The Essence of Human Mind

How does brain compute 1 + 1? How does brain store this information and adds another 1 to the result to produce 3. This is what I wonder. Computers mechanically save and calculate operations through electrical current, transistors and capacitors. But brain? I have no knowledge in biology so I cannot tell, but figuring out this basic question could be the answer to artificial intelligence and intelligent machines.

Where does free will come from? How come I can decide to lift my right hand or to write '%' out of nowhere. Did the sum of the overall brain activity tell me to do this, or is the something that creates actions out of nowhere? Sum of overall brain activity has to be predetermined from the sum of brain activity nanosecond before. Therefore that would mean that we do not have free will. But if we do have this 'ability', where does it come from?

Computers do not have this ability of free decision. But can they have it? As previously said, I do not have much knowledge, but something tells me that computer program cannot be programmed to 'think' by itself. Of course the word 'think' is vague, as the great paper 'Imitation game' of Alan Turing shows - terms think, intelligent, machine have to be precisely defined. I do not think that creativity and human like intelligence can be created from silicon chips. The same way chess game of computer against human cannot be won only by brute force of computation thousands of possible steps. There has to be some element of intelligence both in the software and the hardware.

If we look at the power of brain it is many times less than the electrical power of a computer. There is some element that makes the structure of brain intelligent itself. If the intelligent roots and bases of any program or machine are found/created then the result can behave intelligently itself.

If a program is dully programmed then it will behave dully, but when intelligence is created in its structure it will behave intelligently. Question is if it is the same case with hardware. Can we somehow structure hardware so it behaves intelligently? Of course I am here talking contradictory, because software in the end is hardware. Maybe I am talking about the debacle between GOFAI and other approaches to AI.

But I think this is maybe obvious, but to me it is a great reveal I found out - structure itself has to be intelligent in order to produce an intelligent behavior.

But where does intelligence come from indeed? In a great book of Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas R. Hofstadter nicely describes intelligence as the ability to recognize patterns. Of course he goes deeper than that. But I do think that this is the case.

Another question could be what is consciousness? How to know a person is conscious?

Lukas Cerny, 13. 2. 2015

Why is it Powerful to have a Liberal Mind?

I had the idea of coloring my hair to dark red. Everybody looked at me like I am an idiot. I know I will not have the guts to do it, but I like the idea of being different than others. Having red hair will make me different, but not in the significant way, or the way I would want to be. Everybody can color their hair to red, but not many can come up with an idea that will change the society; that will form the future. These people are geniuses. No doubt it`s hard to be that, but all of us can start by being more liberal. Liberal?

I can start to cite Oxford dictionary with the meaning of the word liberalism, liberal or liberty, but now I realize that it is better to start off with my own definition of what I feel those abstract terms mean. For me a liberal person is able to recognize wide range of opinions, cultures or lifestyles and comes up with new ideas or expresses his original perception of the world. He is innovative just by the even slightly different, non black-or-white view of a problem. It is the opposite of conservatism; liberalists accept and look up to change, in the stronger words of Steve Jobs “they have no respect for the status quo.”

So I call liberalism a form of mentality, of a certain type of thinking. Liberalists are therefore those responsible for innovations of any kind. Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, Vaclav Havel and thousands of others truly revolutionized the society. Some of them not to a better, but all of them did. These people expressed their ideas that are different. Just the word different signifies the innovation, change. