Onion Slices

One of the things that I've been giving a lot of thought to over the past several years is the nature of thought and the human mind. I've given it a lot of thought, but I've never really sat down and put into words many of the concepts that I've had banging around. Recently on the game show, Jeopardy, there was a game between two of the best players of the game and a computer designed to answer natural-language questions. The method of it's weighing of answers was similar to what humans do, but it had the advantage of being much quicker to click the button than either of the two humans. Over the course of two episodes, Watson (the computer) soundly trounced the two humans.

I realize that there was a lot more to the show than what we saw on TV. Watson crashed often, and it took hundreds of test games for the developers and programmers to tune the algorithms that it used. While that is something that wasn't talked about much, it's important to note that we're in no danger of being overrun by mechanical overlords anytime soon!

This imagination, the idea that we hold in our heads that we're going to be eliminated or overrun by machines is what has me writing this post now. It is the central theme, and honestly, I think this is part of what makes us "human" in most senses of the word.

History

A while ago, I was reading the book Anathema by Neal Stephenson. Not to get too much into the plot or detail of the book, one of the things explored was the nature of thought and memory, and it has been a set of conversations that I've been thinking quite a bit about. In a basic sense, one of the concepts explored was the idea that something that is odd about "people" is that they have the ability to ask things like "what if?" We have the capacity to hold, in our little brains, whole parallel universes where one thing is different, or one act comes out in a different manner, or we extrapolate in a very detailed manner what will happen in the future. The ability to hold this little image of un-reality in our head is actually quite amazing! Watching the episodes of Jeopardy with the computer, Watson, brought some of these facts to head. First off, one of the key figures in the project pointed out something quite interesting. For quite a bit of time, the people who have worked with Artificial Intelligence have assumed that the difficult part of creating a truly sentient being would be the things that humans struggle with themselves; the ability to learn massive amounts of data and sort through them in a swift and efficient manner. What they found, however, this was the EASY part, and the hard part is the actual synthesis of new ideas, all because the machine has no real mechanism (as yet) to be able to ask "what if?"

I know that I'm simplifying things quite a bit, but I don't want to turn this into too much of a long drawn out thesis. So, now that I've exposed this idea of the "holographic mind," the idea that the brain holds numerous iterations of the entire universe, simulations of reality, I can come to the real reason why I've wanted to write all this out.

Daily Activities

Honestly, this is something that I'm sure most people don't care about, but this really is (I feel) important to know about how our minds work. Human science and medicne are concerned with how the chemicals and "meat" portions of the body work, but anyone really digging into less explored aspects is looked at with some worry. I've never been concerned about that, simply for the fact that this was the same way people treated doctors when astrology was still considered a mainstream science.

What makes thinking about this so interesting and important is that philosophers and religious leaders have given a lot of thought to the idea of the soul and always asked the question of "where does it reside?" and "what does it actually contain?" It's well known that other animals develop intelligence and humor, they are clever and can pass on learning to others. What then, makes us any different? I think this ability to construct large-scale scenarios and simulations of almost any scale is what really sets us apart. Many romantics will say that it's our ability to dream and fantasize, and that (while grossly simplified) is exactly what I'm thinking. When we are in line at the supermarket, planning out what we want to make with the things in our cart, we usually picture and construct the whole scenario. We're cooking, making the dish, others come in and we eat, we talk about our day and share. Sitting there and letting the dreams come, and not only simulating what we will do, but what the others will be doing is something quite complex and quite amazing!

Learning

Our whole lives we have the ability to grow and learn and change who and what we are to a great degree. One of the quotes from Star Trek: The Next Generation has really gotten into my head about how we manage to learn and change. One of the members of the ship's crew is an android and he tells a child that he is amazed because while he can walk, and run, and move around faster and more precisely than a human, all that ability is totally dependent on his legs remaining exactly the same length, while the child can run and walk and play while constantly growing and changing.

Our ability to learn is the same with regards to the way we simulate the world. What it looks like we do is develop the ability to take a snapshot, like a picture, of how we are perceiving reality, and store that as a base image that we then use to build out our simulations and scenarios. When we are young, we are constantly trying to gather up a larger and larger cache of those snapshots. Sometimes we passively take those snapshots, while other times we have to take a hand in building a situation that we want to simulate so that we have the starting point we want to work from. Picture a child who is in a "testing" mood. They will do something that they know they are forbidden to do, and while parents have many reasons why they do this, they miss one of the deep underlying causes. The child has a theory of how the scenario will play out, but is learning to trust that simulation. They need to decide if what the previous snapshot predicted is correct. That is much more what they are testing than the ability of an adult to catch them doing something they are not supposed to be doing.

While all this learning is going on, we tend to see many other aspects of the simulation mind developing. Constantly asking more and more questions, rambling around, testing, probing and exploring are also methods of expanding this simulation to a macro scale (why is the sun hot?) and to the micro scale (why do we have to kill the germs on our hands by washing them?). We are building our understanding of the world so that we can hone the focus of our simulations, based on the situational snapshots we've taken.

Out of Whack

Sometimes we have problems with this, however, and things can go wrong. The two things that I think are most common are a breakdown of the snapshot process and a breakdown of the simulation process. These two situations can cause all sorts of other problems.

Snapshot Breakdown

Often times we talk to people who seem to not be living in our world. We put all sorts of names on those people, but they usually suffer from two distinct problems. There are those who are not able to take and use new snapshots, and so are limited to living in a world of their own, or there are those who have a strong ability to create non-contiguous snapshots and live in a world different than everyone else. Living in the past or on another planet.

I've noticed, often times, that people talk about getting old and losing our ability to learn, or become set in our ways. This, I think, is a mild case of our snapshots getting stuck. Sometimes, this is taken to extremes. There are some people who I've been dealing with recently who are wholly unable to cope with any shock that would upset the one old snapshot that they've come to love, and that they keep using. Often these people are noticeable because they don't examine the reality of a situation, but change the facts of the past and present to fit the idealized model they have internally. In the case of people I'm dealing with, they will talk to you about a plan that they have to improve the efficiency of a process, but fail to note that they are the reason that the process isn't efficient. When confronted with feedback along those lines, their conscious brain shuts down and they lash out in any manner that they can to prove that they are NOT the problem until internal equilibrium is restored.

Simulation Overrun

This is a whole separate topic, and I'm going to break it out into another post!