Unlocking Consciousness

Lessons from the Convergence of Computing and Cognitive Psychology

Charles T Ross

• Publisher: WSPC (EUROPE)
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781786344700
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Intelligenza artificiale (IA) e semantica

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In order to bridge the gap between artificial and synthetic intelligence, we must first understand our own intelligence. 'What is intelligence?' might appear as a simple question, but many great minds have agreed that there is no singular answer. Unlocking Consciousness attempts to examine this central question through exploring the convergence of computing, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience and biogenetics.

The book is the first of its kind to compare comprehensive definitions of both information and intelligence, an essential component to the advancement of computing into the realms of artificial intelligence. In examining explanations for intelligence, consciousness, memory and meaning from the perspective of a computer scientist, it offers routes that can be taken to augment natural and artificial intelligence, improving our own individual abilities, and even considering the potential for creating a prosthetic brain.

Unlocking Consciousness demonstrates that understanding intelligence is not just for the benefit of computer scientists, it is also of great value to those working in evolutionary, molecular and systems biology, cognitive neuroscience, genetics and biotechnology. In unlocking the secrets of intelligence and laying out the methods of which information is structured and processed, we can unlock a completely new theory of consciousness.

For additional published articles and appendices referenced in this title, readers can visit http://www.brainmindforum.org/ for further information.

--> Contents:

• Preface
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Philosophy
• Convergence:
  • Contribution of Computers: Predator or Partner?
  • State of the Art: Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Ideas, Past, Present and Future
• Information:
  • Sources of Information
  • Language
  • Representation of Information
  • Memory & Learning
  • Meaning
• Intelligence:
  • Summary of the Evolution of Intelligence
  • General and Responsive Intelligence
  • Aquisitive and Creative Intelligence
  • Physical, Emotional, Holistic and Medical Intelligence
  • Measurement, Implications and Extrapolation of Intelligence
  • The Many Languages and Powerful Tools of the Body
  • Definitions of Intelligence
• Consciousness:
  • Understanding Consciousness
  • Thinking, Knowledge and Creativity
  • The Synaptic Conjecture
• The Future:
  • The Future
• Bibliography
• List of Appendices
• Index

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--> Readership: Computer scientists, software and electronic engineers, cognitive neuroscientists, researchers and the general public interested in the operation of the brain. -->
Keywords:Artificial Intelligence;Neuroscience;Convergence;Thinking ProcessReview:0

PART I

CONVERGENCE

CHAPTER ONE

CONTRIBUTION OF COMPUTERS: PREDATOR OR PARTNER?

Give me a fulcrum and I will move the World.

Archimedes

What are these machines we have invented? Why are they so special?

Let us first look briefly at where computers have come from. We can learn a lot from this history.

Most people think that computers slid unobtrusively into the world after the Second World War. Some claim that the first computer was the Colossus machine built to break German codes. In many ways it was, but it could only do the job it was designed to do. After the war, various machines were designed, but the first general purpose, stored program, binary digital computer — variously claimed by a number of universities in the UK and USA around 1948 — was the watershed moment in human history.

The First Known Mechanical Calculator — First Century BC

However, various types of computers, calculators, controllers and early information processors have been in existence since the days of the Greek ascendency. To everyone’s surprise, a very much corroded “machine” was retrieved from a wreck on the bottom of the Aegean Sea earlier in the twentieth century. It was undeniably made about the first century before the Christian era. Thanks to recent scanning techniques, it has been possible to study it without risking damage and as a result various reconstructed operating models are now working. The engineering is extraordinary with precision gear wheels not seen again till the Swiss started to make watches. The Antikythera can compute many astronomical events, in particular, the dates, even times of eclipses, and the dates for human events like the Olympic Games.

Sundials did not have moving parts, but they accurately displayed the time and proved that either the earth or the sun must move. Eratosthenes argued that the earth moved and is a sphere. He then went on to measure its diameter remarkably accurately, again, about the first century BC.

The Abacus

The abacus established the concept that the position of a number was as significant as its value. Addition (and multiplication) could be done by swapping rows of balls between parallel shafts. As soon as one row is full, it triggers moving a ball to the next row. Essentially, this is the same basic process of arithmetic used in the most modern mainframe computers today.

Mills

Windmills and watermills enabled a large wheel powered by wind or water to turn a shaft, and the invention of gears enabled that shaft to move other shafts faster or slower and even change direction — a horizontal water wheel turning a vertical mill wheel, for instance.

