Emergence

Baibh Cathba November 22nd, 2009

As I am still uncertain as to what exactly I am supposed to be writing about, I will start this post with a bit of trepidation. I’m no philosopher, so I cannot sum up the kinds of questions that have been plaguing great thinkers throughout time with some flip answers of a college student intent on doing maybe a day or two of thinking. Tossing words such as “metaphysical”, “reality”, and “humanity” around are a sure way that someone (probably even myself) is going to stagger under the implications attached to the word. (Maybe I shouldn’t even be writing at all, because this is less of a communication device and more of a virtual vomit; how can I know I’m “thinking” if I can’t even define the word?). Considering the kinds of things brought up by the question, such as what it takes to be human, what it means to think, and how can we define words using other words, the educational plate is pretty crowded. It is almost like looking at a five-course banquet and being told that you are only to eat one course, yet still be able to describe the banquet’s other courses with a degree of knowledge as to how they taste. Regardless, here’s attempt number one of the Emergence homework.

There seem to be two components I can infer from the original question posed to us in class. The first part regards to whether impulse/intention comes from the physical or the ephemeral. The second part is almost a sub-set of the first part, regarding the question of whether or  not thought is an illusion.

Okay… so I tend to get a bit pedantic when I’m nervous. How do I unpack the previous sentences?

First: impulse and intention. Are they the same thing? Probably not. Impulse is something most likely connected to the simplest behaviors perhaps even associating with the concept of instinct. In fact, Wikipedia mentions the strong hints of “a wish or urge“ in relation to control; i.e. a lack thereof regarding the urge. (Surprisingly, the use of “urge” also implies base instincts and the connections back to instinct or “sub-conscious” level of operation). Intention seems to imply a decision or some kind of extra layer to a decision than “mere impulse”. By claiming “intentionality” there are strong hints of conscious thought and philosophy. This brings us to the most important topic at hand: does this matter? By bothering to define the words, it would seem as if this were so; however, the main question being addressed is directly related to this issue regarding impulse and intention.

If we have separate words for impulse and intention, are there also differentiations between the hardware and software of the human body? The physical reality of a human body (the hardware, the chassis, the flesh, the “reality”) versus the software of the human body (the mind, the soul, the spirit, the thinking, the “fantasy”), surely these are not the simple breakdown between impulse and intention? We attribute the ideas of “idea”, “thought”, “metaphysical” to the realm of the brain; however, should it also not be considered that the brain is comprised of both the hardware and software to be called a brain? Does this mean we are to call a “thought” not only a metaphysical event, but also a physical reality? Or tying this back to the original question is a thought only physical manifestation of chemicals?

Okay, so in making a huge circle out of the land of “thinking too hard”, where are we, where we began? (and if Baibh is supposed to be answering a question (as in singular), why are there MORE questions than when this post started?)

Well, in order to get an answer… why not say that the formation of a thought requires both aspects? This is similar to the issue of “maturity” and “making sense” that came from the reading for this upcoming Monday. Children are able to change some physical pieces in order to create new metaphysical pieces (the evolution of body and mind in child development). Is such a thing as creating oneself “pre-programmed”? Is this rushing into the dangerous territory of “nature vs. nurture”?

To bring it back into the realm of semi-understandable, I would like to point out that impulse and intent are a combination of the physical and metaphysical. If we consider a human being to essentially be a “complete robot”, wherein there is hardware and software, then we could come to the conclusion that both physical and metaphysical properties are necessary components in the creation of a thought. A program cannot be run without hardware and hardware cannot run without programs, and there is no true way to say “hardware is the driver” or “software is the key”. As such, the “human robot” (for lack of a better term) is then a product of input. Unless there is something which one can react to, there can be no thought. Without input, there can be no thought. So is thought physical or metaphysical? I’d say both because hardware without anything to run on it is just as useless as software without anything to run it on.

This leads us to the sub-question of whether or not thought is an illusion. Depending on the definition of thought, one can come to different conclusions. If one believes thought to be “hardware” and wired into the brain, then it would probably be tied to a specific portion of the brain. Is there a specific region of the brain for thought? It’s something to think about.

If one claims thought as software, the issue of measurement will arise. However, there is an answer in the vague reactions of the brain in response to the thoughts. If one imagines a memory bank sitting in a computer, one knows there are millions of bits and bytes and such stored inside such an object. However, it is not a truly tangible thing as 250Gigs and 500Gigs can fit into the same box with no outer difference. How do we know what such an object can actually hold? Looking at the human brain is a similar experience. We cannot physically map where thoughts in the brain are stored. Likewise, if thoughts are merely a pre-programmed response to the plans encoded into our DNA, then surely we are absolved of anything we might do. Eerily enough, this means I was destined to write this essay IN ENGLISH since my birth. How odd!

