This Blog has Moved to NovaSpivack.com

The Next Mozart?

This just in: Read this article about an amazing child prodigy who may be one of the greatest musical geniuses in 200 years. Not only can he compose like a master, but he can compose multiple pieces of music at once! How does he do it? It's a bit spooky -- maybe he's the reincarnation of Mozart? Or maybe his brain is just different in a special way?

Brain Study Reveals Differences Between Semantic and Episodic Memory

This interesting new brain study reveals processing differences between Semantic Memory and Episodic Memory in human brains. Nature performs these functions differently, and there is probably a good reason why that is so. On the Web we don't really have an equivalent of Episodic Memory or Semantic Memory yet... but we're working on it!

If the Universe is a Simulation, then What?

Here's an interesting speculation. Assume for the moment that our universe is in fact a simulation runnning on a vast computing system created a race of beings that is far more advanced than we can presently imagine. The next logical question would be, "Why would an advanced civilization want or need to undertake such a project?"

Zapping Your Brain Improves Verbal Skills

New research has found that running a mild electric current through your brain can significantly boost your verbal skills, with no side-effects, as far as anyone knows so far. Very interesting. It appears to decrease the firing threshold of neurons in the path of the current. This research was applied mainly to the frontal lobe of the brain. I wonder what it might do to other brain regions? Fascinating discovery.

Flying by Brain

This is pretty cool stuff -- growing brains using live tissue and then teaching them to control software:

from an article in Slashdot: "Scientists at the University of Florida made a living 'brain' by extracting 25,000 neurons from a rat's brain and culturing them inside a glass dish. Then, the neurons began to extend lines to each other, creating a living neural network between them. The dish had a grid of 60 electrodes connected to a computer running a flight simulator. The scientists were able to train the 'brain' to control the plane in the simulator and to react to conditions of the plane. Are we getting closer to create an artificially made conscious being, or perhaps, a living computer?" AlphaJoe was one of several readers to add a link to Wired's article on the experiment.

New Technique Turns Animals into Drones; Humans Next?

Scientists have discovered that by blocking the effect of a gene called D2 in a particular part of the brain they can transform normal monkeys into "drones" that will work as hard as they can, continuously, on repetitive tasks, without needing any expection of reward to keep going. In other words, they can transform regular monkeys into the primate-equivalent of worker-bee's. Normally monkeys (and most humans) tend to work hardest only when they expect a reward, and in particular they don't usually sustain high productivity on endless repetitive tasks without some sort of "light at the end of the tunnel." But not anymore; It's a Brave New World folks -- this same drone-gene is expected to also function the same way in humans, raising the spectre of Aldous Huxley's Epsilon (human drone worker) Caste becoming a reality. (New product idea -- Dronicine -- the little grey pill that makes you a drone!). It's a scary thought -- but then again, maybe a daily dose of this stuff would have made junior high-school more bearable. Come to think of it by the way, for those of you (like me) who find themselves working 12 hours a day for no reason (and without any big reward in sight for that matter), maybe we're already drones???

Minding the Planet: From Semantic Web to Global Mind

Draft 1.1 for Review (integrates some fixes from readers)
Nova Spivack (www.mindingtheplanet.net)

INTRODUCTION

This article presents some thoughts about the future of intelligence on Earth. In particular, I discuss the similarities between the Internet and the brain, and how I believe the emerging Semantic Web will make this similarity even greater.

DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE

The Semantic Web enables the formal communication of a higher level of language -- metalanguage. Metalanguage is language about language -- language that encodes knowledge about how to interpret and use information. Metalanguages – particularly semantic metalanguages for encoding relationships between information and systems of concepts – enable a new layer of communication and processing. The combination of computing networks with semantic metalanguages represents a major leap in the history of communication and intelligence.

The invention of written language long ago changed the economics of communication by making it possible for information to be represented and shared independently of human minds. This made it less costly to develop and spread ideas widely across populations in space and time. Similarly, the emergence of software based on semantic metalanguages will dramatically change the economics not only of information distribution, but of intelligence -- the act of processing and using information.

