Beyond Artificial Intelligence

From Human Consciousness to Artificial Consciousness

Alain Cardon

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786303592
• eBook ISBN: 9781119551027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Semantics
• Index: Computer Science

This book will present a complete modeling of the human psychic system that allows to generate the thoughts in a strictly organizational approach that mixes a rising and falling approach. The model will present the architecture of the psychic system that can generate sensations and thoughts, showing how one can feel thoughts.

The model developed into an organizational architecture based on massive multiagent systems. The architecture will be fully developed, showing how an artificial system can be endowed with consciousness and intentionally generate thoughts and, especially, feel them. These results are multidisciplinary, combining both psychology and computer science disciplines.

1
The Organizational Architecture of the Psychic System and the Feeling of Thinking

We are going to present an architecture of the human psychic system by adopting an organizational path that considers the psyche as a highly dynamic idea-generating system that operates continuously at different rates and structures its components on several scales to generate forms, stable for a very short time, that will be understood as the forms of thoughts. In such a framework, the question is how should such a system, made up of multiple active components on multiple scales, be designed so as to permanently produce perceptual and ideational representations of the things of the world using its abilities of naming and language abstractions? We should take into account that the system generates representations of multiple things at multiple levels and in multiple situations, allowing the human to understand reality so that they can act with a high degree of behavioral autonomy. The dynamically, spatially and temporally organized conception of representations will then be the major characteristic of the system, which is, in the end, a generator of complex constructions, usually intentionally, with highly dynamic memorizations. And we will show that the understanding of mental representations always takes place in a specific setting that brings together the psychic system’s instances given certain characteristics, which we will call the mental landscape of the psychic system.

We are going to propose two models. The first model will be based on the components that carry meaning, the dynamic union of which defines the characteristics of all thoughts generated by organizing itself by means of specific elements of control. The second model will bring together the components of meaning with those of control in a unique expression that will then be morphological. The second model will represent the generative use of continuous thought-generating constructs made up of multiple aggregates of neurons connected by multiple dendrites, which produce active, emergent conformations so that the system can feel them for itself, based on a highly specific system of self-control.

1.1. The problem of the study of thought

We approach the design and generation of thoughts by taking an interest in the precise architecture of the psychic system. We are speaking about the “psychic system” and we will therefore adopt a dynamic systems modeling approach. But is it common to consider that which effectively generates thoughts as a system? In this domain, the word “system” is often troubling, because it implies – to those who are unfamiliar with dynamic models and their morphological characteristics – a reduction to mechanical and automatous features, which is obviously not acceptable in the case of the psyche. Furthermore, the position of considering the functioning of the generation of thought as that of “some type of system” is unacceptable to those who have the ability to think with immanent features engendered by an infinite source.

We refer to idea representation as a form of experienced thought concerning any subject. The brain continuously generates such representations by producing a series of themes of varying duration, some almost instantaneous, others whose duration depends on an intentional focus on perceived or defined subjects.

When we consider the generation of thoughts as the output of a system, we must necessarily situate the model on a certain level that cannot be reduced to the cellular level, which is the level of the minimal physical substrate. We should assert that this system is limited with respect to its effective operational components and its potential for action and interaction, even if these limits are extremely large. We should take into consideration that this system emerges with a certain form, but develops and grows in size and organization in accordance with what is permitted by its architectural process. It continually modifies itself as it is used, and almost continuously, although at different speeds, produces idea representations with finite but multiple characteristics from its emergent states, which lead to behavioral effects ranging, for example, from movements to spoken and comprehended speech. It is an organizational system that modifies its morphology in its running, that sometimes deteriorates and that, in the end, dies with the physical host that shelters it, the human being.

This type of thought-generating system will never be a conventional state-based system, with an initial and a final state for each thought produced; this type of system would be reductive and even absurd in this case. Instead, it would be a system that is continually formed from an ensemble of active dynamic components with variable lines of potentiality and increasingly experienced emergent representations. A very organizational specific, high-level set of processes that imposes multiple constraints is required to arrange the components of the system and to transform it into an organization that will be conscious because it is experiencing the generated thoughts. A conscious event is therefore an organizational act, strictly effective for the set of components constituting the system, which puts them into a particular global state that is able to be experienced. And such an act, which does not occur by chance, must have a more or less precisely predetermined target; it has a duration, constraints, a scope and it has a global substrate at its disposal as the natural result of the operation of the system, which engenders continuous learning and development.

We assert that the generation of thoughts is the organizing process performed by brains when they are functioning, which we will refer to generally as building experienced perceptible representations concerning a great number of things in the world. This is what is usually referred to as “moments of experienced consciousness”. The notion of representation that we will use here is that of a complex and completely dynamic appraisal of a constructed form, which can be taken as its targeted object, which is, itself, a particular thing that is understood by the system. We will refer to C.S. Peirce’s triadic signs to clearly understand the meaning of the verb “to be taken as” that we are using here [PEI 84].

