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Nowism -- A Theme for the New Era?

DRAFT 1 -- A Work in Progress

Introduction

Here's an idea I've been thinking about: it's a concept for a new philosophy, or perhaps just a name for a grassroots philosophy that seems to be emerging on its own. It's called "Nowism." The view that now is what's most important, because now is where one's life actually happens.

Certainly we have all heard terms like Ram Das' famous, "Be here now" and we may be familiar with the writings of Eckhart Tolle and his "Power of Now" and others. In addition there was the "Me generation" and the more recent idea of "living in the now." On the Web there is also now a growing shift towards real-time, what I call the Stream.

These are all examples of the emergence of this trend. But I think these are just the beginnings of this movement -- a movement towards a subtle but major shift in the orientation of our civilization's collective attention. This is a shift towards the now, in every dimension of our lives. Our personal lives, professional lives, in business, in government, in technology, and even in religion and spirituality.

I have a hypothesis that this philosophy -- this worldview that the "now" is more important than the past or the future, may come to characterize this new century we are embarking on. If this is true, then it will have profound effects on the direction we go in as a civilization.

It does appear that the world is becoming increasingly now-oriented; more real-time, high-resolution, high-bandwidth. The present moment, the now, is getting increasingly flooded with fast-moving and information-rich streams of content and communication.

As this happens we are increasingly focusing our energy on keeping up with, managing, and making sense of, the now. The now is also effectively getting shorter -- in that more happens in less time, making the basic clockrate of the now effectively faster. I've written about this elsewhere.

Given that the shift to a civilization that is obsessively focused on the now is occurring, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether this will gradually penetrate into the underlying metaphors and worldviews of coming generations, and how it might manifest as differences from our present-day mindsets.

How might people who live more in the now differ from those who paid more attention to the past, or the future? For example, I would assert that the world in and before the 19th century was focused more on the past than the now or the future. The 20th century was characterized by a shift to focus more on the future than the past or the now. The 21st century will be characterized by a shift in focus onto the now, and away from the past and the future.

How might people who live more in the now think about themselves and the world in coming decades. What are the implications for consumers, marketers, strategists, policymakers, educators?

With this in mind, I've attempted to write up what I believe might be the start of a summary of what this emerging worldview of "Nowism" might be like.

It has implications on several levels: social, economic, political, and spiritual.

Nowism Defined

Like Buddhism, Taoism, and other "isms," Nowism is a view on the nature of reality, with implications for how to live one's life and how to interpret and relate to the world and other people.

Simply put: Nowism is the philosophy that the span of experience called "now" is fundamental. In other words there is nothing other than now. Life happens in the now. The now is what matters most.

Nowism does not claim to be mutually exclusive with any other religion. It merely claims that all other religions are contained within it's scope -- they, like everything else, take place exclusively within the now, not outside it. In that respect the now, in its actual nature, is fundamentally greater than any other conceivable philosophical or religious system, including even Nowism itself.

Risks of Unawakened Nowism

Nowism is in some ways potentially short-sighted in that there is less emphasis on planning for the future and correspondingly more emphasis on living the present as fully as possible. Instead of making decisions with their effects in the future foremost in mind, the focus is on making the optimal immediate decisions in the context of the present. However, what is optimal in the present may not be optimal over longer spans of time and space.

What may be optimal in the now of a particular individual may not at all be optimal in the nows of other individuals. Nowism can therefore lead to extremely selfish behavior that actually harms others, or it can lead to extremely generous behavior on a scale that far transcends the individual, if one strives to widen their own experience of the now sufficiently.

Very few individuals will ever do the necessary work to develop themselves to the point where their actual experience of now is dramatically wider than average. It is however possible to do this, while quite rare. Such individuals are capable of living exclusively in the now while still always acting with the long-term benefit of both themselves all other beings in mind.

The vast majority of people however will tend towards a more limited and destructive form of Nowism, in which they get lost in deeper forms of consumerism, content and media immersion, hedonism, and conceptualization. Rather than being freed by the now, they will be increasingly imprisoned by it.

This lower form of Nowism -- what might be called unawakened Nowism -- is characterized by an intense focus on immediate self-gratification, without concern or a sense of responsibility for the consequences of one's actions on oneself or others in the future. This kind of living in the moment, while potentially extremely fun, tends to end badly for most people. Fortunately most people outgrow this tendency towards extremely unawakened Nowism after graduating college and/or entering the workforce.

Abandoning extremely unawakened Nowist lifestyles doesn't necessarily result in one realizing any form of awakened Nowism. One might simply remain in a kind of dormant state, sleepwalking through life, not really living fully in the present, not fully experiencing the present in all its potential. To reach this level of higher Nowism, or advanced Nowism, one must either have a direct spontaneous experience of awakening to the deeper qualities of the now, or one must study, practice and work with teachers and friends who can help them to reach such a direct experience of the now.

Benefits of Awakened Nowism: Spiritual and Metaphysical Implications of Nowist Philosophy

In the 21st Century, I believe Nowism may actually become an emerging movement. With it there will come a new conception of the self, and of the divine. The self will be realized to be simultaneously more empty and much vaster than was previously thought. The divine will be understood more directly and with less conceptualization. More people will have spiritual realization this way, because in this more direct approach there is less conceptual material to get caught up in. The experience of now is simply left as it is -- as direct and unmediated, unfettered, and unadulterated as possible.

This is a new kind of spirituality perhaps. One in which there is less personification of the divine, and less use of the concept of a personified deity as an excuse or justification for various worldy actions (like wars and laws, for example).

Concepts about the nature of divinity have been used by humans for millenia as tools for various good and bad purposes. But in Nowism, these concepts are completely abandoned. This also means abandoning the notion that there is or is not a divine nature at the core of reality, and each one of us. Nowists do not get caught up in such unresolvable debates. However, at the same time, Nowists do strive for a direct realization of the now -- one that is as unmediated and nonconceptual as possible -- and that direct realization is considered to BE the divine nature itself.

Nowism does not assert that nothing exists or that nothing matters. Such views are nihilism not Nowism. Nowism does not assert that what happens is caused or uncaused -- such views are those of the materialists and the idealists, not Nowism. Instead Nowism asserts the principles of dependent origination, in which cause-and-effect appears to take place, even though it is an illusory process and does not truly exist. On the basis of a relative-level cause-effect process, an ethical system can be founded which seeks to optimize happiness and minimize unhappiness for the greatest number of beings, by adjusting ones actions so as to create causes that lead to increasingly happy effects for oneself and others, increasingly often. Thus the view of Nowism does not lead to hedonism -- in fact, anyone who makes a careful study of the now will reach the conclusion that cause and effect operates unfailingly and therefore is a key tool for optimizing happiness in the now.

Advanced Nowists don't ignore cause-and-effect, in fact quite the contrary: they pay increasingly close attention to cuase-and-effect and their particular actions. The natural result is that they begin to live a life that is both happier and that leads to more happiness for all other beings -- at least this is the goal and example of the best-case. The fact that cause-and-effect is in operation, even though it is not fundamentally real, is the root of Nowist ethics. It is precisely the same as the Buddhist conception of the identity of emptiness and dependent-origination.

Numerous principles follow from the core beliefs of Nowism. They include practical guidance for living ones life with a minimum of unnecessary suffering (of oneself as well as others), further principles concerning the nature of reality and the mind, and advanced techniques and principles for reaching greater realizations of the now.

As to the nature of what is taking place right now: from the Nowist perspective, it is beyond concepts, for all concepts, like everything else, appear and disappear like visions or mirages, without ever truly-existing. This corresponds precisely to the Buddhist conception of emptiness.

The scope of the now is unlimited, however for the uninitiated the now is usually considered to be limited to the personal present experience of the individual. Nowist adepts, on the other hand, assert that the scope of the now may be modified (narrowed or widened) through various exercises including meditation, prayer, intense physical activity, art, dance and ritual, drugs, chanting, fasting, etc.

Narrowing the scope of the now is akin to reducing the resolution of present experience. Widening the scope is akin to increasing the resolution. A narrower now is a smaller experience, with less information content. A wider now is a larger experience, with more information content.

Within the context of realizing that now is all there is, one explores carefully and discovers that now does not contain anything findable (such as a self, other, or any entity or fundamental basis for any objective or subjective phenomenon, let alone any nature that could be called "nowness" or the now itself).

