Saturday, January 26, 2013
Kurzweil still has some work to do to become realistic
This book is probably essential. Ray Kurzweil is reaching the age when he starts listening to various critics and trying to integrate their work in his. But he still believes the human world we know is coming to its end to give way to a mechanically enhanced human world that sounds a lot like Terminator 25.
RAY KURZWEIL – HOW TO CREATE A MIND – 2012
We must
understand this title that pretends to tell you how you can create a mind has
to be taken literally. Ray Kurzweil believes in his Artificial Intelligence engineer’s
enthusiasm that he can create a mind, that he may qualify as god himself, a
secular god as a matter of fact.
“Evolution can
then be viewed as a spiritual process in that it creates spiritual beings, that
is, entities that are conscious. Evolution also moves toward greater
complexity, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater
creativity, and the ability to express more transcendent emotions, such as
love. These are all descriptions that people have used for the concept of God,
albeit God is described as having no limitations in these regards.” (p. 223)
And do not
consider all that is pure rhetoric or pulpit preaching. He believes evolution
is the real God when he says: “Our neocortex is virgin territory when our brain
is created . . . the biological process of actually growing a brain.” (p. 62) We
can wonder about this evolution or biological process if it is a creator or a
grower, God or a simple farmer. But we have to wonder what Kurzweil means by
“brain” and “mind.” Page 23 over 26 lines he uses the following string of words:
“mind . . . brain . . . mind . . . theories . . . ideas . . . thought . . .
thinking . . . theories . . . thought . . . brain . . . thinking . . . “ We can
assert that these words are not really discriminated. This lack of clear
definitions of these terms is of course an enormous shortcoming that is just as
nearly irritating as the levity with which he deals with Einstein: “Einstein
articulated my goals in this book well when he said that ‘any intelligent fool
can make things bigger and more complex . . . but it takes . . . a lot of
courage to move in the opposite direction.’” (p. 11) It is obvious Einstein did
not articulate his goals since he has not been alive for a while now. That use
of the passive by Kurzweil to draw to himself what the quoted person said is
even more astounding with at least two and quite often more than three
quotations, at times long ones, at the head of all chapters and even
subchapters. Kurzweil seems to forget that quoting does not prove anything. But
this quoting and bringing together opposed ideas is the basic unitarian
objective of the author:
“The truth can
be discovered only by finding an explanation that overrides – transcends –
seeming differences, especially for fundamental questions of meaning and
purpose. That is how I resolve the Western-Eastern divide on consciousness and
the physical world. In my view both perspective have to be true. On the one
hand it is foolish to deny the physical world . . . On the other hand, the
Eastern perspective – that consciousness is fundamental and represents the only
reality that is truly important – is also difficult to deny.” (p. 222)
On one hand
blunt and brutal materialism since Kurzweil does not seem to consider the
material existence of the mind, except when reduced to the brain, or of ideas,
thoughts, ideologies, etc. On the other hand a principle that is derived from a
false reference to Buddhism.
“In the Eastern
view, consciousness is the fundamental reality, the physical world only comes
into existence through the thoughts of conscious beings . . . I call this the
Buddhist school of quantum mechanics, because in it particles essentially don’t
exist until they are observed by a conscious person.” (p. 218-219)
Kurzweil does
not know what he is speaking of. Buddhism is basically expressed in the
Dhammapada and the Abhidhamma. For Buddha the whole material world exists
outside our consciousness and we are part of it because we have a body. This
whole world can only be captured by our six senses, the five basic senses plus
the mind as a meta-sense that processes the sensations captured by the five
other senses plus the abstract concepts conveyed by language and organized in
abstract reasoning or description. The word “consciousness” that Kurzweil uses
does not correspond at all to the words used for the “mind” that sixth sense or
meta-sense. In fact there are two words in Pali for the mind, “mana” that
refers to the meta-sense itself and “citta” which refers to the various mental
states of an individual experiencing some type of feeling, emotion, mental
excitation, etc. Kurzweil uses the word “determined” a lot about the material
world. There is a Buddhist concept behind. The whole physical world, including
us as physical beings is determined, follows the physical laws governing the
cosmos. By using the mind any individual can get into meditation, which will
lead him onto the eightfold path of illumination that is to say the possibility
to get detached from the determined world and hence to merge with cosmic energy
once death has come, thus getting out of the triple characteristic of the
determined world: everything is changing all the time; everything is carried by
a cycle that goes from birth to life and decay then to death and then to
rebirth. Nibbana (known in Sanskrit as Nirvana) is that mentally produced
escape from this cycle into cosmic energy; everything has no essence, soul or
permanence of any type.
