Well, I started writing a followup to my previous blog entry on subjective/objective reality, dealing with issues relating to consciousness and qualia, but it got way too big for a reasonable blog entry, and so I've posted it as an HTML document:
http://www.goertzel.org/new_essays/QualiaNotes.htm
But it's still rough and informal and speculative in the manner of a blog entry, rather than being a really polished essay.
Of course, I have plenty more to say on the topic than what I wrote down there, but -- well -- the usual dilemma ... too many thoughts, too little time to write them all down... I need to prioritize. Entertaining, speculative philosophy only gets a certain fraction of my time these days!
BTW, I wrote about 1/3 of those notes while watching "Jailhouse Rock" with the kids, but I don't know if Elvis's undulating pelvis had any effect on the style or contents of the essay or not. (Wow -- the Elvis phenomenon really makes piquant the whole transhumanist dilemma of "Is humanity really worth preserving past the Singularity or not?"!! ... A decent helping of art, beauty and humor exists there in Elvis-land, sure -- but along with such a whopping dose of pure and unrefined asininity --- whoa.... )
How many of you readers out there agree that the first superhuman AI should be programmed to speak to humans through a simulation of Elvis's face??? ;-D
Friday, July 22, 2005
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Objective versus subjective reality: Which is primary?
This post is a purely intellectual one -- playing at the border between "blog entry" and "brief philosophical essay"..... It transmits a small portion of the philosophical train of thought I undertook while wandering with Izabela at White Sands National Monument a few weeks ago. Much of that train of thought involved issues such as free will and the emergence of notions of self, will and reality in the infant's mind (the epigenesis of conceptual structures and cognitive dynamics in the infant and toddler mind is much on my mind these days, because in the Novamente AI project we're working on putting together a demonstration of Novamente progressing through the earlier of Jean Piaget's stages of child cognitive development). But what I'll discuss here today is a bit different from that: the relation between objective and subjective reality.
One of my motivations for venturing into this topic is: I've realized that it's wisest to clearly discuss the issue of reality before entering into issues of consciousness and will. Very often, when I try to discuss my theory of consciousness with people, the discussion falls apart because the people I'm talking to want to assume that objective reality is primary, or else that subjective experiential reality is primary. Whereas, to me, a prerequisite for intelligently discussing consciousness is the recognition that neither of these two perspectives on being is primary -- each has their own validity, and each gives rise to the other in a certain sense.
OK, so ... without further ado... : There are two different ways to look at the world, both of which are to some degree sympathetic to me.
One way is to view the objective world as viewed by science and society as primary, and to look at the subjective worlds of individuals as approximations to objective reality, produced by individual physical systems embedded within physical reality.
Another way is to view the subjective, experiential world of the individual world (mine, or yours) as primary, and look at "objective reality" as a cognitive crutch that the experiencing mind creates in order to make use of its own experience.
I think both of these views are valid and interesting ones -- they each serve valuable purposes. They don't contradict each other, because the universe supports "circular containment": it's fine to say "objective reality contains subjective reality, and subjective reality contains objective reality." The theory of non-well-founded sets shows that this kind of circularity is perfectly consistent in terms of logic and mathematics. (Barwise and Etchemendy's book "The Liar" gives a very nice exposition of this kind of set theory for the semi-technical reader. I also said a lot about this kind of mathematics in my 1994 book Chaotic Logic, see a messy rough draft version of the relevant chapter here ... (alas, I long ago lost the files containing the final versions of my books!!))
But it's also interesting to ask if either of the two types of world is properly viewed as primary. I'll present here an argument that it may make sense to view either subjective or objective reality as primary, depending on the level of detail with which one is trying to understand things.
My basic line of argument is as follows. Suppose we have two entities A and B, either of which can be derived from the other -- but it's a lot easier to derive B from A than to derive A from B. Then, using the principle of Occam's Razor, we may say that the derivation of B from A is preferable, is more fundamental. (For those not in the know, Occam's Razor -- the maxim of preferring the simplest explanation, from among the pool of reasonably correct ones -- is not just a pretty little heuristic, but is very close to the core of intelligent thought. For two very different, recent explorations of this theme, see Marcus Hutter's mathematical theory of general intelligence; and Eric Baum's book What is Thought (much of which I radically disagree with, but his discussion of the role of Occam's Razor in cognition is quite good, even though he for some reason doesn't cite Ray Solomonoff who conceived the Occam-cognition connection back in the 1960's)).
I will argue here that it's much easier to derive the existence of objective reality from the assumption of subjective reality, than vice versa. In this sense, I believe, it's sensible to say that the grounding of objective reality in subjective reality is primary, rather than vice versa.
Occam's Razor pushes toward the second conclusion, because it gives a simple explanation of many different things, whereas explanations of form 1 are a lot less elegant, since according to this explanatory style, each phenomenon where different sorts of perception disagree with each other requires positing a whole new class of peculiarly-behaving entity.
Note that nothing in the mirage lake or other similar experiences causes one to doubt the veracity of one's experiences.
Each experience is valid unto itself. However, the mind generalizes from experiences, and takes particular sensations and cognitions to be elements of more general categories. For instance, it takes a particular arrangement of colors to be a momentary image of a "lake", and it takes the momentary image of a lake to be a snapshot of a persistent object called a "lake." These generalizations/categorizations are largely learned via experience, because they're statistically valid and useful for achieving subjectively important goals.
From this kind of experience, one learns that, when having a subjective experience, it's intelligent to ask "But the general categories I'm building based on this particular experience -- what will my future subjective experiences say about these categories, if I'm experiencing the same categories (e.g. the lake) through different senses, or from different positions, etc." And as soon as one starts asking questions like that -- there's "objective reality."
That's really all one needs in order to derive objective reality from subjective reality. One doesn't need to invoke a society of minds comparing their subjective worlds, nor any kind of rigorous scientific world-view. One merely needs to posit generalization beyond individual experiences to patterns representing categories of experience, and an Occam's Razor heuristic.
In the mind of the human infant, this kind of reasoning is undertaken pretty early on -- within the first six months of life.
It leads to what developmental psychologists call "object permanence" -- the recognition that, when a hand passes behind a piece of furniture and then reappears on the other side, it still existed during the interim period when it was behind the furniture. "Existed" here means, roughly, "The most compact and accurate model of my experiences implies that if I were in a
different position, I would be able to see or otherwise detect the hand while it was behind the chair, even though in actual fact I can't see or detect it there from my current position." This is analogous to what it means to believe the mirage-lake doesn't exist: "The most compact and accurate model of my experiences implies that if I were standing right where that lake
appears to be, I wouldn't be wet!" Notice from these examples how counterfactuality is critical to the emergence of objective from subjective reality. If the mind just sticks to exactly what it experiences, it will never evolve the notion of objective reality. Instead, the mind needs to be able to think "What would I experience if...." This kind of basic counterfactuality leads fairly quickly to the notion of objective reality.
On the other hand, what does one need in order to derive subjective reality from objective reality? This is a lot trickier!
Given objective reality as described by modern science, one can build up a theory of particles, atoms, molecules, chemical compounds, cells, organs (like brains) and organisms -- and then one can talk about how brains embodied in bodies embedded in societies give rise to individual subjective realities. But this is a much longer and more complicated story than the emergence of objective reality from subjective reality.
Occam's-razor-wise, then, "objective reality emerges from subjective reality" is a much simpler story than the reverse.
But of course, this analysis only scratches the surface. The simple, development-psychology approach I've described above doesn't explain the details of objective reality -- it doesn't explain why there are the particular elementary particles and force constants there are, for example. It just explains why objective reality should exist at all.
And this point gives rise to an interesting asymmetry. While it's easier to explain the existence of objective reality based on subjective reality than vice versa, it seems like it's probably easier to explain the details of subjective reality based on objective reality than vice versa. Of course, this is largely speculative, since right now we don't know how to do either -- we can't explain particle physics based on subjectivist developmental psychology, but nor can we explain the nature of conscious experience based on brain function. However, my intuition is that the latter is an easier task, and will be achieved sooner.
So we then arrive at the conclusion that:
One of my motivations for venturing into this topic is: I've realized that it's wisest to clearly discuss the issue of reality before entering into issues of consciousness and will. Very often, when I try to discuss my theory of consciousness with people, the discussion falls apart because the people I'm talking to want to assume that objective reality is primary, or else that subjective experiential reality is primary. Whereas, to me, a prerequisite for intelligently discussing consciousness is the recognition that neither of these two perspectives on being is primary -- each has their own validity, and each gives rise to the other in a certain sense.
OK, so ... without further ado... : There are two different ways to look at the world, both of which are to some degree sympathetic to me.
One way is to view the objective world as viewed by science and society as primary, and to look at the subjective worlds of individuals as approximations to objective reality, produced by individual physical systems embedded within physical reality.
Another way is to view the subjective, experiential world of the individual world (mine, or yours) as primary, and look at "objective reality" as a cognitive crutch that the experiencing mind creates in order to make use of its own experience.
I think both of these views are valid and interesting ones -- they each serve valuable purposes. They don't contradict each other, because the universe supports "circular containment": it's fine to say "objective reality contains subjective reality, and subjective reality contains objective reality." The theory of non-well-founded sets shows that this kind of circularity is perfectly consistent in terms of logic and mathematics. (Barwise and Etchemendy's book "The Liar" gives a very nice exposition of this kind of set theory for the semi-technical reader. I also said a lot about this kind of mathematics in my 1994 book Chaotic Logic, see a messy rough draft version of the relevant chapter here ... (alas, I long ago lost the files containing the final versions of my books!!))
But it's also interesting to ask if either of the two types of world is properly viewed as primary. I'll present here an argument that it may make sense to view either subjective or objective reality as primary, depending on the level of detail with which one is trying to understand things.
My basic line of argument is as follows. Suppose we have two entities A and B, either of which can be derived from the other -- but it's a lot easier to derive B from A than to derive A from B. Then, using the principle of Occam's Razor, we may say that the derivation of B from A is preferable, is more fundamental. (For those not in the know, Occam's Razor -- the maxim of preferring the simplest explanation, from among the pool of reasonably correct ones -- is not just a pretty little heuristic, but is very close to the core of intelligent thought. For two very different, recent explorations of this theme, see Marcus Hutter's mathematical theory of general intelligence; and Eric Baum's book What is Thought (much of which I radically disagree with, but his discussion of the role of Occam's Razor in cognition is quite good, even though he for some reason doesn't cite Ray Solomonoff who conceived the Occam-cognition connection back in the 1960's)).
I will argue here that it's much easier to derive the existence of objective reality from the assumption of subjective reality, than vice versa. In this sense, I believe, it's sensible to say that the grounding of objective reality in subjective reality is primary, rather than vice versa.
On the other hand, it seems that it's probably easlier to derive the details of subjective reality from the details of objective reality than vice versa. In this sense, when operating at a high level of precision, it may be sensible to say that the grounding of subjective reality in objective reality is primary, rather than vice versa.
Suppose one begins by assuming "subjective reality" exists -- the experienced world of oneself, the sensations and thoughts and images and so forth that appear in one's mind and one's perceived world. How can we derive from this subjective reality any notion of "objective reality"?
Philip K. Dick defined objective reality as "that which doesn't go away even when you stop believing in it." This is a nice definition but I don't think it quite gets to the bottom of the matter.
Consider the example of a mirage in the desert -- a lake of water that appears in the distance, but when you walk to its apparent location, all you find is sand. This is a good example of how "objective reality" arises within subjective reality.
There is a rule, learned through experience, that large bodies of water rarely just suddenly disappear. But then, putting the perceived image of a large body of water together with the fact that large bodies rarely disappear,and the fact that when this particular large body of water was approached it was no longer there -- something's gotta give.
There are at least two hypotheses one can make to explain away this contradiction:
1. one could decide that deserts are populated by a particular type of lake that disappears when you come near it, or
2. one can decide that what one sees from a distance need not agree with what one sees and otherwise senses from close up.
The latter conclusion turns out to be a much more useful one, because it explains a lot of phenomena besides mirage lakes.Occam's Razor pushes toward the second conclusion, because it gives a simple explanation of many different things, whereas explanations of form 1 are a lot less elegant, since according to this explanatory style, each phenomenon where different sorts of perception disagree with each other requires positing a whole new class of peculiarly-behaving entity.
Note that nothing in the mirage lake or other similar experiences causes one to doubt the veracity of one's experiences.
Each experience is valid unto itself. However, the mind generalizes from experiences, and takes particular sensations and cognitions to be elements of more general categories. For instance, it takes a particular arrangement of colors to be a momentary image of a "lake", and it takes the momentary image of a lake to be a snapshot of a persistent object called a "lake." These generalizations/categorizations are largely learned via experience, because they're statistically valid and useful for achieving subjectively important goals.
From this kind of experience, one learns that, when having a subjective experience, it's intelligent to ask "But the general categories I'm building based on this particular experience -- what will my future subjective experiences say about these categories, if I'm experiencing the same categories (e.g. the lake) through different senses, or from different positions, etc." And as soon as one starts asking questions like that -- there's "objective reality."
That's really all one needs in order to derive objective reality from subjective reality. One doesn't need to invoke a society of minds comparing their subjective worlds, nor any kind of rigorous scientific world-view. One merely needs to posit generalization beyond individual experiences to patterns representing categories of experience, and an Occam's Razor heuristic.
In the mind of the human infant, this kind of reasoning is undertaken pretty early on -- within the first six months of life.
It leads to what developmental psychologists call "object permanence" -- the recognition that, when a hand passes behind a piece of furniture and then reappears on the other side, it still existed during the interim period when it was behind the furniture. "Existed" here means, roughly, "The most compact and accurate model of my experiences implies that if I were in a
different position, I would be able to see or otherwise detect the hand while it was behind the chair, even though in actual fact I can't see or detect it there from my current position." This is analogous to what it means to believe the mirage-lake doesn't exist: "The most compact and accurate model of my experiences implies that if I were standing right where that lake
appears to be, I wouldn't be wet!" Notice from these examples how counterfactuality is critical to the emergence of objective from subjective reality. If the mind just sticks to exactly what it experiences, it will never evolve the notion of objective reality. Instead, the mind needs to be able to think "What would I experience if...." This kind of basic counterfactuality leads fairly quickly to the notion of objective reality.
On the other hand, what does one need in order to derive subjective reality from objective reality? This is a lot trickier!
Given objective reality as described by modern science, one can build up a theory of particles, atoms, molecules, chemical compounds, cells, organs (like brains) and organisms -- and then one can talk about how brains embodied in bodies embedded in societies give rise to individual subjective realities. But this is a much longer and more complicated story than the emergence of objective reality from subjective reality.
Occam's-razor-wise, then, "objective reality emerges from subjective reality" is a much simpler story than the reverse.
But of course, this analysis only scratches the surface. The simple, development-psychology approach I've described above doesn't explain the details of objective reality -- it doesn't explain why there are the particular elementary particles and force constants there are, for example. It just explains why objective reality should exist at all.
And this point gives rise to an interesting asymmetry. While it's easier to explain the existence of objective reality based on subjective reality than vice versa, it seems like it's probably easier to explain the details of subjective reality based on objective reality than vice versa. Of course, this is largely speculative, since right now we don't know how to do either -- we can't explain particle physics based on subjectivist developmental psychology, but nor can we explain the nature of conscious experience based on brain function. However, my intuition is that the latter is an easier task, and will be achieved sooner.
So we then arrive at the conclusion that:
- At a coarse level of precision, "subjectivity spawns objectivity" is a simpler story than vice versa
- At a higher level of precision, "objectivity spawns subjectivity" is a simpler story than vice versa
So, which direction of creation is more fundamental depends on how much detail one is looking for!
This is not really such a deep point -- but it's a point that seems to elude most philosophers, who seem to be stuck either in an "objective reality is primary" or "subjective reality is primary" world-view. It seems to me that recognizing the mutual generation of these two sorts of reality is prerequisite for seriously discussing a whole host of issues, including consciousness and free will. In my prior writings on consciousness and will I have taken for granted this kind of mutual-generationist approach to subjectivity/objectivity, but I haven't laid it out explicitly enough.
All these issues will be dealt with in my philosophy-of-mind book "The Hidden Pattern", which I expect to complete mid-fall. I wish I had more time to work on it: this sort of thinking is really a lot of fun. And I think it's also scientifically valuable -- because, for example, I think one of the main reasons the field of AI has made so little progress is that the leading schools of thought in academic and industrial AI all fall prey to fairly basic errors in the philosophy of mind (such as misunderstanding the relation between objective and subjective reality). The correct philosophy of mind is fairly simple, in my view -- but the errors people have made have been quite complicated in some cases! But that's a topic for future blog entries, books, conversations, primal screams, whatever....
More later ... it's 2AM and a warm bed beckons ... with a warm wife in it ;-> ... (hmm -- why this sudden emphasis on warmth? I think someone must have jacked the air conditioning up way too high!!)
Monday, July 18, 2005
The massive suckage of writing academic research papers / the ontology of time / White Sands
I was a professor for 8 years, so I'm no stranger to the weird ways of academia. But I've been pretty much away from that universe for a while, pursuing commercial software development and independent research. Recently I've re-initiated contact with the world of academic research, because it's become clear that getting some current academic publications on my AI and bioinformatics work will be valuable to my scientific and business pursuits. Egads!! The old frustrations are coming back -- badly enough to spill over into a blog entry....