Okay, so since thought surely isn’t just an illusion where I’m manifesting something that has been determined since my coding as  little DNA molecule, what is thought? Is it the nebulous connection between the input and eventual output? I would like to think so, but maybe there are other answers out there.

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ethan November 16th, 2009

First off, what do we mean by these terms? Einstein’s Brain is very straightforward –it is merely the brain of the greatest physicist of the twentieth century. On the other hand, a brain full of Einsteins is a little different. We can conceive of there being a collection of Einstein’s in a room, talking and bickering with each other. From interactions between these many Einsteins, they come to a decision on whatever needs to be done. What are the differences between these two different conceptions of thought? Einstein’s brain is just made up of millions of neurons, all interacting near-instantaneously to come up with a decision. How is this any different than many Einsteins, all interacting to come up with their decision?

The major difference is the level at which the interactions are happening. In Einstein’s brain, neurons are during furious parallel processing at the microscopic level. In a brain of Einsteins, many different instances of Einstein are talking to each other at the human level – with speech and recognizable forms of communication. Of course, those same Einsteins also are made up those very neurons. The brain of Einsteins simply has another level of interactions. This extra level of interactions enable the brain of Einsteins to be more perceptive and decisive. In addition, different Einsteins could think of different aspects of a problem and collaborate to come up with a solution!

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chris November 16th, 2009

In comparing the difference between Einstein’s brain and a brain of Einsteins, it is important to realize that these two cerebral structures are so different that it is nearly impossible to see a “brain” of Einsteins as being as brain at all. The most significant characteristic of a human brain (or any brain for that matter) is that macro, complicated behavior can emerge as a result of billions of smaller interactions between neurons that follow very simple rules. If a neuron is given a specific stimulation at its pre-synapses, it will always send the same information to its post-synapses; there is no decision making involved. In contrast, if a neuron were to instead have the properties of an entire Einstein brain, each individual neuron would have sentience and have the ability to make its own decision. As a result of this, each Einstein brain can do whatever it wants with the stimulation it receives from other Einsteins, and its output is not predictable.

A good analogy for this brain of sentient entities is a community with a purely democratic system of government. While a purely democratic system of government may sound like a good idea in theory, such a government would be inefficient and unable to cope with the demands for adaptation in this world. The same is true of a brain that operates on a network of billion of Einstein brains. Each Einstein would have his own say in the mental processes that occur in the bigger a brain, and because of this it is unlikely that the high parallel computing power that the brain is famous for will ever get achieved. Instead, each Einstein will try to convince the other Einsteins of what should be done and the reasons for doing so. If it were a brain where each neuron is someone’s brain that is less stubborn than Einstein this problem would not be so pronounced. Image having billions Einsteins who spend 30 years trying to disprove an idea that most other renowned physicists have embraced, and image these Einsteins trying to make a decision together. If there was a lion running towards this entity of Einsteins, the decision processes of all the individual Einsteins would not be processes fast enough to save the entity.

However, while it is evident that Einsteins in conflict will never get anything done, what if each Einstein was working towards a common goal and that all the Einsteins were synch in their objective. In this case the brain of Einsteins would be a force to be reckoned with. It would be having a two dimensional array as opposed to a one dimensional array and the computing power would be much greater than that of an individual brain. One only has to look at the Borg race from Star Trek to see the powers that a network of connected individuals have as long as they are drones and working for a common goal without the ability to make their own personal decisions.

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Megan Clark November 16th, 2009

