Toward The Future

Jose Cordeiro on Singularity 1 on 1: The Energularity is Near

2012-01-11T17:13:00.000-08:00

This weekend I interviewed Jose Cordeiro for Singularity 1 on 1 and I have to admit that this was one of my favorite interviews so far with perhaps the strongest, most positive endings on the show.

Jose is a published book author, energy expert, futurist, transhumanist and Singularity University faculty member. So, even if Venezuela’s terribly slow internet connection did not make for the best video recording, the interview is absolutely worth watching. Furthermore, if you ever attend a public event or a lecture where you suddenly hear someone scream “Energyyyy!” on the top of their lungs – you will have no doubt that it can be no one else but our friend Cordeiro.

During our 48 min conversation we discuss a large variety of topics such as: Jose’s personal background and his failed attempt to become Venezuela’s energy minister; the staggering murder rates in Venezuela; his journey from MIT’s engineering department through the Oil and Gas Industry to renewable resources, Singularity Unviversity and futurism; the Energularity – its meaning and timeline; the Kardashev scale and the vulnerability of pre-type 1 civilizations such as ours; the biggest change in the largest industry on our planet – i.e. the Energy industry’s shift from fossil fuels to solar, wind, geothermal or fusion; the evolution of intelligence, our chances of surviving the technological singularity and the importance of optimism.

My favorite quote from Jose: “The world is just half full but it is beginning to become fuller and fuller and more beautiful."

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Who is Jose Cordeiro?

José Luis Cordeiro is a world citizen in our small planet in a big unknown universe. He was born in Latin America, from European parents, was educated in Europe and North America, and has worked extensively in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. He has studied, visited and worked in over 130 countries in 5 continents.

Mr. Cordeiro studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, USA, where he received his Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) and Master of Science (M.Sc.) degrees in Mechanical Engineering, with a minor in Economics and Languages. His thesis consisted of a dynamic modeling for NASA’s “Freedom” Space Station (the “International” Space Station of today). He later studied International Economics and Comparative Politics at Georgetown University in Washington, USA, and then obtained his Masters of Business Administration (MBA) at the Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires (INSEAD) in Fontainebleau, France, where he majored in Finance and Globalization. During his studies, Mr. Cordeiro worked with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) in Vienna, Austria, and with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, USA. He started his doctoral work at MIT, which he continued later in Tokyo, Japan, and finally received his PhD at Universidad Simón Bolívar (USB) in Caracas, Venezuela. He is a lifetime member of the Sigma Xi (ΣΞ, Scientific Research) and Tau Beta Pi (ТΒΠ, Engineering) Honor Societies in North America, is also a honorary member of the Venezuelan Engineers College (CIV), and his name has been included in the Marquis Edition of Who’s Who in the World.

Following his graduation, Mr. Cordeiro worked as an engineer in petroleum exploration for the French company Schlumberger. For several years, he served as an advisor for many of the major oil companies in the world, including Agip, BP, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, PDVSA, Pemex, Petrobras, Repsol, Shell and Total. Later, in Paris, he initiated his relation with the international consulting company Booz-Allen & Hamilton, where he specialized in the areas of strategy, finance and restructuring. In Latin America, he has served as an advisor for some of the most important regional corporations and has taken part in the transformation and privatization of a number of oil companies in the continent. His experience and studies in monetary policy, currency boards, dollarization and monetary unions have taken him to participate in several monetary changes in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

At present, he is chair of the Venezuelan Node of the Millennium Project, Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE – JETRO) in Tokyo, Japan, and Energy Advisor and Faculty at Singularity University (SU) in NASA Ames, Silicon Valley, USA. He is also an independent consultant, writer, researcher, professor and “tireless traveler”. He has lectured as an Invited Professor at several major institutions, from MIT in the USA and Sophia University (上智大学) in Japan to the Institute for Higher Studies in Administration (IESA) and the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), where he created the first formal courses of Futures Studies (“Prospectiva”) and Austrian School of Economics in Venezuela.

Mr. Cordeiro is founder of the World Future Society (Venezuela Chapter), director of the Single Global Currency Association (SGCA) and the Lifeboat Foundation, cofounder of the Venezuelan Transhumanist Association and of the Internet Society (ISOC, Venezuela Chapter), board advisor to the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN), member of the Academic Committee of the Center for the Dissemination of Economic Knowledge (CEDICE), the World Future Society (WFS) and the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF), former director of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA, Humanity+), the Extropy Institute (ExI), the Club of Rome (Venezuela Chapter, where he was active promoting classical liberal ideas) and of the Association of Venezuelan Exporters (AVEX), where he participated in the original negotiations of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). He has also been advisor to the Venezuelan Business Association (AVE) and other companies and international organizations.

Thanks to his extensive work in technological foresight, futures studies, globalization, economic integration, long-term development, energy, education and monetary policy, Mr. Cordeiro has authored and coauthored several books. El Desafío Latinoamericano, his first book, is a continental bestseller originally published by McGraw-Hill and is used in more than 100 universities in the hemisphere (see introductory pages). Its second Spanish edition is now available completely free in electronic form by the author, who is also donating his book royalties. Arturo Uslar Pietri, the most universal and respected Venezuelan of the 20th century, described other two books of Mr. Cordeiro with the following words: “as important to Venezuela as the independence battle of Carabobo” (The Great Taboo) and “an impressive work that describes the grave economic malady… of Venezuela” (La Segunda Muerte de Bolívar). He has authored other books about Ecuador (La Segunda Muerte de Sucre) and Mexico (¿Pesos o Dólares?), and about special topics like education (Benesuela vs. Venezuela), energy (Energía para el Desarrollo de América del Sur and Cenários Energéticos 2020, in Portuguese) and transhumanism (2020: Transhuman & Economy of the Future, in Korean). He has written more than 10 books and co-written over 20 more in five languages, including sections of the State of the Future by the Millennium Project.

Mr. Cordeiro has a fortnightly opinion column in the largest and most prestigious Venezuelan general newspaper (El Universal) and has also written and has been interviewed in major media (press, radio and TV) including ABC, BBC,CNN, Chosun Ilbo (Korean Daily), El Comercio (Ecuador), El Comercio (Peru), El Tiempo (Colombia), El Universal (Mexico), El Universal (Venezuela), Los Andes (Argentina),O Estado de Sao Paulo (Brazil), Mainichi Shimbun (Japan Daily News), La Tribune (France), The New York Times, Univision and The Washington Times (USA).

by Singularity

DAVID J. CHALMERS

2010-02-20T17:29:00.000-08:00

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

David J. Chalmers
Philosophy Program
Research School of Social Sciences
Australian National University
Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

1 Introduction

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given.

To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. I critique some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness, and argue that these methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the door to further progress is opened. In the second half of the paper, I argue that if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given.

I put forward my own candidate for such an account: a nonreductive theory based on principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance and a double-aspect view of information.

2 The Easy Problems and the Hard Problem

There is not just one problem of consciousness. “Consciousness” is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others. At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into “hard” and “easy” problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.

The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:

• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
• the integration of information by a cognitive system;
• the reportability of mental states;
• the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
• the focus of attention;
• the deliberate control of behavior;
• the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. For example, one sometimes says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake.

There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. To explain access and reportability, for example, we need only specify the mechanism by which information about internal states is retrieved and made available for verbal report. To explain the integration of information, we need only exhibit mechanisms by which information is brought together and exploited by later processes. For an account of sleep and wakefulness, an appropriate neurophysiological account of the processes responsible for organisms’ contrasting behavior in those states will suffice. In each case, an appropriate cognitive or neurophysiological model can clearly do the explanatory work.

If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem. Although we do not yet have anything close to a complete explanation of these phenomena, we have a clear idea of how we might go about explaining them. This is why I call these problems the easy problems. Of course, ‘easy’ is a relative term. Getting the details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work. Still, there is every reason to believe that the methods of cognitive science and neuroscience will succeed.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs.

Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of “consciousness”, an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state.
Sometimes terms such as “phenomenal consciousness” and “qualia” are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of “conscious experience” or simply “experience”. Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g., Newell 1990; Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term “consciousness” for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term “awareness” for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about “consciousness” are frequently talking past each other.

The ambiguity of the term “consciousness” is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists writing on the subject. It is common to see a paper on consciousness begin with an invocation of the mystery of consciousness, noting the strange intangibility and ineffability of subjectivity, and worrying that so far we have no theory of the phenomenon. Here, the topic is clearly the hard problem—the problem of experience. In the second half of the paper, the tone becomes more optimistic, and the author’s own theory of consciousness is outlined. Upon examination, this theory turns out to be a theory of one of the more straightforward phenomena—of ortability, of introspective access, or whatever. At the close, the author declares that consciousness has turned out to be tractable after all, but the reader is left feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch. The hard problem remains untouched.

3 Functional Explanation

Why are the easy problems easy, and why is the hard problem hard? The easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions.
To explain a cognitive function, we need only specify a mechanism that can perform the function. The methods of cognitive science are well-suited for this sort of explanation, and so are well-suited to the easy problems of consciousness. By contrast, the hard problem is hard precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions. The problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained. (Here “function” is not used in the narrow teleological sense of something that a system is designed to do, but in the broader sense of any causal role in the production of behavior that a system might perform.)

To explain reportability, for instance, is just to explain how a system could perform the function of producing reports on internal states. To explain internal access, we need to explain how a system could be appropriately affected by its internal states and use information about those states in directing later processes. To explain integration and control, we need to explain how a system’s central processes can bring information contents together and use them in the facilitation of various behaviors. These are all problems about the explanation of functions.

How do we explain the performance of a function? By specifying a mechanism that performs the function. Here, neurophysiological and cognitive modeling are perfect for the task. If we want a detailed low-level explanation, we can specify the neural mechanism that is responsible for the function. If we want a more abstract explanation, we can specify a mechanism in computational terms. Either way, a full and satisfying explanation will result.
Once we have specified the neural or computational mechanism that performs the function of verbal report, for example, the bulk of our work in explaining reportability is over.

In a way, the point is trivial. It is a conceptual fact about these phenomena that their explanation only involves the explanation of various functions, as the phenomena are functionally definable. All it means for reportability to be instantiated in a system is that the system has the capacity for verbal reports of internal information. All it means for a system to be awake is for it to be appropriately receptive to information from the environment and for it to be able to use this information in directing behavior in an appropriate way. To see that this sort of thing is a conceptual fact, note that someone who says “you have explained the performance of the verbal report function, but you have not explained reportability” is making a trivial conceptual mistake about reportability. All it could possibly take to explain reportability is an explanation of how the relevant function is performed; the same goes for the other phenomena in question.

Throughout the higher-level sciences, reductive explanation works in just this way. To explain the gene, for instance, we needed to specify the mechanism that stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next. It turns out that DNA performs this function; once we explain how the function is performed, we have explained the gene. To explain life, we ultimately need to explain how a system can reproduce, adapt to its environment, metabolize, and so on. All of these are questions about the performance of functions, and so are well-suited to reductive explanation. The same holds for most problems in cognitive science.

To explain learning, we need to explain the way in which a system’s behavioral capacities are modified in light of environmental information, and the way in which new information can be brought to bear in adapting a system’s actions to its environment. If we show how a neural or computational mechanism does the job, we have explained learning. We can say the same for other cognitive phenomena, such as perception, memory, and language. Sometimes the relevant functions need to be characterized quite subtly, but it is clear that insofar as cognitive science explains these phenomena at all, it does so by explaining the performance of functions.

When it comes to conscious experience, this sort of explanation fails. What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open.

There is no analogous further question in the explanation of genes, or of life, or of learning. If someone says “I can see that you have explained how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next, but you have not explained how it is a gene”, then they are making a conceptual mistake. All it means to be a gene is to be an entity that performs the relevant storage and transmission function. But if someone says “I can see that you have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but you have not explained how it is experienced”, they are not making a conceptual mistake. This is a nontrivial further question.

This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere.

This is not to say that experience has no function. Perhaps it will turn out to play an important cognitive role. But for any role it might play, there will be more to the explanation of experience than a simple explanation of the function. Perhaps it will even turn out that in the course of explaining a function, we will be led to the key insight that allows an explanation of experience. If this happens, though, the discovery will be an extra explanatory reward. There is no cognitive function such that we can say in advance that explanation of that function will automatically explain experience.

To explain experience, we need a new approach. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say.

4 Some Case-studies

In the last few years, a number of works have addressed the problems of consciousness within the framework of cognitive science and neuroscience. This might suggest that the analysis above is faulty, but in fact a close examination of the relevant work only lends the analysis further support. When we investigate just which aspects of consciousness these studies are aimed at, and which aspects they end up explaining, we find that the ultimate target of explanation is always one of the easy problems. I will illustrate this with two representative examples.

The first is the “neurobiological theory of consciousness” outlined by Crick and Koch (1990; see also Crick 1994). This theory centers on certain 35-75 hertz neural oscillations in the cerebral cortex; Crick and Koch hypothesize that these oscillations are the basis of consciousness. This is partly because the oscillations seem to be correlated with awareness in a number of different modalities—within the visual and olfactory systems, for example—and also because they suggest a mechanism by which the binding of information contents might be achieved. Binding is the process whereby separately represented pieces of information about a single entity are brought together to be used by later processing, as when information about the color and shape of a perceived object is integrated from separate visual pathways.

Following others (e.g., Eckhorn et al. 1988), Crick and Koch hypothesize that binding may be achieved by the synchronized oscillations of neuronal groups representing the relevant contents. When two pieces of information are to be bound together, the relevant neural groups will oscillate with the same frequency and phase.

The details of how this binding might be achieved are still poorly understood, but suppose that they can be worked out. What might the resulting theory explain? Clearly it might explain the binding of information contents, and perhaps it might yield a more general account of the integration of information in the brain. Crick and Koch also suggest that these oscillations activate the mechanisms of working memory, so that there may be an account of this and perhaps other forms of memory in the distance. The theory might eventually lead to a general account of how perceived information is bound and stored in memory, for use by later processing.

Such a theory would be valuable, but it would tell us nothing about why the relevant contents are experienced. Crick and Koch suggest that these oscillations are the neural correlates of experience. This claim is arguable—does not binding also take place in the processing of unconscious information?—but even if it is accepted, the explanatory question remains: Why do the oscillations give rise to experience? The only basis for an explanatory connection is the role they play in binding and storage, but the question of why binding and storage should themselves be accompanied by experience is never addressed. If we do not know why binding and storage should give rise to experience, telling a story about the oscillations cannot help us.

Conversely, if we knew why binding and storage gave rise to experience, the neurophysiological details would be just the icing on the cake. Crick and Koch’s theory gains its purchase by assuming a connection between binding and experience, and so can do nothing to explain that link.
I do not think that Crick and Koch are ultimately claiming to address the hard problem, although some have interpreted them otherwise. A published interview with Koch gives a clear statement of the limitations on the theory’s ambitions.

Well, let’s first forget about the really difficult aspects, like subjective feelings, for they may not have a scientific solution. The subjective state of play, of pain, of pleasure, of seeing blue, of smelling a rose—there seems to be a huge jump between the materialistic level, of explaining molecules and neurons, and the subjective level. Let’s focus on things that are easier to study—like visual awareness. You’re now talking to me, but you’re not looking at me, you’re looking at the cappuccino, and so you are aware of it. You can say, “It’s a cup and there’s some liquid in it.” If I give it to you, you’ll move your arm and you’ll take it—you’ll respond in a meaningful manner. That’s what I call awareness. (What is Consciousness, Discover, November 1992, p. 96.)
The second example is an approach at the level of cognitive psychology. This is Bernard Baars’ global workspace theory of consciousness, presented in his book A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. According to this theory, the contents of consciousness are contained in a global workspace, a central processor used to mediate communication between a host of specialized nonconscious processors. When these specialized processors need to broadcast information to the rest of the system, they do so by sending this information to the workspace, which acts as a kind of communal blackboard for the rest of the system, accessible to all the other processors.

Baars uses this model to address many aspects of human cognition, and to explain a number of contrasts between conscious and unconscious cognitive functioning. Ultimately, however, it is a theory of cognitive accessibility, explaining how it is that certain information contents are widely accessible within a system, as well as a theory of informational integration and reportability. The theory shows promise as a theory of awareness, the functional correlate of conscious experience, but an explanation of experience itself is not on offer.

One might suppose that according to this theory, the contents of experience are precisely the contents of the workspace. But even if this is so, nothing internal to the theory explains why the information within the global workspace is experienced. The best the theory can do is to say that the information is experienced because it is globally accessible. But now the question arises in a different form: why should global accessibility give rise to conscious experience? As always, this bridging question is unanswered.

Almost all work taking a cognitive or neuroscientific approach to consciousness in recent years could be subjected to a similar critique. The “Neural Darwinism” model of Edelman (1989), for instance, addresses questions about perceptual awareness and the self-concept, but says nothing about why there should also be experience. The “multiple drafts” model of Dennett (1991) is largely directed at explaining the reportability of certain mental contents.
The “intermediate level” theory of Jackendoff (1988) provides an account of some computational processes that underlie consciousness, but Jackendoff stresses that the question of how these “project” into conscious experience remains mysterious.

Researchers using these methods are often inexplicit about their attitudes to the problem of conscious experience, although sometimes they take a clear stand. Even among those who are clear about it, attitudes differ widely. In placing this sort of work with respect to the problem of experience, a number of different strategies are available. It would be useful if these strategic choices were more often made explicit.

The first strategy is simply to explain something else. Some researchers are explicit that the problem of experience is too difficult for now, and perhaps even outside the domain of science altogether. These researchers instead choose to address one of the more tractable problems such as reportability or the self-concept. Although I have called these problems the “easy” problems, they are among the most interesting unsolved problems in cognitive science, so this work is certainly worthwhile. The worst that can be said of this choice is that in the context of research on consciousness it is relatively unambitious, and the work can sometimes be misinterpreted.

The second choice is to take a harder line and deny the phenomenon. (Variations on this approach are taken by Allport 1988; Dennett 1991; Wilkes 1988.) According to this line, once we have explained the functions such as accessibility, reportability, and the like, there is no further phenomenon called “experience” to explain. Some explicitly deny the phenomenon, holding for example that what is not externally verifiable cannot be real. Others achieve the same effect by allowing that experience exists, but only if we equate “experience” with something like the capacity to discriminate and report. These approaches lead to a simpler theory, but are ultimately unsatisfactory. Experience is the most central and manifest aspect of our mental lives, and indeed is perhaps the key explanandum in the science of the mind.

Because of this status as an explanandum, experience cannot be discarded like the vital spirit when a new theory comes along. Rather, it is the central fact that any theory of consciousness must explain. A theory that denies the phenomenon “solves” the problem by ducking the question.

In a third option, some researchers claim to be explaining experience in the full sense. These researchers (unlike those above) wish to take experience very seriously; they lay out their functional model or theory, and claim that it explains the full subjective quality of experience (e.g., Flohr 1992; Humphrey 1992). The relevant step in the explanation is usually passed over quickly, however, and usually ends up looking something like magic. After some details about information processing are given, experience suddenly enters the picture, but it is left obscure how these processes should suddenly give rise to experience. Perhaps it is simply taken for granted that it does, but then we have an incomplete explanation and a version of the fifth strategy below.

A fourth, more promising approach appeals to these methods to explain the structure of experience. For example, it is arguable that an account of the discriminations made by the visual system can account for the structural relations between different color experiences, as well as for the geometric structure of the visual field (see e.g., Clark 1992; Hardin 1992). In general, certain facts about structures found in processing will correspond to and arguably explain facts about the structure of experience. This strategy is plausible but limited. At best, it takes the existence of experience for granted and accounts for some facts about its structure, providing a sort of nonreductive explanation of the structural aspects of experience (I will say more on this later). This is useful for many purposes, but it tells us nothing about why there should be experience in the first place.

A fifth and reasonable strategy is to isolate the substrate of experience. After all, almost everyone allows that experience arises one way or another from brain processes, and it makes sense to identify the sort of process from which it arises. Crick and Koch put their work forward as isolating the neural correlate of consciousness, for example, and Edelman (1989) and Jackendoff (1988) make related claims. Justification of these claims requires a careful theoretical analysis, especially as experience is not directly observable in experimental contexts, but when applied judiciously this strategy can shed indirect light on the problem of experience. Nevertheless, the strategy is clearly incomplete. For a satisfactory theory, we need to know more than which processes give rise to experience; we need an account of why and how. A full theory of consciousness must build an explanatory bridge.

5 The Extra Ingredient

We have seen that there are systematic reasons why the usual methods of cognitive science and neuroscience fail to account for conscious experience. These are simply the wrong sort of methods: nothing that they give to us can yield an explanation. To account for conscious experience, we need an extra ingredient in the explanation. This makes for a challenge to those who are serious about the hard problem of consciousness: What is your extra ingredient, and why should that account for conscious experience?

There is no shortage of extra ingredients to be had. Some propose an injection of chaos and nonlinear dynamics. Some think that the key lies in nonalgorithmic processing. Some appeal to future discoveries in neurophysiology. Some suppose that the key to the mystery will lie at the level of quantum mechanics. It is easy to see why all these suggestions are put forward. None of the old methods work, so the solution must lie with something new. Unfortunately, these suggestions all suffer from the same old problems.