This is
important because this should lead us to refusing the basic objective Kurzweil
gives to humanity: to use intelligent machines to “coloniz[e]” (p. 281) the
universe. In previous books he was rejoicing in the idea that the speed of
light could be stepped over, hence speeding the “colonizing [of] the universe”
(p. 281) though in this book he is more realistic since the good news about
having transported molecules at a speed higher than the speed of light has been
disproved in this very 2012 year. But the objective remains: to colonize the
universe. Some people never learn. The colonization of the planet by the
Europeans has not exactly been the best thing in the world producing slavery, the
eradication of American Indians, Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, etc, colonialism and
throwing three continents, if not four into, underdevelopment and exploitation.
It is high time Kurzweil questions his basic fundamental motivation. The
conquest of the universe is not on the agenda. So far we are dealing with the
discovery of the universe. We might never conquer it, especially if intelligent
beings exist here and there. The use of the cavalry seems to be slightly passé.
This said, and
it is fundamental we can move to the main subject of the book: the mind, though
in fact he never speaks of it reducing it to the brain. So let’s start with the
brain.
After a rather
long career and many books published on his “Singularity” that was and still is
heftily criticized by many people in the field, including people who are
specialists, theoreticians and entrepreneurs in computing science and
technology like Kurzweil himself, he wrote this book to get back in phase with
others. Criticism was generally rejected high-handedly before. This time he
makes an effort to integrate the research of others in the first half of his
book, hence to describe the functioning of the brain the way it is known by
scientists, though in the second half of the book he goes back his messianic,
apocalyptic, prophetic, oracular prediction of the merging of biological
intelligence, hence man, into non-biological intelligence, hence machines and
we jump onto the track to Terminator 25 all over again and dreams of a time
when “computers will have . . . surpassed unenhanced human intelligence.” This
phrase gives us in a nutshell, not a walnut but a hazelnut, his basic thinking.
Note he of course neglects the fact that human intelligence develops along with
all the intelligent machines and theories man has invented. If these
intelligent machines are used properly, that is to say at the top of their
capabilities, then the intelligence of the users will tremendously develop.
Will we have a new mutation in biological evolution? Some human beings are able
to develop some tremendous capabilities as for memory, the assimilation of
hierarchical systems like foreign languages, etc. These are supposed to be
autistic, but do we know anything serious about autistic people apart from
believing they are different and have to be put away?
Let’s speak of
the brain now. I will not be over technical about it. He borrows from various
other researchers (Jeff Hawkins, Dileep George and Jaron Lanier mostly) the
general architecture of the brain and adds a couple of things.
The neocortex
is the part of the brain that controls our most advanced human intelligent
activities. It has six layers and it is structured in vertical columns across
these six layers; Each column hence has six layers too. These columns are
connected in many ways first of all to the columns around each one of them on a
proximity basis, but some spindle neurons can connect many columns in all parts
of the brain, 60% of these spindle neurons in the right hemisphere and 40
percent in the left hemisphere. They appeared with hominids, our ancestors
after branching out of apes some 10 or 15 million years ago. But we must know
that they already existed in apes since Gorillas have about 20% of our number,
Bonobos have 2.5% and chimpanzees about 2%. Other mammals do not have any at
all. Kurzweil does not speak of mirror neurons and he should have since they
are also only vastly present in Homo Sapiens, though they must have been
present in hominids and are present in some apes, and these are essential for
learning and empathy since they enable someone to imitate the actions of
someone else and to empathetically feel the same emotions as other people
around them. He also mentions though lightly the fact that a fetus has a brain
as soon as one month of age and this fetus will hear (he does not mention this
one) and see around the 20th or 24th weeks of pregnancy.
