Emergence

In the beginning of the year we were asked to write about the game of “Life” created by Conway. I was a complete skeptic, believing that it is near impossible to create life though a computer program due to the fact that there are so many exceptions and unpredictable actions. I still believe this but after reading about Metacat and playing around with it, I am starting to see a shit in my beliefs. Metacat puts up a good fight in convincing me that a computer could really think and account for life.
Metacat with the combination of copy cat has done a good job in representing a computer program that seems to think. With in the programs themselves there are sub-programs and rules that take in many exceptions, such as pattern clamping and temporal traces. With all of these sub-parts it seems that Metacat is indeed “thinking”. The steps that Metacat takes to come up with an answer can be somewhat parallel to the way a human brain works in thinking, the only exception being the speed at which it processes.
It’s amazing if you think about everything that goes on in our bodies without us even knowing.
If someone say to a joke like “A man walk into a bar, he should have seen it”, we as humans have the ability to hear that and understand the meaning outside of it literal contexts. But for a computer to do this is a little harder. Metacat can make analogies and process thing out of a completely literal state, but only to some degree. It will work on an analogy and come up with answers that are not complete literal answers, but if a problem is too hard it seems to default to a direct literal answer. This was shown in the abc to abd xyz to xyd. It seems that the pattern was to take the right most letter and turn it into the letter that follows it, c went to d. But with xyz example there was a snag, z has no following letter and the rules state that there is no loop in the letters. So the computer had to think and use all it sub parts to come up with another way to view the pattern and problem. Which was the right most letter changes to d.
“When humans make analogies, we not only construct mental mappings according to constraints, we also understand the meaning of the concepts connected by these mappings.”(Marshall, 5) We make analogy to connect to realms of our knowledge to strengthen our learning. But when a computer makes and analogy sometimes that transfer and strengthening of knowledge is not really there. It was cool that Metacat has the ability to know that it had done the problem before. But what I found even more amazing was the fact that it could recognize that it had done similar analogies. I did a cat goes to bat and then a sat went to bat and it recognized that it was similar to the cat to bat problem.
Metacat definitely gave me some good insight. I found myself trying to connect what I was seeing on the screen with what might be happening in my brain at the same moment. I think humans in general take for granted just how amazing our brains are. Some of my classmates comment on how they got bored while running programs. To me I think the bored comes because we are typing in problems that we already see a pattern too. Before typing in the letters I think we all feel like we know what should be the out put. Metacat is seeing the problem for the first time and is going through the whole thought process that we already did. I feel that we just get inpatient.
All I can say is that I for one am very thankful that I do not have to mechanically think about every step in a process when given a problem. I am happy that some how my brain just works.

Einstein’s brain or a brain full of little Einsteins, which one would you choose? It seems that both so good that it is hard to make a decision. There can’t really be a right answer.
To have a brain anywhere near the capacity of Einstein’s brain would be absolutely amazing. There is no argument in saying that he was on of the greatest minds ever. Having his brain would be a huge increase in brainpower for my self and many others but what if you had thousands of little Einstein brains working in your brain. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. If we replace every neuron in our minds with a brain capable of what Einstein’s was capable of it would appear that almost a perfect mind was created. His brain a lone was capable of extreme brainpower but imagine that power time thousands. The brain would be able to compute almost anything at a very high speed. If I we were to insert Einstein’s brain into my own, I just in vision everything being much more efficient. Now every time ideas are flowing in my mind, I feel they would be processed fast and better because his power was combined with my own. If I were to just have his brain, I know it would be a definite improvement, but I feel that my brain composed of thousands of his brains would be an even bigger improvement. A combination of the two allows for a calibration, it is possible that Einsteins may not know some information in my brain. This comes strictly from life experience and the fact that I know Japanese.
For me the main idea comes down to the way his brain is wired. It would seem that people, like Einstein, just have different brains then the rest of us. The way they forge connections and “learn” can’t be like an ordinary person, something up there is out of the ordinary. Maybe the neurons fire faster or the connections are made faster, but something is different. Moving back to the topic on hand, to me putting little Einsteins in within the brain would allows for this super speed and connection making to be applied over and over. In place of one neuron we would have, thousands of his neurons. In my opinion more is better.