Semantic metalanguages provide a way to formally express, distribute and share the knowledge necessary to interpret and use information, independently of the human mind. In other words, they make it possible not just to write down and share information, but also to encode and share the background necessary for intelligently making use of that information. Prior to the invention of such a means to share this background knowledge about information, although information could be written and shared, the recipients of such information had to be intelligent and appropriately knowledgeable in advance in order to understand it. Semantic metalanguages remove this restriction by making it possible to distill the knowledge necessary to understand information into a form that can be shared just as easily as the information itself.

The recipients of information – whether humans or software – no longer have to know in advance (or attempt to deduce) how to interpret and use the information; this knowledge is explicitly coded in the metalanguage about the information. This is important for artificial intelligence because it means that expertise for specific domains does not have to be hard-coded into programs anymore -- instead programs simply need to know how to interpret the metalanguage. By adding semantic metalanguage statements to information data becomes “smarter,” and programs can therefore become “thinner.” Once programs can speak this metalanguage they can easily import and use knowledge about any particular domain, if and when needed, so long as that knowledge is expressed in the metalanguage.

In other words, whereas basic written languages simply make raw information portable, semantic metalanguages make knowledge (conceptual systems) and even intelligence (procedures for processing knowledge) about information portable. They make it possible for knowledge and intelligence to be formally expressed, stored digitally, and shared independently of any particular minds or programs. This radically changes the economics of communicating knowledge and of accessing and training intelligence. It makes it possible for intelligence to be more quickly, easily and broadly distributed across time, space and populations of not only humans but also of software programs.

The emergence of standards for sharing semantic metalanguage statements that encode the meaning of information will catalyze a new era of distributed knowledge and intelligence on the Internet. This will effectively “make the Internet smarter.” Not just monolithic expert systems and complex neural networks, but even simple desktop programs and online software agents will begin to have access to a vast decentralized reserve of knowledge and intelligence.

The externalization, standardization and sharing of knowledge and intelligence in this manner, will make it possible for communities of humans and software agents to collaborate on cognition, not just on information. As this happens and becomes increasingly linked into our daily lives and tools, the "network effect" will deliver increasing returns. While today most of the intelligence on Earth still resides within human brains, In the near future, perhaps even within our lifetimes, the vast majority of intelligence will exist outside of human brains on the Semantic Web.

THE INTERNET IS A BRAIN AND THE WEB IS ITS MIND

Anyone familiar with the architecture and dynamics of the human nervous system cannot help but notice the striking similarity between the brain and the Internet. But is this similarity more than a coincidence - is the Internet really a brain in its own right - the brain of our planet? And is its collective behavior intelligent - does it constitute a global mind? How might this collective form of intelligence compare to that of an individual human mind, or a group of human minds?

I believe that the Internet (the hardware) is already evolving into a distributed global brain, and its ongoing activity (the software, humans and data) represents the cognitive process of an increasingly intelligent global mind. This global mind is not centrally organized or controlled, rather it is a bottom-up, emergent, self-organizing phenomenon formed from flows of trillions of information-processing events comprised of billions of independent information processors.

As with other types of emergent computing systems, for example John Conway’s familiar cellular automaton “The Game of Life,” on the Internet large scale homeostatic systems and seemingly intentional or guided information processes naturally emerge and interact within it. The emergence of sophisticated information systems does not require top-down design or control, it can happen in an evolutionary bottom-up manner as well.

Like a human brain, the Internet is a vast distributed computing network comprised of billions of interacting parallel processors. These processors include individual human beings as well as software programs, and systems of them such as organizations, which can all be referred to as "agents" in this system. Just as the computational power of the human brain as a whole is vastly greater than that of any of the individual neurons or systems within it, the computational power of the Internet is vastly beyond any of the individual agents it contains. Just as the human brain is not merely the sum of its parts, the Internet is more than the sum of its parts - like other types of distributed emergent computing systems, it benefits from the network effect. The power of the system grows exponentially as agents and connections between them are added.

The human brain is enabled by an infrastructure comprised of networks of organic neurons, dendrites, synapses and protocols for processing chemical and electrical messages. The Internet is enabled by an infrastructure of synthetic computers, communications networks, interfaces, and protocols for processing digital information structures. The Internet also interfaces with organic components however – the human beings who are connected to it. In that sense the Internet is not merely an inorganic system – it could not function without help from humans, for the moment at least. The Internet may not be organized in exactly the same form as the human brain, but it is at least safe to say it is an extension of it.

