Crossing Platforms in Midstream III

“…and man will be made dirigible, and let loose the body as a placenta for the soul.” — James Joyce, from The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

What a technological era! Within a few years, our computers will have main brains consisting of central processing units containing hundreds of cores. The calculating potentials for hundreds of parallel, or transactional, processes occurring at one time will greatly speed up and greatly enhance how our external minds will be able to manipulate data. Will they be able to loop outside of their own mental processes and reflect back upon them, as a human being does?

It is not only humans who can strangely loop out of their minds to reflect back upon them and the thoughts that are generated (Thank you, Douglas Hofstadter, i.e., STRANGE LOOPS). Many species can, but humans seem to do it with the great flare of their massive cerebral cortexes. To lesser degrees, animals with minds as simple as insects (still very complex, but simpler than ours) do some looping, and thus make calculated decisions, utilizing varying degrees of fuzzy logic. Where does consciousness come into play here? Is self-referential loopiness the key to consciousness, or is there more to this? Cognitive scientists are still asking the questions, and to this day not enough is known about the neural networks and how they fire electrochemical messages to each other to fully understand what consciousness is.

Suffice to say that some of our loopiness, our fuzzy logic, is now being externailzed into forms of silicone, plastics and metals, fired by electricity, and performing multiple calculations and processes in an instant. We are about to make some quantum leaps forward in this externalization of thought. A massive project by Microsoft is in play to build software for multiple core processors. It is being done in a gothic cathedral on the outskirst of Barcelona, Spain, where a supercomputer running on 10,000 processor cores with twenty terabytes of storage will be the arena for new software production. New ways of performing tasks will be devised. Transactional calculations instead of parallel processes may be devised to create the elaborate programs and multimedia products from software manufacturers.

So, what is it to be human? What makes us distinctly different from other specieis, and is humanness transferrable to the mechanized minds of robots and computers that we are now creating? Such questions have been the topic of many a Phillip K. Dick novel, as well as the basis for movies, such as Steven Spielberg’s AI (artificial intelligence), in which a self-conscious robotic child wants desparately to be loved, and to love, as a real boy (yes, an updated Pinocchio story).

We extend our minds and bodies into plastic and metal forms to explore the planets and beyond in space, into the depths of the oceans, and to zoom into the realm of subatomic worlds. How much of our humanness is contained in these extended minds and bodies? When will such an “extension” be considered as an entity unto itself?

We are, perhaps, decades away from being able to answer these questions, or even to pose them substantially, but it is certain that our humanness contains as much of our externalized dreams that now exist as our synthesized world as it does what is within us. We have created a network of exansive and shared learning through these devices, such as the one on wich I am typing this message, to be sent out over the global airwaves of broadband Internet, and into the minds of others, at least those who can understand my American English, or be able to translate it using a language translating program.

The amazement continues.

Amen.

MH Pathfinder

Notes on “I Am a Strange Loop,” by Douglas Hofstadter, and Loops Into Other Things

Douglas Hofstadter has been writing books on the strangeness and loopiness of self-referential thinking for about thirty years. His books include the following:

Godel, Escher and Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid

The Mind’s I

Metamagical Themas

I Am A Strange Loop

His latest book is an attempt to simplify the complexities of self-referential thinking. He would argue that each of his books have been attempts to do so, but he would also admit that they ended up being longer essays with more complex explanations and extrapolations of the complexities of self-referential thought than he intended. GEB (Godel, Escher and Bach) is one of my favorite reference books, and a book just to recapture my wonder and curiosity for the universe when reading the media news of of the New American Dark Age and George Bush’s continual march of determined ignorance gets too depressing. So, he offers “I Am A Strange Loop.” I enjoy all of his books. Hofstadter’s “I” is a playful child full of curiosity which never seems to age into complacency about the wonders of loopiness, and the seeming paradoxical nature of human consciousness, or the consciousnesses of other beings as well. When do the thought mechanisms of a machine or living thing reach a point of self-referential thought? Hofstadter lets us know that this is not a phenomenon that is easy to pin down, nor an issue that is concretely black and white, nor absolute.  If we paid attention, we might be amazed at the array of lifeforms in which this strange loopiness arises, and the degree of complexity in creatures that we might not usually consider closely related to us in “intelligence.”

Let me offer this paraphrased review, an appreciative rephrasing and personalization of some of the many fun, exciting and mesmerizing points of Hoftstadter’s book, mingled with an extrapolation or two (or three, or four…) of my own. Thanks Mr. Hofstadter for a metamagical thematic playtime in my mind, for my “I” to ponder and enjoy.

