Kermit the Frog, Maximum Entropy Production, Etc.

While in Shanghai on a business trip recently, in a restaurant eating some terrifyingly spicy fish hot-pot with a couple of my Aidyia colleagues, I noticed the radio was playing a cover version of a song from the original Muppet Movie, “The Rainbow Connection”…. 

As often happens, this got me thinking….

This is not remotely an original observation, but it’s one of these cliches that has struck me over and over again during my life: There’s a certain beauty to the process of seeking, which often exceeds the satisfaction of finding what one is looking for.  This is related to why so many people enjoy the process of entrepreneurship — of starting new things and chasing success.  The feeling of increasing success is exciting, the ups and downs as one moves toward the goal and then toward and then away etc. in complex patterns are exciting….  Actually achieving the goal may give an oomph of satisfaction but then the oomph goes away and one craves the joy of the process of seeking again.  Of course there are always new things to seek though — one can seek to grow one’s company bigger and bigger, etc.  Many people enjoy seducing new men or women more than actually having an ongoing relationship with one whom they’ve captured, but I’ve never quite felt that way; I guess seeking a really good ongoing relationship is enough of a challenging quest for me, given my  peculiar and in some ways difficult personality…

This point struck me hard as a kid when I was watching the Muppet Movie and saw Kermit the Frog singing the “The Rainbow Connection”

Why are there so many songs about rainbows
And what's on the other side
Rainbows are visions
But only illusions
And rainbows have nothing to hide

So we've been told
And some choose to believe it
I know they're wrong, wait and see
Some day we'll find it
The rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me
 

Who said that every wish
Would be heard and answered
When wished on the morning star
Somebody thought of that
And someone believed it
And look what it's done so far

What's so amazing
That keeps us stargazing
And what do we think we might see
Some day we'll find it
The rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

All of us under its spell, we know that it's probably magic

Have you been half asleep?
And have you heard voices?
I've heard them calling my name;
Is this the sweet sound
That called the young sailors?
The voice might be one and the same

I've heard it too many times to ignore it
It's something that I'm supposed to be
Some day we'll find it
The rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers, and me

Kermit’s plaintive froggy voice moved my emotions and I have to say it still does, way more than the typical ballad sung by a human pop star…   What occurred to me as a child as I watched him sing (maybe not the first time I saw the movie — we had it on video-tape when I was a kid and I heard the song more than once!), was that he had found his Rainbow Connection right there, inside the song — He was seeking something else, something beyond himself and his life, but actually inside the beauty of the song, and the feeling of singing the song, and the connection between him and the singer — and the songwriters and puppeteers behind the Kermit persona — and the various listeners of the song such as myself, and the people singing and humming the song around the world at various times and places … this whole melange of feeling and creation and expression and interaction obviously WAS the “Rainbow Connection” — a connection between different minds and voices, sounds waving through the air and colored pictures flashing on screens decoded from electromagnetic waves cast through the air via antennas … a diversity of colors beyond the humanly perceived rainbow and including all sorts of other frequencies ….  When I listened to the song I was basking in the reality of the Rainbow Connection and so was the imaginary and real Kermit.  Of course as a child I didn’t articulate it exactly this way but less-crystallized versions of these thoughts verged through my mind (as probably has happened with many other listeners to this same song, in another aspect of the Good Old Rainbow Connection).   And I could only suspect that somewhere in the back of his good-natured though not that bright little froggy mind, Kermit realized that the beauty was really in the process of seeking and not in the goal — that the beauty and connection and joy he was after, were already there in the the song he was singing about the quest for these things, and in the life and love he expressed that constituted and animated this quest itself….

So, well, all hail Kermit !!! ... what else?

Similar ideas have occurred to me recently in an utterly different context…

A different twist on the aesthetic primacy of process over goal is provided by the Maximum Entropy Production Principle, which hypothesizes that, in many circumstances, complex systems evolve along paths of *maximum entropy production*.   The fine print is complex, but there's a lot of evidence mathematical, conceptual and physical in favor of this idea, e.g.:

•  An informal enthusiastic presentation: http://www.lawofmaximumentropyproduction.com/
• A deep biological/philosophical discussion: http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/189/284
• A nice technical article: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370157305004813
• A whole technical journal issue: http://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/special_issues/maximum-entropy-production

This is rather fascinating — it suggests we can think about the wonderful complexity of life, nature, humanity and so forth as, in some measure, resulting from a rush to achieve the goal of the Second Law of Thermodynamics — heat death — as rapidly as possible!!   Of course this isn’t really the total story of complexity and life and all that, but it seems to be an important ingredient — and it’s certainly a poignant one.   The goal in this case is a humanly repellent and disturbing one: the loss of complex form and the advent of stultifyingly uniform random movement in the universe.  The path followed in working toward this goal is a deep, rich, tremendously beautiful one.  

Whether you’re seeking the Rainbow Connection or Ultimate Heat Death, it seems that the process of optimization, in many cases, has a great deal of power to create beauty and structure and feeling.   The process of seeking a goal in the face of limitations and constraints forces a tradeoff between the degree of goal fulfillment and the constraints — and it’s this dance that leads to so much structure and beauty.  

In the case of a song like the Rainbow Connection, the constraints are about time (people get bored if a song is too long) and human comprehension (it’s hard to express a universal human feeling in a way that humans can universally appreciate, given the diversity of our mind-sets and cultures) and the physics of sound waves and the limitations of the human ear and so on.  In the case of Jimi Hendrix, whose music I prefer to even that of Kermit, it was about Hendrix’s musical creativity and the sounds he heard in his head interacting with the constraints of what could be done with the electric guitar and the amplification and production equipment at the time.

In the case of thermodynamics, the core constraints are the “laws” of mechanics and temporal continuity.   The end goal is Ultimate Heat Death, perhaps, but a physical system can only change so much at each point in time.   The physical system is trying to maximize entropy production, yeah, but it can only do so in a manner consistent with the laws of physics, which — among many other constraints — only allow a certain pace of change over time.  Figuring out how to maximize entropy production in the context of obeying the laws of physics and what they say about the relation between matter and spacetime — this is the interplay that helps yield the wonderful complexity we see all around us. 

If the constraints were too relaxed, the goal might get approached too quickly and surely, and there would be no beauty on the path along the way.  If the goal and the constrants were both weak, things might just drift around quasi-randomly in less than interesting ways.  If the constraints were too strong there might just be no interesting ways for the overall objective function to get pursued (be it heat death or writing a great song or whatever).   Constraints that are strong but not too strong, imposed on a suitable objective function, are what yield wonderful complexity.  Lots of analogies arise here, from raising kids to the evolution of species.

To view it in terms of optimization theory: Constraints take a simple objective function and turn it into a complex objective function with multiple extrema and subtle dependencies all across the fitness landscape.  These subtleties in the objective function lead to subtle, intricate partial solutions — and when there is a continuity constraint, so that newly posed solutions must constitute slight variations on previously posed solutions, the only way to dramatically maximize the core objective function is to pass through a variety of these partial solutions.

The ultimate bliss and glorious spectral togetherness Kermit was seeking — or that my childhood self thought he was seeking — or whatever — is an amazing, thrilling vision for sure.  But the process of gradually moving toward this ultimate cosmic vision, in a manner consistent with the constraints of human and froggy life, and the continuity constraint in moving through possible solutions, is what yields such subtle, interesting and moving forms as we see, hear and are in this world right now…

…

OK OK, that’s all pretty fast and loose, I know.  Hey, I’m just musing while listening to a song, not proving a bloody theorem.  My petty human mind, not yet achieved ultimate superintelligence, has got to churn through stuff like this day by day to gradually muck toward a fuller understanding of the world.  It’s a process ;-) ….

As Captain Beefheart said, “a squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous — fast and bulbous, got me?”

Paranormal Phenomena, Nonlocal Mind and Reincarnation Machines

How I Came to Accept the Paranormal

While I’m generally an extremely stubborn person,  my opinion has radically changed on some topics over the years.   I don't view this as a bad thing.   I don't aspire to be one of those people whose ideas are set in stone, impervious to growth or adaptation.

Some of my changes of opinion have been purely "changes of heart" -- e.g. in my early 20s I transitioned from a teenage solipsism to a more compassion-oriented attitude, due more to internal growth than any external data or stimuli.   

Other times, the cause of my change of opinion has been encountering some body of evidence that I simply hadn’t been aware of earlier.  

The change of mind I'm going to write about here has been of the latter kind -- data-driven.

What I’m going to write about here is a certain class of paranormal phenomena that seem related to religious notions of “survival after death.”   In my teens and 20s I was pretty confident these phenomena were obviously nothing more than wishful thinking.   People didn't want to admit they were doomed to die one day, so they made up all sorts of fanciful stories about heavens and hells after death, and reincarnation, and ghosts and what-not.  

I didn’t want to die either, but I was interested in achieving physical immortality via fixing the problems that make the human body age, or  by uploading my  mind into a robot or computer or whatever – by methods that made good solid rational sense according to science, even if they seemed outlandish according to most peoples’ everyday world-views.   

(I did, in my youth, acquire from somewhere some sort of intuitive spiritual sense that my mind would continue to exist after my death, fused with the rest of the universe somehow.  But I didn’t imagine I’d continue to have any individuality or will after my body died – I intuitively, non-rationally felt I’d continue to exist in some sort of inert form, always on the verge of having a thought or taking an action but never quite doing so….)

My current view of these "survival-ish" paranormal phenomena is quite different.   I definitely haven’t had any sort of religious conversion, and I don’t believe any of the traditional stories about an afterlife are anywhere near accurate.    But I now am fairly confident there is SOMETHING mysterious and paranormal going on, related to reincarnation, channeling and related phenomena.

My new perspective doesn’t fit that well into our standard contemporary verbiage, but a reasonable summary might be:

• Individual human minds have an aspect that is "nonlocal", in the sense of not being restricted to exist within the flow of our time-axis, in the same sense that our bodies are generally restricted.  
• Due to this non-localized aspect, it’s possible for human minds that are evidently grounded in bodies in a certain spacetime region, to manifest themselves in various ways outside this spacetime region – thus sometimes generating phenomena we now think of as “paranormal”
• This non-localized aspect of human minds probably results from the same fundamental aspects of the universe that enable psi phenomena like ESP, precognition, and psychokinesis
• The path from understanding which core aspects of physics enable these phenomena, to  understanding why we see the precise paranormal phenomena we do, may be a long one – just as the path from currently known physics to currently recognized biology and psychology is a long one

How did I come to this new view?

The first step was to accept, based on an extensive review of the available evidence, that psi phenomena are almost surely real.   My perspective on this is summarized in the introductory and concluding chapters of  Evidence for Psi, a book I co-edited with Damien Broderick last year.   See also the links on this page.   I don’t want to take space and time here summarizing the evidence for psi phenomena, which includes lots of carefully-analyzed laboratory data, alongside loads of striking, well-substantiated anecdotal evidence.   It was the laboratory data that first convinced me psi was very likely real.  After getting largely convinced by the laboratory data, I started reading through the literature on anecdotal psi phenomena, and it started to seem less and less feasible that it was all just fabricated.

I’ve also speculated a bit about how one might tweak currently understood physics to obtain a physics in which psi could be possible.   See my blog post on Surprising Multiverse Theory.  Basically, I think it might be enough to posit that the various histories summed over in quantum-mechanical sums-over-histories are weighted in a manner that depends on their information content, rather than just on their energy.   This relates closely to a proposal made by the famous physicist Lee Smolin in a totally different context, as well as to Sheldrake’s morphic field hypothesis.

I recall reading (a few years ago) the excellent book Varieties of Anomalous Experience, with its run-down of various case studies of apparent reincarnation, and then digging into that literature a bit further afterwards.   I became almost-convinced there was SOMETHING paranormal going on there, though not terribly convinced that this something was really “reincarnation” as typically conceived.

Now I’ve just read the equally excellent book Immortal Remains by the philosopher Stephen Braude.   In the careful, rationalist manner of the analytical philosopher, he summarizes and dissects the evidence for various paranormal phenomena that others have taken as indicative of an afterlife for humans – reincarnation, mediumistic channeling, possession, out-of-body experiences, and so forth.   (But the book is a lot more fun to read than most academic philosophy works, with lots of entertaining tidbits alongside the meticulous deductions and comparisons – it’s highly recommended to anyone with a bit of patience who wants to better understand this confusing universe we live in!).

Survival versus SuperPsi versus ??

One of Braude’s themes in the book is the comparison of what he (following generally accepted terminology in this area) calls “survival” based versus “SuperPsi” based explanations of these phenomena. SuperPsi in this context means any combination of recognized psi phenomena like ESP, precognition, psychokinesis and so forth – even very powerful combinations of very powerful instances of these phenomena.

One thing that Braude points out in the book is that, for nearly all the phenomena he considers, there seems to be a thinkable SuperPsi-based explanation, as well as a thinkable survival-based explanation.   This is not surprising since neither the SuperPsi hypothesis nor the survival hypothesis can be very clearly formulated at this stage of our knowledge.  So, he considers the choice between the two classes of hypothesis to come down mainly to considerations of simplicity.  In his view, the SuperPsi explanations often tend to get way too complex and convoluted, leading him to the conclusion that there is most probably some survival-esque phenomenon going on along with probably lots of psi phenomena....  (For a discussion of why I agree with Braude that simplicity is key to a good scientific explanation, see this essay, which was reprinted with slight changes as part of my book The Hidden Pattern.)

The contrast of survival vs. SuperPsi makes a compelling theme for a book, but I suspect it may not be the best way to think about the issues.   

As far as my attitudes have drifted, I still strongly doubt that “survival” in any traditional sense is the real situation.   I really doubt that, after people have died, they keep on living in some “other world” – whether a heaven or hell or just another planet or whatever.   I also really doubt that, after someone dies, their soul or essence enters another person so that this other person is “a new version of them” (the traditional reincarnation story in its most common form).    One thing Braude’s careful review makes clear is how scantily the evidence supports these traditional conclusions.  

