Arts and Minds

Artificial Intelligence Requires Emotional Mediation

Artificial intelligence will never be intelligent in the human sense until we find a way of organizing machine process, storage and retrieval that is mediated by an emotion-emulating algorithm.

Information moving about within our brains, even what we believe to be pure logical thought and fact is attached to emotional preferences and dislikes (intellectual passions if you like), and these emotional tags or neurological links assist us in making efficient and meaningful use of the primary sensory chaos present in the unprocessed perceived environment. Emotion plus other data equals meaning, and meaning is everything in both thought and emotion, and in action or communication.

Comprehending what meaning means aught to be our main target as we pursue the grail of artificial intelligence. We can eventually understand and build an operational concept of meaning, but it will be difficult (or maybe impossible) if we only stick to the computer science worldview. The difficulty will be somewhat eased if computer scientists go to lunch with psychotherapists who teach and use psychodynamic theory.

In a simple mind experiment, think of an idea or a theory, perhaps some fact or strong belief you have been working with. Are you fond of it? Do you defend this belief or theory when colleagues challenge it’s validity in meetings? Your defense is not purely logical. It is also strongly emotional.

We are motivated by emotion first, logic second. We store away and remember our observations and scientific ideas with ‘tags’ that connect emotion to logical thought.

If computation is ever to be deeply companionable with humans, we must build computers that process data the way humans feel and think, this is not improbable. Because they exist together within the brain, emotions, logically, must be merely another quality or kind of information in the brain in the same way as are logical propositions.

Emotion is not a halo of irrational spiritual vapor hovering outside our brains. It is more likely central to the brain’s own deep logic. Perhaps emotion is a faster pathway to learning and remembering in animals, including humans, and will eventually provide the same functions within computer systems and their application programs.

Perhaps, if we keep our minds open this avenue of investigation may also lead to a better understanding of the mysterious process of human thought and emotion.

Information Sausages

Imagine that the worldwide network is in fact only a information sausage exchange and sausage packing plant . If we poke a peephole in the roof and look down at the operations below, we see crowds of people, millions really, trying to stuff their own information into some sausage and send it off, or pick-up a delivery of sausage with their name on it. Each person arrives with some idea or question to stuff into the sausage-making machines below. We see that the production line winds around like an airport check-in area—unrelated people are located in front of and behind each other, each in their turn stuffing their information into funnels, filling each of the sausage-skins in sequence with discontinuous, unrelated packages of information.

The information-sausages move along the line, each filled with it’s bits, and are cut off from the endless supply at the end of the line where a packing station counts lengths of just-so-many-sausages to be randomly tossed into boxes and shipped out the back door. From our perch on the roof we see outside the building that the boxes are carried away and distributed through the distribution network.

At millions of endpoints and nodes in this network, like the one you are on right now, humans get to sample the sausage and digest it’s contents. But the overall impression we get from looking down through our peephole is that of too many people trying to jam too much stuff into too many small packages and tossing them unsorted, into an endless queue of trucks. We are looking at a traffic jam stretching from input to destination of ideas, words, bits, identities, locations, and workers, each speaking different languages, without understanding of meaning. It is Babel, even for those who speak the same language. The hum is deafening, the noise out-shouts the signal. This signal to noise imbalance is most difficult when nasty selfish folks attempt to fill millions of sausage links with viruses causing endless trouble. While the sum of all this effort is greater than the sausages themselves, it is not as great as it should be. We have a thoughtless network because information does not conform to semantic structures. We need a thoughtful one structured in the terms of human language. We need Twine (developed by Radar Networks Inc.) to tie our packages together in personalized 'giftwrap'.

After The Fast Last Mile are The Slow Last Inches

After the ‘last mile’ is completed, when the last high bandwidth cable has been connected, and computers are predictably faster than they are, information will still have to travel the last few inches from the screen and be formed into meaning and memory within the mind. These inches are your own nerve fiber, not copper or optical fiber, and they place the ultimate limits upon our efforts to push or pull information from providers to consumers. Outwitting our own brains will be the next big thing. In order to make these last inches more receptive to what the information network provides to their computer screens, the network must pre-digest the information it serves to users. The most powerful digestive juices we can employ come by way of Twine via Radar Networks Inc.. Twine, like the human brain, does a lot of it's work associatively. It is the first really syncretic system to be developed for computation. Using Twine, my computer finds something for me, something important that I did not know and was not seeking. It is a bit of a shock. This is new territory. My computer suddenly seems smart.

While Moore’s Law optimizes the possibilities for many aspects of computation, the pace of nerve fiber information transmission will ever remain constant. Eventually, (a long time from now) a computer may demonstrate the processing and intelligence equivalent of brain-power. But we will still always have to read, organize and consider the sentences as we read them.

