Me me me vs ...

I see many people who like to be the topic of talks all the time, to be the center of attention. In one word, to be popular. 

I also know few people who, on the contrary to the first group, do not need to be the center of attention. Instead, they seclude themselves from social life. In a subtle way, they see themselves better than the rest, but do not make a show of that.

The first group usually call themselves, in a humorous way, narcissists.

Although they might seem so in the first glance, they are usually somewhere close to the opposite. If Narcissism is characterized by self-love, egotism, and selfishness, I can see it in the second group and more clearly. A person who loves him-self, doesn't need to prove it to someone else, nor needs others' approvals or love (self-love makes him self-sufficient). An egotist doesn't care about people's opinions and a selfish person usually puts himself on a pedestal instead of becoming the subject of talks. He knows better that these sorts of talks in praise of someone, are nothing but absurd.

It might be linked to the difference of introversion/extroversion too. I don't know about extroversion, but one can be introvert by choice. By definition, Narcissism very much suits the second group (mentioned above), and introversion comes with the package.

The curse of consciousness?

Prespeech mind lacks reflective awareness (or what is known as consciousness). With speech there came a dark side, an Achilles' heel if you will: while the positive side of acquiring speech was the ability to get hold of, remember and use experience, the negative side was the anxiety and limbic overinvolvement in acquiring the concepts like death, danger, threat, pain, fear, hunger loss and etc.

Since it was anxiety overload that had to be compensated for, it is easy to identify two distinctly mind-created and mind enhanced danger schemata:

1. Invisible forces or gods, that is, agencies that lend causal coherence to incomprehensible phenomena.
2. Humans, or more precisely alien groups of humans, with their imagined group of intentions as constituting the source of danger.

Simply put: the down side of being equipped with language was an anxiety resulted from the negative emergent concepts that the pre-speech species didn't experience. Gods or concepts as such were created in order to explain the inconsistencies in the scenarios that found meaning through language.

With some adaptations, from The Crucible of Consciousness

Élan vital*

(This post is randomly generated by a text-generating software, character by character)

"Imagine At the border between England and Wales you pass a small town called Abergele. Its railway station has a beautifully kept garden in which, sprawling across the lawn, you are faced with the inscription, set out in small white pebbles: ‘Welcome to Wales by British Railways.’ No one will fail to recognize this as an orderly pattern, deliberately contrived by a thoughtful station-master. And we could refute anyone who doubted this by computing as follows the odds against the arrangement of the pebbles having come about by mere chance. Suppose that the pebbles had originally all belonged to the garden and would, if left to chance, be found in any part of this area with equal probability; we could compare the large number of arrangements open to the pebbles, if distributed at random all over the garden, with the incomparably smaller number of arrangements in which they would spell out the inscription ‘Welcome to Wales by British Railways’. The ratio of the latter small number over the former very large number would represent the fantastically small chance of the pebbles having arranged themselves in the form of the inscription merely by accident; and this would crushingly refute any supposition of this having been the case."**

According to Polanyi, the significance of this type of occurance is because of the quality of orderliness. That's because the probability of some events, if happened randomly, is infinitesimal. It seems improbable that such order be a result of mere accident. He then applies this to the theory of evolution:

"This bears on the theory that the different living species have come into existence by accidental mutations. This can be affirmed only if, first you accredit the distinctive pattern of living beings as exhibiting a peculiar orderliness which you trust yourself to appraise, and second you accept at the same time the belief that evolution has taken place by a vastly

improbable coincidence of random events combining to an orderly shape of a highly distinctive character. However, if we are to identify—as I am about to suggest—the presence of significant order with the operation of an ordering principle, no highly significant order can ever be said to be solely due to an accidental collocation of atoms, and we must conclude therefore that the assumption of an accidental formation of the living species is a logical muddle. It appears to be a piece of equivocation, unconsciously prompted by the urge to avoid facing the problem set to us by the fact that the universe has given birth to these curious beings, including people like ourselves. To say that this result was achieved by natural selection is entirely beside the point. Natural selection tells us only

why the unfit failed to survive and not why any living beings, either fit or unfit, ever came into existence. As a solution for our problem it is logically on a par with the method of catching a lion by catching two and letting one escape."**

On the origin of life there are several hypotheses, from the Primordial Soup (more of a theory than a thesis) to the Electric Spark to RNA world.. . Almost all are based on this small probabilities. Some say the time that it took for life to emerge was so long that makes it less improbable after all. But in the previous example, it still seems improbable that the pebbles write themselves into a "meaningful" sentence after a billion year and the magnitude of order in a sentence is not even comparable to the order in a single cell organism.

*

** The book is about not the origin of life, but personal knowlege.

Written by Pinocchio

After all, it is a "Chinese" room, not a Japanese. What do you expect?

Spaun (or Semantic Pointer Architecture : Unified Network) is a cognitive neural model of a perception-memory-motor system.

"...The model consists of 2.3 million spiking neurons whose neural properties, organization, and connectivity match that of the mammalian brain. Input consists of images of handwritten and typed numbers and symbols, and output is the motion of a 2 degree-of-freedom arm that writes the model’s responses. Tasks can be presented in any order, with no “rewiring” of the brain for each task. Instead, the model is capable of internal cognitive control (via the basal ganglia), selectively routing

information throughout the brain and recruiting different cortical components as needed for each task."

The tasks it can perform are:

1. Digit Recognition, in which a handwriting digit is given to it as an input and Spaun recognizes it with an accuracy well compared to that of humans.

2. Tracing from the memory, Spaun can not only recognize a digit and draw it as an output, it can mimic the style of the input (its font for instance).

3. Serial Working Memory, that is to repeat a sequence of numbers in the same order given to it.

4. Question Answering, it can identify a digits position within a sequence. It is a different task from the  one above in that in the previous task, it only repeats the sequence.

5. Addition by Counting, Spaun can perform mental addition via counting, which might seem an easy task, given a calculator does it pretty easily, but it is done from start to the end by the network (the recognition and probably decoding of the input and the further computation).

6. Pattern Completion,  given a training set such as :

Input: Biffle biffle rose zarple. Output: rose zarple.

Input: Biffle biffle frog zarple. Output: frog zarple.

Input: Biffle biffle dog zarple. Output: dog zarple.

It can generalize the pattern and give the following output to this:

Input: Biffle biffle quoggie zarple. 

Output: quoggie zarple.

I admit this is impressive. But, from a computational semantics point of view, I wonder, if such a model simulates a network with specified neural properties and organizations for understanding and producing language, after training it (the same way a human infant is trained), would it "understand" and produce language (appropriately)?

I came across this paper through Conscious Entities' post which in my opinion, shouldn't be missed. 

Here are some videos demonstrating each task performance by Spaun.

Concept explosion 2045*

I can usually think of a situation in which a concept could have, for the very first time, emerged. Despite trying a lot, I couldn't do it for some abstract concepts such as "knowledge", "thought" and "consciousness", not at least without the scenario ending up implausibly funny.

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I always wonder, have I had other sets of concepts instead of the ones I now have, would my perception of objects and events be different than what it is now? (how would my world be like if I couldn't conceive of "knowledge"?)

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There seems to be a correlation between the number of concepts involved in human life and its complexity.  In the scientific arena, new concepts are created each day. With the limited memory capacity we have, if we were to keep and use all concepts we acquire, we couldn't function mentally. So, prioritization is essential - both in individual and collective scales - or we may end up with a pile of unnecessary, inessential concepts and if our ultimate goal is to understand/define life, with the increasing number of concepts, aren't we making it more impossible? 

Singularity makes sense.

* 2045.com