Artificial Intelligence  

Dr Micheal Harre has been thinking alot about how our workplaces will involve incorporating artificial intelligence. His use of the technology in exploring the emergence of economic bubbles is already heavily reliant on AI to provide detailed analysis. 

Dr. Michael Harré an artificial  intelligence enthusiast and lecturer in Complex Systems at the University of Sydney, believes living and working with AI will force the world to reassess basic assumptions about our sense of self.

"What will it be like to regularly confront an AI, or a robot with an AI in it, that behaves like a human?"

"What will it be like to regularly confront an AI, or a robot with an AI in it, that behaves like a human?" Harré asks. "The fact that we will be interacting with the appearance of consciousness in things that are clearly not biological will be enough for us to at least unconsciously revise what we think consciousness is."

Today, AI systems and people have very different decision-making processes. Humans rely strongly on intuition, while AIs calculate all possible options and deduce the most likely answer. All this data-crunching comes at a cost: the vast computational power that's needed limits the number of tasks AI can do.

According to Harré, AI is a very different discipline from robotics. Artificial intelligence is a field of computer science that mimics the natural learning process of the human brain by creating what are called artificial neural networks. A popular technique used today is reinforcement learning. In such systems, each correct answer reinforces the AI's neural pathways, so it actually learns from experience. The software isn't specifically coded – rather the program evolves its own algorithms and uses feedback to refine the results.

This form of machine learning is very good at dealing with big data, and makes them invaluable for services such as fraud detection and security surveillance. Working with these huge inputs of information makes AI a power-hungry beast that devours huge computational resources.

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AI has been moving into various industries since the 1990s – from finance to communications, heavy industry and even toys – constantly evolving and becoming more sophisticated. Over the last two years alone, there has been dramatic evolution of artificial intelligence. Energy-efficient computers and microchips based on the neural structure of the brain are driving the surge in AI advancement. Digital assistants such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, movie recommendation services and online customer support are all examples of artificial intelligence in services that we increasingly take for granted.

Harré is part of a new wave of researchers exploring the relationship between human thinking, artificial intelligence and economics. He believes that understanding human cognition will drive AI advancement – and vice versa. "The stronger the connection we can draw between economics, psychology and neuroscience – three very different fields studying humans at very different scales – the better our understanding will be in all three areas."

"We are not well equipped, cognitively speaking, to deal with the complexity of the systems that have come to dominate our world: financial and economic systems, climatic systems and even our social interactions and how information is spread," states Harré. "Everything depends on everything else, often leading to the impression that chaos and disorder dominate, and that trying to understand such systems is a lost cause. But if we scratch the surface, there are often some basic underlying principles. Understanding these is the biggest challenge we face today, and this is what my work aims to do."

"I look at the mathematics reflected in complex systems. This can give us a better understanding of how relatively small variations in human behaviour can lead to quite significant and sometimes sudden system-level consequences - such as the behaviours of individual buyers and sellers leading to a financial market crash."

To that end, Harré and his colleagues are developing simple AIs called agent-based models that simulate the Australian housing market and identify if it is at risk of collapse. Millions of households are modelled by these AIs, which interact with each other to buy and sell houses. The project will allow them to look at different suburbs, cities and regions across Australia to identify the factors that might lead to a system-wide collapse.

"We want to know what drives bubbles, whether those drivers are in the current Australian market, and how we deflate the problem of a potential crash by helping inform policy," Harré says.
For Harré, it's not just the computational power of AI that is useful, it's the potential of a future in which we will work with and interact daily with AI personalities – and he is excited about the diversity of viewpoints this implies. AI, by its nature, will have opinions.

"I think we're going to end up with a very dynamic workforce," he says. "The key thing for the future is going to be people who are more willing to be agile within the jobs they take."

SOURCE  PhysOrg

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Consciousness  

A research team may have figured out its physical origins of consciousness in the brain, after pinpointing a network of three specific regions in a ground-breaking study.

A team of researchers has pinpointed the regions of the brain that may play a role maintaining consciousness. Their findings, which have already garnered multiple awards from the American Academy of Neurology, were published in the journal, Neurology.