Nonalgorithmic processing, for example, is put forward by Penrose (1989; 1994) because of the role it might play in the process of conscious mathematical insight. The arguments about mathematics are controversial, but even if they succeed and an account of nonalgorithmic processing in the human brain is given, it will still only be an account of the functions involved in mathematical reasoning and the like. For a nonalgorithmic process as much as an algorithmic process, the question is left unanswered: why should this process give rise to experience? In answering this question, there is no special role for nonalgorithmic processing.

The same goes for nonlinear and chaotic dynamics. These might provide a novel account of the dynamics of cognitive functioning, quite different from that given by standard methods in cognitive science. But from dynamics, one only gets more dynamics. The question about experience here is as mysterious as ever. The point is even clearer for new discoveries in neurophysiology. These new discoveries may help us make significant progress in understanding brain function, but for any neural process we isolate, the same question will always arise. It is difficult to imagine what a proponent of new neurophysiology expects to happen, over and above the explanation of further cognitive functions. It is not as if we will suddenly discover a phenomenal glow inside a neuron!

Perhaps the most popular “extra ingredient” of all is quantum mechanics (e.g., Hameroff 1994). The attractiveness of quantum theories of consciousness may stem from a Law of Minimization of Mystery: consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe the two mysteries have a common source. Nevertheless, quantum theories of consciousness suffer from the same difficulties as neural or computational theories. Quantum phenomena have some remarkable functional properties, such as nondeterminism and nonlocality. It is natural to speculate that these properties may play some role in the explanation of cognitive functions, such as random choice and the integration of information, and this hypothesis cannot be ruled out a priori. But when it comes to the explanation of experience, quantum processes are in the same boat as any other. The question of why these processes should give rise to experience is entirely unanswered.

(One special attraction of quantum theories is the fact that on some interpretations of quantum mechanics, consciousness plays an active role in “collapsing” the quantum wave function. Such interpretations are controversial, but in any case they offer no hope of explaining consciousness in terms of quantum processes. Rather, these theories assume the existence of consciousness, and use it in the explanation of quantum processes. At best, these theories tell us something about a physical role that consciousness may play. They tell us nothing about how it arises.)

At the end of the day, the same criticism applies to any purely physical account of consciousness. For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory.

Purely physical explanation is well-suited to the explanation of physical structures, explaining macroscopic structures in terms of detailed microstructural constituents; and it provides a satisfying explanation of the performance of functions, accounting for these functions in terms of the physical mechanisms that perform them. This is because a physical account can entail the facts about structures and functions: once the internal details of the physical account are given, the structural and functional properties fall out as an automatic consequence. But the structure and dynamics of physical processes yield only more structure and dynamics, so structures and functions are all we can expect these processes to explain.

The facts about experience cannot be an automatic consequence of any physical account, as it is conceptually coherent that any given process could exist without experience. Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical.

The moral of all this is that you can’t explain conscious experience on the cheap. It is a remarkable fact that reductive methods—methods that explain a high-level phenomenon wholly in terms of more basic physical processes—work well in so many domains. In a sense, one can explain most biological and cognitive phenomena on the cheap, in that these phenomena are seen as automatic consequences of more fundamental processes. It would be wonderful if reductive methods could explain experience, too; I hoped for a long time that they might. Unfortunately, there are systematic reasons why these methods must fail.

Reductive methods are successful in most domains because what needs explaining in those domains are structures and functions, and these are the kind of thing that a physical account can entail. When it comes to a problem over and above the explanation of structures and functions, these methods are impotent.

This might seem reminiscent of the vitalist claim that no physical account could explain life, but the cases are disanalogous. What drove vitalist skepticism was doubt about whether physical mechanisms could perform the many remarkable functions associated with life, such as complex adaptive behavior and reproduction. The conceptual claim that explanation of functions is what is needed was implicitly accepted, but lacking detailed knowledge of biochemical mechanisms, vitalists doubted whether any physical process could do the job and put forward the hypothesis of the vital spirit as an alternative explanation. Once it turned out that physical processes could perform the relevant functions, vitalist doubts melted away.

With experience, on the other hand, physical explanation of the functions is not in question. The key is instead the conceptual point that the explanation of functions does not suffice for the explanation of experience. This basic conceptual point is not something that further neuroscientific investigation will affect. In a similar way, experience is disanalogous to the élan vital. The vital spirit was put forward as an explanatory posit, in order to explain the relevant functions, and could therefore be discarded when those functions were explained without it. Experience is not an explanatory posit but an explanandum in its own right, and so is not a candidate for this sort of elimination.

It is tempting to note that all sorts of puzzling phenomena have eventually turned out to be explainable in physical terms. But each of these were problems about the observable behavior of physical objects, coming down to problems in the explanation of structures and functions. Because of this, these phenomena have always been the kind of thing that a physical account might explain, even if at some points there have been good reasons to suspect that no such explanation would be forthcoming. The tempting induction from these cases fails in the case of consciousness, which is not a problem about physical structures and functions. The problem of consciousness is puzzling in an entirely different way. An analysis of the problem shows us that conscious experience is just not the kind of thing that a wholly reductive account could succeed in explaining.

6 Nonreductive Explanation

At this point some are tempted to give up, holding that we will never have a theory of conscious experience. McGinn (1989), for example, argues that the problem is too hard for our limited minds; we are “cognitively closed” with respect to the phenomenon. Others have argued that conscious experience lies outside the domain of scientific theory altogether.

I think this pessimism is premature. This is not the place to give up; it is the place where things get interesting. When simple methods of explanation are ruled out, we need to investigate the alternatives. Given that reductive explanation fails, nonreductive explanation is the natural choice.

Although a remarkable number of phenomena have turned out to be explicable wholly in terms of entities simpler than themselves, this is not universal. In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental. Fundamental entities are not explained in terms of anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world. For example, in the nineteenth century it turned out that electromagnetic processes could not be explained in terms of the wholly mechanical processes that previous physical theories appealed to, so Maxwell and others introduced electromagnetic charge and electromagnetic forces as new fundamental components of a physical theory. To explain electromagnetism, the ontology of physics had to be expanded. New basic properties and basic laws were needed to give a satisfactory account of the phenomena.

Other features that physical theory takes as fundamental include mass and space-time. No attempt is made to explain these features in terms of anything simpler. But this does not rule out the possibility of a theory of mass or of space-time. There is an intricate theory of how these features interrelate, and of the basic laws they enter into. These basic principles are used to explain many familiar phenomena concerning mass, space, and time at a higher level. I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental.

We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.

Where there is a fundamental property, there are fundamental laws. A nonreductive theory of experience will add new principles to the furniture of the basic laws of nature. These basic principles will ultimately carry the explanatory burden in a theory of consciousness. Just as we explain familiar high-level phenomena involving mass in terms of more basic principles involving mass and other entities, we might explain familiar phenomena involving experience in terms of more basic principles involving experience and other entities.

In particular, a nonreductive theory of experience will specify basic principles telling us how experience depends on physical features of the world. These psychophysical principles will not interfere with physical laws, as it seems that physical laws already form a closed system. Rather, they will be a supplement to a physical theory. A physical theory gives a theory of physical processes, and a psychophysical theory tells us how those processes give rise to experience. We know that experience depends on physical processes, but we also know that this dependence cannot be derived from physical laws alone. The new basic principles postulated by a nonreductive theory give us the extra ingredient that we need to build an explanatory bridge.

Of course, by taking experience as fundamental, there is a sense in which this approach does not tell us why there is experience in the first place. But this is the same for any fundamental theory. Nothing in physics tells us why there is matter in the first place, but we do not count this against theories of matter. Certain features of the world need to be taken as fundamental by any scientific theory. A theory of matter can still explain all sorts of facts about matter, by showing how they are consequences of the basic laws. The same goes for a theory of experience.

This position qualifies as a variety of dualism, as it postulates basic properties over and above the properties invoked by physics. But it is an innocent version of dualism, entirely compatible with the scientific view of the world. Nothing in this approach contradicts anything in physical theory; we simply need to add further bridging principles to explain how experience arises from physical processes. There is nothing particularly spiritual or mystical about this theory—its overall shape is like that of a physical theory, with a few fundamental entities connected by fundamental laws. It expands the ontology slightly, to be sure, but Maxwell did the same thing. Indeed, the overall structure of this position is entirely naturalistic, allowing that ultimately the universe comes down to a network of basic entities obeying simple laws, and allowing that there may ultimately be a theory of consciousness cast in terms of such laws. If the position is to have a name, a good choice might be naturalistic dualism.

If this view is right, then in some ways a theory of consciousness will have more in common with a theory in physics than a theory in biology. Biological theories involve no principles that are fundamental in this way, so biological theory has a certain complexity and messiness to it; but theories in physics, insofar as they deal with fundamental principles, aspire to simplicity and elegance. The fundamental laws of nature are part of the basic furniture of the world, and physical theories are telling us that this basic furniture is remarkably simple. If a theory of consciousness also involves fundamental principles, then we should expect the same. The principles of simplicity, elegance, and even beauty that drive physicists’ search for a fundamental theory will also apply to a theory of consciousness.
(A technical note: Some philosophers argue that even though there is a conceptual gap between physical processes and experience, there need be no metaphysical gap, so that experience might in a certain sense still be physical (e.g., Hill 1991, Levine 1983, Loar 1990).

Usually this line of argument is supported by an appeal to the notion of a posteriori necessity (Kripke 1980). I think that this position rests on a misunderstanding of a posteriori necessity, however, or else requires an entirely new sort of necessity that we have no reason to believe in; see Chalmers 1996 (also Jackson 1994 and Lewis 1994) for details. In any case, this position still concedes an explanatory gap between physical processes and experience. For example, the principles connecting the physical and the experiential will not be derivable from the laws of physics, so such principles must be taken as explanatorily fundamental. So even on this sort of view, the explanatory structure of a theory of consciousness will be much as I have described.)

7 Outline of a Theory of Consciousness

It is not too soon to begin work on a theory. We are already in a position to understand certain key facts about the relationship between physical processes and experience, and about the regularities that connect them. Once reductive explanation is set aside, we can lay those facts on the table so that they can play their proper role as the initial pieces in a nonreductive theory of consciousness, and as constraints on the basic laws that constitute an ultimate theory.

There is an obvious problem that plagues the development of a theory of consciousness, and that is the paucity of objective data. Conscious experience is not directly observable in an experimental context, so we cannot generate data about the relationship between physical processes and experience at will. Nevertheless, we all have access to a rich source of data in our own case. Many important regularities between experience and processing can be inferred from considerations about one’s own experience. There are also good indirect sources of data from observable cases, as when one relies on the verbal report of a subject as an indication of experience. These methods have their limitations, but we have more than enough data to get a theory off the ground.

Philosophical analysis is also useful in getting value for money out of the data we have.
This sort of analysis can yield a number of principles relating consciousness and cognition, thereby strongly constraining the shape of an ultimate theory. The method of thought experimentation can also yield significant rewards, as we will see. Finally, the fact that we are earching for a fundamental theory means that we can appeal to such nonempirical constraints as simplicity, homogeneity, and the like in developing a theory. We must seek to systematize he information we have, to extend it as far as possible by careful analysis, and then make the nference to the simplest possible theory that explains the data while remaining a plausible candidate to be part of the fundamental furniture of the world.

Such theories will always retain an element of speculation that is not present in other scientific theories, because of the impossibility of conclusive intersubjective experimental tests. Still, we can certainly construct theories that are compatible with the data that we have, and evaluate them in comparison to each other. Even in the absence of intersubjective observation, there are numerous criteria available for the evaluation of such theories: simplicity, internal coherence, coherence with theories in other domains, the ability to reproduce the properties of experience that are familiar from our own case, and even an overall fit with the dictates of common sense. Perhaps there will be significant indeterminacies remaining even when all these constraints are applied, but we can at least develop plausible candidates. Only when candidate theories have been developed will we be able to evaluate them.

A nonreductive theory of consciousness will consist in a number of psychophysical principles, principles connecting the properties of physical processes to the properties of experience. We can think of these principles as encapsulating the way in which experience arises from the physical. Ultimately, these principles should tell us what sort of physical systems will have associated experiences, and for the systems that do, they should tell us what sort of physical properties are relevant to the emergence of experience, and just what sort of experience we should expect any given physical system to yield. This is a tall order, but there is no reason why we should not get started.

In what follows, I present my own candidates for the psychophysical principles that might go into a theory of consciousness. The first two of these are nonbasic principles—systematic connections between processing and experience at a relatively high level. These principles can play a significant role in developing and constraining a theory of consciousness, but they are not cast at a sufficiently fundamental level to qualify as truly basic laws. The final principle is my candidate for a basic principle that might form the cornerstone of a fundamental theory of consciousness. This final principle is particularly speculative, but it is the kind of speculation that is required if we are ever to have a satisfying theory of consciousness. I can present these principles only briefly here; I argue for them at much greater length in Chalmers (1996).

1 The principle of structural coherence.

This is a principle of coherence between the structure of consciousness and the structure of awareness. Recall that “awareness” was used earlier to refer to the various functional phenomena that are associated with consciousness. I am now using it to refer to a somewhat more specific process in the cognitive underpinnings of experience. In particular, the contents of awareness are to be understood as those information contents that are accessible to central systems, and brought to bear in a widespread way in the control of behavior. Briefly put, we can think of awareness as direct availability for global control. To a first approximation, the contents of awareness are the contents that are directly accessible and potentially reportable, at least in a language-using system.

Awareness is a purely functional notion, but it is nevertheless intimately linked to conscious experience. In familiar cases, wherever we find consciousness, we find awareness.
Wherever there is conscious experience, there is some corresponding information in the cognitive system that is available in the control of behavior, and available for verbal report.
Conversely, it seems that whenever information is available for report and for global control, there is a corresponding conscious experience. Thus, there is a direct correspondence between consciousness and awareness.

The correspondence can be taken further. It is a central fact about experience that it has a complex structure. The visual field has a complex geometry, for instance. There are also relations of similarity and difference between experiences, and relations in such things as relative intensity. Every subject’s experience can be at least partly characterized and decomposed in terms of these structural properties: similarity and difference relations, perceived location, relative intensity, geometric structure, and so on. It is also a central fact that to each of these structural features, there is a corresponding feature in the nformationprocessing structure of awareness.

Take color sensations as an example. For every distinction between color experiences, there is a corresponding distinction in processing. The different phenomenal colors that we experience form a complex three-dimensional space, varying in hue, saturation, and intensity.
The properties of this space can be recovered from information-processing considerations: examination of the visual systems shows that waveforms of light are discriminated and analyzed along three different axes, and it is this three-dimensional information that is relevant to later processing. The three-dimensional structure of phenomenal color space therefore corresponds directly to the three dimensional structure of visual awareness.
This is precisely what we would expect. After all, every color distinction corresponds to some reportable information, and therefore to a distinction that is represented in the structure of processing.

In a more straightforward way, the geometric structure of the visual field is directly reflected in a structure that can be recovered from visual processing. Every geometric relation corresponds to something that can be reported and is therefore cognitively represented. If we were given only the story about information-processing in an agent’s visual and cognitive system, we could not directly observe that agent’s visual experiences, but we could nevertheless infer those experiences’ structural properties.

In general, any information that is consciously experienced will also be cognitively represented. The fine-grained structure of the visual field will correspond to some finegrained structure in visual processing. The same goes for experiences in other modalities, and even for nonsensory experiences. Internal mental images have geometric properties that are represented in processing. Even emotions have structural properties, such as relative intensity, that correspond directly to a structural property of processing; where there is greater intensity, we find a greater effect on later processes. In general, precisely because the structural properties of experience are accessible and reportable, those properties will be directly represented in the structure of awareness.

It is this isomorphism between the structures of consciousness and awareness that constitutes the principle of structural coherence. This principle reflects the central fact that even though cognitive processes do not conceptually entail facts about conscious experience, consciousness and cognition do not float free of one another but cohere in an intimate way.
This principle has its limits. It allows us to recover structural properties of experience from information-processing properties, but not all properties of experience are structural properties. There are properties of experience, such as the intrinsic nature of a sensation of red, that cannot be fully captured in a structural description.

The very intelligibility of inverted spectrum scenarios, where experiences of red and green are inverted but all structural properties remain the same, show that structural properties constrain experience without exhausting it. Nevertheless, the very fact that we feel compelled to leave structural properties unaltered when we imagine experiences inverted between functionally identical systems shows how central the principle of structural coherence is to our conception of our mental lives. It is not a logically necessary principle, as after all we can imagine all the information processing occurring without any experience at all, but it is nevertheless a strong and familiar constraint on the psychophysical connection.

The principle of structural coherence allows for a very useful kind of indirect explanation of experience in terms of physical processes. For example, we can use facts about neural processing of visual information to indirectly explain the structure of color space. The facts about neural processing can entail and explain the structure of awareness; if we take the coherence principle for granted, the structure of experience will also be explained. Empirical investigation might even lead us to better understand the structure of awareness within a bat, shedding indirect light on Nagel’s vexing question of what it is like to be a bat. This principle provides a natural interpretation of much existing work on the explanation of consciousness (e.g., Clark 1992 and Hardin 1992 on colors, and Akins 1993 on bats), although it is often appealed to inexplicitly. It is so familiar that it is taken for granted by almost everybody, and is a central plank in the cognitive explanation of consciousness.

The coherence between consciousness and awareness also allows a natural interpretation of work in neuroscience directed at isolating the substrate (or the neural correlate) of consciousness. Various specific hypotheses have been put forward. For example, Crick and Koch (1990) suggest that 40-Hz oscillations may be the neural correlate of consciousness, whereas Libet (1993) suggests that temporally-extended neural activity is central. If we accept the principle of coherence, the most direct physical correlate of consciousness is awareness: the process whereby information is made directly available for global control. The different specific hypotheses can be interpreted as empirical suggestions about how awareness might be achieved. For example, Crick and Koch suggest that 40-Hz oscillations are the gateway by which information is integrated into working memory and thereby made available to later processes. Similarly, it is natural to suppose that Libet’s temporally extended activity is relevant precisely because only that sort of activity achieves global availability. The same applies to other suggested correlates such as the “global workspace” of Baars (1988), the “high-quality representations” of Farah (1994), and the “selector inputs to action systems” of Shallice (1972). All these can be seen as hypotheses about the mechanisms of awareness: the mechanisms that perform the function of making information directly available for global control.

Given the coherence between consciousness and awareness, it follows that a mechanism of awareness will itself be a correlate of conscious experience. The question of just which mechanisms in the brain govern global availability is an empirical one; perhaps there are many such mechanisms. But if we accept the coherence principle, we have reason to believe that the processes that explain awareness will at the same time be part of the basis of consciousness.

2 The principle of organizational invariance.

This principle states that any two systems with the same fine-grained functional
organization will have qualitatively identical experiences. If the causal patterns of neural organization were duplicated in silicon, for example, with a silicon chip for every neuron and the same patterns of interaction, then the same experiences would arise. According to this principle, what matters for the emergence of experience is not the specific physical makeup of a system, but the abstract pattern of causal interaction between its components. This principle is controversial, of course. Some (e.g., Searle 1980) have thought that consciousness is tied to a specific biology, so that a silicon isomorph of a human need not be conscious. I believe that the principle can be given significant support by the analysis of thought-experiments, however.

Very briefly: suppose (for the purposes of a reductio ad absurdum) that the principle is false, and that there could be two functionally isomorphic systems with different experiences.
Perhaps only one of the systems is conscious, or perhaps both are conscious but they have different experiences. For the purposes of illustration, let us say that one system is made of neurons and the other of silicon, and that one experiences red where the other experiences blue. The two systems have the same organization, so we can imagine gradually transforming one into the other, perhaps replacing neurons one at a time by silicon chips with the same local function. We thus gain a spectrum of intermediate cases, each with the same organization, but with slightly different physical makeup and slightly different experiences.

Along this spectrum, there must be two systems A and B between which we replace less than one tenth of the system, but whose experiences differ. These two systems are physically identical, except that a small neural circuit in A has been replaced by a silicon circuit in B.
The key step in the thought-experiment is to take the relevant neural circuit in A, and install alongside it a causally isomorphic silicon circuit, with a switch between the two.
What happens when we flip the switch? By hypothesis, the system’s conscious experiences will change; from red to blue, say, for the purposes of illustration. This follows from the fact that the system after the change is essentially a version of B, whereas before the change it is just A.

But given the assumptions, there is no way for the system to notice the changes! Its causal organization stays constant, so that all of its functional states and behavioral dispositions stay fixed. As far as the system is concerned, nothing unusual has happened.
There is no room for the thought, “Hmm! Something strange just happened!”. In general, the structure of any such thought must be reflected in processing, but the structure of processing remains constant here. If there were to be such a thought it must float entirely free of the system and would be utterly impotent to affect later processing. (If it affected later processing, the systems would be functionally distinct, contrary to hypothesis). We might even flip the switch a number of times, so that experiences of red and blue dance back and forth before the system’s “inner eye”. According to hypothesis, the system can never notice these “dancing qualia”.