Clocks

The next big advance was clocks. Displaying the passage of time was useful and enabled people to say their prayers regularly. Various solutions preceded the pendulum as a form of regular release, as a heavy weight provided the power to move the gear wheels to move the hands on a dial. Sounding a bell on the hour soon followed. Arguably, the first example of a general purpose machine was when one mechanism was invented that could ring a different number on each hour.

Very little happened in the 1,000 years of the Roman Christian era as no one could, or can to this day, process roman numerals — even modern computers find them inscrutable!

Beginning of Automation

In the eighteenth century, a weaver in Lyon in France came up with a groundbreaking invention.

On Jacquard’s looms, his weavers followed a continuous series of monotonous movements as they threw bobbins of different coloured thread across the fixed threads which made the patterns in the cloth his customers wanted to buy. He realised that the positions of a series of holes in a long strip of cardboard could be used to select the next bobbin. Link up the cardboard into a ring, and the machine would reproduce the required pattern continuously — automation, punched-card technology, even the beginning of digital imagery, dots of assorted colours between the warp and weft. The basis of television images today.

Automatic Organ Music

Fairground organs provided a similar opportunity. Holes in a continuous concertina of cards allowed air to flow into the organ pipes in different patterns and sequences — playing the tunes of pieces of music. The length of the holes determined the length the note played. Take out one card pack, insert another and the organ played a different tune, without further human interference — a general-purpose system.

Steam Power

In the tin mines of Cornwall steam power was harnessed to push pistons, to turn wheels, to replace unreliable wind to power pumps, to lift water and to stop mines flooding. Steam power was working increasingly efficiently long before the science was understood. For a century, a substance called phlogiston was thought to be responsible for fire. Although this was soon disproved, it led to the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics. There is a persuasive argument to start to consider whether our growing knowledge of information could lead to the formulation of some Laws of Infodynamics.

The Babbage Difference Engine

In the nineteenth century, Babbage famously tried to pull the two technologies of machines capable of computation and machines capable of generating energy together to design and power his difference engine. (The reconstruction in the Science Museum is now driven by electricity — not known in Babbage’s time.) The difference engine used the information-processing concepts of the abacus and the engineering of clocks to compute numbers.

His greater breakthrough was to incorporate interchangeable gear wheels, so that his machine could compute different algorithms, different maths tunes! He never made his system work, but his colleague, Ada Countess of Lovelace, arguably the first programmer, appreciated the significance of this invention.

It is interesting that for a number of years in the 1950s and 1960s, many girls were programmers. Sadly, our education system has discouraged girls, even more than boys to take up programming.

Tabulators

Later in the nineteenth century, Hollerith and others designed mechanical systems reminiscent of the abacus but now driven by electric motors. Using individual cards in packs, usually with 80 columns of 12 rectangular holes, these machines used pins to recognise holes which then turned cog wheels or opened gates to let cards fall though. In combination, these machines could sort and add the values of packs of cards, punch the totals into “output” or “memory” cards and drive simple printing machines. By the end of the 1930s, interchangeable wiring panels were introduced which enabled a standard tabulator to be programmed to do different jobs. Ingenious wiring panel programs were carrying out very sophisticated applications.

In many ways, but in a higher league, this is where the artificial intelligence (AI) leaders have reached today. They are writing brilliant applications programs, but like their wiring panel forebears their programs and panels can only do one application. We can learn a lot from this about what we mean by “general intelligence” both in our computers and our brains.

Electronics

The big breakthrough was when semiconductors replaced gears. Ten teeth on a gear wheel could be represented by 10 thermionic valves (and later transistors). Gear wheels had to be inserted and replaced. Valves or transistors could be programmed to switch on or off automatically in evermore complex patterns and sequences — the dawn of software. A sequence of information looks the same as a sequence of instructions, so it is possible to store programs in the memories of computers. Hence, the crucial importance of the general purpose stored program computer.

One thermionic valve was about the size of an iPhone. There are more than a billion transistors in an iPhone!

Overture

Everything about the work at Bletchley Park, Colossus and the Bombs were covered by the Official Secrets Act for decades after the war ended. In the late 1940s, however, teams in Manchester, Cambridge, the National Physical Laboratory and America started work on a variety of systems. Funding in near bankrupt Britain was scarce and most was directed towards building atomic power stations. Everyone aimed at providing fast, flexible calculating capability. Cambridge planned their system to be a service to the whole university, and to help people use it, they devised a basic machine code set of about 10 instructions — the first proto programming language. In the early 1950s, the Lyons catering company, working with Manchester University and the Ferranti Company, started to design machines for commercial applications. International Computers and Tabulators started to attach more complex processors to their tabulators.

