Ode to Joy

Someone I know said recently that we should all list five things each day that we’re grateful for. She’s quite right, we should, and I do. I’m always gasping to myself about the things I’m grateful for, including the person who said this and the fact that I actually wake up each morning (I’m only going to get to see about 0.00000026% of all the days there have ever been or ever will be, so each one is precious).

I’m not going to list five things here, just two that I’m particularly grateful for today. The first is that I didn’t get struck by lightning! I climbed Mount Wilson, near Sedona, and the view was so stunning that I failed to notice a mere 20-mile wide thunderstorm creeping up behind me and trapping me on the mountaintop. To one side of me was a thousand-foot sheer drop, and to the other was safety, but to get to it I would have had to cross slightly higher open ground, directly under the worst of the storm, so I’m additionally grateful that a) I was very interested in atmospheric electricity many years ago and so I understand how things behave in a large potential difference, and b) I’m only five foot ten. Anyway, I got away with it but it was a bit close for comfort. I was otherwise engaged during the really scary ones, but here’s one of the many lightning strokes that were busily seeking out my head:

Yoo-hoo! I'm over here!

The second thing I’m grateful for today is that I was born on such a beautiful planet. The other day I was looking at photos of Mars and it looked amazing. But the interesting bits were hundreds or thousands of miles apart. Earth’s a bit more complex. Here is just a small fraction of the beautiful things I saw in a mere ten square FEET on the flanks of Mt. Wilson today. You need to have “What a Wonderful World” playing in your head as you look at these. Enjoy!

Bye darling

Isn’t human behaviour wonderful?

This is just a trivial post but then I’ve had a lazy afternoon, so what do you expect? I went downtown, as I usually do of a Sunday, and watched some dancing. But I got there not long before it finished, so I strolled up into Thorpe Park, to watch people instead.

There were no murders going on, this being Flagstaff, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether to cringe or be envious of the guy singing and playing guitar at his girlfriend, so I watched a foursome, milling around near a car. I’ll call them Janet and John, and Peter and Jane.

Janet and John were approaching sixty, I’d say, and Peter and Jane were in their thirties. Jane was carrying a little dog, which was a useful distraction to all (a function usually served by babies). John, the older man, wore a cowboy hat and a moustache that he must have bought to go with the hat. That’s about as complex as he got. Janet, his wife, was more interesting. She had a sort of “nursey” air to her, but she was incredibly awkward and nervous, emitting little giggles to fill the silences. (She had those shoulders, Holly!) They were obviously Jane’s parents, and they hadn’t seen her for ages. This visit had clearly not been long enough by a factor of at least a thousand, but hell, Peter has his limits.

The thing is, they were all trying to say goodbye, but they couldn’t make it happen. Each would say a little piece and make sure it had a good trajectory, ending on the fundamental tone. Perfect. A momentary silence while everyone took their places for the finale, and then Peter would give Janet a hug. The trouble is, Janet would then giggle, shrug her shoulders and say how nice it was to have had more than one hug today. I think she got four in the end, so she must have been thrilled.

But her voice would always tail off, because she really didn’t want to see her daughter go. And that left the tune unfinished, so John, ever gallant, would then step in and say something to cover the gap - crack a joke, probably, given the way everyone took a conspiratorial step forward into a huddle and then erupted backward again. And that would give Jane time to think of something to say, or the dog would make a contribution and Janet would tickle him under the chin. And everyone was back where they started.

Peter made a solid move towards the car, and Jane put the dog inside. But she didn’t follow through, and came back out to appease poor Janet’s wistful look. And so then Peter would have to give her another hug (“Goodness, that’s THREE hugs I’ve had today!”) and the dance would start all over again.

I watched this for about half an hour and I felt so sorry for them. They were poised on the threshold of leaving but just couldn’t climb that last step. So I stood up, yawned, dropped my coffee cup into a trashcan and started to walk off, stage left. And immediately, Peter leapt for the driver’s door, Jane got in, Janet got a grip and John’s moustache breathed a sigh of relief. Mission accomplished.

SOMEBODY had to leave or they’d have been there still.

There’s no point to this post, I just wanted to remark on how beautiful and complex human communication is, and how subtly poised and balanced. What a wonderful world!

Ok, so, about this game thing…

If you look up into the night sky, just to the right of the bit that looks like a giant shopping cart, you’ll see a small blue star, called Sulis. Around it floats a stormy orange gas giant, and around that in turn swims a small moon, called Selene (until I come up with a nicer name).

Selene is gravitationally challenged by all that whirling mass and hence is warm, comparatively wet and volcanic. It’s a craggy, canyon-filled landscape, by sheer coincidence remarkably similar to northern Arizona. The thin atmosphere contains oxygen, but sadly also much SO2 and H2S, making it hostile to earthly life without a spacesuit. But life it does contain! Spectroscopic analysis and photography from two orbiters have confirmed this (never mind how the orbiters got there – work with me, guys!)

There are hints of many species, some sessile, some motile. And just a little circumstantial evidence that one of these species may be moderately intelligent and perhaps even has a social structure. Your mission, should you wish to pay me a few dollars for the privilege, is to mount an expedition to Selene and study its biology and ecosystems. If at all possible I’d also like you to attempt contact with this shadowy sentient life-form.

Nothing is known (well, ok, I know it because I’m God, but I’m not telling you) about Selene’s ecosystems, geology, climate or, in particular, its biology. What is the food web? How do these creatures behave? What’s their anatomy? What niches do they occupy? How does their biochemistry work? How do they reproduce? Do they have something similar to DNA or does a different principle hold sway? What’s the likely evolutionary history? For the more intelligent creatures, what can be learned of their psychology, neurology and social behavior? Do they have language? Can we communicate with them? Are they dangerous? How smart are they? Do they have a culture? Do they have myths; religion? What does it all tell us?

You need to work together to build an encyclopedia – like Wikipedia – containing the results of your experiments, your observations and conclusions, stories, tips for exploration and research, maps, drawings, photos and all the rest. It will be a massive (I hope!), collaborative, Open Science experiment in exobiology…

So that’s the gist of what I’m working on. I was going to open a pet store and sell imported aliens but I decided it would be much more fun to build a virtual world you can actually step into, instead of watching through the bars of a cage. I’ll try to develop a whole new, self-consistent but non-earthlike biology, building on some of the things I learned from Creatures and my Lucy robot. I’ll discuss some of the technical issues on this blog but I’ll try not to give the game away – the point of the exercise is to challenge people to do real science on these creatures and deduce/infer this stuff for themselves. They/you did it admirably for Creatures but in those days I couldn’t give you anything as complex and comprehensive as I can now, and this time I don’t have marketing people breathing down my neck telling me that nobody’s interested in science.

I have no idea what the actual features will be, or to what extent it’ll be networked, etc. I’m just starting work on the terrain system and I have an awful long way to go. Because I’m working unfunded and have only a limited amount of money to live on, I’m going to work the other way round to most people, so instead of working to a spec I’ll squeeze in as many features as I can before the cash runs out. I know it’s absurd to hope to do all this in the space of a year to 18 months – after all, how many programmers and artists worked on Spore? Something like a hundred? But I think I’m as well equipped for the job as anyone, I work far more efficiently on my own, and it’s worth the attempt.

Whaddaya think?

“Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence”

Ever the guardian of my intellectual development, Norm sent me a link to a New Scientist article on memristors, today. I’d never heard of them, but the article was interesting for both good and bad reasons, so I thought I’d share my impressions.

Here’s a short summary: The memristor is apparently a “missing component” in electronics, hypothesized by Leon Chua in 1971, to sit alongside the well known resistor, capacitor and inductor, but at the time it was unknown as a physical device. In the early years of this century, Stan Williams developed a nanoscale device that he believed fit the bill. And then Max di Ventra, a physicist at UCSD, linked this work with some research on a slime mould, which showed that they are capable of “predicting” a future state in a periodic environmental change. He suggested that this is a biophysical equivalent to a memristor. The article then goes on to suggest that neural synapses work the same way, and so this must surely be the big missing insight that has prevented us from understanding the brain and creating artificial intelligence.

But the article troubles me for a couple of reasons and I can’t help thinking there’s a serious problem with the way physicists and mathematicians tend to think about biology. Firstly, here’s a quote from the article:

“To Chua, this all points to a home truth. Despite years of effort, attempts to build an electronic intelligence that can mimic the awesome power of a brain have seen little success. And that might be simply because we were lacking the crucial electronic components – memristors.”

Hmm… So exactly what years of effort would that be, then? VERY few people have ever attempted to “build an electronic intelligence”. We simply don’t do that – we use computers! 

Sure, a computer is an electronic device, but the whole damned point of them is that they are machines that can emulate any other machine. So they can emulate memristors too. They don’t actually have to be MADE of them in order to do that – they simply simulate them in code, like they simulate everything else. And I’m sure I’ve many times written code that has a state memory like a memristor. I didn’t know there was a named physical device that works in the same way, and it’s very interesting that there is, because it might give us new analogies and insights. But if I needed something to behave like that I could have coded it any time I wanted to. It’s meaningless to say that we’ve been stuck because we lacked a new type of electronic component. Only a physicist would confuse hardware and software like that! It boggles my mind.

And then I’m a little perplexed about a missing electronic component we DO know about. Maybe someone can help me with this? Chua’s work apparently hypothesized the memristor as a fourth component to add the existing resistor, capacitor and inductor. But where’s the transistor? Isn’t that a fundamental component? It’s a resistor, after a fashion, but surely it’s a fundamental building block in its own right, because it has the ability to allow a voltage to modulate a current - without them almost no electronic circuits would do anything useful!

I hate to say it, but I wonder if that’s a comment on the minds of physicists, too? It’s the transistor (or vacuum tube) that makes the difference between a static circuit, for which the mathematics of physics works well, and a dynamic circuit, for which it doesn’t. The capacitor is a dynamic system too, but only for a moment and then it settles down into something nice and easy to write equations for. It’s only when you add transistors and their consequent ability to generate feedback that the system really starts to dance and sing, and then the equations stop being much use.

The real glaring insight that electronics gives us, in my not-always-terribly-humble opinion, is the realization that sometimes classical science has a bad habit of being obsessed with “quantities” and ignoring or even sometimes denying the existence of “qualities”. Two electronic systems might have precisely the same mass, complexity and constituent substances, for instance, but be wired up in a different arrangement, producing radically different results. The reductionism implicit in much of physics can’t “see” the difference between the two circuits – because it’s something purely qualitative, not quantitative.

It’s the same with the brain. The reason we don’t understand the brain has NOTHING of significance to do with some “missing component”. It has nothing to do with quantum uncertainty or any other reductionistic claptrap. The reason we don’t understand the brain is that we don’t understand the CIRCUIT. We don’t understand the system as a whole. Memories, thoughts, ideas and the Self are not properties of the brain’s components, they are properties of its organisation. It’s very hard to understand organisations – I could easily give you an electronic circuit diagram out of context and it might take you days or weeks to figure out how it works and exactly what it does. But you could know everything you need to know about the properties of its resistors, capacitors,  inductors and transistors, and even it’s memristors. You could weigh it and measure it all you liked and it would tell you nothing. Organization is not amenable to understanding using the tools of classical Physics.

Life and mind are qualitiative constructs. Looking for some special elixir vitae is completely missing the point. The article is very interesting and I plan to look up more information. Memristors may well provide a useful analogy that gives us some hints and insights about localised properties of brains, and that may steer us towards making more sense of the circuitry of intelligence. However, to suggest that we’ve got it all wrong because we didn’t have the right component in our toolbox for making our “electronic brains” is just nonsense. Electronic components are the province of physics, but electronic design is not. Synapses may be the province of physics too, but biology is not. Biology is a branch of cybernetics, which has a very different mindset (or did until physicists took it over and turned it into information theory).

P.S. I sort of see why transistors are missing now – at the mathematical level of description of Chua’s work, I guess a transistor is just a resistor, because both of them convert between voltage and current. Time only really enters into the equations as an integral, and the deeply nonlinear consequences of the transistor don’t really apply when you consider it as a single isolated component. But that was my point - once you wire them up into circuits all of this is pretty much irrelevant. It’s circuits that matter for intelligence. Minds are emergent properties of organisations. Looking for a “magic” component is just a modern-day form of vitalism.