A brain of Einsteins is an interesting concept. And to properly assess the efficacy of such a brain, one must first consider the fact that each particle of the brain is identical. Does this make it better or worse than one united Einstein’s brain?
For me, the discussion of this hinges on the fact that each Einstein is the same, since there is only one Einstein. If each Einstein is identical in DNA, how would that affect the patterns of thought? If the makeup of each is the same, would all of the individual thoughts be the same as well? I personally know very little about the makeup of the brain and how neurons work; the same can be said for my knowledge of DNA,  so let’s  look at either side.
If each Einstein is the same, has the same DNA and therefore the same brain, would the quantity of thoughts really mean more than the quality? Or, as an even greater stretch, how different would the thoughts be, if they came from identical brains? In this case, I feel that the brain of Einsteins would only be negligibly different from Einstein’s brain.  But, on the other hand, if identical DNA can produce different thoughts, would there really be any competition between Einstein’s brain and a brain composed of many Einsteins?  It strikes me that in this case, a brain composed of Einsteins would almost need to be more powerful than Einstein’s brain.
Of course, this has drawbacks. Any group with different thoughts is bound to have different opinions; if a brain can’t get along, is it really a powerful brain after all? Or, also interestingly enough, each section of the brain has a distinct function – it isn’t so simple to categorize a brain as being stronger or weaker or smarter or dumber than another type of brain. If the motor functions are made of a group of Einsteins (personally unaware of how Einstein’s original motor skills were) all trying to work together are much less likely to be strong than those of a single brain component already trained to work specifically on that type of skill. With many, each only having a small fraction of their own brains allotted for motor skills, the chances of skilled coordination are slim.
There is no easy way to compare a brain full of Einsteins to the brain of Einstein. And, unfortunately, without a greater understanding of the human brain, I’m not able to draw any distinct conclusions. I can only say that, either way it goes, the brains have the potential of being distinctly different, but also of measuring out to be the same in the end, after one combines the benefits and drawbacks that would come from each potential setup. Perhaps someone else can shed some light on which of the possible outcomes I’ve touched on has the most probability of occurrence.

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Riki November 15th, 2009

Einstein’s brain, like all brains, is composed of neurons and glial cells. The neurons transmit electrochemical signals to each other, and glial cells provide the neurons with various forms of support and insulation. It is common knowledge that a neuron can only transmit a signal in one direction; however, recent research suggests otherwise. Whether or not synaptic transmission is bi-directional, neurons transmit signals very quickly – generally believed to be at speeds greater than 200 mph. Each neuron can be connected to more than just two other neurons. While some make only a few connections, most make thousands. The vast network of synaptic connections coupled with signal transmission speed is one of the reasons why the brain is so efficient. Another important point is that a neuron is a single cell. The brain is composed of roughly 100 billion neurons. Each neuron doesn’t think for itself. A person’s thoughts emerge from the brain’s neuronal networks.

A brain composed of Einsteins, on the other hand, is probably not as efficient as Einstein’s brain. If each neuron is replaced with an Einstein, then each neuron is replaced with a brain containing 100 billion neurons. This certainly seems like it would make for a more powerful brain, and this may be true if each neuron was replaced with 100 billion more neurons, though it would take much longer for information to travel. Unfortunately, Einstein is not just 100 billion neurons. Something must house those neurons, specifically, the human body. Assuming the Einsteins don’t possess telepathic powers, they must communicate via the five senses, perhaps using verbal speech or body language or sign language or pheromones. It would take much, much longer for one Einstein to communicate something to the next Einstein or thousands of other Einsteins. Even though each neuron is an Einstein, each Einstein does not necessarily think the same things as the other Einsteins at the same time. Identical twins theoretically have the same DNA (it’s almost the same, but some genes can be expressed on one that aren’t on the other due to environmental factors), but they don’t have the same thoughts. So an Einstein might try to communicate something to another Einstein, but the receiving Einstein might not understand what the transmitting Einstein is trying to say, so the transmitting Einstein must further explain until the receiving Einstein understands, otherwise the signal cannot be passed down to the next Einstein. But each Einstein is likely to be communicating the signal to thousands of other Einsteins, many of which could be confused. It would take an excruciatingly long time for just one signal to be transmitted. One can only imagine how long it would take if some of the Einsteins were uncooperative. The brain would probably be a massive web of confusion.

Albert Einstein may have been a genius, but a person whose brain is composed of Einsteins might have trouble staying alive.

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Baibh Cathba November 13th, 2009

To start this post, I think that some terminology and outlining ought to be explored before running into other thoughts. First, consider Einstein’s brain. It has little neurons that just fire according to (essentially) random patterns that will eventually make some sort of sense, perhaps eventually creating thoughts. Fairly understandable, so what about a brain made of Einsteins? This seems to be a classic case of anthropomorphism (the human desire to give animated traits to inanimate objects. This also applies to “my nerves were screaming in pain” as nerves do not have vocal chords with which to scream, and might even be dubbed a metaphor if one were feeling particularly pedantic that day.) As such, objects like the brain in the Einstein example, are given personalities. A particular comic found here, addresses the concept of anthropomorphism in an amusing visual example.