This I take to be a reductio of the original assumption. It is a central fact about experience, very familiar from our own case, that whenever experiences change significantly and we are paying attention, we can notice the change; if this were not to be the case, we would be led to the skeptical possibility that our experiences are dancing before our eyes all the time. This hypothesis has the same status as the possibility that the world was created five minutes ago: perhaps it is logically coherent, but it is not plausible. Given the extremely plausible assumption that changes in experience correspond to changes in processing, we are led to the conclusion that the original hypothesis is impossible, and that any two functionally isomorphic systems must have the same sort of experiences. To put it in technical terms, the philosophical hypotheses of “absent qualia” and “inverted qualia”, while logically possible, are empirically and nomologically impossible.

(Some may worry that a silicon isomorph of a neural system might be impossible for technical reasons. That question is open. The invariance principle says only that if an isomorph is possible, then it will have the same sort of conscious experience.)
There is more to be said here, but this gives the basic flavor. Once again, this thought experiment draws on familiar facts about the coherence between consciousness and cognitive processing to yield a strong conclusion about the relation between physical structure and experience. If the argument goes through, we know that the only physical properties directly relevant to the emergence of experience are organizational properties. This acts as a further strong constraint on a theory of consciousness.

3 The double-aspect theory of information.

The two preceding principles have been nonbasic principles. They involve high-level notions such as “awareness” and “organization”, and therefore lie at the wrong level to constitute the fundamental laws in a theory of consciousness. Nevertheless, they act as strong constraints. What is further needed are basic principles that fit these constraints and that might ultimately explain them.

The basic principle that I suggest centrally involves the notion of information. I understand information in more or less the sense of Shannon (1948). Where there is information, there are information states embedded in an information space. An information space has a basic structure of difference relations between its elements, characterizing the ways in which different elements in a space are similar or different, possibly in complex ways. An information space is an abstract object, but following Shannon we can see information as physically embodied when there is a space of distinct physical states, the differences between which can be transmitted down some causal pathway. The states that are transmitted can be seen as themselves constituting an information space. To borrow a phrase from Bateson (1972), physical information is a difference that makes a difference.

The double-aspect principle stems from the observation that there is a direct isomorphism between certain physically embodied information spaces and certain phenomenal (or experiential) information spaces. From the same sort of observations that went into the principle of structural coherence, we can note that the differences between phenomenal states have a structure that corresponds directly to the differences embedded in physical processes; in particular, to those differences that make a difference down certain causal pathways implicated in global availability and control. That is, we can find the same abstract information space embedded in physical processing and in conscious experience.

This leads to a natural hypothesis: that information (or at least some information) has two basic aspects, a physical aspect and a phenomenal aspect. This has the status of a basic principle that might underlie and explain the emergence of experience from the physical.
Experience arises by virtue of its status as one aspect of information, when the other aspect is found embodied in physical processing.

This principle is lent support by a number of considerations, which I can only outline briefly here. First, consideration of the sort of physical changes that correspond to changes in conscious experience suggests that such changes are always relevant by virtue of their role in constituting informational changes—differences within an abstract space of states that are divided up precisely according to their causal differences along certain causal pathways.
Second, if the principle of organizational invariance is to hold, then we need to find some fundamental organizational property for experience to be linked to, and information is an organizational property par excellence.

Third, this principle offers some hope of explaining the principle of structural coherence in terms of the structure present within information spaces. Fourth, analysis of the cognitive explanation of our judgments and claims about conscious experience—judgments that are functionally explainable but nevertheless deeply tied to experience itself—suggests that explanation centrally involves the information states embedded in cognitive processing. It follows that a theory based on information allows a deep coherence between the explanation of experience and the explanation of our judgments and claims about it.

Wheeler (1990) has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this “it from bit” doctrine, the laws of physics can be cast in terms of information, postulating different states that give rise to different effects without actually saying what those states are. It is only their position in an information space that counts. If so, then information is a natural candidate to also play a role in a fundamental theory of consciousness. We are led to a conception of the world on which information is truly fundamental, and on which it has two basic aspects, corresponding to the physical and the phenomenal features of the world.
Of course, the double-aspect principle is extremely speculative and is also underdetermined, leaving a number of key questions unanswered. An obvious question is whether all information has a phenomenal aspect. One possibility is that we need a further constraint on the fundamental theory, indicating just what sort of information has a phenomenal aspect. The other possibility is that there is no such constraint. If not, then experience is much more widespread than we might have believed, as information is everywhere. This is counterintuitive at first, but on reflection I think the position gains a certain plausibility and elegance. Where there is simple information processing, there is simple experience, and where there is complex information processing, there is complex experience. A mouse has a simpler information-processing structure than a human, and has correspondingly simpler experience; perhaps a thermostat, a maximally simple information processing structure, might have maximally simple experience? Indeed, if experience is truly a fundamental property, it would be surprising for it to arise only every now and then; most fundamental properties are more evenly spread. In any case, this is very much an open question, but I believe that the position is not as implausible as it is often thought to be.

Once a fundamental link between information and experience is on the table, the door is opened to some grander metaphysical speculation concerning the nature of the world. For example, it is often noted that physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their relations to other entities, which are themselves characterized extrinsically, and so on. The intrinsic nature of physical entities is left aside. Some argue that no such intrinsic properties exist, but then one is left with a world that is pure causal flux (a pure flow of information) with no properties for the causation to relate. If one allows that intrinsic properties exist, a natural speculation given the above is that the intrinsic properties of the physical—the properties that causation ultimately relates—are themselves phenomenal properties. We might say that phenomenal properties are the internal aspect of information.

This could answer a concern about the causal relevance of experience—a natural worry, given a picture on which the physical domain is causally closed, and on which experience is supplementary to the physical. The informational view allows us to understand how experience might have a subtle kind of causal relevance in virtue of its status as the intrinsic nature of the physical. This metaphysical speculation is probably best ignored for the purposes of developing a scientific theory, but in addressing some philosophical issues it is quite suggestive.

8 Conclusion

The theory I have presented is speculative, but it is a candidate theory. I suspect that the principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance will be planks in any satisfactory theory of consciousness; the status of the double-aspect theory of information is less certain. Indeed, right now it is more of an idea than a theory. To have any hope of eventual explanatory success, it will have to be specified more fully and fleshed out into a more powerful form. Still, reflection on just what is plausible and implausible about it, on where it works and where it fails, can only lead to a better theory.

Most existing theories of consciousness either deny the phenomenon, explain something else, or elevate the problem to an eternal mystery. I hope to have shown that it is possible to make progress on the problem even while taking it seriously. To make further progress, we , more refined theories, and more careful analysis. The hard problem is a hard problem, but there is no reason to believe that it will remain permanently unsolved.

From: http://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf

ROGER PENROSE

2009-11-21T09:05:00.000-08:00

Quantum Consciousness

Sir Roger Penrose, OM, FRS (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He has received a number of prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their contribution to our understanding of the universe. He is renowned for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is also a recreational mathematician and philosopher.

Born in Colchester, Essex, England, Roger Penrose is a son of Lionel S. Penrose and Margaret Leathes. Penrose is the brother of mathematician Oliver Penrose and correspondence chess grandmaster Jonathan Penrose. Penrose was precocious as a child. He attended University College School. Penrose graduated with a first class degree in mathematics from University College London. In 1955, while still a student, Penrose reinvented the generalized matrix inverse (also known as Moore-Penrose inverse, (see Penrose, R. 'A Generalized Inverse for Matrices.' Proc. Cambridge Phil. Soc. 51, 406-413, 1955). Penrose earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge (St John´s College) in 1958, writing a thesis on 'tensor methods in algebraic geometry' under algebraist and geometer John A. Todd. He devised and popularised the Penrose triangle in the 1950s, describing it as "impossibility in its purest form" and exchanged material with the artist M. C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it. In 1965 at Cambridge, Penrose proved that singularities (such as black holes) could be formed from the gravitational collapse of immense, dying stars (Ferguson, 1991: 66).

In 1967, Penrose invented the twistor theory which maps geometric objects in Minkowski space into the 4-dimensional complex space with the metric signature (2,2). In 1969 he conjectured the cosmic censorship hypothesis. This proposes (rather informally) that the universe protects us from the inherent unpredictability of singularities (such as the one in the centre of a black hole) by hiding them from our view behind an event horizon. This form is now known as the "weak censorship hypothesis"; in 1979, Penrose formulated a stronger version called the "strong censorship hypothesis". Together with the BKL conjecture and issues of nonlinear stability, settling the censorship conjectures is one of the most important outstanding problems in general relativity. Also from 1979 dates Penrose's influential Weyl curvature hypothesis on the initial conditions of the observable part of the Universe and the origin of the second law of thermodynamics. Penrose wrote a paper on the Terrell rotation.

Roger Penrose is well known for his 1974 discovery of Penrose tilings, which are formed from two tiles that can only tile the plane nonperiodically, and are the first tilings to exhibit fivefold rotational symmetry. Penrose developed these ideas from the article Deux types fondamentaux de distribution statistique (1938; an English translation Two Basic Types of Statistical Distribution) of Czech geographer, demographer and statistician Jaromír Korcák. In 1984, such patterns were observed in the arrangement of atoms in quasicrystals. Another noteworthy contribution is his 1971 invention of spin networks, which later came to form the geometry of spacetime in loop quantum gravity. He was influential in popularizing what are commonly known as Penrose diagrams (causal diagrams). In 2004 Penrose released The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, a 1,099-page book aimed at giving a comprehensive guide to the laws of physics. He has proposed a novel interpretation of quantum mechanics. Penrose is the Francis and Helen Pentz Distinguished (visiting) Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.

Penrose is married to Vanessa Thomas, with whom he has one child. He has three sons from a previous marriage to American Joan Isabel Wedge (1959).

From Wikipedia

Quantum Consciousness

Polymath Roger Penrose takes on the ultimate mystery

John Horgan Scientific American Nov 89

Roger Penrose is slight in figure and gentle in mien, and he is an Roddly diffident chauffeur for a man who has just proposed how the entire universe-including the enigma of human consciousness-might work. Navigating from the airport outside Syracuse, N.Y., to the city's university, he brakes at nearly every crossroad, squinting at signs as if they bore alien runes. Which way is the right way? he wonders, apologizing to me for Ins indecision. He seems mired in mysteries. when we finally reach his office, Penrose finds a can labeled "Superstring" on a table. He chuckles. On the subject of superstrings-not the filaments of foam squirted from this novelty item but the unimaginably minuscule particles that some theorists think may underlie all matter-his mind is clear: he finds them too ungainly, inelegant. "It's just not the way I'd e.,cpect the answer to be," he observes in his mild British accent. lvhen Penrose says "the answer," one envisions the words in capital letters. He confesses to agreeing with Plato that the truth is embodied in mathematics and e@sts "out there," independent of the physical world and e%-en of human thought. Scientists do not invent the truth-thev discover it.

A genuine discovery should do more than merely conform to the facts: it should feel right, it should be beautiful. In this sense, Penrose feels somewhat akin to Einstein, who judged the validity of propositions about the world by asking: Is that the way God would have done it? "Aesthetic qualities are important in science," Penrose remarks, "and necessary, I think, for great science."

I interviewed Penrose in September while he was visiting Syracuse University, on leave from his full-time post at the University of Oxford. At 58 he is one of the world's most eminent mathematicians and/or physicists (he cannot decide which category he prefers). He is a "master," says the distinguished physicist John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, at exploiting "the magnificent power of mathematics to reach into everything." An achievement in astrophysics first brought Penrose fame. In the 1960's he collaborated with Stephen W. Hawking of the University of Cambridge in showing that singularities-objects so crushed by their own weight that they become infinitely dense, beyond the ken of classical physics-are not only possible but inevitable under many circumstances. This work helped to push black holes from the outer bmits of astrophysics to the center.

In the 1970's Penrose's lifelong passion for geometric puzzles yielded a bonus. He found that as few as two geometric shapes, put together in jigsaw-puzzle fashion, can cover a flat surface in pattems that never repeat themselves. "To a small extent I was thinking about how simpie structures can force complicated arrangements," Penrose says, "but mainly I was doing it for fun;" Called Penrose tiles, the shapes were initially considered a curiosity unrelated to natural phenomena. Then in 1984 a researcher at the National Bureau of Standards discovered a substance whose molecular structure resembles Penrose tiles. This novel form of solid matter, called quasicrystals, has become a major focus of materials research [see "Quasicrystals," by David R. Nelson; Scientific American August, 1986].

Quasicrystals, singularities and almost every other oddity Penrose has puzzled over figure into his current magnum opus, The Emperor's New Mind. The book's ostensible purpose is to refute the view held by some artificial-intelligence enthusiasts that computers wifl someday do all that human brains can doand more.

The reader soon realizes, however, that Penrose's larger goal is to point the way to a grand synthesis of classical physics, quantum physics and even neuropsychology. He begins his argument by slighting computers' ability to mimic the thoughts of a mathematician. At first glance, computers might seem perfectly suited to this endeavor: after all, they were created to calculate. But Penrose points out that Alan M. Turing himself, the original champion of artificial intelligence, demonstrated that many mathematical problems are not susceptible to algorithmic analysis and resolution. The bounds of computability, Penrose says, are related to Godel's theorem, which holds that any mathematical system always contains self-evident truths that cannot be formally proved by the system's initial a)doms. The human mind can comprehend these truths, but a rule-bound computer cannot.

In what sense, then, is the mind unlike a computer? Penrose thinks the answer might have something to do with quantum physics. A system at the quantum level (a group of hydrogen atoms, for instance) does not have a single course of behavior, or state, but a number of different possible states that are somehow "superposed" on one another. When a physicist measures the system, however, all the superposed states collapse into a single state; only one of all the possibilities seems to have occurred. Penrose finds this apparent dependence of quantum physics on human observation-as well as its incompatibility with macroscopic events-profoundly unsatisfying. If the quantum view of reality is absolutely true, he suggests, we should see not a single cricket ball resting on a lawn but a blur of many balls on many lawns. He proposes that a force now conspicuously absent in quantum physics-namely gravity-may link the quantum realm to the classical, deterministic world we humans inhabit. That idea in itself is not new: many theorists-including those trying to weave reality out of supersmngshave sought a theory of quantum gravity.

But Penrose takes a new approach. He notes that as the various superposed states of a quantum-level system evolve over time, the distribution of matter and energy within them begins to diverge. At some level-intermediate between the quantum and classical realms-the differences between the superposed states become gravitationally significant; the states then collapse into the single state that physicists can measure. Seen this way, it is the gravitational influence of the measuring apparatus-and not the abstract presence of an observer that causes the superposed states to collapse. Penrosian quantum gravity can also help account for what are known as non-local effects, in which events in one region affect events in another simultaneously. The famous Einstein-Podoisky-Rosen thought experiment first indicated how nonlocality could occur: if a decaying particle simultaneously emits two photons in opposite directions, then measuring the spin of one photon instantaneously 'fixes" the spin of the other, even if it is light-years away. Penrose thinks quasicrystals may involve nonlocal effects as well. Ordinary crystals, he explains, grow serially, one atom at a time, but the complexity of quasicrystals suggests a more global phenomenon: each atom seems to sense what a number of other atoms are doing as they fall into place in concert. This process resembles that required for laying down Penrose tiles; the proper placement of one tile often depends on the positioning of other tiles that are several tiles removed.

What does all this have to do with consciousness? Penrose proposes that the physiological process underlying a given thought may initially involve a number of superposed quantum states, each of which performs a calculation of sorts. When the differences in the disnibution of mass and energy between the states reach a gravitationally significant level, the states collapse into a single state, causing measurable and possibly nonlocal changes in the neural structure of the brain. This physical event correlates with a mental one: the comprehension of a mathematical theorem, say, or the decision not to tip a waiter.

The important thing to remember, Penrose says, is that this quantum process cannot be replicated by any computer now conceived. With apparently genuine humility, Penrose emphasizes that these ideas should not be called theories yet: be prefers the word "suggestions.' But throughout his conversation and writings, he seems to imply that someday humans (not computers) will discover the ultimate answer-to everything. Does he really believe that? Penrose mulls the question over for a moment. "I guess I rather do," he says finally "although perhaps that's being too pessimistic." Why pessimistic? Isn't that the hope of science? "Solving mysteries, or trying to solve them, is wonderful," he replies, "and if they were all solved that would be rather boring."

From: http://www.dhushara.com/book/quantcos/penrose/penr.htm#anchor720208

Natasha Vita-More

2009-11-09T17:22:00.000-08:00

What is transhumanism? And, by extension, what is extropy?

Natasha Vita-More (born 1950 as Nance Clark, New York) is a media artist and theorist known for designing "Primo Posthuman. This future human prototype incorporates biotechnology, robotics, information technology, nanotechnology, cognitive and neuroscience for human enhancement and extreme life extension.

Vita-More is the Director of H Lab for scientific and artistic design collaborations. Vita-More is currently a Visiting Scholar at Twenty-First Century Medicine. She is a PhD candidate at the Planetary Collegium, University of Plymouth. Her thesis concerns human enhancement and extreme life extension. She holds a B.F.A., University of Memphis; filmmaker-in-residence, University of Colorado; M.Sc., University of Houston; M.Phil. University of Plymouth.

Philosophy

In 1982, Vita-More authored the Transhuman Statement; produced and hosted cable TV show TransCentury Update on human futures reaching over 100,000 viewers in Los Angeles and Telluride 1985-1992; founded Transhumanist Arts and Culture 1993. She was the Chair of “Vital Progress Summit” 2004, establishing a precedent for proaction of human enhancement. She was the president of the Extropy Institute 2002-2006. She currently advises non-profit organizations including Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, Adaptive A.I., and LifeBoat Foundation, is a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and has been a consultant to IBM on the future of human performance.

This interview was conducted by Venessa Posavec 12/20/07

V: What is transhumanism? And, by extension, what is extropy?

NVM: Transhumanism reflects philosophies of life, such as extropy, that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond currently human biological form, and addresses human limitations by means of science and technology guided by, basically, ethical life-promoting positive and practical priniciples and values. In specific, transhumanism is a set of ideas which represents a worldview to improve the current situation that we as humanity are facing, which includes short lifespan, limited cognitive abilities, limited sensoral abilities, erratic emotions, and going to the larger sector of peoples – the problem with so many people suffering in the world from starvation, or lack of housing, or lack of, basically, getting any of the necessary fundamental needs met that very much affects transhumanism as looking at a world view. And, therein, we support critical thinking in the development of sciences and technologies to extend life, eradicate aging, solve problems of disease, and encourage and enhance intellectual, creative, physical and mental well-being. In this regard, it is essential to be aware of the possible dangers that lie ahead. That is why the proactionary principle is so vital in fighting the bias towards advancing the human condition. And there lies the crucial examination of potential dangers, that not only affect transhumanists, but the entire world. We look ardently at how technologies, including the NBIC technologies – nanoscience, bioscience, information science, and cognitive science – can possibly be used to help solve some of the problems in the world that address humans being stuck in a state of stasis. It’s about time we really knuckle down and started helping people around the world rather than just talking about it, so transhumanism does look at that, of course.

V: How do you address the argument that transhumanism is not an extension of humanism, but rather in direct opposition to what it means to be human?

NVM: Well, there is some issues with that. I’ve heard this, and thank you for bringing it up, because it is a very important problem to be looked at very carefully – not strategically – but carefully. Actually, transhumanism is not in opposition to what it means to be human, but in order to understand humanism and what it means to be human, we have to discuss first, what is a human and what does it mean to be human. For example, a father, a new father of a child, might have a different opinion than a politician. Or a literary scholar may have a different opinion than a religious fundamentalist. There’s no codified, definitive definition for what it means to be human, because the question, in large part, is subjective. Each human has a value system and a set of emotions and a set of experiences that determine for him or her what it means to be human. But in its simplist sense, what it means to be human is based on our biology. A human has a body, and that body is biological. As such, it has a set of chromosomes and genes, intelligence, and sensory and perceptual awareness. The single most complex issue is in accepting mortality of humans. And that’s where humanism comes in. Humanism accepts the mortality of being human in a biological state. The single most complex issue and aim for transhumanism is the emotive desire and the intellectual reason to extend life past the accepted human lifespan, which is, what, 121, 122 years, or somewhere around that particular timeframe. In order to achieve the aim of extending life, the human mind, body, and identity would have to become something other than strictly biological. It will have to incorporate technological methods to construct a regenerative existence for humans. So, that’s the crux of the matter. Humanists do not look at the next step of human evolution like the transhuman or posthuman or whatever we might become in the future. Humanism deals with the here and now pretty much. Transhumanism, on the other hand, looks ahead, is planning, is more critically minded and progressive about dealing with those things. But I think the real issue lies with what it means to be human.

V: Do you think the transhumanist meme is spreading?

NVM: Oh yes, I do. I think so because the ideas which were so avant-garde in the 1980s and even in the 1990s are now headlining the world’s most popular literature. The ideas which were so visionary and radical early on now have become the fodder for political debate. And once ideas get into the arena of political arguments and academic arguments, philosophical arguments, ethical arguments, and even in the business sector, it means that there’s a maturation process that has occurred, and the ideas we talked about early on in the 80s and the early 90s are now issues to be considered practical, probable, and even preferred futures for many people. So I think the true sign of it is we’ve caused enough trouble where people have taken us seriously. We’re no longer just science fiction or avant-gardes, we’re people with views and vision that is alarming and frightening a heck of a lot of people, but at the same time, thank goodness, a lot of people are starting to go, “Wow. This is possible. We could do these things.” And the world sorely, desperately needs a bit of practical optimism and some problem solving.