"For the first time, we have found a connection between the brainstem region involved in arousal and regions involved in awareness, two prerequisites for consciousness."

“For the first time, we have found a connection between the brainstem region involved in arousal and regions involved in awareness, two prerequisites for consciousness,” said Michael D. Fox, MD, PhD, Director of the Laboratory for Brain Network Imaging and Modulation and the Associate Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “A lot of pieces of evidence all came together to point to this network playing a role in human consciousness.”

Classical neurology holds that arousal and awareness are two critical components of consciousness. Arousal is likely regulated by the brainstem – the portion of the brain, contiguous with the spinal cord, that is responsible for the sleep/wake cycle and cardiac and respiratory rates. Awareness, another critical component of consciousness, has long been thought to reside somewhere in the cortex, the outer layer of the brain responsible for many of its higher functions.

The researchers analyzed 36 patients with brainstem lesions, of which 12 led to coma and 24 did not. Mapping the injuries revealed that a small “coma-specific” area of the brainstem – the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum – was significantly associated with coma. Ten out of the 12 coma-inducing brainstem lesions involved this area, while just one of the 24 control lesions did.

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Prepared with that information, Fox and colleagues used a wiring diagram of the healthy human brain – based on a large, shared data set called the Human Connectome Project– to identify which other parts of the brain were connected to these coma-causing lesions. Their analysis revealed two areas in the cortex of the brain that were significantly connected to the coma-specific region of the brainstem. One sat in the left, ventral, anterior insula (AI), the other in the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC). Both regions have been implicated previously in arousal and awareness.

“We now have a great map of how the brain is wired up in the Human Connectome,” said Fox, who is also an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. “We can look at not just the location of lesions, but also their connectivity. Over the past year, researchers in my lab have used this approach to understand visual and auditory hallucinations, impaired speech, and movement disorders. A collaborative team of neuroscientists and physicians had the insight and unique expertise needed to apply this approach to consciousness.”

Finally, the team investigated whether this brainstem-cortex network was functioning in another subset of patients with disorders of consciousness, including coma. Using a special type of MRI scan, the scientists found that their newly identified “consciousness network” was disrupted in patients with impaired consciousness. The findings – bolstered by data from rodent studies – suggest the network between the brainstem and these two cortical regions plays a role maintaining human consciousness.

“The added value of thinking about coma as a network disorder is it presents possible targets for therapy, such as using brain stimulation to augment recovery,” Boes said.

A next step, Fox notes, may be to investigate other data sets in which patients lost consciousness to find out if the same, different or overlapping neural networks are involved.

“This is most relevant if we can use these networks as a target for brain stimulation for people with disorders of consciousness,” said Fox. “If we zero in on the regions and network involved, can we someday wake someone up who is in a persistent vegetative state? That’s the ultimate question.”

SOURCE  Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

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 Ray Kurzweil  

In a discussion last year at Singularity University, Ray Kurzweil shared his views on the schools of thought regarding consciousness and artificial intelligence.

S peaking last Fall at Singularity University "fireside chat", Ray Kurzweil reviewed some of the ideas from his book, How to Create a Mind and  elaborates on schools of thought regarding consciousness and artificial intelligence.

According to Kurzweil, there is no scientific way to determine if something is conscious.

"I believe that people will accept these entities are conscious, and we'd better believe it, because they will be smarter than we are."

Kurzweil discusses how there is no definition of consciousness that is widely accepted.  Some, like the philosopher John Searle suggest that a common sense definition is all that is required. "Consciousness consists of all those states of feeling or sentience or awareness. It begins in the morning when you wake up from a dreamless sleep, and it goes on all day until you fall asleep or die or otherwise become unconscious. Dreams are a form of consciousness on this definition."

Roger Penrose, on the other hand, attributes consciousness to a quantum process in the brain, specifically in microtubules in the neurons. "In my view, largely based on the fact that consciousness is mysterious, and quantum computing is mysterious, so they must be related in some way," says Kurzweil.

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With the debate over a scientific definition in mind, Kurzweil admits you have to have a leap of faith when dealing with consciousness. Some would say this makes consciousness an illusion, so it cannot be studied.  Kurzweil disagrees.

When it comes to machine intelligence, Kurzweil says:

If you can really realistically emulate the salient functional information processes that are going on the in brain, you'll achieve the equivalent of that brain, and if that brain is conscious, there is no reason why the recreation can't also be conscious.

There are a lot of details to this, he admits, but essentially if the pattern of processes are recreated, and the initial pattern represented consciousness, the recreation is conscious.

"I believe that people will accept these entities are conscious, and we'd better believe it, because they will be smarter than we are, and they'll get angry if we tell them they're not really conscious," Kurzweil sardonically says.


SOURCE  Singularity University

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 Science Fiction  

When his cybernetic pet project is put in jeopardy, the handyman of a decaying apartment building is forced to take a stand, blurring the lines between human and machine.

The short film sci-fi film Flesh Computer from writer/director Ethan Shaftel, explores the nature of consciousness by jumping between the perspectives of an eclectic group of characters including a young girl, a vicious bully, and a tiny housefly.

Flesh Computer examines consciousness from the seemingly insignificant act of killing an the housefly. "The huge difference in scale between myself and a fly means this is not a particularly upsetting or meaningful occurrence for me, though it is very significant for the fly: the end of its existence and its awareness, however limited it may be, of the universe," says Shaftel.

"The huge difference in scale between myself and a fly means this is not a particularly upsetting or meaningful occurrence for me, though it is very significant for the fly: the end of its existence and its awareness, however limited it may be, of the universe."

Shaftel is a director, editor, and game designer based in Los Angeles. In addition to his feature film debut Suspension released by Warner Brothers, Ethan has directed award-winning short films, a line of games for Hasbro, and screen content for musicians ranging from Tiesto, to Jane's Addiction and Foster the People.

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Noted philosopher David Chalmers appears in the film and raises some fundamental questions on consciousness in counterpoint to the action.  The actions of the film reflect the possibility of panpsychism, the theory that every particle in the universe may have a degree of consciousness.

The full interview with Chalmers used in the film is below.

Flesh Computer also stars Rob Kerkovich (NCIS: New Orleans), Anthony Guerino, and introducing Elle Gabriel.

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 Neuroscience  

New research could lead to the development of new tools to help untangle what happens in the brain during sleep and dreaming. This work is leading to knowledge of  how the brain uses networks to encode short-term memory.

As real as that daydream may seem, its path through your brain runs opposite reality.

Aiming to discern discrete neural circuits, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have tracked electrical activity in the brains of people who alternately imagined scenes or watched videos.

“A really important problem in brain research is understanding how different parts of the brain are functionally connected. What areas are interacting? What is the direction of communication?” says Barry Van Veen, a UW-Madison professor of electrical and computer engineering.

“We know that the brain does not function as a set of independent areas, but as a network of specialized areas that collaborate."

Van Veen, along with Giulio Tononi, a UW-Madison psychiatry professor and neuroscientist, Daniela Dentico, a scientist at UW–Madison’s Waisman Center, and collaborators from the University of Liege in Belgium, published results recently in the journal NeuroImage. Their work could lead to the development of new tools to help Tononi untangle what happens in the brain during sleep and dreaming, while Van Veen hopes to apply the study’s new methods to understand how the brain uses networks to encode short-term memory.

During imagination, the researchers found an increase in the flow of information from the parietal lobe of the brain to the occipital lobe — from a higher-order region that combines inputs from several of the senses out to a lower-order region.

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In contrast, visual information taken in by the eyes tends to flow from the occipital lobe — which makes up much of the brain’s visual cortex — “up” to the parietal lobe.

“There seems to be a lot in our brains and animal brains that is directional, that neural signals move in a particular direction, then stop, and start somewhere else,” says Van Veen. “I think this is really a new theme that had not been explored.”

"There seems to be a lot in our brains and animal brains that is directional, that neural signals move in a particular direction, then stop, and start somewhere else. I think this is really a new theme that had not been explored."

The researchers approached the study as an opportunity to test the power of electroencephalography (EEG) — which uses sensors on the scalp to measure underlying electrical activity — to discriminate between different parts of the brain’s network. Brains are rarely quiet, though, and EEG tends to record plenty of activity not necessarily related to a particular process researchers want to study.

To zero in on a set of target circuits, the researchers asked their subjects to watch short video clips before trying to replay the action from memory in their heads. Others were asked to imagine traveling on a magic bicycle — focusing on the details of shapes, colors and textures — before watching a short video of silent nature scenes.

Using an algorithm Van Veen developed to parse the detailed EEG data, the researchers were able to compile strong evidence of the directional flow of information.

“We were very interested in seeing if our signal-processing methods were sensitive enough to discriminate between these conditions,” says Van Veen, whose work is supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. “These types of demonstrations are important for gaining confidence in new tools.”


SOURCE  University of Wisconsin–Madison

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 Consciousness  

Scientists have found evidence that awareness can continue for at least several minutes after clinical death which was previously thought impossible.

Recollections in relation to death, so-called out-of-body experiences (OBEs) or near-death experiences (NDEs), are an often spoken about phenomenon which have frequently been considered hallucinatory or illusory in nature; however, objective studies on these experiences are limited.

In 2008, a large-scale study involving 2060 patients from 15 hospitals in the United Kingdom, United States and Austria was launched. The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study, sponsored by the University of Southampton in the UK, examined the broad range of mental experiences in relation to death.

Understandably, the study is being greeted with a lot of skepticism, but as Dr Jerry Nolan, Editor-in-Chief of Resuscitation, stated: “The AWARE study researchers are to be congratulated on the completion of a fascinating study that will open the door to more extensive research into what happens when we die.”

Researchers also tested the validity of conscious experiences using objective markers for the first time in a large study to determine whether claims of awareness compatible with out-of-body experiences correspond with real or hallucinatory events. Some have attributed these sensations to the body's release of DMT (dimethyltryptamine) at the time of impending death. Dr. Rick Strassman conducted research on the psychedelic drug at the University of New Mexico. Strassman advanced the hypothesis that a massive release of DMT from the pineal gland prior to death or near-death was the cause of the near-death experience phenomenon.

Results of the study have been published in the journal Resuscitation and are now available online. The study concludes:

• The themes relating to the experience of death appear far broader than what has been understood so far, or what has been described as so called near-death experiences.  

• In some cases of cardiac arrest, memories of visual awareness compatible with so called out-of-body experiences may correspond with actual events.  

• A higher proportion of people may have vivid death experiences, but do not recall them due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory circuits. 

• Widely used yet scientifically imprecise terms such as near-death and out-of-body experiences may not be sufficient to describe the actual experience of death. Future studies should focus on cardiac arrest, which is biologically synonymous with death, rather than ill-defined medical states sometimes referred to as ‘near-death’. 

• The recalled experience surrounding death merits a genuine investigation without prejudice. 

"Contrary to perception, death is not a specific moment but a potentially reversible process that occurs after any severe illness or accident causes the heart, lungs and brain to cease functioning."

Dr Sam Parnia, Assistant Professor of Critical Care Medicine and Director of Resuscitation Research at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA, and the study’s lead author, explained: “Contrary to perception, death is not a specific moment but a potentially reversible process that occurs after any severe illness or accident causes the heart, lungs and brain to cease functioning. If attempts are made to reverse this process, it is referred to as ‘cardiac arrest’; however, if these attempts do not succeed it is called ‘death’. In this study we wanted to go beyond the emotionally charged yet poorly defined term of NDEs to explore objectively what happens when we die.”

Thirty-nine per cent of patients who survived cardiac arrest and were able to undergo structured interviews described a perception of awareness, but interestingly did not have any explicit recall of events.

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“This suggests more people may have mental activity initially but then lose their memories after recovery, either due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory recall,” explained Dr Parnia, author of the book Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death.

Among those who reported a perception of awareness and completed further interviews, 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections in relation to death that were not compatible with the commonly used term of NDE’s. These included fearful and persecutory experiences. Only 9 per cent had experiences compatible with NDEs and 2 per cent exhibited full awareness compatible with OBE’s with explicit recall of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ events.

Many of the cases sound very similar to the effects of concussion, which may indicate that the brain does not completely 'shut down' as one unit during severe trauma, or when the heart ceases to feed it blood.