This is a pretty boring blog entry, I'm afraid: just a long rant about how annoying academic research can be. But I got irritated enough to write this stuff down, so I guess I may as well post it....
I've been working on an academic paper together with my former Webmind colleague Pei Wang, on the topic of "why inference theories should represent truth values using two numbers rather than one." For instance, the inference component of my Novamente AI system represents the truth values of statements using a probability and a "weight of evidence" (which measures, roughly, the number of observations on which the probability is based). Pei's NARS reasoning system uses two-component truth values with a slightly different interpretation.
Now, this is a perfectly decent paper we've written (it was just today submitted for publication), but, what strikes me is how much pomp, circumstance and apparatus academia requires in order to frame even a very small and simple point. References to everything in the literature ever said on any vaguely related topic, detailed comparisons of your work to whatever it is the average journal referee is likely to find important -- blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.... A point that I would more naturally get across in five pages of clear and simple text winds up being a thirty page paper!
I'm writing some books describing the Novamente AI system -- one of them, 600 pages of text, was just submitted to a publisher. The other two, about 300 and 200 pages respectively, should be submitted later this year. Writing these books took a really long time but they are only semi-technical books, and they don't follow all the rules of academic writing -- for instance, the whole 600 page book has a reference list no longer than I've seen on many 50-page academic papers, which is because I only referenced the works I actually used in writing the book, rather than every relevant book or paper ever written. I estimate that to turn these books into academic papers would require me to write about 60 papers. To sculpt a paper out of text from the book would probably take me 2-7 days of writing work, depending on the particular case. So it would be at least a full year of work, probably two full years of work, to write publishable academic papers on the material in these books!
For another example, this week I've been reading a book called "The Ontology of Time" by L. Nathan Oaklander. It's a pretty interesting book, in terms of the contents, but the mode of discourse is that of academic philosophy, which is very frustrating to me. It's a far cry from Nietzsche or Schopenhauer style prose -- academic philosophy takes "pedantic" to new heights.... The book makes some good points: it discusses the debate between philosophers promoting the "A-theory of time" (which holds that time passes) and the "B-theory of time" (which holds that there are only discrete moments, and that the passage of time is an illusion). Oaklander advocates the B-theory of time, and spends a lot of space defending the B-theory against arguments by A-theorists that are based on linguistic usage: A-theorists point out that we use a lot of language that implies time passes, in fact this assumption is embedded in the tense system of most human languages. Oaklander argues that, although it's convenient to make the false assumption that time passes for communicative purposes, nevertheless if one is willing to spend a lot of time and effort, one can reduce any statement about time passing to a large set of statements about individual events at individual moments.
Now, clearly, Oaklander is right on this point, and in fact my Novamente AI design implicitly assumes the B-theory of time, by storing temporal information in terms of discrete moments and relations of simultaneity and precedence between them, and grounding linguistic statements about time in terms of relationships between events occurring at particular moments (which may be concrete moments or moments represented by quantified mathematical variables).
There are also deep connections between the B-theory and Buddhist metaphysics, which holds that time is an illusion and only moments exist, woven together into apparent continua by the illusion-generating faculty of the mind. And of course there are connections with quantum physics: Julian Barbour in "The End of Time" has argued ably that in modern physics there is no room for the notion of time passing. All moments simply exist, possessing a reality that in a sense is truly timeless -- but we see only certain moments, and we feel time moving in a certain direction, because of the way we are physically and psychologically constructed.
But Oaklander doesn't get to the connections with Buddhism and quantum theory, because he spends all his time pedantically arguing for fairly simple conceptual points with amazing amounts of detail. The papers in the book go back 20 years, and recount ongoing petty arguments between himself and his fellow B-theorists on the one hand, and the A-theorists on the other hand. Like I said, it's not that no progress has been made -- I think Oaklander's views on time are basically right. What irritates me is the painfully rate of progress at which these very smart philosophers have proceeded. I attribute their slow rate of progress not to any cognitive deficits on their part, but to the culture and methodology of modern academia.
Obviously, Nietzsche would be an outcast in modern academia -- casting his books in the form of journal papers would really be a heck of a task!
And what if the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project had been forced to write up their incremental progress every step of the way, and fight with journal referees and comb the literature for references? There's no way they would have made the massively rapid progress they did....
And the problem is not restricted to philosophy, of course -- "hard" science has its own issues. In computer science most research results are published at least twice: once in a conference proceedings and once in a journal article. What a waste of the researcher's time, to write the same shit up twice ... but if you don't do it, your status will suffer and you'll lose your research grants, because others will have more publications than you!
Furthermore, if as a computer scientist you develop a new algorithm intended to solve real problems that you have identified as important for some purpose (say, AI), you will probably have trouble publishing this algorithm unless you spend time comparing it to other algorithms in terms of its performance on very easy "toy problems" that other researchers have used in their papers. Never mind if the performance of an algorithm on toy problems bears no resemblance to its performance on real problems. Solving a unique problem that no one has thought of before is much less impressive to academic referees than getting a 2% better solution to some standard "toy problem." As a result, the whole computer science literature (and the academic AI literature in particular) is full of algorithms that are entirely useless except for their good performance on the simple "toy" test problems that are popular with journal referees....
Research universities are supposed to be our society's way of devoting resources to advancing knowledge. But they are locked into a methodology that makes knowledge advance awfully damn slowly....
And so, those of us who want to advance knowledge rapidly are stuck in a bind. Either generate new knowledge quickly and don't bother to ram it through the publication mill ... or, generate new knowledge at the rate that's acceptable in academia, and spend half your time wording things politically and looking up references and doing comparative analyses rather than doing truly productive creative research. Obviously, the former approach is a lot more fun -- but it shuts you out from getting government research grants. The only way to get government research money is to move really slowly -- or else to start out with a lot of money so you can hire people to do all the paper-writing and testing-on-toy-problems for you....
Arrrgh! Anyway, I'm compromising, and wasting some of my time writing a small fragment of my research up for academic journal publication, just to be sure that Novamente AI is "taken seriously" (or as seriously as a grand AGI project can possibly be taken by the conservative-minded world we live in).... What a pain.
If society valued AGI as much as it valued nuclear weapons during World War II, we'd probably have superhuman AI already. I'm serious. Instead, those of us concerned with creating AGI have to waste our time carrying out meaningless acts like writing academic papers describing information already adequately described in semi-formal documents, just to be taken seriously enough to ask for research money and have a nonzero chance of getting it. Arrggh!
OK, I promise, the next blog entry won't be as boring as this, and won't be a complaint, either. I've actually been enjoying myself a lot lately -- Izabela and I had a great vacation to New Mexico, where we did a lot of hiking, including the very steep and very beautiful Chimney Canyon route down Mount Sandia, which I'd always wanted to do when I lived in New Mexico, but never gotten around to. Also, we camped out on the dunes in White Sands National Monument, which is perhaps the most beautiful physical location I know of. I can't think of anywhere more hallucinogenic -- psychedelic drugs would definitely enhance the experience, but even without them, the landscape is surprisingly trippy, giving the sensation of being in a completely different universe from the regular one, and blurring the distinction between inside and out....
Most of the time wandering around in White Sands was spent in conversation about the subtleties of the interrelationship between free will and consciousness -- interesting and perhaps valuable ideas that I haven't found time to write down yet, because all my writing-time these last couple weeks has been spent putting already-well-understood ideas into the form of academic papers ;-ppp White Sands is exactly the right place to mull over the structure of your mind, since the landscape itself projects you involuntarily into a kind of semi-meditative state....
Hmmm... maybe I'll write down those ideas about free will and consciousness in the next blog entry. It's tempting to write that stuff now -- but it's 1:25 AM, I think I'll go to sleep instead. Tomorrow, alas, is another day... (I tried to make all the days run into each other by taking Modafinil to eliminate my need for sleep -- but it just wound up upsetting my stomach too much, so I've had to go back to sleeping again: bummer!!)
This is a pretty boring blog entry, I'm afraid: just a long rant about how annoying academic research can be. But I got irritated enough to write this stuff down, so I guess I may as well post it....
I've been working on an academic paper together with my former Webmind colleague Pei Wang, on the topic of "why inference theories should represent truth values using two numbers rather than one." For instance, the inference component of my Novamente AI system represents the truth values of statements using a probability and a "weight of evidence" (which measures, roughly, the number of observations on which the probability is based). Pei's NARS reasoning system uses two-component truth values with a slightly different interpretation.
Now, this is a perfectly decent paper we've written (it was just today submitted for publication), but, what strikes me is how much pomp, circumstance and apparatus academia requires in order to frame even a very small and simple point. References to everything in the literature ever said on any vaguely related topic, detailed comparisons of your work to whatever it is the average journal referee is likely to find important -- blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.... A point that I would more naturally get across in five pages of clear and simple text winds up being a thirty page paper!
I'm writing some books describing the Novamente AI system -- one of them, 600 pages of text, was just submitted to a publisher. The other two, about 300 and 200 pages respectively, should be submitted later this year. Writing these books took a really long time but they are only semi-technical books, and they don't follow all the rules of academic writing -- for instance, the whole 600 page book has a reference list no longer than I've seen on many 50-page academic papers, which is because I only referenced the works I actually used in writing the book, rather than every relevant book or paper ever written. I estimate that to turn these books into academic papers would require me to write about 60 papers. To sculpt a paper out of text from the book would probably take me 2-7 days of writing work, depending on the particular case. So it would be at least a full year of work, probably two full years of work, to write publishable academic papers on the material in these books!
For another example, this week I've been reading a book called "The Ontology of Time" by L. Nathan Oaklander. It's a pretty interesting book, in terms of the contents, but the mode of discourse is that of academic philosophy, which is very frustrating to me. It's a far cry from Nietzsche or Schopenhauer style prose -- academic philosophy takes "pedantic" to new heights.... The book makes some good points: it discusses the debate between philosophers promoting the "A-theory of time" (which holds that time passes) and the "B-theory of time" (which holds that there are only discrete moments, and that the passage of time is an illusion). Oaklander advocates the B-theory of time, and spends a lot of space defending the B-theory against arguments by A-theorists that are based on linguistic usage: A-theorists point out that we use a lot of language that implies time passes, in fact this assumption is embedded in the tense system of most human languages. Oaklander argues that, although it's convenient to make the false assumption that time passes for communicative purposes, nevertheless if one is willing to spend a lot of time and effort, one can reduce any statement about time passing to a large set of statements about individual events at individual moments.
Now, clearly, Oaklander is right on this point, and in fact my Novamente AI design implicitly assumes the B-theory of time, by storing temporal information in terms of discrete moments and relations of simultaneity and precedence between them, and grounding linguistic statements about time in terms of relationships between events occurring at particular moments (which may be concrete moments or moments represented by quantified mathematical variables).
There are also deep connections between the B-theory and Buddhist metaphysics, which holds that time is an illusion and only moments exist, woven together into apparent continua by the illusion-generating faculty of the mind. And of course there are connections with quantum physics: Julian Barbour in "The End of Time" has argued ably that in modern physics there is no room for the notion of time passing. All moments simply exist, possessing a reality that in a sense is truly timeless -- but we see only certain moments, and we feel time moving in a certain direction, because of the way we are physically and psychologically constructed.
But Oaklander doesn't get to the connections with Buddhism and quantum theory, because he spends all his time pedantically arguing for fairly simple conceptual points with amazing amounts of detail. The papers in the book go back 20 years, and recount ongoing petty arguments between himself and his fellow B-theorists on the one hand, and the A-theorists on the other hand. Like I said, it's not that no progress has been made -- I think Oaklander's views on time are basically right. What irritates me is the painfully rate of progress at which these very smart philosophers have proceeded. I attribute their slow rate of progress not to any cognitive deficits on their part, but to the culture and methodology of modern academia.
Obviously, Nietzsche would be an outcast in modern academia -- casting his books in the form of journal papers would really be a heck of a task!
And what if the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project had been forced to write up their incremental progress every step of the way, and fight with journal referees and comb the literature for references? There's no way they would have made the massively rapid progress they did....
And the problem is not restricted to philosophy, of course -- "hard" science has its own issues. In computer science most research results are published at least twice: once in a conference proceedings and once in a journal article. What a waste of the researcher's time, to write the same shit up twice ... but if you don't do it, your status will suffer and you'll lose your research grants, because others will have more publications than you!
Furthermore, if as a computer scientist you develop a new algorithm intended to solve real problems that you have identified as important for some purpose (say, AI), you will probably have trouble publishing this algorithm unless you spend time comparing it to other algorithms in terms of its performance on very easy "toy problems" that other researchers have used in their papers. Never mind if the performance of an algorithm on toy problems bears no resemblance to its performance on real problems. Solving a unique problem that no one has thought of before is much less impressive to academic referees than getting a 2% better solution to some standard "toy problem." As a result, the whole computer science literature (and the academic AI literature in particular) is full of algorithms that are entirely useless except for their good performance on the simple "toy" test problems that are popular with journal referees....
Research universities are supposed to be our society's way of devoting resources to advancing knowledge. But they are locked into a methodology that makes knowledge advance awfully damn slowly....
And so, those of us who want to advance knowledge rapidly are stuck in a bind. Either generate new knowledge quickly and don't bother to ram it through the publication mill ... or, generate new knowledge at the rate that's acceptable in academia, and spend half your time wording things politically and looking up references and doing comparative analyses rather than doing truly productive creative research. Obviously, the former approach is a lot more fun -- but it shuts you out from getting government research grants. The only way to get government research money is to move really slowly -- or else to start out with a lot of money so you can hire people to do all the paper-writing and testing-on-toy-problems for you....
Arrrgh! Anyway, I'm compromising, and wasting some of my time writing a small fragment of my research up for academic journal publication, just to be sure that Novamente AI is "taken seriously" (or as seriously as a grand AGI project can possibly be taken by the conservative-minded world we live in).... What a pain.
If society valued AGI as much as it valued nuclear weapons during World War II, we'd probably have superhuman AI already. I'm serious. Instead, those of us concerned with creating AGI have to waste our time carrying out meaningless acts like writing academic papers describing information already adequately described in semi-formal documents, just to be taken seriously enough to ask for research money and have a nonzero chance of getting it. Arrggh!
OK, I promise, the next blog entry won't be as boring as this, and won't be a complaint, either. I've actually been enjoying myself a lot lately -- Izabela and I had a great vacation to New Mexico, where we did a lot of hiking, including the very steep and very beautiful Chimney Canyon route down Mount Sandia, which I'd always wanted to do when I lived in New Mexico, but never gotten around to. Also, we camped out on the dunes in White Sands National Monument, which is perhaps the most beautiful physical location I know of. I can't think of anywhere more hallucinogenic -- psychedelic drugs would definitely enhance the experience, but even without them, the landscape is surprisingly trippy, giving the sensation of being in a completely different universe from the regular one, and blurring the distinction between inside and out....
Most of the time wandering around in White Sands was spent in conversation about the subtleties of the interrelationship between free will and consciousness -- interesting and perhaps valuable ideas that I haven't found time to write down yet, because all my writing-time these last couple weeks has been spent putting already-well-understood ideas into the form of academic papers ;-ppp White Sands is exactly the right place to mull over the structure of your mind, since the landscape itself projects you involuntarily into a kind of semi-meditative state....
Hmmm... maybe I'll write down those ideas about free will and consciousness in the next blog entry. It's tempting to write that stuff now -- but it's 1:25 AM, I think I'll go to sleep instead. Tomorrow, alas, is another day... (I tried to make all the days run into each other by taking Modafinil to eliminate my need for sleep -- but it just wound up upsetting my stomach too much, so I've had to go back to sleeping again: bummer!!)
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Time Travel , Free Will, Ouspensky, Xaj Kalikak, and The Trans-temporal Post-Singularity Ubermind
This entry is motivated by an interesting news article that my friend David Hart forwarded to me, about one of my old favorite topics: time travel.
I'll use the article as an excuse to riff on an idea I had back in the 1980's about the possible transtemporal nature of superhuman minds following the Singularity.
The article is titled "No paradox for time travellers" and appeared on NewScientist.com on 18 June 2005, written by Mark Buchanan. It pertains to a technical paper online at
www.arxiv.org/quant-ph/0506027
Back when I first got serious about science back in my late teens and early 20's, time travel was my top choice of research area -- but after a little while I decided that AI, my second choice, was more likely to be achievable within my lifetime. (EVEN FURTHER DIGRESSION: My third choice was working toward human immortality via biology -- which I'm working on in the background now via my work with Biomind LLC -- but I backburnered that one because I don't enjoy biology personally nearly as much as physics or computer science. To me, it seems that biological immortality will be made possible via a combination of many relatively small insights and leaps -- "big science" like one sees in contemporary biology -- whereas time travel and AI seem more amenable to huge revolutionary insights ... this is one reason the latter interest me more than biology ... the other being that CS and physics have a mathematical elegance that appeals to me, and that biology lacks....)
I learned in the mid-80's, when studying general relativity theory in grad school at NYU, that modern physics deems time travel possible -- but difficult to achieve. Basically, it makes time travel into an engineering problem, but one that would seem to probably require engineering on the scale of making weird configurations of exotic forms of matter and energy ("exotic" meaning physically possible to produce, but incredibly difficult and/or expensive to do so using current technologies). Do-able, but probably not this decade....
