Terrence Sejnowski on the edge:

“By 2015 computer power will begin to approach the neural computation that occurs in brains. This does not mean we will be able to understand it, only that we can begin to approach the complexity of a brain on its own terms. Coupled with advances in large-scale recordings from neurons we should by then be in a position to crack many of the brain’s mysteries, such as how we learn and where memories reside. However, I would not expect a computer model of human level intelligence to emerge from these studies without other breakthroughs that cannot be predicted. Computers have become the new microscopes, allowing us to see behind the curtains. Without computers none of this would be possible, at least not in my lifetime.”

We have seen AI and ALife with little success. What is missing? Which of the following A-* fields do you consider as important for modeling human-level intelligence:

• artificial emotions ?
• artificial curiosity ?
• artificial intuition ?
• artificial insights/humor ?
• artificial empathy ?
• artificial will ?

Susan Backmore talks in a TED video about memes. She says about evolution: evolution takes place if you have information copied with variation and selection. If you have variation (creatures that vary), selection (a struggle for live) and heredity
(survivors that pass on genes to their offspring), i.e. dissemination of information with variation and selection, then you must get evolution. In this sense, evolution is an emergent property of the evolutionary algorithm.

In her talk, she describes selfish replicators and their survival machines, and argues that we are result of different replicators: If a gene is a quantum of life, then a meme is a quantum of culture. All animals are mere gene machines. We alone are gene machines and meme machines as well. Gene machines are the survival objects of the first-level replicator, meme machines the survival objects of the second-level replicator. She also invented the term temes for technological memes.

Nature recently had a series of articles at the interface between science and society which considered the question: What does it mean to be human? Wired asked a similar question a few months ago. Well, there is an old saying “to err is human”. This sets us apart from machines, but we share this tendency with other animals. What sets us apart from other animals who only care about food (self-maintenance) and sex (self-reproduction) ?

Again a self-* property: humans are self-conscious and self-defined. They define themselves over an invented and self-defined name. And every man is expected to become aware of himself through self-consciousness, to find his place in life himself with the help of ‘free-will’, and to create himself as a person.

The key evolutionary innovation was certainly language. Humans are able to understand language which can be used to pass on cultural information very efficiently. They are able to solve a captcha. And only they deal with all the cultural things useless for direct survival and reproduction, for example music, art, and poetry, which belong to other evolutionary systems, systems where information is not transmitted genetically. Humans live in multiple worlds.

To be human means to be stuck in a body closely related to one of the great apes, while being able to understand Shakespeare, to appreciate a Sonata from Beethoven, to laugh about a Charlie Chaplin film, or to build a Large Hadron Collider.

We are located somewhere between genetic and cultural evolution. Our bodies belong to the biological world, our thoughts belong to the cultural word, and our selves are in between. The idea of the self, self-consciousness and language serve as a connection between both worlds and lead to prototypes of religion.

Being human means typically to deal with:

• Self-Consciousness /the ability to recognize yourself/. All animals are selfish survival machines following the needs for self-maintenance and self-reproduction, but only humans experience self-consciousness. Only we can ask, “what am I? I am this? What is this place? And how am I related to it?”
• Language /the ability to communicate/. All animals communicate in one way or another with members of their species, but only humans can describe their environment in detail with language
• Religion /the ability to believe/. Many other animals form groups, too, but only humans recognize and believe that these groups can live longer than any individual. Only humans belief that they have a soul and that groups have a spirit. Only they can form social relations with non-physical agents, fictional characters, and imaginary friends
• Tools /the ability to use objects and tools/ Art and Music /creativity and the desire for beauty/ Stone tools belong to the earliest evidence of human culture, besides pre-historic art and cave paintings.
• Humor /the ability to understand complex inconsistent situations and to produce incongruous actions/. Some animals like hyena make sounds similar to laughter, but only humans laugh if they have understand a funny situation. Laughter separates the human from the animal. Already Kant said “Ein Mensch ist ein thier, das lacht” (a human is an animal which laughs) and Aristotle observed that “only the human animal laughs”.

All of these items are associated with complex cognitive activities and more or less abstract thoughts. The weird, the funny, and the divine belong to abstract thoughts which do not match physical objects directly. Humans as complex BDI-machines with extreme high capacity are capable of abstraction in all three areas: beliefs, desires and intentions. Actions are extended by intentions, perceptions by beliefs, and feelings by desires. Our cognitive system has produced the following emergent properties due to an increased brain:

• sophisticated beliefs and abstract perceptions: language understanding, music and art comprehension, religious thoughts, hope
• sophisticated intentions and abstract actions: language production, music and art production, tool use
• sophisticated desires and abstract feelings: love, sorrow, solidarity, generosity, hate, hostility, humor

Shostakovich is one of the last great classical composers. I like his works, esp. his cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues which follow the style of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier written 200 years earlier. If someone deserves to be called the Bach of the 20th century, it would be Shostakovich.

The following Cello sonata is one of his early works composed in 1934, it sounds a bit like film music: perpetual motion energy. Despite the constant progressive motion the repeating sequences leave an impression of stagnancy. The progress in stagnancy, dissonance in consonance and variety in monotony contribute to the complexity of the composition. Here is the 2nd movement of Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata Op.40 played by Anne Gastinel and Roger Muraro:

The starlings of Otmoor near Oxford are a spectacular example of flocking, which Craig Reynolds described with his boids model so well. A nice example of boids with predators can be found here.

Whenever in the natural world there is happening something interesting, it is either supper-time and pairing time. Animals become alive if there is something to eat or mate. Both actions have to do with self-reproduction, self-regeneration and growth: during supper-times the body is regenerated and during pairing-times the species. In the former case the body grows, and in the latter the population. And there is a third form of growth: during insights the mind grows, because insights are based on a cognitive process of acquiring knowledge. Insights are related to learning, and learning in turn can be viewed as self-design. Again a self-* property. Dawkins’ selfish genes come to mind..

New scientific studies examined the genetic mutations that underlie cancers. Maybe the role of the major cell signaling pathways is as important as aberrant key genes:

“a team led by Bert Vogelstein, Kenneth Kinzler, and Victor Velculescu at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, had begun a private cancer genome project, starting with breast and colorectal cancer. Now this team and collaborators have sequenced the coding regions of 20,700 genes—nearly all the known genes in the human genome—in 22 glioblastoma and 24 pancreatic cancer samples”

“they report finding hundreds of genes that were mutated in these two cancers. There were an average of 63 altered genes in each pancreatic tumor and 60 per glioblastoma. The mutations varied from tumor to tumor, but the most important tended to fall in the same cell pathways. For example, 12 specific pathways were disrupted in at least 70% of pancreatic tumors. “It points to a new way of looking at cancer,” says Vogelstein, who suggests that treatments should target these pathways, not the products of single genes.”

Jocelyn Kaiser, A Detailed Genetic Portrait of the Deadliest Human Cancers, Science Vol. 321 (2008) 1280-1281

In his book The Clash of Civilizations Harvard professor Samuel Phillips Huntington (1927-2008) proposed a theory that people’s cultural identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. In the past centuries, we had indeed a clash of different cultural systems and their entities: first between religious entities, then between political entities, and finally between economical entities. The religious clashes are the most ancient ones besides the archaic clash of clans, tribes and chiefdoms. They existed (mixed with other forms) since the dawn of civilization. In the beginning, there was no clear difference between religion, politics and economy: in ancient Egypt the king was the religious and “economic” leader, too. During the course of time, independent religions, national states and international companies emerged, and the conflicts escalated in heavy clashes and wars during the last centuries. In Europe, the focus shifted gradually from religion to politics and finally to the economy:

• 17th century: religious clash of religions (e.g. the religious Thirty Years’ War)
• 18th century: clash of monarchies (e.g. World War I)
• 19th century: political clash of states (e.g. the Franco Prussian War)
• 20th century: clash of ideologies (e.g. the cold war)
• 21th century: economic clash of international corporations

Interestingly, we can find intermediate periods between the major clashes of cultural systems where a clash of “mixed” systems happened. Monarchies are a mixture of religion and state, while ideologies like capitalism and communism fall between politics and economy.

In Europe the last heavy war was World War II. World War II ended the conflicts and clashes between national states, like World War I which ended the clashes between struggling monarchies. The major wars were also endpoints for different cultural clashes:

• clash of religions ended with the Thirty Years’ War (religion and state became independent: secularization, emergence of social institutions)
• clash of monarchies ended with World War I (monarchy and state became independent: democratization, emergence of political parties)
• clash of political states ended with World War II (state and economy became independent: globalization, emergence of global corporations)

Interesting new SFI working papers this year:

SFI 08-12-048: Agent-Based Models of Levels of Consciousness, Helena Hong Gao and John H. Holland

SFI 08-09-042: Dynamics of Human Behavior, Douglas R. White

SFI 08-09-040: Why Model?, Joshua M. Epstein