In short the now is totally devoid of anything findable whatsoever, although sensory phenomena do continue to appear to arise within it unceasingly. Such phenomena, and the sensory apparatus, body, brain, mind and any conception of self that arises in reaction to them, are all merely illusion-like appearances with no objectively-findable ultimate, fundamental, or independent existence.

This state is not unlike the analogy of a dream in which oneself and all the other places and characters are all equally illusory, or of a completely immersive virtual reality experience that is so convincing one forgets it isn't real.

Nowism does not assert a divine being or deity, although it also is not mutually exclusive with the existence of one or more such beings. However all such beings are considered to be no more real than any other illusory appearance, such as the appearances of sentient beings, planets, stars, fundamental particles, etc. Any phenomena -- whether natural or supernatural -- are equally empty of any independent true existince. They are all illusory in nature.

However, Nowists do assert that the nature of the now itself, while completely empty, is in fact the nature of consciousness and what we call life. It cannot be computed, simulated or modeled in an information system, program, machine, or representation of any kind. Any such attempts to represent the now are merely phenomena appearing within the now, not the now itself. The now is fundamentally transcendental in this respect.

The now is not limited to any particular region in space or time, let alone to any individual being's mind. There is no way to assert there is a single now, or many nows, for no nows are actually findable.

The now is the gap between the past and the future, however, when searched for it cannot really be found, nor can the past or future be found. The past is gone, the future hasn't happened yet, and the now is infinite, constantly changing, and ungraspable. The entire space-time continuum is in fact within a total all-embracing now, the cosmically extended now that is beyond the limited personalized scope of now we presently think we have. Through practice this can be gradually glimpsed and experienced to greater degrees.

As the now is explored to greater depths, one begins to find that it has astonishing implications. Simultaneously much of the Zen literature -- especially the koans -- starts to make sense at last.

While Nowism could be said to be a branch of Buddhism, I would actually say it might be the other way arond. Nowism is really the most fundamental, pure, philosophy -- stripped of all cultural baggage and historical concepts, and retaining only what is absolutely essential.

Video: My Talk on the Evolution of the Global Brain at the Singularity Summit

If you are interested in collective intelligence, consciousness, the global brain and the evolution of artificial intelligence and superhuman intelligence, you may want to see my talk at the 2008 Singularity Summit. The videos from the Summit have just come online.

(Many thanks to Hrafn Thorisson who worked with me as my research assistant for this talk).

A Universal Classification of Intelligence

I've been thinking lately about whether or not it is possible to formulate a scale of universal cognitive capabilities, such that any intelligent system -- whether naturally occurring or synthetic -- can be classified according to its cognitive capacity. Such a system would provide us with a normalized scientific basis by which to quantify and compare the relative cognitive capabilities of artificially intelligent systems, various species of intelligent life on Earth, and perhaps even intelligent lifeforms encountered on other planets.

One approach to such evaluation is to use a standardized test, such as an IQ test. However, this test is far too primitive and biased towards human intelligence. A dolphin would do poorly on our standardized IQ test, but that doesn't mean much, because the test itself is geared towards humans. What is needed is a way to evaluate and compare intelligence across different species -- one that is much more granular and basic.

What we need is a system that focuses on basic building blocks of intelligence, starting by measuring the presence or ability to work with fundamental cognitive constructs (such as the notion of object constancy, quantities, basic arithmetic constructs, self-constructs, etc.) and moving up towards higher-level abstractions and procedural capabilities (self-awareness, time, space, spatial and temporal reasoning, metaphors, sets, language, induction, logical reasoning, etc.).

What I am asking is whether we can develop a more "universal" way to rate and compare intelligences? Such a system would provide a way to formally evaluate and rate any kind of intelligent system -- whether insect, animal, human, software, or alien -- in a normalized manner.

Beyond the inherent utility of having such a rating scale, there is an additional benefit to trying to formulate this system: It will lead us to really question and explore the nature of cognition itself. I believe we are moving into an age of intelligence -- an age where humanity will explore the brain and the mind (the true "final frontier"). In order to explore this frontier, we need a map -- and the rating scale I am calling for would provide us with one, for it maps the range of possible capabilities that intelligent systems are capable of.

I'm not as concerned with measuring the degree to which any system is more or less capable of some particular cognitive capability within the space of possible capabilities we map (such as how fast it can do algebra for example, or how well it can recall memories, etc.) -- but that is a useful second step. The first step, however, is to simply provide a comprehensive map of all the possible fundamental cognitive behaviors there are -- and to make this map as minimal and elegant as we can. Ideally we should be seeking the simplest set of cognitive building blocks from which all cognitive behavior, and therefore all minds, are comprised.

So the question is: Are there in fact "cognitive universals" or universal cognitive capabilities that we can generalize across all possible intelligent systems? This is a fascinating question -- although we are human, can we not only imagine, but even prove, that there is a set of basic universal cognitive capabilities that applies everywhere in the universe, or even in other possible universes? This is an exploration that leads into the region where science, pure math, philosophy, and perhaps even spirituality all converge. Ultimately, this map must cover the full range of cognitive capabilities from the most mundane, to what might be (from our perspective) paranormal, or even in the realm of science fiction. Ordinary cognition as well as forms of altered or unhealthy cognition, as well as highly advanced or even what might be said to be enlightened cognition, all have to fit into this model.

Can we develop a system that would apply not just to any form of intelligence on Earth, but even to far-flung intelligent organisms that might exist on other worlds, and that perhaps might exist in dramatically different environments than humans? And how might we develop and test this model?

I would propose that such a system could be developed and tuned by testing it across the range of forms of intelligent life we find on Earth -- including social insects (termite colonies, bee hives, etc.), a wide range of other animal species (dogs, birds, chimpanzees, dolphins, whales, etc.), human individuals, and human social organizations (teams, communities, enterprises). Since there are very few examples of artificial intelligence today it would be hard to find suitable systems to test it on, but perhaps there may be a few candidates in the next decade. We should also attempt to imagine forms of intelligence on other planets that might have extremely different sensory capabilities, totally different bodies, and perhaps that exist on very different timescales or spatial scales as well -- what would such exotic, alien intelligences be like, and can our model encompass the basic building blocks of their cognition as well?

It will take decades to develop and tune a system such as this, and as we learn more about the brain and the mind, we will continue to add subtlety to the model. But when humanity finally establishes open dialog with an extraterrestrial civilization, perhaps via SETI or some other means of more direct contact, we will reap important rewards. A system such as what I am proposing will provide us with a valuable map for understanding alien cognition, and that may prove to be the key to enabling humanity to engage in successful interactions and relations with alien civilizations as we may inevitably encounter as humanity spreads throughout the galaxy. While some skeptics may claim that we will never encounter intelligent life on other planets, the odds would indicate otherwise. It may take a long time, but eventually it is inevitable that we will cross paths -- if they exist at all. Not to be prepared would be irresponsible.

Artificial Stupidity: The Next Big Thing

There has been a lot of hype about artificial intelligence over the years. And recently it seems there has been a resurgence in interest in this topic in the media. But artificial intelligence scares me. And frankly, I don't need it. My human intelligence is quite good, thank you very much. And as far as trusting computers to make intelligent decisions on my behalf, I'm skeptical to say the least. I don't need or want artificial intelligence.

No, what I really need is artificial stupidity.

I need software that will automate all the stupid things I presently have to waste far too much of my valuable time on. I need something to do all the stupid tasks -- like organizing email, filing documents, organizing folders, remembering things, coordinating schedules, finding things that are of interest, filtering out things that are not of interest, responding to routine messages, re-organizing things, linking things, tracking things, researching prices and deals, and the many other rote information tasks I deal with every day.

The human brain is the result of millions of years of evolution. It's already the most intelligent thing on this planet. Why are we wasting so much of our brainpower on tasks that don't require intelligence? The next revolution in software and the Web is not going to be artificial intelligence, it's going to be creating artificial stupidity: systems that can do a really good job at the stupid stuff, so we have more time to use our intelligence for higher level thinking.

The next wave of software and the Web will be about making software and the Web smarter. But when we say "smarter" we don't mean smart like a human is smart, we mean "smarter at doing the stupid things that humans aren't good at." In fact humans are really bad at doing relatively simple, "stupid" things -- tasks that don't require much intelligence at all.

