Reddit mentions of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

So this got a bit long, sorry for that but I didn't want to work. When I get home, I'll try to add some sources for what I said about the human brain and maybe some stuff about neural networks Who's in Charge and Incognito are really great popular science introductions from well-known neuroscience researchers. There's also a BBC documentary which I found very fascinating. For neural networks, I'd recommend coursera.org or any odd intro book.

The rest is basically what I think about the whole issue extrapolating the above, and I have neither good data nor yet found good sources which deal with it. I simply have some objections concerning the ease of creating intelligence.

Feel free to criticise and update my views!

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That's still not enough. The problem lies within what I call robustness and the fact that by relying solely on correlation, you lack the 'theoretical' part of science, i.e. you cannot postulate general principles before observing them. Let me explain:

1. Robustness.
   
   I'll use an example. Let's say we have a machine which we want to use to increase the efficiency of air ventilation in one of our tube (BE for subway) stations. It is equipped with several sensors: temparature, visuals of the tube station, the amounts of gases at any one point, etc.
   
   Now let's say this machine is only based on correlation, as really all things are up to now. This means that they get data on which preprogrammed software finds patterns, and more meta-software decides - after a few cycles of attempting the task - which is the best strategy to reach a preset goal. This works sufficiently well in sufficiently many cases, and at one point a human decides a treshhold at which an increase in efficiency makes a strategy viable for actual use (maybe test it for bugs, etc.).
   
   So this machine runs well for several years, until one day a whole group of passengers suffocates because the air conditioning is not turned on as they leave the tube wagon. How did it happen? The machine, after all, did its job marvellously beforehand. The problem is that external conditions changed in a manner not predicted by the engineers, and that in fact we only engineered the machine's behaviour indirectly without really knowing how it operated.
   
   The problem was, interestingly enough, that the machine learned that the most efficient way of predicting when tubes arrived was to correlate the arrival of trains with the time on the big clock in the main entrance. It's fairly reasonable, if our tube system is usually on time (So maybe we are in Switzerland, not the UK). However, during the night before, the clock broke and stood still. Since the machine didn't understand what it was doing, it didn't go "Hey, the clock's standing still but I know the concept of "being broken", hence I'd best alarm someone/switch to a different strategy and I don't want humans to die in any case .. " etc. It has no concept of death, or killing, or humans. It might not even know how to correlate anything beyond time and arrival, because it has worked so well beforehand, discarded everything else and was unable to re-train itself quickly enough. Even worse, from the POV of the machine nothing was wrong in the first place.
   
   Sure, you can fix it. But then, are you really confindent you are able to eliminate all possibilites for such bugs in the future? Same goes for testing beforehand. All in all, it doesn't sound very 'autonomous'.
   
   The problem is that by only using correlation to understand even simple problems in a very complex environment, even minute changes in said environment can render your whole correlation strategy useless. In other words, the strategy is not robust under changes in our environment. This is something which is acceptable in a very specialised environment that can be controlled by beings which think more robustly (such as humans or strong AIs) and grant the required oversight, and it is also where AFAIK all of the examples in the video came from. But this means that the machines can never be truly general purpose and act autonomously.
   
   Getting more machines only gives more strategies which work, and if done correctly can indeed increase robustness of a system. Though it is not clear by any means that this is always or even often the case! Bigger systems might just attract themselves to more narrow strategies as one strategy becomes dominant in a sufficiently large minority of the systems' members. You need a lot more than just a system - you need a way of controlling the precious tension between homogeneity and heterogenity of strategies.
   
   Quick side remark: there's one hypothesis in neurology that this is exactly why our consciousness gives an evolutionary edge; it acts as an arbiter between competing strategies and solves dilemmas which would otherwise lead to infinte loops or other bad stuff. Do not be angry at boredom. It's your brain going "we are stuck in a loop, change strategies or re-evaluate goals".
   
   That's where the second point comes in.
   
