Singularity Signposts - Consciousness and Coprocessors and …

George Rebane

In 1976 Julian Jaynes, the late Princeton psychologist, developed in three volumes his groundbreaking theory of consciousness.  Combined between one set of covers in 1990, it was called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  In this mouthful Dr Jaynes presented a definition of consciousness from which people comprised of renown philosophers to computer scientists have found hard to escape.

In the The Origin he takes us through a fascinating journey of the early history of western civilization, theory of language in guiding/constraining thought (google Sapir-Whorf), to the operational definition of the bicameral mind.  Jaynes argues that the bicameral mind is all anyone had up to the beginning of the Dorian invasions around 1,200 BC.  These invasions originating from the Middle East (Persia et al) caused a fundamental change in the agrarian societies of the greater Near East that includes Greece, the Levantine, and Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq to the Mediterranean and up north through Turkey and Greece).  The book is a page turner, and its successful reading should conclude with the award of at least sixteen upper division unit credits at a first rate university.

Scientists and philosophers have muddled for centuries about what consciousness really is.  Jaynes develops a meticulous case that consciousness is a sometime thing, a mental state in which a human actually practices the introspection of planning and simulating the real world in which the ‘I’ and ‘me’ are actors and objects of contemplation.  As such, it is quickly realized that during most of our day we are going through routines of behavior and dealing with the external world in a semi-autopilot mode which is really not conscious behavior.  Lower critters, and today machines, can be taught to replicate such interactions with their surroundings.

This smacked me across the forehead like a 2-by-4 after having been a student of Vedanta and Buddhism since the late teens.  A westerner, noodling from the western traditions of philosophy and psychology, had come to essentially the same conclusion about our internal life and perceptions as had the eastern sages.

Jaynes convincingly argues that the bicameral mind is Man's pre-conscious state.  The bicameral human acts more or less automatically to the cultural perceptions of over-arching natural forces and dictates of his god(s).  It is a mental state that instantly salves stress, resolves conundrums, and makes (‘takes’ for you Brits) your decisions.  In fact, Jaynes identified the most probable area of the brain where such pre-conscious processing takes/took place.  It is on the right side of the brain opposite Wernicke’s area on the left that is critical to speech formation and understanding.

Werneke’s area and its mirror form the ‘two rooms’ that played, and still do for many people, the role of organizing and informing the individual’s environment.  When a person was confronted with an unknown or a conundrum, the ‘gods’ spoke.  And at times they spoke in the most vivid of ways.  People, alone and in groups, actually saw them and conversed with them, and involved their gods in activities both profane and sacred – to the bicameral mind the gods were a constant reality.  All this was witnessed and subsequently captured in the literature, poetry, music, and art of every such civilization.

Life was almost totally free of conflicts – when the god(s) said ‘plant’ you planted, ‘marry her’ you married her, ‘kill’ you killed, ‘let live’ you showed mercy.  In the bicameral cosmology you were an instrument of the gods who controlled all aspects of your reality and your daily comings and goings.  Even the conflict between disagreeing gods was solved for you, since the pantheon was completely hierarchical with an established pecking order; you did what the ranking god said.

All this bicameralism was possible when people lived in small groups in which everyone pretty well knew everyone else, and could readily and compellingly share their experiences (group hallucinations) with the others.  But this changed when the armed bands from the east began pressing eastward toward the fertile valleys of Mesopotamia and beyond.  To defend themselves, people began coming together into ever bigger villages that had walls and ultimately into cities with sophisticated defensive infrastructures.

At this point the numbers grew so large that it was hard for everyone to hear the gods say the same things.  People on the other side of town didn’t see each other all that often, and the gods said different things to them.  The societal solution to this was the rise of the priests as the intermediaries to the gods.  The priests in their newly built temples talked with the gods and brought to the people a common message that served.  Individuals in such larger groups would confirm their own communications with god, and they often proved to be in error according to the priests.

As the Dorian centuries passed, more and more people quit hearing and seeing the gods in their midst.  By 800 BC or so, the mediating role of the priests was complete in almost every religion in that region of the world.  And between contact with the priests, people were literally left to their own devices in solving life’s problems.  Religion’s rules still dictated what had to be done, but those dictates were in the large, they were not up close and personal.  And in the interval individuals had to fend for themselves psychologically, they had to start taking stock of themselves as agents who were on their own and had to interpret the dictates of their culture from the perspective of the ‘I’ and the ‘me’.  Someone new entered into the daily equation, it was the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ as the cognitive critter who now had to fly solo between the times that religion came to help out.  Questions arose and had to be answered then and there – ‘what should ‘I’ do now?’, ‘what would the gods want ‘me’ to do in this situation?’

The contemplation of individual independence arose and it was pretty scary.  Before having to think about what ‘I’ should do, the answer had been easy and instant.   With the ‘I’ arose the notion of individual responsibility, because it was not always clear that you would make the right choice even if you did your best to satisfy what you thought your god wanted.  For the first time, you were responsible for your actions, and there were consequences for error (sin) even with the best of intentions.  People began to think more and more about the role of ‘I’ and ‘me’, and in their anguish there arose a cry that was immortalized in their writings and art, ‘Why have the gods fallen silent?’  People became aware of themselves as independent agents, and cultures transformed in turmoil.  Go read the Old Testament that was written over these centuries.

To put a bow on all this, let me be clear that not everyone lost their bicameral minds.  The historical and experimental vindication of Jaynes’ theories clearly points to examples of bicameralism into and beyond the Renaissance – people actually did see witches fly on broom sticks, they actually did witness and interact with trolls in the forest.  Such people live among us today in different parts of the world still fulfilling the wishes of their god(s) with a calm countenance.  Today we know on which side of the skull an individual’s reality is constructed.

With this extended preamble we can pull ourselves back into the early 21st century and consider the extensive work that Jaynes, Daniel Dennett, Roger Penrose, and others have motivated in the study of consciousness.  Major universities today have ‘consciousness studies’ departments and institutes.  And inevitably at this point we must welcome the entry of the machine as the next ‘platform’ which may/will support consciousness.

In the meanwhile, to see what kinds of diversity exists in this burgeoning field, there is an alternative theory of consciousness developed by Dr Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin that is based on something called integrated information theory.  Scientific American and The New York Times report (here and here) that Tononi is attempting to develop a consciousness metric that would allow someone to be hooked up to a bunch of cranial electrodes, and the meter would read out the ‘level of consciousness’ that was going on in his head.

Unfortunately, Dr Tononi is starting with a much simpler level of brain activity that he also labels consciousness – the level that correlates with a range of activity that is, say, fully awake and can react to pain, all the way over to deep sleep or even being comatose.  According to Tononi “consciousness … is nothing more than integrated information. Information theorists measure the amount of information in a computer file or a cellphone call in bits, and Dr. Tononi argues that we could, in theory, measure consciousness in bits as well. When we are wide awake, our consciousness contains more bits than when we are asleep.”

So Dr Tononi is attempting to abstract the information content of billions of brain cells interacting with each other through trillions of connections, and portray that as a measure of a critter’s consciousness.  And recognizing the magnitude of the problem of attempting to do this from the outside of the skull with a handful of electrodes, he has started his detailed research with a worm that has only 302 neurons in its pea brain.

Tononi’s definition of consciousness is primitive compared to the sophisticated theory and experimental evidence that Julian Jaynes has left us.  I would label Tononi’s ‘consciousness’ as the brain’s domain of sentient perception of its external environment.  And the more it accurately perceives, the more complex its internal bit patterns are in the sense that they can encode more information according to the classical information theory of Claude Shannon.  But you can see that this measure is completely blind to the brain’s ability to introspect an ‘I’ or ‘me’.  We can be pretty sure the worm isn’t doing any of that stuff even though it may make the needle move on Dr Tononi’s meter.  Nevertheless, this metric would also be very useful in measuring the level of patterned activity in a very complex computer or network of computers that learns to perceive an environment through sensors (say, video cameras) or from pawing through a large database.

In a related field, engineers have already built mobile robots with Bayes brains (Bayesian networks that learn, encode knowledge, and handle decisions in uncertain environments) that have the robots playing sophisticated hide-and-seek.  They ‘conceive of’ and leave a purposefully false trail designed to throw off the seeking robot.  Again, in no way can we ascribe the Jaynes definition of consciousness to such machines even though they are beginning to show vestiges of counterfactual planning (‘If that object is not visibly disturbed, then he would not deduce that I would be hiding there.’).  We regularly employ humans who aren’t that smart.

So here we have a semantic problem – one of these types of consciousness (Jaynes and Tononi's integrated information content) will have to be renamed.  The semantic problem is important because many people, including me, feel that the post-Singularity intelligent machines would have to incorporate or embody Jaynes consciousness, at least in their early stages of development.  And Tononi’s metric will not reveal that internal state.  After that, who knows what levels of consciousness they will then quickly evolve?

Meanwhile, something hopeful for the rest of us mortals is the brain-computer interface work being done at places like MIT Media Lab (here).  There intimate connections between neurons and embedded micro chips – brain coprocessors - are being developed that are destined to let a human issue thought commands that their coprocessor(s) can understand, translate into in-body (e.g. control limbs/prosthetics) or out-body actions, and communicate back to the brain.  Think of commanding a dumber but agile robot to do something, or, say, fetch a specific piece of information and put it up on a display.  And soon, of course, the display would not be needed if we properly have the computer stimulate the brain’s visual cortex and we see the information ‘in our head’.  Things are moving ever faster.

Finally, another step has been taken to advance telecommuting to an entirely new domain.  More workers may soon be able to stay home and have a physical semi-intelligent avatar stand in for them in the office (here).  The robot would attend meetings and give presentations at the direction of its human sitting in a comfortable lounge chair at home.  No need to drive two tons of polluting steel on expensive roads to a place far away so that you can look at other people and talk to them up close and personal, your avatar will do that.  What will this mean to beautiful remote locales like Nevada County, California?

Of course, this brave new world can quickly be taken into the cocoon format that we saw in the Matrix movies.  Why have a physical house with a physical refrigerator and swimming pool?  Can’t we virtualize all that?  With a few more neural connections into various places on our spine, and voila! we can all exist in a future ‘Second Life’ environment and really shrink our carbon footprint.  Just imagine racks of  cocoons, some maintenance robots flitting about and tending them to flush out the dead bodies and hook up the new ones, along with huge arrays of solar, wind, and water powered server farms that take care of creating the ‘what’s happenin’ now’ part of our perceived worlds.

And to think that so much of this technology is already on the drawing boards and in the labs.  With implants, can we all be instant geniuses and not worry about all that education and unemployment?  I may have gotten carried away a bit – then again … .

Comments

[D. King]

George,

Great read.

I wonder how Julian Jaynes would explain these?

http://tinyurl.com/2dsenhw

Is this the I or me of the time?

http://tinyurl.com/26bz3m3

…and what about this George, what about this? :)

http://tinyurl.com/294z7qv

[George Rebane]

Dave - I think the first two pose no problem to being generated and appreciated by bicameral minds. Not sure where the third one comes from. But recall that the bicamerals had no problem drawing pictures of their gods mixing with humans at various ceremonies of celebration, marriage, worship, ... . Ancient pottery, friezes, and mosaic renderings are full of such scenes, as are the poetry and literature from the pre-Dorian age.

[D. King]

"Ancient pottery, friezes, and mosaic renderings are full of such scenes, as are the poetry and literature from the pre-Dorian age."

Yes, but here is the difference.

"The evidence suggests that they were not merely decorations of living areas, since the caves in which they have been found do not have signs of ongoing habitation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting