Bees And Flowers: An Essay By Extropia DaSilva

April 18, 2009 - in Homepage, Mind Child's Musings by: Extropia DaSilva
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MACHINES WHO THINK CREATIVELY.

So, what is ‘real’? In order to answer that question sensibly, we must take into consideration the limits of our experience. We are not in direct contact with the world. What we perceive as reality is a simulation created by the mind that usefully predicts at least some part of the actual reality which (I assume) exists outside of the mind. Every person, place and event that you can remember exists only as complex patterns stored in and processed by your brain. I should clarify that. I do not mean nothing exists outside of your mind. I mean that how you perceive those things is unique to you, shaped as it is by the bundle of fragments, the intricate pattern of experiences, that comprise your life so far. Evolution has surely shaped our minds so that your perception of certain things matches that of other people, but nevertheless you live in a simulated world of your own.

In this simulated world, what really matters is not the actual/fantastical and virtual/physical dimension of a person, place or event. It is the resolution of the model that counts; how ‘fine-grained’ it is. Strange though it may seem, this would suggest that a ‘digital person’ you know very well, having developed a rich model from the patterns provided by the relevant human/technological source, is more of a person to you than the hordes of people you pass in the street every day, but from whome you never take the time to build an elaborate representation. I think it is a mistake to equate fiction with untruth. Stories are only convincing if they are built from bits and pieces that were observed in daily life. That does not mean to say we can only write about something that actually happened, but the stories that persist generation after generation are the ones that tell us something useful and practical about people and society. A Science Fiction tale, for example, is best thought of as an extended thought experiment, the purpose of which is to clarify our thinking about certain issues. It has sometimes been said that Sci-Fi is never really about the future, but an alternative way of looking at the society in which the author lived. In holding up a contrast to that society, we may better understand its true nature.

And what about the future? We have long used external devices as augmentations of our cognitive processes. By integrating elements from existing programs in neuroscience (such as brain modelling and neurophysiology), cognitive sciences (physiology, reasoning), computer sciences (AI, simulation and modelling), control theory (mechanisms and control) game theory (decision making and cost/benefit analysis), robotics (perception, world modelling and behaviour) and visualization (computer graphics, videogames), we could one day see the emergence of machines who think creatively. Increasingly, an avatar will become not just a tool for communication and roleplay, but an intelligent partner collaborating with humans and capable of acting autonomously in increasingly diverse situations. I believe it is no coincidence that a storytelling species became technologically capable. The art of storytelling lies in imagining something that may not actually exist, and to plausibly describe its affect on the world if, in fact, it did. That, too, is the art of inventing technologies.

A recurrant debate in transhumane circles concerns the 1st/third person perspective of uploads. Such debates are argued as if uploads were to suddenly appear, fully developed, in today’s unprepared world. I think it is much more likely to emerge as a result of tens of thousands of conservative steps taken by a variety of technologies. Among these will be ways and means of communicating with computers, better interactions with software agents and robots, and improvements in videogame and simulation software. Among other things, I expect we will use this emerging suite of technologies to advance our storytelling capabilities.

If you think about it, ‘I’ has never been purely a 1st person. We are all a blend of 1st and third person perspectives. As the poet Robbie Burns said, “what a gift of God to give us/to see ourselves as others see us”. Novelists, scriptwriters and roleplayers are just people who have developed everyone’s innate ability to model selves — their own as well as others — from bits and pieces that already exist. We keep records of our thoughts in external media; notepads, tape recorders and, increasingly, the myriad devices communicating with the Cloud and the forthcoming Digital Gaia. As these devices grow in sophistication, not just storing information but also processing it and collaborating with us in creating and editing it, there will be an economic advantage in ensuring machine intelligence communicates usefully with the biological intelligences that helped spawn it. Our thoughts will not just migrate to unthinking substrates, but to external cognitive devices that will become increasingly capable of introspecting on thoughts, concepts, ideas, etc, uploaded from the mind of a person to the Mind of Digital Gaia. More obviously than it is now, cognition will be extended or, as David Chalmers and Andy Clark put it, “if, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head we would have no hesitation in recognising as part of the cognitive process, than that part of the world IS part of the cognitive process”.

If mind uploading and full brain emulation ever actually happens, it will emerge in a society in which people are used to thought processes extending out from the mind to interface with computers, robots, and other bio-technological minds. A world in which ideas replicate as they copy into many semi or fully autonomous artificial life forms living in virtual worlds, several possible sequences of cause-and-effect tried out in simulation. A place in which the virtual blends with the actual or replaces it entirely, in accordance with a person’s moment-by-moment needs; seeing yourself from many angles at once as your perception jacks in to remote eyes and ears in physical space, or as Digital Gaia dreams up alternative personal histories for your mind to explore.

In such a reality, which will emerge (if at all) from many conservative steps leading down to current technologies, will uploading really mess with your identity as some have suggested? Or will our innate ability to create selves out of the bits and pieces of everyday experience keep up with technology as it, too, aquires minds capable of such things? In order to answer such questions, we cannot rely only on fact, reality and the actual as guides. We must also tap into our fictional, fantastical and virtual sources. The latter is not the poor relation of the former, but its equal. It is by creating and sharing stories that we clarify our thinking about a reality we never know directly.

Perhaps the final words are best left to Sherry Turkle. “As we begin to live with objects that challenge the boundry between the born and the created and between human and everything else, we will need to tell ourselves different stories”.

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http://gwynethllewelyn.net Gwyneth Llewelyn

Whew. Lots to think about I should say, right from the start, that your use of my own poor little self as some kind of “personality” to make a point is a bit skewed. As I keep repeating, about only 200 human beings read my blog every day (the rest are ‘bots gathering statistics). My blog rank on Technorati keeps falling. The number of regular readers has declined over the years, continuously so. And so on… but alas, it’s your essay

I have to admit that this is one of the most interesting essays you ever wrote, for lots and lots of reasons. One is clearing out the idea of human beings as “narrative beings”, a concept I only had from Terry Pratchett’s books, and which I did mostly disregard as “fiction”, even if on his partnership with Ian Stewart and Jack S. Cohenon on Science of Discworld II: The Globe, this thought is echoed over and over again. It’s interesting to see someone tie this concept — that we humans are, mostly, storytellers — with the notion (or “illusion”, as some oriental philosophies would say) of the self as an invented narrative, which, of course, fits quite well in the overall concept that reality is a perception of our senses — in a way, we tell to ourselves the story of the perception of reality (and of others). I definitely favour that argument, too In fact, it has strong and powerful consequences, and, ironically, it is a “theory of the universe” (and not only of the mind!) in the sense that “the universe is a collection of stories about what we perceive”. Science is a story, too.

Even more intriguing were the quotes from scientists explaining the notion of self as “fragments of stories” that we assemble to, well, become “ourselves” — but that those same fragments can quite easily be assembled to create imaginary characters in fiction. Or, well, on virtual worlds. Eons ago, I wrote something not unlike that: the notion that our self is a dynamic thing that is assembled from several personality traits and that it can get “reshuffled” pretty easily when you’re younger, less so after your teens — except, of course, if you’re under the influence about some kind of drug, narcotic, stimulant, or, well, through brain damage and/or surgery. In fact, although I didn’t realise that at the time, it’s exactly because of this ability of the “ever-changing self” that drugs are able to deal with mental disorders like bipolarity or the more common depression — we can artificially “shut down” some areas of the brain, and become “different” in that way.

Granted, if you start reading oriental philosophy or anything the classical Greeks have written 2500 years ago or more, this won’t be news. They always said that the notion of “self” was purely delusional — just a story that we tell and share with others.

Starting from this assumption, it naturally follows that if someone can tell your story well enough, they become you. This is, in fact, one of the most worrying aspects of electronic identity theft: creeps being able to impersonate your self as good as you, and, well, use that for illegitimate (or criminal!) purposes. This is a serious crime. One that is hard to prevent. So, if the authorities already worry about identities being stolen, and incorporate that in the body of law that protects our societies, it’s obvious that “identities can be copied” (or, well, roleplayed, since that word is quite well loaded). I missed some typical examples on your essay: e.g. things like Sherlock Holmes or even Charlie Chaplin’s Charlot that became stereotypes, but whose “stories” will be immediately recognised by anyone — and we can, of course, use many more examples. Are vampires real? No. So why can anybody (in the Western world at least) define what a vampire is with excruciating detail to the point that everybody in the audience will immediately know what they’re talking about?

So, I’m obviously not “surprised” by your essay — just surprised, in fact, about the many ties you found between (apparently) different research areas, all of them pretty much saying bits and pieces, but you managed to bring them all together under a consistent idea. Gosh, I just realise that this is exactly what you said that an essay actually is — bits and pieces, floating around, gathering into the same “story”. Nothing is new, just recycled — “newness” comes only from the insight of saying which pieces should be assembled together, and which should stay out of it. Uncanny. Very nice work, Extie

Lastly, I always find your ideas about “immortality through avatars” amusing. Oh yes, they’re not so “obvious” — the transhumanists and extropians are usually more worried about the “mind uploaded to computers” issue. You, on the other hand, minimise the importance of the technology by itself, and point to a far easier route for “immortality”: having other people roleplaying your self (and, after all, what better “machine” to upload your mind to — a human being, which are the best known examples of “mind-running” computers that we know about? And hooray, they already exist, work fine, and we have 6.3 billion of them around!).