V: What events or medical advances have you seen that support the ideal of being a transhuman?

NVM: Well, you know, it’s interesting that you ask this question, because I just finished a paper for an inclusion in a book on forecasting what is probable within the next 25, 30 years, so I had to do a lot of research in looking at what is possible, not just fairy tale or Pollyanna looking at it, but really what’s going on. I looked at the issues that face people, and what people – humanity and society – is really concerned about. And that is, number one, dealing with specific diseases that cause problems for children, Tay Sachs, sickle cell anemia, other diseases that totally degenerate the body and the mind. And at the same time, looking at the enormous number of people who desperately need transplants – their organ has become diseased and they need a new organ, and what’s going on in that realm. As well as, the enormous number of people who suffer from paralysis, whether it’s full-body paralysis or semi-body paralysis. So, I looked at those particular areas, and it’s amazing to realize what’s going on. For example, zenoplantation, using pig organs to transplant into humans has been a really radical step in medicine, however that’s becoming, not passe, but becoming overlooked by the possibility of regenerating our own organs. So, in short, what we’re looking at in all these different areas of disease and paralysis and difficulty getting organs is the up and coming area of medicine, technology, and science – well, basically, biotechnology – which is looking at regenerative medicine. What is happening in biotechnology is regenerating the areas of the body that have become disesased so that those areas repgenerat the cells and repair the cell damage and the organ. For example, if you have a diseased organ, you can clone your own organ, put it back in the body, or better yet, regenerate the cells that are diseased. This, in and of itself, will affect the entire body and mind. So, you take the brain, and you have a neurological disease, and the regenerative process of the neurons in the brain will help return you to a state of better cognitive capability.

V: So, if the transhumanist philosophy was actualized, and we lived in this posthuman world, unaffected by aging or degeneration, what would that world look like?

NVM: Oh boy. I just love this question. What an exciting idea to think about. Well, this morning I was watching testa(?) on YouTube at a rave, and I was looking at the enormous light and color and fascination and sound and movement, and I thought, this is what the future could be. One big, giant rave. But seriously, I think that there’s a lot to be said about the rhythm of music, and the rhythm of people in a state of bliss or trance in expressing a communicative and mobile attitude of exchange and communication. So, in short, for me, if I could be an instrumental part of the design team, it would be stunningly pleasant, fluid, and interconnected. Where we could connect with each other 24/7, or just drop out at our whim and not communicate with anyone, where we would be able to teleport to any location at any time, where our ability to NVM: and boulders in the road.

V: I just read a post somewhere about the Fermi Paradox, and the reason that we haven’t made contact with any other intelligent civilization is because perhaps their world is exactly like that, and they’re just in this perfect utopian pleasure world, and they have no desire to explore out any further.

NVM: That’s an interesting thing that you bring that up. I find that the concept of perfection and perfect is such an oxymoron, because if one was to reach a state of perfection, that would be so disingenuous to our creative process and our cognitive process. Perfection is a state of statis, and therefore it would no longer be a state of bliss, it would be a state of almost erosion and entropy, because perfection is a dead end. So, I like the idea of becoming, and that continuous becoming and exploring. So, in my vision of the posthuman future, it wouldn’t stop at a state of perfection, it would continually be achieving and looking and pursuing. And I’m kind of a nice person, so I would have to say that my world would be different than the Fermi Paradox world, it would be reaching out to help. Maybe that’s the woman in me, I don’t know.

V: What kind of an impact do you think that these different advances would have on our society – societal impacts – of these regenerative methods and technologies. What would that do to population, if we’re all healthy and living forever?

NVM: Ok, good question. I think that we have to multi-track, and it’s one thing that many of us don’t do, and I have to catch myself at it as well. If we multi-track, that would be looking at the different domains of expertise and knowledge simultaneously, and oftentimes one domain, like science will exceed and maybe culture will lag behind, or maybe the arts will shoot far ahead in vision and potential, and perhaps economics or politics or education will lag behind. So, looking at it from a strategist point of view, and looking at a schema of events, not all domains of knowledge move forward at the same pace. So, one may lead, then the other may lead, in this massive complex adaptive system. If human beings live for longer periods of time – I try not to use “immortal” or “forever”, because I don’t know what the future holds, and I don’t know what forever means. But let’s just say extreme life extension or extended or super-longevity, if that were to occur, and regenerative medicine did help people with disease and keep us in a state of health and well-being, which would be absolutely lovely, that means that the population would not only balance out, but would probably grow, unless people, as the trend is now, had less and less children. But, having children is lovely, so let’s not take that out of the equation. What would happen in all practical purposes, would be that we develop habitats, environments off the planet, and we start building habitats on the moon, and near Earth orbit, and we start expanding out into our solar system. And this is really a practical thing to do, because society has always reached out to the next island or the next continent to expand and explore and develop. So, it’s part of our innate humanness, or what it means to be human, one of the characteristics or behavioral characteristics I would include would be the essential desire and almost need to expand beyond, to go to the next place, and build and explore and develop. With the XPrize having done so well recently, and new advances in getting our rocket boosters off the planet, and developing new types of architecture for near Earth orbit and perhaps on the moon and Mars, I think it’s reasonable if not just common sensical that we would be building habitats off planet, and I’m sure they would eventually become very lovely and soothing and enjoyable. So, I think that would eradicate a problem of overpopulation. But, the interesting thing there is, this whole myth that the old should die and make way for the young, may suit people in their middle ages, but there’s a lot of old people who don’t really want to die. They want to make room for the young to be sure, for their grandchildren or their friends’ grandchildren. But, their life is very valuable too. My mother is in her 90s, and she is still a very valuable, lovely, generous, spontaneous person, and I think she’s enjoying life, so I wouldn’t want her to die just to make room for someone else. So, I think we have to have a whole paradigm shift in our reasoning about life and sustainability. Life is not something just to throw away because it gets wrinkled. Life is something to nurture. And here’s the paradox of getting old: we become wiser and more knowledgeable and more compassionate as we get older, and then we are expected to die. I would like to change that, very much.

V: A few questions about some of the institutes that you have contributed to. What is the Extropy Institute?

NVM: Extropy Institute is the founding organization of transhumanism. It was developed in the late 1980s, early 1990s, as a pioneering transhumanist organization known for its visionary foresight in the future. And it was the pioneering organization that put transhumanism on the map. It had conferences and high gloss magazines sold in bookstores, and brought the ideas of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, cloning, extreme life extension, space exploration, biotechnology, all of these emerging technologies, it brought it out into the mainstream as much as possible. So, it has been a crucial pioneering catalyst for transhumanism.

V: What future plans are there for the institute?

NVM: Well, the institute closed down 2 years ago, but it’s not forgotten to be sure. We closed it down because we achieved our first and most finessed goal which was to memetically engineer transhumanism through the codified philosophy of extropy. And once that was realized, we felt that it was time for the board and our advisors and all our members to go out on their own and build their own organizations, because that is part and parcel of the philosophy of extropy. Spread more memes, and sprout more fruit. That is what is occurring now. We are rebuilding an extropian network, or a network of extropy, currently, and will continue having summits, probably will have a summit in 2008. The extropy network bringing high minds to high places. I’m not sure what the goal will be. Our last summit was on countering the precautionary principle in the United States and in a few other countries, where President Bush’s bioethics committee was saying transhumanism is the most dangerous idea, and ardently fighting levels of progress to improve the human condition. And we thought that was a really terrible, disingenuous thing to do for humankind, especially Americans, since we’ve had so much trouble with our reputation and our behavior across the planet. So, we took that on. I think we did quite well. Our keynotes were Marvin Minsky and Ray Kurzweil, and Greg Fay and Max More, and myself and Anders Sandberg, and it was a great conference. It was a great summit. It was all virtual, it was the first virtual summit, and so we were very pleased with the success of that. So, I will organizing one in 2008.

V: What is Transhumanist Arts & Culture?

NVM: Transhumanist Arts & Culture was developed in the early 1980s, when I had my cable television show in Los Angeles and in Tellyride, Colorado, called Transcentury Update, based on the transhuman condition. It was basically to bring together creative people in the arts and the sciences, and technologies, to consider what the role of artist’s art is today and in the future. Throughout history, artists, including science and technology, have been a voice and vision of civilization. And artists as communicators, have an ability, a marvelous ability, to reach out to others and introduce insight and vision about society and culture. So I thought that artists and the arts, bringing that together based on transhumanism, could engender some passion and dreams and hopes for humanity, and express it through various mediums, like NET, and media art, robotics, artificial general intelligence, interactive media, animation, film, etc. Basically, it was just to get this group of creative people together artistically, whether they were pronounced artists or not.

V: What are some resources that could help people better understand the transhumanist philosophy?

NVM: I think the best resources still is, and I mean this in all objectivity, is Extropy Institute, because it was the pioneering organization of transhumanism, and the website is still up, so it’s a great resource. That’s at www.extropy.org. I think Transhumanist Arts & Culture is a good site too, because it has a FAQ, and approaches transhumanism from a more creative, visionary perspective of arts and technology, and that’s www.transhumanist.biz. Another site is Anders Sandberg’s website. He’s now in England, but it was a Swedish website, and I think it was the original encyclopedic website for transhumanism, so that’s . The World Transhumanist website is pretty good. It does have a bit of bias, because it tends to be overtly political and not inclusive, so I’m hoping that will be changed through the new executive director James Clemet and the new board. I am an honorary vice-chair of that organization, and I’m hoping that its future is going to be positive. But, basically just Googling ‘transhumanism’ is pretty good. I think some of the most ardent writing is done by Max More, who is the author of the philosophy of transhumanism. Some of his papers are excellent.

V: What is the Singularity?

NVM: In one sentence, the Singularity is a time when supercomputers become smarter than human intelligence.

V: Ok. And, what would that mean?

NVM: That would mean that supercomputers, through artificial general intelligence, are able to teach themselves and outsmart humans in all practical sense. The thinking processes of supercomputers will far exceed our human ability to solve problems and reason. The interesting thing therein with the Singularity and supercomputing power, is that the computers will teach themselves. So it will be this dynamo effect where the supercomputers get smarter and smarter and smarter. And, the smarter you are, the more knowledge you have. It might happen very quickly, it could happen more slowly, no one knows what the timeframe of the Singularity will be, but the assumption is that when it hits, it will hit hard, unless our human potential, our human cognitive ability, our human sensibility takes a look at this, and we say to ourselves, “Ok, we’re going to merge more with machines”. Because, if supercomputers became smarter than us, more intelligent than us, then it would not be very good for our future as a species. So, that’s the threat of the Singularity. If we don’t prepare for it, then we could be left behind. And I think this is not science fiction, it is something we need to very seriously consider. And I think transhumanism is one social movement that is considering this very deeply and seriously and with all force ahead, because it is possible that this could happen.

V: How do you think transhumanism is related to the Singularity? Or, do you think the Singularity is a necessity in order to achieve the advances that will give us the richer, healthier life that the transhumanist ideals cover?

NVM: A paradigm shift is necessary. The Singularity could be the paradigm shift that would shake up the world. But, it may not look like a Singularity to people within the environment of change. It could come in slow strides, or one big wave. Transhumanism is related to this because, whether it comes in slow strides or one big wave, we are aware of it, we are thinking about it, we’re talking about it, we’re writing about it, we’re holding conferences on it, we’re bringing it to the mainstream, so that everyone can understand that supercomputing power, bringing about supercomputing intelligence could be something we’d want to be totally aware of, not dumbed down to it. So, transhumanism’s role here, one of its key roles, is to look at the issues, look at the possibilities, strategically plan for it, come up with scenarios, and help educate the public about the effects of high-end supercomputing power. With artificial intelligence, one might say, “ok, let’s look at this big soup or this smorgasbord, how does artificial intelligence relate to the Singularity”? Well, artificial intelligence is the intelligence of supercomputing. That’s what it is, basically. Now, it could be top down, bottom up, neural networks, whatever the formula is to create a vast strong heavy-handed intelligence is the issue. If that’s not human intelligence, what is it? For the history of our species and civilization, the human mind, the human capability, the cognitive ability, has been said to be smarter, more intelligent than all other species, and we’ve held that as our amulet, ‘we have it, you don’t’ type of thing, which is a hierarchy of species, to be sure. But, one thing that is vital to human nature in most people’s standards is that we are the most intelligent animal. Well, ok, what if we’re not? How would we deal with that? How would we look at that? How would that affect our species, our culture, our humanity, if indeed, the human being is no longer the most intelligent, the most capable, the most able to problem solve species on the planet? So, that would reduce us to a position of being secondary to something else. And what if that something else is an artificial intelligence or supercomputing power? How would we deal with that? Probably not very well. So, what can we do now? What we can do now is be aware of it, understand it, make preparation for it, and integrate with it. So what we could do, in my estimation, is become the supercomputers. And that’s what the posthuman is. And that’s one aspect of looking at the future, that would be one scenario, that we merge with the machines, the supercomputing capability, and we become the future species, the evolution of human with this new animal, let’s call it. It’s not an animal, obviously, it’s not biological, but its mechanism is based on regenerative processes. If we merge with that, and that’s what the posthuman could be, then we might better situate ourselves.

V: What, in your words, is a futurist?

NVM: I think there are several different types of futurists. There’s the normative futurist, there’s the strategic futurist, there’s the artistic futurist, there’s the visionary futurist. So, if I put all these together, and sculpted a quintessential futurist, I think it would be someone who was able to look at the future with scrutinizing eyes and not get lost in Pollyanna reasoning, but to ardently consider how timeframes involve various domains, which like I said, multi-tracking, various domains where one could take the lead and the other lag behind, but how this is a shifting type of environment.. It’s crucial for a futurist to be wide-eyed and bushy-tailed about the future, without allowing his or her desire to…. no, I’m gonna stop here, because I don’t think that’s right. I think I’m just gonna say, what is a futurist? A futurist is a person who considers the consequences of the future and does his or her best to help strategize and develop scenarios that would help educate others about the future.

V: What trends are you aware of that people should be looking at?

NVM: Regenerative medicine, how that might affect their life and the lives of their loved ones. A second trend that I think that we all need to be aware of, is the religious dogma, the pervasiveness of religious wars, will eventually become a moot point, so I think we need to start preparing, and start practicing in earnest a compassion and understanding and sense of diversity and acceptance of different people’s religious views, because that is the trend of the future. This “I’m right, you’re wrong”, is passe, it’s so 20th Century. I think that we all need to be practicing a new framework and language in accepting the differences and the different beliefs and gods that many people share. Another trend that I think is crucial for people to start paying attention to is equal to the religious dogma – is political dogma. There is no 21st Century politics that actually is 21st Century. Most of the political platforms and behaviors are very 20th Century, theyr’e based on ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’, it’s very talking heads, and two-dimensional. The future of politics is going to be very immersive, very connected. It’s going to be an interactive connection intelligence of determining individual rights, and self ownership of rights. I think that preparing for that would be to start moving away from ‘I’m a Democrat, you’re a Republican’, or “I’m a Liberatarian, you’re a Socialist”, or any of these languages and mindsets that keep us really in a state of dogma, and are so inappropriate today. Another trend that I think is crucial to pay attention is the sense that space exploration is coming about, and to start looking at what it might be like to actually live in different habitats, in near Earth orbit, or on the moon. With that in mind, another trend that I think is crucial is that we are going to live longer. So, I think people need to start preparing their finances. I mean, it’s never too late to put aside 10% of your income. People think if they’re over 50, if they didn’t do that when they were 20, then what’s the point now, because I’m going to die in 20 years. Well, that’s an old world mindset. I think that if you start preparing anytime, that is just fine. So, this whole retirement vision, and ageist vision, I think is going to become wiped from our memories. So, the trend there is to think youthful, think vital, think healthy. As far as all the technology trends and scientific trends, I’m sure most of your guests have already gone over them. Artificial general intelligence will come about in 20-30 years, and that’s going to be very exciting. Nano, molecular manufacturing, where each person has an MM machine on their desktop rather than a printer to build molecular manufacturing projects, just like you’d print out a color picture, will be a trend of the future. Nanotechnology is pretty much the buzzword these days. And therein nanomedicine. Going back to regenerative medicine, nanomedicine is going to just totally change the face of medicine. Nanomedicine, giving credit to Robert Freitas, nanomedicine is taking nanorobots into the body and repairing cell damage that way, which is part of the regenerative process indeed. Other trends, I think, are how we look at ourselves as humans. I think for the first time in the history of our humanity, our civilization, we’re going to realize that we may not be the end result. And this is going to cause an enormous paradigm shift for all of humanity. Similar to, perhaps, the paradigm shift that was caused when we realized that we were not at the center of the universe, or that the world was not flat, that the world was actually round and we wouldn’t fall off an edge. So, some of the biggest trends leading up to these major shifts may seem not as exciting as some of the greatest technologies and sciences. But, sometimes, just the self realization, that this little shift of perception can cause enormous reverberations that if we’re not prepared to think about, could really cause some backlashes in society and in the behavior of society.

V: So, 2008 is right around the corner. Do you have any specific predicitons for this upcoming year?

NVM: Wikipedia falls short. It is unveiled that Wikipedia is run by a few people that dominate its information base. Wikipedia has to stand up and get a good attorney. I think that Wikipedia may find itself in a lot of trouble for manipulating knowledge, and presenting itself as a knowledge bowl media source of information, where it’s not such. I think that could be very news-worthy. I don’t know, 2008, that’s right here. So, what could happen in a year? What could happen in a year? I think one of the maybe obvious things that will happen in 2008, so it’s not really a prediction, it’s just an insight, is that we will develop a new species. It’s already on the drawing board, and has been happening. I’m not saying I support it or I don’t support it. But it looks like it’s going to happen. May or may not be a good thing, I don’t know. As far as investing in technologies, I think nanotechnology will be developing more and more patents. But as far as a real forecast of something terribly exciting, i have no idea. I’m not very good at making predictions, because I don’t think it’s smart for futurists to make predictions, because they only turn around and slap us in the ass afterwards. We always find you predict something, and then it doesn’t happen, and that hits the news. So, to protect from making a fool out of myself, I’m not going to make any hard and fast predictions. But, I think it would be absolutely fabulous if we actually figured out a way to have space tourism. I just think in 2008 that would be fabulous. I’m going to give you my hopeful prediction. This is my hopeful prediction, that the United States becomes loved by the world again. (laughs) That would be my hope, that something extraordinary happens, where the United States quits dictating other cultures of people how to live and how to behave, and we just kind of take a step backwards and become a kinder, more intelligent nation again.

V: That’s a tall order.

NVM: I know. But, wouldn’t that be lovely. Because, Americans are such generous people. We need to just clean up our act, for goodness sakes.

V: How about some predictions for the next 5 years, through 2012?

NVM: Through 2012 – I think we’re going to be able to regenerate many organs of the body instead of having transplants, and that could be through cloning a cell from that organ, or having nanomedicine, or genetic engineering regenerate the organs. I think that would be astounding, and beneficial to people all over the world, the hundreds and thousands and even millions of people who are suffering from disease in their organs. So, I think that is a major trend, I think it’s totally possible, if not probably. I think reversing aging will take even greater strides within this timeframe, because plastic surgery and regenerative medicine there is really taking leaps and bounds. As far as transportation – I don’t know if we’re going to be able to fix some of the problems with pollution and transportation, it’s just so vile. I really just don’t like it. I’ve been hopeful in the past, and my dreams didn’t come true. And it’s not that I’m being pessimistic about it at all, I’m being practical. People want to have their cars. And they want their cars their way. And they want to drive faster, and bigger, and whatever. I’m gonna leave that one alone, because i would like cars to be put in prison. I think they’re just vile killers. It would be lovely if there was a new methodology for transportation, like we shared automobiles – picked one up and dropped one off at locations, I think that would eradicate a lot of the problems. I think one of the trends in this timeframe that would be near and dear to everyone, that science and technology and smart thinking develops ways to actually reverse global warming trends. This could be done through a number of engineering, but I think nanotechnology will be crucial in that, as well as regenerative medicine. I think a lot of our promise for making trends or predictions for this timeframe would be based on the ability to get nanotechnology through and get it working and solving some problems. Some of the downsides of that is legislation, and a lot of conservatives, and technoconservatives, basically, that would fight nanotechnology because of a fear of runaway technology or gray goo assemblers or whatever. But I think we have to really deal with the problems on the planet. I think this timeframe would be looking at the planet and dealing with some of the problems and that we all become more ardent environmentalists, but not crazy environmentalists like Greenpeace, or the ‘greens’, or any of these people that want to go back to villages without telephones. I think we need to be really smart about it. We’re kind of on the cusp of things happening. It’s hard to say things are going to happen in 5 or 10 years because you don’t know what discontinuities will come about, so making any type of prediction within any given timeframe is difficult, unless you go off, say, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. I think what happens is the least expected thing to happen. I’m not very good at this, I’m sorry.

V: Do you have any general predictions for the next 10 years, through 2017?

