Interlude: Unconscious Artificial Intelligence?

I’ve been considering the nature and role of consciousness for some years. Along the way, I’ve wondered about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and whether at some point it might become conscious. My conclusion has been that however complex and “intelligent” an AI would become, that would not produce consciousness. Consciousness requires life and – as at must include at least some degree of self-awareness – it could only be the property of an individual organism with some organized “self.” Machine intelligence might be constructed – coded – to simulate self (and thus pass the Turing Test) but this would nevertheless not be an awareness of self. (Even now, AIs and robots can be quite “clever.” A recent visitor to a Tokyo hotel asked the robot concierge how much it cost. It replied “I’m priceless.” Cute.) However elaborate the mind – in the case of the most advanced AI’s built with neural networks this might be quite sophisticated, even to the point that the human programmers might not be able to replicate its internal processes – consciousness is an additional property beyond mere complexity and processing power. In the first season of HBO’s Westworld, android “hosts” become conscious through the repeated experience of pain and loss. But of course, to feel such emotions, one must first experience them as such. Quantity (of coded processing operations) does not equal qualia. Qualitative experiences are only possible if one is already conscious.

But human beings not only possess a conscious mind but also an unconscious one. Most brain processes – even those that at some point enter consciousness – originate and work away unconsciously. We all have the experience of dreaming and also of doing things quite competently, without any awareness of having done them. (We may, for example, drive a familiar daily route and get to our destination without remembering details of the ride.) The brain processing of the unconscious mind may indeed be replicated by advanced machine intelligence. As AI becomes more complex, given the power of electronic circuits and the complexity of coded learning via neutral networks, the processing capacity of machine intelligence may well exceed human despite not becoming conscious. They would also, perhaps, exceed human ability to understand what they are “thinking” (or even “dreaming”). It was Stephen Hawking who most famously warned of the dangers of such AIs. He warned that we need to be attentive to their management.

So, though AIs may never become conscious or self-aware, they may nevertheless run autonomously along routes enabled by the algorithms coded into their machine DNA and come to “conclusions” we humans might find inconvenient or dangerous. (They might for example decide that human activity is injurious to the planet – which it seems it is – and seek to correct the disease.) Limits should be included in the most basic AI coding and algorithms. Isaac Asimov thought of this some time ago. His Three Laws of Robotics make a good start:

First Law – A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law – A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law – A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

To these he later added a zeroith law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

This last might be might turn out to be a doubled-edged sword.

Next week I will return to  Notes on "A History of Political Theory"

A Ruminations Credo

These are fancies of my own, by which I do not pretend to discover things but to lay open myself.... if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention; so that I can promise no certainty, more than to make known to what point the knowledge I now have has risen.... I speak my opinion freely of all things, even of those that, perhaps, exceed my capacity, and that I do not conceive to be, in any wise, under my jurisdiction.  And, accordingly, the judgment I deliver, is to show the measure of my own sight.

 Michel de Montaigne

The Brain As Quantum Computer

Recently I had the opportunity to watch southern African White-necked crows while they were watching me. I was taking afternoon tea (and eating rusks) on the patio overlooking a beautiful valley in the hills near Mbabane. Crows are smart and these are among the smartest. One sat on the roof of the next house staring at me convinced that at some point, I would grow careless and give him or her a chance to steal something, perhaps something to eat. As I was ever-vigilant, eventually they flew off over the valley, soaring and dipping in very real time. As I watched, I thought about the complex calculations that a bird must make moment-to-moment to move so quickly through three-dimensional space. They must keep track of where they are, where to go, how to get there. Knowing each requires entire subsets of information – such as (for where to go), where they saw food or last saw food or might find food while watching for anything that might require evasive action. These calculations must be solved each fraction of a second. I then thought this must be true for any animal with a brain (or nervous system). Neural systems allow the organism to move through, and react to, the environment rather than obey simple tropisms or merely be buffeted about by the external environment. The more complicated the neural system – reaching a peak of networks of networks to the 4th or 5th power (or beyond) running in our human brains – the more complex the information that can be stored and manipulated. A classical view of the human brain would start with the 500 trillion synapses of the adult brain’s hundred billion neurons. Now that is a lot of synapses. But think about how much information is stored there in language, knowledge, experience, memories and everything else that makes each individual unique and utterly complex.

I’ve speculated in this space about quantum consciousness, the production of mind from brain through “collapsing the wave functions apprehended from the perceptual flow. While watching the crows, I realized that the brain must function as a quantum computer and not as a classical system. The notion that quantum processes mix with (or form) consciousness is called “orchestrated objective reduction.” It rests on the possibility that the microtubules in nerve cells are small enough to contain quantum states. The brain accounts for just two percent of the human body’s mass but utilizes around 20% of its energy. It basically is like having a 20 watt bulb in our head shining all the time. This energy could be powering the creation and persistence of entangled states inside the microtubules of every cell. In this way, the neural organization of the brain would be the maintenance of a complex, constantly refreshed, while constantly changing, global entangled state. The collapse of the highest level of this entangled state-of-states coincides with consciousness. Inside our heads, this quantum computer has storage and calculating power well beyond what would be true if our brains functioned simply along classical physics lines. It may produce what we experience as consciousness. Or, collapse may come through the decisions that we – the “ghost” in the machine, acting as the internal observer – make in each moment as the crow flies.