The issue you always arise is the “why would someone like to roleplay me?”, and, of course, this is where we get religious — or perhaps mystical would be a less loaded word. You seem to imply that only “famous” people would likely be roleplayed by others — thus preserving their immortality. In real life, this is, to an extent, true. Sherlock Holmes, for instance, is probably the archetypal detective that has been mostly roleplayed ever, just because, well, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was famous and his stories became even more famous. A minor detective on an even minor book of an unknown author might never be picked up ever again. Similarly, Plato has roleplayed what Socrates might have said, because, well, Socrates, even if he hasn’t ever written a single word (that we know about), was “famous” — more famous than Plato at least. Examples abound.

On the other hand, of course, you make a good argument that “unknown” people (in the sense of “less famous”) might be “easier” to roleplay because there is little known about them, and fewer friends to “fool” (in the good sense). That argument is definitely true; the question, of course, arises:

If you have unlimited abilities to create your own self — either in real life or, well, in virtual worlds — why should you be compelled to roleplay someone’s self? That’s something I still don’t get I might imagine one scenario: claiming to be “Charlot” in 2009 might be far better for a performer to get an audience, than, well, claiming to be himself. Elvis impersonators are more “famous” than the real persons that impersonate them — just, well, because they impersonate “Elvis”. So there is some good argument to say that famous people (whatever “famous” might mean in this context…) will be good candidates for roleplaying. After all, mentally deranged people are keen to say they’re reincarnations of Cleopatra or Napoleon, but never of John Doe, anonymous goat keeper of a rural dwelling on the highlands

And finally, of course, I might add some things of my own If I’m personally not that keen about releasing so many information about my real self — and God knows I give enough hints — does that mean a) I have something to hide; b) I’m aiming for immortality, as you suggest, by forfeiting the link with my real self, so that someone else might pick up the mind-patterns of “Gwyneth Llewelyn” in the future; c) I’m just having fun roleplaying someone; d) none of the above.

Ha! I wish it were an easy answer And, of course, the answer is different depending on the year you ask me It might make a whole essay one day, but suffice it to say that by disconnecting my virtual self from my real self, I’m just making a simple statement: human beings are worth by what they say and do (you might say: “the story they tell”), not because of who they are, where they’re born, how old they are, what they’re studied, what cool friends they’ve got. If there is a simple lesson I’ve learned is that I, as a person (and that is true of every human being on Earth, even if most will disagree with me ), am worth very little. It’s just my ego that makes me think otherwise. Everybody else is way more important than me. However, we tend to “tag” people relatively to our social status, wealth, friendship, knowledge, studies, and, well, colour of skin, age, gender, religion, whatnot. I dislike “tags”. I’m just another one of the 6.3 billion human beings in existence — nothing else, and nothing more. My virtual projection into Second Life, the cute-ish red-headed avatar that walks around with a smile, a glint in her eyes, and a flower in her head (has nobody ever wondered why?), is just tabula rasa — take me for what stories I spin about myself, not for my, uh, “credentials” or “authority” that comes from immaterial and transitory things that I might have accumulated elsewhere in real life. These are completely irrelevant to what makes me a human being. And by voluntarily discarding all those “real life tags” I allow everybody in SL (and elsewhere) to tag me from scratch based on what they experience.

Granted, this might have been my reasoning, but it has a major flaw: as time passes by in SL, I accumulate new tags That runs, of course, against my original intentions (just an hour ago, I logged in to OS Grid, and the first guy I met there just asked: “Hey, are you the same Gwyn that blogs a lot?” *sigh* There goes my theory!). I’m sure that there is a lesson to be learned there, too. The good news, of course, is that as SL grows and grows, I become less and less relevant, and that is a Good Thing.

And of course, there would be an easy way out, e.g. getting different avatars, different names, all the time, so that I could avoid the tagging. Alas, that doesn’t work at all. Imagine a tourist visiting a nice, peaceful, fishermen’s village at the coast. She won’t make an impression if she stays just a few days around and talks to people. She will be quickly forgotten once she leaves. But if she remains in the village for years or decades, she will be accepted by the community, and, even if they remember that she might once have lived elsewhere, she’ll be “part of it” now, and will be treated according to the way she presents herself. In a sense, that’s my idea of Second Life, strongly influenced by Philip’s own idea of “SL as a country”. I’m an immigrant here in SL, but after so much time has passed, I feel that I’m accepted now, and can contribute back to the community as well. Starting afresh every day — juggling among alts — defeats that purpose.