In the USA, International Business Machines Corporation did the same. The US government placed a series of orders with both IBM and Univac, an offshoot of Remington Rand, and Hewlett Packard who started to build a solid commercial base. The National Cash Register Company tied up with Elliott Automation in the UK for the latter to design and build and the former to sell the EA 400 series computers.

These early machines were the size of whole offices and housed in air-conditioned rooms. They had specialised operators, who wore overalls to minimise any problems with dust, to load information and programs into the systems and bring out the results.

The arrival of semiconductors or transistors — solid-state electronics reduced the size of systems by about 80% and widened their applications. The basic design architecture of these systems has not changed much, with just two exceptions. The ability to control and process terminals, process a number in parallel and of great significance, random access memory (RAM) systems. In 1966, the first systems for the financial community with teleprinter terminals in banker’s and broker’s offices linked to a central computer providing minute-by-minute stock market prices and valuing and analysing portfolios were operating, first in London and then in New York.

In the 1960s, IBM marketed a range of systems — the 360 family — a small system then a “ladder” of larger machines that buyers could acquire as they expanded their knowledge and usage. They decided to provide a basic operating program that would be standard up this range. This turned out to be vastly more difficult than expected and cost IBM a great deal of money and resources.

The development of computer operating systems plays a major role in how we think about and widen our understanding of our background general intelligence.

By the middle of the 1970s, commercial computing was a substantial business in the UK with over 100,000 staff in the hardware and software sides of the technology. Universities were beginning to offer courses in the design and programming of software. This alarmed the teaching profession, and some Local Education Authorities tried to ban their use in schools.

Why Does This Help Us Understand How Our Brain and Mind Work?

We learn a lot by analogy. If an abacus does arithmetic that way, does this throw any light on how our mind does arithmetic? Nine tenths of invention is getting the community to accept something new. Democracy is much more than a voting system. Equally important is the toleration of new ideas.

The First Act of the Computer Revolution

Bright teenagers and undergraduates bought components and wired up small processors. Others attached commercial television screens. The technology of record players was converted to recording and playing data. Add a keyboard — wire up a standard electric typewriter. It all went on a bedroom desk. Adverts in technical magazines generated a profusion of orders. An aptly called BASIC programming language enabled anyone to communicate with their own micro-computer. The mainframe manufacturers initially ignored these trivial upstarts. Scare stories circulated about the damage to teenagers spending too much time playing games with their computers. The British Government instructed the research councils not to fund any proposals that included using these “toys” to keep them out of the universities. If schools wanted them, the parents would have to buy them with loyalty points from the local Tesco. The BBC marketed a system — the famous BBC Micro — and was overwhelmed with orders. This upset everyone. The BBC was not supposed to compete with business and did not proceed.

Nobody in “the establishment”, however one defines that group, could believe that the whole community would soon have them in their homes, let alone in their pockets. Is it psychologically interesting that the establishment could not comprehend that “ordinary” members of the public, especially their children could not only understand, but also push out the frontiers of something like computing.

In the event, it is the establishment that has signally failed to grasp the opportunities that this new science, technology, business and commercial opportunity have offered. It is embarrassing to the nation of Newton, Darwin, Brunel, Turing and Berners-Lee that not one single major national computer system has been installed to specification, on time and within budget. After long continuous lobbying, some aspects of computer programming were included in the National school’s curriculum in 2015. It is more surprising still, that no one across government seems to be much concerned about this record. The behaviour of some groups, industries, whole professions even, seem as though they are in denial.

The great breakthrough in human development was language — an efficient means of communication. The great breakthrough in computing was the combination of a keyboard, screen and processor. We could communicate with our machines.

Computers Come of Age

Computers now dominate the scene, and it is useful to study some of the component industries and sciences, and the advantages and disadvantages of the internet and the World Wide Web. Plato was not too keen on the early democracy, where a good orator could sway the Agora to make terrible decisions. No doubt there are many “remainers” in the UK, and voters in the USA, that might be tempted to think that “social media” has similar drawbacks and agree with him.

It is ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• About the Author
• Contents
• Introduction
• Philosophy
• Part I Convergence
• Part II Information
• Part III Intelligence
• Part IV Consciousness
• Part V The Future
• Bibliography
• List of Appendices
• Index