The idea of emergence is one that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around. I would like to say that this book has helped me to understand but at some points I find myself with more questions than definite answers. A book like Emergence is definitely one of those books that needs group discussing.
It’s amazing to me that Steven Johnson has found one word that seems to connect a number of ideas. To be honest when I think of city structure my first thought is not ant colonies or the media. But though reading Emergence I am definitely starting to see and somewhat understand the connections. One of our class discussions revolved around this idea that emergence is the idea of a system forming from the bottom up. An ant colony is a huge system that runs from the bottom up. The ant’s within the system have no real way of communicating but yet somehow keep their huge colony runs smoothly. They individually make changes that collectively change the system as a whole. The parts change the system instead of the system changing the parts.
So who is Gennifer Flowers? To be honest before reading this book I had never heard of her, but she holds a great deal of responsibility in why the media of my era is the way it is. Her story shifted the top down system of new broadcasting to a bottom up system. (Since we all read the book I’m not going to really go into details about the case.) The important idea is that, the heads of the system thought her story was not news worthy and choose to blow it off and just move on, but a local news station aired it and the story became news. Steven Johnson writes in Emergence “In the hierarchical system of old, the network heads could willfully suppress a story if they thought it was best for the American people not to know, but that privilege died with Gennifer Flowers, and not be because of lower standards or sweeps week. It was a casualty of feedback.” And the feedback was so strong that the original repressors of the story found themselves airing the story they had once thought non news worthy. Can feedback = emergence? Is that the connection Steven Johnson was trying to make?
Steven Johnson goes on in the book to mention that when the parts start to call the shots instead of the system as a whole, emergent behavior is starting. The Gennifer Flowers news story was the starting point for the emergence of a new kind of media.
Look at what happened when Michael Jackson died. People went crazy and the media followed. For a complete month every news station ran stories about his death everyday, all day. Don’t get me wrong I love Michael and he definitely was a world icon, but many days I kept wondering what else is going on out in the world. Other things definitely had to be going on. But the media feed into the people frenzy, and more coverage kept popping up. Positive Feedback drove the media coverage.
Feedback loops like this have outgrown just the news world. Is Gennifer Flowers the one to blame for the many reality tv shows out there? I really don’t care what Paris Hilton is wearing and quite frankly in my opinion Jon and Kate should not be household names. But I think I am the odd one out in the entertainment/media system, right? If the media is working on a feedback system then the reason we have so many reality shows is because there was a demand for them. Somewhere along the line we as a society established that we cared about all this non sense. Society put out the demand for magazines like US weekly and People, we created the demand the media had to supply the product.
I’m left wondering if this new system will ever change. And what can emerge out of it.

The idea of emergence is one that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around. I would like to say that this book has helped me to understand but at some points I find myself with more questions than definite answers. A book like Emergence is definitely one of those books that needs group discussing.
It’s amazing to me that Steven Johnson has found one word that seems to connect a number of ideas. To be honest when I think of city structure my first thought is not ant colonies or the media. But though reading Emergence I am definitely starting to see and somewhat understand the connections. One of our class discussions revolved around this idea that emergence is the idea of a system forming from the bottom up. An ant colony is a huge system that runs from the bottom up. The ant’s within the system have no real way of communicating but yet somehow keep their huge colony runs smoothly. They individually make changes that collectively change the system as a whole. The parts change the system instead of the system changing the parts.
So who is Gennifer Flowers? To be honest before reading this book I had never heard of her, but she holds a great deal of responsibility in why the media of my era is the way it is. Her story shifted the top down system of new broadcasting to a bottom up system. (Since we all read the book I’m not going to really go into details about the case.) The important idea is that, the heads of the system thought her story was not news worthy and choose to blow it off and just move on, but a local news station aired it and the story became news. Steven Johnson writes in Emergence “In the hierarchical system of old, the network heads could willfully suppress a story if they thought it was best for the American people not to know, but that privilege died with Gennifer Flowers, and not be because of lower standards or sweeps week. It was a casualty of feedback.” And the feedback was so strong that the original repressors of the story found themselves airing the story they had once thought non news worthy. Can feedback = emergence? Is that the connection Steven Johnson was trying to make?
Steven Johnson goes on in the book to mention that when the parts start to call the shots instead of the system as a whole, emergent behavior is starting. The Gennifer Flowers news story was the starting point for the emergence of a new kind of media.
Look at what happened when Michael Jackson died. People went crazy and the media followed. For a complete month every news station ran stories about his death everyday, all day. Don’t get me wrong I love Michael and he definitely was a world icon, but many days I kept wondering what else is going on out in the world. Other things definitely had to be going on. But the media feed into the people frenzy, and more coverage kept popping up. Positive Feedback drove the media coverage.
Feedback loops like this have outgrown just the news world. Is Gennifer Flowers the one to blame for the many reality tv shows out there? I really don’t care what Paris Hilton is wearing and quite frankly in my opinion Jon and Kate should not be household names. But I think I am the odd one out in the entertainment/media system, right? If the media is working on a feedback system then the reason we have so many reality shows is because there was a demand for them. Somewhere along the line we as a society established that we cared about all this non sense. Society put out the demand for magazines like US weekly and People, we created the demand the media had to supply the product.
I’m left wondering if this new system will ever change. And what can emerge out of it.

Where do my thoughts come from? Do they come from the emergent properties of the billions of neurons that populate my brain? Or do they originate from lower-level processes? Are these thoughts of mine just the byproduct of certain physical interactions between tiny atoms and molecules? Is this a conscious decision?

I believe that these decisions and the consciousness of our human lives are absolutely derived a higher level of decision-making – that is, the emergent properties of neurons. Why do I think this? It’s because I believe that the thing that differentiates a conscious, thinking human being from a mere animal is the ability to do things are not necessary and even potentially self-harmful. What comes to my mind quickly that seems like evidence is the seemingly modern problem of eating disorders. Humans are the only creatures that will intentionally not eat even when their body tells them that they need food. Can this come from the lower level, physical parts of the body? Generally, eating disorders germinate from psychological disorders (found in DSM-IV) – can this be attributed to the body? Personally, I believe that it cannot. A lower-level process cannot be responsible for making this devastating decision to simply not nourish itself. A certain level of consciousness must be needed to intentionally hurt themselves. As such, I believe that it must be higher-level.

When asked about the origin of my thoughts and decisions in my brain I began to create analogies to my brain. This weekend while staring at the ocean i also began to make connections to waves. Analogies between computers and the brain are many but the wave analogy really helped me understand. As a child i always wondered where waves in the ocean came from. This subject was especially difiicult because no matter what i  could not trace the origin of a wave to the shore, much like i cannot see the origin of my thoughts turn in to an action with my body. In computers, tracing an input to an output seems more possible. The fact is because i cannot look inside my brain, I have difficulties understanding where and how my thoughts originate.

After falling asleep on a plane I began to comptemplate when do i have thoughts? Why would i have a thought? With this line of thinking, I began to see my thoughts as reactions to the world surrounding me. While I am known for being highly tangential, in my mind my thoughts all follow a clear and logical chaing of reasoning (at that moment). Like how something happens and my brain is “reminded” of a analogous situation and begin churning out ideas. (Please note on the plane I almost said omg my brain works like Metacat! )

Furthermore, on the plane a baby began to cry. Besides thinking to myself  how that baby should shut up i began to think does the baby know how to do anything but cry. Besides being cute, babies, at first, cry, eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom. But as babies mature they begin to ask for food, learn how to use the toilet, and play. This thought process lead me to the  idea that just like how language is learned so is thinking. Babies initailly cry whenever “something” is wrong. I do not know if babies know whether they initially know what is wrong but they cry. Because we learn to communicate and function on higher levels , I thought just how language was being “taught” in Elman’s paper and to Metacat, functioning is being taught to babies. Intially all they know how to do  is cry, but after a while they learn how to function based on given situations.

Initially this question really perplexed me becasue i was thinking of ideas as spontaneously generated objects but now i see them as reactions to the internal and external stimuli i experience. So much like a computer, inputs are given and throught a network of neurons the brain returns thoughts and ideas for the situation. While waves aren’t quite as analogous, they gave my brain an input with in combination of the prompt an idea of how my brain creates thoughts. (Now I am relatively certain that there is no little dude in my brain that controls me 🙂  ).

Is it all just neurons? If we want to say that, can we specify further and say that it’s all just cells? That would be the ultimate cellular automata – to begin with one cell, one “on”, which follows a randomly chosen pattern to become a human with a distinct brain. Another cell follows a different pattern, and becomes a dog or a fish (or anything else). Or, maybe they’re all permutations from the one cell (or atom), which have broken into different patterns within the automata. Is it possible that the world we’ve come to know came to be through the same pattern as a cellular automata, triggered by a bang which set us on our way? The rules the automata followed, we would still be learning through the rules of science. Is this possible?

If it isn’t just cells, if we think about it simply as control of neurons, then I ask, how much control do we have? It brings me back to Mr Kelly, that first Greek teacher of mine, who never hesitated to ask “Why did you do that?” Are firing neurons really capable of being totally random or thoughtless? Bethie mentioned as well (in class) the reflex test in a doctor’s office as a thoughtless movement, but, as it is triggered by nerve signals, is it really thoughtless? I don’t think any movement could ever be thoughtless, or wouldn’t we be able to do it without a brain?

Still, back to the neurons. If everything is controlled by neurons, what controls them? More neurons? Or is everything we do controlled by our environment? I think back to the discussion we had over the neurological test, in which a subject would need to lift a finger or arm, and the brain would show signs of what was going to be done before it happened. What causes those neurons to fire?

The human body is an amazing piece of work. I often find myself wondering how so much can be happening within me without even knowing it. Everything just communicates and gets done, my heartbeats, my lungs breath and my feet walk. How much of what I am doing is really me, how much control do I have over my body? Often time people used phrases like, “I consciously made an effort” or “where is your conscience?” What if anything am I consciously doing? What does that really mean, it seems that 50% of the time we make a conscious effort to do something, we end of not doing it. Did we really make an extra effort, or was the decision already pre determined? I truly believe that people have choices in life and have control over their action, for some reason I can’t get myself to believe that we are just run by neurons, it just seems too black and white. If decisions were just black and white, cut and dry, wouldn’t everyone act the same? In all honesty I don’t really know, but it seems that all the confusions for me, at least, comes form not knowing where the line is drawn, where does the ability to make a decisions come from?
What for example, makes a person raise their hand? Is this ability coming from a higher level or is it just the results of lower level neurons firing. It seems scientifically, that when a question is given to a subject, the subject reads the question and automatically begins to process the information. If the information corresponds to something that they have “learned” then it seems no questions will be asked, but when even a part of the information is foreign its seems a new process starts. Most of the time when we raise our hands it is to ask a question about something we do not understand or something we are confused about. When the information is foreign to our brains, it seems that there must be some interruption in the pattern of the firing neurons. When something is not understood, I tend to think the neurons fire a signal saying “help.” This help signal tells the brain that more information is needed, so the brain must re-think it steps. It knows from a past experience (or learning) that raising the hand allows for a question to be asked. The brain then sends an output signal to the motor system, which then fires neurons to raise the hand. If we think of it this way it seems that the process of raising a hand is not a conscious decision but rather a pre-determined output for the lack of understanding. But what about those times when something is not understand but no hand is raised to ask a question?
The ability to not raise a hand when confused points to the fact that in some way there is conscious control over this ability. If a question was not understood a person could a, raise their hand or b, not raise their hand. The person makes the decision. Although the neurons may be firing as described above, some higher-level system received the information and process it to make the decision to raise the hand or not.
George Bernard Shaw once said, “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” Shaw seems to believe that if you imagine what you want, you can create it, a way of thinking that marketing companies go gaga over. Consciously, you imagine and then you create. If you believe, you can and will succeed. This idea of where decision comes from can never really be proven one way or another. After all who knows how much of anything we are really controlling. For example am I consciously writing this paper or, was it all pre-determined thoughts upon which I had no control over.

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.

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!