One case was validated and timed using auditory stimuli during cardiac arrest. Dr Parnia concluded: “This is significant, since it has often been assumed that experiences in relation to death are likely hallucinations or illusions, occurring either before the heart stops or after the heart has been successfully restarted, but not an experience corresponding with ‘real’ events when the heart isn’t beating. In this case, consciousness and awareness appeared to occur during a three-minute period when there was no heartbeat. This is paradoxical, since the brain typically ceases functioning within 20-30 seconds of the heart stopping and doesn’t resume again until the heart has been restarted. Furthermore, the detailed recollections of visual awareness in this case were consistent with verified events.

“Thus, while it was not possible to absolutely prove the reality or meaning of patients’ experiences and claims of awareness, (due to the very low incidence (2 per cent) of explicit recall of visual awareness or so called OBE’s), it was impossible to disclaim them either and more work is needed in this area. Clearly, the recalled experience surrounding death now merits further genuine investigation without prejudice.”

Further studies are also needed to explore whether awareness (explicit or implicit) may lead to long term adverse psychological outcomes including post-traumatic stress disorder.

Parnia's work may also help to answer the question of what is consciousness.


SOURCE  University of Southampton

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 Consciousness  

Sam Harris describes the properties of consciousness and how mindfulness practices of all stripes can be used to transcend one's ego.

Sam Harris, author of Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion recently sat down to discuss the subject of consciousness with Big Think.

Harris defines consciousness as "an experiential internal qualitative dimension to any physical system." Put more simply, consciousness is what it's like and how it feels to be you. Thus, consciousness exists in a realm of irreducible subjectivity with which science isn't always comfortable.

"I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion."

The problem of discussing consciousness scientifically is that consciousness is irreducibly subjective. Philosophers from Thomas Nagel, John Searle, David Chalmers have made this point.

Harris says, "If there’s an experiential internal qualitative dimension to any physical system then that is consciousness. And we can’t reduce the experiential side to talk of information processing and neurotransmitters and states of the brain in our case because – and people want to do this."

When you’re trying to study human consciousness, for instance, by looking at states of the brain, all you can do is correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become that never gives you license to throw out the first person experiential side.

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As the neuroscientist Harris says, "We have very strong third person “objective measures” of things like anxiety and fear at this moment. You bring someone into the lab, they say they’re feeling fear. You can scan their brains with FMRI and see that their amygdala response is heightened. You can measure the sweat on their palms and see that there’s an increased galvanic skin response. You can check their blood cortisol and see that its spiking."

This is one of many reasons why Harris believes you can't have a reasonable scientific discussion of consciousness if you're going to ignore qualitative internal experiential language. There's so much more to consciousness than the physical and the tangible. The technology and theory does not yet exist for us to scientifically and numerically define what consciousness is.

"The hope that we are going to talk about consciousness short of any kind of qualitative internal experiential language, I think, is a false one," says Harris. "We have to understand both sides of it subjective – classically subjective and objective."

I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. 

Harris explains that what we perceive as self, an unchanging constant experiencer, is really an ever-changing system constructed within the brain. Everything you experience from your thoughts, to your moods, to your impulses, and behavior, manifest themselves within the brain. They are the results emergent properties of billions of synapses interacting and other neurological functions.

The sense that most of us have is of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. "Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads," states Harris. "Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion."

As in his book, Harris argues that there are important truths to be found in the experiences of such contemplation, and that there is more to understanding reality than science and secular culture generally allow, and that at the core, there may be a scientific underpinning to some spirituality.


SOURCE  Big Think

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 Robotics  

In director Gabe Ibáñez's new movie, Automata, the dangers of when mind and machine meld, are examined. Check out he just-released trailer.

As technology continues an exponential rise, it seems as though filmmakers are starting to get their hard science fiction right. Her recently looked intelligently at how personal data assistants might become conscious and self-improving, and now a trailer for Spanish director Gabe Ibañez's Automata looks like it may do the same for robots, with a bit or action thrown in of course.

Antonio Banderas stars in Automata, as Jacq Vaucan, an insurance agent of ROC robotics corporation, who routinely investigates the case of manipulating a robot. What he discovers will have profound consequences for the future of humanity.

The trailer brought out the following comment from Martin Takaichi, "Part Blade Runner, part District 9, part Robot and Frank. Count me in!"

"Part Blade Runner, part District 9, part Robot and Frank. Count me in!"

The film is set thirty years into the future, when when the planet’s ecology is on the point of collapse, and, it would seem, the robots have caught up with their masters.  It appears that Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics play some role in the story.  One twist is that he robots in the world of Automata are forbidden to alter themselves. "Self repairing implies some idea of a conscience," says one of the film's characters.

According to Ibañez, the film is about “this moment where artificial intelligence arrives at the same place as human intelligence.”

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The trailer is populated with an array of different robots makes and models –  from a low-tech, Tonka-like version to sleek, gender-specific designs complete with candy-colored hair, suggesting a robot civilization with its own hierarchy and class consciousness.

Automata also stars Dylan McDermott,  Robert Forster, Melanie Griffith (appearing alongside her now-former husband, Banderas), and Academy Award winner Javier Bardem as the voice of Blue Robot.

The film opens  on October 10.





SOURCE  Cinescondite Rises

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 Consciousness  

In his work, David Chalmers explores the “hard problem of consciousness" — the quest to explain our subjective experience.

Our consciousness is a fundamental aspect of our existence, says philosopher David Chalmers: "There's nothing we know about more directly.... but at the same time it's the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe." In a recent TED Talk, he shares some ways to think about the movie playing in our heads.

"Why is it that all that physical processing in our brain be accompanied by consciousness at all?" asks Chalmers.

"Why is it that all that physical processing in our brain be accompanied by consciousness at all?"

For Chalmers, the questions answered so far — mainly, about what parts of the brain do which bits of processing — are the “easy” (in comparison) problems. The hard problem is why is it that all that processing should be accompanied by this movie at all.

Many say that in a few years it will turn out that consciousness is just another emergent phenomenon, “like traffic jams or hurricanes or life, and we’ll figure it out.” But Chalmers believes there are limitations to this picture. Classic cases of emergence are all about behavior, about objective functioning. “You can apply that to the brain — how we walk, how we talk, how we play chess. But why is it that all this behavior is accompanied by subjective experience?”

According to Chalmers, consciousness is fundamental. “Physicists sometimes take parts of the universe as fundamental building blocks — space or time, or mass.” These are taken as primitive and the rest is built up from there. Sometimes the list of fundamentals expands, such as when James Clerk Maxwell realized that electromagnetism couldn’t be explained from other known laws of physics, and so he postulated electric charge as a new fundamental idea. Chalmers thinks that’s where we are with consciousness.

“This doesn’t mean you suddenly can’t do science with it. This opens up the way to do science with it,” he says,  Chalmers thinks we need to connect this fundamental with the other fundamentals.

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Chalmer’s also states every system might be conscious at some level. Consciousness might be universal, an idea called panpsychism. The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking, or wracked with angst. Rather, it’s that “Photons have some element of raw subjective feeling, a precursor to consciousness. This might seem crazy to us,” he says, “but not to people from other cultures.”

“I used to think I shouldn’t eat anything that’s conscious. If you’re a panpsychist, you’ll be pretty hungry,” he jokes.  It’s also natural to ask about other systems, like computers. If consciousness is integrated information, and computers do integrate information, that raises ethical issues about developing intelligent computer systems, and turning them off.

Chalmers is a philosopher at the Australian National University and New York University. He works in philosophy of mind and in related areas of philosophy and cognitive science. While he's especially known for his theories on consciousness, he's also interested (and has extensively published) in all sorts of other issues in the foundations of cognitive science, the philosophy of language, metaphysics and epistemology.

Chalmers placed the "hard problem" of consciousness firmly on the philosophical map. He famously challenges materialist conceptions of mind, arguing for an "explanatory gap" between our brains’ physical properties and our minds’ qualia. Elsewhere he has championed the notion of the "extended mind," which argues that the mind is not confined to skin or skull, but plausibly may extend beyond them.

