Musings on the idea of Free Will

April 16, 2009 1 Comment

Think about what it means to make a decision.  The cashier gave you too much change – do you tell him/her?  It seems like you make your choice based on past events (your parents taught you that it was deceitful to take something that shouldn’t be yours) or the current state of your mind (the cashier is really cute, maybe I’ll get a few points by pointing out the mistake).  Upon further analysis, it really seems that the exact state of your brain (memories, neural pathways and triggers) and the state of external stimuli might be fully responsible for each decision and action.  However, one could make the same argument for a computer, which function is based on the concept of a finite state machine (each action is fully determined by the state of the machine and its inputs).  This idea essentially boils down to us being nothing more than robots.  Are you okay with that?

What about the following scenario:

Two kids with the same parents grow up in the same environment.  Why do they frequently have a completely different set of values?  One gives the money back to the cashier without question; one keeps the money without question.  Why?  It can’t be purely due to genetics.  And it can’t be purely due to upbringing.  Determinists would argue that slight differences in genetics or environment may have a domino effect on the value systems of the individual.  But, could it also be due to the possibility that these are two different souls, which have evolved differently?  Believers in reincarnation might say that the former has learned a universal lesson in a previous incarnation and is perhaps an older, or more experienced, soul.  It is therefore natural for that person to make such a decision, whereas the sibling’s soul has not yet learned that universal lesson.  We can’t be sure, but it does seem odd that people often talk of the deep personality differences between their children that are observable at such a young age that environmental differences are precluded.  This tends to lend support to the idea that there is a “ghost in the machine.”

 

Filed under Life, Philosophy Tagged with ,

Inferring the Existence of the Soul?

March 5, 2009 1 Comment

The following is an excerpt from my book, “The Universe – Solved!”  It is a thought experiment that seems to prove the existence of the soul…

Given that in the primate world there is a continuum of neural complexity from lemurs to humans, it is safe to say that somewhere there is a species with roughly half the neural complexity of a human.  Per the atheistic way of thinking, such a species would therefore have half the consciousness of a human.  Let’s arbitrarily define the level of neural complexity on a scale from 0 to 1, 1 being human.  Out primate friend would then have a neural complexity, and therefore, consciousness, of .5.  Later in this chapter we will present the strong evidence of the distributed nature of the brain; namely, that there is no single specific place where a memory resides or a specific component of a visual image is captured.  From the cases involving brain tumors and brain loss due to injuries, it is clear that we could remove half of a human’s brain and that person would continue to be conscious.  Maybe only half as conscious as before, not unlike waking up on a beach in Cancun during spring break after a night of bad tequila.

Here comes the thought experiment part.  Imagine the possibility of a brain transplant.  It’s not hard to do, given that the brain is simply an organ, like the many others that are routinely subject to transplant with today’s surgical techniques.  There are certainly a lot more connections to a brain compared with, say, a liver, but it’s really just a matter of time before it is possible and then ultimately perfected.  Just as the cloning procedure is working its way up the species complexity scale (lab mice, sheep, humans), so will the brain transplant procedure.  A head transplant, for example, was performed by Case Western Reserve University neurosurgeon Dr. Robert White on a rhesus monkey in 1970.  It survived for eight days and exhibited many normal functions.  Cross-species transplants, also known as xenotransplants, have long since been proven to be possible, with chimpanzee kidneys in humans, pig livers in humans, cynomolgus monkey hearts in baboons, and baboon hearts in humans all achieving some level of success.  The main reasons that experimentation and advances in that field are slow to progress are the controversial ethical issue (it is right for pigs to become organ factories?) and the fear of cross-species viral infections.  But, ethical and safety issues aside, it is reasonable to assume that with sufficient technology, it will be possible to transplant a human brain or portion thereof into our primate that nominally has a .5 consciousness level.  Let’s further imagine that the process could become fairly straightforward, like plugging a new motherboard into a computer.  As long as the interfaces line up from a physical and networking standpoint, the procedure is “plug and play.”

So let’s imagine our human subject, Nick, and 2 lesser primates, Magilla and Kong.  We remove Nick’s brain and attach it to Magilla’s body.  Nick should retain his memories and consciousness, but feel really different, since his sensory input is completely new.  We would have to conclude that he maintained a continuous, albeit altered, stream of identity.  If Karl Pribham and others are right, we could theoretically put half of Nick’s brain into Magilla and the other half in Kong.  Where is his identity now?  Which body does the old Nick feel that he is in?  If we took the biological reductionist point of view, we would have to say that his consciousness is in both primates.  That must be very confusing, receiving two separate sets of sensory stimuli and two distinct developing sets of new memories.  Given that the state of the two primates is fairly consistent with the state of two similar natural primates, namely that they each have a brain of .5 neural complexity, why should there be a single conscious identity occupying both bodies in the case of Kong and Magilla, but two distinct identities in the natural case?  My answer is simple, invoking Occam’s Razor.  Nick’s soul simply chose which primate to move into along with his brain.  Alternately, his soul could have said, “This is ridiculous.  I’m returning to the spirit domain.  Let some other souls fight over those abominations.”

baboon brain transplant

Filed under Future Tech, Philosophy Tagged with , ,

The Singularity Cometh? Or not?

October 8, 2008 1 Comment

There is much talk these days about the coming Singularity.  We are about 37 years away, according to Ray Kurzweil.  For some, the prospect is exhilarating – enhanced mental capacity, ability to experience fantasy simulations, immortality.  For others, the specter of the Singularity is frightening – AI’s run amok, all Terminator-like.  Then there are those who question the entire idea.  A lively debate on our forum triggered this post as we contrasted the position of transhumanists (aka cybernetic totalists) and singularity-skeptics.

For example, Jaron Lanier’s “One Half of a Manifesto” published in Wired and edge.org, suggests that our inability to develop advances in software will, at least for now, prevent the Singularity from happening according to the Moore’s Law pace.  One great quote from his demi-manifesto: “Just as some newborn race of superintelligent robots are about to consume all humanity, our dear old species will likely be saved by a Windows crash. The poor robots will linger pathetically, begging us to reboot them, even though they’ll know it would do no good.”  Kurzweil countered with a couple specific examples of successful software advances, such as speech recognition (which is probably due more to algorithm development than software techniques).

I must admit, I am also disheartened by the slow pace of software advances.  Kurzweil is not the only guy on the planet to have spent his career living and breathing software and complex computational systems.  I’ve written my share of gnarly assembly code, neural nets, and trading systems.  But, it seems to be that it takes almost as long to open a Word document, boot up, or render a 3D object on today’s blazingly fast PCs as it did 20 years ago on a machine running at less than 1% of today’s clock rate.  Kurzweil claims that we have simply forgotten: “Jaron has forgotten just how unresponsive, unwieldy, and limited they were.”

So, I wondered, who is right?  Are there objective tests out there?  I found an interesting article in PC World that compared the boot-up time from a 1981 PC to that of a 2001 PC.  Interestingly, the 2001 was over 3 times slower (51 seconds for boot up) than its 20-year predecessor (16 seconds).  My 2007 Thinkpad – over 50 seconds.  Yes, I know that Vista is much more sophisticated than MS-DOS and therefore consumes much more disk and memory and takes that much more time to load.  But really, are those 3D spinning doodads really helping me work better?

Then I found a benchmark comparison on the performance on 6 different Word versions over the years.  Summing 5 typical operations, the fastest version was Word 95 at 3 seconds.  Word 2007 clocked in at 12 seconds (in this test, they all ran on the same machine).

In summary, software has become bloated.  Developers don’t think about performance as much as they used to because memory and CPU speed is cheap.  Instead, the trend in software development is layers of abstraction and frameworks on top of frameworks.  Developers have become increasingly specialized (“I don’t do “Tiles”, I only do “Struts”) and very few get the big picture.