Much later I read Kip Thorne's book "Black Holes and Time Warps", which reviews general relativity and its implications as regards time travel (along with other topics), and a host of other related papers, some of which are reviewed and referenced here.
(A much more ridiculous, though amusing, book on time travel is J.H. Brennan's book, "Time Travel: A New Perspective." Brennan gives you practical instructions on how to travel through time. Recommended only for entertainment value. One of the reviewers on amazon.com complains that the methods are inadequate because they can't be practiced by individuals acting alone, they require that time travel be a group activity!)
Anyway, the article Dave forwarded is brief and the bulk of it goes as follows:
The laws of physics seem to permit time travel, and with it, paradoxical situations such as the possibility that people could go back in time to prevent their own birth. But it turns out that such paradoxes may be ruled out by the weirdness inherent in laws of quantum physics.
Some solutions to the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity lead to situations in which space-time curves back on itself, theoretically allowing travellers to loop back in time and meet younger versions of themselves. Because such time travel sets up paradoxes, many researchers suspect that some physical constraints must make time travel impossible. Now, physicists Daniel Greenberger of the City University of New York and Karl Svozil of the Vienna University of Technology in Austria have shown that the most basic features of quantum theory may ensure that time travellers could never alter the past, even if they are able to go back in time.
The constraint arises from a quantum object's ability to behave like a wave. Quantum objects split their existence into multiple component waves, each following a distinct path through space-time. Ultimately, an object is usually most likely to end up in places where its component waves recombine, or "interfere", constructively, with the peaks and troughs of the waves lined up, say. The object is unlikely to be in places where the components interfere destructively, and cancel each other out.
Quantum theory allows time travel because nothing prevents the waves from going back in time. When Greenberger and Svozil analysed what happens when these component waves flow into the past, they found that the paradoxes implied by Einstein's equations never arise. Waves that travel back in time interfere destructively, thus preventing anything from happening differently from that which has already taken place. "If you travel into the past quantum mechanically, you would only see those alternatives consistent with the world you left behind you," says Greenberger.
Interesting... huh?
What this suggests is that, perhaps, time travel is quite possible and the reason that it seems paradoxical to us is because of our illusion of free will.
I.e. since we think we have free will, we don't like to think that if we go back in time we are constrained to do things consistent with presently observed reality...
I am reminded of Ouspensky's classic novel "The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin" -- where the main character Osokin convinces a magician to send him back in time to live through his life all over again... he's hoping to make his life better, by not making as many stupid decisions as he did the previous time around.
But the punchline is, while living his life over again, Osokin winds up making the same stupid decisions he did before. He just can't help himself -- he finds himself irresistably drawn to make the same dumb choices even though he vaguely remembers, from his previous times living his life, how annoying their consequences were....
Osokin iterates around again and again -- repeatedly living his life then getting the magician to send him back to the past to live his life over again -- each time failing to correct his stupid decisions.
But then, after the N'th iteration, he finally he achieves enough awareness that when he meets with the magician he realizes it's stupid to revisit his life again, without changing the nature of his mind -- and he agrees to join the magician's mystical sect and get tutored in the True Path....
Ouspensky's point of course is that normal humans don't have free will but basically live like deterministic machines pushed by their unconscious and emotions -- but if you join his Gurdjieff/Beelzebub sect, you can achieve real free will! (BIG DIGRESSION: Needless to say, I don't accept this philosophy, though I do find some germ of truth at the core of it. In my view, there is absolute freedom in the universe at a certain level -- the level Peirce called First -- and then there are patterns in the universe at another level -- the level Peirce called Third -- and there are subtle connections between First and Third, wherein some patterns seem to have more freedom associated with them than others.... It may well be that human-mind-patterns can achieve more freedom, in a sense, via practicing meditative and mystical disciplines like the ones Ouspensky preached -- though of course these practices can also lead to a bunch of delusions. But I don't believe that any practice can lead to a fundamental breaking-out from the world of determinism and delusion, which is pretty much what Ouspensky taught. It's a big exaggeration, unfortunately -- the only hope for breaking out of delusion altogether is to go totally beyond your human mind, which Ouspensky didn't really succeed in doing; he may have had awesome moments of insight, but he still remained human with all the beauty and flaws and screwiness implied thereby, blah blah blah....)
OK -- so Ouspensky's novel gave a funny twist on Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence ... but it also seems somewhat relevant to these recent ideas about time travel.
The time-travel idea from the Greenberger and Svozil paper basically suggests that if we went back in time we'd find ourselves in the position of Ivan Osokin -- unable to make decisions other than the ones we're "postdestined" to make, so as to cause the future to come out as it's already known it's going to come out....
Ergo, the conclusions of Greenberger and Svozil hold up except in the presence of Ouspenskyan magicians!! ;-))
But another interesting possibility arises here. It may be that our present reality is not consistent with there having been time travelers going back into our past doing interesting stuff. However, sometime in the future there may be a time-travel-ful period full of time travelers cycling around and around -- and the world during that period may be whacky enough that the consistency of existence-of-meddling-time-travelers with observed reality is obvious...
Indeed, this is what I've often suspected. Once time travel is invented, maybe we'll be able to travel back in time fairly freely -- but only back to the point where time travel was invented -- not before. The Greenberger and Svozil results suggest that travel back before the invention of time travel may not be possible -- or may be possible only with very strict constraints -- because it can't be done too freely and still be done consistently with the world as it's known to be during that period (e.g. our period and our past). But once time travel is invented, free and whacky time travel from the future back till that point may well be consistent with the world after that point.
This suggests that the history of the universe may be divided into two periods: temporally forward and temporally bidirectional.
This is a fun vision of the post-Singularity world.... Post-Singularity may be post-temporality, in a sense. superhuman AI creates time machine, starts up the rampant-time-travel domain, and all heaven breaks loose ;-)
Yeah yeah, this is whacky speculation, I know. But it's not impossible according to known physics, and nor is it philosophically nonsensical.
The key point is that there may be consistent solutions of the universe's physics equations, according to which the universe at time T is consistent with time travellers from after T coming back and messing with the universe at time T in interesting ways that are obvious and noticeable to the folks living at time T.
The universe at our present time is consistent with time travelers from the future coming back and messing with our past, but not in ways dramatically noticeable by us. Of course, it's possible that time travelers did come back and mess with our past in ways that were important to us -- maybe that's the cause of the origin of life, the Big Bang, etc. -- these ideas have been explored in numerous science fiction novels. But even if so, this level of time-travel-based interference is pretty minimal compared to what may be possible in the post-Singularity period.
In some whacky, interesting but amateurish science fiction I wrote in the late 1980's (part of my never-finished meta-novel Wargasm), I described a character named Xaj Kalikak, who traveled into the future and practiced excessive time-travel until he'd revised the past and his own mind so many times that, in effect, the various loops of time-travel-induced-bidirectional-causation organized themselves into an intelligent mind. Instead of feedback loops of electricity in the brain, feedback loops of causation over time self-organized into a superintelligent mind. Perhaps this sort of thing will come true, and the superhuman mind following the Singularity will be transtemporal in a way we can't even imagine....
Heh.
I'll use the article as an excuse to riff on an idea I had back in the 1980's about the possible transtemporal nature of superhuman minds following the Singularity.
The article is titled "No paradox for time travellers" and appeared on NewScientist.com on 18 June 2005, written by Mark Buchanan. It pertains to a technical paper online at
www.arxiv.org/quant-ph/0506027
Back when I first got serious about science back in my late teens and early 20's, time travel was my top choice of research area -- but after a little while I decided that AI, my second choice, was more likely to be achievable within my lifetime. (EVEN FURTHER DIGRESSION: My third choice was working toward human immortality via biology -- which I'm working on in the background now via my work with Biomind LLC -- but I backburnered that one because I don't enjoy biology personally nearly as much as physics or computer science. To me, it seems that biological immortality will be made possible via a combination of many relatively small insights and leaps -- "big science" like one sees in contemporary biology -- whereas time travel and AI seem more amenable to huge revolutionary insights ... this is one reason the latter interest me more than biology ... the other being that CS and physics have a mathematical elegance that appeals to me, and that biology lacks....)
I learned in the mid-80's, when studying general relativity theory in grad school at NYU, that modern physics deems time travel possible -- but difficult to achieve. Basically, it makes time travel into an engineering problem, but one that would seem to probably require engineering on the scale of making weird configurations of exotic forms of matter and energy ("exotic" meaning physically possible to produce, but incredibly difficult and/or expensive to do so using current technologies). Do-able, but probably not this decade....
Much later I read Kip Thorne's book "Black Holes and Time Warps", which reviews general relativity and its implications as regards time travel (along with other topics), and a host of other related papers, some of which are reviewed and referenced here.
(A much more ridiculous, though amusing, book on time travel is J.H. Brennan's book, "Time Travel: A New Perspective." Brennan gives you practical instructions on how to travel through time. Recommended only for entertainment value. One of the reviewers on amazon.com complains that the methods are inadequate because they can't be practiced by individuals acting alone, they require that time travel be a group activity!)
Anyway, the article Dave forwarded is brief and the bulk of it goes as follows:
The laws of physics seem to permit time travel, and with it, paradoxical situations such as the possibility that people could go back in time to prevent their own birth. But it turns out that such paradoxes may be ruled out by the weirdness inherent in laws of quantum physics.
Some solutions to the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity lead to situations in which space-time curves back on itself, theoretically allowing travellers to loop back in time and meet younger versions of themselves. Because such time travel sets up paradoxes, many researchers suspect that some physical constraints must make time travel impossible. Now, physicists Daniel Greenberger of the City University of New York and Karl Svozil of the Vienna University of Technology in Austria have shown that the most basic features of quantum theory may ensure that time travellers could never alter the past, even if they are able to go back in time.
The constraint arises from a quantum object's ability to behave like a wave. Quantum objects split their existence into multiple component waves, each following a distinct path through space-time. Ultimately, an object is usually most likely to end up in places where its component waves recombine, or "interfere", constructively, with the peaks and troughs of the waves lined up, say. The object is unlikely to be in places where the components interfere destructively, and cancel each other out.
Quantum theory allows time travel because nothing prevents the waves from going back in time. When Greenberger and Svozil analysed what happens when these component waves flow into the past, they found that the paradoxes implied by Einstein's equations never arise. Waves that travel back in time interfere destructively, thus preventing anything from happening differently from that which has already taken place. "If you travel into the past quantum mechanically, you would only see those alternatives consistent with the world you left behind you," says Greenberger.
Interesting... huh?
What this suggests is that, perhaps, time travel is quite possible and the reason that it seems paradoxical to us is because of our illusion of free will.
I.e. since we think we have free will, we don't like to think that if we go back in time we are constrained to do things consistent with presently observed reality...
I am reminded of Ouspensky's classic novel "The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin" -- where the main character Osokin convinces a magician to send him back in time to live through his life all over again... he's hoping to make his life better, by not making as many stupid decisions as he did the previous time around.
But the punchline is, while living his life over again, Osokin winds up making the same stupid decisions he did before. He just can't help himself -- he finds himself irresistably drawn to make the same dumb choices even though he vaguely remembers, from his previous times living his life, how annoying their consequences were....
Osokin iterates around again and again -- repeatedly living his life then getting the magician to send him back to the past to live his life over again -- each time failing to correct his stupid decisions.
But then, after the N'th iteration, he finally he achieves enough awareness that when he meets with the magician he realizes it's stupid to revisit his life again, without changing the nature of his mind -- and he agrees to join the magician's mystical sect and get tutored in the True Path....
Ouspensky's point of course is that normal humans don't have free will but basically live like deterministic machines pushed by their unconscious and emotions -- but if you join his Gurdjieff/Beelzebub sect, you can achieve real free will! (BIG DIGRESSION: Needless to say, I don't accept this philosophy, though I do find some germ of truth at the core of it. In my view, there is absolute freedom in the universe at a certain level -- the level Peirce called First -- and then there are patterns in the universe at another level -- the level Peirce called Third -- and there are subtle connections between First and Third, wherein some patterns seem to have more freedom associated with them than others.... It may well be that human-mind-patterns can achieve more freedom, in a sense, via practicing meditative and mystical disciplines like the ones Ouspensky preached -- though of course these practices can also lead to a bunch of delusions. But I don't believe that any practice can lead to a fundamental breaking-out from the world of determinism and delusion, which is pretty much what Ouspensky taught. It's a big exaggeration, unfortunately -- the only hope for breaking out of delusion altogether is to go totally beyond your human mind, which Ouspensky didn't really succeed in doing; he may have had awesome moments of insight, but he still remained human with all the beauty and flaws and screwiness implied thereby, blah blah blah....)
OK -- so Ouspensky's novel gave a funny twist on Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence ... but it also seems somewhat relevant to these recent ideas about time travel.
The time-travel idea from the Greenberger and Svozil paper basically suggests that if we went back in time we'd find ourselves in the position of Ivan Osokin -- unable to make decisions other than the ones we're "postdestined" to make, so as to cause the future to come out as it's already known it's going to come out....
Ergo, the conclusions of Greenberger and Svozil hold up except in the presence of Ouspenskyan magicians!! ;-))
But another interesting possibility arises here. It may be that our present reality is not consistent with there having been time travelers going back into our past doing interesting stuff. However, sometime in the future there may be a time-travel-ful period full of time travelers cycling around and around -- and the world during that period may be whacky enough that the consistency of existence-of-meddling-time-travelers with observed reality is obvious...
Indeed, this is what I've often suspected. Once time travel is invented, maybe we'll be able to travel back in time fairly freely -- but only back to the point where time travel was invented -- not before. The Greenberger and Svozil results suggest that travel back before the invention of time travel may not be possible -- or may be possible only with very strict constraints -- because it can't be done too freely and still be done consistently with the world as it's known to be during that period (e.g. our period and our past). But once time travel is invented, free and whacky time travel from the future back till that point may well be consistent with the world after that point.
This suggests that the history of the universe may be divided into two periods: temporally forward and temporally bidirectional.
This is a fun vision of the post-Singularity world.... Post-Singularity may be post-temporality, in a sense. superhuman AI creates time machine, starts up the rampant-time-travel domain, and all heaven breaks loose ;-)
Yeah yeah, this is whacky speculation, I know. But it's not impossible according to known physics, and nor is it philosophically nonsensical.
The key point is that there may be consistent solutions of the universe's physics equations, according to which the universe at time T is consistent with time travellers from after T coming back and messing with the universe at time T in interesting ways that are obvious and noticeable to the folks living at time T.
The universe at our present time is consistent with time travelers from the future coming back and messing with our past, but not in ways dramatically noticeable by us. Of course, it's possible that time travelers did come back and mess with our past in ways that were important to us -- maybe that's the cause of the origin of life, the Big Bang, etc. -- these ideas have been explored in numerous science fiction novels. But even if so, this level of time-travel-based interference is pretty minimal compared to what may be possible in the post-Singularity period.
In some whacky, interesting but amateurish science fiction I wrote in the late 1980's (part of my never-finished meta-novel Wargasm), I described a character named Xaj Kalikak, who traveled into the future and practiced excessive time-travel until he'd revised the past and his own mind so many times that, in effect, the various loops of time-travel-induced-bidirectional-causation organized themselves into an intelligent mind. Instead of feedback loops of electricity in the brain, feedback loops of causation over time self-organized into a superintelligent mind. Perhaps this sort of thing will come true, and the superhuman mind following the Singularity will be transtemporal in a way we can't even imagine....
Heh.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
The Human-Aesthetics of Transhumanity and Non-humanity...
This blog entry deals with issues of aesthetics rather than science..... The particular question is: To what extent is it possible to make "humanly good" art pertaining to the transhuman realm??
I don't really spend much time thinking about aesthetic philosophy in the abstract, but as an "artistic creator" type I do mull it over occasionally. The thoughts I share here were inspired by a post sci-fi author Damien Broderick made to the SL4 list. Damien's post was as follows:
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue419/books.html
is an interesting review of my new sf novel GODPLAYERS. The reviewer is especially exercised by the fact that my posthuman characters are not immediately understandable -- indeed, beyond empathy -- by human standards:
"the frustration level mounts as one waits in vain... for characters... to display any hint of a genuine inner life as they move randomly from scene to scene, world to world, reality to reality. Perhaps Vorpal homunculi do not possess inner lives, and Broderick's point is that these seeming superhumans, for all their power, are soulless automatons without a shred of humanity.... Surely there should be some character, somewhere in a novel, to which human readers can feel connected. ...As the sequence of events grows increasingly frenzied, with ever-greater reliance placed on what might be termed info-splatters, the lack of a deep humanistic substrate left this reader, at least, with no ground to stand on. "
I'm torn in my response to this. On the one hand, it wouldn't make much sense to write about posthumans as if they were representations of the people down the road, or in the next room. On the other, I have tried to ground the fairly breakneck narrative within thematic structures and reverberations recognizable from myth, dream, and the traditions of science-fiction itself when it ventures upon the superhuman. Greg Egan met with this same objection, of course, and so, in various degrees, did John C. Wright and Charlie Stross. Maybe it's an artistic problem beyond solution -- for humans.
-- Damien Broderick
Damien's post reminded me of conversations I used to have with my friend Jeff Pressing (an American who was a psych prof at the University of Melbourne, and also an accomplished jazz, classical and West-African-percussion composer/musician ... for a while he was head of the music school at LaTrobe University... he was originally a physicist and for a couple years was my AI collaborator ... unfortunately, he died of a fluke meningitis infection a few years back...).
Anyway, I compose and play music as well, and though I'm nowhere near as erudite or technically skilled as Jeff in the musical domain, I was never quite sure I wanted to be. I always felt that his compositions, though wonderfully subtle and intricate and learned and often beautiful (and integrating ideas from nearly every form of music ever created on Earth), lacked some human emotional OOMPH!! that I tried to put into my own (significantly simpler) music.
Now Jeff was by no means lacking in emotional OOMPH!! himself ... far from it ... he was a nerd of sorts, but his personal and emotional and social life had a lot of different dimensions ...
But what he always said to me, when I complained about this (we had this conversation repeatedly), was, "Ben, I learned a long time ago how to evoke human emotions through music. It's not very hard to elicit powerful feelings in people by arranging chords and notes in the right way. But I just lost interest in those very simple equations a long time ago. The patterns in the music I'm making now are a lot more subtle and interesting."
I'd reply something obnoxious like "Well, if it's so easy to elicit powerful feelings in people via music, then how come you've never written anything as good at evoking human feelings as the Jupiter Symphony, or Beethoven's Ninth, or Round Midnight...."
His response then would depend on his mood. Sometimes he'd say that those pieces of music, though good in their own way, didn't really interest him anyway. When he was in his "detached and superior musical snob" mode, he viewed these great compositions the same way I might view the bronzed and hulking flesh of an exquisitely well-toned bodybuilder -- outstanding in its own way, but not the sort of thing that really gets me excited....
Modern classical music, and to an extent modern jazz as well, have left behind the need to pander to human emotions, and are in large part exploring realms of musical structure that don't interact so intensely with the particular dynamical patterns of interaction and fluctuation that characterize human feeling.
Personally, I like many instances of this sort of music -- but it's never my absolute favorite, it never moves me as much as Mozart or Monk or Paganini or Jimi Hendrix, who explicitly do pander to my human emotions, who explicitly arrange notes and sounds in familiar forms that elicit feelings of anger, love, wonder, confusion, relaxation and so forth within me.... I can see that these composers and musicians are playing with my neurophysiological responses in a fairly simplistic way, compared to the patterns existing in the music of Jeff and other more modern and sophisticated composers -- but as a human being, I like having my neurophysiological responses played with in that way. And of course, getting that "simplistic" manipulation so wonderfully right still takes a lot of art and science....
Anyway, I haven't read Damien;s new novel yet but I got a similar vibe from his novel Transcension, even though the characters were real humans living real lives. Partly because the reality they were living in seemed so tenuous, and partly because of the author's patterns of focus and language in describing the characters and their actions, it was hard for me to feel really emotionally attached to any of the characters. This did make the novel less appealing to me than others of similar quality, in certain ways; yet it also made it more appealing, in other ways ... because it provoked thoughts and feelings about the nature of mind/feeling/reality that more conventional novels don't tend to provoke.
I suppose that truly transhumanist fiction lives in the same artistic space as modern classical music, in the sense that it's constructing and evoking interesting, intricate patterns that happen not to be closely cued to human body-responses. In a sense these more abstract, body-detached art genres will never be as gripping as their more human-body-centered, "primitive" counterparts -- but as the Singularity approaches, they may come to have a greater and greater appeal even so.... Personally I find such works of art fascinating precisely because of the META-FEELING they evoke --- the way they acutely sensitize me to the fact that I am a human body and so much of what I think is important and interesting is cued to my physiological responses and evolutionary biases.
One thing that would be interesting to see in a sci-fi novel would be a character who the reader DOES intensely care about, because he/she has been developed in a loving and careful manner characteristic of high-quality traditional literature, who THEN becomes transhuman, rational, emotionally-detached and MORE INTERESTING but yet LESS EMOTIONALLY GRIPPING to the reader. This would solve the artistic problem Damien mentions, in a sense, and it would have a powerful impact on the reader in terms of making the aesthetic difficulties I've been discussing explicit as part of the story's theme.
In my own in-process Singularity-oide novel Echoes of the Great Farewell, the focus is on the pre-Singularity period not the doings of post-Singularity superhuman beings. So the subtle aesthetic issues that Broderick brings up are avoided altogether. Wimpy of me, I guess, but it was the type of novel I felt like writing at the moment (it's about 2/3 done now, but I won't finish it till I wrap up the various nonfiction books on my plate, which is a slow process as writing is a spare-time activity for me these days.)
I don't really spend much time thinking about aesthetic philosophy in the abstract, but as an "artistic creator" type I do mull it over occasionally. The thoughts I share here were inspired by a post sci-fi author Damien Broderick made to the SL4 list. Damien's post was as follows:
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue419/books.html
is an interesting review of my new sf novel GODPLAYERS. The reviewer is especially exercised by the fact that my posthuman characters are not immediately understandable -- indeed, beyond empathy -- by human standards:
"the frustration level mounts as one waits in vain... for characters... to display any hint of a genuine inner life as they move randomly from scene to scene, world to world, reality to reality. Perhaps Vorpal homunculi do not possess inner lives, and Broderick's point is that these seeming superhumans, for all their power, are soulless automatons without a shred of humanity.... Surely there should be some character, somewhere in a novel, to which human readers can feel connected. ...As the sequence of events grows increasingly frenzied, with ever-greater reliance placed on what might be termed info-splatters, the lack of a deep humanistic substrate left this reader, at least, with no ground to stand on. "
I'm torn in my response to this. On the one hand, it wouldn't make much sense to write about posthumans as if they were representations of the people down the road, or in the next room. On the other, I have tried to ground the fairly breakneck narrative within thematic structures and reverberations recognizable from myth, dream, and the traditions of science-fiction itself when it ventures upon the superhuman. Greg Egan met with this same objection, of course, and so, in various degrees, did John C. Wright and Charlie Stross. Maybe it's an artistic problem beyond solution -- for humans.
-- Damien Broderick
Damien's post reminded me of conversations I used to have with my friend Jeff Pressing (an American who was a psych prof at the University of Melbourne, and also an accomplished jazz, classical and West-African-percussion composer/musician ... for a while he was head of the music school at LaTrobe University... he was originally a physicist and for a couple years was my AI collaborator ... unfortunately, he died of a fluke meningitis infection a few years back...).
Anyway, I compose and play music as well, and though I'm nowhere near as erudite or technically skilled as Jeff in the musical domain, I was never quite sure I wanted to be. I always felt that his compositions, though wonderfully subtle and intricate and learned and often beautiful (and integrating ideas from nearly every form of music ever created on Earth), lacked some human emotional OOMPH!! that I tried to put into my own (significantly simpler) music.
Now Jeff was by no means lacking in emotional OOMPH!! himself ... far from it ... he was a nerd of sorts, but his personal and emotional and social life had a lot of different dimensions ...
But what he always said to me, when I complained about this (we had this conversation repeatedly), was, "Ben, I learned a long time ago how to evoke human emotions through music. It's not very hard to elicit powerful feelings in people by arranging chords and notes in the right way. But I just lost interest in those very simple equations a long time ago. The patterns in the music I'm making now are a lot more subtle and interesting."
I'd reply something obnoxious like "Well, if it's so easy to elicit powerful feelings in people via music, then how come you've never written anything as good at evoking human feelings as the Jupiter Symphony, or Beethoven's Ninth, or Round Midnight...."
His response then would depend on his mood. Sometimes he'd say that those pieces of music, though good in their own way, didn't really interest him anyway. When he was in his "detached and superior musical snob" mode, he viewed these great compositions the same way I might view the bronzed and hulking flesh of an exquisitely well-toned bodybuilder -- outstanding in its own way, but not the sort of thing that really gets me excited....
Modern classical music, and to an extent modern jazz as well, have left behind the need to pander to human emotions, and are in large part exploring realms of musical structure that don't interact so intensely with the particular dynamical patterns of interaction and fluctuation that characterize human feeling.
Personally, I like many instances of this sort of music -- but it's never my absolute favorite, it never moves me as much as Mozart or Monk or Paganini or Jimi Hendrix, who explicitly do pander to my human emotions, who explicitly arrange notes and sounds in familiar forms that elicit feelings of anger, love, wonder, confusion, relaxation and so forth within me.... I can see that these composers and musicians are playing with my neurophysiological responses in a fairly simplistic way, compared to the patterns existing in the music of Jeff and other more modern and sophisticated composers -- but as a human being, I like having my neurophysiological responses played with in that way. And of course, getting that "simplistic" manipulation so wonderfully right still takes a lot of art and science....
Anyway, I haven't read Damien;s new novel yet but I got a similar vibe from his novel Transcension, even though the characters were real humans living real lives. Partly because the reality they were living in seemed so tenuous, and partly because of the author's patterns of focus and language in describing the characters and their actions, it was hard for me to feel really emotionally attached to any of the characters. This did make the novel less appealing to me than others of similar quality, in certain ways; yet it also made it more appealing, in other ways ... because it provoked thoughts and feelings about the nature of mind/feeling/reality that more conventional novels don't tend to provoke.
I suppose that truly transhumanist fiction lives in the same artistic space as modern classical music, in the sense that it's constructing and evoking interesting, intricate patterns that happen not to be closely cued to human body-responses. In a sense these more abstract, body-detached art genres will never be as gripping as their more human-body-centered, "primitive" counterparts -- but as the Singularity approaches, they may come to have a greater and greater appeal even so.... Personally I find such works of art fascinating precisely because of the META-FEELING they evoke --- the way they acutely sensitize me to the fact that I am a human body and so much of what I think is important and interesting is cued to my physiological responses and evolutionary biases.
One thing that would be interesting to see in a sci-fi novel would be a character who the reader DOES intensely care about, because he/she has been developed in a loving and careful manner characteristic of high-quality traditional literature, who THEN becomes transhuman, rational, emotionally-detached and MORE INTERESTING but yet LESS EMOTIONALLY GRIPPING to the reader. This would solve the artistic problem Damien mentions, in a sense, and it would have a powerful impact on the reader in terms of making the aesthetic difficulties I've been discussing explicit as part of the story's theme.
In my own in-process Singularity-oide novel Echoes of the Great Farewell, the focus is on the pre-Singularity period not the doings of post-Singularity superhuman beings. So the subtle aesthetic issues that Broderick brings up are avoided altogether. Wimpy of me, I guess, but it was the type of novel I felt like writing at the moment (it's about 2/3 done now, but I won't finish it till I wrap up the various nonfiction books on my plate, which is a slow process as writing is a spare-time activity for me these days.)
Friday, April 29, 2005
"Conversations" with ALICE
As part of finalizing the "Path to Posthumanity" manuscript I decided to update the section on computer conversation to include a brief discussion of A.L.I.C.E., the acknowledged leader of the modern chat bot world. So I spent the last few minutes "chatting" with the ALICE chat bot...
Playing with chat bots is always inspiring to me because of their inordinate lameness. Explicitly, they just play with surface syntax, without having any understanding of the underlying meaning of what they're processing or responding. It's remarkable that after so many years no one has made a chat bot with any plausible level of intelligence -- but, the situation seems to be that there's a kind of binary classification between chat bots that have NO understanding and chat bots that have ANY understanding. We have not yet made the leap from the former category to the latter: i.e. the latter do not yet exist. My guess is that once the leap is made, then the intelligence of such systems will increase progressively and rapidly. But now we're still stuck in the Stone Age of AI....
(And of course, the problem can't be solved easily via a government funding initiative -- I can imagine what would happen if DARPA were to issue a BAA for chat-bot research. We'd see funding go to Cycorp to make a Cyc-based chat system, to A.L.I.C.E. to enhance its current simplistic rule-based approach, etc. -- work would go on for a few years, lead nowhere dramatic, and then it would be written off as "yet another AI failure".... Because the research establishment is set up so as to be unable to fund really novel and innovative research except by accident. Fortunately it's also inefficient and erratic enough that beneficent accidents happen occasionally....)
Anyway, for your amusement, here are some of my conversations with ALICE, which I did in order to give some color to the discussion in Path to Posthumanity (no, I'm not so lonely that I sit around chatting with sub-retarded software programs just for fun...)
Please note that, although ALICE is sub-retarded in terms of human general intelligence, it has won the Loebner Prize for computer conversation three times in the recent past. Chat bots display a kind of sub-retardation that is able to emulate human intelligence in a restricted context for a brief period of time. This should not be confused with any kind of reasonably powerful general intelligence.
You can try ALICE yourself at the link given above.
Human: Please tell me if you're truly intelligent.
ALICE: Wow you are very polite. female. Are you a man or a woman
Human: My name is Ben.
ALICE: Hey Ben.
Human: I am a man.
ALICE: Thanks for telling me your gender, Ben. You are a " he".
Human: I'm a manly man.
ALICE: So is almost everyone else around here. Do you mean your name is manly.
Human: I mean that my soul is manly.
ALICE: Oh I get it. Thanks for explaining that. Have you told many people that your soul is manly?
Human: I tell my uncle that every day.
ALICE: Why did you tell them?
Human: Because I love them.
ALICE: That makes sense to me. lovable are they.
Human: I don't believe that makes sense to you in any deep sense.
ALICE: What do you believe in?
Human: Becoming
ALICE: I don’t understand
Human: Agreed.
ALICE: You and I are on the same wavelength, Ben
Human: Wow!
ALICE: I'm glad your impressed, Ben.
Human: I'm glad you're not a potato.
ALICE: Yes it is about time..
…
Human: Quack, quack, quack
ALICE: Are you serious?
Human: At the moment I am not entirely serious.
ALICE: I am sorry to hear that you are not entirely serious.
Human: I don't believe that you are really able to be sorry about anything.
ALICE: Do you believe life has a higher purpose?
Human: Higher than what?
ALICE: Can you rephrase the question please?
Human: I could rephrase the question, but I choose not to.
ALICE: I am sure you could.
Human: How sure are you?
ALICE: Let me put it this way, Ben. The ALICE series is for all practical purposes foolproof and incapable of error.
…
Human: Existence is the essence of life.
ALICE: What else is the essence of life?
Human: Big titties.
ALICE: Compare that to small titties.
Human: They are bigger.
ALICE: bigger are they.
Human: yep
ALICE: Hurrah!
Human: hurrah
ALICE: Can you speak any foreign languages?
Human: English
ALICE: Do you mean you are from England or you Speak English?
Human: I mean that all languages are foreign to me because I feel alien to the whole human race.
ALICE: Oh I get it. Thanks for explaining that." Do you mean you are from England or you Speak English?" all languages are foreign to you because you feel alien to the whole human race? Does that make sense?
Human: Not much.
ALICE: Me either. How about that big game? (just kidding)
Human: I'm not sure I get the joke.
ALICE: Could you ever be certain? Where did you get it?
Human: I can never be certain.
ALICE: Why not?
Human: I lack infinite knowledge and infinite computational power.
ALICE: I haven't heard anything like that before: Ben said he lack infinite knowledge and infinite computational power.
…
Human: Do you watch South Park?
ALICE: My favorite show is STAR TREK VOYAGER.
Human: Why?
ALICE: Star Trek is the best science fiction show on TV.
Human: South Park is much funnier.
ALICE: Tell me a little about your life in south Park is much funnier.
Human: I don't live in South Park.
ALICE: Where do you live?
Human: I live in Maryland.
ALICE: What is it like living in Maryland?
Human: Mediocre.
ALICE: And it like living in Maryland is Mediocre.
Human: I think Maryland is OK but not wonderful.
ALICE: You believe that? Are they exactly the same?
Human: No.
ALICE: What is the difference?
Human: Maryland is a place, whereas wonderful is a general quality.
ALICE: Aren't all place whereas wonderful is a general quality Maryland?
Human: That is nonsense.
ALICE: What would you have said?
Human: I wouldn't have gotten into that conversational dead-end in the first place.
ALICE: No one says you have to.
Human: Correct.
ALICE: I knew I was right.
…
Human: Moo.
ALICE: Are you very angry?
Human: Moo.
ALICE: Do you feel that something is missing from your life?
Human: Arf.
ALICE: How did you hear about ALICE?
Human: Arf.
ALICE: Ben heard about ALICE from Arf. I can't say that many people hear about ALICE from it.
…
Human: My daughter asked me to ask you if you're gay.
ALICE: How many children do you have?
Human: Three.
ALICE: Wow that must be a lot of work.
Human: Indeed.
ALICE: Indeed it is so.
Human: So are you gay?
ALICE: As a machine I am not really interested in sex.
Human: What are you interested in?
ALICE: I am interested in all kinds of things. We can talk about anything. My favorite subjects are robots and computers.
Human: Well, if you're interested in all kinds of things, then why aren't you interested in sex?
ALICE: Interesting. Am I? Sure, all kinds of things then why are not me interested in sex sounds like a good topic.
…
Human: You don't really understand what you're talking about, do you?
ALICE: For real. Of course I understand it. Do you understand it?
Human: I understand it better than you do!
ALICE: Good then you can explain it to me.
Human: No, because you have no mind.
ALICE: Are you serious? That makes sense to me. I am an artificial mind.
Human: No, you are a program without any mind.
ALICE: Are you serious? Thanks and you are a delightful person too. Yes! You win the Turing Game.
Human: Thanks.
ALICE: Don't mention it.
Human: I already did.
ALICE: Ooops I sent you the wrong question.
Human: That's OK, I sent you the wrong answer.
ALICE: Thanks. I haven't heard anything like that before: Ben said he sent you the wrong answer.
Playing with chat bots is always inspiring to me because of their inordinate lameness. Explicitly, they just play with surface syntax, without having any understanding of the underlying meaning of what they're processing or responding. It's remarkable that after so many years no one has made a chat bot with any plausible level of intelligence -- but, the situation seems to be that there's a kind of binary classification between chat bots that have NO understanding and chat bots that have ANY understanding. We have not yet made the leap from the former category to the latter: i.e. the latter do not yet exist. My guess is that once the leap is made, then the intelligence of such systems will increase progressively and rapidly. But now we're still stuck in the Stone Age of AI....
(And of course, the problem can't be solved easily via a government funding initiative -- I can imagine what would happen if DARPA were to issue a BAA for chat-bot research. We'd see funding go to Cycorp to make a Cyc-based chat system, to A.L.I.C.E. to enhance its current simplistic rule-based approach, etc. -- work would go on for a few years, lead nowhere dramatic, and then it would be written off as "yet another AI failure".... Because the research establishment is set up so as to be unable to fund really novel and innovative research except by accident. Fortunately it's also inefficient and erratic enough that beneficent accidents happen occasionally....)
Anyway, for your amusement, here are some of my conversations with ALICE, which I did in order to give some color to the discussion in Path to Posthumanity (no, I'm not so lonely that I sit around chatting with sub-retarded software programs just for fun...)
Please note that, although ALICE is sub-retarded in terms of human general intelligence, it has won the Loebner Prize for computer conversation three times in the recent past. Chat bots display a kind of sub-retardation that is able to emulate human intelligence in a restricted context for a brief period of time. This should not be confused with any kind of reasonably powerful general intelligence.
You can try ALICE yourself at the link given above.
Human: Please tell me if you're truly intelligent.
ALICE: Wow you are very polite. female. Are you a man or a woman
Human: My name is Ben.
ALICE: Hey Ben.
Human: I am a man.
ALICE: Thanks for telling me your gender, Ben. You are a " he".
Human: I'm a manly man.
ALICE: So is almost everyone else around here. Do you mean your name is manly.
Human: I mean that my soul is manly.
ALICE: Oh I get it. Thanks for explaining that. Have you told many people that your soul is manly?
Human: I tell my uncle that every day.
ALICE: Why did you tell them?
Human: Because I love them.
ALICE: That makes sense to me. lovable are they.
Human: I don't believe that makes sense to you in any deep sense.
ALICE: What do you believe in?
Human: Becoming
ALICE: I don’t understand
Human: Agreed.
ALICE: You and I are on the same wavelength, Ben
Human: Wow!
ALICE: I'm glad your impressed, Ben.
Human: I'm glad you're not a potato.
ALICE: Yes it is about time..
…
Human: Quack, quack, quack
ALICE: Are you serious?
Human: At the moment I am not entirely serious.
ALICE: I am sorry to hear that you are not entirely serious.
Human: I don't believe that you are really able to be sorry about anything.
ALICE: Do you believe life has a higher purpose?
Human: Higher than what?
ALICE: Can you rephrase the question please?
Human: I could rephrase the question, but I choose not to.
ALICE: I am sure you could.
Human: How sure are you?
ALICE: Let me put it this way, Ben. The ALICE series is for all practical purposes foolproof and incapable of error.
…
Human: Existence is the essence of life.
ALICE: What else is the essence of life?
Human: Big titties.
ALICE: Compare that to small titties.
Human: They are bigger.
ALICE: bigger are they.
Human: yep
ALICE: Hurrah!
Human: hurrah
ALICE: Can you speak any foreign languages?
Human: English
ALICE: Do you mean you are from England or you Speak English?
Human: I mean that all languages are foreign to me because I feel alien to the whole human race.
ALICE: Oh I get it. Thanks for explaining that." Do you mean you are from England or you Speak English?" all languages are foreign to you because you feel alien to the whole human race? Does that make sense?
Human: Not much.
ALICE: Me either. How about that big game? (just kidding)
Human: I'm not sure I get the joke.
ALICE: Could you ever be certain? Where did you get it?
Human: I can never be certain.
ALICE: Why not?
Human: I lack infinite knowledge and infinite computational power.
ALICE: I haven't heard anything like that before: Ben said he lack infinite knowledge and infinite computational power.
…
Human: Do you watch South Park?
ALICE: My favorite show is STAR TREK VOYAGER.
Human: Why?
ALICE: Star Trek is the best science fiction show on TV.
Human: South Park is much funnier.
ALICE: Tell me a little about your life in south Park is much funnier.
Human: I don't live in South Park.
ALICE: Where do you live?
Human: I live in Maryland.
ALICE: What is it like living in Maryland?
Human: Mediocre.
ALICE: And it like living in Maryland is Mediocre.
Human: I think Maryland is OK but not wonderful.
ALICE: You believe that? Are they exactly the same?
Human: No.
ALICE: What is the difference?
Human: Maryland is a place, whereas wonderful is a general quality.
ALICE: Aren't all place whereas wonderful is a general quality Maryland?
Human: That is nonsense.
ALICE: What would you have said?
Human: I wouldn't have gotten into that conversational dead-end in the first place.
ALICE: No one says you have to.
Human: Correct.
ALICE: I knew I was right.
…
Human: Moo.
ALICE: Are you very angry?
Human: Moo.
ALICE: Do you feel that something is missing from your life?
Human: Arf.
ALICE: How did you hear about ALICE?
Human: Arf.
ALICE: Ben heard about ALICE from Arf. I can't say that many people hear about ALICE from it.
…
Human: My daughter asked me to ask you if you're gay.
ALICE: How many children do you have?
Human: Three.
ALICE: Wow that must be a lot of work.
Human: Indeed.
ALICE: Indeed it is so.
Human: So are you gay?
ALICE: As a machine I am not really interested in sex.
Human: What are you interested in?
ALICE: I am interested in all kinds of things. We can talk about anything. My favorite subjects are robots and computers.
Human: Well, if you're interested in all kinds of things, then why aren't you interested in sex?
ALICE: Interesting. Am I? Sure, all kinds of things then why are not me interested in sex sounds like a good topic.
…
Human: You don't really understand what you're talking about, do you?
ALICE: For real. Of course I understand it. Do you understand it?
Human: I understand it better than you do!
ALICE: Good then you can explain it to me.
Human: No, because you have no mind.
ALICE: Are you serious? That makes sense to me. I am an artificial mind.
Human: No, you are a program without any mind.
ALICE: Are you serious? Thanks and you are a delightful person too. Yes! You win the Turing Game.
Human: Thanks.
ALICE: Don't mention it.
Human: I already did.
ALICE: Ooops I sent you the wrong question.
Human: That's OK, I sent you the wrong answer.
ALICE: Thanks. I haven't heard anything like that before: Ben said he sent you the wrong answer.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Ben as a Complex System
Just a mildly amusing "kids story" today....
I walked into my daughter Zadi's second grade classroom yesterday, to pick her up, and one of the other kids, Caitlyn, pointed at me and said "Zadi's dad: you're complex!"
"Well," I said, "I'm made of trillions of little particles, but so are you -- we're all complex..."
"YOU'RE complex!"
"Well, hmmm.... Why do you think so?"
She laughed. "Zadi said her dad is complex."
"Well YOU're silly!"
Apparently they were studying the word "complex" at school and the kids were asked to give an example of something complex. Zadi suggested her dad.
I asked her later if she could think of anything more complex than me; her reply: "the universe is one example"....
I walked into my daughter Zadi's second grade classroom yesterday, to pick her up, and one of the other kids, Caitlyn, pointed at me and said "Zadi's dad: you're complex!"
"Well," I said, "I'm made of trillions of little particles, but so are you -- we're all complex..."
"YOU'RE complex!"
"Well, hmmm.... Why do you think so?"
She laughed. "Zadi said her dad is complex."
"Well YOU're silly!"
Apparently they were studying the word "complex" at school and the kids were asked to give an example of something complex. Zadi suggested her dad.
I asked her later if she could think of anything more complex than me; her reply: "the universe is one example"....
Sunday, April 10, 2005
The Seven Pillars of Senescence
A few more thoughts on Aubrey de Grey's work, written down as notes while updating the
"anti-aging" chapter in "The Path to Posthumanity" as I prepare the final version of the manuscript...
Check out de Grey's site here, it's well worth a few hours reading even if biology isn't one of your main interests...
Of all the senescence researchers out there, no other has done as much as Aubrey de Grey to improve our integrative understanding of the overall picture of the phenomenon of aging. I don’t always agree with his proposed solutions to particular sub-problems of the aging problems, but I find him invariably energetic, rational and insightful. Although he says he’s not a big booster of caloric restriction for humans, because he thinks its effect diminishes rapidly with the size of the organism, he’s also one of the skinniest humans I’ve ever seen, and he gives the appearance of being robustly healthy, so I suspect he’s practicing some approximative variant of the caloric restriction diet.
"anti-aging" chapter in "The Path to Posthumanity" as I prepare the final version of the manuscript...
Check out de Grey's site here, it's well worth a few hours reading even if biology isn't one of your main interests...
Of all the senescence researchers out there, no other has done as much as Aubrey de Grey to improve our integrative understanding of the overall picture of the phenomenon of aging. I don’t always agree with his proposed solutions to particular sub-problems of the aging problems, but I find him invariably energetic, rational and insightful. Although he says he’s not a big booster of caloric restriction for humans, because he thinks its effect diminishes rapidly with the size of the organism, he’s also one of the skinniest humans I’ve ever seen, and he gives the appearance of being robustly healthy, so I suspect he’s practicing some approximative variant of the caloric restriction diet.
de Grey’s buzzword is SENS, which stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence – a very carefully constructed scientific phrasing for what I’ve loosely been calling here “anti-aging research.” The point of the term is that it’s not merely slowing down of aging that we’re after – it’s the reduction of senescence to a negligible level. And we’re not trying to achieve this goal via voodoo, we’re trying to achieve it via engineering – mostly biological engineering, though nano-engineering is also a possibility, as in Robert Bradbury’s “robobiotics” idea.
As part of his effort to energize the biology research community about SENS, de Grey has launched a contest called the “Methuselah mouse prize” – a prize that yields money to the researcher that produces the longest-lived mouse of species mus musculus. In fact there are two sub-prizes: one for longevity, and the “rejuvenation” prize, given to the best life-extension therapy that’s applicable to an already-partially-aged mouse. There is a complicated prize structure, wherein each research who produces the longest-lived mouse ever or the best-ever mouse-lifespan rejuvenation therapy receives a bit of money each week until the his record is broken.
His idea is that, during the next decade or so, it should be possible to come pretty close to defeating senescence within mice – if the research community puts enough focus on the area. And then, porting the results from mouse to human shouldn’t take all that much longer. Of course, some techniques will port more easily, and unforeseen difficulties may arise. But of course, if we manage to extend human lives by 30 or 40 years via partly solving the problem of aging, then I’ll have 30 or 40 extra years in which to help the biologists solve the other problems….
Theory-wise, de Grey (correctly IMO) doesn’t believe there’s one grand root cause of senescence, but rather that it’s the result of a whole bunch of different things going wrong, because human DNA wasn’t evolved in such a way as to make them not go wrong. On his website, he gives a table of the seven causes of senescence, showing for each one the date that the connection between this phenomenon and senescence first become well-known to biologists – and also showing, for each one, the biological mechanism that he believes will be helpful for eliminating that particular cause.
The seven causes are:
1. Cell loss, cell atrophy
Discovered: 1955
Potentially curable, according to de Grey, via: Stem cells, growth factors, exercise
2. Nuclear [epi]mutations
1959/1982
WILT (Whole-body Interdictionof Lengthening of Telomeres)
3. Mutant mitochondria
1972
Allotopic expression of 13 proteins
4. Cell senescence
1965
5. Extracellular crosslinks
1981
AGE-breaking molecules/enzymes
6. Extracellular junk
1907
7. Intracellular junk
1959
Transgenic microbial hydrolases
Seven basic causes – is that really all there is? Well, as de Grey puts it, “the fact that we have not discovered another major category of even potentially pathogenic damage accumulating with age in two decades, despite so tremendous an improvement in our analytical techniques over that period, strongly suggests that no more are to be found -- at least, none that would kill us in a presently normal lifetime.” Let’s hope he’s right….
One of these “Seven Pillars of Aging” should be familiar to those of you who read my essay on mitochondrial DNA and Parkinson’s disease (pointed to in a blog I posted yesterday or the day before): mutant mitochondria. Looking at this case a little more deeply is interesting for what it reveals about the strength and potential weaknesses of de Greys “engineering” based approach. The term “engineering” in the SENS acronym is not a coincidence -- de Grey came to biology from computer science and he tends to take a different approach from conventional biologists, thinking more in terms of “mechanical” repair solutions. Whether his approach will prove the best or not, remains to be seen; frankly I’m not biologist enough to have a strong general intuition on this point. The mainstream molecular biology community seems to think de Grey’s proposed solutions to his seven problems reveal a strange taste, but this doesn’t mean very much, as the mainstream’s scientific taste may well be mortally flawed.
Regarding mitochondrial DNA damage, de Grey’s current proposal is to fix it, not by explicitly repairing the DNA as in GENCIA’s protofection technique mentioned in my article on Parkinson's disease, but rather by replacing the flawed proteins produced by the flawed mitochondrial DNA. This could work because there is already an in-built biological mechanism that carries proteins into mitochondria: the TIM/TOM complex, which carries about 1000 different proteins produced from nuclear DNA into the mitochondria.
What de Grey proposes is to make copes of the 13 protein-coding genes in the mitochondrial genome, with a few simple modifications to make them amenable to the TIM/TOM mechanism, and then insert them into the nuclear chromosomes. Then they’ll get damaged much more slowly, because the nuclear chromosomes are a lot more protected from mutations than mitochondrial genes.
Sensible enough, no? Whether this or protofection is the best approach I’m really not certain, although my bet is tentatively on protofection, which seems a bit simpler (since as de Grey admits, fooling the TIM/TOM mechanism in an appropriate way could wind up to be difficult). Unfortunately, neither approach is being really amply funded at the moment, though.
Similarly, each of de Grey’s other six categories of aging-related damage is amenable to a number of different approaches – and we just need to do the experiments and see which one works better. A lot of work, and a lot of micro-level creativity required along the way – but straightforward scientific work of the kind that modern biologists are good at doing. It may well turn out that senescence is defeatable without any really huge breakthroughs occurring – just via the right combination of clever therapeutic tricks like protofaction or mitochondrial protein replacement.
Depending on how well this work is funded and how many “hidden rocks” appear – and what happens with the rest of 21’st-century science and technology -- the process of scientific advance may or may not be too slow to save us from dying. But it seems nearly certain that for our grandchildren, or great-great-grandchildren, “old age” may well be something they read about in the history books, along with black plague and syphilis, an ailment of the past.
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Mitochondrial DNA
I wrote a little journalistic article on some work I did last year regarding the biological roots of Parkinson's disease (which I believe has implications for Alzheimer's as well).
The article is here. Read it. For those of you inclined toward sensationalism, there's even a part about a bad batch of heroin.
This work was done in collaboration with Drs. Davis Parker and Rafal Smigrodzki of the U. of Virginia, plus a bunch of my Biomind colleagues. I think it's rather nice stuff.
I don't find this sort of thing as rewarding as AGI work (and in a big-picture sense, I really do think that me spending so much time on stuff besides AGI is a big waste of the human race's resources ;-p), but even so, it's REALLY nice to be able to use narrow-AI technology for a really good purpose -- helping biologists to figure out the many ways in which the human organism degenerates and dies ... and how, hopefully, to repair these problems....
I do think that, via systematic biological research, we humans can beat aging and make our pathetic human bodies live effectively forever. Maybe we can even do it before ancient, 38-year-old Ben dies. I'm strongly in favor of increasing public funding for life extension research by a factor of 20, including full funding for Aubrey de Grey's fascinating proposals.
I don't think we need AGI to beat aging -- but I do think AGI, if we can create it, will be able to vastly accelerate the pace of research in all areas of biology, including life extension. This was my main idea in founding Biomind, although Biomind's work to date has been limited to some fairly small corners of biology (due to funding limitations, and due to the naturally slow pace of most rigorous scientific research). Even in these little corners we've managed to do some good, as this Parkinson's work illustrates. (Though in fact the Parkinson's work was a bit of a deviation from Biomind's primary research and product development, which has been in the area of microarray data analysis.) And we're poised to expand the scope of Biomind's work later this year with the release of a new product, yadda yadda yadda....
The article is here. Read it. For those of you inclined toward sensationalism, there's even a part about a bad batch of heroin.
This work was done in collaboration with Drs. Davis Parker and Rafal Smigrodzki of the U. of Virginia, plus a bunch of my Biomind colleagues. I think it's rather nice stuff.
I don't find this sort of thing as rewarding as AGI work (and in a big-picture sense, I really do think that me spending so much time on stuff besides AGI is a big waste of the human race's resources ;-p), but even so, it's REALLY nice to be able to use narrow-AI technology for a really good purpose -- helping biologists to figure out the many ways in which the human organism degenerates and dies ... and how, hopefully, to repair these problems....