The brain provides a memory system for storing, locating and recalling information. The Internet also provides shared address spaces and protocols for using them. This enables agents to participate in collaborative cognition in a completely decentralized manner. It also provides a standardized shared environment in which information may be stored, addressed and retrieved by any agent of the system. This shared information space functions as the collective memory of the global mind.

Just as no individual neuron in the human brain could be said to have the same form or degree of intelligence as the brain as-a-whole - we individual humans cannot possibly comprehend the distributed intelligence that is evolving on the Internet. But we are part of it nonetheless, whether we know it or not.  The global mind is emerging all around us, and via us, is our creation but it is already becoming independent of us - truly it represents the evolution of a new form of meta-level intelligence that has never before existed on our planet.

Although we created it, the Internet is already far beyond our control or comprehension - it surrounds us and penetrates our world - it is inside our buildings, our tools, our vehicles, and it connects us together and modulates our interactions. As this process continues and the human body and biology begins to be networked into this system we will literally become part of this network - it will become an extension of our nervous systems and eventually, via brain-computer interfaces, it will be an extension of our senses and our minds. Eventually the distinction between humans and machines, and the individual and the collective, will gradually start to dissolve, along with the distinction between human and artificial forms of intelligence.

I'm Learning Tibetan

Well, I'm finally doing it -- I've started studying Classical Tibetan. After many years of procrastinating I've taken the leap. You may wonder why anyone would need to know Classical Tibetan -- the answer is that it is the language used in all the classical Tibetan Buddhist texts. One of my main interests in life -- although not one that is featured in this blog -- is Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, which after studying almost everything else, is the only philosophical tradition that is both scientific and useful enough to be of any practical value, in my opinion. At this point I've read just about every translation of classical Tibetan texts available in English, so the only way I will be able to go further is to read the original Tibetan texts themselves -- there are tens of thousands of incredibly profound and important texts that haven't been translated yet. I'm very excited about being able to read these myself. The next step after that will be to learn Modern Tibetan so I can actually speak to Tibetans, but that will be later on. So currently I am trying to reshape my brain to write and think in Tibetan, a language that is sort of like a cross between Chinese, Hungarian and Sanskrit! Yikes -- it's a completely new way of thinking and requires incredible concentration, at least at this stage -- but I'm hoping that after a few months it will start getting easier. Wish me luck! And by the way if you are serious about learning Tibetan I can recommend a great tutor.

New Version of My "Metaweb" Graph -- The Future of the Net

Notes:

Many people have requested this graph and so I am posting my latest version of it. The Metaweb is the coming "intelligent Web" that is evolving from the convergence of the Web, Social Software and the Semantic Web. The Metaweb is starting to emerge as we shift from a Web focused on information to a Web focused on relationships between things --- what I call "The Relationship Web" or the "Relationship Revolution."

We see early signs of this shift to a Web of relationships in the sudden growth of social networking systems. As the semantics of these relationships continue to evolve the richness of the "arcs" will begin to rival that of the "nodes" that make up the network.

This is similar to the human brain -- individual neurons are not particularly important or effective on their own, rather it is the vast networks of relationships that connect them that encode knowledge and ultimately enable intelligence. And like the human brain, in the future Metaweb, technologies will emerge to enable the equivalent of "spreading activation" to propagate across the network of nodes and arcs. This will provide a means of automatically growing links, weighting links, making recommendations, and learning across distributed graphs of nodes and links. This may resemble a sort of "Hebbian learning" across the link structure of the network -- enhancing the strength of frequently used connections and dampening less used links, and even growing new transitive links when appropriate.

As the intelligence with which such processes unfolds, in a totally decentralized and grassroots manner, we will begin to see signs of emergent "transhuman" intelligences on the network. Web services are the beginning of this -- but imagine if they were connected to autonomous intelligent agents, roaming the network and able to interact with one another, Web sites, and even people. These next-layer intelligences will begin to function as brokers, associators, editors, publishers, recommenders, advertisers, researchers, defenders, buyers, sellers, monitors, aggregators, distributors, integrators, translators, and also as knowledge-stewards responsible for constantly improving the structure and quality of subsets of the Web that they oversee. And while many of these agents will be able to interact intelligently with humans, not all of them will -- most will probably just have interfaces for interacting with other agents.