By the way, nice haircut David!


SOURCE  TED

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 Consciousness  

Physicist Max Tegmark sees people as "food, rearranged." That makes his answer to complicated questions like "What is consciousness?" simple: It's just math. Why? Because it's the patterns, not the particles, that matter.

As a physicist, Max Tegmark sees people as "food, rearranged." That makes his answer to complicated questions like "What is consciousness?" simple: It's just math. Why? Because it's the patterns, not the particles, that matter.

"Why is one arrangement, like your brain conscious, while another arrangement, like a bunch of carrots, not?" asks Tegmark at a recent TEDx Talk at Cambridge event.

He reflects on the work of David Chalmers, and his so-called hard problem of consciousness.

"I think it is because consciousness is a phenomenon that has properties above and beyond the properties of it's particles."

Continuing his exploration of consciousness emerging from particles, Tegmark states: "I think it is because consciousness is a phenomenon that has properties above and beyond the properties of it's particles."  These are known as emergent phenomenon.  This is akin to the states of matter, like solids, liquids and gasses; the particles are the same, but the pattern changes between the states.

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"Could there be a number that quantifies consciousness?" asks Tegmark.  He cites the research of neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and his integrated information theory.

Tegmark also goes on to say that consciousness may be the result of properties that are beyond that of the substrate particles involved. Computation requires a certain minimal range of properties of the substrate medium.  "I think consciousness is the same way," he states.

"I think is the way computation feels when it is being processed." Tegmark encourages an exploration of these patterns as a way to better understand the phenomenon of consciousness.

Known as “Mad Max” for his unorthodox ideas and passion for adventure, his scientific interests range from precision cosmology to the ultimate nature of reality, all explored in his popular book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. Tegmark is an MIT physics professor with more than two hundred technical papers and has featured in dozens of science documentaries. His work with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.”

Tegmark also co-authored a recent warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence with Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell and Frank Wilczek, in which the writers claim that highly intelligent machines may be, "potentially our worst mistake ever."


SOURCE  TEDx Talks

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 Ray Kurzweil  

Recently at the Google I/O Conference, the company's Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil spoke and was interviewed.  He discussed some of his familiar concepts and then talked a bit more about his artificial intelligence work at Google.

For decades Ray Kurzweil has explored how artificial intelligence can enrich and expand human capabilities. In his latest book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, he takes this exploration to the next step: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works, then applying that knowledge to create intelligent machines.

In this talk, recorded recently at the Google I/O Conference, Kurweil reviews some of his familiar concepts on the Singularity, including the Law of Accelerating Returns.  In the interview following the speech, with Google engineer, Robert J. "RJ" Mical, he goes into more detail about his work in artificial intelligence at Google.

In the near term, Kurzweil's project at the company is developing artificial intelligence based on biologically inspired models of the neocortex to enhance functions such as search, answering questions, interacting with the user, and language translation.

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Kurzweil described how the brain is made up of a series of increasingly more abstract parts. The most abstract — which allows us to judge if something is good or bad, intelligent or unintelligent — is an area that has been difficult to replicate with a computer.

"My leap of faith is that an entity seems conscious, and seems to be having the subjective experiences it claims to be having, I'll believe its conscious."

According to Kurzweil, humans will need to build computers that can build abstract consciousness from a more concrete level. Humans will program them to recognize patterns, and then from those patterns they will need to be smart enough to learn to understand more.

People have a tendency to dismiss using artificial intelligence for specific applications like speech recognition, Kurzweil said, but he believes each new application is a part of the greater effort to develop AI.

“I like the idea of crossing the river one stone to the next,” Kurzweil said. “We do get from here to there one step at a time.”

The goal is to understand natural language to communicate with the user as well as to understand the meaning of web documents and books. In the long term, Kurzweil believes it is only by extending our minds with our intelligent technology that we can overcome humanity's grand challenges.

Comically at the end of the interview, with less than two minutes remaining, Mical asks the question, "What is consciousness? What is free will? What is soul?" To which Kurzweil responds, "I always thought you had a sense of humor. One minute should be plenty for that."