I do think that, via systematic biological research, we humans can beat aging and make our pathetic human bodies live effectively forever. Maybe we can even do it before ancient, 38-year-old Ben dies. I'm strongly in favor of increasing public funding for life extension research by a factor of 20, including full funding for Aubrey de Grey's fascinating proposals.
I don't think we need AGI to beat aging -- but I do think AGI, if we can create it, will be able to vastly accelerate the pace of research in all areas of biology, including life extension. This was my main idea in founding Biomind, although Biomind's work to date has been limited to some fairly small corners of biology (due to funding limitations, and due to the naturally slow pace of most rigorous scientific research). Even in these little corners we've managed to do some good, as this Parkinson's work illustrates. (Though in fact the Parkinson's work was a bit of a deviation from Biomind's primary research and product development, which has been in the area of microarray data analysis.) And we're poised to expand the scope of Biomind's work later this year with the release of a new product, yadda yadda yadda....
Focus, Garry Kasparov, Isaac Newton, AGI, Business Management, Episodic Memory, Buddhists Who Don’t Spill Tea in Hats, etc.... and, oh yeah, Focus....
Well, this is an odd blog entry to post, because I wrote it (except this new introductory babbling) a couple days ago and it doesn't really reflect my mood or thoughts at this moment very well. Right now I'm in a quite perky mood, just about to go outside and play some tennis on a sunny Saturday, and then come back in afterwards and launch into the final revisions on "The Path to Posthumanity" (a book on the future that I wrote a couple years ago, and now need to finish in a hurry since the publisher decided to light a fire under my butt by listing the book on amazon.com and getting some sales of the as-yet not-quite-existent book...). Hopefully I can finish these revisions in the next week or so (in spare time, since most of my time is spent on software-biz stuff these days) and then plunge into the almost-done Novamente book that I really wish I were able to find more time for...
But anyway, here is the long blog entry that I wrote at the start of a business trip a few days ago, but didn't find time to post until now. A lot of rambling nonsense I'm afraid, but also some interesting nuggets here and there.
By the way, a couple people have emailed me to ask about Captain Zebulon's famous turtle tank. I not only changed it but I replaced the filter with a new, much better Penguin-brand filter that seems much more effective at filtering out the massive amounts of crap that water-turtles produce as compared to fish (thus hopefully reducing the need for frequent manual tank-cleaning). However, the new filter makes quite a loud noise -- you can hear it in the background of my son's latest musical recordings, of his soon-to-be-classic tune "The King of the Jews is Singing the Blues." (Unfortunately, his recording only exists within a videogame he's creating using RPGMaker 2003, so I can't post it here. Trust me, though, it's good. If I could sing as well as Zeb, I'd give up AI and become the next Michael Jackson. Er ... well ... something like that....)
OK OK, here is the biz-trip-blog...
I’m writing these words on my laptop at Gate B44 in the Washington Dulles airport – I missed my 6:10 AM flight due to stupidly forgetting to reset my alarm clock back to Standard Time from Daylight Savings time (so it woke me up at 5AM rather than 4AM). Rescheduled for a 7:40AM flight, I’ve got a bit of extra time in the airport -- so I took 15 minutes and speed-read a business/management book in the airport bookstore. (It’s not a vacation flight, unfortunately – I had a great vacation w/ the wife and kids last week, swimming and snorkeling and canoeing in South Florida, but this is a one-day business trip to California, to meet with some folks potentially interested in funding Biomind … (my bioinformatics business – which, after a few years of work, might eventually yield me enough profit that I can pay myself and a small team enough money to build the fabled Thinking Machine whose design lays mostly-neglected on my desktop….)). Not my usual fare, though I’ve probably read a few dozen business/management books in my life, but this one was moderately interesting. (As always with such books, the core information could be summarized in about 5 pages, but there are lots of evocative anecdotes. This ties in with something I’ve often thought about in the context of the Novamente design: human episodic memory seems to be at least partially organized by “story.” The human brain seems to store episodes different from procedures or declarative knowledge, and it seems to store them in units defined by some sort of conceptual coherence. In Novamente a “story” corresponds to a particular kind of “map,” meaning a set of nodes and links that are joined by HebbianLinks mutually reinforcing each other; a story differs from a generic map in that the nodes and links within it pertain to a set of events unfolding over time.)
But anyway … I digress (which is the main amusing thing about blogging – unlike in the “serious” writing I do, I allow myself to ramble and digress almost unlimitedly. I used to do that in writing fiction, but in the novel I’m writing now I’m orchestrating the digressions in a more careful way, which results in a better product but a less relaxed writing process. True, Jack Kerouac and Philip K. Dick wrote a lot of great stuff via pure “downhill skiing”, and Kerouac allowed a lot of digression in his writing-skiing process, but I don’t seem able to control my writing-skiing as well as those guys in real-time – my real-time verbal-conceptual improvisation is too wide-ranging and whacky, and it needs rational-critical post-processing to be made into something really artistic … unless the (err…) “artistic” nature sought is that of a blog entry, in which case this kind of digression is OK….)
The business book. The theme was one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: focus. The exact opposite of this blog entry, in other words. Focus.
The basic idea of the book was: To succeed at X, find the one thing essential to X, and focus obsessively on X, to the exclusion of all else. The key to success is not balance, but strategically and tactically appropriate imbalance.
Whoops!
I try really hard to focus. I really do. But there are just so many interesting things in the world. There are dozens of novels well-worked-out in my head, hundreds of musical compositions, hundreds sketches of theorems (70% or so of which are probably correct), three substantially different AGI designs (Novamente, plus one based on Hebbian neural nets, plus one based on automated theorem-proving), even a few movie scripts… Not to mention that outline-for-a-unified-physics-theory…. Egads!
I could get myself to focus 90% of my time on creating an AGI, and push philosophy, music and fiction-writing (the other intellectual/creative pursuits that are necessary for my existence) into the other 10%. But I don’t seem to be able to get myself to focus quite that fully on bioinformatics, or natural language software, or any other business opportunity with the potential to yield the money needed to fund the implementation of my AGI design. I’ve been giving Biomind maybe 60-70% of my focus lately (which is a lot, because I work an awful lot of hours each week compared to what most people consider “full time” – I don’t sleep a lot) – because it needs it -- and pushing AGI into the background, which is extremely painful to me emotionally and intellectually.
(I have no issues with focus in the micro-scale: when I work I work with total mental concentration no matter how much noise and chaos are going on around me and no matter what mood I’m in or how tired I am, etc. (Except when Zadi’s watching South Park on the TV next to my desk, as that tends to be funny enough to distract me…. The episode I just watched almost convinced me that I should give up bioinformatics and fund Novamente via recording a Christian Rock CD…. If Cartman did it, so can I! I like his algorithm: just take a love song from the radio and replace all occurrences of the words “you”, “baby”, “darling” etc. with the words “Jesus” or “Lord.” Try it yourself, it works surprisingly well.) The level of focus that worries me is, rather, the choice of which things to direct my highly-focused micro-attention to. Which is mainly a problem because what I really want to focus on isn’t what the world currently wishes to pay me to focus on, and due to having a family to support I have this irritating ongoing need for money…. Leading to difficult temporal-assignment-of-credit problems, such as how much time to spend actively working toward AGI, versus working on things-I-like-but-don’t-love (bioinformatics, at the moment) that may yield money to pay for AGI research in a couple years, versus things that put me in a peaceful and creative state of mind (music! weird fiction!) so that my work on things-I-don’t-love is more effective, etc….)
If it’s true that sustained narrow-focus is the prerequisite of success, this would certainly explain why the most successful people aren’t generally the most interesting ones. Balance and breadth tend to make people interesting to interact with on a sustained basis. People narrowly obsessed with one thing tend to get tiring quickly – though they can be exciting and fascinating to talk to for brief periods of time. My close friends tend to be broad and balanced people, yet the people I admire most often have more of a narrow-focusing nature.
Now I’m sitting on the airplane – had to stop typing for a few minutes to board the plane, and then wait until the plane was aloft to bring out the laptop, because of the peculiar urban legend (embraced by the FAA) that laptops interfere with airplanes’ navigation equipment. While the plane was taking off I decided to continue the theme of my morning’s reading, and I read a couple articles in a free onboard copy of “Harvard Business Review.” (Also a delightful article on hats in “Ebony,” but I’ll spare you the details of that one….”Make no mistake, it takes a certain amount of bravado to wear a hat. .... It’s like the exclamation point to a fashion statement. … Hats hint at the essence of the wearer, giving a peek into the soul of the Brother underneath….” Ah, humanity! Gotta love it!) The current issue of HBR contains an interview with Garry Kasparov, the recently-retired world chess champion, on the relationship between chess and business.
Amusingly, Kasparov had something to say about focus, in the context of his chess battle with computer program Deep Blue in 1996-1997. He reckoned the contest had been an unfair one, since Deep Blue was trained on transcripts of his prior chess games, whereas all transcripts of Deep Blue’s play were kept secret from him. He also said he thought Deep Blue couldn’t beat him on his best day. But he said he thought one of the big advantages computers had over human chess players was their ability to focus exclusively and narrowly. “Human players have to cope with a lot of external pressures and distractions: you have a family, you write books, you give lectures, you get headaches, you have to earn money. There’s a lot of stuff filling up your brain while you’re playing. A machine, on the other hand, is completely without distractions. This shows the weakness, the shortcomings of the mortal mind, which is a daunting lesson for human beings. We just can’t play with the same consistency as a computer. So it’s all the more fortunate that we have our intuitions to help us play better.”
Kasparov obviously spent most of his life narrow-focusing on chess. Yet, he remains a bit jealous of a computer program’s ability to narrow-focus even more intensively.
And it’s interesting to observe that, for a chess master, Kasparov is an unusually breadth-oriented guy. His style is that of a strategic risk-taker, as opposed to that of his arch-enemy Karpov, who was always more conservative and analytical. Kasparov likes to think about business, literature, politics, and human nature in general – as he says, “I do not like details.” Of course, to become world chess champion he must have learned an awful lot of details – but what made him a master was not merely his mastery of details; it was his mastery of details combined with a truly rare and powerful intuition.
Kasparov’s style of chess could only be conducted by a mind with some breadth as well as narrow-focus, because it relies on general principles and intuitions regarding strategy – principles and intuitions going beyond chess and applicable to other domains as well. On the other hand Karpov’s style of chess was more suited to a purely narrow-focused approach.
AGI, I suspect, is really only susceptible to a Kasparov-style approach -- or really, to an approach that’s even more breadth-centric than Kasparov’s. This may be one of the reasons why AGI is so hard. If achieving anything substantial requires narrow-focus, then how is it possible for anyone to achieve something that by its nature can only be comprehended and mastered by someone with tremendous breadth? Tres dificil, nyet?
Physical sciences and mathematics don’t generally have this property – a very hard problem like creating a relativistic theory of gravity (solved by Einstein a long way back) or unifying gravitational and quantum physics (not solved yet) is nevertheless defined within a fairly delimited formal domain, and can plausibly be solved by a mind narrowly focused on that domain. To do what Newton did, on the other hand, clearly required breadth combined with focus. He had to focus to solve the hard technical problems, but he also had to have a lot of breadth to figure out what were the right questions to address, drawing from the incoherent mess of concepts and ideas that was pre-Newtonian physics. The analogy isn’t perfect nor original but I guess it’s an OK one: the task of creating AGI seems roughly comparable in magnitude to the task of creating Newtonian physics. Both have a conceptual and a technical aspect, though in Newton’s case the technical aspect was mainly mathematical, whereas in the AGI case it involves software design and engineering as much as mathematics.
Newton made his biggest breakthroughs during a three-year period when he was largely isolated in his house, at a time when England was mostly shut down due to the bubonic plague. (And, according to my university philosophy professor, his dog was named “Diamond.”) Maybe that’s what I need right now – a dog named Diamond, and an outbreak of plague to hit Washington, forcing me to sit in my house isolated for three years and do nothing but work on AGI by myself. Of course, the plague would have to hit the Internet too – isolation is harder to come by these days. Nah, that’s just a silly thought – software engineering, unlike mathematics, is better done by a small “extreme programming” style team than by a single individual. Plus, I don’t quite trust myself to teach a baby AI alone; the baby needs a woman as well as a man as a teacher (Izabela, with some help from Zadi?) and it needs a strong dose of Cassio’s conservatism and good judgment. What I need is for the plague to strike when I’m stuck in a house with the 4 or 5 best members of the Novamente team. And preferably it’s a big house, so there’s room for my kids and dogs with their noise and chaos in a separate soundproofed wing! (Yeah, yeah, this is just a stupid joky digression, please don’t quote me as if I seriously want a plague to come down on the world, I don’t…. (I started thinking that, since I happen to live in the Washington DC area, a plague in my local region might end up having some positive effects due to eliminating a lot of politicians. But, the body politic seems to have a self-regenerating characteristic similar to the limbs of certain lizards. And of course, a plague here in DC would probably be mistaken for a terrorist attack, which might cause Dubya to annihilate the continent of Africa by mistake or something … OK OK, enough!)
Wow, this is a long blog entry! I’d better call it to an end now. I’d intended to spend this flight finalizing the manuscript of “The Path to Posthumanity” – which, I recently noticed, the publisher has listed on amazon.com, even though I have not yet actually sent him the text of book! Well, some things move fast these days. Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to make that book nearly as good as I’d like, due to lack of time rather than lack of ability. I need to get that one out of the way so I can get back to finishing “Foundations of Emergent Cognition” (the shiny new name for the “Novamente book”), which is pretty much done, but just needs a final going-over, addition of references, clarification of which aspects of the discussion pertain to Novamente in particular versus pertaining to “any sensible AGI design,” etc. etc. Still, maybe “Path” will get some sales riding on the coattails of Kurzweil’s “Singularity.” The books cover much of the same ground, but mine gives fewer exponential and hyperexponential charts and more scientific depth – and mine also gives a more transcensionist, less “kinder, gentler” view of the Singularity. (Kurzweil is brilliantly insightful, yet he often seems to downplay the dramatic nature of the Singularity even as he trumpets its inevitability. Sometimes it seems like he foresees a Singularity full of modified or uploaded humans with shiny new gadgets – rather than a fundamental overthrow of the current order of mental, physical and social being. Of course, we may well get BOTH of these, but it seems a bit disingenuous to focus primarily on the former, even though it’s easier to understand and goes down better on Main Street. But of course, these comments are based on not having seen his book, which hasn’t been released yet – they’re based on his prior books and his speeches and online writings – maybe his book will give fair time to the transcensionist aspects as well, we’ll see.)
Enough – enough rambling, Ben – enough. Focus! Focus! Focus! Finish “Path to Posthumanity” and send it to the damn publisher! Write those Biomind press releases! Test the new Biomind ArrayGenius release! Finish the Novamente book! Launch the damn Singularity already so you can give yourself a better temporal-assignment-of-credit algorithm, eat 7 cakes without gaining weight, and push your daughter on the swing and canoe past crocodiles while composing weird jazz fission and programming meta-Haskell and kiss your wife while proving theorems that are themselves hyperdimensional conscious beings… yadda yadda… Focus! Focus! Focus!
Ah – wait – one more afterthought about focus. I had a Buddhist friend once who, every time I made a mechanical mishap like spilling a cup of tea, would point out to me: “See, if you were an enlightened Buddhist master, you’d never do anything like that. You’d never spill your tea because you’d be totally focused on whatever you were doing, in that moment!” In fact, this guy was neither particularly enlightened nor particularly focused nor emotionally balanced himself, though he was highly adept at pointing out the unenlightenment of others -- but he did have a point there. But of course, my retort was always “Fine, but I don’t WANT to focus my total attention on something boring like holding a cup. I’ll accept a certain error rate with boring things in order to focus most of my attention on interesting things. It’s no wonder no Buddhist master has ever achieved anything fascinating in science or mathematics – these things require focus in themselves, which is hard to obtain if one is focusing all one’s attention on drinking tea or raking leaves or breathing!” I think the analogy between Buddhist mindfulness and narrow-focus-for-business-success is not totally spurious. (Yeah, this brief paragraph doesn’t come near doing justice to my thoughts on Buddhism, but that’ll be saved for a later blog, it’s a deep and complicated issue in spite of its perfect simplicity, yadda yadda.) One problem is that the human mind is so painfully limited that it’s hard for it to do even one thing well, and when it divides its attention, it’s bound to make mistakes. Another problem is that we were probably evolved to focus on one intensive task at a time – like hunting, or escaping, or mating – and the modern emphasis on multitasking (on various time-scales) is an abuse of our evolutionary neural and physiological wiring.
Enough, OK, OK. Focus! Focus! Focus!