Vast systems of "hybrid intelligence" (humans + intelligent software) will form -- for example, next-generation communities that intelligently self-organize around emerging topics and trends, smart marketplaces that self-optimize to reduce the cost of transactions for their participants, 'group minds' and 'enterprise minds' that embody and manage the collective cognitiion of teams and organizations, and knowledge networks that function to enable distributed collective intelligence among networks of indivdiuals, across communities and business-relationships.

As the network becomes increasingly autonomous and self-organizing we may say that the network-as-a-whole is becoming "intelligent." But it will be several steps beyond that before it finally "wakes up" -- when the various processes of the network reach that point at which the entire system truly functions as a coordinated, self-aware intelligence. This will require the formation of many higher layers of intelligence -- leading to something that functions like the cerebral cortex in humans. It will also require something that functions as its virtual "self-awareness" -- an internal process of meta-level self-representation, self-projection, self-feedback, self-analysis and self-improvement within the network. For a map of how this may actually unfold over time we might look at the evolutionary history of nervous systems on Earth.

As structures that provide virtual higher-order cognition and self-awareness to the network emerge, connect to one another, and gain sophistication, the Global Brain will self-organize into a Global Mind -- the intelligence of the whole will begin to outpace the intelligence of any of its parts and thus it will cross the threshold from being just a "bunch of interacting parts" to "a new higher-order whole" in its own right -- a global intelligent Metaweb for our planet.

Brainwave Helmet Controls Video Game

Wow. This is a very cool new project -- controlling video games with a braincap.

Neuromarketing and Memetic Attenuation

This article discusses new research in how the brain makes buying decisions and other choices -- what is now called "neuromarketing". Neuromarketing researchers seek to discover, and influence, the neurological forces at work inside the mind of potential customers. According to the article, most decisions are made subconsciously and are not necessarily rational at all - in fact they may be primarily governed by emotions and other more subtle cognitive factors such as identity and sense of self. For example, when studied under a functional MRI, the reward centers of brains of subjects who were given "The Pepsi Challenge" lit up when they tasted Pepsi, but Coke actually lit up the parts of the brain responsible for "sense of self" -- a much deeper response. In other words, the Coke brand is somehow connected to deeper neurological structures than Pepsi.

Neuromarketing is interesting -- it's actually something I've been thinking about on my own in an entirely different context. What I am interested in is the question of "What makes people decide that a given meme is 'hot'?" Each of us is immersed in a sea of memes -- we are literally bombarded with thousands or even millions of ideas, brands, products and other news every day -- But how do we decide which ones are "important," "cool," and "hot?" What causes the human brain to pick out certain of these memes at the expense of the others? In other words, how do we differentiate signal from noise, and how do we rank memetic signals in terms of their relative "importance?" Below I discuss some new ideas about how memes are perceived and ranked by the human brain.

Girl With X-Ray Eyes

I have come across several references to Natasha in the last week. It seems to be a well-documented case of extra-sensory medical perception. This type of perception is not at all uncommon among Tibetan lamas and Chinese Taoists that I have studied with, and I have heard from friends who are close to Native American and African healers, of people with similar abilities. There is also a well-known teenager named Adam who gained some notoriety with similar abilities -- although he is able to do it remotely. I wonder how this is possible?

A Very Smart Parrot

Here is a fascinating article about a parrot with a 950 word vocabulary, a sense of humor, and telepathy!

Neural Net that Invents Things

The Creativity Machine is a special application of neural networks based on the deliberate introduction of mathematical noise into the network. By adding noise after the network has been trained, the system is able to wander around slightly less rigidly, leading it to "free associate" and even to "dream" and "hallucinate." Stephen Thaler came up with this idea after becoming curious about what happens when the human brain dies. He began experimenting with deliberately killing his neural nets by randomly degrading the weights connecting the artificial neurons in the system to simulate cell death. He found that as they "died" the network generated memories, then fragmentary memories, and finally new conceptions made from the shards of memories. This led him to realize that he could stimulate artificial creativity in his neural nets by adding noise to the weights and then seeing what the system dreamed. In the past I spoke with him about this technology; now it looks like things are finally moving forward with it. Stephen is definitely a visionary.

