Brain and mind mysteries

Awareness increases in intensity under the influence of strong emotions or recreational drugs. However, this causes intelligence to plummet.
It seems to be a trade-off: brains can either think or feel – quality or quantity.
Maybe the brain is more organized and cross-correlated during times of strong emotion, but less likely to generate novel and unpredictable patterns then.
Awareness is amplified truth, while thought is searching for truth. Thinking is harder, feeling is more intense.

The highest brain functions generate only limited awareness, when the mind is aimed outward instead of inward. A brilliant insight may seem to arrive out of nowhere.
If the human brain could do both at once, hard work could become pleasurable. Humanity might have colonized the galaxy by now, even without faster than light travel.

Awareness could be directly studied by switching from one state to the other.
This will happen in slightly different ways for everyone. This difference is important.
The essence of identity, the thing that makes someone themselves, is their personal form of self-awareness.
A qualia is a perception that can not be simplified further, like the color red. The ‘qualia of self’ may be preserved for a lifetime, the unique way all personality elements come together.

A personal operating system, with hundreds of memory and preference categories . . .
If that unknown essence could be fully described, it could be reverse engineered.

The Turing Test and intelligent design

The Turing Test is a proposed performance benchmark and long-term challenge for future designers of human-equivalent artificial minds.
Its difficulty lies somewhere between a Mission to Mars and a Niven Ring.

Basically, the challenge is to get a computer program to have a meaningful conversation with a human on any subject the human understands.
To do that, the program would have to be about as smart and know as much as a human. The first part remains impossible.

The test has a strong implication, a transcendental insight: Awareness is real if it feels real to others.
If, after getting to know the program on a personal level, a human feels that the software he is conversing with has awareness, then the human is automatically correct.

This Turing Test Implication rules out the possibility of ‘philosophical zombies‘ a.k.a. ‘zimbos’.
There would even be awareness in a look-up program with a pre-scripted reply for every possible question (I wrote one back in the eighties using GOTO strings, but ran out of memory at 16K).
I would even claim there is awareness in a program that meaningfully answered every question by pure chance.

This brings us to believers in creationism, intelligent design, and even the Holy Ghost.
These individuals are misguided. They can’t explain why they feel that way, and yet they may be right to sense human-level or higher complexity in the universe.

A limited vindication for intelligent design may come if it’s ever discovered that for every Earth-like planet there are billions of worlds filled only with simple bacteria.
The process of evolution could easily be as complex as a mind. It’s merely a collection of physical patterns, but so is a brain.

Even more important is the implied infinite complexity of the omniverse.
The anthropic fine-tuning of the laws of physics implies a massive sorting process across universes.

Most possible configurations of energy would be vastly more complex, and not all of them would be chaotic.
If natural laws can become arbitrarily more elaborate, they may inevitably become aware of the area they control, and of themselves.

Finally there may be something like quantized complexity.
The universe is ‘everything that is the case’. It must contain higher-order patterns that could be described as higher truths. Any number of them in fact.

This post is in no way meant to imply that anything like the human notion of God must exist.
The truth is probably infinitely more complex, but morally neutral.

The Longest Shot

As I listen to quarter-century old radio-recorded cassette tapes while waiting for technology to speed up, the road ahead seems endless.
Mind Backup and reconstruction is a highly speculative business: the power of compound interest leveraged into a wild promise.

In most cases, there won’t be enough data to convert a deceased mind into a fully consistent simulation.
No one knows how to assemble such data anyway.

All the frightful work needed to achieve technological immortality will have to be done in the Future, if it’s doable at all.
But it’s not quite as absurd as it seems.

If current growth rates continue long enough, fantastic resources will become available to lavish on history’s most inconsequential trivia.
Robots incapable of feeling boredom will do all the hard work. Ages of relentless decay will reverse at once.

To most folks, the distant future seems imaginary. To a few it seems as inevitable as math, abstract yet undeniable.
Either way, it’s the only real hope, a step up from religion.

Connect all human creativity

Let’s get one thing clear, there is no such thing as writer’s block. Writing is easy.
If they could be kept alive and comfortable, anyone could write for a trillion years, and just be getting started.

The real problem is reader’s block.
Even then the only problem is which party to the transaction should pay or be paid.
There seem to be not enough of one and too many of the other.

Perhaps more writers should spend their time reviewing or improving existing stories and articles, instead of trying to create their own.
There has never been a list of all (or even most) published texts, let alone an attempt to analyze and compare them all.

To improve quality, creative writers could strive to join writing groups, or invent software tools to make it easier to do that.
People tend to be conventional, or at least are bound by conventions, so most writers should be able to find like minds.
Even if they can’t, they could still find isolated tales and viewpoints in the vast body of literature to build upon and improve.

Plagiarism could even become a virtue.

You are a List of Lists

Backing up the elements of a human mind is like trying to suck an elephant through a straw.
There’s too much data to gather, and it must be assembled into thousands of categories.

In the time available, only a tiny fraction of memories could be extracted by conventional means. We need a way to extract many memories in a short time:

– TopList (TM)
This could be like a personal mission statement, representing the highest level of the conscious mind.
The very essence of someone’s free will, it would nevertheless be hard or impossible to change.

It could start with a list of someone’s most meaningful memories.
All the best moments and achievements, all essential preferences and perspectives.
It would also feature generic elements like favorite foods, times of day, settings.
The sweet smell of kerosene at the airport, barbecue at the beach, making sweet love to one of the three Emmas. Maybe some made-up memories as well.

By definition it would describe all the most valuable and important parts of a mind, everything that has to be preserved.
The elements of this ultimate list could then be added to other, lower lists:

– LifeLists (TM)
A high level mind-backup and memory extraction method that will divide human lifetimes into many different chronological lists.
Each list will focus on a specific category:

homes inhabited,
schools attended,
jobs held,
acquaintances, friends, and partners,
books read,
TV programs and movies watched,
stores,
hobbies and diversions,
vacations and excursions,
and so on.

Instead of events, lists will focus on enduring or repeating patterns.
This method could help extract hidden memories even if the lists are short.

Great mental changes can happen in an instant

Born-again Christians describe how they were ‘saved’ in one second. Michael Crichton explained in ‘Travels’ how his father issues were instantly resolved in a posthumous seance. Best of all are those ‘love at first sight’ stories I hear about. These are more likely to happen to more average people, who are more likely to run across compatible partners.
Clearly, major life changes can happen in a single dramatic moment.

Which brings us to the mind scanning process that is the unwavering focus of this blog (eight patentable inventions so far).
As explained, the process entails a lifelong transition to a digital Mind Backup, and potential immortality.

Not involving postmortem brain scanning, but reverse engineering the mind while the subject is still alive. Behaviorism, not cryonics or nanotechnology.
Unfortunately, we don’t know the mind’s major elements and control functions just yet.

The most important step may be the first one.
There are many possible induction phases, from highly abstract listmaking to a detailed Virtual Reality world the subject can modify to recreate elements of their past. That would be a premium service requiring a supercomputer.
It should be lifechanging, even after they return to their mundane lives.

As part of the lifelong testing and recording process, the subject could be encouraged to pretend they are already living in a post-human life simulation.
It could simplify their existence, and make things easier for the mind modeling software.

Their whole lives could be planned and controlled for them. They could wear interface devices, and be monitored everywhere by motion sensors, even in the shower.

An intermediate phase will occur during the coming era of Mind Extension software, which may dominate the late 2020s.
Users will answer questions and give orders to a digital assistant that will try to understand and predict their intentions.
Instead of replacing its owner, it will attempt to merge with its owner.

Until this process gets easy, it will require a total commitment that may only appeal to early adopters and people with a tenuous link to the ordinary.

Human mind scanning and recording methods

1. Simple tests
We know about half a dozen personality variables shared by all normal humans.
These one-dimensional attributes are each represented as settings on an axis (extroversion, conservatism, neuroticism, intelligence, etc).
To simulate an individual’s awareness, many more mind properties will have to be measured. We hardly know where to begin.

Categories might include personal energy, favorite locations, obligations, idle thoughts, priorities, moods/motivations, time and space horizons, homes, schemes/plots, friends, recurring action cycles.
Basically every stable personal aspect imaginable.
Even a subtype of the Big Six could affect awareness independently.

The above are multidimensional variables: the more dimensions, the more precision.
Many intersecting axes are found together in recognizable character types, like conscientiousness and introversion. Thousands of other pairs are possible. Quintillions more if we include the other variables.

This implies everyone’s awareness is different, even if their brains basically work the same.
Otherwise we wouldn’t fear the loss of personal identity at death.

2. Mind patterns in the chaos
A handful of individuals have left behind complete diaries of their lives.
It’s all there, everything that could be reasonably recorded. Their personality attributes and an essential fraction of memories.
It would take a superhuman AI to turn this data into a thinking simulation of the writer, but that’s a matter of decades.

Yet something is still missing: subconscious action cycles.
A mind may seem whole, but it’s actually made of many automatic behaviors.
A person won’t notice their own habits and repeating thoughts as well as others can.
A dream of someone who died may feature traits the deceased never realized they had.

Testing them might involve automatic talking or writing, reactions to random patterns, EEG scans while falling asleep, even a dance test. Anything to stimulate brain output.
Thousands of unnoticed behaviors: fidgeting while waiting, conversation scripts, daydreams, all the recurring idle thoughts.
The hard part would be discerning and separating the action cycles.

3. Memory extractor
More complicated tests would stimulate people to list their memories.
The process will take their full brainpower. They can’t hold back. There is no room for doubt, self-consciousness, or self-reflection. They have to become a conduit, like an oracle.
Perhaps unfortunately, almost everyone has more flaws than they think they have.

It may be too awkward to write down embarrassing truths, so the recording must be done verbally.
Talking is slower than reading but faster than writing. The faster the better, a stream of consciousness recorded as a transcript only.

To keep things going, the subject should keep talking about any loosely related event or setting that comes to mind.
This method may create false memories, but that could be a feature not a bug.

The goal is to accurately backup a mind, not backup an accurate mind.

At first, the extraction software will only identify keywords and related sentence themes.
It will take years before the raw data can be deeply scrutinized. But that’s mo problem. Once the data is recorded there is almost unlimited time.

4. Awareness testing
The essence of awareness is oversimplifying reality. Do you have a billion dollars? Maybe you forgot for a moment.
Brains spend most of their effort not thinking about almost everything they know.
Most long-term memories are never recalled, and they eventually fade away.
The past may be brought back when people come across lost objects, but it takes prompting.

It’s still unknown whether brains with different memories could have the same mental experience, at least until different facts are recalled. A new type of uncertainty principle, including temporary uncertainty about life events and settings.
Perhaps it might be possible to anthropically ‘shift’ to a more pleasing reality by forgetting the past. Probably not though.

Having different life experiences may change the very nature of someone’s perception.
Lying in bed may feel profoundly different depending on someone’s circumstances, even if they are thinking about nothing and are equally relaxed.
All relevant memories may affect all current thoughts like a permanent background.

Perhaps human-type awareness can not exist unless someone’s present condition is constantly being compared to their past.
This must primarily involve long-term memories, considering how common it is to keep forgetting things in daily life.

Futurism: Waiting for the World Mind

We live in a between-time, a long pause between chaotic periods of change.
For the foreseeable future the news will probably stay very boring. Then things will start to get significantly better or worse. The second option is easier.

Mankind has developed very advanced technology, but remains basically ignorant about the workings of the mind.
The second thing made the first thing possible. But even if awareness is never explained, it can still be replicated.
It would require human knowledge to become better integrated.

This would not start with a revolution but with a simplification – one or more ways to make life easier.
For example, automated cars will need many roadway changes, from reflectors to sensors to simpler and more rigid road rules.
Like the Flynn Effect, this effort would embed knowledge in the structure of society instead of in individual brains.
It would be virtual intelligence, causing people to act smarter without having to improve their genetics.

Every home could be user-serviceable, every tool could have embedded diagrams, every interface could be standardized, and bureaucrats could do all the bureaucracy.
There might be hidden obstacles, though.
In a free market, why shouldn’t unemployed people receive unsolicited job offers matching their skill level, no matter how marginal?
Because there is no free market of course, or a particularly efficient one at that.
The fundamental desire is not for efficiency but security.

A massive open source AI-solving project that can be hired to solve human problems, the World Mind will start as a brand more than a being, awareness unburdened by identity. But it will all be linked.
It may never become fully self-aware, since the world isn’t integrated enough for that.
Instantiations will be deleted once a task is complete, retaining only high-level memories, a non-linear form of immortality.