He forgets to say that the brain grows after birth. But he does mention that everything
happening while the brain is growing has important consequences on the growth
of this brain. But he makes his basic mistake here at the very basis of his
approach.
First he
considers that “learning and recognition take place simultaneously.” (p. 63) He
just forget in the womb the fetus cannot learn because all he hears or feels
has no referential dimension; These sensations he feels and the sound clusters
of any type he hears are registered, that was proved, but with no reference,
hence no real meaning, though they can have a comforting or disturbing effect
on the fetus along with the mother’s mood.
After birth it is obvious then the baby has the possibility to attach a
referent hence a meaning to what he sees and identifies. At this point it is
impossible to say that learning and recognizing happens simultaneously for the
same things. You have to learn about something before recognizing it. Even if
is only a comforting sensation you have to experience it first, to more or less
identify it second before being able to recognize it. Recognition is
necessarily second at least because to identify you have to experience several
times and that’s what he probably means. The first time you just experience,
the second time then you recognize and by recognizing you identify even if it
is superficially. But there must be a first moment of pure experience. But this
is nothing in itself. The main shortcoming at this moment is the absence of any
consideration about language. For Kurzweil language, spoken first and written
second are the only two inventions of humanity (he says so twice p. 27 and 159)
bringing together in one movement two human inventions that have at least
300,000 years between them and it neglects the phylogeny of that linguistic
ability. Once again without entering details, language which was oral only for
at least 300,000 years out of 305,000 years is an invention of humanity, ,hence
of the brain and since language is not something you can touch it is part of
the mind. Written language will only come very late in human history. There are
still some human groups on the earth that do not write at all.
To invent human
articulated language the neocortex has to have a hierarchical organization,
which is the case in each column and in the neocortex all together and within
the brain between the old brain and the neocortex. That hierarchical
architecture of the brain makes the brain only able to function along that
line. The hierarchical architecture of the brain produces hierarchical
thinking, hierarchical language, hierarchical society, etc. All human
activities contain a hierarchical dimension that is the reflection of the
architecture of the brain. And here with language you hold an essential line of
thought. Every single advancement in phylogeny, in lexicon, in syntax is
produced by the mind and each advancement is inscribed in the mind and
determines the next advancement. We could show how complex but also how direct
and simple this transitive productive process is. What’s more the experience of
a human being in front of any entity is hierarchical. He must first discriminate
it. Then he has to identify it and name it with a new name if it is a new
entity or an old name if he recognizes it as already known and named. Then it
has to be classified and that leads to another abstract operation that is known
has conceptualization. There is no concept if there is no conceptualization;
Kurzweil uses the word “concept” several times, though he does not list it in
his index, but he does not use the word “conceptualization” which means for him
concepts are generated by magic.
It is obvious
then that written language amplifies the intellectual conceptualization of
people since they do not have to simply remember plain facts that are recorded
in books. They can step further into more abstract thinking. Imagine what it is
when you have the Internet at the tip of your fingers. There are thus
systematic hierarchies that he neglects. From root to theme and then frond at
the level of the semantic units of the language often called words. From
syncretic concatenation, to clause structure, to multi-clause structure by
concatenation and then embedding, as for syntax often called grammar. From
simple calls, to orders, to descriptive discourse, to explicative discourse, to
any other discourse with an ever higher level of abstraction, social meaning,
content or intention, and that has to use various media to be uttered or
produced.
But there is
more if you cross brain and language.
