Author: ethan

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.

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!

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.

As I was reading Emergence, one particular passage grabbed my attention. On page 127, Johnson is drawing comparisons between the Internet as an emergent system and the human brain. He describes how new software is scanning the connections in the surfing behaviors of internet users. These methods depend not on the actual content being read, but on the complex relationships between different sites. He then compares this to how the human brain functions — since the firing of neurons is relatively slow compared to the circuitry of a computer, our brains don’t think about things linearly – instead, it’s an enormously parallel machine that looks for underlying patterns.

If millions of different pieces of software do this pattern matching just like human neurons do, how does that change our view of the Internet as, perhaps, a emergent entity? I believe that one of the important differences between that pattern-matching is that there is no real connection between the software that scours the internet. The greatest strength of our brains is that the overheads of parallel processing – the time it takes to communicate, how to pass information, what to do with idle processors (neurons) – are nearly invisible, simply through the the millions of years of evolution. On the other hand, the software we have is created by humans. Communication and what to do with the data must be guided and filtered by human hands – and the sheer complexity of the task is no small thing. These multitudes of programs be truly emergent until real, unforeseen behaviors arise. Perhaps it can learn and guess at which websites will be popular.

As software that crawls the internet grows more complex, I think we’ll see more interesting trends emerge from the woodwork. The software that deals with interconnections between websites effectively have the ability to predict whether a new website will be popular or not – and beyond that, they have the necessary information to perhaps create a new, popular website. If this software begins to create it’s own internet pages…well, that may be a spark of something interesting.