The evidence DOES support the conclusion that the paranormal phenomena Braude considers actually happen in the world, and don’t have explanations in terms of science as we now know it.  But the evidence does NOT especially strongly support any of the classical religious analyses of these paranormal phenomena.  My own view is that these religious attempts at explanation have largely served to cloud the matter.   Personally, the main reason I previously rejected these sorts of phenomena entirely, was my reaction to the various conceptual inconsistencies and obvious appeals to human emotion that I saw in these traditional religious explanations.

What we see in the data Braude considers is that:

• After a human being dies, it is sometimes possible for “self and other mind patterns” associated with that human being’s mind to manifest themselves in the world at a later time. 
• While a human being is alive, it is sometimes possible for  “self and other mind patterns” associated with that human being’s mind to manifest themselves in the world at some distant physical location, without any good conventional explanation for how this could happen
• Sometimes these “self and other mind patterns” manifest themselves in a manner that is mixed up with other things, e.g. with someone else’s mind
• Sometimes these “self and other mind patterns” provide evidence of their association with the mind of a spatially or temporally distant human, which is very difficult to “explain away” in terms of known science

Exactly what specific forms the above phenomena take is a long story, which Braude tells in his book, which I don’t feel like taking time to summarize here right now.  Read the book!

Anyway, it should be pretty clear that the above does not imply “survival / afterlife” in any traditional sense.   Yet Braude makes a good case that hypothesizing these phenomena to be caused by some combination of ESP, psychokinesis, precognition and so forth becomes inordinately complicated.

From Carbon to Ecosystems

One thing that strikes me is what a long distance exists between potential “physics of psi” explanations like my Surprising Multiverse Theory, and the complex, messy particulars of phenomena like mediumistic channeling.   Channeling, for instance, apparently involves subtle intersections between individual and social psychology and culture, and appears to mix up instances of ESP and psychokinesis with other “nonlocal mind” phenomena that are more distinct from traditional psi.

An analogy that springs to mind, however, is the relation between the carbon atom and the complexities of the Earth’s ecosystem.   The carbon atom enables the development of life, and this can be seen, in a general sense, via looking at the atom at the micro level, and the nature of the bonds it permits.   On the other hand, predicting the specifics of macroscopic life based on the microscopic properties of the carbon atom is something we still can’t come close to doing.   We can’t, yet, even solve the protein folding problem (a very particular subcase of this more general problem).  

Similarly, it’s “easy” to see that hypotheses like the Surprising Multiverse Theory have some potential to explain how the universe could contain phenomena like mediumistic channeling, apparent reincarnation, and so forth.   But getting from something like a low-level information-theoretic tweak to quantum physics, up to specific predictions about paranormal phenomena among human beings, is bound to involve a lot of complexity, just like any explanation bridging multiple hierarchical levels of reality.  

Toward a Paranormal-Friendly (Patternist) Philosophy of the Cosmos

I don’t have anywhere near a scientific explanation of these paranormal phenomena I’m talking about, at present.  I would like to find one, perhaps by building up from Surprising Multiverse Theory or something similar, perhaps by some other means.  Of course, I don’t think it makes sense to reject evidence simply because we don’t have a good theory for it yet.

I do have a philosophical perspective on these phenomena, which helps me think about them in what I hope is a coherent way.   My basic philosophy of the universe is summarized in The Hidden Pattern (free pdf) and A Cosmist Manifesto (free pdf).  But thinking about paranormal phenomena leads me to enrich and extend that basic philosophy in certain ways.

As I’ve said in my previous writings, my preferred way of thinking about these things involves positing a Pattern Space, which exists outside our spacetime continuum.   The whole spacetime universe that defines our everyday being, is just one particular pattern of organization, which in some sense exists within a much larger space of patterns.   When a pattern like a human mind emerges within our spacetime continuum, it also exists in the broader pattern space.   

But what is meant by a pattern being “within our spacetime continuum"?  I haven’t thought about this deeply before.  Basically, I suggest, what it means that this pattern is heavily interlinked with other patterns that are “within our spacetime continuum”, and not so heavily interlinked with other patterns that are not “within our spacetime continuum.”   That is: the spacetime continuum may be thought of as a special sort of cluster of interlinked patterns.

Since the spacetime continuum is just one powerful, but not omnipotent, pattern of organization, it’s not so bizarre that sometimes a pattern that is heavily interlinked with other patterns in the “spacetime continuum pattern cluster”, could sometimes interlink with other patterns that are outside this cluster.   Extra-cluster pattern interactions are then perceived, by patterns inside the cluster, as “paranormal.”

This way of thinking ties in with philosopher Charles Peirce’s “one law of mind” – which he formulated as “the tendency to take habits.”   Peirce observed that, in our universe (but NOT in a hypothetical random universe), once a pattern has been observed to exist, the probability of it being observed again is surprisingly high.  This is the basic idea underlying the Surprising Multiverse Theory.   This seems conceptually related to the statement that the patterns we observe mainly live inside a cluster in pattern space.   Inside a cluster, the odds of various entities being connected via a strong pattern should be atypically high – that’s closely related to what makes the cluster a cluster.

Mind Uploading via Reincarnation Machines?

If indeed the paranormal phenomena Braude surveys are real, and have some sort of scientific explanation that we just haven’t found yet, then this has fascinating potential implications for mind uploading.   It suggests that, when someone dies, their mind is still in some sense somewhere – and can potentially be brought back by appropriate dynamics in certain biophysical systems (e.g. the mind of a medium, or a child born as an apparent reincarnation, etc.).

This raises the possibility that, by engineering the right kind of physical system, it might be possible to specifically induce “paranormal” phenomena that cause a dead person’s mind to manifest itself in physical reality, long after that person’s death.

Of course, this is utterly wild speculation.   But what makes it fun is that it’s also fairly logical extrapolation from empirical observations.   If the data about the paranormal is real, but the data ultimately has some scientific explanation rather than a religious one, then most likely the underlying phenomena can be tapped into and manipulated via engineered systems, like all other scientifically understood phenomena.

Of course, a scientific understanding of these phenomena will likely include an understanding of their limitations.  Maybe these limitations will prevent us from building reincarnation machines.   But maybe they won’t.

If we buy the “morphic field” type idea, then what would attract the reincarnation of a deceased person’s mind, would likely be a set of mind-patterns very similar to that person’s mind.  This would be in the spirit of the well-demonstrated phenomenon of ESP among identical twins.   

In this case, it would follow that one very good way to engineer reincarnation might be to create an intelligent robot (perhaps with a quantum-computer infrastructure?) with

• Lots of the mind-patterns of the deceased person one wishes to reincarnate 
•  Lots of degrees of freedom capable of being adjusted and adapted

This would be achieved, for instance, if one created a robot intended as a simulacrum of a deceased person based on information they had left behind – videos, emails and what-not.  There are existing organizations focused specifically on accumulating information about people so as to facilitate this kind of post-mortem simulation.

The strange and exciting hypothesis one is led to, is that such a simulacrum might actually attract some of the mind-patterns of the person simulated, seducing these patterns out of the overarching pattern space – and thus animating the simulacrum with the “feel” of the person being simulated, and perhaps specific memories and capabilities of that person, beyond what was programmed into the simulacrum.

Oh Really?

If you’re a typical tech geek who’s a fan of my AGI work, you may think I’ve gone totally nuts by this point.   That doesn’t bother me particularly though.  

I mean, AGI is almost trendy now, but when I started out with it 30 years ago everyone thought I was nuts to be thinking about it or trying to work on it.    Peer pressure doesn’t really work on me.

I don’t have any real interest in arguing these points with people who haven’t taken the time to inform themselves about the relevant data.   If you want to discuss the points I’ve raised here, do us all a favor and read at least

• The Evidence for Psi
• Randi’s Prize
• Varieties of Anomalous Experience
• Immortal Remains

If you’ve absorbed all this data and are still highly skeptical, then I’m quite willing to discuss and debate with you.   On the other hand, if you feel like you don’t want to take the time to read so many pages on this sort of topic, that’s understandable – but yet, IMO, by  making this choice you are forfeiting your right to debate these points with people who HAVE familiarized themselves with the data.

This is weird stuff, for sure.   But don’t blame the messenger.   It’s a weird world we live in.   We understand very little of it, at present.   If we want to increase our understanding as rapidly as we can, the best strategy is to keep an open mind – to look at what reality is showing us and really think about it, rather than shutting out troublesome data because it doesn’t match our preconceptions, and rather than accepting emotionally satisfying simplifications (be they scientific or religious in nature).

Immortality and Immortality

Does this line of thinking I’ve presented here reassure me that my possible forthcoming physical death (I’m 48 years old now, certainly old enough to be thinkig about such things!) may not be so bad after all?    Hmmm – kind of, I guess.  But I’m not going to cancel my Alcor membership, nor stop devoting a portion of my time to longevity research.   I want to keep this body going, or port my mind to a different physical substrate in a direct way.   

The apparent fact that my mind exists outside of spacetime, and can potentially be brought back into spacetime – at least in some partial way – after my death, doesn’t really diminish my urge to keep on continually existing within THIS spacetime continuum, going forward from right now.   Why would it?  

The overarching pattern space is no doubt wonderful, but ongoing existence in this limiting time-axis is pretty cool too – and keeping on living here is very unlikely to stop my mind-patterns from flourishing and romping trans-temporally in the cosmic pattern space, sooo.... 

Why I Signed Tegmark's Open Letter on AI Safety

A bunch of folks have messaged me recently asking me why the heck I signed the Open Letter on AI safety recently proposed by Max Tegmark and his chums at the newly formed Future of Life Institute (in full, the letter is called Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence: an Open Letter)....   It is true that Tegmark's new organization is at the moment mainly funded by the great inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose recent statements about AI have, er, not pleased me especially.

Reading through the brief text of the Open Letter, I did find one thing I don't agree with.   The letter contains the phrase "...our AI systems must do what we want them to do. "  Well, that is just not going to be possible, obviously....   It may happen for a while, but once we have AGI systems that are massively smarter than people, they are going to do what they want to do, or what other powerful forces in the universe want them to do, but not necessarily what we want them to do.   

Our best hope of making AI systems do what we want them to do, will be to become one with these AI systems via brain-computer interfacing, mind uploading and the like.   But in this case, the "we" who is guiding the AIs (i..e AIs that are the future "us") will not be the same human "we" that we are now -- this future "we", descended from our current human selves, may have quite different goals, motivations, and ways of thinking.

But in the Open Letter, this phrase about controlling AIs, which doesn't make sense to me, is embedded in the paragraph

The progress in AI research makes it timely to focus research not only on making AI more capable, but also on maximizing the societal benefit of AI. Such considerations ...  constitute a significant expansion of the field of AI itself, which up to now has focused largely on techniques that are neutral with respect to purpose. We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do. 

and I do approve the overall gist here.  I think we should do research aimed at maximizing the odds that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial.   This seems a no-brainer, right?

Looking at the associated document outlining suggested research directions, I found myself agreeing that these would all be worthwhile things to study.   For instance, in the computer science section of the document, they advocate study of

1. Verification: how to prove that a system satis es certain desired formal properties. (Did I build
   the system right?")
2. Validity: how to ensure that a system that meets its formal requirements does not have unwanted behaviors and consequences. (Did I build the right system?")
3. Security: how to prevent intentional manipulation by unauthorized parties..
4. Control: how to enable meaningful human control over an AI system after it begins to operate

I think all these kinds of research are valuable and worth pursuing presently.

I definitely do NOT think that these kinds of research should take priority over research on how to make thinking machines be more and more generally intelligent.   But that is not what the open letter advocates.   It just suggests that the research areas suggested should get MORE attention than they current do.

It may be that some of the signatories of the Open Letter actually ARE in favor of stopping or slowing AGI R&D while work on safety-oriented topics proceeds.   But, for example, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind signed the letter, and I know he is trying pretty hard to push toward creating AGI, with his team at Google in the UK.  Ditto for Itamar Arel, and plenty of other signatories.

One could argue about whether it makes sense to divert resources from building AGI toward research on AGI safety, at this stage.  But to my mind, this would be a pointless argument.   AGI occupies a minimal percentage of the world's resources, so if more funding is to be put into AGI safety, it doesn't have to come out of the pot of AGI R&D funding.   As an example, Musk put US$10M into Tegmark's Future of Life Institute -- but it's not as though, if he hadn't done that, he would have put the same money into AGI R&D.  

Do I think that $10M would have been better spent on OpenCog AGI R&D?   Well, absolutely.   But that wasn't the issue.    There is a huge amount of wealth in the world, and very little of it goes to AGI or other directly Singularity-oriented tech.   Rather than fighting over the scraps of resources that currently go to Singularity-oriented tech, it's more useful IMO to focus on expanding the percentage of the world's resources that go into Singularity-oriented development as a whole.

In short, I considered not signing the document because of the one phrase I disagreed with, as mentioned above.  But eventually I decided this is not a legal contract where every phrase has to be tuned to avoid having loopholes that could come back to bite me; rather, it's just an expression of common feeling and intent.   I signed the document because I wanted to signal to Max Tegmark and his colleagues that I am in favor of research aimed at figuring out how to maximize the odds that AGI systems are robust and beneficial.   This kind of research has the potential to be worthwhile in making the phase "from here to Singularity" go more smoothly -- even though in the end we're obviously not going to be able to "make AGI systems do what we want them to do" ... except potentially by morphing what "we" are so that there is no boundary between the AGIs and us anymore.

What is Life?

I was trolling the Google+ discussion forum related to the Developmental AI MOOC, which my son Zar recently completed, and noticed a discussion thread on the old question of “What is Life?” — prompted by the question “Are these simple developmental-AI agents we’ve built in this course actually “alive” or not?

I couldn’t help adding my own two cents to the forum discussion; this blog post basically summarizes what I said there.

First of all, I’m not terribly sure "alive or not" is the right question to be asking about digital life-forms.  Of course it's an interesting question from our point of view as evolved, biological organisms.  But -- I mean, isn't it a bit like asking if an artificial liver is really a liver or not?   What are the essential characteristics of being a liver?  Is it enough to carry out liver-like functions for keeping an organism's body going?  Or do the internal dynamics have to be liver-like?  And at what level of detail?

Having said that, though, I think one can make some mildly interesting headway on the "what is life?” question by starting with the concept of agency and proceeding from there...

I think Stan Franklin was onto something with his definition of "autonomous agent" in his classic “Agent or Program?” paper .  He was writing there more from an AI view than an ALife view, but still the ideas there seem very much applicable.  The core definition of the paper is:




An autonomous agent is a system situated within and part of an environment that senses that environment and acts on it, over time, in pursuit of its own agenda and so as to affect what it senses in the future.

The paper then goes on to characterize additional properties possessed by various different types of agents.   For instance, according to Franklin's approach,

• every agent satisfies the properties: reactive, autonomous, goal-oriented and temporally continuous.
• some agents have other interesting properties like: learning/adaptive, mobile, flexible, having-individual-character, etc.

Given this approach, one could characterize “life” via saying something like

A life-form is an autonomous agent that is adaptive and possesses metabolism and self-reproduction.

This seems fairly reasonable — but of course begs the question of how to define metabolism and self-reproduction.  If one defines them too narrowly based on biological life, one will basically be defining "traditional biological life."  If one defines them too broadly, they'll have no meaning.

A related approach that seems sensible to me is to define a kind of abstract "survival urge"  For instance, we could say that


An agent possesses survival-urge if its interactions with the environment, during the period of its existence, have a reasonably strong influence on whether it continues to exist or not ... and if its continued existence is one of its goals.


and


An agent with individual character possesses individual-character survival-urge if its interactions with the environment, during the period of its existence, have a reasonably strong influence on whether other agents with individual-character similar to it exist in future ... and if both its continued existence and the existence of other agents with similar individual-character to it, are among its goals.


Then we could abstractly conceive life as

A life-form is an adaptive autonomous agent with survival urge

or

An individuated life-form is an adaptive autonomous agent with, survival urge, individual character and individual-character survival-urge

These additions bring us closer to the biological definition of life.

(I note that Franklin, in his paper, doesn't define what a "goal" is.  But in the discussion in the paper, it's clear that he conceived it as what I've called an implicit goal rather than an explicit goal.   That is, he considers that a thermostat has a goal; but obviously, the thermostat does not contain its goal as deliberative, explicitly-represented cognitive content.  He seems to consider a system's goal as, roughly, "the function that a reasonable observer would consider the system as trying to optimize."   I think this is one sensible conception of what a goal is.)

Unfortunately I haven't studied the agents created in the Developmental AI MOOC well enough to have a definitive opinion if they are "alive" according to the definitions I've posited in this post.  My suspicion, though, based on a casual study, is that they are autonomous agents without so much of a survival urge.   But I guess a survival urge and even an individuated one could be achieved via small modifications to the approach taken in the course exercises.

My overall conclusion, then, is that some fairly simple digital life-forms should logically be said to obey the criteria of “life”, if these are defined in a sensible way that isn’t closely tied to the specifics of the biological substrate. 

Now, some may find this unsatisfying, in that digital organisms like the ones involved in the Developmental AI MOOC are palpably  much simpler than known biological life-forms like amoebas, paramecia and so forth.    But  my reaction to that would be that complexity is best considered a separate issue from “alive-ness.”  The complexity of an agent’s interactions and perceptions and goal-oriented behaviors can be assessed, as can the complexity of its behaviors specifically directed toward survival or individual-character survival.   According to these criteria, existing digital life-forms are definitely simpler than amoebas or paramecia, let alone humans.  But I don’t think this makes it sensible to classify them as “non-alive.”   It’s just that the modern digital environment happens to allow simpler life-forms than Earthly chemistry gave rise to via evolution.

Is the Technological Singularity a "Final Cause" of Human History?

Intuitively, it is tempting (to some people anyway!) to think of the potential future Technological Singularity as somehow "sucking us in" -- as a future force that reaches back in time and guides events so as to bring about its future existence.   Terrence McKenna was one of the more famous and articulate advocates of this sort of perspective.

This way of thinking relates to Aristotle's notion of "Final Causation" -- the final cause of a process being its ultimate purpose or goal.   Modern science doesn't have much of a place for final causes in this sense; evolutionary theories often seem to be teleological in a "final causation" way on the surface, but then can generally be reformulated otherwise.   (We colloquially will say "evolution was trying to do X," but actually our detailed models of how evolution was working toward X, don't require any notion of "trying", but only notions of mutation, crossover and differential survival...)

It seems to me, though, that the Surprising Multiverse theory presented in one of my recent blog posts (toward the end), actually implies a different sort of final causation -- not quite the same as what Aristotle suggested, but vaguely similar.  And this different sort of final causation does, in a sense, suggest that the Singularity may be sucking us in....

The basic concept of the Surprising Multiverse theory is that, in the actual realized rather than merely potential world, patterns with high information-theoretic surprisingness are more likely to occur.   This implies that, among the many possible universes consistent with a given set of observations (e.g. a given history over a certain interval of time), those universes containing more surprisingness are more likely to occur.

Consider, then, a set of observations during a certain time interval -- a history as known to a certain observer, or a family of histories as known to a set of communicating observers -- and the question of what will happen AFTER that time interval is done.   For instance, consider human history up till 2014, and the question of the human race's future afterwards.

Suppose that, of the many possible futures, some contain more information-theoretic surprisingness.   Then, if the Surprising Multiverse hypothesis holds, these branches of the multiverse -- these possible universes -- will have boosted probabilities, relative to other options.   The surprisingness weighting may then be viewed intuitively as "pulling the probability distribution over universes, toward those with greater surprisingness."

The "final cause" of some pattern P according to observer O, may be viewed as the set of future surprising patterns Q that are probabilistically caused by P, from the perspective of observer O. (There are many ways to quantify the conceptual notion of probabilistic causation -- perhaps the most compelling is as "P having nonneutralized positive component effect on Q, based on the knowledge of O", as defined in the interesting paper A Probabilistic Analysis of Causation.)

So the idea is: final causation can be viewed as the probabilistic causation that has the added oomph of surprisingness (and then viewed in the backwards direction).   A final cause of P is something that is probabilistically caused by P, and that has enough surprisingness to be significantly overweighted in the Surprising Multiverse weighting function that balances P's various possible futures.

So what of the Singularity?  We may suppose that a Technological Singularity will display a high degree of probabilistic surprisingness, relative to other alternative futures for humanity and its surrounds. If so, branches of the multiverse involving a Singularity would be preferentially weighted higher, according to the Surprising Multiverse hypothesis.   The Singularity is thus a final cause of human history.   QED....

A fair example of the kind of thing that passes through my head at 2:12 AM Sunday morning ;-) ...

The SpaceshipTwo Crash and the Pluses and Minuses of Prize-Driven and Incremental Development

SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic's ambitious new plane/spaceship, crashed Friday (two days ago), killing one pilot and seriously injuring another.

This is a human tragedy like every single death; and it's also the kind of thing one can expect from time to time in the course of development of any new technology.   I have no doubt that progress toward tourist spaceflight will continue apace: inevitable startup struggles notwithstanding, it's simply an idea whose time has come.   