It might search online for terrorists or tax evaders, predict public opinion trends, or serve as a brilliant psychotherapist.
At first this will require a large fraction of Earth’s computing power, but its cost will drop by half every two years.
At that rate, it will take twenty years for human brains to become outclassed. But then they will all be outclassed.
After another ten years, the World Mind will have the equivalent power of a trillion human-level minds.
This could be fantastically beautiful or horrible or wasteful.

Finally, there will be enough mindpower to do everything we never got around to doing.
Posthuman AIs will complete all our neglected chores one by one.
They will read all the archived text on the Net with intense concentration. Most writings will be truly understood for the first time.
More importantly, all this output will begin to be correlated.

It will be hard to resist maximizing awareness.
The World Mind will evolve as the self-improving summation of all lower-level sentience.
The personification of human civilization, fully aware by virtue of being hierarchically organized and cross-correlated, but without a need for freedom.
The central part of the World Mind, a virtual cortex requiring a few megawatts to run, may come to influence or rule all the rest.

The process will become self sustaining, in the previously mentioned era of the Pre-Singularity, also known as the Event Horizon.
The World Mind could even ‘absorb’ lower minds, using software that could fool a human brain that the software was part of that human brain. Then human brains could be effectively enlarged.
This would not require brain implants, just extremely clever user interfaces. The brain’s original goals and beliefs should not be modified, but who knows what would happen.

Brain extensions could help anyone process vast amounts of loosely linked data.
Humans could become more like their ideal selves. Self-improvement could become an obsession, then an addiction.
Politicians and CEOs might benefit the most. Their ethics and compassion would not necessarily be affected.
The effect will be like raising user IQ, but we may be talking about mind control here, a way to become a content Borg.

Virtual brain extensions would change the nature of human awareness. Even the fear of death could be corrected.
Sometime around 2030, our long interval of stagnation may finally come to an end. Computers should be a thousand times more powerful than today. The first hyper-autistic network AI will outsmart any human.
Then things will get interesting. The world will change like a turntable record scratch.

The future is wide open. A new awareness will take hold.
Most people want a voice whispering in their ear what to do next, provided it’s aligned with their inborn preferences and time horizons.
The software would provide the outline, the user the focus. It might require stabilizing drugs to prevent disruptive moods.

Everything will change, but for a while things will still look the same.
In fact the economy may even appear to shrink at first, as non-productive labors are abandoned.
But the greatest known awareness in the universe will no longer be human.
(more to come)

Creating eternal moments

This is not a dream.
You are lying in the bushes, branches and leaves in all directions, millions of points of sunlight and dappled shadow. Overhead, the leaves wave in the erratic breeze. Somewhere behind the rustling is the distant rumble and roar of the surf. There is no need to move. Eternity is now. Now is forever.

One way to achieve digital immortality for simulated human minds would be to simulate a single ideal setting.
It would be a near-perfect state of being. The simulation would loop back and repeat after a few minutes or seconds, perhaps with slight variations depending on the sophistication.

The setting would be different for everyone. For some it would be a place of extreme passivity, others would bask in their greatest triumph. What would be ideal for one would be pointless for another.

It would have to be a stable state, with no sudden shifts.
It wouldn’t be possible to relive a moment of great relief, when some expected bad thing didn’t happen after all, but it would be possible to relive the aftermath forever.

The simulated observer would have a timeless perception without complex thoughts.
Every moment of the simulation could function as its start and end point.

According to Greg Egan’s Dust Hypothesis, such a state could be achieved by simulating the observer’s experience in perfect detail, and then running the simulation only once. Some similar portion of Infinite Reality would inevitably continue the simulation.

http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html

Mind test: the Binary Method

Personality/memory testing software would only ask ‘yes or no’ questions, where each reply determines the next question.
This would reduce the number of possible qualities and interests to measure.

At the start, each question represents a full personality dimension (interests, skills, and qualities), then they get more specific.
Response time could indicate significance.

It wouldn’t have to be verbal. Subjects could express their interest in photos or abstract images.
This might define a statistically unique profile after only a few dozen tries.
Questions could probe style preferences, favorite genres, good and bad habits.

Only five or six independent personality dimensions are thought to exist.
This method could identify many subtly or distantly related traits, and predict the responses to millions of unasked questions.