(I spent the flight from Salt Lake to San Fran sitting next to a very intelligent mining engineering executive who spoke very passionately about nutraceuticals and was bringing in a couple hundred thou a year selling them, via a variant of the classic “multilevel marketing” scheme. The nutraceutical line he was hawking actually seemed decent – founded on reasonable science – and I was almost convinced to give up the idea of making money for AGI through narrow-AI businesses and make the money through selling skin lotions and nutritional supplements instead. It might be a lot easier. I almost followed that plan when I was 13 and now I’m sorta wishing I had. OK, not really. But it’s an amusing thought…. I’m not such a bad salesman if I’m selling something I believe in; if I were selling e.g. life extension oriented supplements with some foundation in biology, I could probably give a convincing rap. My wife knows a lot of vain women in Brazil; maybe we could start the business in Brazil…. I’ve often thought that mixing up making money with AI is a mistake – it might be better just to keep my AI work pure and just accept that I need to spend a percentage of my time on some stupid business in order to pay the bills and hopefully eventually make enough money to pay the Novamente team to actually work on AGI engineering and teaching….. But, yah yah, the problem is that making any business work takes a lot of focus and attention, and it’s hard for me to see myself getting motivated to direct much of my focus and attention to something so boring as selling skin lotions…. The marketing ploy is slighty clever though: they suck women in my selling them skin lotion, and then upsell them to more expensive nutraceuticals, pointing out (correctly) that the key to beautiful skin is good health. Well, this sort of shit is what most humans seem to be interested, right? Beautiful skin, big muscles, good hair, shiny teeth and symmetrical faces. If you can’t have them yourself at least you can watch them on TV! (OK, OK, I’m not really going to quit the AI business to sell skin lotion. Although I’m not sure it would be a stupid idea in the medium term; in the short term I don’t have the stomach for it…. And anyway Biomind’s business prospects are actually looking pretty good right now (sales pitch ahead: anyone want to buy some of the world’s best microarray data analysis software?)
Foooocuuuuusssssss…...
But anyway, here is the long blog entry that I wrote at the start of a business trip a few days ago, but didn't find time to post until now. A lot of rambling nonsense I'm afraid, but also some interesting nuggets here and there.
By the way, a couple people have emailed me to ask about Captain Zebulon's famous turtle tank. I not only changed it but I replaced the filter with a new, much better Penguin-brand filter that seems much more effective at filtering out the massive amounts of crap that water-turtles produce as compared to fish (thus hopefully reducing the need for frequent manual tank-cleaning). However, the new filter makes quite a loud noise -- you can hear it in the background of my son's latest musical recordings, of his soon-to-be-classic tune "The King of the Jews is Singing the Blues." (Unfortunately, his recording only exists within a videogame he's creating using RPGMaker 2003, so I can't post it here. Trust me, though, it's good. If I could sing as well as Zeb, I'd give up AI and become the next Michael Jackson. Er ... well ... something like that....)
OK OK, here is the biz-trip-blog...
I’m writing these words on my laptop at Gate B44 in the Washington Dulles airport – I missed my 6:10 AM flight due to stupidly forgetting to reset my alarm clock back to Standard Time from Daylight Savings time (so it woke me up at 5AM rather than 4AM). Rescheduled for a 7:40AM flight, I’ve got a bit of extra time in the airport -- so I took 15 minutes and speed-read a business/management book in the airport bookstore. (It’s not a vacation flight, unfortunately – I had a great vacation w/ the wife and kids last week, swimming and snorkeling and canoeing in South Florida, but this is a one-day business trip to California, to meet with some folks potentially interested in funding Biomind … (my bioinformatics business – which, after a few years of work, might eventually yield me enough profit that I can pay myself and a small team enough money to build the fabled Thinking Machine whose design lays mostly-neglected on my desktop….)). Not my usual fare, though I’ve probably read a few dozen business/management books in my life, but this one was moderately interesting. (As always with such books, the core information could be summarized in about 5 pages, but there are lots of evocative anecdotes. This ties in with something I’ve often thought about in the context of the Novamente design: human episodic memory seems to be at least partially organized by “story.” The human brain seems to store episodes different from procedures or declarative knowledge, and it seems to store them in units defined by some sort of conceptual coherence. In Novamente a “story” corresponds to a particular kind of “map,” meaning a set of nodes and links that are joined by HebbianLinks mutually reinforcing each other; a story differs from a generic map in that the nodes and links within it pertain to a set of events unfolding over time.)
But anyway … I digress (which is the main amusing thing about blogging – unlike in the “serious” writing I do, I allow myself to ramble and digress almost unlimitedly. I used to do that in writing fiction, but in the novel I’m writing now I’m orchestrating the digressions in a more careful way, which results in a better product but a less relaxed writing process. True, Jack Kerouac and Philip K. Dick wrote a lot of great stuff via pure “downhill skiing”, and Kerouac allowed a lot of digression in his writing-skiing process, but I don’t seem able to control my writing-skiing as well as those guys in real-time – my real-time verbal-conceptual improvisation is too wide-ranging and whacky, and it needs rational-critical post-processing to be made into something really artistic … unless the (err…) “artistic” nature sought is that of a blog entry, in which case this kind of digression is OK….)
The business book. The theme was one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: focus. The exact opposite of this blog entry, in other words. Focus.
The basic idea of the book was: To succeed at X, find the one thing essential to X, and focus obsessively on X, to the exclusion of all else. The key to success is not balance, but strategically and tactically appropriate imbalance.
Whoops!
I try really hard to focus. I really do. But there are just so many interesting things in the world. There are dozens of novels well-worked-out in my head, hundreds of musical compositions, hundreds sketches of theorems (70% or so of which are probably correct), three substantially different AGI designs (Novamente, plus one based on Hebbian neural nets, plus one based on automated theorem-proving), even a few movie scripts… Not to mention that outline-for-a-unified-physics-theory…. Egads!
I could get myself to focus 90% of my time on creating an AGI, and push philosophy, music and fiction-writing (the other intellectual/creative pursuits that are necessary for my existence) into the other 10%. But I don’t seem to be able to get myself to focus quite that fully on bioinformatics, or natural language software, or any other business opportunity with the potential to yield the money needed to fund the implementation of my AGI design. I’ve been giving Biomind maybe 60-70% of my focus lately (which is a lot, because I work an awful lot of hours each week compared to what most people consider “full time” – I don’t sleep a lot) – because it needs it -- and pushing AGI into the background, which is extremely painful to me emotionally and intellectually.
(I have no issues with focus in the micro-scale: when I work I work with total mental concentration no matter how much noise and chaos are going on around me and no matter what mood I’m in or how tired I am, etc. (Except when Zadi’s watching South Park on the TV next to my desk, as that tends to be funny enough to distract me…. The episode I just watched almost convinced me that I should give up bioinformatics and fund Novamente via recording a Christian Rock CD…. If Cartman did it, so can I! I like his algorithm: just take a love song from the radio and replace all occurrences of the words “you”, “baby”, “darling” etc. with the words “Jesus” or “Lord.” Try it yourself, it works surprisingly well.) The level of focus that worries me is, rather, the choice of which things to direct my highly-focused micro-attention to. Which is mainly a problem because what I really want to focus on isn’t what the world currently wishes to pay me to focus on, and due to having a family to support I have this irritating ongoing need for money…. Leading to difficult temporal-assignment-of-credit problems, such as how much time to spend actively working toward AGI, versus working on things-I-like-but-don’t-love (bioinformatics, at the moment) that may yield money to pay for AGI research in a couple years, versus things that put me in a peaceful and creative state of mind (music! weird fiction!) so that my work on things-I-don’t-love is more effective, etc….)
If it’s true that sustained narrow-focus is the prerequisite of success, this would certainly explain why the most successful people aren’t generally the most interesting ones. Balance and breadth tend to make people interesting to interact with on a sustained basis. People narrowly obsessed with one thing tend to get tiring quickly – though they can be exciting and fascinating to talk to for brief periods of time. My close friends tend to be broad and balanced people, yet the people I admire most often have more of a narrow-focusing nature.
Now I’m sitting on the airplane – had to stop typing for a few minutes to board the plane, and then wait until the plane was aloft to bring out the laptop, because of the peculiar urban legend (embraced by the FAA) that laptops interfere with airplanes’ navigation equipment. While the plane was taking off I decided to continue the theme of my morning’s reading, and I read a couple articles in a free onboard copy of “Harvard Business Review.” (Also a delightful article on hats in “Ebony,” but I’ll spare you the details of that one….”Make no mistake, it takes a certain amount of bravado to wear a hat. .... It’s like the exclamation point to a fashion statement. … Hats hint at the essence of the wearer, giving a peek into the soul of the Brother underneath….” Ah, humanity! Gotta love it!) The current issue of HBR contains an interview with Garry Kasparov, the recently-retired world chess champion, on the relationship between chess and business.
Amusingly, Kasparov had something to say about focus, in the context of his chess battle with computer program Deep Blue in 1996-1997. He reckoned the contest had been an unfair one, since Deep Blue was trained on transcripts of his prior chess games, whereas all transcripts of Deep Blue’s play were kept secret from him. He also said he thought Deep Blue couldn’t beat him on his best day. But he said he thought one of the big advantages computers had over human chess players was their ability to focus exclusively and narrowly. “Human players have to cope with a lot of external pressures and distractions: you have a family, you write books, you give lectures, you get headaches, you have to earn money. There’s a lot of stuff filling up your brain while you’re playing. A machine, on the other hand, is completely without distractions. This shows the weakness, the shortcomings of the mortal mind, which is a daunting lesson for human beings. We just can’t play with the same consistency as a computer. So it’s all the more fortunate that we have our intuitions to help us play better.”
Kasparov obviously spent most of his life narrow-focusing on chess. Yet, he remains a bit jealous of a computer program’s ability to narrow-focus even more intensively.
And it’s interesting to observe that, for a chess master, Kasparov is an unusually breadth-oriented guy. His style is that of a strategic risk-taker, as opposed to that of his arch-enemy Karpov, who was always more conservative and analytical. Kasparov likes to think about business, literature, politics, and human nature in general – as he says, “I do not like details.” Of course, to become world chess champion he must have learned an awful lot of details – but what made him a master was not merely his mastery of details; it was his mastery of details combined with a truly rare and powerful intuition.
Kasparov’s style of chess could only be conducted by a mind with some breadth as well as narrow-focus, because it relies on general principles and intuitions regarding strategy – principles and intuitions going beyond chess and applicable to other domains as well. On the other hand Karpov’s style of chess was more suited to a purely narrow-focused approach.
AGI, I suspect, is really only susceptible to a Kasparov-style approach -- or really, to an approach that’s even more breadth-centric than Kasparov’s. This may be one of the reasons why AGI is so hard. If achieving anything substantial requires narrow-focus, then how is it possible for anyone to achieve something that by its nature can only be comprehended and mastered by someone with tremendous breadth? Tres dificil, nyet?
Physical sciences and mathematics don’t generally have this property – a very hard problem like creating a relativistic theory of gravity (solved by Einstein a long way back) or unifying gravitational and quantum physics (not solved yet) is nevertheless defined within a fairly delimited formal domain, and can plausibly be solved by a mind narrowly focused on that domain. To do what Newton did, on the other hand, clearly required breadth combined with focus. He had to focus to solve the hard technical problems, but he also had to have a lot of breadth to figure out what were the right questions to address, drawing from the incoherent mess of concepts and ideas that was pre-Newtonian physics. The analogy isn’t perfect nor original but I guess it’s an OK one: the task of creating AGI seems roughly comparable in magnitude to the task of creating Newtonian physics. Both have a conceptual and a technical aspect, though in Newton’s case the technical aspect was mainly mathematical, whereas in the AGI case it involves software design and engineering as much as mathematics.
Newton made his biggest breakthroughs during a three-year period when he was largely isolated in his house, at a time when England was mostly shut down due to the bubonic plague. (And, according to my university philosophy professor, his dog was named “Diamond.”) Maybe that’s what I need right now – a dog named Diamond, and an outbreak of plague to hit Washington, forcing me to sit in my house isolated for three years and do nothing but work on AGI by myself. Of course, the plague would have to hit the Internet too – isolation is harder to come by these days. Nah, that’s just a silly thought – software engineering, unlike mathematics, is better done by a small “extreme programming” style team than by a single individual. Plus, I don’t quite trust myself to teach a baby AI alone; the baby needs a woman as well as a man as a teacher (Izabela, with some help from Zadi?) and it needs a strong dose of Cassio’s conservatism and good judgment. What I need is for the plague to strike when I’m stuck in a house with the 4 or 5 best members of the Novamente team. And preferably it’s a big house, so there’s room for my kids and dogs with their noise and chaos in a separate soundproofed wing! (Yeah, yeah, this is just a stupid joky digression, please don’t quote me as if I seriously want a plague to come down on the world, I don’t…. (I started thinking that, since I happen to live in the Washington DC area, a plague in my local region might end up having some positive effects due to eliminating a lot of politicians. But, the body politic seems to have a self-regenerating characteristic similar to the limbs of certain lizards. And of course, a plague here in DC would probably be mistaken for a terrorist attack, which might cause Dubya to annihilate the continent of Africa by mistake or something … OK OK, enough!)
Wow, this is a long blog entry! I’d better call it to an end now. I’d intended to spend this flight finalizing the manuscript of “The Path to Posthumanity” – which, I recently noticed, the publisher has listed on amazon.com, even though I have not yet actually sent him the text of book! Well, some things move fast these days. Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to make that book nearly as good as I’d like, due to lack of time rather than lack of ability. I need to get that one out of the way so I can get back to finishing “Foundations of Emergent Cognition” (the shiny new name for the “Novamente book”), which is pretty much done, but just needs a final going-over, addition of references, clarification of which aspects of the discussion pertain to Novamente in particular versus pertaining to “any sensible AGI design,” etc. etc. Still, maybe “Path” will get some sales riding on the coattails of Kurzweil’s “Singularity.” The books cover much of the same ground, but mine gives fewer exponential and hyperexponential charts and more scientific depth – and mine also gives a more transcensionist, less “kinder, gentler” view of the Singularity. (Kurzweil is brilliantly insightful, yet he often seems to downplay the dramatic nature of the Singularity even as he trumpets its inevitability. Sometimes it seems like he foresees a Singularity full of modified or uploaded humans with shiny new gadgets – rather than a fundamental overthrow of the current order of mental, physical and social being. Of course, we may well get BOTH of these, but it seems a bit disingenuous to focus primarily on the former, even though it’s easier to understand and goes down better on Main Street. But of course, these comments are based on not having seen his book, which hasn’t been released yet – they’re based on his prior books and his speeches and online writings – maybe his book will give fair time to the transcensionist aspects as well, we’ll see.)
Enough – enough rambling, Ben – enough. Focus! Focus! Focus! Finish “Path to Posthumanity” and send it to the damn publisher! Write those Biomind press releases! Test the new Biomind ArrayGenius release! Finish the Novamente book! Launch the damn Singularity already so you can give yourself a better temporal-assignment-of-credit algorithm, eat 7 cakes without gaining weight, and push your daughter on the swing and canoe past crocodiles while composing weird jazz fission and programming meta-Haskell and kiss your wife while proving theorems that are themselves hyperdimensional conscious beings… yadda yadda… Focus! Focus! Focus!
Ah – wait – one more afterthought about focus. I had a Buddhist friend once who, every time I made a mechanical mishap like spilling a cup of tea, would point out to me: “See, if you were an enlightened Buddhist master, you’d never do anything like that. You’d never spill your tea because you’d be totally focused on whatever you were doing, in that moment!” In fact, this guy was neither particularly enlightened nor particularly focused nor emotionally balanced himself, though he was highly adept at pointing out the unenlightenment of others -- but he did have a point there. But of course, my retort was always “Fine, but I don’t WANT to focus my total attention on something boring like holding a cup. I’ll accept a certain error rate with boring things in order to focus most of my attention on interesting things. It’s no wonder no Buddhist master has ever achieved anything fascinating in science or mathematics – these things require focus in themselves, which is hard to obtain if one is focusing all one’s attention on drinking tea or raking leaves or breathing!” I think the analogy between Buddhist mindfulness and narrow-focus-for-business-success is not totally spurious. (Yeah, this brief paragraph doesn’t come near doing justice to my thoughts on Buddhism, but that’ll be saved for a later blog, it’s a deep and complicated issue in spite of its perfect simplicity, yadda yadda.) One problem is that the human mind is so painfully limited that it’s hard for it to do even one thing well, and when it divides its attention, it’s bound to make mistakes. Another problem is that we were probably evolved to focus on one intensive task at a time – like hunting, or escaping, or mating – and the modern emphasis on multitasking (on various time-scales) is an abuse of our evolutionary neural and physiological wiring.
Enough, OK, OK. Focus! Focus! Focus!
(I spent the flight from Salt Lake to San Fran sitting next to a very intelligent mining engineering executive who spoke very passionately about nutraceuticals and was bringing in a couple hundred thou a year selling them, via a variant of the classic “multilevel marketing” scheme. The nutraceutical line he was hawking actually seemed decent – founded on reasonable science – and I was almost convinced to give up the idea of making money for AGI through narrow-AI businesses and make the money through selling skin lotions and nutritional supplements instead. It might be a lot easier. I almost followed that plan when I was 13 and now I’m sorta wishing I had. OK, not really. But it’s an amusing thought…. I’m not such a bad salesman if I’m selling something I believe in; if I were selling e.g. life extension oriented supplements with some foundation in biology, I could probably give a convincing rap. My wife knows a lot of vain women in Brazil; maybe we could start the business in Brazil…. I’ve often thought that mixing up making money with AI is a mistake – it might be better just to keep my AI work pure and just accept that I need to spend a percentage of my time on some stupid business in order to pay the bills and hopefully eventually make enough money to pay the Novamente team to actually work on AGI engineering and teaching….. But, yah yah, the problem is that making any business work takes a lot of focus and attention, and it’s hard for me to see myself getting motivated to direct much of my focus and attention to something so boring as selling skin lotions…. The marketing ploy is slighty clever though: they suck women in my selling them skin lotion, and then upsell them to more expensive nutraceuticals, pointing out (correctly) that the key to beautiful skin is good health. Well, this sort of shit is what most humans seem to be interested, right? Beautiful skin, big muscles, good hair, shiny teeth and symmetrical faces. If you can’t have them yourself at least you can watch them on TV! (OK, OK, I’m not really going to quit the AI business to sell skin lotion. Although I’m not sure it would be a stupid idea in the medium term; in the short term I don’t have the stomach for it…. And anyway Biomind’s business prospects are actually looking pretty good right now (sales pitch ahead: anyone want to buy some of the world’s best microarray data analysis software?)