NVM: In ten years, I think we will have a very different voting system on politics, and a very different outlook on how to govern nations, how to govern people. I think that in 10 years, there may be a revitalizing of the United Nations, and there will be new types of world councils to deal with specific problems, so the United Nations will not hold a monopoly on how the world communicates. I think we need more rigorous organizations. I think in 10 years we will see a very bountiful shift in the way women allow themselves to be treated in some of the areas of the world where there rights are extremely limited, and their whole personhood, their bodies, are shamed. In 10 years, that will be sorely addressed, because it’s been on the drawing table for so long, and it’s reaching a point of almost where it’s at a vortex, something has to happen quickly. So I think in 10 years, because things don’t happen as quickly as we like, that women in the Middle East, women in Africa, women in India and China, and lots of the areas around the world where their rights have been limited and they’ve been sequestered to suffer in very confined living sensibilities, I think that will shift, and it will be one of the most marvelous shifts in the world, because I think that women have been treated so devastatingly poorly. So, that’s something I look forward to, and I think it will happen. I feel very confident. With communication, and especially the internet and getting word out and these small grassroots groups that are helping these women, I think it will reach point where the self esteem and the pride and the sense of being will far exceed the rule of thumb posed on them by their religious brutes.

From: http://memebox.com/futureblogger/show/99

K. ERIC DREXLER

2009-11-04T16:51:00.000-08:00

Nanotechnology - the Present and Future

Kim Eric Drexler (born April 25, 1955 in Almeda, California) is an American engineer best known for popularizing the potential of molecular nanotechnology (MNT), from the 1970s and 1980s. His 1991 doctoral thesis at MIT was revised and published as the book "Nanosystems Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation" (1992), which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992. He also coined the term grey goo.

LIFE AND WORK

K. Eric Drexler was very strongly influenced by ideas on Limits to Growth in the early 1970s. His response in his first year at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was to seek out someone who was working on extraterrestrial resources. He found Dr. Gerard K. O´Neill of Princeton University, a physicist famous for a strong focus on particle accelerators and his landmark work on the concepts of space colonization. Drexler was involved in NASA summer studies in 1975 and 1976. Besides working summers for O'Neill building mass driver prototypes, he delivered papers at the first three Space Manufacturing conferences at Princeton. The 1977 and 1979 papers were co-authored with Keith Henson, and patents were issued on both subjects, vapor phase fabrication and space radiators.

Drexler participated in NASA summer studies on space colonies in 1975 and 1976. He fabricated metal films a few tens of nanometers thick on a wax support to demonstrate the potentials of high performance solar sails. He was active in space politics, helping the L5 Society defeat the Moon Treaty in 1980.

During the late 1970s, he began to develop ideas about molecular nanotechnology (MNT). In 1979, Drexler encountered Richard Feynman´s provocative 1959 talk There´s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. The term nanotechnology was coined by the Tokyo Science University Professor Norio Taniguchi in 1974 to describe the precision manufacture of materials with nanometer tolerances, and was unknowingly appropriated by Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology to describe what later became known as molecular nanotechnology (MNT). In that book, he proposed the idea of a nanoscale "assembler" which would be able to build a copy of itself and of other items of arbitrary complexity. He also first published the term "grey goo" to describe what might happen if a hypothetical self-replicating molecular nanotechnology went out of control.

Drexler holds three degrees from MIT. He received his B.S. in Interdisciplinary Sciences in 1977 and his M.S. in 1979 in Astro/Aerospace Engineering with a Master's thesis titled “Design of a High Performance Solar Sail System,.” In 1991 he earned a Ph.D. under the auspices of the MIT Media Lab (formally, the Media Arts and Sciences Section, School of Architecture and Planning). His Ph.D. work was the first doctoral degree on the topic of molecular nanotechnology and (after some editing) his thesis, “Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation,” was published as "Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation" (1992), which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992.

Drexler and Christine Peterson, at that time husband and wife, founded the Foresight Institute in 1986 with the mission of "Preparing for nanotechnology.” Drexler and Peterson ended their 21-year marriage in 2002. Drexler is no longer a member of the Foresight Institute.

In August 2005 Drexler joined Nanorex, a molecular engineering software company based in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, to serve as the company's Chief Technical Advisor. Nanorex's nanoENGINEER-1 software was reportedly able to simulate a hypothetical differential gear design in "a snap". According to Nanorex's web site, an open source molecular design program is currently slated for release in Fall 2007.

In 2006, Drexler married Rosa Wang, a former investment banker who works with Ashoka: Innovators for the Public on improving the social capital markets.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._Eric_Drexler

Nanotechnology - the Present and Future - An Interview with Dr K. Eric Drexler, Chairman of The Foresight Institute.

With the current major investment in nanotechnology R&D resulting in a myriad of practical discoveries and applications, nanotechnology is set to drive major breakthroughs in almost any sector of technology.

Combined with the suitability of computational tools to this emerging science,it came as no surprise that nanotechnology was a hot topic of discussion and debate at AccelrysWorld 2004.

Accelrys caught up with Dr K. Eric Drexler, founder of The Foresight Institute www.foresight.org), and talked about the present and future goals of this enabling science.

The Foresight Institute is a non-profit organization, founded in 1986, to promote communication among researchers and to help to disseminate research results to a broader audience, such as the general public, policy makers, and venture capitalists, and to facilitate the formation of companies, networks, and collaborations in the field.

Nanotechnology is a name that gets widely touted today. "The original definition is based on the development of molecular machine systems able to build a wide range of products inexpensively, with atomic precision," said Dr Drexler. "The term now covers a wide range of cutting edge areas of technology. As a result, new developments of great value are coming out that are under this label."

Dr Drexler believes that some of these breakthroughs will have revolutionary potential, with applications ranging from aircraft and antibiotics to integrated circuits. "Molecular manufacturing promises a comprehensive revolution in our ability to manipulate the structure of matter. It's about bringing digital control to the atomic level and doing so on a large scale at low cost. It's very difficult to overstate the significance of that to physical technology, economics, medicine, and military affairs."

As the majority of molecular modeling and simulation software operates at the nanoscale, these tools will play a major part in the development and application of this technology. "Developing molecular manufacturing systems involves the use of molecular machine systems, and molecular machine systems are well modeled by molecular mechanics," explained Dr Drexler. "To examine the chemical reactions that are at the heart of construction involves the use of packages that address molecular physics at the level of quantum theory, but most of the system, most of the complexity, most of the novelty, is at the level of hundreds to thousands to millions of atoms in structures that are well described by molecular mechanics approximations."

"The vital role of molecular modeling in this field is to enable engineering design, at the component and systems level, to set the objectives that then will guide the laboratory efforts at physical implementation."

So what are the practical applications of this science and what can we all look forward to in the future? There are a number of products on the market today that have been developed using nanotechnology, such as nanoparticles in sunscreens, and carbon nanotubes in strong materials.

Dr Drexler explained that an important goal is devices with improved properties. "The earliest major results are likely to be in the field of molecular sensors that use molecular machinery for their active elements in moving and sensing the structures involved." A good example could be, for example, a DNA reader. "I think a natural early goal for a molecular machine centered nanotechnology development programme would be a DNA reader that enables you obtain, from a blood sample, a CD with your genome on it, after only a day of chip time. The chip will have molecular machines sitting on top of microelectronic circuitry, using kilobase per second per read heads."

Dr Drexler was philosophical about the longer-term future of nanotechnology, explaining that the goal is atomically precise fabrication, by guiding the motion of molecules, resulting in precise rearrangements of atoms that would typically transfer at one to several atoms at a time. But there is caution to be heeded. "The belief that nanotechnology is about building by picking up and putting down single atoms is technically misleading," warned Drexler. "This has been a basis for some of the misunderstanding that has plagued the field." Dr Drexler believes that this has been part of the reason that many chemists have failed to examine the original research literature that would have shown this perception to be incorrect.

Putting any misconceptions aside, Dr Drexler believes that manufactured novel nanoscale machines will one day become reality. "These machines already exist in nature and researchers have already begun to redesign protein molecules to have novel function as enzymes." Dr Drexler thinks that a reasonably well-defined and attractive milestone on route to nanoscale machines would be a piece of molecular machinery comparable in size and complexity to a ribosome. "A machine, that, like a ribosome, can use digital data to guide the atomically precise construction of polymeric materials with predictable and tailored properties, designed and implemented faster and easier."

Dr Drexler believes computational tools will play an important role in achieving these goals. "I think that every significant advance in new artificial molecular machine systems will be based on molecular modeling," believes Drexler. "People will not put into practice ideas without first testing them by simulation. The simulations can be used to refine the designs to within engineering margins of safety, eliminating resources wasted on 'non-starters'."

"This methodology, led by molecular simulation, will be at the heart of the engineering process that will lead us forward into this new world of technology," concluded Dr Drexler.

From: http://accelrys.com/references/case-studies/drexler.pdf

NICK BOSTROM

2009-10-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?

Nick Bostrom (born Niklas Boström in 1973) is a Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk and the Anthropic principle. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics (2000). He is currently the director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

In addition to his writing for academic and popular press, Bostrom makes frequent media appearances in which he talks about transhumanism-related topics such as cloning, artificial intelligence, superintelligence, mind uploading, cryonics, nanotechnology, and the simulation argument.

In 1998, Bostrom co-founded (with David Pearce) the World Transhumanist Association (which has since changed its name to Humanity+). In 2004, he co-founded (with James Hughes) the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Bostrom currently serves as the Chair of both organizations. In 2005 he was appointed Director of the newly created Oxford Future of Humanity Institute. Bostrom is the 2009 finalist in philosophy for and potential first ever recipient of the Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement.

Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?

BY NICK BOSTROM
Department of Philosophy, Oxford University

I. INTRODUCTION

Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears. That is the basic idea. The rest of this paper will spell it out more carefully.

Apart from the interest this thesis may hold for those who are engaged in futuristic speculation, there are also more purely theoretical rewards. The argument provides a stimulus for formulating some methodological and metaphysical questions, and it suggests naturalistic analogies to certain traditional religious conceptions, which some may find amusing or thought-provoking.

The structure of the paper is as follows. First, we formulate an assumption that we need to import from the philosophy of mind in order to get the argument started. Second, we consider some empirical reasons for thinking that running vastly many simulations of human minds would be within the capability of a future civilization that has developed many of those technologies that can already be shown to be compatible with known physical laws and engineering constraints. This part is not philosophically necessary but it provides an incentive for paying attention to the rest. Then follows the core of the argument, which makes use of some simple probability theory, and a section providing support for a weak indifference principle that the argument employs. Lastly, we discuss some interpretations of the disjunction, mentioned in the abstract, that forms the conclusion of the simulation argument.

II. THE ASSUMPTION OF SUBSTRATE-INDEPENDENCE

A common assumption in the philosophy of mind is that of substrate-independence. The idea is that mental states can supervene on any of a broad class of physical substrates. Provided a system implements the right sort of computational structures and processes, it can be associated with conscious experiences. It is nor an essential property of consciousness that it is implemented on carbon-based biological neural networks inside a cranium: silicon-based processors inside a computer could in principle do the trick as well.

Arguments for this thesis have been given in the literature, and although it is not entirely uncontroversial, we shall here take it as a given.

The argument we shall present does not, however, depend on any very strong version of functionalism or computationalism. For example, we need not assume that the thesis of substrate-independence is necessarily true (either analytically or metaphysically) – just that, in fact, a computer running a suitable program would be conscious. Moreover, we need not assume that in order to create a mind on a computer it would be sufficient to program it in such a way that it behaves like a human in all situations, including passing the Turing test etc. We need only the weaker assumption that it would suffice for the generation of subjective experiences that the computational processes of a human brain are structurally replicated in suitably fine-grained detail, such as on the level of individual synapses. This attenuated version of substrate-independence is quite widely accepted.

Neurotransmitters, nerve growth factors, and other chemicals that are smaller than a synapse clearly play a role in human cognition and learning. The substrate-independence thesis is not that the effects of these chemicals are small or irrelevant, but rather that they affect subjective experience only via their direct or indirect influence on computational activities. For example, if there can be no difference in subjective experience without there also being a difference in synaptic discharges, then the requisite detail of simulation is at the synaptic level (or higher).

III. THE TECHNOLOGICAL LIMITS OF COMPUTATION

At our current stage of technological development, we have neither sufficiently powerful hardware nor the requisite software to create conscious minds in computers. But persuasive arguments have been given to the effect that if technological progress continues unabated then these shortcomings will eventually be overcome. Some authors argue that this stage may be only a few decades away. Yet present purposes require no assumptions about the time-scale. The simulation argument works equally well for those who think that it will take hundreds of thousands of years to reach a “posthuman” stage of civilization, where humankind has acquired most of the technological capabilities that one can currently show to be consistent with physical laws and with material and energy constraints.

Such a mature stage of technological development will make it possible to convert planets and other astronomical resources into enormously powerful computers. It is currently hard to be confident in any upper bound on the computing power that may be available to posthuman civilizations. As we are still lacking a “theory of everything”, we cannot rule out the possibility that novel physical phenomena, not allowed for in current physical theories, may be utilized to transcend those constraints that in our current understanding impose theoretical limits on the information processing attainable in a given lump of matter. We can with much greater confidence establish lower bounds on posthuman computation, by assuming only mechanisms that are already understood. For example, Eric Drexler has outlined a design for a system the size of a sugar cube (excluding cooling and power supply) that would perform 10^21 instructions per second. Another author gives a rough estimate of 10^42 operations per second for a computer with a mass on order of a large planet. (If we could create quantum computers, or learn to build computers out of nuclear matter or plasma, we could push closer to the theoretical limits. Seth Lloyd calculates an upper bound for a 1 kg computer of 5*10^50 logical operations per second carried out on ~10^31 bits. However, it suffices for our purposes to use the more conservative estimate that presupposes only currently known design-principles.)The amount of computing power needed to emulate a human mind can likewise be roughly estimated. One estimate, based on how computationally expensive it is to replicate the functionality of a piece of nervous tissue that we have already understood and whose functionality has been replicated in silico, contrast enhancement in the retina, yields a figure of ~10^14 operations per second for the entire human brain. An alternative estimate, based the number of synapses in the brain and their firing frequency, gives a figure of ~10^16-10^17 operations per second. Conceivably, even more could be required if we want to simulate in detail the internal workings of synapses and dendritic trees. However, it is likely that the human central nervous system has a high degree of redundancy on the mircoscale to compensate for the unreliability and noisiness of its neuronal components. One would therefore expect a substantial efficiency gain when using more reliable and versatile non-biological processors.

Memory seems to be a no more stringent constraint than processing power. Moreover, since the maximum human sensory bandwidth is ~10^8 bits per second, simulating all sensory events incurs a negligible cost compared to simulating the cortical activity. We can therefore use the processing power required to simulate the central nervous system as an estimate of the total computational cost of simulating a human mind.

If the environment is included in the simulation, this will require additional computing power – how much depends on the scope and granularity of the simulation. Simulating the entire universe down to the quantum level is obviously infeasible, unless radically new physics is discovered. But in order to get a realistic simulation of human experience, much less is needed – only whatever is required to ensure that the simulated humans, interacting in normal human ways with their simulated environment, don’t notice any irregularities. The microscopic structure of the inside of the Earth can be safely omitted. Distant astronomical objects can have highly compressed representations: verisimilitude need extend to the narrow band of properties that we can observe from our planet or solar system spacecraft. On the surface of Earth, macroscopic objects in inhabited areas may need to be continuously simulated, but microscopic phenomena could likely be filled in ad hoc. What you see through an electron microscope needs to look unsuspicious, but you usually have no way of confirming its coherence with unobserved parts of the microscopic world. Exceptions arise when we deliberately design systems to harness unobserved microscopic phenomena that operate in accordance with known principles to get results that we are able to independently verify. The paradigmatic case of this is a computer. The simulation may therefore need to include a continuous representation of computers down to the level of individual logic elements. This presents no problem, since our current computing power is negligible by posthuman standards.

Moreover, a posthuman simulator would have enough computing power to keep track of the detailed belief-states in all human brains at all times. Therefore, when it saw that a human was about to make an observation of the microscopic world, it could fill in sufficient detail in the simulation in the appropriate domain on an as-needed basis. Should any error occur, the director could easily edit the states of any brains that have become aware of an anomaly before it spoils the simulation. Alternatively, the director could skip back a few seconds and rerun the simulation in a way that avoids the problem.

It thus seems plausible that the main computational cost in creating simulations that are indistinguishable from physical reality for human minds in the simulation resides in simulating organic brains down to the neuronal or sub-neuronal level. While it is not possible to get a very exact estimate of the cost of a realistic simulation of human history, we can use ~10^33 - 10^36 operations as a rough estimate. As we gain more experience with virtual reality, we will get a better grasp of the computational requirements for making such worlds appear realistic to their visitors. But in any case, even if our estimate is off by several orders of magnitude, this does not matter much for our argument. We noted that a rough approximation of the computational power of a planetary-mass computer is 10^42 operations per second, and that assumes only already known nanotechnological designs, which are probably far from optimal. A single such a computer could simulate the entire mental history of humankind (call this an ancestor-simulation) by using less than one millionth of its processing power for one second. A posthuman civilization may eventually build an astronomical number of such computers. We can conclude that the computing power available to a posthuman civilization is sufficient to run a huge number of ancestor-simulations even it allocates only a minute fraction of its resources to that purpose. We can draw this conclusion even while leaving a substantial margin of error in all our estimates.
· Posthuman civilizations would have enough computing power to run hugely many ancestor-simulations even while using only a tiny fraction of their resources for that purpose.

IV. THE CORE OF THE SIMULATION ARGUMENT

The basic idea of this paper can be expressed roughly as follows: If there were a substantial chance that our civilization will ever get to the posthuman stage and run many ancestor-simulations, then how come you are not living in such a simulation?

We shall develop this idea into a rigorous argument. Let us introduce the following notation:

The actual fraction of all observers with human-type experiences that live in simulations is then

Writing f1 for the fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations (or that contain at least some individuals who are interested in that and have sufficient resources to run a significant number of such simulations), and N1 for the average number of ancestor-simulations run by such interested civilizations, we have
and thus:
Because of the immense computing power of posthuman civilizations, N1 is extremely large, as we saw in the previous section. By inspecting (*) we can then see that at least one of the following three propositions must be true:

V. A BLAND INDIFFERENCE PRINCIPLE

We can take a further step and conclude that conditional on the truth of (3), one’s credence in the hypothesis that one is in a simulation should be close to unity. More generally, if we knew that a fraction x of all observers with human-type experiences live in simulations, and we don’t have any information that indicate that our own particular experiences are any more or less likely than other human-type experiences to have been implemented in vivo rather than in machina, then our credence that we are in a simulation should equal x:

This step is sanctioned by a very weak indifference principle. Let us distinguish two cases. The first case, which is the easiest, is where all the minds in question are like your own in the sense that they are exactly qualitatively identical to yours: they have exactly the same information and the same experiences that you have. The second case is where the minds are “like” each other only in the loose sense of being the sort of minds that are typical of human creatures, but they are qualitatively distinct from one another and each has a distinct set of experiences. I maintain that even in the latter case, where the minds are qualitatively different, the simulation argument still works, provided that you have no information that bears on the question of which of the various minds are simulated and which are implemented biologically.

A detailed defense of a stronger principle, which implies the above stance for both cases as trivial special instances, has been given in the literature. Space does not permit a recapitulation of that defense here, but we can bring out one of the underlying intuitions by bringing to our attention to an analogous situation of a more familiar kind. Suppose that x% of the population has a certain genetic sequence S within the part of their DNA commonly designated as “junk DNA”. Suppose, further, that there are no manifestations of S (short of what would turn up in a gene assay) and that there are no known correlations between having S and any observable characteristic. Then, quite clearly, unless you have had your DNA sequenced, it is rational to assign a credence of x% to the hypothesis that you have S. And this is so quite irrespective of the fact that the people who have S have qualitatively different minds and experiences from the people who don’t have S. (They are different simply because all humans have different experiences from one another, not because of any known link between S and what kind of experiences one has.)

The same reasoning holds if S is not the property of having a certain genetic sequence but instead the property of being in a simulation, assuming only that we have no information that enables us to predict any differences between the experiences of simulated minds and those of the original biological minds.

It should be stressed that the bland indifference principle expressed by (#) prescribes indifference only between hypotheses about which observer you are, when you have no information about which of these observers you are. It does not in general prescribe indifference between hypotheses when you lack specific information about which of the hypotheses is true. In contrast to Laplacean and other more ambitious principles of indifference, it is therefore immune to Bertrand’s paradox and similar predicaments that tend to plague indifference principles of unrestricted scope.

Readers familiar with the Doomsday argument may worry that the bland principle of indifference invoked here is the same assumption that is responsible for getting the Doomsday argument off the ground, and that the counterintuitiveness of some of the implications of the latter incriminates or casts doubt on the validity of the former. This is not so. The Doomsday argument rests on a much stronger and more controversial premiss, namely that one should reason as if one were a random sample from the set of all people who will ever have lived (past, present, and future) even though we know that we are living in the early twenty-first century rather than at some point in the distant past or the future. The bland indifference principle, by contrast, applies only to cases where we have no information about which group of people we belong to.

If betting odds provide some guidance to rational belief, it may also be worth to ponder that if everybody were to place a bet on whether they are in a simulation or not, then if people use the bland principle of indifference, and consequently place their money on being in a simulation if they know that that’s where almost all people are, then almost everyone will win their bets. If they bet on not being in a simulation, then almost everyone will lose. It seems better that the bland indifference principle be heeded.

Further, one can consider a sequence of possible situations in which an increasing fraction of all people live in simulations: 98%, 99%, 99.9%, 99.9999%, and so on. As one approaches the limiting case in which everybody is in a simulation (from which one can deductively infer that one is in a simulation oneself), it is plausible to require that the credence one assigns to being in a simulation gradually approach the limiting case of complete certainty in a matching manner.

VI. INTERPRETATION

The possibility represented by proposition (1) is fairly straightforward. If (1) is true, then humankind will almost certainly fail to reach a posthuman level; for virtually no species at our level of development become posthuman, and it is hard to see any justification for thinking that our own species will be especially privileged or protected from future disasters. Conditional on (1), therefore, we must give a high credence to DOOM, the hypothesis that humankind will go extinct before reaching a posthuman level:

One can imagine hypothetical situations were we have such evidence as would trump knowledge of fp. For example, if we discovered that we were about to be hit by a giant meteor, this might suggest that we had been exceptionally unlucky. We could then assign a credence to DOOM larger than our expectation of the fraction of human-level civilizations that fail to reach posthumanity. In the actual case, however, we seem to lack evidence for thinking that we are special in this regard, for better or worse.

Proposition (1) doesn’t by itself imply that we are likely to go extinct soon, only that we are unlikely to reach a posthuman stage. This possibility is compatible with us remaining at, or somewhat above, our current level of technological development for a long time before going extinct. Another way for (1) to be true is if it is likely that technological civilization will collapse. Primitive human societies might then remain on Earth indefinitely.

There are many ways in which humanity could become extinct before reaching posthumanity. Perhaps the most natural interpretation of (1) is that we are likely to go extinct as a result of the development of some powerful but dangerous technology. One candidate is molecular nanotechnology, which in its mature stage would enable the construction of self-replicating nanobots capable of feeding on dirt and organic matter – a kind of mechanical bacteria. Such nanobots, designed for malicious ends, could cause the extinction of all life on our planet.

The second alternative in the simulation argument’s conclusion is that the fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulation is negligibly small. In order for (2) to be true, there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations. If the number of ancestor-simulations created by the interested civilizations is extremely large, the rarity of such civilizations must be correspondingly extreme. Virtually no posthuman civilizations decide to use their resources to run large numbers of ancestor-simulations. Furthermore, virtually all posthuman civilizations lack individuals who have sufficient resources and interest to run ancestor-simulations; or else they have reliably enforced laws that prevent such individuals from acting on their desires.

What force could bring about such convergence? One can speculate that advanced civilizations all develop along a trajectory that leads to the recognition of an ethical prohibition against running ancestor-simulations because of the suffering that is inflicted on the inhabitants of the simulation. However, from our present point of view, it is not clear that creating a human race is immoral. On the contrary, we tend to view the existence of our race as constituting a great ethical value. Moreover, convergence on an ethical view of the immorality of running ancestor-simulations is not enough: it must be combined with convergence on a civilization-wide social structure that enables activities considered immoral to be effectively banned.Another possible convergence point is that almost all individual posthumans in virtually all posthuman civilizations develop in a direction where they lose their desires to run ancestor-simulations. This would require significant changes to the motivations driving their human predecessors, for there are certainly many humans who would like to run ancestor-simulations if they could afford to do so. But perhaps many of our human desires will be regarded as silly by anyone who becomes a posthuman. Maybe the scientific value of ancestor-simulations to a posthuman civilization is negligible (which is not too implausible given its unfathomable intellectual superiority), and maybe posthumans regard recreational activities as merely a very inefficient way of getting pleasure – which can be obtained much more cheaply by direct stimulation of the brain’s reward centers. One conclusion that follows from (2) is that posthuman societies will be very different from human societies: they will not contain relatively wealthy independent agents who have the full gamut of human-like desires and are free to act on them.

The possibility expressed by alternative (3) is the conceptually most intriguing one. If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence. The physics in the universe where the computer is situated that is running the simulation may or may not resemble the physics of the world that we observe. While the world we see is in some sense “real”, it is not located at the fundamental level of reality.

It may be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman. They may then run their own ancestor-simulations on powerful computers they build in their simulated universe. Such computers would be “virtual machines”, a familiar concept in computer science. (Java script web-applets, for instance, run on a virtual machine – a simulated computer – inside your desktop.) Virtual machines can be stacked: it’s possible to simulate a machine simulating another machine, and so on, in arbitrarily many steps of iteration. If we do go on to create our own ancestor-simulations, this would be strong evidence against (1) and (2), and we would therefore have to conclude that we live in a simulation. Moreover, we would have to suspect that the posthumans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings.

Reality may thus contain many levels. Even if it is necessary for the hierarchy to bottom out at some stage – the metaphysical status of this claim is somewhat obscure – there may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time. (One consideration that counts against the multi-level hypothesis is that the computational cost for the basement-level simulators would be very great. Simulating even a single posthuman civilization might be prohibitively expensive. If so, then we should expect our simulation to be terminated when we are about to become posthuman.)

Although all the elements of such a system can be naturalistic, even physical, it is possible to draw some loose analogies with religious conceptions of the world. In some ways, the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation: the posthumans created the world we see; they are of superior intelligence; they are “omnipotent” in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws; and they are “omniscient” in the sense that they can monitor everything that happens. However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels.

Further rumination on these themes could climax in a naturalistic theogony that would study the structure of this hierarchy, and the constraints imposed on its inhabitants by the possibility that their actions on their own level may affect the treatment they receive from dwellers of deeper levels. For example, if nobody can be sure that they are at the basement-level, then everybody would have to consider the possibility that their actions will be rewarded or punished, based perhaps on moral criteria, by their simulators. An afterlife would be a real possibility. Because of this fundamental uncertainty, even the basement civilization may have a reason to behave ethically. The fact that it has such a reason for moral behavior would of course add to everybody else’s reason for behaving morally, and so on, in truly virtuous circle. One might get a kind of universal ethical imperative, which it would be in everybody’s self-interest to obey, as it were “from nowhere”.

In addition to ancestor-simulations, one may also consider the possibility of more selective simulations that include only a small group of humans or a single individual. The rest of humanity would then be zombies or “shadow-people” – humans simulated only at a level sufficient for the fully simulated people not to notice anything suspicious. It is not clear how much cheaper shadow-people would be to simulate than real people. It is not even obvious that it is possible for an entity to behave indistinguishably from a real human and yet lack conscious experience. Even if there are such selective simulations, you should not think that you are in one of them unless you think they are much more numerous than complete simulations. There would have to be about 100 billion times as many “me-simulations” (simulations of the life of only a single mind) as there are ancestor-simulations in order for most simulated persons to be in me-simulations.

There is also the possibility of simulators abridging certain parts of the mental lives of simulated beings and giving them false memories of the sort of experiences that they would typically have had during the omitted interval. If so, one can consider the following (farfetched) solution to the problem of evil: that there is no suffering in the world and all memories of suffering are illusions. Of course, this hypothesis can be seriously entertained only at those times when you are not currently suffering.

Supposing we live in a simulation, what are the implications for us humans? The foregoing remarks notwithstanding, the implications are not all that radical. Our best guide to how our posthuman creators have chosen to set up our world is the standard empirical study of the universe we see. The revisions to most parts of our belief networks would be rather slight and subtle – in proportion to our lack of confidence in our ability to understand the ways of posthumans. Properly understood, therefore, the truth of (3) should have no tendency to make us “go crazy” or to prevent us from going about our business and making plans and predictions for tomorrow. The chief empirical importance of (3) at the current time seems to lie in its role in the tripartite conclusion established above. We may hope that (3) is true since that would decrease the probability of (1), although if computational constraints make it likely that simulators would terminate a simulation before it reaches a posthuman level, then out best hope would be that (2) is true.

If we learn more about posthuman motivations and resource constraints, maybe as a result of developing towards becoming posthumans ourselves, then the hypothesis that we are simulated will come to have a much richer set of empirical implications.

VII. CONCLUSION

A technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero; (2) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero; (3) The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3).

Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation.

From: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER

2009-10-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

GÖDEL, ESCHER, BACH

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, described as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll”.

On its surface, GEB examines logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach , discussing common themes in their work and lives. At a deeper level, the book is a detailed and subtle exposition of concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence.

Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of "meaning" itself.

In response to confusion over the book´s theme, Hofstadter has emphasized that GEB is not about mathematics, art, and music but rather about how cognition and thinking emerge from well-hidden neurological mechanisms. In the book, he presents an analogy about how the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants.

STRUCTURE

GEB takes the form of an interweaving of various narratives. The main chapters alternate with dialogues between imaginary characters, inspired by Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles", in which Achilles and the Tortoise discuss a paradox related to modus ponens. Hofstadter bases the other dialogues on this one, introducing characters such as a Crab, a Genie, and others. These narratives frequently dip into self-reference and metafiction.

Word play also features prominently in the work. Puns are occasionally used to connect ideas, such as "the Magnificrab, Indeed" with Bach's Magnificat in D; " SHRDLU, Toy of Man's Designing" with Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man´s Desiring; and "Typographical Number Theory", or "TNT", which inevitably reacts explosively when it attempts to make statements about itself. One Dialogue contains a story about a genie (from the Arabic "Djinn") and various "tonics" (of both the liquid and musical varieties), which is of course entitled "Djinn and Tonic".

One dialogue in the book is written in the form of a crab canon, in which every line before the midpoint corresponds to an identical line past the midpoint. The conversation still makes sense due to uses of common phrases which can be used as either greetings or farewells ("Good day") and the positioning of lines which, upon close inspection, double as an answer to a question in the next line.

THEMES

GEB contains many instances where objects and ideas speak about or refer back to themselves (cf. recursion and self-reference). For instance, TNT is an illustration of Gödel´s incompleteness theorem. There is also a phonograph which destroys itself by playing a record entitled "I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X" (this being an analogy to Gödel's incompleteness theorem), an examination of canon form in music, and a discussion of Escher's lithograph of two hands drawing each other. To describe such self-referencing objects, Hofstadter coins the term "strange loop", a concept he examines in more depth in his follow-up book I Am a Strange Loop.

To escape many of the logical contradictions brought about by these self-referencing objects, Hofstadter discusses Zen Koans. He attempts to show the reader how to perceive reality outside the normal confines of their own experience and embrace such paradoxical questions by rejecting the premise — a strategy also called “unasking”.

Call stacks are also discussed in GEB, as one dialogue describes the adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise as they make use of "pushing" and "popping" tonics. Entering a picture in a book would count as "pushing", entering a picture in a book within a picture in a book would have caused a double "pushing", and "popping" refers to an exit back to the previous layer of reality. The Tortoise humorously remarks that a friend of his (a weasel) performed a "popping" while in their current state of reality and has never been heard from since; the implied question is, "Did the friend simply cease to exist, or has the friend achieved a higher state of reality?" Also, since the reader is "pushed" into the world of Tortoise and Achilles, would the friend have ascended to the same level of reality in which the readers of GEB reside? Subsequent sections discuss the basic tenets of logic, self-referring statements, ("typeless") systems, and even programming.

One puzzle (in the dialogue "Aria with Diverse Variations") is a speculation concerning an author who writes a book and chooses to end the story without actually stopping the text. That an author cannot make a sudden ending (with regard to the story) come as a surprise, when the fact that there are only a few pages left in the book is obvious to the reader. Such an author might wrap up the main point, and then continue writing, but drop clues to the reader that the end has already passed, such as wandering and unfocused prose, misstatements, or contradictions.

PUZZLES

The book is filled with puzzles. An example of this is the chapter entitled "Contracrostipunctus", which combines the words acrostic and contrapunctus (counterpoint). In a dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise, the author hints that there is a contrapuntal acrostic in the chapter that refers both to the author (Hofstadter) and Bach. This can be found by taking the first word of each paragraph, to reveal: Hofstadter's Contracrostipunctus Acrostically Backwards Spells "J. S. Bach". This is only the acrostic. The counterpoint acrostic is found by taking the first letters of the acrostic (in bold) and reading them backwards to get "J. S. Bach" (as the acrostic itself claims).

Art of fugue(Contrapunctus XIV)

TRANSLATION

Although Hofstadter claims the idea of translating his book "never crossed [his] mind" when he was writing it, when approached with the idea by his publisher he was "very excited about seeing [the] book in other languages, especially … French". He knew, however, that "there were a million issues to consider" when translating, since the book relies not only on word-play but "structural puns" as well—writing where the form and content of the work mirror each other (such as the "Crab Canon" dialogue, which reads almost exactly the same forwards as backwards).

Hofstadter gives one example of translation trouble in the paragraph "Mr. Tortoise, Meet Madame Tortue", saying translators "instantly ran headlong into the conflict between the feminine gender of the French noun tortue and the masculinity of my character, the Tortoise". Hofstadter decided to translate the French character as "Madame Tortue", and the Italian version as "signorina Tartaruga". Because of other troubles translators might have retaining the meaning of the book, Hofstadter "painstakingly went through every last sentence of GEB, annotating a copy for translators into any language that might be targeted".

Translation also gave Hofstadter a way to add new meaning and puns. For instance, in Chinese, the subtitle is not a translation of an Eternal Golden Braid, but a seemingly unrelated phrase Jí Yì Bì (集异璧, literally "collection of exotic jades") which is homophonic to GEB in Chinese. Some material regarding this interplay is to be found in Hofstadter's later book Le Ton beau de marot, which is mainly about translation.

BlooP and FlooP

BLooP and FLooP are simple programming languages designed by Douglas Hofstadter to illustrate a point in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach. BLooP is a non-Turing-complete programming language whose only control flow structure is a bounded loop. This language can only express primitive recursive functions. FLooP is identical except that it supports unbounded loops; it is a Turing-complete language. These can be regarded as primitive models of computation.

BLooP examples

Note: The only variables are output (the return value of the procedure) and cell(i) (an infinite array of integers). The only operators are ⇐ (assignment), + (addition), × (multiplication), < (less-than), > (greater-than) and = (equals).

Factorial function:

Subtraction function (this is not a built-in operation):

From Wikipedia

Henry Markram

2009-10-17T14:46:00.000-07:00

BLUE BRAIN PROJECT

Henry Markram, Project Director of the Blue Brain Project, Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Technology and co-Director of EPFL's Brain Mind Institute, obtained his B.Sc. (Hons) from Cape Town University, South Africa under the supervision of Rodney Douglas and his Ph.D from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, under the supervision of Menahem Segal. During his PhD he discovered a link between acetylcholine and memory mechanisms by showing that acetylcholine modulates the primary receptor linked to synaptic plasticity.

He went to the USA as a Fulbright Scholar at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he studied ion channels on synaptic vesicles. He then went as a Minerva Fellow to the Laboratory of Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute, Heidelberg, Germany, where he discovered calcium transients in dendrites evoked by sub-threshold activity, and by single action potentials propagating back into dendrites. He also began studying the connectivity between neurons, describing in great detail how layer 5 pyramidal neurons are interconnected.

He was the first to alter the precise millisecond relative timing of single pre- and post-synaptic action potentials to reveal a highly precise learning mechanism operating between neurons -- now reproduced in many brain regions and known as spike timing-dependent synaptic plasticity (STDP). These experiments were carried out in 1993, four years before publication. Although there were some correlation-sensitive findings before, this was the first study that manipulated single pre- and post-synaptic spike times to monitor the effect of synaptic changes.

He was appointed assistant professor at the Weizmann Institute for Science, Israel, where he started systematically dissecting out the neocortical column. He discovered that synaptic learning can also involve a change in synaptic dynamics (called redistribution of synaptic efficacy) rather than merely changing the strengths of connections. He also revealed a spectrum of new principles governing neocortical microcircuit structure, function, and emergent dynamics. Based on the emergent dynamics of the neocortical microcircuit he and Wolfgang Maass developed the theory of liquid computing, or high entropy computing.

In 2002 he moved to EPFL as full professor and founder/director of the Brain Mind Institute and Director of the Center for Neuroscience and Technology. At the BMI, in the Laboratory for Neural Microcircuitry, Markram has continued to unravel the blueprint of the neocortical column, building state-of-the-art tools to carry out multi-neuron patch clamp recordings combined with laser and electrical stimulation as well as multi-site electrical recording ,chemical imaging and gene expression. Markram has received numerous awards and published over 75 papers.

About the Blue Brain Project

The cerebral cortex, the convoluted "grey matter" that makes up 80% of the human brain, is responsible for our ability to remember, think, reflect, empathize, communicate, adapt to new situations and plan for the future. The cortex first appeared in mammals, and it has a fundamentally simple repetitive structure that is the same across all mammalian species.

The brain is populated with billions of neurons, each connected to thousands of its neighbors by dendrites and axons, a kind of biological "wiring". The brain processes information by sending electrical signals from neuron to neuron along these wires. In the cortex, neurons are organized into basic functional units, cylindrical volumes 0.5 mm wide by 2 mm high, each containing about 10,000 neurons that are connected in an intricate but consistent way. These units operate much like microcircuits in a computer. This microcircuit, known as the neocortical column (NCC), is repeated millions of times across the cortex. The difference between the brain of a mouse and the brain of a human is basically just volume - humans have many more neocortical columns and thus neurons than mice.

This structure lends itself to a systematic modeling approach. And indeed, the first step of the Blue Brain project is to re-create this fundamental microcircuit, down to the level of biologically accurate individual neurons. The microcircuit can then be used in simulations.

What the Blue Brain Project is not

The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse engineer the brain, to explore how it functions and to serve as a tool for neuroscientists and medical researchers. It is not an attempt to create a brain. It is not an artificial intelligence project. Although we may one day achieve insights into the basic nature of intelligence and consciousness using this tool, the Blue Brain Project is focused on creating a physiological simulation for biomedical applications.

Building the microcircuit

Modeling Neurons

Neurons are not all alike - they come in a variety of complex shapes. The precise shape and structure of a neuron influences its electrical properties and connectivity with other neurons. A neuron's electrical properties are determined to a large extent by a variety of ion channels distributed in varying densities throughout the cell's membrane. Scientists have been collecting data on neuron morphology and electrical behavior of the juvenile rat in the laboratory for many years, and this data is used as the basis for a model that is run on the Blue Gene to recreate each of the 10,000 neurons in the NCC.

Modeling connections

To model the neocortical column, it is essential to understand the composition, density and distribution of the numerous cortical cell types. Each class of cells is present in specific layers of the column. The precise density of each cell type and the volume of the space it occupies provides essential information for cell positioning and constructing the foundation of the cortical circuit. Each neuron is connected to thousands of its neighbors at points where their dendrites or axons touch, known as synapses. In a column with 10,000 neurons, this translates into trillions of possible connections. The Blue Gene is used in this extremely computationally intensive calculation to fix the synapse locations, "jiggling" individual neurons in 3D space to find the optimal connection scenario.

Modeling the column

The result of all these calculations is a re-creation, at the cellular level, of the neocortical column, the basic microcircuit of the brain. In this case, it's the cortical column of a juvenile rat. This is the only biologically accurate replica to date of the NCC - the neurons are biologically realistic and their connectivity is optimized. This would be impossible without the huge computational capacity of the Blue Gene. A model of the NCC was completed at the end of 2006.
In November, 2007, The Blue Brain Project officially announced the conclusion of Phase I of the project, with three specific acheivements:

1. A new modeling framework for automatic, on-demand construction of neural circuits built from biological data

2. A new simulation and calibration process that automatically and systematically analyzes the biological accuracy and consistency of each revision of the model

3. The first cellular-level neocortical column model built entirely from biological data that can now serve as a key tool for simulation-based research

Simulating the microcircuit

Once the microcircuit is built, the exciting work of making the circuit function can begin. All the 8192 processors of the Blue Gene are pressed into service, in a massively parallel computation solving the complex mathematical equations that govern the electrical activity in each neuron when a stimulus is applied. As the electrical impulse travels from neuron to neuron, the results are communicated via inter-processor communication (MPI). Currently, the time required to simulate the circuit is about two orders of magnitude larger than the actual biological time simulated. The Blue Brain team is working to streamline the computation so that the circuit can function in real time - meaning that 1 second of activity can be modeled in one second.

Interpreting the results

Running the Blue Brain simulation generates huge amounts of data. Analyses of individual neurons must be repeated thousands of times. And analyses dealing with the network activity must deal with data that easily reaches hundreds of gigabytes per second of simulation. Using massively parallel computers the data can be analyzed where it is created (server-side analysis for experimental data, online analysis during simulation).

Given the geometric complexity of the column, a visual exploration of the circuit is an important part of the analysis. Mapping the simulation data onto the morphology is invaluable for an immediate verification of single cell activity as well as network phenomena. Architects at EPFL have worked with the Blue Brain developers to design a visualization interface that translates the Blue Gene data into a 3D visual representation of the column. A different supercomputer is used for this computationally intensive task. The visualization of the neurons' shapes is a challenging task given the fact that a column of 10,000 neurons rendered in high quality mesh (see picture) accounts for essentially 1 billion triangles for which about 100GB of management data is required. Simulation data with a resolution of electrical compartments for each neuron accounts for another 150GB. As the electrical impulse travels through the column, neurons light up and change color as they become electrically active. See some clips of the column in action.

A visual interface makes it possible to quickly identify areas of interest that can then be studied more extensively using further simulations. A visual representation can also be used to compare the simulation results with experiments that show electrical activity in the brain. This calibration - comparing the functioning of the Blue Brain circuit with experiment, improving and fine-tuning it - is the second stage of the Blue Brain project, expected to be complete by the end of 2007.

What's next for the Blue Brain Project?

Phase I marks the completion of a proof-of-principle simulation-based research process that has resulted in a cellular-level model of the neocortical column. We have achieved biological fidelity such that the model itself now serves as a primary tool for evaluating the consistency and relevance of neurobiological data, while providing guidance for new experimental efforts. These new data will serve to further refine the neocortical column model. The assembled process allows neuroscientists to investigate scientific questions by integrating the available experimental data and evaluating hypotheses of network dynamics and neural function.

The completion of phase I provides the basis now for increasing the resolution of the models down to the molecular level and expanding the size of the models towards the whole brains of mammals.

In the future, information from the molecular and genetic level will be added to the algorithms that generate the individual neurons and their connections, and thus this level of detail will be reflected in the circuit's construction. The simulations can be used to explore what happens when this molecular or genetic information is altered -- situations such as a genetic variation in particular neurotransmitters, or what happens when the molecular environment is altered via drugs.

The project will continue to expand and will necessarily involve additional scientists and research groups from around the world.

http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/page18699.html

Hans Moravec

2009-09-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

SUPERHUMANISM

Hans Moravec (born November 30, 1948 in Austria) is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute (Carnegie Mellon) of Carnegie Mellon University. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on the impact of technology. Moravec also is a futurist with many of his publications and predictions focusing on transhumanism. Moravec developed techniques in computer vision for determining the region of interest (ROI) in a scene. Other ROI techniques exist, including the patents of Sherman de Forest (U.S.), and the computer vision / image processing articles by Sobel. His last academic publication was in 2003.

From Wikipedia

According to Hans Moravec, by 2040 robots will become as smart as we are. And then they'll displace us as the dominant form of life on Earth. But he isn't worried - the robots will love us.

By Charles Platt

Hans Moravec reclines in his chair and places his palms against his chest. "Consider the human form," he says.

"It clearly isn't designed to be a scientist. Your mental capacity is extremely limited. You have to undergo all kinds of unnatural training to get your brain even half suited for this kind of work - and for that reason, it's hard work. You live just long enough to start figuring things out before your brain starts deteriorating. And then, you die."

He leans forward, and his eyes widen with enthusiasm. "But wouldn't it be great," he says, "if you could enhance your abilities via artificial intelligence, and extend your lifespan, and improve on the human condition?"

Since his earliest childhood, Moravec has been obsessed with artificial life. When he was 4 years old, his father helped him use a wooden erector set to build a model of a little man who would dance and wave his arms and legs when a crank was turned. "It excited me," says Moravec, "because at that moment, I saw you could assemble a few parts and end up with something more - it could seem to have a life of its own."

At the age of 10, he constructed a toy robot from miscellaneous scrap metal. In high school, when another student maintained that no machine could ever be truly human, Moravec suggested replacing human neurons, one at a time, using man-made components that would have the equivalent function. At what point, he asked, would humanness disappear? If a wholly artificial entity is still able to act human in every way, how could we prove that it isn't human?

Today, Moravec is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, the largest robot research lab in the country and one he helped establish in 1980. He is a rare mixture of visionary and engineer, equally comfortable speculating on the fate of the planet or using a soldering iron, microchips, and stepper motors to build high-tech versions of his childhood dancing man. More than that, though, he's our most gung-ho advocate of technology as a tool to transform human beings and make us more than we are - within our lifetimes, if we want it.

Some of his concepts have a confrontational, in-your-face shock value. For instance, to find out how the mind works, Moravec suggests severing a volunteer's corpus callosum (the nerve bundle linking the two hemispheres of the human brain) and interposing a computer to monitor thought traffic. After the computer has had time to learn the code, it can start inserting its own input, helping solve difficult math problems, suggesting new ideas, even offering friendly advice.

Or here's another scenario for anyone who'd like to escape the constrictions of dull old human biology: a futuristic robot surgeon peels away the brain of a conscious patient, using sensors to analyze and simulate the function of every neuron in each slice. As Moravec puts it, "Eventually your skull is empty, and the surgeon's hand rests deep in your brainstem. Though you haven't lost consciousness, your mind has been removed from the brain and transferred to a machine."

But even proposals like these are modest compared with Moravec's Number One concern, which is nothing less than the future of humanity. By 2040, he believes, we can have robots that are as smart as we are. Eventually, these machines will begin their own process of evolution and render us extinct in our present form. Yet, according to Moravec, this is not something we should fear: it's the best thing we could hope for, the ultimate form of human transcendence. And in his own laboratory, he's laying the groundwork that may help this evolutionary leap happen ahead of schedule.

Not everyone thinks this is such a wonderful idea. Joseph Weizenbaum, professor emeritus of computer science at MIT, complains that Moravec's book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence is as dangerous as Mein Kampf. Respected mathematician Roger Penrose has written a long essay for The New York Review of Books in which he twice uses the word "horrific" to describe some of Moravec's concepts. Book reviewer Poovan Murugesan denounces Moravec as "a loose cannon of fast ideas" who suffers from "irresponsible optimism."

Even Moravec's fans seem a little ambivalent. "He comes off as a cross between Mister Rogers and Dr. Faustus," says writer Richard Kadrey. And in the words of award-winning science fiction author Vernor Vinge, who is also an associate professor of mathematical sciences at San Diego State University, "Moravec puts the rest of the technological optimists to shame. He is beyond their wildest extremes." But, Vinge adds hastily, "I mean this as praise!"

How seriously should we take Moravec's ideas? He is widely respected as a pioneer in robotics, but where is the line dividing his painstakingly practical research from his unfettered speculation? Why does he insist that breaking the boundaries of being human is important not just for himself, but for everyone - and why does he seem so crazy-cheerful about the whole thing?

These questions were on my mind when I visited Moravec at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In person, he's a friendly faced, slightly overweight, irrepressibly good-humored man in his late 40s who wears homely clothes and seems shy with strangers. But his enthusiasm gives him a childlike charm - even when he talks lyrically about human extinction.

His office is next door to the "high bay," a big lab displaying the results of previous Robotics Institute projects, including a huge, multilegged "walker" that was sent down into the cone of an active volcano, and a Pontiac minivan that can drive itself at speeds up to 60 mph. The van has already found its way from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC, with minimal human supervision, under the legal fiction that its four onboard Sparcstations and their mechanical interface are "an advanced form of cruise control."

But Moravec seems bored by these past achievements and has shed most of his administrative responsibilities at the Robotics Institute. He hides out in a small, undistinguished, modern office with a couple of computers, a few file cabinets, a refrigerator, a microwave oven, and a lot of books. This is where he pursues his immediate goal: designing and programming a domestic robot that can navigate freely in cluttered home environments. It is the next logical step, he says, toward truly intelligent machines that we will not only tolerate but love - even as they threaten to displace us as the dominant form of life on Earth.

Moravec's early work in robotics was plagued by setbacks. "I spent most of the 1970s," he recalls, "trying to teach a robot to find its way across a room. After 10 years, in 1979, I finally had one that could get where it was going three times out of four - but it took five hours to travel 90 feet." He chuckles like a fond father recalling the first incompetent steps of his baby boy.

Why was it so hard for a robot to accomplish a task that even a mouse can manage with ease? The answer, of course, is that animals have had hundreds of millions of years in which to evolve motor skills. The problem of moving through a three-dimensional world is hideously complex, as Moravec indicates, while counting off the tasks on his fingers: "Our robot used multiple images of the same scene, taken from different points of view, in order to infer distance and construct a sparse description of its surroundings. It used statistical methods to resolve mismatching errors. It planned obstacle-avoidance paths. And then it had to decide how to actually turn its motors and wheels."

In 1980, he built new robots and attempted to boost their performance. "But the best we were able to do with our old approach," he recounts, "was speed it up about tenfold and improve its accuracy tenfold. We did not manage to reduce its brittleness."

By "brittleness" Moravec means that the system tended to fail suddenly and catastrophically. "Accidental conspiracies of sensory miscues would lead it to a wrong conclusion while being sure that it was right. In practical terms, it could misidentify the surrounding objects and run into a wall."

Like Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, trying to run into the mouth of a tunnel painted on a rockface?

"Precisely!" he laughs again, sounding genuinely happy, as he does whenever he describes the lovably fallible behavior of his creations.

In 1984, using US$10 Polaroid ultrasonic range finders instead of expensive video cameras, he created a new commercial robot that analyzed maps of the surrounding space rather than just objects in it. The result, to his surprise, was a system that could navigate reliably and relatively swiftly.

Moravec's current research robot, a project initiated in 1987, now sits in a small workshop just across the corridor outside his office. "Would you like to take a look?" he asks.

We walk into a windowless space no larger than an average living room. There are a couple of video monitors, workbenches littered with tools, pale beige walls, and a vinyl floor. The robot stands in the center of the room: an ugly little four-wheeled truck the size of a go-cart. But Moravec exudes pleasure and affection as he guides his toy out of the workshop, into the hall, and back again.

Today's best robots can think at insect level," he says as we return to his office. He explains that state-of-the-art mobile robots orient themselves by sensing special markers placed on floors, walls, or ceilings. Insects behave the same way: ants follow pheromone trails, lightning bugs look for each other's flashes, and moths navigate with reference to the moon.

The trouble is, such systems are still brittle. Just as a moth can become fatally confused by fixing on candlelight instead of moonlight, a robot guided by markers can easily make a disastrous mistake - as happened when one designed by a Connecticut company to distribute hospital linens took a nosedive down a flight of stairs when it failed to notice a marker that was supposed to tell it not to proceed past a certain point.

Robots that orient themselves with markers have found some application in industry - transporting pallets and cleaning floors - but they offer few advantages over the older systems that follow hidden guide wires. As a result, the market is very limited. "In fact," says Moravec, "the market barely exists at all. So, what we're shooting at now is a robot with the intelligence of a small vertebrate - the smallest fish you can imagine. It will no longer depend on navigational points; it will build a relatively dense representation of volumes of space."

By 2000, he foresees that this type of machine will find its own way around complex, cluttered places without using markers and without needing to be installed by experts. At first these robots will be expensive and specialized, but Moravec predicts they will become smaller, cheaper, and more user-friendly in just the same way that microcomputers evolved from mainframes. "Once we have a robot that customers can take out of the box, show it a job, and trust it to work without doing silly things - then the market will grow easily to hundreds of thousands and beyond. Any institution that does regular cleaning will find that it's cheaper to use a robot than a person. The same goes for delivery jobs."

Moravec estimates that these systems will need an onboard computer capable of 500 million instructions per second. The first IBM PCs managed 0.3 mips; a modern Pentium-based PC reaches 200 mips; and it's reasonable to expect that 500-mips processors will be affordable by the turn of the century.

This power will enable the robot to convert 500-by-500-pixel stereoscopic pictures from its camera eyes into a 3-D model consisting of about 100-by-100-by-100 cells. Updating and processing all this visual information will take about one second - the longest interval that is reasonably safe and practical, since the robot will move blindly between glimpses of the world.

Once robots find a niche doing dull, repetitive jobs, Moravec sees an ever-expanding market. "The next step will be adding an arm and improving the sensor resolution so that they can find and manipulate objects. The result will be a first generation of universal robots, around 2010, with enough general competence to do relatively intricate mechanical tasks such as automotive repair, bathroom cleaning, or factory assembly work."

By "universal" Moravec means the robot will tackle many different jobs in the same way a Nintendo system plays many different games. Plug in one cartridge, and the robot will know how to change the oil in your car. Plug in another, and it will know how to patrol your property and challenge intruders.

Add more memory and computing power and enhance the software, and by 2020 we have a second generation that can learn from its own performance. "It will tackle tasks in various ways," says Moravec, "keep statistics on how well each alternative has succeeded, and choose the approach that worked best. This means that it can learn and adapt. Success or failure will be defined by separate programs that will monitor the robot's actions and generate internal punishment and reward signals, which will actually shape its character - what it likes to do and what it prefers not to do."

Moravec pauses. The near future of robotics is something he's spelled out a thousand times before, and he no longer finds it particularly exciting. But now we get to a subject that interests him more: the idea that robots can mimic human traits.

By 2030, according to Moravec, we should have a third-generation universal robot that emulates higher-level thought processes such as planning and foresight. "It will maintain an internal model not only of its own past actions, but of the outside world," he explains. "This means it can run different simulations of how it plans to tackle a task, see how well each one works out, and compare them with what it's done before." An onlooker will have the eerie sense that it's imagining different solutions to a problem, developing its own ideas.

But perfecting the model of reality this robot will need is not going to be an easy task. In fact, creating this model is the single hardest problem in artificial intelligence. Intuitively, human beings know why they need to wear a raincoat in wet weather, or why they must turn the handle before pushing open a door. Almost without thinking we know if a bottle is empty, whether an object is breakable, or when food has spoiled. But to an artificial intelligence, none of these things is obvious - each everyday fact must be established in advance or derived from logical principles.

On the plus side, each time a robot learns a fact or masters a skill, it will be able to pass its knowledge to other robots as quickly and easily as sending a program over the Net. This way, the task of understanding the world can be divided among thousands or millions of robot minds. As a result, the machines will soon develop a deeper knowledge base than any single person can hope to possess. Within a short space of time, robots that are linked in this way will no longer need our help to show them how to do anything.

Meanwhile, they will be smart enough to interact with us on a human level. "Their world model will include psychological attributes," Moravec says, "which means, for instance, that a robot will express in its internal language a logical statement such as 'I must be careful with this item, because it is valuable to my owner, and if I break it, my owner will be angry.' This means that if the robot's internal processes are translated into human terms, you will hear a description of consciousness - especially if the robot applies psychological attributes to its own actions, as in 'I don't like to bump into things,' which is a compact way of saying that the robot gets an internal negative reinforcement signal whenever it collides with something, or imagines a collision."

Moravec's critics are skeptical on this point. Many have stated flat out that a machine can never be "conscious." Their arguments are hard to refute, partly because no one can really say what consciousness is; but Moravec sidesteps the issue. He believes a robot that understands human behavior can be programmed to act as if it is conscious, and can also claim to be conscious. If it says it's conscious, and it seems conscious, how can we prove that it isn't conscious?

Either way, there's no doubt that systems that can analyze their world, deduce generalizations, and modify their behavior will have a major impact on society.

"The robots will still be in our thrall," Moravec points out, meaning that we will still be designing and programming them to serve and obey us. "They'll learn everything they know from us, and their goals and their methods will be imitations of ours. But as they become more competent, efficiency and productivity will keep going up, and the amount of work for humans will keep going down. By around 2040, there will be no job that people can do better than robots."

He sits back in his chair, pausing with cheerful satisfaction as he does whenever he reaches a radical conclusion that places him one step ahead, waiting for his audience to catch up.

In this case, though, Moravec's conclusion is less radical than it seems - because when many jobs are broken down into tasks, they require a relatively limited degree of "humanness." Even today, we have expert systems that offer advice based on a large number of facts in a field such as medicine or geology. Imagine this expertise gradually broadening to include subjects such as corporate law, mechanical design, profitability, and efficiency. Decisions in these areas are all made logically from sets of facts, which means that if the facts are completely spelled out, a machine intelligence should be able to deal with them.

Thus a corporation can literally become automated from the bottom up: first the assembly lines, then bookkeeping, product design, and planning. Even management can be taken over by computers that are able to learn from past performance. Ultimately, a corporation will consist of a diverse mix of robots, some mobile, some fixed, some large and powerful, some microscopic, all interacting with speed and versatility that is completely beyond human abilities.

But what about the time scale? Isn't he compressing a huge amount of progress into a very few decades?

"Back in the 1970s I made some overoptimistic assumptions about the rate of progress of computers. I thought that using an array of cheap microcomputers, we might achieve human equivalence by the mid-1980s. Then I did a slightly more careful calculation around 1978 and decided it would take another 20 years, requiring a supercomputer. But then I started getting serious, writing articles and essays, and I thought I should do the calculations more rigorously. So I collected 100 data points of previous computer progress, I did the best calculation I could, I compared the human retina with computer vision applications, and I plotted it all out."

Still, even if his predictions are confirmed to be on schedule, there's an obvious problem: When robots are doing all the work, no one will earn any money. How can an economy flourish when all the consumers are penniless?

Moravec obviously isn't troubled by the question. In fact, it's hard to imagine any question bothering him: he sits calmly, comfortably, eating the questions and spitting out answers with ease. Today, he points out, people who retire are supported via wealth that is ultimately created by industry. As industry becomes more efficient, there will be more wealth, allowing people to retire earlier. When industry is totally automated and hyper-efficient, it will create so much wealth that retirement can begin at birth. "We'll levy a tax on corporations," Moravec says, "and distribute the money to everyone as lifetime social-security payments."

But what if the robot-run corporations fail to function as he expects? He assumes these business entities will follow programs written by us, compelling them to obey laws and pay their taxes. But the programming will also encourage robot-controlled corporations to compete with each other.

Won't they try to exploit loopholes in their instructions, just as present-day businesses try to evade federal regulations? Isn't there a real risk that autonomous robots will steal from each other and cheat on their taxes?

"There is always the possibility that some kind of malfunction will produce a rogue corporation," Moravec admits. "We'll need police provisions so that legal companies will act to suppress rogues economically, or physically, if necessary. And among the inprogrammed laws we'll need antitrust clauses to force dangerously large companies to divest into smaller entities."

But this would be a second set of rules to solve a problem created by robots breaking the first set of rules. The system still seems fundamentally unstable.

"It is unstable," he agrees. "Everything will depend on the way in which we create it. Crafting these machines and the corporate laws that control them is going to be the most important thing humanity ever does. You know, each age has an activity in which the best minds get involved. Crafting the laws, and their implementation, will be the thing to do in the 21st century."

If the job is done right, he predicts a world of comfort, health, and boundless plenty - at least for a while. Human beings will be like slave owners whose servants never complain, need no supervision, and are constantly eager to please.

In the long term, though, robots programmed to serve us with maximum efficiency can become a potential hazard. They will naturally try to obtain energy and raw materials as cheaply as possible, with a minimum of regulatory interference. And the ideal way to do this is by relocating some of their operations beyond planet Earth.

Unlike human beings, robots don't need to breathe air, aren't disoriented by zero gravity, and can be easily shielded from harmful radiation. There are vast mineral resources in the asteroid belt, where there will be no regulations regarding pollution, noise, or safety. Robot factories located in space would be able to manufacture products with maximum efficiency and then drop them down into Earth's gravity well. Alternatively, they could conduct hazardous research and radio the encrypted results back to their parent corporation on Earth.

Only a small "seed colony" of robots would be needed to set up an off-world operation. Using local mineral ores and solar energy, robots could build everything they required - including copies of themselves.

In this scenario, everything is still being controlled by the parent corporations, which are still being controlled by us. Therefore, the off-world operations should present no problems. "But now suppose a company goes out of business," Moravec says, "leaving its research division in space, where there's no supervision. The result is self-sustaining, superintelligent wildlife."

His critics, of course, disagree. They complain that his vision is inhuman, lacking attributes such as culture and art that seem central to our identity. Skeptics also point out that the negative implications of his work far outweigh its benefits in the near future, when robots will cause a huge economic dislocation, creating a feeling of purposelessness among citizens who are rendered permanently unemployable.

Moravec is quite aware of this but sees no way to prevent it. He says his projection of the future is at least 50 percent probable, and we're seeing the first signs of it right now. "In Europe generally," he says, "I believe unemployment is now up to around 15 percent, and essentially this will never reverse. We're already moving into the mode I envisage, where everyone is subsidized by productive machines."

This has created uncertainty and discontent - as he readily admits. "We all agree," he says, "that the world is a bit screwed up. The reason for this is rather obvious. We have a Stone Age brain, but we don't live in the Stone Age anymore. We were fitted by evolution to live in tribal villages of up to 200 relatives and friends, finding and hunting our food. We now live in cities of millions of strangers, supporting ourselves with unnatural tasks we have to be trained to accomplish, like animals who have been forced to learn circus tricks."

In which case, what's the answer? Moravec adamantly believes that reversing the evolution of technology would create an even bigger disaster. "Most of us would starve," he says. He suggests the opposite approach: that we try to catch up with technology by accelerating our own evolution. "We can change ourselves," he says, "and we can also build new children who are properly suited for the new conditions. Robot children."

Inevitably, I ask whether he has any normal, flesh-and-blood children.

"No. In fact, I am biologically incapable of it. I contracted testicular cancer as I was finishing my PhD; it didn't affect me very much, it didn't really hurt, I noticed a growth, but I still had my thesis to write and my orals to do, and the whole thing seemed very unreal. There were two surgeries, one minor, one major - with my intestines out in a bag to get at the lymph nodes. I came through it in sparkling condition, aged around 30. But a side effect is that I'm basically infertile."

Does this mean that his love of robots is nothing more than a displaced desire for the biological children he can't have?

"Not at all. Long before the cancer, I was already obsessively committed to robots for whatever neurotic reason. That was where I wanted to spend my energy. I met my wife in the hospital when I was getting chemotherapy in 1980. She already had two children, so I inherited them as stepchildren."

Does his wife share any of his feelings about machines?

He laughs. "At the moment, my wife is a biblical scholar."

Moravec himself was raised Catholic, but he rebelled against it as a teenager and says he still has some anti-Catholic reflexes. As a result, he and his wife had some bitter theological debates in the past. "But these days there's no point in arguing," he says, "because we already know exactly what each other is going to say, and in any case she's more astute in human relations than I am, so she knows how to handle me. But I have changed my outlook slightly. I'm a little less hard-core in my atheism than I used to be. And my ideas about resurrection in some ways are not so different from those of early theologians, or from the Greek thought that fed into that."

Also, of course, the desire for human transcendence has been a fundamental feature of almost all religions. And Moravec's vision of a supremely powerful artificial intelligence that will love humanity enough to re-create it is basically a vision of a god - the only difference being that in his scheme of things, we create god version 1.0, after which it builds its own enhancements.

But how does all this fit in with Moravec's obvious personal love for machines?

"My father was an engineer in Czechoslovakia and had a business making and selling electrical goods during the war. When the Russians arrived in 1944, he became a refugee. He left the country on a tricycle with 50 kilos of tools and 50 kilos of food. He met my mother in Austria, which is where I was born. He had an electrical store, where he'd hand wind transformers to convert battery-operated radios so they'd run on house current. We relocated to Canada in 1953."

This marks the point where the genie finally gets out of the bottle and Earth's retirement community of pampered humans finds itself faced with a big problem. Out in space, the preprogrammed drive to compete and be efficient will result in the runaway evolution of machine capabilities.

Moravec feels that in a short period of time, all the local materials will be plundered and converted into machines, and all available solar energy will be used to power them.

The result will be a dense, interacting swarm of competing entities - although, he says, the competition will be relatively benign. Warfare among robots will be rare because "fighting wastes energy, and a third entity can eat the pieces."

He believes that the most useful skill will be intelligence. Robots will be motivated to make themselves as small as possible, conserving raw materials to build better brains. "As a result, you end up with the whole mess forming a cyberspace where entities try to outsmart each other by causing their way of thinking to be more pervasive. Here's an ecology where all the dead-matter activity has been squeezed out and almost everything that happens is meaningful. You have this sphere of cyberspace with a robot shell, expanding outward toward Earth."

What will it look like?

"It will look like a region of space glowing warmly, with hardly anything visible on a human scale. The competitive pressure toward miniaturization will result in activity on the subatomic level. They'll transform matter in some way; it will no longer be matter as we know it."

Since space-based machine intelligences will be free to develop at their own pace, they will quickly outstrip their cousins on Earth and eventually will be tempted to use the planet for their own purposes. "I don't think humanity will last long under these conditions," Moravec says. But, ever the optimist, he believes that "the takeover will be swift and painless."

Why? Because machine intelligence will be so far advanced, so incomprehensible to human beings, that we literally won't know what hit us. Moravec foresees a kind of happy ending, though, because the cyberspace entities should find human activity interesting from a historical perspective.

We will be remembered as their ancestors, the creators who enabled them to exist.

As Moravec puts it, "We are their past, and they will be interested in us for the same reason that today we are interested in the origins of our own life on Earth."

He seems very sincere as he says this, almost as if it's an article of faith for him - though of course it has some logical foundation. Machine intelligences of the far future will develop from our initial programming, just as a child grows from its parents' DNA. Consequently, even when robots are smarter than we are, they should retain many of our priorities and values.

But Moravec takes the scenario even one step further. Assuming the artificial intelligences now have truly overwhelming processing power, they should be able to reconstruct human society in every detail by tracing atomic events backward in time. "It will cost them very little to preserve us this way," he points out. "They will, in fact, be able to re-create a model of our entire civilization, with everything and everyone in it, down to the atomic level, simulating our atoms with machinery that's vastly subatomic. Also," he says with amusement, "they'll be able to use data compression to remove the redundant stuff that isn't important."

But by this logic, our current "reality" could be nothing more than a simulation produced by information entities.

"Of course." Moravec shrugs and waves his hand as if the idea is too obvious. "In fact, the robots will re-create us any number of times, whereas the original version of our world exists, at most, only once. Therefore, statistically speaking, it's much more likely we're living in a vast simulation than in the original version. To me, the whole concept of reality is rather absurd. But while you're inside the scenario, you can't help but play by the rules. So we might as well pretend this is real - even though the chance things are as they seem is essentially negligible."

And so, according to Hans Moravec, the human race is almost certainly extinct, while the world around us is just an advanced version of SimCity.

I've been sitting opposite Moravec in his office, typing on my laptop computer, following his exposition step by step. The vision he has described exists for him as a unified whole; it takes him only about an hour to describe it clearly and fluently from beginning to end. For him it seems entirely pleasurable: a destiny that grows out of his own work and affirms his own values.

Growing up in Montreal, learning English and adjusting to a strange new culture, Hans Moravec was a solitary child who found solace in building models and gadgets. "I remember the thrill I got when I put together something and made it work. I could admire it for hours. And these things also made other people proud of me. I guess I actually thought that they would get me a wife! I knew I didn't have any social skills, but maybe if I could build these machine things really, really well, it would make me more attractive to women." He laughs at his own childhood naïveté.

And yet, he didn't always want to be a scientist. First he wanted to be Superman. "But I could see that it wasn't practical. Then I noticed another character in the comics, Lex Luthor, who didn't have superpowers but was almost a match for Superman. So, I thought if I couldn't be Superman, maybe I could be Lex Luthor."

In person, Moravec seems diffident and gentle; he doesn't drive a car because, he says, he's uneasy with so much potentially dangerous mass in his control. He likes living in Pittsburgh because his home is a short walk from his office, and he seems to feel little need to venture outside this simple life.

Yet as a child he enjoyed fantasies about superheroes and supervillains, and as an adult he talks casually of totally rebuilding human society. He refers to his new book, for which he's currently seeking a publisher, as "a kind of speculative long-term business plan for humanity," and in it he speaks condescendingly of "Earth's small-minded biological natives." Can Moravec really claim that his work as a scientist is in no way manipulative?

"People such as myself," he says, "may have a little bit of influence, but we're like mosquitoes pushing at a rolling boulder. Progress is inflicted on people in the same way that natural evolution is inflicted on people. It really is evolution; it's the selection and growth of information, transmitted from one generation to the next."

But what about the rights of people who don't love the rolling boulder of progress?

"Well," he says, beginning to sound a little impatient with my objections, "they'll - they'll get used to it! In fact, they should enjoy it, since the amount of wealth will be astronomical; you'll be able to live anywhere and in any way you want."

In any case, he says, the progress he's talking about will be offered via the free market, not physically imposed on anyone. "All I'm suggesting is that we give people a choice. In the next decade, people will either buy their housecleaning robot or not buy it. And I think they'll want to buy it. Then they'll have the choice of upgrading to one that learns, and I think they'll want that, too. Then they'll have the choice of a robot that claims it's conscious, a really nice entity that talks like a person, seems to understand you, and has nothing but your best interests at heart - because that's how it's programmed. And then the fourth generation will take that personality and add intelligence. It will be a constant help to you; it will explain why something that you want to do isn't what you should do - because it loves you. I think people will like these machines and will quickly get used to them."

Well, yes - until the machines cut loose, develop hyperintelligence, and bring about our demise.

"But I don't consider it a demise," Moravec retorts, still insisting that his vision is wholly positive. "The robots will be a continuation of us, and they won't mean our extinction any more than a new generation of children spells the extinction of the previous generation of adults. In any case, in the long term, the robots are much more likely to resurrect us than our biological children are."

For people who find long-term resurrection a somewhat nebulous concept, there are also some practical reasons why we should be happy to change ourselves radically. On a long-term basis, Moravec points out, our planet may not be a hospitable place to live. Huge climatic shifts may occur (as they did during the ice ages). Our sun may become unstable. The world may be ravaged by incurable diseases. Our entire ecology could be destroyed by a large meteor or comet. "Sooner or later," he says, "something big will come along that we cannot deal with. But by changing ourselves in the most fundamental way, we will be able to survive such catastrophes."

This is an arguable point of view, but I can't help wondering which came first, Moravec's personal interest in becoming more than human, or his proof that it's really a very good idea. He readily admits that he has a personal obsession with robots, and his passion for transcendence is far more extreme than that of most scientists. What makes him so different from everyone else?

"Well, I was breast-fed as a baby," he answers with typically disconcerting candor. "I was also the first born of my family, and I was well loved by my mother - which must have helped me feel confident about life." He pauses, realizing that this explanation isn't adequate. "Maybe the idea of human transcendence makes me happy because my endorphin levels were misadjusted early on in life," he says with a laugh and a shrug, unable to come up with a better answer.

Personally, I suspect he likes the idea of radical change because he's an intensely intelligent man who is easily bored by the everyday world. He finds it impossible to believe that it makes sense to continue, as human beings, in our exact same form. "Do we really want more of what we have now?" he asks, sounding incredulous. "More millennia of the same old human soap opera? Surely we have played out most of the interesting scenarios already in terms of human relationships in a trivial framework. What I'm talking about transcends all that. There'll be far more interesting stories. And what is life but a set of stories?"

Ultimately, Moravec comes back again to the power and grandeur of a destiny that exceeds all limits. "This universe is so big," he says. "The possibilities must be infinitely greater than anything we can imagine for ourselves. Pushing things in the direction of expanded possibilities seems to be by far the most productive use of my time. And that, here, is my purpose."

By: Charles Platt

http://www.primitivism.com/superhumanism.htm

Stephen Hawking

2009-09-10T17:39:00.001-07:00

Big Questions about our universe

Stephen William Hawking, (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes. He has also achieved success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general; these include the runaway best seller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times bestsellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.

Hawking's key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes as bekenstein-Hawking radiation). He is a world-renowned theoretical physicist whose scientific career spans over 40 years. His books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Science. On August 12, 2009, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (but intends to retire from this post in 2009), a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and the distinguished research chair at Waterloo's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Hawking has a neuro muscular dystrophy that is related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a condition that has progressed over the years and has left him almost completely paralysed.

Research fields

Hawking's principal fields of research are theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity.

In the late 1960s, he and his Cambridge friend and colleague, Roger Penrose, applied a new, complex mathematical model they had created from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. This led, in 1970, to Hawking proving the first of many singularity theorems; such theorems provide a set of sufficient conditions for the existence of a singularity in space-time. This work showed that, far from being mathematical curiosities which appear only in special cases, singularities are a fairly generic feature of general relativity.

He supplied a mathematical proof, along with Brandon Carter, Werner Israel and D. Robinson, of John Wheeler's "No-Hair Theorem" – namely, that any black hole is fully described by the three properties of mass, angular momentum, and electric charge.

Hawking also suggested that, upon analysis of gamma ray emissions, after the Big Bang, primordial mini black holes were formed. With Bardeen and Carter, he proposed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. In 1974, he calculated that black holes should thermally create and emit subatomic particles, known today as Hawking radiation, until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.

In collaboration with Jim Hartle, Hawking developed a model in which the universe had no boundary in space-time, replacing the initial singularity of the classical Big Bang models with a region akin to the North pole: One cannot travel north of the North Pole, as there is no boundary there. While originally the no-boundary proposal predicted a closed universe, discussions with Neil Turok led to the realisation that the no-boundary proposal is also consistent with a universe which is not closed.

Hawking's many other scientific investigations have included the study of quantum cosmology, cosmic inflation, helium production in anisotropic Big Bang universes, large N cosmology, the density matrix of the universe, topology and structure of the universe, baby universes, Yang-Mills instantons and the S matrix, anti de Sitter space, quantum entanglement and entropy, the nature of space and time, including the arrow of time, spacetime foam, string theory, supergravity, Euclidean quantum gravity, the gravitational Hamiltonian, Brans-Dicke and Hoyle-Narlikar theories of gravitation, gravitational radiation, and wormholes.

At a George Washington University lecture in honour of NASA's 50th anniversary, Prof. Hawking theorised on the existence of extraterrestrial life, "primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare."

From Wikipedia

The Computer

Communication system

I communicate with a computer system. I have always used IBM compatible computers, on my wheel chair. They run from batteries under the wheel chair, although an internal battery will keep the computer running for an hour if necessary. The screen is mounted on the arm of the wheel chair where I can see it, more recent systems have the whole computer in a box on this arm. The original systems were put together for me by David Mason, of Cambridge Adaptive Communications. This company manufacture and supply a variety of products to help people with communication problems express themselves. Recently, Intel engineers designed a new computer for me powered by a Pentium II processor, which I now use.

On the computer, I run a program called Equalizer™, written by a company called Words Plus inc. A cursor moves across the upper part of the screen. I can stop it by pressing a switch in my hand. This switch is my only interface with the computer. In this way I can select words, which are printed on the lower part of the screen. When I have built up a sentence, I can send it to a speech synthesizer. I use a separate synthesizer, made by Speech+. It is the best I have heard, though it gives me an accent that has been described variously as Scandinavian, American or Scottish. I also can use Windows 98 through an interface called EZ Keys, again made by Words Plus. I am able to control the mouse with the switch through cleverly selected process from a small box shown on the desktop. I can also write text using similar menu's to those in Equalizer.

I can save what I write to disk. I write papers using a formatting program called TEX. I can write equations in words, and the program translates them into symbols, and prints them out on paper in the appropriate type. I can also give lectures. I write the lecture beforehand, and save it on disk. I can then send it to the speech synthesiser, a sentence at a time. It works quite well, and I can try out the lecture, and polish it, before I give it.

Recent Improvements

Professor Hawking is determined that he is able to keep up with the recent improvements in computer and communication technology. Below are some of the recent improvements, which have been carried out on the system within the last 12 months.

In non-wireless areas, Intel manage a 3G account for us so that Professor Hawking is able to use the internet from anywhere in the world, via a PCMCIA 3G card.

The computer has been replaced about once per year; it is currently (Jan 2009) running on a Lenovo Thinkpad T60 and the next model will have an X61 at its heart.

Upgrade to Windows XP (in around 2001)

The computer is running on Windows XP. For many years it has been impossible to upgrade beyond Windows'98, because Professor Hawking's favourite speech software, Equalizer by Words-Plus, was made in 1986, and was designed to run only on DOS based operating systems. However, Intel has kindly funded the conversion of the software to XP. This involved Words-Plus re-writing the whole program for today’s operating system.

Power

Due to Professor Hawking's active lifestyle, it is impossible to power his chair computer via the mains as he is never in one place long enough to make this practical. Thus the laptop needs to be powered by the wheelchair batteries, which are similar to car batteries, in the back of the chair.

Keep talking

It is essential that Stephen is able to make use of a telephone. He is able to use Voice over IP, or connect his chair computer directly to a telephone socket. The process works by sending digital commands from his computer instructing the phone system to dial a number, answer the phone or hang up at the end of a call.

Who's got the remote?

Stephen has a universally programmable infra-red remote control attached directly to his computer system. This enables him to operate many of the electronic items in his home, such as televisions, video recorders and music centres. He also has a radio control device which enables him to open doors and operate lights throughout his home. He is now also able to operate doors within his workplace. With the opening of the newly built Centre for Mathematical Sciences, he will be able to get about the building virtually unassisted.

From official website of Professor Stephen William Hawking, by Nicki Ley and Graduate Assistant, Sam Blackburn.

http://www.hawking.org.uk/

MICHIO KAKU

2009-09-08T08:08:00.000-07:00

"The World" What Will The Future Look Like?

Michio Kaku (b. January 24, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist specializing in string field theory, and a futurist. He is a popularizer of science, host of two radio programs and a best-selling author.

Kaku has publicly stated his concerns over issues including the human cause of global warming, nuclear armament, nuclear power, and the general misuse of science. He was critical of the Cassini-Huygens space probe because of the 72 pounds of plutonium contained in the craft for use by its radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Alerting the public to the possibility of casualties if its fuel were dispersed into the environment during a malfunction and crash as the probe was making a 'sling-shot' maneuver around earth; he was critical of NASA's risk assessment.

Ultimately, the probe was launched and successfully completed its mission. Kaku is generally a vigorous supporter of the exploration of outer space, believing that the ultimate destiny of the human race may lie in the stars; but he is critical of some of the cost-ineffective missions and methods of NASA.

Kaku credits his anti-nuclear war position to programs he heard on the Pacifica Radio network, during his student years in California. It was during this period that he made the decision to turn away from a career developing the next generation of nuclear weapons in association with Dr. Teller and focused on research, teaching, writing and media. Dr. Kaku joined with others such as Dr. Helen Caldicott, Jonathan Schell, Peace Action and was instrumental in building a global anti-nuclear weapons movement that arose in the 1980s, during the administration of US President Ronald Reagan.

Kaku was a board member of Peace Action and on the board of radio station WBAI-FM in New York City where he originated his long running program, Explorations, that focused on the issues of science, war, peace and the environment.

From Wikipedia

Quick Questions With Michio Kaku

1. If time machines exist, can we ever hope to meet our older, or younger, selves?

A. That is a big "if." But assuming they exist, then there is hope that we might meet our older or younger selves, but they won't be exactly "us." The river of time, I believe, may fork into two rivers if we travel in time.Hence, if we jump from one time line to another time line, we may meet ourselves in the past, but these people won't really be "us." They will be genetically identical to us, but will be a younger or older version of ourself in a parallel universe. Hence, we won't have any time paradoxes. So if we change the past, we change someone else's past, who is genetically identical to us, but is not really "us." Of course, we won't know for sure until we finally build a time machine. (In fact, I give a blueprint for a time machine in my book, Physics of the Impossible, which is consistent with all known physics.)

2. Since we haven't ever met any time travelers from the future, does that mean they will never be invented?

A. No. Perhaps we are not interesting to them. We think we are so great that they will want to visit us, but maybe we are too primitive for them. After all, if we see an anthill, do we go down to the ants and say "I bring you beads. I bring you trinkets. Take me to your leader"? Some of us may even have the urge to step on them.But the technological distance between an ant and us may be small compared to the technological chasm between us and a time-faring civilization. They may be thousands to millions of years ahead of us in technology, and hence have no interest in visiting us. But one day, if someone knocks on your door and says she is your great-great-great-granddaughter, do not slam the door. Perhaps in the far future our descendants will develop time machines, and want to visit their illustrious ancestors.

3. Are fears of robots taking over the world, Terminator-style, ever founded in reality?

A. Yes, robots may eventually take over the world. But we will have plenty of warning. Right now, robots have the intelligence of a cockroach. A retarded, stupid cockroach. Our most advanced robots take about six hours just to walk around a strange room. It may be years to decades before they are as smart as a mouse, then a rabbit, then a dog or cat, and finally a monkey. By the time they have the intelligence of a monkey, they can be dangerous, since they will have agendas of their own. But we will have plenty of warning. By the time they are as smart as a monkey, I think we should put a chip in their brains to turn them off when they have murderous thoughts. The key is that we will have plenty of time before these robot creations become truly sentient and conscious, with their own goals and desires.

From: http://science.discovery.com/questions/michio-kaku/michio-kaku.html

Marvin Lee Minsky

2009-09-08T07:36:00.000-07:00

Artificial Intelligence

Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927) is an American cognitive in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of MIT 's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.

Minsky won the Turing Award in 1969, the Japan Prize in 1990, the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence in 1991, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in 2001.

Minsky is listed on Google Directory as one of the all time top six people in the field of artificial intelligence. Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than himself, the other being Carl Sagan. Patrick Winston has also described Minsky as the smartest person he has ever met. Minsky is a childhood friend of the Yale University critic Harold Bloom, who has referred to him as "the sinister Marvin Minsky." Ray Kurzweil has referred to Minsky as his mentor.

Minsky's patents include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963) and the confocal microscope (1957, a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope). He developed, with Seymour Papert, the first Logo “turtle”. Minsky also built, in 1951, the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC.

Minsky wrote the book Perceptrons (with Seymour Papert), which became the foundational work in the analysis of artificial neural networks. This book is the center of a controversy in the history of AI, as some claim it to have had great importance in driving research away from neural networks in the 1970s, and contributing to the so-called AI winter. That said, none of the mathematical proofs present in the book, which are still important and interesting to the study of perceptron networks, were ever countered.

Minsky was an adviser on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and is referred to in the movie and book.

Probably no one would ever know this; it did not matter. In the 1960s, Minsky and Good had shown how neural networks could be generated automatically—self replicated—in accordance with any arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too complex for human understanding.

—Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

In the early 1970s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Minsky and Seymour Papert started developing what came to be called The Society of Mind theory. The theory attempts to explain how what we call intelligence could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky says that the biggest source of ideas about the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a video camera, and a computer to build with children's blocks. In 1986, Minsky published Robotics, a comprehensive book on the theory which, unlike most of his previously published work, was written for a general audience.

In November 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Machine, a book that critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones. Recent drafts of the book are freely available from his webpage.

Minsky is an actor in an artificial intelligence Koan (attributed to his student, Danny Hillis) from the Jargon file:

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6 (computer).
"What are you doing?" asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe,”
Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play," Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

What I actually said was, "If you wire it randomly, it will still have preconceptions of how to play. But you just won't know what those preconceptions are." --Marvin Minsky

From Wikipedia