   
2. Postulating, or creating a model of the universe in your mind.
   
   What do you think is the reasons that it takes a decade or two for a human being to be able to act intelligently on most occasions? It's because it takes that long for us to use the hard-wired architecture of the brain and the given data from our senses to create a reasonably well functioning model of our environment in our minds.
   
   Our brains not only correlate, we postulate.
   
   The best way to see this is our eyes. You see only a fraction of what you perceive to be seeing. The rest? Your brain postulates it from the given data. This makes us quick, but also faulty. Such heuristics drastically diminish our processing requirements to survive in a very complex and ever changing environment. And they're everywhere, our whole architecture runs on it.
   
   But that's only the first part.
   
   Even when we close our eyes, our mind has learned to create a model of the entire environment we live in. Guess why you can "go through" situations in your head. You, consciously or not, simulate engagements that might happen in your head to react better when they do occur. But that's still not the best part. The best part, to me at least, is that we can take this physical model and add abstract notions to it.
   
   If I gave a reasonable intelligent human being the task of our machine in the first example, he or she would have been far worse in regulating the air ventilation. But, unless they slept, were unconscious or actively wanted to kill people, they would understand that the reason for air ventilation is to allow other humans to breathe, ergo they would always activate the ventilation when a train arrives.
   
   But this requires them to understand the concept of an arriving train, of human beings, why you do not want to kill them (very complex reasoning here, I'm serious), that not giving them air will kill them, etc. This can all be, somehow, encoded in a machine as well, but it must all be done before the machine is trained. A human can do so because they're a very well trained machines that postulates on its own all the time.
   
   But this is impossible, by definition, for a "correlation only" machine which resides in an environment which changes in a way the engineers didn't postulate themselves. The reason your brain simulates? So that that margin is relatively small for you. And even if it does, our brain somehow reflects upon itself and knows when it's outside its own comfort zone. That's where consciousness sets in and we mysteriously manage to quickly adapt and develop new strategies on the fly.
   
   And what I just said is so fucking incredible I'm in awe just writing this. From my own experience, I've learned stuff which I just shouldn't be able to ever learn, from an evolutionary point of view. For example, there is no reason my brain should be able to understand infinity. This doesn't occur in nature, and it only occurs within the context of civlisation. But I can, and we all have no idea how. We are so damn adaptable that you can throw us into any environment on this planet and we thrive. We change our own environment, and we still thrive.
   
   So in short:
   
   People shitting over human brains don't realize that our greatest strength are robustness and heuristics, combined by postulating (i.e. model building) and, as ultima ratio, our conscioussness as an arbiter between conflicting strategies and a "self-programmer" when we're out of our comfort zone (which we somehow are able to detect, meaning that we have in fact a model of our own mental abilites, and maybe a model of that, and ... ).
   
   We can do so because we benefit from billions of years of evolution, thousands of years of history which gives us an environment that teaches us (this is so important and is entirely overlooked in AI research AFAIK) and - for an adult - roughly two decades of 'real time learning' within that environment which allowed our brain to create a model of the physical world for itself which is constantly updated and for which we constantly predict outcomes. We have language, which allows us to do our own version of "networking", and it is so important that the ability for language it is hard-wired in our brain.
   
   You want to brute force all that? It might work. But I think we need, at least as our first step, to emulate all of the above and make thinking machines that are similar to us. Then we can abstract away from this. The correlation machines we are developing now are the first step to it, and they are marvellous. But they're just that, a first step.
   
   Edit: You only know more than 3 numbers because our civilisation developed it. Some tribes do not have higher numbers. Intelligence might be inseparately linked to access to communication with other intelligent beings.
   
   Edit2: Finally got hold of the books I thought about when writing this. I should mention that the example I used is actually taken directly from Peter Watts Drifter trilogy, a hard science story very well rooted in actual science with lots of references at the end of each book.

Of course it causes physical changes in the brain, that is why there IS a mental experience. The physical brain and "mentality", or consciousness, are one and the same.

For further explanation, I recommend: http://www.amazon.com/Incognito-Secret-Lives-David-Eagleman/dp/0307377334

Incognito

If you're interested in the inner workings of the brain and it sounds like your are, there's a new book out.