Westworld’s Consciousness Riff

The HBO remake of Westworld is superior TV in a number of ways. But its most intriguing aspect may be its foundational riff on what makes up consciousness. The basic premise is that recursive experience plus an emotional occurrence that anchors memory – especially an episode of painful loss – ignites (self) consciousness. Intriguing, yet not finally convincing. The ability to experience emotion itself requires consciousness – one must be aware of feeling such-and-such. Westworld’s premise begs the question of where that awareness comes from.

There seems to be no a priori reason to suppose that machines cannot be intelligent. It may be useful to think about intelligence as existing in more or less distinct forms. Generically, intelligence might be defined as the ability to acquire, process and apply knowledge. (Animals have varying degrees of this kind of intelligence and so may plants.) Machines have the ability to store and process information. Machine intelligence is the orderly processing of information according to governing rules (software). Both the information and the rules are externally derived and stored within the machine. The machine itself may be contained in discrete units or widely distributed (the cloud). Machines can learn – by adding and elaborating rules based on previous cycles of processing – but they can’t process information without instructions stored in memory. Cloud intelligence is machine intelligence taken to a higher level by accessing massive information from many data sources using more and many powerful processors and sophisticated software with built in “learning routines.”

Human intelligence is what we human beings have. It is what we know as manifested in thought and action. Our knowledge is stored in two places, our heads and in our culture. Culture is contained in language, traditions, techniques, art and artifacts, beliefs and whatever else carries collective knowledge across time and generations. The basic unit of human intelligence, however, remains the individual mind, which itself can be thought of as an organically based “machine.” But there seems to be a ghost in the human machine that we experience as consciousness. Mere machines cannot feel emotion – or pleasure and pain – no matter how massive the memory and computing power. And the movies Matrix and Terminator aside, machines do not inherently strive for self-preservation. Machines are not alive nor do they have “souls.” Whether because humans are organic life forms evolved over hundreds of millions of years after having crossed-over somehow from an inorganic strata or from deeper principle of the universe, we feel and experience pleasure and pain. Why is the unknown. Westworld, for all its brave speculation, sidesteps this question.

Branching Out

I have been blogging here at Everything Rum since 2007.  My first posting was a Consciousness Riff.  I used to blog at Outside Walls, mostly on Kosovo, but closed that down a while ago.  In the Everything Rum space I've blogged on quantum physics, cosmology & space/time, biking, the state of the world, capitalism, the Articles of Confederation and sometimes on politics.   State Department cables (cleared through FOIA) and other related material from my time serving as a US diplomat can be found at Real Diplomacy.  Since 2009, I was writing on international issues at TransConflict. 

Now I am branching out.  I've tried Twitter and Facebook in the past but didn't stay with them.  I'm now returning to Twitter to connect and to accompany my expanded blogging here.  I'll be commenting as I see useful and perhaps will find others who if not in agreement at least have some reason to stop and reflect.  My first effort will follow shortly on the US and Russia.

Quantum Consciousness

In 1929, Niels Bohr, in what he admitted was perhaps a rush of enthusiasm for the new science, speculated that perhaps the quantum understanding of physical reality might also apply to an understanding of the mind and consciousness. Maybe as analogy but perhaps, he suspected, as something more. In effect, Bohr suggested that any effort to apply thought to perception – of the subject apprehending the object – collapsed a continuous wave function. When we use language to describe something – whether it be internal or external – we were extracting some possibilities out of a number of ways to do so, indeed from a continuously variable flow. Recent investigations (as reported in Science News) into apparently illogical thought – decisions or judgements that flout the basic mathematical logic of if A=X and B=X, then A=B – suggest the possibility that quantum logic in which something can be both particle and wave at the same time may apply. The situations examined violated the “sure thing” rule.

One well-known example involved asking students whether they would buy a ticket for a Hawaii vacation in three different situations: They had passed a big test, they had failed the test, or they didn’t yet know whether they had passed or failed. More than half said they would buy the ticket if they had passed. Even more said they would buy the ticket if they failed. But 30 percent said they wouldn’t buy a ticket until they found out whether they had passed or failed.

It seems odd that people would decide to buy right away if they knew the outcome of the test, no matter what it was, but hesitated when the outcome was unknown. Such behavior violated a statistical maxim known as the “sure thing principle.” Basically, it says that if you prefer X if A is true, and you prefer X if A isn’t true, then you should prefer X whether A is true or not. So it shouldn’t matter whether you know if A is true. That seems logical, but it’s not always how people behave.

The researchers found that context is important and that quantum logic may better explain such behavior. We make decisions within a framework that allows possibilities that are logically the same to interfere with each other as quantum waves might. Uncertainty seems to leave us both particle and wave.

