Thinking machines

Is "thinking" a "computation"? If so, making a computer "think" should be a simple problem of engineering. Almost all popular movies featuring "intelligent machines" make this assumption. Sooner or later, machines with "out-think" us.

What would be another way of seeing this?

As a starting point, let me create an image of a "mind" as local disturbances in meme space. I visualize this "disturbance" as typically not confined to a single brain, but more typically a "wave" spreading through connected minds.

This is an evocative image but the word "meme" is itself a "meme" that suffers greatly from over-use and lack of rigor.  To make the idea more rigorous, I recommend "Surfaces and Essences" by Sandler and Hofstadter.  This gives a more close-up view of how humans "think" and it hints that the "computation" underlying thinking is the analogy. The book is massively documented (perhaps over-documented). Although the authors make no claim to base their observations on some theory of how the brain works (it is a theory of how language works), there is a strong reason to think that analogy plays a large role, as we see this in our "deep learning" machine models that are basically seeking analogies between their inputs and the training set.

What makes human "thinking" difficult to model this way is the fact that ultimately humans are basing analogies on human experience - having things like mothers, ice cream, sex, Mac attacks, stubbed toes and so forth. We have sections of our brains that seem to be dedicated to special cases of analogy seeking, such as vision, language, and recognition of human faces. What's more, all of this is cross-wired and mutually enforcing using an electro-chemical processor with 100 trillion synapses, each of which behaves in a chaotic, quantum-uncertain way, impossible to model in a deterministic way. To make things harder, the whole system behaves in a self-modifying way so that the way a synapse behaves in time t is a function of how the other 100 trillion synapses behaved at t-1. I see this as a massive Schrodinger equation that gives a hint of the process without being much use at predicting anything or even describing a single state that would satisfy the equation at any one time.

But that's not all. Really, the "computation" performed by this wonder between our ears is being done as part of a social network. We cannot utter a single word or understand a single sentence without drawing on thousands of years of forgotten human experience built into the language. This is perhaps a more precise image of our minds being a "disturbance in a meme field". In fact, seen this way, "thinking" is a social process that takes place partly in our heads, but significantly among the minds of connected individuals. You might say that our words are little packages of thinking that have been off-loaded and pre-processed by anonymous individuals long dead. Think of the massive amount of pre-processing packed into the word "set".

The fact that we experience "thinking" as something to do with the "self" is an accident of the way we are "wired up" along with the very useful ability of our minds to hide the details of where our thoughts come from. Wonderful though it is, language is a clunky and error-prone way to share an experience.  I have always thought that dolphins act and share experience much more efficiently using sound. I think a dolphin can say "this is what I see" to another dolphin, or perhaps a dolphin can experience what a group of dolphins is seeing. This impression comes from personal experience with dolphins which is another topic for another day ...

To my mind, the role of the machine in this situation is to greatly enhance the ability of groups of humans to "think" together more rapidly and to "think" about matters that would otherwise be beyond the ability of even very large numbers of well-connected humans*. Our concerns that machines may "replace" us needs to be re-framed as concern that the future version of machine-mediated humanity will be something unrecognizable in terms of today's ideas and assumptions. I believe this has always been taking place but it's happening exponentially faster now. Now, as in the past, the "machine" of society has had a tendency to have little regard to the fate of individual human beings. This doesn't have a lot to do with actual, physical machines. For example, the impersonal machine of the marketplace has a tendency to grind up those with nothing to sell and no money to buy another day of life.

This line of thought goes back to 1969 and comes up again and again in my blog. Most recently, I have been charmed with the image of Indra's Net as a way of picturing the field of the mind. This way of thinking leads me to imagine the self as something not entirely caught up in the body of an individual human. It is tempting to see something of Buddhism in this idea but I think it's much more of a 21st-century concept -- something that would only occur to people who interact intensely all day with "social networks".

----------------------

* "thinking", "attention", "intention" and "action" are all subject to the approach outlined here, but that is perhaps another topic for later.