emphasis on the particular technology we use at any one time.

This program would require a working knowledge of brain architecture, at least as we currently understand it. The "mind" is, after all, "running" on this platform. How well can we simulate this platform in silicon? What are the limitations? Many authors  assume that such a simulation is not only possible but just around the corner. Are they right?

My initial impression is that such a proposal should be very well thought out and researched before being presented to any possible supervising body. The "moving parts" of the idea should also be worked out, such as whether it could be conducted mostly in Calgary with remote supervision by a real expert in the field with occasional on-campus face to face visits or whether it would need to be sponsored entirely in Calgary. The latter option may suffer from a lack of local expertise, which is something that should be researched on its own.

---- Later, to JH ---

Thank you for the encouraging words and good luck July 7. Clair and I will be out of town for July and the first weeks of August to look after Clair's mom and other family-related issues.

The Ph. D. idea has many practical problems but the degree itself is not an essential part of the project. I'm looking for focus and interaction. Perhaps I could do something similar under the heading of "Independent Study". I spent some time looking in to what a dissertation proposal would look like and this shed some light on the situation. What would count as "original research"? The answer is quite different depending on the faculty. For example, what I have in mind would not count as "research" in Computer Science or Psychology but might fit the criteria in Philosophy or even History. On the other hand, I can't see myself working usefully with professional philosophers or historians.

The online world has many unexplored opportunities for connection and discussion. It would even be useful to make more of an effort to attract readers and especially commentators to my blog(s) along with perhaps a bit more polish and focus in the blogs themselves. I can also spend more time commenting on other blogs and find active online discussion groups. I could write a book and self publish it -- I'd be happy if 100 people read it. It's also quite easy to get into e-mail discussions with almost anyone by commenting on their ideas. After all, there are many points of contact between my own "research" and that of others. The "way in" is to find those points of contact and establish dialogue based on what already interests other people. In the end, that's what you want, isn't it? To come up with useful ideas, not discover "truth" while meditating in a cave.

I should mention that my Mensa talk was cancelled due to low attendance at the event itself (Regional Gathering), but preparing that talk reminded me of the importance of focus. Mensa may still turn out to be an avenue for connection.

The urge to "sit around the campfire", share ideas and tell our stories is an important part of what it is to be human. 

Which brings us back to pizza ...