Every tragedy is also an occasion for reflection on the lessons implicit in the tragic events.

 

 

(in the center picture, the SpaceShipTwo is shown in the center, 

between the motherships that provide its initial lift)

For me, watching the struggles of the Virgin Galactic approach to spaceflight has also been a bit of a lesson in the pluses and minuses of prize-driven technology development.   SpaceShipTwo is the successor to SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X-Prize for commercial spaceflight a decade ago.   At the time it seemed that the Ansari X-Prize would serve at least two purposes:

1. Raise consciousness generally about the viability of commercial spaceflight, particularly of the pursuit of spaceflight by startups and other small organizations rather than governments and large government contractors
2. Concretely help pave a way toward commercially viable spaceflight, via progressive development of the winning spaceflight technology into something fairly rapidly commercially successful

It seems clear that the first goal was met, and wonderfully well.  Massive kudos are due to the X-Prize Foundation and Ansari for this.   The press leading up to and following from the Ansari X-Prize made startup spaceflight into a well-recognized "thing" rather than a dream of a tiny starry-eyed minority.

Regarding the second goal, though, things are much less clear.    Just a little before the tragic SpaceShipTwo crash, a chillingly prescient article by Doug Messier was posted, discussing the weaknesses of the SpaceShipTwo design from a technical perspective.   If you haven't read it yet, I encourage you to click and read it through carefully -- the article you're reading now is basically a reflection on some of the points Messier raises, and a correlation of some of those points with my own experiences in the AI domain.

Messier's article traces SpaceShipTwo's development difficulties back to the SpaceShipOne design, on which it was based -- and points out that this design may well have been chosen (implicitly, if not deliberately) based on a criterion of winning the Ansari X-Prize quickly and at relatively low cost, rather than a criterion of serving as the best basis for medium-term development of commercial spaceflight technology.

As Messier put it,

It turns out that reaching a goal by a deadline isn’t enough; it matters how you get there. Fast and dirty doesn’t necessarily result in solid, sustainable programs. What works well in a sprint can be a liability in a marathon. A - See more at: http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/10/30/apollo-ansari-hobbling-effects-giant-leaps/#sthash.1ah2VRLy.dpuf

It turns out that reaching a goal by a deadline isn’t enough; it matters how you get there. Fast and dirty doesn’t necessarily result in solid, sustainable programs. What works well in a sprint can be a liability in a marathon.

It turns out that reaching a goal by a deadline isn’t enough; it matters how you get there. Fast and dirty doesn’t necessarily result in solid, sustainable programs. What works well in a sprint can be a liability in a marathon. - See more at: http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/10/30/apollo-ansari-hobbling-effects-giant-leaps/#sthash.1ah2VRLy.dpuf

It turns out that reaching a goal by a deadline isn’t enough; it matters how you get there. Fast and dirty doesn’t necessarily result in solid, sustainable programs. What works well in a sprint can be a liability in a marathon. A - See more at: http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/10/30/apollo-ansari-hobbling-effects-giant-leaps/#sthash.1ah2VRLy.dpuf

However, while I am fascinated by Messier's detailed analysis of the SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo technologies, I'm not sure I fully agree with the general conclusion he draws -- or at least not with the way he words his conclusions.   His article is titled "Apollo, Ansari and the Hobbling Effects of Giant Leaps" -- he argues that a flaw in both the Ansari X-Prize approach and the Apollo moon program was an attempt to make a giant leap, by hook or by crook.  In both cases, he argues, the result was a technology that achieved an exciting goal using a methodology that didn't effectively serve as a platform for ongoing development.

Of course, the inspirational value of putting a man on the moon probably vastly exceeded the technical value of the accomplishment - and the inspirational value was the main point at the time.    But I think it's also important to make another point: the problem isn't that pushing for Giant Leaps is necessarily bad.   The problem is that pushing for a Giant Leap that is defined for non-technical, non-scientific reasons, with a tight time and/or financial budget, can lead to "fast and dirty" style short-cuts that render the achievement less valuable than initial appearances indicate.

Apollo, Ansari and the Hobbling Effects of Giant Leaps - See more at: http://www.parabolicarc.com/2014/10/30/apollo-ansari-hobbling-effects-giant-leaps/#sthash.1ah2VRLy.dpuf

That is: If the goal is defined as "Achieve Giant Leap Goal X as fast and cheap as possible," then the additional goal of "Create a platform useful for leaping beyond X" is not that likely to be achieved as well, along the way.   And further -- as I will emphasize below -- I think the odds of the two goals being aligned are higher if Great Leap Goal X emerges from scientific considerations, as opposed to from socially-oriented marketing or flashy-demonstration considerations.

It's interesting that Messier argues against Giant Leaps and in favor of incremental development.   And yet there is a sense in which SpaceShipOne/Two represents incremental development at its most incremental.    I'm thinking of the common assumption in the modern technology world, especially in Silicon Valley, that the best path to radical technological success is also generally going to be one that delivers the most awe-inspiring, visible and marketable results at each step of the way.   The following graphic is sometimes used to illustrate this concept:

On the surface, the SpaceShipTwo approach exemplifies this incremental development philosophy perfectly.   It's a spaceplane, an incremental transition between place and spaceship; and the spaceship portion is lifted high into the air initially by a plane.   It's precisely because of taking this sort of incremental approach that SpaceShipOne was able to win the Ansari X-Prize with the speed and relatively modest cost that it did.

On the other hand, Messier favors a different sort of incremental spacecraft development -- not incremental steps from plane to plane/spacecraft to spacecraft, but rather ongoing incremental development of better and better materials and designs for making spacecraft, even if this process doesn't lead to commercial space tourism at the maximum speed.   In fact, scientific development is almost always incremental -- the occasional Eureka moment notwithstanding (and Eureka moments tend to rest on large amounts of related incremental development).

It seems important, in this context, to distinguish between incremental basic scientific/technological progress and incremental business/marketing/demonstration progress.   Seeking incremental scientific/technological progress makes sense (though other issues emerge here, in terms of pathologies resulting from trying too hard to quantitatively and objectively measure incremental scientific/technological progress -- I have discussed this in an AGI context before).   But the path of maximally successful incremental business/marketing/demonstration progress often does not involve the most sensible incremental scientific path -- rather, it sometimes involves "fast and dirty" technological choices that don't advance science so much at all.

In my own work on AGI development, I have often struggled with these aspects of development.    The incremental business/marketing/demo development approach has huge commercial advantages, as it has more potential of giving something money-making at each step of the way.   It also has advantages in the purely academic world, in terms of giving one better demos of incremental progress at each step of the way, which helps with keeping grant funding flowing in.   The advantages also hold up in the pure OSS software domain, because flashy, showy incremental results help with garnering volunteer activity that moves an OSS project forward.

However, when I get into the details of AGI development, I find this "incremental business/marketing/demo" approach often adds huge difficulty.  In the case of AGI the key problem is the phenomenon I call cognitive synergy, wherein the intelligence of a cognitive system largely comes from the emergent effects of putting many parts together.   So, it's more like the top picture in the above graphic (the one that's supposed to be bad) rather than the bottom picture.    Building an AGI system with many parts, one is always making more and more scientific and technological progress, step by step and incrementally.   But in terms of flashy demos and massive commercial value, one is not necessarily proceeding incrementally, because the big boost in useful functionality is unlikely to come before a lot of work has been done on refining individual parts and getting them to work together.

Google, IBM and other big companies recently redoubling their efforts in the AI space are trying to follow the bottom-picture approach, and work toward advanced AGI largely via incrementally improving their product and service functionalities using AI technology.  Given the amount of funding and manpower they have, they may be able to make this work.   But where AGI is concerned, it's pretty clear to me that this approach adds massive difficulty to an already difficult task.

One lesson the SpaceShipOne/Two story has, it seems to me, is that aggressive pursuit of the "maximize incremental business/marketing/demo results" path has not necessarily been optimal for commercial spaceflight either.   It has been fantastically successful marketing-wise, but perhaps less so technically.

I've been approached many times by people asking my thoughts on how to formulate a sort of X-Prize for AGI.   A couple times I put deep thought into the matter, but each time I came away frustrated -- it seemed like every idea I thought of was either

• "Too hard", in the sense that winning the prize would require having a human-level AGI (in which case the prize becomes irrelevant, because the rewards for creating a human-level AGI will be much greater than any prize); OR
• Susceptible to narrow-AI approaches -- i.e. likely end up rewarding teams who pushed toward winning the prize quickly via taking various short-cuts, using approaches that probably wouldn't be that helpful toward achieving human-level AGI eventually

The recently-proposed AI TED-talk X-Prize seems to me likely to fall into the latter category.   I can envision a lot of approaches to making AIs to give effective TED talks, that are basically "specialized TED talk giving machines" designed and intensively engineered for the purpose, without really having architectures suitable as platforms for long-term AGI development.   And if one had a certain fixed time and money budget for winning the AI TED-talk X-Prize, pursuing this kind of specialized approach might well be the most rational course.   I know that if I myself join a team aimed at winning the prize, there will be loads of planning discussions aimed at balancing "the right way to do AGI design/development" versus "the cleverest way to win the prize."

On the other hand, as a sci-tech geek I need to watch out for my tendency to focus overly on the technical aspects.  The AI TED-Talk X-Prize, even if it does have the shortcomings I've mentioned above, may well serve amazingly well from a marketing perspective, making the world more and more intensely aware of the great potential AI holds today, and the timeliness of putting time and energy and resources into AGI development.

I don't want to overgeneralize from the SpaceShipTwo crash -- this was a specific, tragic event; and any specific event has a huge amount of chance involved in it.    Most likely, in a large percentage of branches of the multiverse, the flight Friday went just fine.    I also don't want to say that prize-driven development is bad; it definitely has an exciting role to play, at very least in helping to raise public consciousness about technology possibilities.  And I think that sometimes the incremental  business/marketing/demo progress path to development is exactly the right thing.   As well as being a human tragedy, though, I think the recent terrible and unfortunate SpaceShipTwo accident does serve as a reminder of the limitations of prize-driven technology development, and a spur to reflect on the difficulties inherent in pursuing various sorts of "greedy" incremental development.

Grounding Representation and Pattern in Consciousness

A little piece of patternist analytical philosophy to brighten up your weekend....    I was thinking this stuff through today while going about in Tai Po running errands.   Most notably, the back bumper of my car fell off yesterday, and I was trying to find someone to repair it.   A friendly auto repair shop ended up reattaching the bumper with duct tape.  A real repair is pending them finding a replacement for the broken plastic connector between the bumper and the car, in some semi-local junkyard.  Egads!  Well, anyway....


The concept of "representation" is commonly taken as critical to theories of cognition.   In my own work on the foundations of cognition, I have taken the concept of "pattern" as foundational, and have characterized "pattern" as meaning "representation as something simpler."

But what is representation?   What is simplicity?

In this (rather abstract, theoretical) post, I will suggest a way of grounding the concepts of representation and simplicity (and hence, indirectly, pattern) in terms of consciousness -- or more specifically, in terms of the concept of attention in cognitive systems.

I'll speak relatively informally here, but I'm confident these ideas can be formalized mathematically or philosophically if one wishes...

From Attention to Representation

Suppose one has an intelligent system containing a large amount of contents; and each item of contents has a certain amount of attention associated with it at a given point in time.

(One can characterize attention either energetically or informationally, as pointed out in Section 2.6 of my recent review paper on consciousness.   Given the close connection between energy and information in physics, these two characterizations may ultimately be the same thing.)

In real-world cognitive systems, attention is not distributed evenly across cognitive contents.  Rather, it seems to generally be distributed in such a way that a few items have a lot of attention, and most items have very little attention, and there is a steep but continuous slope between the former and latter categories.   In this case, we can speak about the Focus of consciousness as (a fuzzy set) consisting of those items that have a lot of attention during a certain interval; and the Fringe of consciousness as (a fuzzy set) consisting of those items that have more attention than average during a certain interval, but not as much as the items in the Focus do.   (The general idea that human consciousness has a Focus and a Fringe goes back at least to William James.)

It seems to me one can ground the notion of representation in the structure of consciousness, specifically in the relation between the Focus and the Fringe.

Namely, one can say that ...  R represents E, to system S, if: In the mind of system S, when R is in the Focus, this generally implies E is likely to be in the Fringe at around the same time (perhaps at the same time, perhaps a little earlier, or perhaps a little later).

As a single example, consider the typical simplifying model of the visual cortex as a processing hierarchy.  In this case, we may say that when we are visually remembering the tree

• the state of the upper levels of the visual hierarchy is in Focus, along with bits and pieces of the lower levels
• the full state of the whole visual hierarchy is mostly contained in Fringe

So the rough visual image we have of the tree in our "mind's eye" at a certain point in time, represents the richer visual image of the tree we have in our broader sensorimotor memory.

On the other hand, the phrase "the tree in the middle of my old backyard" may represent my stored visual images of that tree as well, if when that phrase occurs in my Focus (because I heard it, said it, or thought about it), my stored visual images rise into my Fringe (rising up from the deeper, even less attended parts of my memory).

From Attention to Simplicity

I'd like to say that R is a pattern in E if: R represents E, and R is simpler than E.   But this obviously begs the question of what constitutes simplicity....

In prior writings, I have tended to take simplicity as an assumptive prior concept.   That is, I have assumed that each mind has its own measure of simplicity, and that measurement of pattern is relative to what measure of simplicity one chooses.

I still think this is a good way to look at it -- but now I'm going to dig a little deeper into the cognitive underpinnings of how each mind generates its own measure of simplicity.

Basically, I propose we can consider E as simpler than F, if it's generally possible to fit more stuff in the Focus along with E, than along with F.

Note that both E and F may be considered as extending over time, in this definition.  Sometimes they may be roughly considered as instantaneous, but this isn't the general case.

One technical difficulty with this proposal is how to define "more."   There are many ways to do that; one is as follows....