This reminds me that I need to read his new book already.

Because that statement is false.

There's another statement used where the number of neuronal connections in a cubic mm of our brain is greater than the number of stars in the milky way. But this assumes the average of tens of thousands of connections to neuronal connections to neighboring neurons. You can find this in the book summary for this book: http://www.amazon.com/Incognito-Secret-Lives-David-Eagleman/dp/0307377334/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311852390&sr=8-1#

Edit: But since there are only about 300 billion (3x10^11) stars in the milky way, and one mole of water (only 18 mL volume) is approximately 18x10^23 atoms, it becomes fairly obvious why, mathematically, it's absurd to even imply that the number of neuronal connections in the brain can be more than the number of atoms in the universe.

I don't think we make choices. I read a book called Incognito that made me wonder if maybe we're all just caught up in a flow of brain chemicals and societal influences. We're all affected by each other's "choices" from yesterday, last week, last year, a hundred years ago, moral rules established two thousand years ago, the universe exploding into existence, and so on and so on. This mostly includes our family and friends, but strangers and ghosts - people long gone - influence our "choices" as well. (I love this question! I can't wait to read all the responses.)

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

It will blow your mind

I think I read about this in "Incognito: The Secret life of the brain" was an amazing read I recommend you guys should look it up.

Sometimes it's really good to read something you fundamentally disagree with. I can't speak on the gravity or depth of this particular book, but it's not a philosophy book from 100+ years ago, so it's a little unfair to compare them on those terms.

I'm a fan of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, by David Eagleman a very accessible recently written book on what goes on beneath conscious awareness. It's pop-science, but that's no reason to dismiss a book. The subject is fascinating and the arguments are very thought-provoking.

From what you are saying, I think you'd like the book Incognito as it kind of touches on that topic. I have to say, you pulled it off wonderfully in your video.

i recently finished reading "the greatest show on earth" by richard dawkins, it is a book about the evidence, beauty and elegance of evolution. it really was an amazing and informative read, yet still accessible to the layman.

i am currently reading "incognito:secret lives of the brain" by david eagleman. i originally heard about this from a talk he had done on npr a couple months ago. the basic gist of it is something like this: the vast majority of what goes on in your brain is controlled by your subconscious and goes on just fine without your consciousnesses ever needing involvement. occasionally a conflict arises that cannot be resolved by your subconscious, and a request is sent to the conscious to solve the issue. i'm probably butchering this explanation, and as i have only started the book, i can't give a good review one way or the other on it, but so far it seems interesting.

Thank you for your well thought out response. It is these discussions that foster the most thought, which is beneficial to everyone involved. Also, please note that I am going off of very little sleep and apologize in advance for any silly errors.

You start with my point about proving a negative, and in order to refute that claim you give two examples. You first example is irrelevant. It is an example of disproving a negative or, rather, proving a positive. This is clearly possible, and not what I was talking about when I said proving a negative. Discovering the pigmies disproved the negative belief. However, if we had never found them we could still not say that is proof of their nonexistence. Merely that we have not found them yet. We could conclude that they probably don't exist, but unless we scour the face of the entire planet, including underground, we cannot prove that they do not exist. This is what is meant by proving a negative. Your second anecdote is more accurate to my claim, but I still have a problem with it. You have proven that little green men do not exist in your bathtub because when we look, they are not there. Let's ignore the case that they are out for a stroll or can become invisible as it would get us nowhere. What you have done is proven the negative because you were able to search the entire relevant space that the negative was implying. I agree, I may have overstepped my bounds when saying that it is impossible in all cases to prove a negative. A better statement would have been unfeasible in general cases. In order to disprove any negative, one would have to search the entire set of things relevant to the subject of the statement and show that, indeed, such a thing is not there. If I say there is a magical rock somewhere in the world that grants three wishes, you have not proven it does not exist until you have found every single rock on the entire planet and shown definitively it is a normal rock. So, you could prove a negative, but you would agree that it is beyond reason or practicality in this case to do so. I believe that this case more closely mirrors our spiritual image since the space of where to search for a god or gods is bounded only by the edges of the universe.

