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!

Free Will (excluding taxes and postage)

I just came across this paper on free will and consciousness by Stuart Kauffman. I think it’s nonsense, but I can’t be bothered to raise a counterargument; it would just take too long. There are so many linguistic slippages to contend with in physics and life’s too short. But I’m posting it because I know some of you will be interested and may wish to take the matter up.

Basically Kauffman looks to a handy loophole, which is claimed to lie between classical and quantum physics, that is neither “lawful” nor random, and he thinks he can take advantage of this to permit the free will and conscious self-determination he so desperately wants. If you ask me, this desperation is easily seen in the following quotes (the italics are mine):

 ”If mind does not act on matter, is mind a mere epiphenomenon?”

“The response to this apparent impasse is a retreat to epiphenomenonalism: Mind does nothing, in fact, it does not act on brain, it is an epiphenomena (sic) of brain. It is fair to say that no one likes this view“

Oh, well, it’s the duty of every scientist to find some loopholes that might plausibly help us avoid finding out something we simply don’t like very much. I can see that. It works for Intelligent Design proponents.

Why “mere”? It doesn’t bother me in the slightest if I’m an epiphenomenon. I don’t feel “mere”; I’m proud of what I am. Maybe a hurricane feels it is making a conscious decision to make landfall over southern Florida, too. So what? I cannot possibly know my future and nor can anyone else (classical theory is enough for that; we don’t need to invoke QM), so I look forward to finding out what is actually going to happen to me. It’s a consequence of my biology that I feel like I’m choosing it, and that I’m somehow making things happen, and if that’s how it feels to me then what do I care if it’s an illusion at the level of physics? I happen to live in a moderately successful social organization, which therefore has evolved a system of belief in culpability and justice; if it hadn’t then I wouldn’t be here, because society would have collapsed. As a consequence, I’m an organism that interprets what happens to me and others as something that was within our control. Sometimes I even have to hold people responsible for “their” actions, because that’s how this society thrives (I don’t have to choose to do it, it’s just the way my thoughts turn out). At the level of description in which “I” live, it makes sense to talk about responsibility, choices and morals. So what if that wouldn’t make sense to an atom? I’m not an atom. I really don’t mind being a lawful consequence of my past and my environment. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest. How else can I even justify my so-called choices? “I did it because…” I don’t feel a need to seek out quantum loopholes that could just plausibly allow the way that the world seems to be, actually to be “true.”

But if this sort of thing bothers you and you’re desperate to escape the feeling that you’re trapped by causality, then this is a paper you should read.

“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.

Between a rock and a hard place

Today I went out, ostensibly to think about my game. I went to Slide Rock in Sedona, where a canyon creek produces a delightful water slide, and bottle-green water cascades through brilliant red rocks as if designed for a film set. Unfortunately I was in a bit of a delicate mood and there were also a lot of women in bikinis, so not much thinking got done and therefore I have nothing to blog about.

I sat opposite a spot where people could jump about 15 feet into the water below, which they did with gay abandon until a pretty, preppy girl of about 18 called Jessica came along. She walked up to the edge, hesitated for a moment and was lost. She chickened out and withdrew in a flurry of nervous giggles. But she had a couple of friends on my bank, who hollered at her for being such a wimp and generally tried to encourage her, thus making it ever harder for her to get up the nerve. She tried again, and chickened out big time. People started to notice, but she bravely kept on trying, and kept on chickening out again. After about ten minutes it had become a major life ordeal for her, and had drawn a crowd of about a hundred of us who were helpfully counting to three and chanting “Jump! Jump!” at the poor girl. Can you imagine? By now it was completely impossible for her and she walked away, with shame and bitter disappointment seething inside her. I really felt for her.

Anyway, up above all this, taking no notice whatsoever, was a small hoodoo, on which sat a precariously balanced cap rock, whose only mistake had been to have a crack in one side, a thousand years ago, which had widened and isolated the rock from its neighboring strata. Once water had seeped into the crack and found its way to the soft sandstone below all was lost for it, too, and it gradually became marooned on a pinnacle of sand, maybe three inches across, from where, unlike Jessica, it will soon plunge into the foaming depths below.

Those foaming depths are formed into a series of potholes, because once such a rock falls into a hollow it can’t float out again, and hence acts as a millstone, grinding and digging itself an ever deeper and more inescapable hole.

The potholes in turn alternated with beaches, because of the way that, once a river starts to churn and bend, the outside of the bend gets the brunt of the water and debris, and so gets carved deeply, while the inside ends up with a slower current and consequent deposition. Once the process has started it can’t stop, until eventually the curve becomes horseshoe-shaped and a flood breaks through the ever thinning wall to produce an oxbow.

And the pebbles on these beaches were graded very neatly, with all the big stones at the top and all the finer ones at the bottom, not because God had carefully arranged them for best effect but because small stones can fall through the gaps between big stones, but big stones can never fall through the gaps between small ones.

And the people who sat on these beaches laughing at Jessica were arranged in clumps that drifted, rose and fell rhythmically during the afternoon, because everyone finds themselves in a tension between the desire to be with other people and the desire not to be seen to stand too close to strangers. As the gaps between them fill they find themselves in a crowd and wander off to find some space, thus becoming a nucleus for further aggregation.

And the level of noise rose and fell too, as each person had to speak louder to be heard over the others, who in turn had to speak even louder, until the crescendo reached the point where someone paused in their conversation to wonder why everyone else was shouting, then others wondered why that person had suddenly stopped talking and stopped too, and then finally those who were a bit slow on the uptake realised that they were the only ones left speaking too loud.

I have absolutely no reason to tell you any of this other than to remark on how amazing it is when positive feedback meets negative feedback and each has a time delay. The result is self-organisation. The result is also very beautiful, and anyone who thinks all this order needs a designer is sadly mistaken: you only have to look at things which have been designed to see that they can’t compare. Only randomness ratcheted by selection and driven by feedback can produce such elegance. Self-organisation blows my mind even more than women in bikinis.

And meanwhile, whilst everybody was kicking the pebbles and wondering about the noise and remarking at the tops of their voices to their neighbours about whether that hoodoo was safe to walk under, Jessica realised that no-one was looking any more, stepped up to the edge and jumped, bless her. I think it probably made her week.

Luckily the rest of us noticed in time to cheer.