For example, organizing. We are terrible organizers. We are lazy, messy, inconsistent, and we make all kinds of errors by accident. We are terrible at tagging and linking as well, it turns out. We are terrible at coordinating or tracking multiple things at once because we are easily overloaded and we can really only do one thing well at a time. These kinds of tasks are just not what our brains are good at. That's what computers are for - or should be for at least.

Humans are really good at higher level cognition: complex thinking, decisionmaking, learning, teaching, inventing, expressing, exploring, planning, reasoning, sensemaking, and problem solving -- but we are just terrible at managing email, or making sense of the Web. Let's play to our strengths and use computers to compensate for our weaknesses.

I think it's time we stop talking about artificial intelligence -- which nobody really needs, and fewer will ever trust. Instead we should be working on artificial stupidity. Sometimes the less lofty goals are the ones that turn out to be most useful in the end.

Virtual Out of Body Experiences

A very cool experiment in virtual reality has shown it is possible to trick the mind into identifying with a virtual body:

Through these goggles, the volunteers could see a camera view of their own back - a three-dimensional "virtual own body" that appeared to be standing in front of them.

When the researchers stroked the back of the volunteer with a pen, the volunteer could see their virtual back being stroked either simultaneously or with a time lag.

The volunteers reported that the sensation seemed to be caused by the pen on their virtual back, rather than their real back, making them feel as if the virtual body was their own rather than a hologram.

Volunteers

Even when the camera was switched to film the back of a mannequin being stroked rather than their own back, the volunteers still reported feeling as if the virtual mannequin body was their own.

And when the researchers switched off the goggles, guided the volunteers back a few paces, and then asked them to walk back to where they had been standing, the volunteers overshot the target, returning nearer to the position of their "virtual self".

This has implications for next-generation video games and virtual reality. It also has interesting implications for consciousness studies in general.

Axons Process Information

I just heard about a very interesting new discovery in neuroscience:. The basic gist is that it appears that axons process information. Until now it has been thought that only the cell body of neurons was the part that processed information. Our present understanding of the brain, and also of psychopharmacology, is based completely on the dendrites and main body of the neuron. If it turns out that axons -- the "wires" that connect neurons -- are actually major contributors to how the brain computes, then it may point to both a new understanding of cognition, as well as a new frontier in treating mental and neurological disorders. (Thanks to Bram for letting me know).

Chinese Authorities Make it Illegal to Reincarnate Without a Permit

This just in. The Chinese Government, in their ongoing campaign against the Dalai Lama and Buddhism in Tibet, have announced a new law making it illegal for a Buddha to reincarnate without a state permit. This law is designed effectively to put an end to the form of Buddhism practiced in Tibet within one generation. The Tibetan monastic system is organized around reincarnated "tulkus" who are usually identified though a battery of tests at a young age and are then tutored and groomed to run monasteries and monastic schools when they grow up. This new law  will make it a crime for anyone to be identified as a reincarnated lama without state approval -- meaning that from now on the Chinese government will be in a position to appoint or deny whoever they select to lead the Buddhists of Tibet. Of course the irony is that the Chinese state is atheistic and in making this law they seem to be contradicting themselves in admitting that Buddhas exist and can reincarnate. But furthermore, the notion that the Chinese state is qualified to identify or approve reincarnated Buddhas is patently absurd. This is one more unfortunate step in China's 50-year cultural genocide of the Tibetan people.

New Findings Overturn our Understanding of How Neurons Communicate

Thanks to Bram for pointing me to this article about how new research indicates that communication in the brain is quite different than we thought. Essentially neurons may release neurotransmitters all along axons, not just within synapses. This may enable new forms of global communication or state changes within the brain, beyond the "circuit model" of neuronal signaling that has been the received view for the last 100 years. It also may open up a wide range of new drugs and discoveries in brain science.

Must-Know Terms for the 21st Century Intellectual

Read this fun article that lists and defines some of the key concepts that every post-singularity transhumanist meta-intellectual should know! (via Kurzweil)

Minding The Planet -- The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web

NOTES

• Master Copy can be found at this URL or http://tinyurl.com/yynb93
• Last Update: Tuesday, November 7, 2006, 10:17AM PST
  
• License -- This article is distributed under the Creative Commons Deed.  If you would like to distribute a version of this article, please link back to http://www.mindingtheplanet.net from your version, thanks.
• Printable version -- Click here to download the printable PDF version of this article
• Illustrated Version -- See the version by the Lifeboat Foundation

 

Prelude

Many years ago, in the late 1980s, while I was still a college student, I visited my late grandfather, Peter F. Drucker, at his home in Claremont, California. He lived near the campus of Claremont College where he was a professor emeritus. On that particular day, I handed him a manuscript of a book I was trying to write, entitled, "Minding the Planet" about how the Internet would enable the evolution of higher forms of collective intelligence.

My grandfather read my manuscript and later that afternoon we sat together on the outside back porch and he said to me, "One thing is certain: Someday, you will write this book." We both knew that the manuscript I had handed him was not that book, a fact that was later verified when I tried to get it published. I gave up for a while and focused on college, where I was studying philosophy with a focus on artificial intelligence. And soon I started working in the fields of artificial intelligence and supercomputing at companies like Kurzweil, Thinking Machines, and Individual.

A few years later, I co-founded one of the early Web companies, EarthWeb, where among other things we built many of the first large commercial Websites and later helped to pioneer Java by creating several large knowledge-sharing communities for software developers. Along the way I continued to think about collective intelligence. EarthWeb and the first wave of the Web came and went. But this interest and vision continued to grow. In 2000 I started researching the necessary technologies to begin building a more intelligent Web. And eventually that led me to start my present company, Radar Networks, where we are now focused on enabling the next-generation of collective intelligence on the Web, using the new technologies of the Semantic Web. 

But ever since that day on the porch with my grandfather, I remembered what he said: "Someday, you will write this book." I've tried many times since then to write it. But it never came out the way I had hoped. So I tried again. Eventually I let go of the book form and created this weblog instead. And as many of my readers know, I've continued to write here about my observations and evolving understanding of this idea over the years. This article is my latest installment, and I think it's the first one that meets my own standards for what I really wanted to communicate. And so I dedicate this article to my grandfather, who inspired me to keep writing this, and who gave me his prediction that I would one day complete it.

This is an article about a new generation of technology that is sometimes called the Semantic Web, and which could also be called the Intelligent Web, or the global mind. But what is the Semantic Web, and why does it matter, and how does it enable collective intelligence? And where is this all headed? And what is the long-term far future going to be like? Is the global mind just science-fiction? Will a world that has a global mind be good place to live in, or will it be some kind of technological nightmare?

Is Moral Judgement Hard-Wired Into the Brain?

A Harvard University researcher believes that moral judgement is hard-wired into the brain:

The moral grammar now universal among people presumably evolved to its final shape during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human past, before the dispersal from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago. This may be why events before our eyes carry far greater moral weight than happenings far away, Dr. Hauser believes, since in those days one never had to care about people remote from ones environment.

Dr. Hauser believes that the moral grammar may have evolved through the evolutionary mechanism known as group selection. A group bound by altruism toward its members and rigorous discouragement of cheaters would be more likely to prevail over a less cohesive society, so genes for moral grammar would become more common.

Man Doesn't Know Who He Is

This is fascinating. A man is interviewed in this CNN video segment because he doesn't know who he is and hopes someone watching will recognize him. So strange. Here is further footage from the full story for this man. He was found in Denver with no memory except a few clues that came out under hypnosis.

UPDATE: Mystery Solved!

Is There Room for The Soul? - Good Article on Cognitive Science

This is a surprisingly good article on the nature of consciousness -- providing a survey of the current state-of-the-art in cognitive science research. It covers the question from a number of perspectives and interviews many of the leading current researchers.

Why Machines Will Never be Conscious

Below is the text of my bet on Long Bets. Go there to vote.

"By 2050 no synthetic computer nor machine intelligence will have become truly self-aware (ie. will become conscious)."

Spivack's Argument:

(This summary includes my argument, a method for judging the outcome of this bet and some other thoughts on how to measure awareness...)

A. MY PERSPECTIVE...

Even if a computer passes the Turing Test it will not really be aware that it has passed the Turing Test. Even if a computer seems to be intelligent and can answer most questions as well as an intelligent, self-aware, human being, it will not really have a continuum of awareness, it will not really be aware of what it seems to "think" or "know," it will not have any experience of it's own reality or being. It will be nothing more than a fancy inanimate object, a clever machine, it will not be a truly sentient being.

Self-awareness is not the same thing as merely answering questions intelligently. Therefore even if you ask a computer if it is self-aware and it answers that it is self-aware and that it has passed the Turing Test, it will not really be self-aware or really know that it has passed the Turing Test.

As John Searle and others have pointed out, the Turing Test does not actually measure awareness, it just measures information processing---particularly the ability to follow rules or at least imitate a particular style of communication. In particular it measures the ability of a computer program to imitate humanlike dialogue, which is different than measuring awareness itself. Thus even if we succeed in creating good AI, we won't necessarily succeed in creating AA ("Artificial Awareness").

But why does this matter? Because ultimately, real awareness may be necessary to making an AI that is as intelligent as a human sentient being. However, since AA is theoretically impossible in my opinion, truly self-aware AI will never be created and thus no AI will ever be as intelligent as a human sentient being even if it manages to fool someone into thinking it is (and thus passing the Turing Test).

New Study: TV May Cause Autism

This study is strange. But plausible.

Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.

From: Slate

Visualizing the Tenth Dimension

One of my readers commented that they were looking for this really cool flash presentation that I blogged about a while back -- it helps you visualize higher-dimensions all the way to 10-dimensions. Check it out! After this your brain will need a rest, and possibly a hard reboot -- but worth it.

By the way, a reader named Runde has discovered that this visualization is not exactly in accord with the view of string theorists or mainstream physics. You can read the criticisms here. Oh Well, that's too bad -- but I think it's really cool anyway because it is an exploration of higher dimensions from the perspective of true metaphysics (metaphysics in the philosophical sense, as opposed to new-age metaphysics).

A Proposal to Make the Media (and Society) Better

I am concerned by what I'm viewing in our national media lately. Viewed from outside (and also from wihtin the USA), it would appear that our nation is obsessed with, and plagued by, an increasing spree of horrible crimes and abuses of human rights. Is this really what it is like to live in America, or is this simply the media's extremely biased reporting?

The media of any social organization, whether a small community or an entire nation, serves as the primary means by which the members of that organization understand and assess the state of the whole. As such the media serves a function to a collective that is similar to "self-awareness" in an individual person. Self-awareness is a feedback loop. It not only serves as a mirror by which an organization can view reflections of its state, it also conditions the planning and execution of further actions by its organization. When people look in the mirror of the media, they not only understand the system they are in, but they also may make choices and further actions based on what they see there.

The pivotal role of media as the central influencer of societal psychology and behavior is often underestimated. And it is through this lens that I view the recent headlines, which are primarily focused on school killing sprees and abuse of children as of late -- with sadness and concern. By sensationalizing such tragedies, and providing lurid details over and over again, the media is actually contributing to the ongoing proliferation of these same behaviors. While I'm not suggesting that censorship is a better alternative, I do think that leading mass media organizations, in their blind quest for more attention and ad dollars, are behaving irresponsibly by sensationalizing -- indeed almost celebrating -- murder, torture, sexual abuse, and other horrible acts as if they are the latest attractions in some kind of societal variety show.

These atrocities should be reported, but the style and manner in which they are reported should be the opposite of sensationalism. They should be more like funerals -- which is after all what these stories are really about. There should be an element of sadness, respect for those affected, concern for those who might read or view such images and stories, and restraint. In particular details of how various horrible crimes were planned and executed are not necessary and not beneficial in telling the story -- they only serve to inspire, trigger and teach would-be copycats to do the same thing. Furthermore by rewarding perpetrators of such crimes with massive publicity (which in many cases is what such egomaniacs are hoping to achieve by committing their crimes) the media is actually playing right into their hands.

As usual I have a radical proposal to fix this: What if the media gave exposure to stories in direct proportion to the number of people actually affected by those stories?

What if stories were evaluated on several dimensions to determine how much exposure to give them -- for example, geographic range, number of people directly impacted, political relevance, etc? The size of a story would therefore be determined by its real effect on the population. Contrast this to what the news media does today where in fact the prominence of a story is often inversely proportional to the number of people directly impacted by it. The media currently amplifies the most shocking news, regardless of how many people are directly affected or involved. A shocking crime that directly affected only 2 people is quickly amplified to the main national headline of the day for a population of 300 million. That is simply out of balance with reality.

For example, horrible as they are, the recent school killings only directly affect a relatively tiny percentage of the national population: So why should they be the main focus of the national news headlines for weeks on end? According to this proposal, such stories would be mere blips on the collective radar. They would not be headline news for the entire nation, and/or if they were they would quickly fall out of the headlines. I'm not downplaying the importance of these stories to the affected people and communities -- nor am I downplaying the broader significance of the trends they may be indicative of -- I'm simply pointing out that these stories, tragic as they may be, get disproportionately too much national media exposure compared to other stories that affect much larger segments of the population such as for example -- stories related to the economy, the environment, the war and upcoming elections, etc.

Study: Woman in Coma Able to Respond With Thoughts

Wow...

A severely brain-damaged woman in an unresponsive, vegetative state showed clear signs of conscious awareness on brain imaging tests, researchers are reporting today, in a finding that could have far-reaching consequences for how unconscious patients are cared for and diagnosed.

In response to commands, the patient’s brain flared with activity, lighting the same language and planning regions that are active when healthy people hear the commands. Previous studies had found similar activity in partly conscious patients, who occasionally respond to commands, but never before in someone who was totally

 

This opens up a whole new range of possibilities. For example, what if there was a way to fit a comatose patient with a brain activity sensor that could enable them to think of certain things in order to trigger things in their environment? For example, suppose that the woman above could think of playing tennis and that would cause the radio to turn on or off in her hospital room? Similarly, if she thought about moving around her house, suppose that could alert a nurse that she needed pain medication or to be repositioned, etc.? This could provide a way for comatose people to communicate with their caregivers and have some control over their environments. It might even be possible to teach them things to think about in order to indicate "yes" and "no" answers to questions. So someone could ask them questions about what they experience and they could answer yes or no. It might even be possible to teach them to communicate letters so they could spell out messages.

The whole premise that a comatose person has no conscious awareness or sensation may be overturned by this. Perhaps they are much more aware than we thought but they are simply unable to control their bodies in order to speak or move? If that is the case, they must be desperate for a way to communicate and this could be the answer.

A Possible Cure for Comas - Electrical Stimulation

This article discusses the potential of using electrical stimulation to revive people from comas. It has been shown to work many times, but American doctors are still not paying attention. A small group of doctors is trying to get some buzz around this idea.

Dolphins are Smarter Than We Think

This is an interesting article about recent evidence of deep thinking by dolphins:

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.

Virtual World to Test Telepathy

A new test for telepathy harnesses a "completely objective" virtual world.

A Tribe That Views Time Differently

A tribe in South America has been found to have a reverse concept of time from all known cultures:

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous Aymara people indicates they have a concept of time opposite to all the world's studied cultures -- so that the past is ahead of them and the future behind.

Breakthrough in Finding Patterns in Complex Data Such as Sound

A new mathematical technique provides a dramatically better way to analyze data, such as audio data, radar, sonar, or any other form of time-frequency data.

Humans have 200 million light receptors in their eyes, 10 to 20 million receptors devoted to smell, but only 8,000 dedicated to sound. Yet despite this miniscule number, the auditory system is the fastest of the five senses. Researchers credit this discrepancy to a series of lightning-fast calculations in the brain that translate minimal input into maximal understanding. And whatever those calculations are, they’re far more precise than any sound-analysis program that exists today.

Study Discovers Whale Song Syntax

New research into the mathematical properties of whale songs reveals that they have a complex language:

The songs of the humpback whale are among the most complex in the animal kingdom. Researchers have now mathematically confirmed that whales have their own syntax that uses sound units to build phrases that can be combined to form songs that last for hours.

Until now, only humans have demonstrated the ability to use such a hierarchical structure of communication. The research, published online in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, offers a new approach to studying animal communication, although the authors do not claim that humpback whale songs meet the linguistic rigor necessary for a true language.

"Humpback songs are not like human language, but elements of language are seen in their songs," said Ryuji Suzuki, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) predoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and first author of the paper.

This research is important because it brings us one step closer to someday being able to decode whalesongs and eventually even communicate with whales. In the long-term it may also contribute to the development of general techniques for interspecies language translation -- techniques that could someday come in handy if and when we start to interact with extraterrestrial species.

Quantum Evolution -- A Radical Theory

The theory of quantum evolution is a radical new take on how mutations in DNA occur. Basically the theory postulates that DNA molecules are in fact macroscopic quantum objects that undergo quantum interference. It is spearheaded by Johnjoe McFadden, a professor in the UK and makes for an interesting read. Here is a brief overview of the main ideas of the theory. He also has some interesting ideas about a possible interaction between electromagnetic fields and consciousness.  It's way too early to tell whether he is correct in his hypoetheses, but I give him high marks for original thinking! Very interesting stuff.

Collective Intelligence 2.0

Introduction:

This article proposes the creation of a new open, nonprofit service on the Web that will provide something akin to “collective self-awareness” back to the Web. This service is like a "Google Zeitgeist" on steroids, but with a lot more real-time, interactive, participatory data, technology and features in it. The goal is to measure and visualize the state of the collective mind of humanity, and provide this back to humanity in as close to real-time as is possible, from as many data sources as we can handle -- as a web service.

By providing this service, we will enable higher levels of collective intelligence to emerge and self-organize on the Web. The key to collective intelligence (or any intelligence in fact) is self-awareness. Self-awareness is, in essence, a feedback loop in which a system measures its own internal state and the state of its environment, then builds a representation of that state, and then reasons about and reacts to that representation in order to generate future behavior. This feedback loop can be provided to any intelligent system -- even the Web, even humanity as-a-whole. If we can provide the Web with such a service, then the Web can begin to “see itself” and react to its own state for the first time. And this is the first step to enabling the Web, and humanity as-a-whole, to become more collectively intelligent.

It should be noted that by "self-awareness" I don’t mean consciousness or sentience – I think that the consciousness comes from humans at this point and we are not trying to synthesize it (we don't need to; it's already there). Instead, by "self-awareness" I mean a specific type of feedback loop -- a specific Web service -- that provides a mirror of the state of the whole back to its parts. The parts are the conscious elements of the system – whether humans and/or machines – and can then look at this meta-mirror to understand the whole as well as their place in it. By simply providing this meta-level mirror, along with ways that the individual parts of the system can report their state to it, and get the state of the whole back from it, we can enable a richer feedback loop between the parts and the whole. And as soon as this loop exists the entire system suddenly can and will become much more collectively intelligent.

What I am proposing is something quite common in artificial intelligence. For example, in the field of robotics, such as when building an autonomous robot. Until a robot is provided with a means by which it can sense its own internal state and the state of its nearby environment, it cannot behave intelligently or very autonomously. But once this self-representation and feedback loop is provided, it can then react to it’s own state and environment and suddenly can behave far more intelligently. All cybernetic systems rely on this basic design pattern. I’m simply proposing we implement something like this for the entire Web and the mass of humanity that is connected to it. It's just a larger application of an existing pattern. Currently people get their views of “the whole” from the news media and the government – but these views suffer from bias, narrowness, lack of granularity, lack of real-time data, and the fact that they are one-way, top-down services with no feedback loop capabilities. Our global collective self-awareness -- in order to be truly useful and legitimate really must be two-way, inclusive, comprehensive, real-time and democratic. In the global collective awareness, unlike traditional media, the view of the whole is created in a bottom-up, emergent fashion from the sum of the reports from all the parts (instead of just a small pool of reporters or publishers, etc.).

The system I envision would visualize the state of the global mind on a number of key dimensions, in real-time, based on what people and software and organizations that comprise its “neurons” and “regions” report to it (or what it can figure out by mining artifacts they create). For example, this system would discover and rank the current most timely and active topics, current events, people, places, organizations, events, products, articles, websites, in the world right now. From these topics it would link to related resources, discussions, opinions, etc. It would also provide a real-time mass opinion polling system, where people could start polls, vote on them, and see the results in real-time. And it would provide real-time statistics about the Web, the economy, the environment, and other key indicators.

The idea is to try to visualize the global mind – to make it concrete and real for people, to enable them to see what it is thinking, what is going on, and where they fit in it – and to enable them to start adapting and guiding their own behavior to it. By giving the parts of the system more visibility into the state of the whole, they can begin to self-organize collectively which in turn makes the whole system function more intelligently

Essentially I am proposing the creation of the largest and most sophisticated mirror ever built – a mirror that can reflect the state of the collective mind of humanity back to itself. This will enable an evolutionary process which eventually will result in humanity becoming more collectively self-aware and intelligent as-a-whole (instead of what it is today -- just a set of separeate interacting intelligent parts). By providing such a service, we can catalyze the evolution of higher-order meta-intelligence on this planet -- the next step in human evolution. Creating this system is a grand cultural project of profound social value to all people on earth, now and in the future.

This proposal calls for creating a nonprofit orgnaization to build and host this service as a major open-source initiative on the Web, like the Wikipedia, but with a very different user-experience and focus. It also calls for implementing the system with a hybrid central and distributed architecture. Although this vision is big, the specific technologies, design patterns, and features that are necessary to implement it are quite specific and already exist. They just have to be integrated, wrapped and rolled out. This will require an extraordinary and multidisciplanary team. If you're interested in getting involved and think you can contribute resources that this project will need, let me know (see below for details).

Further Thoughts

Today I re-read this beautiful, visionary article by Kevin Kelley, about the birth of the global mind, in which he states:

The planet-sized "Web" computer is already more complex than a human brain and has surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence as calculated by Ray Kurzweil. In 10 years, it will be ubiquitous. So will superintelligence emerge on the Web, not a supercomputer?

Kevin's article got me thinking once again about an idea that has been on my mind for over a decade. I have often thought that the Web is growing into the collective nervous system of our species. This will in turn enable the human species to function increasingly as an intelligent superorganism, for example, like a beehive, or an ant colony -- but perhaps even more intelligent. But the key to bringing this process about is self-awareness. In short, the planetary supermind cannot become truly intelligent until it evolves a form of collective self-awareness. Self-awareness is the most critical component of human intelligence -- the sophistication of human self-awareness is what makes humans different from dumb machines, and from less intelligent species.

The Big Idea that I have been thinking about for over a decade is that if we can build something that functions like a collective self-awareness, then this could catalyze a huge leap in collective intelligence that would essentially "wake up" the global supermind and usher in a massive evolution in its intelligence and behavior. As the planetary supermind becomes more aware of its environment, its own state, and its own actions and plans, it will then naturally evolve higher levels of collective intelligence around this core. This evolutionary leap is of unimaginable importance to the future of our species.

In order for the collective mind to think and act more intelligently it must be able to sense itself and its world, and reason about them, with more precision -- it must have a form of self-awareness. The essence of self-awareness is self-representation -- the ability to sense, map,  reason about, and react to, one's own internal state and the state of one's nearby environment. In other words, self-awareness is a feedback loop by which a system measures and reacts to its own self-representations. Just as is the case with the evolution of individual human intelligence, the evolution of more sophisticated collective human intelligence will depend on the emergence of better collective feedback loops and self-representations. By enabling a feedback loop in which information can flow in both directions between the self-representations of individuals and a meta-level self-representation for the set of all individuals, the dynamics of the parts and the whole become more closely coupled. And when this happens, the system can truly start to adapt to itself intelligently, as a single collective intelligence instead of a collection of single intelligences.

In summary, in order to achieve higher levels of collective intelligence and behavior, the global mind will first need something that functions as its collective self-awareness -- something that enables the parts to better sense and react to the state of the whole, and the whole to better sense and react to the state of its parts. What is needed essentially is something that functions as a collective analogue to a self -- a global collective self.