Kurzweil did make an attempt at the question however:

Whether or not an entity has consciousness is not a scientific question because there is no falsifiable experiment that could be run to test if an entity is conscious.  We assume that each other is conscious in the human experience...an AI could claim it is conscious, Eugene Goostman claimed he was conscious, but it wasn't very convincing...our whole moral system is based on consciousness, so you need a leap of faith.  My leap of faith is that an entity seems conscious, and seems to be having the subjective experiences it claims to be having, I'll believe its conscious.   I'll also make an objective prediction that most people will accept the consciousness of these entities.  

SOURCE  Google Developers

By 33rd Square

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 Neuroscience  

In a recent special seminar at the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University, Dr Henry Markram, head of the HBP discussed the project and the principles they are using to uncover the secrets of the brain.

The European Human Brain Project (HBP) is a billion dollar mega-project with dedicated respectively to Neuroinformatics, Brain Simulation, High Performance Computing, Medical Informatics, Neuromorphic Computing and Neurorobotics components.  In fact, the project recently expanded with new participants.

"If you can't measure it, you are going to have to predict it."

In a recent special seminar at the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University, Dr Henry Markram, head of the HBP discussed the project and the principles they are using to uncover the secrets of the brain.

For Markram, understanding the human brain can be broken down into the following problems:

1. Translating the knowledge of the brain into a benefit for society.  Markram discusses how despite our growing knowledge of the brain, the development of medicines for the brain is slowing, and pharmaceutical companies are abandoning the development of neuroscience due to the costs.

2. It is impossible to experimentally map the brain.  Markram postulates that the 55 different types of neurons in the brain leading to trillions of connections.  According to his calculations, it would take over 2000 man-years to map a piece of the brain the size of a pinhead at a cost of two billion dollars.   For Markram, "You are never going to get enough data to model the brain."  His solution to this is called predictive neuroscience.  "If you can't measure it, you are going to have to predict it," he says.

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Neuroscience has to apply the methods of physics to simulate the brain according to Markram.  In the case of the connectome, the Human Brain Project is taking the predictive route, in contrast to the American BRAIN Initiative's measurement plan.

One of the key findings of Markram's team that is helping develop their algorithms for brain simulation is that neurons do not connect to other neurons specifically, but to other regions of the brain.  For the areas they do not yet understand, they are creating 'black boxes' for areas of further study.

3. We don't know how to translate our knowledge from animals into humans.  In the Human Brain Project they are working to build up a data ladder of how gene expression operates between mice and humans.  They will use this to infer and predict what is going on in the human brain.  This is necessary, as the neuroscience work is primarily done on animals, and human cells cannot be explored directly (yet).

4. Obtain an integrative, multi-scale view of the brain under any condition.  This is where the essential brain simulation of the HBP takes prominence.  In order to run a simulation of a human brain, there is a research initiative to develop the computer technology necessary to run such simulations.

In a full (or partial) brain simulation scientists will be able to test environmental factors, chemical interactions and other potential areas on a brain.

5. Symptom-based, subjective classification of brain disease.  Now, it is unknown how inter-related and interconnected brain diseases are.  Markram suggests that diseases like Alzheimer's and autism may be related.  Through a better understanding of the brain, and increased research collaboration such an understanding may be made.

6. Brain to technology.  If we can develop technologies based on an understanding of the brain, there is a great potential for business.  Markram admits that this was a key factor in obtaining funding for the HBP from the European Commision.  Neuromorphic chips development is one area the project is focused on.

7.  Take Society on a Voyage of the Brain.  The team will be constructing a building, a museum of sorts, based on the research progress at the HBP.  The building will be located in Lausanne, Switzerland, but will be partnered with institutions world-wide.

During the question section of the presentation (at ~52:00 mark), the question of consciousness is re-engaged.  Markram, when answering if his project will uncover if consciousness is an emergent property or not, answers that he believes the HBP will learn the neural correlates of behavior and decision-making. Essentially Markram predicts that the project will find the neural states associated with particular behaviors.

"My personal view is that consciousness is a critical mass of causal interactions," says Markram. "What happens when there is a critical mass is another question."


SOURCE  Biological Sciences, NeuroScience

By 33rd Square

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