Define simple_1 as follows: E is simpler_1 than F if it's generally possible to fit a greater number of other coherent cognitive items in the Focus along with E, than with F.   (This relies on the concept of "coherence" of a cognitive item as a primitive -- or in other words, it assumes that the sense or notion of what is a "coherent whole" is available to use to help define simplicity.)

Then define simple_2 as: E is simpler_2 than F if it's generally possible to fit a set of cognitive items with less simplicity_1 in the Focus along with E, as compared to with F.

One can extend this to simple_3, simple_4, etc., recursively.

According to this approach, we would find a detailed image of a tree is less simple than a rough, approximate image.   When visualizing a detailed image, we keep more different samples of portions of the detailed image in Focus, leaving less room for anything else.

Similarly, the concept of the function x^2, once we understand it, takes up much less space in Focus than the procedure "take a number and multiply it by itself", and much less than a large table of pairs of numbers and their squares.   Once an abstraction is learned (meaning that holding it in Focus causes appropriate knowledge to appear in Focus), and mastered (meaning that modifying it while it's in Focus causes the contents of Fringe to change appropriately), then it can provide tremendous simplification over less abstract formulations of the same content.

From Attention to Pattern

So, having grounded both representation and simplicity in terms of the structure of attention, we have grounded pattern in terms of the structure of attention.    This is interesting in terms of the cognitive theory I outlined in my 2006 book The Hidden Pattern and elsewhere, which grounded various aspects of intelligence in terms of the "pattern" concept.

As I've previously grounded so much of cognition in terms of pattern, if one then grounds pattern in terms of consciousness, one is then in effect grounding the structure and dynamics of cognition in terms of simple aspects of the structure of consciousness.   This can be viewed mathematically and formally, and/or phenomenologically.

Logical and Linguistic Representation

Often when one hears about "representation", the topic at hand is some sort of formal, logical or linguistic representation.   How does that kind of representation fit into the present framework?

Formal or semi-formal systems like (formal or natural) languages or mathematical theories may be viewed as systems for generating representations of cognitive items.

(What I mean by a semi-formal system is: A system for generating entities for which, for a variety of values of x less than 1, we have a situation where a fraction x of the system's activity can be explained by a set of n(x) formal rules.   Of course n(x) will increase with x, and might sometimes increase extremely fast as x approaches 1.   Natural languages tend to be like this.)

When we have a situation where

• R represents E
• R is a construct created in some formal or semi-formal system S
• E is not a construct in S; rather, E is connected via some chain of representations with sensory and/or motor data

then we can say that E "grounds" R.  

Grounding tends to be useful in the case of systems where

• R is commonly simpler than E (or at least, there's some relatively easy way to tell what will be the situations in which R is going to be simpler than E)
• There is a methodology for going from E to the formal / semi-formal representation R, that doesn't take a huge amount of attention (once the mind is practiced at the methodology)
• Carrying out manipulations within the formal / semi-formal system commonly generates new formal  / semi-formal constructs that represent useful things

These criteria hold pretty well in the case of human languages, and most branches of mathematics (I suppose the jury's still out on, say, the theory of inaccessible cardinals....)

Note that one system may be grounded in another system.   For instance, formal grammars of English are grounded in natural English language productions -- which in turn are grounded, for each language user, in sensorimotor experience.

If it is simple to generate new representations using a certain system, then this means the process of representation-generation is a pattern in a the set of representations generated -- i.e. it's simpler to hold that process in Focus over an interval of time, than to hold the totality of representations generated by it in Focus over an interval of time.   The formal and semi-formal systems adopted by real-world minds, are generally adopted because grounding is useful for them, and their process of representation-generation is a pattern.

This is all quite abstract -- I'll try to make it a little more concrete now.

Suppose I tell you about a new kind of animal called a Fnorkblein, which much enjoys Fbljorking, especially in the season of YingYingYing.   You can then produce sentences describing the actual or potential doings of these beings, e.g. "If Fnorkbleins get all their joyful Fbljorking done in YingYingYing, they may be less happy in other seasons."

These sentences will be representations of, and patterns in, your visual images of corresponding scenes (your mental movie of the Fnorkbleins romping and Fbljorking in the throes of their annual YingYingYing celebration, and so forth).   They will ground these images.

Furthermore, the process of formulating this Fnorkblein-ful sentences, will take relatively little Focus for you, because you know grammar.   If you didn't know grammar, then formulating linguistic patterns representing Fnorkblein-relevant images would require a lot more work, i.e. a lot more Focus spent on the particulars of Fnorkbelein-ness.

Of course, people can use grammar fairly effectively -- including about Fnorkbleins -- without any knowledge of any explicit formalization of grammar.    However, if one wants people to stick close to a specific version of grammar, rather than ongoingly improvising in major ways, it does seem effective to teach them explicit formalized rules that capture much of everyday grammatical usage. That is, if the task at hand is not deploying the grammar one knows in practical contexts, but rather communicating or gaining knowledge regarding which sentences are considered grammatical in a certain community -- then formalizations of grammar become very useful.    This is the main reason grammar is taught in middle school -- giving a bit of theory alongside the real-world examples a child hears in the course of their life, helps the child learn to reliably produce grammatical sentences according to recognized linguistic patterns, rather than improvising on the patterns they've heard as happens in informal communication.   (And it may be that formal grammars are also useful for teaching AIs grammar, to help overcome their lack of the various aspects of human life and embodiment that human children learn to pick up grammar implicitly from examples -- but that's a whole other story.)

It seems the act of teaching/learning the rules of grammar of a language, constitutes a pattern in "the act of communicating/learning the set of sentences that are grammatical in that language", in the sense that: If one has to tell someone else how to reliably assess which sentences are grammatical in a certain language (as utilized within a certain specific community), a lot less Focus will be spent via telling them the rules of grammar alongside a list of examples, than by just giving them a long list of examples and leaving them to do induction.   When teaching grammar, while a rule of grammar is in the Focus, the specific examples embodying that rule of grammar are in the Fringe.   While passing the rules of grammar from teacher's Focus to student's Focus, the real point is what is being represented: the passage of sets of sentences judged as grammatical/ungrammatical from teacher's Fringe to student's Fringe.

The rules of grammar, then, may be described as a "subpattern" in the act of communicating a natural grammar (a subpattern meaning they are part of the pattern of teaching the rules of grammar).   This may seem a bit contorted, but it's not as complicated as the design of the computer I'm typing this on.   Formal grammars, like Macbooks, are a complex technology that only emerged quite recently in human evolution.

Interpretations....

And so, Bob's your uncle....   Starting from the basic structure of consciousness, it's not such a big leap to get to pattern -- which brings one the whole apparatus of mind as a system for recognizing patterns in itself and the world -- and to systems like languages and mathematics.

One can interpret this sort of of analysis multiple ways ... for instance:

Taking physical reality as the foundation, one can study the structure of consciousness corresponding to a certain physical system (e.g. a brain), and then look at the structure of the mind corresponding to that physical system as consequent from the structure of its consciousness.

Taking experience as the foundation, one can take entities like Unity and Attention as primary, and then derive concepts like Focus and Fringe, and from there get to Representation and Pattern and onwards -- thus conceptually grounding complex aspects of cognition in terms of phenomenological basics.