Each column,
and that is Kurzweil’s approach, is composed of many modules, each one having
about 100 neurons. These modules are connected inside the column in complex
intertwined networks. Hence we then have a first hierarchy: neurones and their
relations within a module, then modules and their relations within a column and
at each level relations between the elements and the direct outside: neurons
from one module to neurons from another module in the same column, modules from
one column to modules from the same column and to modules from other columns. And
yet we miss the spindle neurons that can connect any column to any other column
and any module to any other module. These spindle neurons seem to be totally
opportunistic and develop according to the needs of this or that moment for
this or that individual. We thus get to what Dileep George calls “recursive
cortical networks” (quoted p. 152) and I insist on the fact that these networks
are growing from nearly conception to death, or at least to an advanced age, as
long as we can learn new tricks, that they are flexible and versatile in many
ways, which explains why we can learn new things all the time: there is plenty
of room in the brain and any learning does not depend on a type of available
neurons, they are all basically the same. This enables man to use many ways of
thinking and one at least is unpredictable and hence inimitable.
The simplest
way is to put together two entities and their proximity implies they are
connected. It’s what is called syncrertic thinking and it corresponds to what
Kurzweil calls “leakage” in the brain, one neuron being in a certain state due
to some influx of information coming to it may have a direct influence on its
neighbors as if it leaked its information over his surrounding neurons.
Then we can
build a deductive argumentation. One event is the cause of another which is the
effect of the first one. We can thus build deductive chains. That’s the standard
reasoning in sciences like mathematics. We can also inverse the reasoning and
get into an inductive chain of reasoning. From what I know I induce that this
should be true. It is a hypothesis. This is also important in sciences, but
also in everyday life like: it was raining yesterday hence my father must have
stayed home.
But there is
another way of thinking. I call it subduction. The simplest form of subduction
is a metaphor; I treat one entity as if it were another and that may reveal an
aspect of the first entity I had not seen at first. A metaphor or a subduction
does not prove anything. It has to be demonstrated afterwards, but that’s how
the most creative activities of man develop. We have a deep feeling, a strong
emotion, a profound conviction, post traumatic stress, and we draw from this
the idea that the working truth should be this or that. It is an induction in a
way but a lot vaster and deeper. This sudden truth is the Eureka of Archimedes.
A sudden illumination. Note such epiphanies can happen at any time and anywhere
and in any field of activity. This subduction corresponds perfectly to the
recursive cortical networks Dileep George is speaking of. Note language is not
indispensible. A composer can just experience such epiphanies in his composing
and he would be unable to explain in words what it means. That’s generally why
I would consider the artistic creator is the last person who can explain his
own creation.
The question
that I will only evoke here is where do these elements of the mind of a person
register in the brain. Kurzweil does not even ask the question. For him whole
lists of patterns as he calls them are available in the various modules. The
question is to know where all these elements, patterns or not, are registered.
My idea is that we are working at the level of the molecules with particularly
the proteins in the microtubules of the neurons since it is proved some of
these proteins can vary including in structure when impacted by some influx of
information. Same thing about the transportation of the sensorial information
from the sensorial organs to the brain: how is it done? A vast discussion is
needed here.
The last point
I would like to make here is about Artificial Intelligence. Kurzweil’s
objective is to copy a real brain, or maybe several (though mixing two brains
might produce strange effects since there cannot be two brains that are
identical due to their psychogenetic history), and then compress the
information by cutting out all redundancy and the brain is very redundant.
Kurzweil says that should have no effect. I would doubt it since each instance
of one piece of information was registered in one specific situation with
particular emotional or sensorial elements around it and these variations from
one recording to the next of the same item will be lost by compressing. Then he
will simulate that compressed version of a brain in an intelligent machine. His
machine will only be able to simulate the compressed version of one particular
brain and hence will in no way represent the human brain at the level of its
abstract totality. But Kurzweil knows it is in many ways bound to be too short:
“Almost certainly
we would not find a precise match; the neuronal structure would invariably
differ in many details compared with the models in the computer. However, I
would maintain that there must be an essential mathematical equivalence to a
high degree of precision between the actual biology and our attempt to emulate
it; otherwise these systems would not work as well as they do.” (p. 153)
What is lost in
such a simulation is what makes a brain different from all others, the
circumstantial elements attached to each item of knowledge, but it is these
elements that may be particularly pervasive in a subductive inspirational way
of thinking. A plane after all flies pretty well but it is quite different from
a bird, isn’t it, though it performs the task of flying quite well.
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 8:19 AM 