Article on Cognitive Overload

Here is an interesting article on "Cognitive Overload" for those interesting in a more scholarly analysis of the subject. Nice work!

Study Shows Brain Solves Problems While Sleeping

And interesting study shows that people are shown a difficult math problem are 3 times more likely to figure out a hidden rule that solvesit after 8 hours of sleep. The brain seems to work in the background to solve problems. Actually, there are many examples of how the brain solves problems during sleep -- for example, dream-discovery is how the chemical structure of benzene was discovered. There are many other examples of this. I have experienced very detailed "working sessions" during my dreams in which I develop comprehensive designs and breakthrough new approaches to problems I work on during the day. I know a lot of other creative people who have similar experiences. Perhaps this could be a new way to solve problems: focus on them intently before going to sleep and perhaps that primes the brain to do background processing on the problem during REM sleep. This is testable. For example, provide a test subject with several problems to solve. Then randomly choose one to focus on as they go to sleep and later test to see if the chosen problem is more likely to be solved correctly, or is solved faster, than the other problems that were not targeted prior to sleep.

Now You Can Program Your Dreams...

The company in Japan that brought us the "BowLingual" dog-bark translator has now announced their new Dream Workshop device. They claim you can use it to program your dreams at night while you sleep. People who've tried it say it sometimes works. Only one minor problem... the dreams don't always go as planned...

Using Nanoparticles to Augment Human Brains...?

CNN posted an article today about the potential risk of nanotechnology on the human brain. Basically some research shows that nano-scale particles such as industrial waste, or even components of nanotechnologies, can migrate through the human circulatory system and eventually lodge in the brain. This could cause harmful effects. But on the other hand, maybe this "bug" is actually a "feature!"

The fact that this is possible could be used to introduce nanoscale computational devices into the human nervous system -- essentially splicing a distributed computer into a living human brain. Suppose the nanoparticles could establish an ad hoc local area network amongst themselves, and suppose they lodged throughout the human nervous system, attaching to neurons. Suddenly it might be possible to do real-time sensing -- and triggering -- of any neuron in the human body. And all of this could be monitored by an external computer system. This could enable amazing new biofeedback systems. But that's just the beginning -- because it might also enable people to "backup" their nervous systems -- including perhaps their memories and skills. It could also potentially enable software augmentation of human thinking as it happens -- an external computer network could interact with your own "internal network" and as you think or sense things, it could search the entire Net or an expert system, or the brains of other people in your network, and give you suggestions, knowledge, etc.

Essentially this could be a way to network humans to computers, the Internet, and then to other humans. This could enable future "group minds" and "collective intelligences" that we cannot even imagine yet. It could also enable humans to easily interact with virtual reality environments -- they could be overlaid onto their sensory experience to augment information (such as a visual scene being augmented with labels or diagrams etc.), or even to "switch channels" from this "reality" (which may also be virtual) that we experience to other synthetic realities that exist in our computer networks. It might even enable people to record their dreams, and/or enter the dreams of other people -- that would be the most advanced "virtual reality" possible.

Another interesting application of this technology might be to deliver neural drugs more effectively. It could also be used to facilitate interspecies communication -- for example imagine a system that could map between a human brain and a dolphin brain. You permeate both a human and dolphin's nervous systems with nanocomputing particles. First there is "learning phase" where an external system monitors them as they do things in order to learn how their brains work. Then it starts to learn how to map between them by observing how they interact with other organisms of their species and with their environments in order to figure out their language, communicat and memory representation schemes.

Once that is known it could directly map information between them, maybe even in real-time, enabling not only communication but even memory uploading and downloading. That would be cool -- imagine being able to do virtual telepresence into the nervous system of a dolphin as it swims around with its pod in the wild. You could "look through it's sense organs" as it swims around, and maybe even observe what it thinks and feels like -- sort a window into being someone else -- in this case someone who is of a different species. Among the many other applications of this technology of course there would be amazing potential in the arts, education, therapy, collaboration, entertainment, science, relationships, etc. and many other enjoyable diversions that people would probably figure out they could engage in once their nervous systems are networked.