Then follows the complex brain-work of deriving and ascribing context and meaning to what we have read. This will always happen at the nice human speed of brain and nerve. There is human pleasure in this process and pace, like taking a walk, or a swim, we live within and enjoy our human scale speed limits. Someday Moore’s Law will become unimportant to most hands-on uses of computers because our brains will be so much slower (and more expensive).

WE FORGET PROPER NOUNS

REFLECTIONS OF REALITY: Some Notes On Archetypal Place And Syncretic Process: Proper Nouns:
The mind hides its deepest structure. We cannot remove it from our thoughts to see or know nature (or our own nature) 'clearly', for the structure holds our thoughts together. When things make sense, they make this particular structural sense. We cannot isolate this structure for examination because without the foundation, the building of our mind collapses in upon itself. It’s presence is so pervasive and we are so embedded in it, that if we were able to remove these deep foundations, we would cease to exist as the individuals who entered upon this quest. However much we become aware of structure, our very awareness is based upon our own ontological self-creation of structure. A frame fabricated to support what has been learned; it is the lens, the language, the embedded concepts and the constant and dependable floor of our lives. I have read numerous neurological case-histories that present patients who have memory loss of various kinds and degrees. In some cases the report asserts that amnesia is nearly complete. The observer fails to mention, almost universally, that the patient retained language, knew how to sit in a chair, and when asked to name the president, did not reply: “what’s a name?”—“what is a president?”—“what is what?”.

Many Level Thinking: The Meaning Of Bats In The Belfry

I have a longtime friend who thinks in seven levels at once. He is not admired for this ability, instead, most people find his conversation confusing; he skips around from subject to subject, changes times of reference, sensory modalities, and other dimensions of normal conversation. His discussion drifts, we are soon in a sea of ideas, lost. I ask: “what were we talking about?” He looks at me as if I were simple. Have I been inattentive? I am unsure and confused, after half an hour, I think I am losing my mind.

MEMORY AS MEANING

When first my consciousness surfaced this morning from the night-long swim through sleep, I directed my attention to remembering a photograph of a woman who has been traveling much too long, someone I love, whose photograph I have looked at often, and with serious consideration during the writing of these essays.
While these sentiments may be important to her and myself, they are also important to my subject. I have been motivated to regard this image, to find charming details, new discoveries, to memorize it. I know this photograph. I have searched it almost microscopically for meaning. I also know other photographs, for there are many photographs that I admire as art, that I have examined carefully. This one is not art, only a snapshot. Before opening my eyes I readied myself to observe the experience of remembering this photograph. It happens fast. First there is no photo, then as I become aware that I intend to remember it, it is there in memory. But what has “appeared”, and where is it? What kind of representation am I examining so earnestly? Can I actually see it “in my minds eye”?

Topological Morphology of Cats and Consciousness

Topological Morphology of Cats and Consciousness

Mayer Spivack
10/31/03

I am not Gregor Samsa, but as I awoke this morning from complicated dreams I found my chin and chest transformed into a bed for a black cat.

My chin and chest belong to cats at the beginning and end of the day. However, what made this morning unusual was that I had gone to sleep after reading the first half of the wonderful prose, recently published in The New Yorker, of Gabriel Garcia Marquez entitled “personal History, The Challenge” (Oct. 6 2003, pg. 100, [as in “One Hundred Years Of Solitude”—this, in the New Yorker, could not be accidental].

Marquez, in his fantastic and real meditations is always more accurate about human experience than most psychology, because as he states in his article, he… “realized that my two great defects were the two greatest defects possible: the clumsiness of my writing and my ignorance of the human heart.” And so he made a lifelong project to become infinitely graceful dancing in this mysterious fog that drifts only at the mind’s “heart”. I share his first “defect”, my only similarity with this great writer and thinker, and I am now revealing the extent of my struggle with the second. In the case of G. Marquez, both defects are corrected.

Breaking Boundaries - The Syncretic Mind In Search Of Meaning

One Node in a Network of Thought-Experiments, Hypotheses, and Essays

© Mayer Spivack 1996

Definitions of the term syncretic loosely extracted from the Random House Dictionary of the English language give us the following understanding: “Syn-cre-tism...1. the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles, practices, or parties, as in philosophy or religion. 2. Gram. The merging, as by historical change in a language, of two or more categories in a specified environment into one...”

In a series of posts, beginning with this one, I will publish thoughts and essays on syncretic and associative learning that I call "Breaking Boundaries". This writing will explore how meaning and creative process germinate and bloom in the mind. I offer the proposition that syncretic association is a mental process essential to both art and science, and suggest that it is the means by which our associative minds seek meaning in a world of disorganized raw information. Until we have detected some order within the chaos of raw experience, and have begun to form patterns that are significant to our understanding of that experience, we have only made simple percepts that are without meaning. I am exploring how the detection of pattern and order—the finding-out of cognizable features (that may be inherent in the fractal ‘raw’ experience of nature)—are synonymous with the detection and invention of meaning, and how they, together, may constitute the organic process of our creativity.