One can obviously understand the consciousness and self-referential thinking and feelings of beings, such as dogs, elephants, dolphins, chimpanzees and humans. What about a mosquito? How about a robot-activated self-driving car? Does the robot-activated self-driving car have a consciousness of “self”? If a human’s self-referential “I-ness” is a soul, does the mosquito have a soul, albeit with much less self-referential abilities, thus a “smaller” soul? Is my dog’s soul smaller because she doesn’t perceive the complexities of symbols and metaphors that I recognize? I certainly lack the olfactory linguistics of Truffle, my dog, so there are complexities of meanings and metaphors that my nose cannot decipher, therefore the nose of my soul is is not as gifted as the nose of the soul of my dog. Is a soul’s nose any less important to a mind’s “I”?

Well, you can see that the questions can be quite fun, puzzling and go into many different directions. What is more, beyond the self-referential loopiness of living, thinking beings, there is a loopiness to the universe itself. An atom is a seemingly stable element of matter, but it is in reality a temporal state of energy, a tension between two opposing forces–the strong and weak force of the atom. It may be that no matter exists at all, and that even stranger things occur within subatomic particles, such as a quark occupying two spaces at the same time or light behaving as both a wave and a particle. And, the mathematical explanations for the behaviors of some subatomic particles require at least eleven dimensions. We live in three dimensions, understand the curving nature of space/time through the fourth, but how much do we know about the other seven dimensions? Or, are there even more? These ideas are not clear and belong to the realm of quantum physics and theoretical designs which are often difficult to clearly demonstrate to satisfy our sensate thinking.

So, the “I” of me is not a tangible thing to be pinned down, and when one peers into the brain to see the electrochemical processes and neural firings of axions and synapses the “I” is not to be seen careening through them. A system often takes on a personality that is greater than the sum of its parts, or at least a result of the parts working as a whole. A human body is composed of various organs and entities, enzymes, bacteria and a host of other living things. Some people, befuddled by the directions and behaviors that come from their own thoughts, say things like, “I don’t know what my brain was thinking,” as if their brain was somehow detached and operating independently from the rest of the body and context in which that body exists. How large is the “I” of the mind? What is the mind? Is it only the cerebral cortex that tails down into bundles of nerves that branch out to the limbs and digits of toes and fingers? Does the mind stop at the spine, the nerve endings? Does the mind incorporate the lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, gall bladder, appendix and other organs, the derma and blood? Or is the “I” of the mind these things, as well, or none of them? Is the “I” a metaphysical soul? It may be something beyond what we can physically see or sense, but the mind’s “I” is nonetheless a result of the physiological processes of a human body that reaches that self-referential loopiness to stand outside of itself and look back and say, “Hey! That’s me!”

Well, after reading these few paragraphs, you may be able to understand how Douglas Hofstadter’s attempts to convey the nature of self-referential thinking could easily expand into hundreds of pages. Fortunately, Hofstader draws upon some very playful and creative analogies and self-referential sentence structuring that tweaks the curiosity and child within each of our “I”s. And I’m not talking about your left “I” or your right “I”, but the “I”behind your eyes. In THE MIND’S I he utilizes phrases from Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, full of paradoxical metaphores and strange loopiness.

Douglas Hofstadter also is a contributing writer to Scientific American.

Amen.

MH

The Pathfinder

The Globe is Warming

Dateline: September 2nd, 2007, 8:48 p.m., Pacific DST

The Place? Cypress, California.

The current temperature in the southern California suburban oasis of Cypress Village, our home,  is 88 degrees, Fahrenheit, even though the sun descended beneath the horizon some two hours ago.  It is Labor Day weekend, and there is no doubt that most of us have been laboring simply to stay still, quiet and full of refreshing water.  Our house is air-conditioned by four fans, running non-stop since early this morning.  There is a fan in our upstairs bedroom window, a fan in the bedroom of my daughter Lauren, an oscillating fan in the kitchen, and an oscillating tower fan that spans from our entertainment/laptop room to our living room.  We found only an hour’s relief with a drive to the coast, but even this was a mere five to ten degrees less than home.  Meteorologists tell us that we won’t get a break until Thursday when the near hundred-degree daytime highs will cool back down to the mid-seventies–arctic by this weekend’s averages.

Southern California is prone to drought, with dry spells from two years to a lingering six years.  With high percentages of humidity, we have “rain” in the form of intermittent thunderstorms in the deserts and foothills, which elicit flash flood warnings for the residents of these regions.  In Cypress Village, we have no rain, no floods, only heat, lingering, unending, paralyzing heat.  Today I need no convincing about the warming of the earth.  This part that we call home is nearly fried.

Amen.

MH