Second, the idea of a homunculus (the singular form of homunculi… as evidenced by the “i” at the end this word, it derives from Latin) is the concept of a tiny person that unpacks into a full human. This is almost related to the idea of a brain made of Einsteins in that one of the two definitions of Homunculus refers to the idea of a “little human” driving the brain. Expanding the idea of only one driver in a brain ( a homunculus) to multiple drivers (the Einsteins) seems to be a fairly logical next step if combined with the idea of anthropomorphism. If we say that each neuron is an Einstein, then we have independent-thinking decision-makers that create a thinking unit, which in this case is a brain.

Okay, so playing into this idea, what does this mean? An “Einstein” would be a “voter”, and if we’re counting all the “Einstein” in the brain to be equal in value and have equal votes, it is likely that it would take forever to move… if the brain could even function at all. If each “Einstein” has an internal decision-making process and each “Einstein” can develop as a personality on its own, there is no real impetus to work with the other “Einstein”s. As such, the deliberation over an even as simple as “pass this message on” could stop in the originator “Einstein’s” own spot. If a brain requires the passing of a message along a certain path, and if the message never makes it along the path, can the Einstein’s then be considered a brain?

If we are looking at Einstein’s brain, what does that mean? Essentially, we are looking at an ant colony. Without deliberation, the individual neurons are firing or not firing. This is as simple as using 1’s and 0’s to program with binary, if we were to talk in computing terms. As discussed in class previously, there are no leader ants, no monarchies, no universal decision-makers in an ant colony. (Sorry Dreamworks and Pixar, ANTZ and A Bug’s Life are not scientifically sound.)

So, going back to the what’s the difference between Einstein’s brain and a brain made of Einsteins? Well, in a word: depth (i.e. one has one level Brain::neurons, the other has Einsteins::brains::neurons). If I were to expand on the topic a little I would have to also include point of view. Because at the individual level, one could have conversations with Einstein. One cannot converse with Einstein’s brain, but on can talk to the Einstein’s in a brain made of Einsteins. Kind of mind-boggling. It’s similar to the idea presented in “Prelude . . . Ant Fugue” (a chapter in a book, The Mind’s I, by Douglas Hofstadter).

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Riki November 4th, 2009

The paper says the connectionist network is a model that is “based loosely on neural architecture”; however, after reading the paper, I found many similarities between the connectionist network and a neural network. Each unit has an activation value, which are passed between units in only one direction. This is exactly like the action potential of a neuron. In a connectionist network, there are three types of layers: input, hidden, and output, which are exactly like the three types of neurons: afferent, inter, and efferent. In both networks, the input/afferent sends a signal to the hidden/inter, which sends a signal to the output/efferent. In neural networks, however, inter neurons usually send many signals to each other before sending a signal to an efferent neuron, if they even do. Also, the paper says that the connectionist network can learn and recognize patterns to generalize. The brain generalizes a lot of information, which is one of the reasons why it is so efficient. Back-propagation is like the feedback loops found not just in the brain, but anywhere in the body. Because of these similarities to the brain, I was able to mostly understand this paper, which was a first in the computer science-y readings we’ve had to do for this class. And since I could see it in those terms, I think I have a little more respect for cognitive models, such as Metacat.

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ethan November 4th, 2009

In reading the Connectionist Foundations article, I found the most interesting part of the article to be the paragraph that explained how these networks show “grace degradation of their performance.” This seems like a really critical point to me - most programs that I’ve been acquainted with, just by using them or writing them, have a very specific problem domain. If you exceed it, or give the program something it’s not ready for, you only get an error message. Instead of a sudden drop-off in usefulness, the fact that they slowly become more ineffective is a remarkable phenomenon that deserves to be looked at closely - which suggests that we ought to consider Connectionist networks seriously.

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Megan Clark November 4th, 2009

Admittedly, I found the chapter difficult to understand, having no background with neural networking. But, after talking to Priscy about it, I feel like I have a better idea. I can better appreciate the methods for helping these networks “learn”, especially through back-propagation. What was most interesting to me, however, was the comparisons between these types of models and linguistics. As a linguistics major, I have still taken surprisingly few linguistics classes, so I appreciated this method of assessing data. I really enjoyed looking at the tensor product representation of the sentence “Mary gave the book to John”. It struck me as being similar to the structure of syntactical trees, which have the same idea of generalizing a role (such as noun phrase, prepositional phrase, down to something as finite as ‘tense’) and a filler which suits each sentence to fit the tree. Thinking of it in this way helped me comprehend better the computational version.

I hope that, in class, we can further discuss the methods these networks use for learning. The ideas discussed in this paper interested me, but were phrased in ways that were difficult for me to read and really comprehend.

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Marianne November 4th, 2009

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