Anyway the idea of permeating a human nervous system with networkable nanocomputers is definitely something to think about, or think twice about, as the case may be (pun intended!).

The Metaweb: The Global Mind Just Got Smarter

One of the many cool things about the Metaweb is that it functions as a vast bottom-up collaborative filtering system. RSS feeds represent perspectives of publishers. Because feed publishers can automatically or manually include content from other feeds they can "republish," annotate and filter content. Every feed is effectively a switch, routing content to and from other feeds. You are my filter. I am your filter.

Entire communities can collaboratively filter information, in a totally bottom-up way. The community as a whole acts to filter and route content in an emergent fashion, without any central coordination. On top of this sites can then provide value-added aggregation and information-refinery services by tracking memes across any number of feeds and then repackaging and redistributing them in virtual feeds for particular topics or interests. And these new feeds are fed right back into the collective mind, becoming raw materials for still other feeds that pick them up.

What we have here is the actual collective consciousness of humanity thinking collective thoughts in real-time, and we get to watch and participate! We are the "neurons" in the collective minds of our organizations, communities, marketplaces. Our postings comprise the memes, the thoughts, in these collective thought processes. Already the Metaweb is thinking thoughts that no individual can comprehend -- they are too big, too distributed, too complex. As the interactions of millions of people, groups and memes evolve we will see increasing layers of intelligence taking place in the Metaweb.

New Research Shows Animals Can Think About Thought

This article discusses new experiments that seem to indicate that certain animals can think about their own cognition -- what is called "metacognition." For example, if given a memory task, some animals such as bottlenose dolphins, are capable of indicating that they are "not sure" -- in other words that they "don't know" the answer. This is evidence that they are able to think about the fact that they don't know the answer. It's an interesting read.

Is Reality Really Real? The Late Philosopher Donald Davidson's Problematic Answer...

Here's an article about an interesting modern theory that purports to "prove" that "reality" is not just an illusion. It's a bit of a complicated appeal to the basis of language, but makes some good points. However, I think there may be a fundamental flaw at the very root of the argument.

Reverse Speech, the First 20 Years...

According to Reverse Speech theorists the mind embeds reverse messages in ordinary speech. This is not so outlandish a claim -- it is known that the brain uses reversal at a very fundamental level in language and perception. Check out this summary of reverse speech results to see some very interesting cases -- in particular relating to speeches done by political leaders. I don't know whether this phenomenon is scientifically legit, but I have been following it for about 6 years. It is quite interesting.

Are Brains Really Necessary?

It turns out that some people who have almost no brain tissue are able to perform as or more intelligently than people with normal brains. This article discusses some documented cases. I personally met someone who graduated from Harvard graduate school and then went on to be a senior strategist in the computer industry. Later during an unrelated x-ray of his head they discovered that he had less than half of a normal brain! I'm not kidding -- this is true. He was highly intelligent and well-respected in his field; nobody would have ever suspected that he was pretty much brainless. Of course the obvious social commentary here is irresistable -- maybe there are many more brainless people who graduated from Harvard??? In any case, the interesting point here is not that you don't need a brain to graduate from Harvard, but rather that it appears that in some documented cases people with little to no brain tissue are able to demonstrate full cognitive abilties. If that is the case, then (a) what is the brain for?, and (b) what is enabling them to think without a brain?

Through The Looking Glasses?

Here's a weird find: The makers of these new sunglasses claim they are designed to specifically stimulate the right and left hemispheres of the brain, bringing the wearer into an altered state.

Computers Getting Smarter; Humans Getting Stupider

If artificial intelligence happens and computers ever become intelligent, will that mean that humans are stupider than we thought? After all, "intelligence" is a relative term isn't it? Will humans someday compete to be as intelligent as computers? Will computers someday devise a test for whether humans are intelligent or not, and decide that we don't pass? Will we someday be judged as "insentient" by a self-proclaimed "sentient" computer? If a computer judged you as "insentient" would you agree with it -- even if it could logically prove its conclusion to you?

