Computing Paradigms and the Neo Cortex
A neural network, also known as, a parallel distributed processing network, is similar in kind to the cortical structures in the brain. It is also a computational paradigm.
A neural network, whether it is a computer processor or your brain consists of interconnected nodes; we call them neurons, that together produce output - or an output function. This OUTPUT relies on nodes or neurons cooperating; that is, working together - all the individual neurons working together in order for the network to effectively work.
"Complex behaviors arising out of groups of interacting nonlinear entities are also called `emergent properties'." (Dr. Frank T. Vertosick, Jr., The Genius Within) Individually, actions are dumb but together they emerge mysteriously and their behavior is smart. It is the theory of intelligent bacteria.
"Bacteria realized long ago that they could not survive if every bacterial species, armed with a paltry complement of only two thousand (or fewer) genes, had to invent its own solutions to every threat. They needed to introduce a greater degree of nonlinearity into their lives through communication and cooperation among themselves, including genetic exchange. When confronted with penicillin, staph went immediately to the genetic lending library comprised of all the world's bacterial DNA and looked up what it needed: a lactamase gene. From there, mutation and selection kicked in and customized the lactamase gene for staph's needs. One of the custom features was increased production of lactamase..." (ibid)
Of course bacteria evolves rapidly, more rapidly than anything else. There is a new generation of most bacteria every 15-20 minutes. That is super fast. "The ability to import large blocks of pre-evolved data across cellular boundaries hastened bacterial evolution immensely, allowing an incredible amount of adaption in a short period of time. In humans, we call such accelerated adaptation to a new problem `reason.'"
As Steven Pinker points out in The Blank Slate that wall which has been erected by false conclusions has been falling "in the landscape of knowledge, the one that twentieth-century social scientists guarded so jealously." I divides matter from mind, the material from the spiritual, the physical from the mental, biology from culture, nature from society, and the sciences from the social sciences, humanities and arts..." Those walls are all coming down and new ideas are breaching the wall providing us with a new understanding of human nature. Pinker calls them the "four frontiers of knowledge -- the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution..." And it has resulted in dispelling those myths held previously about the `noble savage,' the `blank slate' and the `ghost in the machine.'"
Homo sapiens have held bizarre theories, superstitions - and spawned paradoxes in "every period and culture." There is an enlightenment in science and it probably began in the 50s with a cognitive revolution of new ideas and new computational models and paradigms.
The processing of information by neural networks is being utilized in computational systems in parallel, rather than the old series (or sequential) binary computers (or Von Neumann machines).
"Since it relies on its member neurons collectively to perform its function, a unique property of a neural network is that it can still perform its overall function even if some of the neurons are not functioning. In other words it is robust to tolerate error or failure. (see fault tolerant) Additionally, neural networks are more readily adaptable to fuzzy logic computing tasks than are Von Neumann machines."
"In 1997 an IBM computer called Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov and unlike its predecessors, it did not just evaluate trillions of moves by brute force but was fitted with strategies that intelligently responded to patterns in the game. Newsweek called the match `The Brain's Last Stand.' Kasparov called the outcome `the end of mankind.'" (Pinker - The Blank Slate)
At the risk of sounding Luddite,
will new technology be the beginning or the end of mankind?
Levels of Intelligence
Many people think that if not for animal research and our persecution of them that animals would be pretty well off just living with nature but that is not true. Animals live a very risky existence and there is nothing less risky that communing with nature. Nature and the natural world is full of risk with all the accompanying fear and difficulties and life is a constant struggle.
We have a pretty good and peaceful existence here even as most human animals have a very difficult time getting along with poverty and limited access to needed resources. Nature is cruel and humans are also cruel to each other.
The existence for all of life is not smooth and it never has been. It is probably better now than most of us can imagine without the benefits of the technology which has been developed in the last couple of decades and we have seen a quantum leap in technology and the accompanying improvement experienced by humans in their daily lives because of it.
And as for your pets, most of them are living a much better life than any wolf that is trying to survive in the wild.
That is not to say there is no harmony in the wild. Facial expressions of apes and chimps are indicative of social harmony. There is a theory that facial expression signals evolved in order to foster group cohesion (Seth Dobson, Dartmouth Collage). There is also a correlation to group harmony with grooming, a calming activity. With humans it is gentle touch and with dogs and apes, et al, it is grooming activity.
"Chimpanzees display a complex, flexible facial expression repertoire with many physical and functional similarities to humans," researchers wrote in the Oct. 20 online edition of the research journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. One of the scientists, Lisa Parr of Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., categorized over 250 distinct ex- pressions in chimps, our closest evolutionary relatives." (Max Plank-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)
But the reality is all animals (including plants and herbivores), including us, humans, are always struggling to exist. Darwin wrote about this struggle - which is not necessarily, he said, a bloody battle for existence; rather, it is a competition and it is to the death.
And this struggle adds to the needs for variability. Juan Luis Arsuaga and Ignacio Martinez in The Chosen Species, The Long March of Human Evolution, writes "...different species are constantly under the threat of death, and that consequently small genetic advantages may be crucial to reaching adulthood and reproducing, or to continuing to reproduce."
It is all about productivity, to be precise, about reproduction - the purpose of existence at the biological level.
The authors of The Chosen Species write about increasing productivity, "natural selection pursues no particular goal. Moreover, no genetic variant is better than another in an absolute sense; everything depends on the environmental circumstances. What is favorable at one moment may be unfavorable at another..."
And variation is chance so if you are lucky enough to survive you have a gift, not from anyone or anything in particular but a result of pure chance and what you do with it, may determine your humanity. For the short time we have been on this planet, humans have excelled at reproducing and spreading out over the entire planet but we have not been here long. Neanderthals were here longer (about 400,000 years). So our human track record is relatively short.
Bacteria however, really excels at surviving. In truth they appear far better at it than we are. They can live anywhere - even in extreme environments where other life could not adapt. Actually compared to bacteria we are really wimps. We cannot survive large variations in the environment and if we go through another ice age, which surely will happen, we will go extinct - but bacteria will not. It is possible we exist for the benefit of bacteria. We're a host for them. They live off of us and they benefit us too, but not so much that they exist so we can exist, but we most certainly exist so they can survive - is much more likely scenario.
I think we really live in their world and don't know it. They seem to have intelligence though some would disagree but together, collectively, they most definitely possess intentionality. They may be laughing at us. The honest truth is, we don't know. I bet they are.
The Power of Collective Intelligence and Humanity
I wonder if bacteria may be more advanced (or more ethical) than we are - as a collective - and we falsely and vaingloriously consider ourselves ethically superior to bacterium
And the reason I say that is because bacteria is not so self-interested in itself only - not to also consider the community of bacteria of which it is a part.
This is about a question and to elaborate on my question, which I think is important enough to at least consider - to take it beyond the envelope of common understanding:
Bacteria is an interacting, nonlinear community - a network which holds the well-being of the community higher than the individual. (I'm not going to present examples here. I presume most of you know them or can search the web for them.)
Can we learn something from this complex behavior of bacterium versus mammals? Mammals, are gregarious and part of a pack or troop, or family or tribe. Humans are collective animals too - like the bacteria. So why do we adopt capitalism as our mode of interaction when a more equitable distribution system would seem to be more community-centric than an individualistic, self-centered, greed motivated system - which causes so much pain and despair, which has been or mode of distribution for the approximately last 5,000 years?
The needs of the community dictates the behavior for bacteria. It does so for other animals also. It does so for bees and for ants and there are other examples. So, why not for humans? Why GREED and not NEED?
I am asking you to think about this. If we are to find our humanity shouldn't we also consider what is wrong with capitalism, which is, IMHO, much of it, and do what we can to improve humanity (and all life) by discarding capitalism and moving toward a more social mode of distribution and interaction, i.e., "From each according to ability, to each according to needs."
If machines are given volition and consciousness and can interconnect with each other they will have nonlinear emergent properties to develop complex behavior and a collective well-being. If humans have volition and consciousness but do not interact and interconnect with their communities their behavior will not be a benefit (or as much of a benefit) to the collective and the "accelerated intelligence" of the interactive community of human intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than the individual.
A Transformative Future
My thoughts about machines having volition might seem to imply some kind of special consciousness similar to the human mind. The human mind is so complex that it cannot be analogized with what a machine can do. The human mind cannot now be compared to a machine; that is, a digital computer - and how much like a human mind, machines may become, really is a question that no one has been able to answer yet. The simple answer is, we don't know.
But at least for now, a machine cannot acquire the creativity of a human brain. A computer can crunch numbers and do all kinds of information processing, and it can do it faster but real intuition is innately human. The brain is more than a kaleidoscope of choices. A mind is not a blank slate; it is adaptive, plastic, fabricating, has cognition and responds to a communications system which is essentially genetically embedded code which constantly rewrites itself. Machines on the other hand are not cognitive though they can model cognition and select choices based on comparisons it makes which have been made before.
Machines can do complex things. Even simple things, like measure stress and tell if someone is lying. When I left the army since I had worked in the White House and the War Room at the Pentagon and around and with all kinds of security (in the 60s) I was invited to a demonstration of the first voice analysis stress device, so they have been around for a long time. Perhaps we ought to be using them in the presidential election to determine who lies the most, because it is a certainty they all lie to some degree. Globes, a company in Israel is manufacturing a KishKish lie detector to be an add-on for Skype. Their lie detector (KishKish) shows the stress levels of the speaker. Nobody has asked the presidential candidates to take the test for obvious reasons.
Perhaps machines will someday acquire the complexity of the human mind and will be capable of the same degree or level of cognition and even emotion. Why do I say this? Because every emotion and every thought, we now know, generates physical signals and there is technology which can tell with some accuracy what a person is actually thinking by what part of the brain is firing synapses. And we may have now or soon, machines which can actually read a person's mind. Maybe that is far-fetched? But we're getting close.
We are actually there now for manipulating genes which can make people smarter. They have done it with mice. Neuroscientists can express a gene in a mouse which is also in humans which can both prevent a mouse from learning, but can stimulate a mouse to learn and the insertion of extra genes or proteins can cause a mouse to learn faster. This is the future, a post-human future.
The big question is whether the future will be Utopian or Dystopian. What is without a doubt a certainty, the future will be a period when techno change will be so rapid and the impact so great that human life as we know it will be transformed. Will it be a good future or a bad future?
Just How Smart Are We Really?
"This intelligence-testing business reminds me of the way they used to weigh hogs in Texas. They would somehow tie the hog to a plank and search around till they found a stone that would balance the weight of the hog and put that on the other end of the plank. Then they'd guess the weight of the stone." John Dewey, 1890.
Singularity is the point in the future where our technology will fully equal or exceed the capabilities of human creativeness. At the risk of sounding Luddite or anti-progressive, I suggest civilization has lost much of its humanity with technology. There was a time in my distant memory when all did more with our families, friends and our neighbors. Today children in developed countries are most of their time in front of computer screens and watching movies and how other people live on television sets.
"Cultural change necessarily involves resistance to change. The term Luddite has been resurrected from a previous era to describe one who distrusts or fears the inevitable changes brought about by new technology. The original Luddite revolt occurred in 1811, an action against the English Textile factories that displaced craftsmen in favor of machines. Today's Luddites continue to raise moral and ethical arguments against the excesses of modern technology to the extent that our inventions and our technical systems have evolved to control us rather than to serve us and to the extent that such leviathans can threaten our essential humanity." (Martin Ryder, U of Colorado at Denver, School of Education: Luddism - Neo-Luddites and Dytopian Views of Technology)
And in spite of some great improvements in medicine and science, where we can treat the harm we have already caused in the first place, with our pesticides and antibiotics which build through mutation and selection new resistant microbial diseases, we have failed. At the rate of technological advancement in those things which could have improved life we have failed miserably. Why are there no solar-powered cars or fusion reactors? Fusion is absolutely necessary if we are going to have truly real safe energy efficiency without pollution. What about magnetic levitation (maglev), or a videophone in every home? And why don't we have hypersonic travel? Transportation is not even mass transportation where that should be the absolute minimum for any mass transport to curb the damage we have done to our environment. There could be undersea cities by now and open sea agriculture. If we keep up populating the planet and our insatiable use of it's resources we will need human settlements on the Moon and elsewhere so we can go there and perhaps ruin those interplanetary rocks also. The truth is we don't care enough. How can anyone be optimistic about any of this when we have had the knowledge to do these things and we haven't done so. We have failed and I think we will go to our end of history knowing we could have done better.
The above includes some copying from other
sources.
Attributions have been provided where required.
All copying is in
compliance with the Fair Use
Doctrine of Copyright law as per
Title 17 U.S.C.
Section 107, Copyright Law.
Permalink: http://inyourface.info/ArT/Alpha/LeV.shtml
Today is Friday May 16, 2008
On the Internet since 1982
(I have been doing it longer - and I do it better)
While I don't use a standard blog (weblog software) mostly because I've been doing this too long - having been there with Ike when the precursor to the Internet, Arpanet got started and every step of the way since, I can't get into all the many fads over the years (now it is social networking), but I have been an observer and participant in events which shape the world since my time with NSA and with Army Security and as a voice security cryptologist in the White House for the President, and the War Room at the Pentagon for the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff plus two wars. You could say this site is one of the better kept secrets [grin] on the InterNUT. You are invited back as often as you would like to see what I and others, I trust, may be saying.
-- Hank Roth