This kind of thought-generating system is obviously very difficult to conceive; it is completely different from a mechanism that correlates its output with its input and that operates by passing through a series of predefined states, such as in a stateful system. But it is still a system; in fact, it is a system of systems made up of multiple, strongly interconnected, dynamic processes operating at different levels that are interdependent in several ways and at several spatial and temporal scales. This system, on the fundamental physical level, activates multiple neurons via the activity of their dendrites and expresses the physical occurrence of the transmission of information flow and energy transfer. The system activates and expresses the surges of activity of processes, which we can understand in the computing sense of the term; surges in the process of neuronal actions that are complementary and especially those that occur in parallel. The very important concept of co-activity indicates that all actions from an emitter of information or energy modify both the receptors and the emitter itself because of this emission. This is an action that transforms the emitter and the receiver via the transfer of information or energy. The system constructs its own inputs by adapting information coming from the body’s senses and endlessly constructs conscious events concerning something that was more or less intentionally targeted.

These specific configurations of the system are always ephemeral and they are produced according to the constraints that are innate or acquired because of the system’s operation and the regulation of its corporeality. And these configurations will be – which is the chief attribute of the system – felt by itself, and will experience them while modifying them and memorizing them to use later to produce subsequent conscious events.

By adopting this position concerning the conception of the system, we are situated in the theory of thought generation according to a constructivist approach by proposing an architecture that will allow for its transposition into the artificial, by situating us in the universe of swarms of constantly reorganizing processes, manipulating symbols and measurable values, constructing the organization of very dynamic structures of active elements for themselves and joining forces with each other. This is the standard position for a modeler who seeks to understand how forms as complex as ideas can be represented in the domain of verifiable knowledge and how ideas exist in and of themselves – that is to say, before they are projected into the space of words expressed in language via the production of sentences identified by sounds and symbols using grammars.

So what is a thought? What form does it have, this thing that is so real and so commonplace, so physical and yet, it seems, so hard to grasp? What is this space where it is made, initiated, expressed and memorized by altering the structure of its deployment space in order to memorize and to create others? What is it, this thing that makes it possible for the living organisms who produce them and use them to partially understand the world that surrounds them, to predict events, and, also, sometimes, to question their own existence? How can we explain the scale of that which is thought by the brains of organisms that are so evolutionarily different, and that are also characteristic of its evolution?

1.2. The interpretation of neuronal aggregates

To be able to develop a model of thought generation in a system, it is necessary to precisely clarify the characteristics of the approach as guided by its architecture. Such an approach is based on observations made in neuroscience, which analyzes neuronal activity using photographs of their energy traces, but we must also clarify what must be the architecture of the system, which is principally based on the very organized processing and manipulation of multiple sources of information. There is, in reality, a countless amount of information transmitted at the synapse level, but the understanding of the production of ideas employing words, for example, will be situated at a different level than that of the synapses. We must orient ourselves within the definition of the different architectural levels of the system that generates and manipulates information flows, which must possess traits on the level of knowledge in order to construct dynamic forms that will become the conformations of generated and felt ideas.

The neuronal system operates on the level of production in parallel with multiple neuronal signals, which form, via their associations and aggregations, a very complex unit that can be interpreted as a structure of combined dynamic forms, a structure made up of activities and information exchanges carrying a certain level of cognitive awareness. Every organization of these dynamic forms becomes stable for a very brief moment to form a conceived thought that will be understood. The unit under consideration is therefore the production of combinations of forms of activities, and in fact of morphologies of informational and energetic forms, which combine, associate, converge and modify each other, producing a stabilized, dynamic structure for an instant, which makes it possible for the thought to thus be perceived. This is the physical generation of every produced thought, when we consider thought at its tangible level in the brain.

A thought is formed from numerous meaningful characteristics that are understood, with some characteristics being important and others secondary, contextual, associated or even opposed. The number of these characteristics is important, but it remains finite and understandable on the cognitive level. We assert that these characteristics are represented by the action of significant groups of neurons that we will call significant neuronal aggregates, which communicate interactively, and that these groups are interpretable as dynamic forms containing the information for generating the significant characteristics of thought. These neuronal aggregates become active with each other when asked to establish these relationships. They then activate each other at larger scales to form aggregates of aggregates, which will become the form of the expressed emergent thought. It is a question, in the model, of defining these aggregations, clarifying how and why, for what reasons, and in what qualitative contexts they can create themselves.

The consideration of what a thought is at the level of the physical substrate that permits its formation amounts to the assertion that it is an organization of complex combinations of deployed forms that communicate, which implies that all thought is defined by the following considerations.

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What is a thought?

A thought is:

• – an essentially dynamic, complex physical element made up of energy and information flows from neuronal aggregates that are deployed simultaneously at several scales;
• – a dynamic construct using the memorization of the characteristics of certain forms that have already been produced;
• – a dynamic construct that expresses itself, that is used by the system that produces it so that it can be experienced, and that only lasts for the ephemeral time period as this conformation in order to perpetuate itself via additional generations of forms that will become the subsequent thoughts, in a continuous process of awakening.

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Each thought is therefore a structure created in a series of produced thoughts, with strong reconstructions using forms that have been expressed and memorized. The difference in comparison to, say, a dictionary search structure is radical because there are no permanent components available, but there are reconstructions of forms that have for the most part been memorized potentially in more or less similar forms, using a memory of conformations and not a memory of components, and this occurs with the generation of each idea.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Organizational Architecture of the Psychic System and the Feeling of Thinking
• 2 The Computer Representation of an Artificial Consciousness
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement