Agent Plus Environment

Meandering along a street in Georgetown recently, I looked out at the throngs of people, walking in pairs and groups and singly, ethnicities as varied as their unseen motivations in walking out that day. I saw them, and felt apart; not disconnected or of some different species, an outsider looking in, but in the way of feeling that I was more self-aware at that moment. A single cell in a much larger organism, looking out and seeing the workings of all other cells. It was a knowing that I could see us all, self-organizing sacks of meat composed of so many tiny molecules, marvelously complicated and simple at the same time.

Hierarchies of behavior, heuristics for selecting actions, emotions and motivations influencing them all. Somehow self-aware, conscious of being, conscious of our consciousness. And I, in that moment, more conscious than the rest, looking at the curve of the road, the brick buildings squeezed up beside white-painted shops and little restaurants, the cars and trucks speeding by, and the people, all blissfully ignorant of everything at my level of awareness.

It was a feeling of awe. If I were a religious being, perhaps I would say I felt the hand of a god, touching me then, showing me the vast oneness of the universe. But I am not, and so I interpreted the feeling otherwise: not a part of any great unity, no; merely one agent existing in a world and conscious of that existence. Marveling at that existence — that any clump of matter could build a society, could conquer the land and sea and air, could walk briskly down a cement sidewalk thinking or not thinking of the weird complexities of the animal brain that made any of these accomplishments possible. That we could organize ourselves such that societies are possible, and so are streets, and restaurants, and cars.

Sometimes it strikes me like that: The realization that all we are, all we ever are, are clumps of molecules bumping around. We have motivations, emotions; we have what feels like intentionality and we speak to each other, creating stories and lies and truths. But we are not special. We have no meaning. The most marvelous thing of all is that we have no more meaning than the simple biologically-inspired, behavior-based robots I created for my thesis. Agents, existing in and interacting with a world. Fascinating, brilliant agents.

Moments like these, wondering at how any of us can exist and marveling at how we do and are conscious of it, I know I picked the right thing to study. That I can be here, writing about the meanings we create and believe, is stupefying and wonderful.

Rock on

Are you familiar with perceptual control theory? If you aren’t, the basic idea is this: People are not rocks. As Philip Runkel puts it,

“Living creatures behave very differently from lifeless things. Unlike a rock, a human does not just sit until something bumps it.”
– Philip Runkel, “Casting Nets and Testing Specimens,” pg 75

The idea is, organisms and agents and people get a bunch of different sensory inputs. They have some internal standards for what they want that set of sensory inputs to be like — some desired state of the world. The difference between how they want the world to be and what the world is actually like drives what they do — what we see as behavior.

The reason this is appealing to me? Perceptual control theory (PCT) says we’re not just input-output machines. Behavior is goal-directed and purposeful.

It’s a useful theory if you want to figure out why people are doing what they do and how to avoid or mediate conflict. Everyone has internal standards that they’re trying to control. As Runkel says,

“[M]ost of us very often act as if we expect other people to behave like rocks. And when we act toward other people as if they were rocks or blankets or typewriters or teacups, we make unending trouble for ourselves. It is true that people do have some features in common with rocks and typewriters. There are, however, important differences between living and nonliving things that most of us overlook time and time again, and to our sorrow.”
– Philip Runkel, “People as Living Things; The Psychology of Perceptual Control,” pg 14

If you want to learn more, I’ve found you a nice list of articles, an informative Less Wrong post a friend linked me to, a comprehensive website, and Google.

And yes, talking about PCT really just was my excuse to share those lovely quotes from Runkel.

Your expectations define your perceptions

It’s raining.

Fat, corpulent water globules cascade from the sky. Plop, plop. A drop, and a few of its compatriots, dribble down the inside of your collar. They’re cold. Wet, and unpleasant. The drops slither down your neck.

“Take my cloak,” he [Lord Golden] suggested.

“It would only get as wet as the rest of me. I’ll change into dry things when I get back.” [Fitz]

He didn’t tell me to be careful, but it was in his look. I nodded to it, steeled myself, and walked out into the pouring rain. It was every bit as cold and unpleasant as I expected it to be. I stood, eyes squinted and shoulders hunched to it, peering out through the gray downpour. Then I took a breath and resolutely changed my expectations. As Black Rolf had once shown me, much discomfort was based on human expectations. As a man, I expected to be warm and dry when I chose to be. Animals did not harbor any such beliefs. So it was raining. That part of me that was wolf could accept that. Rain meant being cold and wet. Once I acknowledged that and stopped comparing it to what I wished it to be, the conditions were far more tolerable. I set out.

— Fool’s Errand, Robin Hobb

Keep it in perspective

Keep what in perspective? Well, everything, but particularly the bad things, the frustrating things, and the irritating things. So it’s raining. So you cut your finger slicing potatoes. So it’s ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit and humid. You are in some set of circumstances and you wish to be in some other set of circumstances. You wish to be dry. You wish your finger didn’t hurt. You wish to be cool and comfortable without drops of sweat sliding down your neck.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world where wishes change the world’s physical properties. We have limited control over our environments. We have slightly more control over our reactions to our environments.

“Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes that see reality.” —Nikos Kazantzakis

What you expect significantly influences how you will perceive your circumstances. The thing is, a lot of times, we don’t explicitly set out our expectations. You leave the air-conditioned building with the continued implicit expectation that you’ll be cool and comfortable, and when that blast of muggy, sticky air hits you, it hits you twice as hard because you’re expecting something else.

What can you do about this? Try explicitly setting up your expectations. It may help prevent the disappointment of being wrong (and feeling unpleasant). Instead of thinking “Aaugh, I’m getting wet and the rain is cold, why can’t I be warm and dry?” try thinking “Okay, I’m going out in the rain so I’ll be wet and cold. That’s just how rain is.” Keep in mind that this works both ways–sure, you can set yourself up to expect to feel better about your circumstances, but you can also easily set yourself up to expect to feel worse.

As a final note, I’m sharing to a quote I occasionally turn to as a reminder to keep things in perspective, from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (on the subject of pop music):

“Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?”

Are you miserable because of your circumstances, or are your circumstances miserable because of your misery?

Billions and trillions

Step by slow, supercomputed step, we approach singularity.

This step: Two massively parallel cortical simulations, run at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs by Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, Steven Esser, and Dharmendra Modha of the IBM Almaden Research Center, and Horst Simon of the aforementioned labs–these are the guys who previously simulated at the scale of mouse and rat cortices. They used a Blue Gene supercomputer (with a whopping 456 CPUs and 144 TB of main memory–just wait, ten years from now I’ll look back on this sentence and laugh at how little computing power and memory that is). The first, and larger, simulation included 1.6 billion neurons and 8.87 trillion synapses. Human brains still dwarf these numbers: roughly 20 billion neurons and 200 trillion synapses. But it’s a cat-sized step with the complexity and scale of a feline brain.

The first simulation used experimentally-measured gray matter thalamocortical connectivity from a cat’s visual cortex–the simulations neurons were connected in a biologically plausible fashion. Phenomenological spiking neurons, individual learning synapses, axonal delays, and dynamic synaptic channels were all included in the software. The second simulation, with 900 million neurons and 9 trillion synapses, had probabilistic connectivity.

Speed-wise, the researchers report that their simulation runs 2-3 orders of magnitude slower than real-time, when compared to a human cortex. With near perfect weak scaling (doubling the memory resource doubles the model size that can be simulated), human-scale models may be just around the corner… well, relatively speaking; the researchers predict it’ll happen in less than ten years. Just as soon as there’s a supercomputer super enough.

The research paper is also available at researcher Dharmendra Modha’s blog [PDF].

But bigger isn’t necessarily better

We may have to wait ten years for human-scale simulations, but we may not need a human-scale platform to be able to build intelligent AI. Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London suggest that bigger may not necessarily be better, when it comes to brains. A lot of complexity can be found even in tiny insect brains. Maybe it’ll be a swarm of honeybee robots that takes over the world!

The complexity of models

For a time, I was convinced that every model out there would not be an adequate model of what a human brain could do because every model out there had to simplify, and thus, that no model or computer software would ever be able truly intelligent until we had the computing power to make an electronic human. I knew there was value to models, but deep down, I retained the conviction that no model, no simulation, no AI would ever manage the same level of complexity or intelligence as a human without being, simply put, a human.

Fortunately, I was relieved of this notion around the same time I started taking Cognitive Science classes: Humans aren’t the only intelligent creatures, the point of a model is not to create the thing you are modeling, all models simplify some aspect (it’s just a matter of choosing which aspects are most important to get exactly right). The world may be its own best representation, as Rodney Brooks so aptly said, but that should not preclude us from simplifying the world to better understand how it works, nor should that, in return, prevent us from trying to simulate ourselves in software.

I, for one, am looking forward to watching the intelligent honeybee robots and the supercomputer human brains band together to overthrow the government.

Beautiful and good to eat

Deep down, maybe we all know we are, every one of us, a unique snowflake. But a lot of people, they don’t want it to be true. They want all the snowflakes to melt together into one big puddle. They want to be able to share their subjective view of the world with everyone else. They want to be able to look at a sunset and know that what it’s like for me to see the sunset is the same as what it’s like for you to see the sunset.

Hey, we all want things we can’t have. And in this case, science says no! Here’s a piece of wisdom from David Brin’s sci-fi novel Kiln People:

“We may use similar terms to describe a sunset. Our subjective worlds often correspond, correlate, and map onto each other. That makes cooperation and relationships possible, even complex civilization. Yet a person’s actual sensations and feelings remain forever unique. Because a brain isn’t a computer and neurons aren’t transistors.

It’s why telepathy can’t happen. We are, each of us, singular and forever alien…”

The amazing thing about people is that this fact doesn’t deter us. We keep trying to share our sensations and feelings with each other. As Virginia Woolf writes in her book Orlando:

For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say “good to eat” when they mean “beautiful” and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.

To be known and understood

Maybe we’re just stubborn. Maybe we’re clinging to a shred of hope that science is wrong and someday, instead of just overlapping with pieces of each other, we’ll be able to know what it’s like to experience the sunset the way someone else does. Here’s a passage from a favorite book of mine, Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss:

“When you’re young, you think it’s going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close—as close as you can get—to another person only makes clear the impassable distance between you. . . .

“But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forgot,” Ray continued. “Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along and we think this is the one. And the whole thing starts all over again. We got through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship—it may not be total understanding, but it’s pretty good—or we keep trying for that perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible.”

“People really want that, what did you say, merging souls? Total union?” [Samson]

“Yes. Or at least they think they do. Mostly what they want, I think, is to feel known.”

What do you think? Is the ultimate human goal to feel known and understood? And if that’s the case, is the illusion of feeling known enough to compensate for never truly being able to share one’s experiences with anyone else?