Awareness Is Not What You Think -- The Zen State Automaton

No computer will ever be able to experience the state of Enlightenment that is familiar to Zen monks and other Buddhist meditators. If a computer is ever going to be truly intelligent -- at least in the same way that humans are -- it must be able to have religious experiences that are the same as those that humans have. The particular religious experience I am speaking of is the realization of the emptiness that is considered to be one of the fundamental truths of eastern philosophical traditions such as Buddhism and Taoism.

According to Buddhist teachings, the pure realization of emptiness is free of any form, substance, nature, characteristics, or content -- yet it is not a mere nothingness. Rather it is said to be fully awake and lucid yet totally beyond the limitations of dualistic consciousness. It contains no thought, no cognitive formations, no sense of identity or self-reflection, no perception --- in short it is totally free of any conceptuality. This is said to be the natural state of being, or the actual nature of mind itself when not obscured by conceptual overlays.

Computer systems, such as hypothetically sophisticated future artificial intelligence programs, will never be able to actually experience authentic religious experiences and will probably never be able to simulate them either -- no matter how "advanced" they are as software programs. This is because computers cannot do anything without using information -- computers are nothing but information processors. In other words, information processors are not capable of simulating or having states that contain no information content. The state of emptiness however is a state that is devoid of information content and is therefore not something that a computer will ever authentically realize. A similar religious experience that is considered to be the final level of spiritual evolution, and the highest realization, in Buddhism, is omniscience -- that state of being all-knowing, which is one of the qualities of a fully enlightened being. Omniscience is a state that is totally infinite -- it contains all information instantaneously. Computers on the other hand cannot process infinite information in finite time and can therefore not become omniscient. These are just two of many types of religious experience that are simply impossible for any computer or software program to generate. While computers and programs might be able to simulate such experiences, these simulations will never the same as the "real thing."

Simulated awareness or consciousness in a computer is not capable of replicating a state without information content. At best, a computer could simulate a lack of sensory input and a lack of cognitive formations -- but in order for that computer to be able to know that this was taking place it would have to create some infomration to represent that fact and then process that information in order to know that fact. In other words a computer can simulate emptiness but that is not the same as actual emptiness. A computer's simulation of emptiness is similar to the statement this sentence does not exist. We can say that all we like, but the mere act of saying it contradicts its meaning. In the same way, in order for a computer to simulate and know the experience of emptiness it must be in a state that is not equivalent to the state of experiencing emptiness.

Humans and other truly sentient beings are not limited in this way. We are capable of knowing emptiness directly because emptiness and awareness (that which knows) are in fact the very same thing. When a sentient being experiences emptiness it is unmediated by any information process -- emptiness is the experience of the very nature of self-awareness. In other words, because we are truly aware and our awareness is inherently aware of awareness, we are capable of being aware of emptiness which is the actual nature of awareness in its pure form (when unclouded by conceptual overlays). The point here is that when a sentient being has a direct realization of emptiness it does not take place through any conceptual process, in fact it is the opposite of a conceptual process, by definition. The experience of emptiness is a direct realization of the non-conceptual, contentless ground that underlies consciousness. Conceptual thought is merely a process of mental projection taking place on the basis of that ground. Computers are only capable of conceptual activity (although primitive at best). Computers are not capable of representing or experiencing a truly non-conceptual state of being.

For this reason, no computer will ever be truly self-aware in the same way that humans are. No computer will ever be able to experience the state of emptiness. No computer will ever be able to synthesize awareness. The Dalai Lama has mentioned in the past that someday, once computer become sophisticated enough, they may be able to support mindstreams, such that a consciousness could conceivably incarnate into such a machine. But that is very different from saying that the machine is conscious or that consciousness has been synthesized by the machine.

True consciousness, true awareness, does not emerge from any formal information process. It is fundamental to the universe. In other words, awareness does not come from something or somewhere -- it is already there and always has been. Just like energy. We never create it, it has always existed and we merely move it, transform it, and channel it from point to point.