Think of the global self as a vast mirror, reflecting the state of the global supermind back to itself. Mirrors are interesting things. At first they merely reflect, but soon they begin to guide decisionmaking. By simply providing humanity with a giant virtual mirror of what is going on across the minds of billions of individuals, and millions of groups and organizations, the collective mind will crystallize, see itself for the first time, and then it will begin to react to its own image. And this is the beginning of true collective cognition. When the parts can see themselves as a whole and react in real-time, then they begin to function as a whole instead of just a collection of separate parts. As this shift transpires the state of the whole begins to feedback into the behavior of the parts, and the state of the parts in turns feeds back to the state of the whole. This cycle of bidirectional feedback between the parts and whole is the essence of cognition in all intelligent systems, whether individual brains, artificial intelligences, or entire worlds.

I believe that the time has come for this collective self to emerge on our planet. Like a vast virtual mirror, it will function as the planetary analogue to our own individual self-representations -- that capacity of our individual minds which represents us back to ourselves. It will be comprised of maps that combine real-time periodic data updates, and historical data, from perhaps trillions of data sources (one for each person, group, organization and software agent on the grid). The resulting visualizations will be something like a vast fluid flow, or a many particle simulation. It will require a massive computing capability to render it -- perhaps a distributed supercomputer comprised of the nodes on the Web themselves, each hosting a part of the process. It will require new thinking about how to visualize trends in such vast amounts of data and dimensions. This is a great unexplored frontier in data visualization and knowledge discovery.

How It Might Work

I envision the planetary self functioning as a sort of portal -- a Web service that aggregates and distributes all kinds of current real-time and historical data about the state of the whole, as well as its past states and future projected states. This portal would collect opinions, trends, and statistics about the human global mind, the environment, the economy, society, geopolitical events, and other indicators, and would map them graphically in time, geography, demography, and subject space -- enabling everyone to see and explore the state of the global mind from different perspectives, with various overlays, and at arbitrary levels of magnification.

I think this system should provide an open data model, and open API for adding and growing data sets, querying, remixing, visualizing, and subscribing to the data. All services that provide data sets, analysis or visualizations (or other interpretations) of potential value to understanding the state of the whole would be able to post data into our service for anyone to find and use. Search engines could post in the top search query terms. Sites that create tag clouds could post in tags and tag statistics. Sites that analyze the blogosphere could post in statistics about blogs, bloggers, and blog posts. Organizations that do public opinion polling, market and industry research, trend analysis, social research, or economic research could post in statistics they are generating. Academic researchers could post in statistics generated by projects they are doing to analyze trends on the Web, or within our data-set itself.

As data is pushed to us, or pulled by us, we would grow the largest central data repository about the state of the whole. Others could then write programs to analyze and remix our data, and then post their results back into the system for others to use as well. We would make use of our data for our own analysis, but anyone else could also do research and share their analysis through our system. End users and others could also subscribe to particular data, reports, or visualizations from our service, and could post in their own individual opinions, attention data feeds, or other inputs. We would serve as a central hub for search, analysis, and distribution of collective self-awareness.

The collective self would provide a sense of collective identity: who are we, how do we appear, what are we thinking about, what do we think about what we are thinking about, what are we doing, how well are we doing it, where are we now, where have we been, where are we going next. Perhaps it could be segmented by nation, or by age group, or by other dimensions as well to view various perspectives on these questions within it. It could gather its data by mining for it, as well as through direct push contributions from various data-sources. Individuals could even report on their own opinions, state, and activities to it if they wanted to, and these votes and data points would be reflected back in the whole in real time. Think of it as a giant emergent conversation comprised of trillions of participants, all helping to make sense of the same subject -- our global self identity -- together. It could even have real-time views that are animated and alive -- like a functional brain image scan -- so that people could see the virtual neurons and pathways in the global brain firing as they watch.

If this global self-representation existed, I would want to subscribe to it as a data feed on my desktop. I would want to run it in a dashboard in the upper right corner of my monitor -- that I could expand at any time to explore further. It would provide me with alerts when events transpired that matched my particular interests, causes, or relationships. It would solicit my opinions and votes on issues of importance and interest to me. It would simultaneously function as my window to the world, and the world's window to me. It would be my way of participating in the meta-level whole, whenever I wanted to. I could tell it my opinions about key issues, current events, problems, people, organizations, or even legislative proposals. I could tell it about the quality of life from my perspective, where I am living, in my industry and demographic niche. I could tell it about my hopes and fears for the future. I could tell it what I think is cool, or not cool, interesting or not interesting, good or bad, etc. I could tell it what news I was reading and what I think is noteworthy or important. And it would listen and learn, and take my contributions into account democratically along with those of billions of other people just like me all around the world. From this would emerge global visualizations and reports about what we are all thinking and doing, in aggregate, that I could track and respond to. Linked from these flows I could then find relevant news, conversations, organizations, people, products, services, events, and knowledge. And from all of this would emerge something greater than anything I can yet imagine -- a thought process too big for any one human mind to contain.

I want to build this. I want to build the planetary Self. I am not suggesting that we build the entire global mind, I am just suggesting that we build the part of the system that functions as its collective self-awareness. The rest of the global mind is already there, as raw potential at least, and doesn't have to be built. The Web, human minds, software agents, and organizations already exist. Their collective state just needs to be reflected in a single virtual mirror. As soon as this mirror exists they can begin to collectively self-organize and behave more intelligently, simply because they will have, for the first time, a way of measuring their collective state and behavior. Once there is a central collective self-awareness loop, the intelligence of the global mind will emerge and self-organize naturally over time. This collective self-awareness infrastructure is the central enabling technology that has to be there first for the next-leap in intelligence of the global mind to evolve.

Project Structure

I think this should be created as a non-profit open-source project. In fact, that is the only way that it can have legitimacy -- it must be independent of any government, cultural or commercial perspective. It must be by and for the people, as purely and cleanly as possible. My guess is that to build this properly we would need to create a distributed grid computing system to collect, compute, visualize and distribute the data -- it could be similar to SETI@Home; everyone could help host it. At the center of this grid, or perhaps in a set of supernodes, would be a vast supercomputing array that would manage the grid, do focused computations and data fusion operations. There would also need to be some serious money behind this project as well -- perhaps from major foundations and donors. This system would be a global resource of potential incalculable value to the future of human evolution. It would be a project worth funding.

My Past Writing On This Topic

A Physics of Ideas: Measuring the Physical Properties of Memes
Towards a Worldwide Database
The Metaweb: A Graph of the Future
From Semantic Web to Global Mind
The Birth of the Metaweb
Are Organizations Organisms?
From Application-Centric to Data-Centric Computing
The Human Menome Project

Other Noteworthy Projects

Principia Cybernetica -- the Global Mind Group
The Global Consciousness Project
W3C - The Semantic Web Working Group
Amazon's Mechanical Turk
CHI -- Harnessing Networks of Humans

Big Thinkers' Most Dangerous Ideas

The Edge has published mini-essays by 119 "big thinkers" on their "most dangerous ideas" -- fun reading.

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

 

A New Kind of Memory Aid

I recently read a report of new neuroscience research in which researchers are able to predict what a person will recall by analyzing their brainstate. You can read a summary here.

This reminds me of an idea I had a while back for using biofeedback to guide brainstates, in order to improve memory. Here's a hypothetical experiment that illustrates the idea. Show a person a set of photographs, and while they are observing each photo use functional brain imaging to record their brainstate. Later, show them the same photos several more times and make additional recordings of their brainstate, in order to generate a database of brainstates that correspond to their perception of each photo. Next, select a photo secretly (without telling the human subject) and lookup its corresponding recorded brainstates in the database. Then, guide the human subject to generate a brainstate that corresponds to the secretly chosen photo using biofeedback that is tied to their real-time brainstate. For example, provide the human subject with a sound or a computer image that corresponds to their real-time brainstate, and which provides them with positive or negative feedback based on the "distance" from their present brainstate to the desired target brainstate, enabling them to guide their brainstate the correct configuration. After the subject becomes accustomed to using the biofeedback system, apply it to guide them to generate a brainstate that matches or is closely within range of the desired brainstates for the selected photo. Then ask the subject to report which photo they are thinking of. We can measure how well the method works by the accuracy by which the subject reports thinking of the photo we selected originally.

If this process works it could be used someday as a new kind of memory aid. For example, suppose that someday functional brain imaging gets small and portable, or even wearable or implantable, so that everyone has access to their real-time brainstate data. When they want to "remember" something they simply hit the "record" button on their personal brainstate recorder and it measures their brainstate while they are thinking of and/or perceiving what they want to recall. Then they simply give this dataset a label or filename in their personal memory database. Later when they want to recall a specific thing, they just select the label and the system uses biofeedback to guide them back to generating that brainstate, at which point they can then recall whatever it is they were trying to remember.

Mathematical Model of Surprise

A group of computer scientists have come up with a mathematical technique to detect surprising features in dense information streams. They tested their method by comparing it to what human's considered surprising, and the results were... surprisingly good! A mathematical model of surprise could be very useful in next-generation information systems, user-interfaces, situation rooms, and even fighter jet cockpits, for filtering signal from noise and helping to focus attention on what's most important at a given time.

Boy in Nepal Said to go Without Food or Water for 6 Months

From the Fringe Department... This article is making the rounds today. It's about a 15 year old boy in Nepal (see the picture) who is said to have been meditating under a tree without food or water, or even moving or going the bathroom, for 6 months. Interesting. Although unfortunately, now that he has been "discovered" I wonder if he'll have any peace from the crowds of onlookers? Jeez, can't a guy just be left alone to meditate without food or water for 6 months in peace anymore??? What is this world coming to?

New Study: Human Hands, Feet and Foreheads Emit Light

Now this is really interesting! New research has found that certain parts of the body emit measurable numbers of photons. This may open up new diagnostic techniques. But that's just the beginning. Spiritual healers from many different faiths have long said that they experience light coming from their hands, and can feel (and even see) energy from the hands, feet and heads of other people. And of course there's the classical image of halos around the heads of saints, which can be taken metaphorically, or perhaps literally, in light of this new research. I wonder if the levels of light coming from different people indicates not only health, but perhaps alertness, stress levels, or state of mind. There are many interesting possibilities for this research...

Sept. 6, 2005 — Human hands glow, but fingernails release the most light, according to a recent study that found all parts of the hand emit detectable levels of light.

The findings support prior research that suggested most living things, including plants, release light. Since disease and illness appear to affect the strength and pattern of the glow, the discovery might lead to less-invasive ways of diagnosing patients.

Mitsuo Hiramatsu, a scientist at the Central Research Laboratory at Hamamatsu Photonics in Japan, who led the research, told Discovery News that the hands are not the only parts of the body that shine light by releasing photons, or tiny, energized increments of light.

"Not only the hands, but also the forehead and bottoms of our feet emit photons," Hiramatsu said, and added that in terms of hands "the presence of photons means that our hands are producing light all of the time."

The light is invisible to the naked eye, so Hiramatsu and his team used a powerful photon counter to "see"it. 

The detector found that fingernails release 60 photons, fingers release 40 and the palms are the dimmest of all, with 20 photons measured.

  The findings are published in the current Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology. 

Turing's Cathedral

George Dyson wrote a nice piece on his impressions from a visit to Google, and some speculations about the future of AI on the Net.

A Possible Future of Physics

Today I read this nice article which provides a short consumer-friendly overview of the history of the Digital Physics paradigm. Digital Physics is not mainstream physics -- but it is growing and someday could become huge. It brings together computer scientists and physicists in an interdisciplinary approach to physics. While many advocates simply take the position that some physical processes resemble computations, the most extreme would go so far as to posit that the universe is actually a giant computation taking place on some sort of primordial computing fabric.

I've been involved with this field since the 1980's when, as a college student at Oberlin, I got interested in cellular automata as a tool for modelling both the brain and the universe. This led to summer research on cellular automata simulations of physical systems on the CAM-6 parallel processor at the lab of Tomasso Toffoli and Norman Margolus at MIT. They were among the first experimentalists in the digital physics field -- running massive cellular automata simulations of fluid dynamics, population biology, optics, and spin glasses, among other things. Since then I've had the opportunity to spend some time with both Ed Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram, discussing the future of digital physics and the quest for a Theory of Everything.

I think that the Digital Physics is the The Next Revolution in physics. But it may still be another 50 to 100 years before it really takes root. But it's just the beginning of what I think may be an ongoing process of future physical models. Below, I speculate about where this trend will lead us (disclaimer: Wild Speculation ahead: Read at your own risk!)

Human-Brained Monkeys Pose Ethical Challenge

A cutting-edge research program is injecting human brain cells into monkey brains, to investigate whether this causes their brains to become more "human." This poses a potential ethical challenge: If the monkeys do become more human, would they be considered "human subjects" and be protected by ethical guidelines governing research onto humans? At which point does a monkey qualify as a legal Person? Could a more humanlinke monkey, or a state attorney on it's behalf, file suit against scientists who harmed it or deprived it of its rights? If a monkey becomes more humanlike, do we have the right to hold it against its will? Super-intelligent monkeys used to be the stuff of the Wizard of Oz, and Flash Gordon science fiction -- now we're actually making them --  what a world we live in! Hey, I have an idea, instead of trying to make monkeys more like men, could we figure out a way to make men LESS like monkeys??? Let's start with the politicians!

African Gray Parrot Understands Concept of Zero

Alex is a very smart parrot indeed. To the surprise of researchers, he understands the concept of zero, something which human children don't grasp until they are 2 or 3 years old. Read more about Alex here.

Researchers Discover Sense of Fair Play and Morality Among Animals

Although it has always seemed obvious to me that animals have emotions and complex personalities, it's taken the scientific community a long time to reach that conclusion. This article describes new findings in the field of animal behavior which indicate that not only do animals have emotions, but they also have a level of ethics, fair-play and morality that was previously thought to be impossible.

Extracting Video from Cat Brains

Fascinating article about research which has successfully extracted video from monitoring cat neurons. They have actually reconstructed what the cat actually saw from its neural signals. This opens the door to recording our day-to-day perceptions (lifelogs) and perhaps even to recording our dreams. And of course there might be options for playback as well. This is cool stuff.

US Scientists Bring Dogs Back from Dead

A new technique has been successfully tested which appears to be able to bring dogs back to life after 3 hours of being clinically dead. This research may hold promise not only for saving lives in cases where clinical death happens before surgery can be performed or completed, but also perhaps for preserving and later reanimating healthy people who simply want to wake up in the future. It's a new approach to suspended animation. Sounds awefully cold though...

Brain Has Particular Neurons for Recognizing Celebrities and Other Concepts

In a very interesting new finding, researchers have discovered the people's brains contain individual neurons, or small groups of neurons, that seem exist only to recognize particular people or concepts. This would imply that there is one neuron, or at least a small group of neurons, in our brains for every unique thing that we know. However, that raises certain questions -- for example, if this is true, then the brain should be a lot larger since there wouldn't be room to represent everything a typical adult knows with unique neurons in that amount of space. On the other hand, perhaps the memories are not stored on the neuronal level at all, but instead are stored and computed on the sub-neuronal tubulin "quantum computing" level, which is the subject of much research these days. For more on that check out this book on research into quantum computing in the brain (found by: Josh).

Simulated Universes and the Nature of Consciousness

Researchers in Europe have completed the first phase of what may be the largest computational physics experiment in history: They built and ran a simulated universe through 14 billion years of development. The experiment used up 25 million megabytes of memory, and the biggest supercomputer in Europe for a month. The result was a "Cube of Creation" of 20 billion light years per side, containing 20 million simulated galaxies. Now they're studying it to see what evolved. They hope to gain insights into the function of black holes, and other cosmological principles. This is an amazing piece of work -- definitely the future of cosmology research.

In previous articles, I've speculated that our own universe might also be such a simulation, perhaps run by a much more advanced civilization in a meta-universe outside ours. But in fact, I think our universe is probably quite different from a mere computer simulation (despite how cool it would be if it were a computer simulation!) -- because I don't believe we can explain everything there is in terms of information and computation: I think consciousness doesn't fit in that model.  After exploring this issue for more than 20 years from the perspectives of computer science and physics, philosophy and religion, I've come to believe that consciousness cannot be reduce to, or emerge from, information or computation. As far as I can tell, it's something at least as or more fundamental than space, time, matter and energy. I would even go so far as to say that we won't ever really understand what the universe is or how it develops or functions without first understanding consciousness much more deeply.