This is deep. But the essential bit seems to be that the conscious observer necessary to turn quantum reality into the classical reality we live in – by observing and thereby collapsing the wave function – also may operate in the same quantum/relativistic manner. If the brain is organically based and operates as a classical system, perhaps the mind – brain/nervous system plus consciousness – acts as a quantum system in which perceived reality is constructed through collapsing the wave functions apprehended from the perceptual flow. (Some of us “collapse” more readily than others: judgers vs perceivers?) Now, whether consciousness itself is a quantum-derived property of the physical brain – perhaps arising at the nano-level – or a “ghost in the machine” would remain a question. But the first possibility – that consciousness arises within and from a physical system that demands consciousness to operate – would seem to violate Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

Moments in Time and Consciousness

Attended the symphony today.  Instrumental music does not hold my attention as well as a play -- especially Shakespeare -- would.  I enjoyed the program but without words (lyrics), it didn't pin down my thoughts.  So they just wandered.

I wondered about exactly why I could not focus on the assembly of notes as I would on an assembly of words.  That made me think about just how these notes add up to music anyway.  The basic length of time in a conscious moment must be long enough for a series of notes to be assembled in the mind into a bit of music.  If we only perceived note by note -- or word by word for that matter -- we'd never make sense of anything.  The basic unit of conscious perception apparently is 2-3 seconds. Our now is this long.  Short term memory -- what is held in consciousness readily available as context for each moment -- is some 10-15 seconds.  We can perceive a much denser reality in each moment than simply one "thing."  Events can enter our consciousness that linger only some 40 milliseconds.  Indeed, each note is made up from a number of vibrations in the air and a symphony has lots of instruments making each note.  So each conscious moment is a highly sampled chunk of passing time.  The point is, however, not this but the apparent fact that our consciousness grasps this moment in its entirety.  It spans the stream of quantized time.  (The smallest unit of time is the Planck time, 5.39x10 to the -44th seconds.)  Consciousness seems to exist outside the flow of time.  We do not observe, think, exist in time but somehow alongside it.  The "ghost" in our machine provides a stage large enough for an assembly of actors to play their parts so that we can experience each moment of the world.

Language and the Soul

Language – the ability to create and exchange meaning between individuals – is what makes us human and different from all other of earth's creatures. Without the ability to use words and grammar, we would not be able to think, plan and act. Thus its evolutionary value. Through language – and with the help of that other great discovery, control over fire – we have conquered the world and subdued nature. It was the bite of the apple that got us tossed out of Nature's Garden to make or break our own.

Think about thinking without words. Not really possible. Without words we might be able to store and recollect images – as we do in dreams – but we could not give them meaning, nor relate one to the other. We might be able to put images together into sequences – for example, how to shape an ax head from a piece of stone – but we could not pass that knowledge to anyone else except by showing. Teaching that way can work but is very inefficient. Perhaps this is why the technology of the Neanderthals changed so little over tens of thousands of years. Images could also be painted on cave walls or drawn in the sand. This would be a bit more efficient. But with language, what we learn can be codified and passed around and on. Knowledge explodes.

We are not the only animals that can communicate with each other. Apes, dogs, whales, ants and others do it through various means. But we are the only animal with words and grammars. Grammar allows words to become veritable skyscrapers of meaning. With language we can develop society, culture, technology, and history.

But think too about what language does for us. It allows each of us to become an individual self. Without words, we remain prisoners of our instincts and reflexes. We can only react to the outside, input determines output. After millions of years of evolution, the early hominids were very clever reactors. But to become an individual cable of rising above simply reacting to inputs, we must be able to think, to tell ourselves – to construct – stories of who we are, what we do and how we do it. We are what we can say we are. With language we move from being an “it” to being an “I.”

Everything modern science tells us leads to the conclusion that our mind is based on our brain and our brain on physiology. Yet we are also conscious, and that science cannot explain. It may be consciousness that provides the space for using language. Where does the next word that you will say come from? Who or what process is behind the curtain stringing our narratives together? Where exactly does it take place? Within our consciousness, we somehow generate our self using language. Then we somehow cross the boundary into the physical and our thoughts emerge from our mind and radiate outward through our brains into action, including speaking.

Perhaps we can call this something within a soul, with no judgement about where that might come from? And what might become of this soul when the body that provides it the mechanisms of perception, thought and language is no more?

To Expand a Bit

One day wondering down Glover-Archibold trail, I took my musing on cosmology to the point of asking the most basic question: why is there something rather than nothing? After giving this some thought, I realized that nothing cannot give rise to something all by itself. The Big Bang by itself explains nothing. And to suppose something always existed doesn't answer the question of why it exists. Much more straightforward to suppose that someone existed. Nothing cannot bring into existence something, only someone can do that, can intend that. This train of thought follows on my earlier musings on consciousness, which obviously exists but also seems to lead back to a someone rather than something. The most straightforward story to tell is that either the universe -- cosmos -- of matter and consciousness simply always was or there was a consciousness that always was that at some point intended that there be matter. What would that consciousness or any consciousness be when conscious only of itself or of nothing?