What does this have to do with the Singularity?  Simply this – With some notable exceptions, software development has not even come close to following Moore’s Law in terms of performance or reliability.  Yet, the Singularity predictions depend on it.  So don’t sell your humanity stock anytime soon.

 

Mac Guy, PC Guy

Filed under AI, Future Tech, Philosophy Tagged with , , , ,

Roger Penrose Agrees with Me: 2+2 may not = 4!

July 28, 2008 1 Comment

One of the sections of “The Universe – Solved!” that generated a bit of controversy was my assertion that there is really nothing that we can know with conviction to be true.  An exerpt:

“2+2=4?  Not in Base 3, where 2+2=11.  In Base 10 (or any base >4), 2+2=4 by convention, but only in an abstract way, and not necessarily always true in the real world.  If you add 2 puddles of water to 2 puddles of water, you still have 2 (albeit larger) puddles of water.  For a more conventional example, a 2-mile straight line laid end-to-end with another 2-mile straight line will not add up to exactly 4 miles in length due to relativity and the curvature of space-time in all locales.  Therefore, 2+2=4 can not be universally true.”

In addition, You have no way of knowing whether the convention that 2+2=4 is only true in the false reality that we think we are in, but not in the real one.  Again, from the book: “So, maybe all we can know for sure is what is happening to us at this exact instant.  Then again, how do we know that we aren’t in a dream right now???  So, the set of things that are 100% true is simply the null set!”

Some readers have argued with these assertions.

So, imagine my pleasure when I read the following quote in the July 26 – August 1 issue of New Scientist magazine by esteemed mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose: “”Do we know for certain that 2 plus 2 equals 4?  Of course we don’t.  Maybe every time everybody in the whole world has ever done that calculation and reasoned it through, they’ve made a mistake.  Maybe it isn’t 4, it’s really 5.  There is a very, very small chance that this has happened.”  His argument is based on the logic of reason, which was different than my argument, but the result was the same nonetheless.

Thank you, Roger, for your enlightened point of view.  I would gladly send you a free autographed book.  Please send me your address.  Smile

Roger Penrose Penrose Tiles

Filed under Philosophy, Programmed Reality Tagged with , , ,

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

April 1, 2008 2 Comments

I was reading an article the other day about a new theory on the reason that we sleep.  A UCLA researcher suggests that rather than provide some vital biological function, it appears that sleep evolved to conserve energy and “keep us out of trouble.”  So it got me thinking about all of the other theories that I have read over the years – it helps restore energy levels, it strengthens the immune system, it repairs tissues and cells, it was an evolutionary development to avoid noctural predators.  And the list goes on, with no end of confusion and no apparent scientific consensus.

I wondered, what would be the purpose of sleep in a programmed reality?

And I thought of a possibility.  In multiplayer online games, a great deal of the logic behind the game resides in the client that sits on your PC.  The storage of the overall architecture of the game, each players attributes (to avoid hacking), etc., are on the server.  So what if our brain is analgous to such a client?  Doesn’t the client need to be upgraded periodically?  Ever notice how most PCs and Macs do automatic upgrades to various client programs upon reset, or when you attempt to open the program after it has been closed?  Notice that these upgrades aren’t done while you are playing or running the program?  The reason for that is to avoid any kind of software conflict.  It is far safer, and in most cases, essential, to do upgrades while the program is not running.  And then the next time you fire it up – presto, there are the changes.

Maybe the purpose of sleep is to allow the programmers the opportunity to upgrade our memories, processing capabilities, or whatever, during a down time.  It might explain why sleep deprivation causes us to act a little strangely.  It’s kind of like trying to run an ancient version of Word on your new Vista laptop.

(thanks to my nutty cat, Simba, for the sleeping pose)

Filed under General, Philosophy, Programmed Reality Tagged with ,

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