Time Traveler Convention and Further Thoughts

There's a very interesting event taking place at MIT tonight -- the first (and only?) Time Traveler Convention. The organizers are inviting anyone in the future who is capable of time travel to travel back to the geo coordinates of this event (to be held at MIT) and attend it, along with proof that they are from the future. In order to increase the chances that this event will be discovered by the relevant people in the future, the organizers have asked as many people as possible to link to the event and have also asked people to insert acid-free paper containing the coordinates of the event into library books that are likely to be read in the future.

This event is an experiment that attempts to test whether in fact time travel will be invented in our future. The hypothesis is that if time travel is possible, and if it is discovered, and if future time-travel-capable beings also find out about this MIT Convention, then they will travel back in time to the event. Of course this begs the question of whether they actually would attend this event even if they could -- for example, perhaps they prefer to remain secret at this time? Or perhaps if they prove to us that time travel is possible at this moment in our evolution it might influence their timeline such that it could risk interfering with their past discovery of time travel or risk the technology ending up in the wrong hands in the future. Or maybe, just maybe, they are simply too "cool" to travel all that distance backwards in time (and spend who knows how much money to do so) just to have cheap chips and dip for an hour or two with a room full of MIT nerds? I mean hey, if I could travel backwards in time would I go to a geek gathering at MIT or would I go somewhere more fun (and with better food and drinks too) like an imperial party in ancient Rome?

In any case, the various potential risks of time travel might outweigh the potential benefit of any actual time travelers attending the MIT event. But let's hope that some real live time travelers do show up at the event. I know one thing for certain, if anyone does show up from the future they will probably be geeks too, since anyone who isn't a geek probably has other parties higher on their list.

Incidentally, this event reminds me of a similar proposal I came up with last year for building a receiver that might be able to receive a message from the future. While time travel by macroscopic things like people might be difficult or impossible due to the amount of energy required and the potential negative impact on the physical structure of the traveler, sending messages backwards in time could be more practical. Such messages could be comprised of subatomic particles or tiny black holes or local disturbances in fundamental fields or physical constants. The question is, how to design a receiver that could receive messages sent by beings in the future? If anyone can think of how to do this, blog about it and link to this article (since comments are off); I'll see your post via the trackbacks hopefully and if it's a really good idea I'll link to it from this article. If someone can design and actually build a suitable receiver then just like the MIT event, it could be publicized widely in the hopes that in the future if and when there is suitable technology, someone will send a message to it.

Links:

My friend, Tom Meyer, suggests that we might be able to utilize existing particle accelerators as "receivers" -- his idea is that we publicize that we will be analyzing the data from a particular device for anomalies placed there as messages to us. It's an intriquing proposal. Would it work?

About Sony's Brain Stimulation Patent

A number of readers sent me links this week about the new Sony patent for ultrasonic neural stimulation.  It is definitely interesting and could represent a useful new approach to non-invasive brainstate manipulation. However, it is by no means anywhere near being useful for entertainment, virtual reality, or mind control. Our understanding of how the brain works is still far too primitive. Even if the Sony technology was actually working (which it is not, by the way -- it is just an idea, no working prototype was built or tested), it would be a long time before we would know where to aim it. By the time neuroscience has reached a point where thoughts can be stimulated reliably by an external source, this Sony patent and its continuations will have long-since expired. I am guessing we are at least 100 years away from having enough of an understanding of the brain for such a technology to be applicable to mass markets. Meanwhile it might be a useful tool for research -- it's certainly more precise than magnetic stimulation, and it is a lot less damaging than creating physical lesions. It will be interesting to see where this goes, if anywhere. But even if it does go somewhere, there is a chance that mere neural stimulation may not be enough to generate fully-immersive states of consciousness. While such stimulation may trigger particular memories or maybe even perceptual experiences, the complexity required to generate a complete experience -- encompassing all sensory modalities and with enough internal detail and logical consistency to be believable -- is far beyond what we can presently even imagine. In the end, I think it would be more fruitful to leverage the brain's ability to generate dreams than to attempt to build conscious experiences from scratch. We should really do more research into the mechanism of dreaming, and in particular, into the mechanisms of lucid dreaming. By combining hypnosis with lucid dreaming we can create completely immersive states of consciousness today, without any special technology or neural stimulation. And these "simulations" are already far richer and more interactive than anything Sony will come up with in the next several hundred years.

Confabulation: New Theory of Cognition Announced

After 30 years of research, a very interesting new theory of cognition has been announced. The theory posits that all human cognition and behavior is based on just one simple, non-algorithmic procedure that has been named confabulation. If the theory is correct it could offer a radical new approach to artificial intelligence, knowledge discovery, and knowledge management.

Past Life Memories of Children

Dr. Ian Stevenson has amassed 3000 documented cases of children remembering events from past lives.

In each case of children’s past life memory, Dr. Stevenson methodically documents the child's statements.  Then he identifies the deceased person the child remembers being, and verifies the facts of the deceased person's life that match the child's memory. He even matches birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records. His strict methods systematically rule out all possible "normal" explanations for the child’s memories.

Dr. Stevenson has devoted the last forty years to the scientific documentation of past life memories of children from all over the world. He has over 3000 cases in his files.  Many people, including skeptics and scholars, agree that these cases offer the best evidence yet for reincarnation.

Dr. Stevenson's credentials are impeccable. He is a medical doctor and had many scholarly papers to his credit before he began paranormal research.  He is the former head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and now is Director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia.

As one reviewer put it, "Either Dr. Stevenson is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known as the Galileo of the 20th century." (Dr Harold Lief in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease)

Learn more about Dr. Stevenson's research here.

Brain Stimulation Helmet for your PC

Years ago I read about Persinger's work on the induction of unusual states of consciousness using magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobe and always wanted to try it -- unfortunately the only way to do that was to go to his lab (assuming you could get invited). The Shakti Helmet brings this technology to the masses. The Shakti Helmet is a device for stimulating your brain using the same types of rotating magnetic fields that Persinger tested, via your PC. Very interesting. I want one. I just bought one. This is a must-have addition to my growing collection of experimental devices. What else have I got in my arsenal, you ask? I have a top-of-the-line Rife Machine, the best binaural sound and light machine, a device that detects REM sleep and stimulates lucid dreaming, and several other similar devices.

New Finding: Brain Computes in Trinary not Binary

MIT neuroscientist, Guosong Liu, has found that human neurons compute in trinary, using signals that are the equivalents of -1, 0 and 1. By contrast, all computers compute in binary, using just 0 and 1. Because the units of trinary computation can in some cases be additive (e.g. 1+1=2) or can "cancel out" (e.g. -1 + 1 = 0), the human brain is able to ignore information during computation, says Liu, something which present computers cannot do. Liu believes the ability for trinary computations to cancel out in some cases will enable next-generation computers to ignore information, and this will fundamentally change computing as we know it.

A Machine That Sees The Future?

This article provides an overview of the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton, which has found that the behavior of a network of specially shielded random number generators deviates from stasticial randomness prior to major world events. I have been following this project for several years and have made various suggestions for further experiments to test the system. It is very intriguing.

An Incredible Flash Production -- Must See!

I was fortunate enough to wander across this amazing online Flash presentation that reveals the hidden meaning of the film, "2001." It's a thoroughly engaging, brilliantly produced, fascinating production -- one of the best uses of Flash animation that I've ever seen. It also makes some really interesting points about human evolution, our relationship to our tools, and the future. It's a must-see -- takes about 20 minutes to go through it, and well worth it! -- also make sure to answer their little survey at the end for a hint about their next production...

Scientists Discuss their Beliefs in the Unknown

The New York Times has published a wonderful and fascinating set of mini-essays by leading scientists about their beliefs in the unknkown and unexplained -- from consciousness, to God, to life on other worlds, and the existence of true love.  There are some terrific thoughts in it -- one of thoses rare articles that breaks through stereotypes and opens the door to new paradigms. We rarely hear scientific voices venturing this far. It's a great read for anyone interested in science and the Big Mysteries of life, the universe and everything... (you have to register with NYT to read it if you haven't already; do it -- it's worth it to read just this article alone!). (Thanks to Joe Rockmore for finding this article!)

Study Disputes Randomness of Dreams

A new study has found that particular types of dreams take place during different phases of sleep, lending credence to the theory that dreams are not random.