Foooocuuuuusssssss…...
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Smart Man with a Funny Beard
By the way -- one of these days I'll write a proper blog entry on anti-aging technology, but for the moment let me just indicate that everyone should look at
Aubrey de Grey's website
Not only is he an uncommonly cool-looking individual -- I think he even beats me at my coolest-looking (2000, I think that was -- back when I had numerous bogus paper millions, was still on my first wife, and none of my sons had a moustache, and I still sorta thought we could probably create an AI without an embodiment for simplicity's sake...) -- but he has some extremely interesting ideas on how to combat human aging.
I have my own as well, which intersect only partly with his -- but he's thought about it a lot more than me, so he's probably more likely to be right ;-)
Like the Novamente AGI project, nearly all of Aubrey's brilliant ideas are currently almost unfunded.
Well, it's not as though society doesn't spend money on research. And a lot of good research gets funded. But research funding seems to suffer from the same peculiar human-mob shortsightedness that causes the US to stick with the absurd, archaic English system of measurement year after year ... and that's causing English to emerge as the international language while Lojban remains the province of 350 geeks on an Internet mailing list...
More later! (For readers of my just-previous blog entry: Yes, I'm still procrastinating cleaning the turtle tank!)
Aubrey de Grey's website
Not only is he an uncommonly cool-looking individual -- I think he even beats me at my coolest-looking (2000, I think that was -- back when I had numerous bogus paper millions, was still on my first wife, and none of my sons had a moustache, and I still sorta thought we could probably create an AI without an embodiment for simplicity's sake...) -- but he has some extremely interesting ideas on how to combat human aging.
I have my own as well, which intersect only partly with his -- but he's thought about it a lot more than me, so he's probably more likely to be right ;-)
Like the Novamente AGI project, nearly all of Aubrey's brilliant ideas are currently almost unfunded.
Well, it's not as though society doesn't spend money on research. And a lot of good research gets funded. But research funding seems to suffer from the same peculiar human-mob shortsightedness that causes the US to stick with the absurd, archaic English system of measurement year after year ... and that's causing English to emerge as the international language while Lojban remains the province of 350 geeks on an Internet mailing list...
More later! (For readers of my just-previous blog entry: Yes, I'm still procrastinating cleaning the turtle tank!)
Darkness at the Break of Noon, Goddamned Turtle Tank, etc.
"Darkness at the break of noon / Shadows even the silver spoon / The handmade blade, the child's balloon / Eclipses both the sun and moon / To understand you know too soon / There is no sense in trying."
Dylan usually gets it right....
Arrrghh.... I'm in an oddly dark mood this Sunday at 5PM, probably not a good frame of mind to be blogging, but it's a good way to delay cleaning out my son's turtle tank (my son doesn't live in it; his turtle Rick does) -- I don't really want to clean the tank but I know I have to do it, and if I start working on something intense or start playing the keyboard, the turtle will probably end up swimming in its own excrement for yet another day....
Hmmm ... the fact that I'm blogging about turtle shit probably indicates that I'm in a bad mood....
Not a bad day overall -- I got lots of interesting AI thinking & writing done, and took a long walk in the woods with the dogs. Sorta miss my kids as usual when they're at their mom's for the weekend. And, an interesting guest from New Zealand is arriving in a couple hours. Oops, better mop the dogs' mud off the floor, too.... (Sometimes I wish I lived in a country like Brazil where you don't need to be rich to have a maid! Is cleaning up really the best use of any fraction of my potentially far too limited lifespan? Well, if you saw the general state of my house you'd realize I don't think so!)
Maybe Buddha was right: all existence is suffering. Well of course he was right, but he left out the other half that Nietzsche said so well: "Have you ever said Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes to all woe as well! All things are enchained, all things are entwined, all things are in love." Or something like that. In German, which I can't read, except for a few words and phrases. Everything is all mixed up, that's the nature of humanity. Almost every experience has some suffering in it -- only the most glorious peak of joy breaks this rule. And semi-symmetrically, almost every experience has some joy. Semi-symmetrically, because the mix of joy and pain seems rather differently biased for different people, based on variations in neurochemistry and situation. Most of the time I have an asymmetrically large amount of joy, I think -- as Dylan was well aware, it's not always easy to tell -- ....
Blah blah blah.
In moods like this I seriously consider giving up on the whole AI business and doing something easier and more amusing. I could become a professor again, write philosophy books and math papers, record CD's of weird music and write novels about alien civilizations living inside magic mushrooms.... I'm really more of a philosopher/artist type, software engineering isn't my thing ... nor is business. Not that I'm bad at these things -- but they don't really grab me, grip me, whatever metaphor you want today ....
Getting rich would be nice but I don't care too much about it -- I could live quite comfortably according to my standards without being rich, especially if I left accursed Washington DC for somewhere with cheaper land. Wow, I miss New Zealand, Western Australia and New Mexico ... great places I lived back in the day ... but it seems I'm stuck here in the DC metro for another 10 years due to a shared-child-custody situation.... Well, there are worse fates. And it's a good place for business....
Well, OK, time to clean the damn turtle tank! I could try to portray the stupid turtle (yeah, they really are stupid, though my son claims he can communicate with them psychically, and they're not as dumb as snakes) swimming in its own crap as a metaphor for something, but I don't feel perverted enough right now. Or at least, I don't feel perverted in the right sort of way.
Years I used to delude myself that I was just, say, 6 or 12 or 18 months away from having a completed thinking machine. That was a fun attitude, but it turned out I wasn't quite self-delusional enough to keep it up forever. I've now gained a lot more respect for how idiotic we humans are, and how much time it takes us to work through the details of turning even quite clear and correct abstract ideas into concrete realities. I've tried hard to become more of a realist, even though it makes me significantly less happy, I suppose because getting to the end goal is more important to me than being maximally happy.
I still think that if I managed to turn Biomind into a load of cash, or some rich philanthropist or government body decided to fund Novamente R&D, I could lead a small team of AI geniuses to the creation of an AI toddler within a few years. But realistically, unless a miraculous patron shows up or DARPA undergoes a random brain tremor and suddenly decides to fund one of my proposals, it's likely to take several years before I manage to drum up the needed funding to make a serious attack on the "Novamente AI toddler problem." (Yeah, I know, good things can sometimes pop up out of nowhere. I could get an email out of the blue tomorrow from the mystery investor. That would be great -- but I'm not counting on it.) Honestly, I just barely have it in me to keep doing software business for 3-5 more years. Not that it isn't fun sometimes, not that it isn't challenging, not that I don't learn a lot -- but it's an affront to my "soul" somehow (no I don't believe in any religious crap...). And no, it's not that I'm a self-contradictory being who would feel that way about any situation -- there are lots of things I love doing unreservedly, software business just isn't one of them. The difficulty is that the things I love doing don't seem to have decent odds of putting me in a position to create a thinking machine. I love music but I'm not good enough to become a star; and I'm about maximally good at fiction writing IMO, but my style and taste is weird enough that it's not likely to ever make me rich..... Urrgghh!!
Y'know, if I didn't have kids and obscenely excessive alimony payments (which were determined at a time when my businesses were more successful, but now my income is a lot lower and the alimony payment remains the same!! ... but hey, they only go on another couple years ;-p), I might just retreat to an electrified hut in some Third World country and program for three years and see if I could make the Novamente toddler myself. No more business and management and writing -- just do it. Very appealing idea. But Zarathustra (oldest son) starts college in a couple years. The bottom line is I'm not singlemindedly devoted to creating AI even though I think it's the most important thing for me to do -- I'm wrapped up with human attachments -- family attachments, which mean an awful lot to me.
Funny, just this morning I was reflecting on how great it was to be alone for a change -- the kids are with their mom, my wife is overseas visiting her family, the dogs and cats and turtle and gerbil don't quite count (OK, the gerbil almost does...) -- how peaceful and empty it felt and how easy it was to think clearly and work uninterruptedly. But now I see the downside: if a dark mood hits me there's no one to lift me out of it by showing me a South Park rerun or giving me a hug.... Human, all-too-human indeed!
And now this most boring and silly of my blog entries comes to an end. Unlike the previous ones I don't think I'll publicize this one on any mailing lists! But I guess I will click "Publish Post" in spite of some momentary reservations. Maybe someone will be amused to observe that egomaniacal self-styled AI superheroes have the same erratic human emotions as everyone else....
How important is it for this kind of human chao-emotionality to survive the Singularity? I'm not saying it shouldn't -- but isn't there some way to extract the joyous essence of humanity without eliminating what it means to be human? Perhaps there is. After all, some humans are probably "very happy" 5-10 times more often than others. What percentage of happiness can you achieve before you lose your humanity? All human existence has some suffering wending through it, but how much can it be minimized without creating "Humanoids"-style euphoridic idiot-bliss? I don't know, but even though I'm a pretty happy person overall, I'm pretty sure my unhappiness level hasn't yet pushed up against the minimum euphoridiotic boundary ;-p
And in classically humanly-perverse style, I find that writing about a stupidly unpleasant mood has largely made it go away. Turtle tank, here I come! Suddenly it doesn't seem so bad to do software business for a few more years, or spend a year going around giving speeches about AI until some funding source appears. Why the hell not? (No, I haven't taken any drugs during the last 10 minutes while typing this!). There's plenty of joy in life -- I had a great time doing AI theory this morning, and next week I'll be canoeing in the Everglades with my wife and kids. Maybe we should bring the turtle and let it swim behind the canoe on a leash?
Ahh.... Turtle tank, turtle tank, turtle tank. (That thing has really gotten disgusting, the filter broke and I need to drain it entirely and install a new filter.) Yum.
Dylan usually gets it right....
Arrrghh.... I'm in an oddly dark mood this Sunday at 5PM, probably not a good frame of mind to be blogging, but it's a good way to delay cleaning out my son's turtle tank (my son doesn't live in it; his turtle Rick does) -- I don't really want to clean the tank but I know I have to do it, and if I start working on something intense or start playing the keyboard, the turtle will probably end up swimming in its own excrement for yet another day....
Hmmm ... the fact that I'm blogging about turtle shit probably indicates that I'm in a bad mood....
Not a bad day overall -- I got lots of interesting AI thinking & writing done, and took a long walk in the woods with the dogs. Sorta miss my kids as usual when they're at their mom's for the weekend. And, an interesting guest from New Zealand is arriving in a couple hours. Oops, better mop the dogs' mud off the floor, too.... (Sometimes I wish I lived in a country like Brazil where you don't need to be rich to have a maid! Is cleaning up really the best use of any fraction of my potentially far too limited lifespan? Well, if you saw the general state of my house you'd realize I don't think so!)
Maybe Buddha was right: all existence is suffering. Well of course he was right, but he left out the other half that Nietzsche said so well: "Have you ever said Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes to all woe as well! All things are enchained, all things are entwined, all things are in love." Or something like that. In German, which I can't read, except for a few words and phrases. Everything is all mixed up, that's the nature of humanity. Almost every experience has some suffering in it -- only the most glorious peak of joy breaks this rule. And semi-symmetrically, almost every experience has some joy. Semi-symmetrically, because the mix of joy and pain seems rather differently biased for different people, based on variations in neurochemistry and situation. Most of the time I have an asymmetrically large amount of joy, I think -- as Dylan was well aware, it's not always easy to tell -- ....
Blah blah blah.
In moods like this I seriously consider giving up on the whole AI business and doing something easier and more amusing. I could become a professor again, write philosophy books and math papers, record CD's of weird music and write novels about alien civilizations living inside magic mushrooms.... I'm really more of a philosopher/artist type, software engineering isn't my thing ... nor is business. Not that I'm bad at these things -- but they don't really grab me, grip me, whatever metaphor you want today ....
Getting rich would be nice but I don't care too much about it -- I could live quite comfortably according to my standards without being rich, especially if I left accursed Washington DC for somewhere with cheaper land. Wow, I miss New Zealand, Western Australia and New Mexico ... great places I lived back in the day ... but it seems I'm stuck here in the DC metro for another 10 years due to a shared-child-custody situation.... Well, there are worse fates. And it's a good place for business....
Well, OK, time to clean the damn turtle tank! I could try to portray the stupid turtle (yeah, they really are stupid, though my son claims he can communicate with them psychically, and they're not as dumb as snakes) swimming in its own crap as a metaphor for something, but I don't feel perverted enough right now. Or at least, I don't feel perverted in the right sort of way.
Years I used to delude myself that I was just, say, 6 or 12 or 18 months away from having a completed thinking machine. That was a fun attitude, but it turned out I wasn't quite self-delusional enough to keep it up forever. I've now gained a lot more respect for how idiotic we humans are, and how much time it takes us to work through the details of turning even quite clear and correct abstract ideas into concrete realities. I've tried hard to become more of a realist, even though it makes me significantly less happy, I suppose because getting to the end goal is more important to me than being maximally happy.
I still think that if I managed to turn Biomind into a load of cash, or some rich philanthropist or government body decided to fund Novamente R&D, I could lead a small team of AI geniuses to the creation of an AI toddler within a few years. But realistically, unless a miraculous patron shows up or DARPA undergoes a random brain tremor and suddenly decides to fund one of my proposals, it's likely to take several years before I manage to drum up the needed funding to make a serious attack on the "Novamente AI toddler problem." (Yeah, I know, good things can sometimes pop up out of nowhere. I could get an email out of the blue tomorrow from the mystery investor. That would be great -- but I'm not counting on it.) Honestly, I just barely have it in me to keep doing software business for 3-5 more years. Not that it isn't fun sometimes, not that it isn't challenging, not that I don't learn a lot -- but it's an affront to my "soul" somehow (no I don't believe in any religious crap...). And no, it's not that I'm a self-contradictory being who would feel that way about any situation -- there are lots of things I love doing unreservedly, software business just isn't one of them. The difficulty is that the things I love doing don't seem to have decent odds of putting me in a position to create a thinking machine. I love music but I'm not good enough to become a star; and I'm about maximally good at fiction writing IMO, but my style and taste is weird enough that it's not likely to ever make me rich..... Urrgghh!!
Y'know, if I didn't have kids and obscenely excessive alimony payments (which were determined at a time when my businesses were more successful, but now my income is a lot lower and the alimony payment remains the same!! ... but hey, they only go on another couple years ;-p), I might just retreat to an electrified hut in some Third World country and program for three years and see if I could make the Novamente toddler myself. No more business and management and writing -- just do it. Very appealing idea. But Zarathustra (oldest son) starts college in a couple years. The bottom line is I'm not singlemindedly devoted to creating AI even though I think it's the most important thing for me to do -- I'm wrapped up with human attachments -- family attachments, which mean an awful lot to me.
Funny, just this morning I was reflecting on how great it was to be alone for a change -- the kids are with their mom, my wife is overseas visiting her family, the dogs and cats and turtle and gerbil don't quite count (OK, the gerbil almost does...) -- how peaceful and empty it felt and how easy it was to think clearly and work uninterruptedly. But now I see the downside: if a dark mood hits me there's no one to lift me out of it by showing me a South Park rerun or giving me a hug.... Human, all-too-human indeed!
And now this most boring and silly of my blog entries comes to an end. Unlike the previous ones I don't think I'll publicize this one on any mailing lists! But I guess I will click "Publish Post" in spite of some momentary reservations. Maybe someone will be amused to observe that egomaniacal self-styled AI superheroes have the same erratic human emotions as everyone else....
How important is it for this kind of human chao-emotionality to survive the Singularity? I'm not saying it shouldn't -- but isn't there some way to extract the joyous essence of humanity without eliminating what it means to be human? Perhaps there is. After all, some humans are probably "very happy" 5-10 times more often than others. What percentage of happiness can you achieve before you lose your humanity? All human existence has some suffering wending through it, but how much can it be minimized without creating "Humanoids"-style euphoridic idiot-bliss? I don't know, but even though I'm a pretty happy person overall, I'm pretty sure my unhappiness level hasn't yet pushed up against the minimum euphoridiotic boundary ;-p
And in classically humanly-perverse style, I find that writing about a stupidly unpleasant mood has largely made it go away. Turtle tank, here I come! Suddenly it doesn't seem so bad to do software business for a few more years, or spend a year going around giving speeches about AI until some funding source appears. Why the hell not? (No, I haven't taken any drugs during the last 10 minutes while typing this!). There's plenty of joy in life -- I had a great time doing AI theory this morning, and next week I'll be canoeing in the Everglades with my wife and kids. Maybe we should bring the turtle and let it swim behind the canoe on a leash?
Ahh.... Turtle tank, turtle tank, turtle tank. (That thing has really gotten disgusting, the filter broke and I need to drain it entirely and install a new filter.) Yum.
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