You next mentioned that an atheistic view is no more or less justifiable than a theistic view. I understand your reasoning and how you got to this point, however I would again like to disagree with you. Firstly I must impress the viewpoint that atheism is merely the lack of belief in a deity, as I stated in my previous post. It is not the claim that no deities exist (however many do take it to that point). Atheism merely says "I do not believe in any gods." As I mentioned one can take this idea further and say "I believe that there are no gods," however the general idea is that it is a lack of belief in deities. For many atheists, their justification for this is simple: without one shred of scientific evidence for any deity, it is unreasonable to believe in said deity. You mention at one point that a theist has evidence of their deity in hand and an atheist discounts it. This is because that "evidence" is not verifiable or falsifiable, probably spiritual and personal in nature. I'm talking about the "I can feel the holy spirit" and "the bible is true because it was written by God" sort of logic. Either we can not test the theist's claim (and thus, by scientific reason we can NOT count it as evidence) or their evidence is dependent upon itself (circular logic). To this point in time, I have heard of no "evidence" for religion that actually falls under the category of evidence by scientific standards. Atheists discount the theists evidence because, in layman's terms, it sucks. It simply is not evidence.

I have touched on a couple of your points in this last segment, and would like to finish off with talking about your last two blocks. You say that I am looking at this as if the mind were a computer with only 2 states. I'm sorry if I gave off that impression, but that's not at all what I was implying. I earlier mentioned the difference between "I do not believe in any gods" and "I believe that there are no gods." There, already, we have 2 states within this area that I have coined the "null state" which is, in itself, one of many states. Your point that it is impossible to disbelieve without a conscious rejection of theistic claims is certainly true; so it's a good thing I never said anything to contrary. You seem to be making a false implication here, however. Atheism ABSOLUTELY IS the rejection of theistic claims, but you try to take it one step further and say that it makes another claim to replace those rejected ones, specifically the claim that there are no gods. As mentioned a couple of times, while this is indeed atheism, atheism in the purest sense is a lack of belief in any deities. It makes no inherent claim. Thus it is, in fact, a state of disbelieving while still a rejection of theistic claims.

It is for this reason that it is the default state. One is not born believing in gods (thus containing a lack of belief which is defined as atheism), one is taught religion. We could further claim that there is no god or gods, but then we would fall into all of the pitfalls your post has lined out for us. Scientifically speaking we can only go so far as to say there is no evidence for god, and thus no reason to attribute belief in such a being. But any further than that is just as unsupported as a theistic view (there can be a debate about probabilities, but this is inane pandering). However, if you realize that atheism very simply is the rejection of theistic claims without the necessity to replace those claims, then we can realize that atheism really is the default stance. Pure atheism makes no claim, it simply asks "why should I believe you?" And we haven't yet gotten a good answer.

I hope I have helped you better understand atheism. Many people have an incorrect view on us, and it seems like you are the same way. It is important to note that we do not inherently make any claims about deities, we simply say we reject all theistic claims. There are many who do make that claim, but it is NOT inherent in atheism. Absolutely not!

P.S. I mostly avoided the topic of human thought because there wasn't much to say there. I actually love the processes of the human brain and love learning about it. It seems you do too. On a completely unrelated note I would recommend you read the book Incognito. It's not perfect but it's tooled toward layman readers and still gets its point across in an interesting way, a very fun read. Thank you for your discussion!

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, by David Eagleman

Currently reading Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain by David Eagleman

David Eagleman, in his book Incognito makes a good argument that who we are one day is not necessarily who we will be in the future. When someone commits suicide it is taking the life not only of the (often emotional and irrational) person of that moment, but also taking the life of the (potentially happy) person who might exist in the future.

In my own experience, I have found ways to deal with depression and become a happier person since I have matured. So I feel this is a very important point to consider. Suicide is almost never the best option to alleviate overall human suffering and it should never be a decision made by a single individual who may not be thinking rationally.