Similarly, the human body and brain do not create conscious and are not themselves conscious either, for they are just organic machines. No machine, whether organic or silicon is really conscious in its own right. Any conciousness that appears on the basis of such machines is merely temporarily associated with them and totally independent of them. Consciousness is totally separate from machines, and from brains and bodies. It is a mystery. It always has been. It always will be. While it may arise within such systems it is not caused by them, not synthesized by their components, and cannot be reduced to them. In other words, a Zen State Automaton is impossible.

My argument goes as follows:

The Zen State Automaton

1. A human being (a truly self-aware system) can be aware of their own awareness without any thoughts occuring (ie. without creating or using any information)

2. Computers cannot do anything (thus they certainly cannot sense or know anything) without using information.

3. Therefore computers will never be able to synthesize or replicate self-awareness using any information process. This proves that computers will never be self-aware or conscious in the same way that truly aware beings (such as humans) are. Without true self-awareness computers will never be truly intelligent -- at least not as intelligent as systems that are truly self-aware. Therefore, artificial intelligence will never be truly intelligent by human standards.

In other words, a Zen State Automaton is impossible.

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I Have an iPod in my Mind

Read this funny article from The Onion by someone who doesn't need an iPod.

30 Year Robot Project Pitched in Japan

Japanese researchers are proposing that their government spend 30 billion yen over 30 years to develop a robot with the mental and emotional capabilities of a 5 year old human. It might be cheaper to just have babies...

The Chinese Room

Paul Ford has been thinking about the Chinese Room thought-experiment, John Searle's famous refutation of the strong-AI hypothesis. As Paul points out: programs have syntax, minds have semantics, syntax is not the same as semantics, therefore computers are not minds. But what about in the era of the so-called "semantic web?" Will programs have semantics then, and will this qualify them as minds? No, because I do not think the essence of mind is semantics per se, rather I think it is what Searle calls "qualia" -- the actual capacity to experience what is being sensed. Experience requires self-awarenesswhich in turn requires awareness. So in my opinion the essence of mind is this mysterious "awareness" that all minds seem to have. What is awareness? Is it an epiphenomenon (a side-effect or illusion) as some AI theorists suggest, or is it something fundamental and irreducible like space-time?

Is Intelligence Relative?

Taylor makes an interesting point in reaction to my post about The Turing Test not working. This got me thinking. Is there a universal standard of intelligence, or is intelligence relative?

Is the Universe A Computer?

The fact that our universe can contain computers is proof that our universe is capable of computation. But does that prove that our universe IS a computer? Certainly the fact that our universe can contain computers means that at least it is equivalent to a computer, but is it limited to computation as we know it, or does it transcend such limitations? The really interesting question is whether or not our universe does things that a computer cannot do. If computers cannot synthesize human intelligence or consciousness, then that proves our universe is not merely a computer, since human intelligence and consciousness takes place within our universe.

Is Consciousness as Fundamental as Space, Time and Energy?

What is consciousness and how important is it to intelligence? Can a computer be truly intelligent without also being conscious? If not, then can consciousness be synthesized on a computer or is consciousness something fundamental to the basic structure of the universe, like space, time and energy?

Is Human Intelligence Rational?

Is intelligence merely the ability to learn, answer questions and solve logic problems, or is intelligence based on something deeper -- for example, the ability to think creatively, to do unexpected things, to behave irrationally?

The Turing Test Doesn't Work

A popular concept among AI people is that the Turing Test is a decent measure of both intelligence and consciousness. I disagree. The Turing Test is really not a measure of consciousness -- nor does it actually measure anything about the computer being evaluated, in fact, if anything, the Turing Test is actually a measure of the intelligence of the human who is evaluating the computer. Is the human smart enough to tell that the computer isn't really a human? If a computer passes the Turing Test, that doesn't prove anything about the computer, but it may prove that the human who is evaluating the computer is not very smart.

The Human Menome Project

I would like to start an initiative to track and measure memes (replicating ideas) as they move around the world in real-time. I've spent about a year thinking about the technology necessary to do this. It requires a lot of data-mining power, but the algorithms are fairly simple. Essentially, we mine the Web for noun-phrases and then measure the space-time dynamics of those phrases as they move through various demographic, geographic, and topical spaces.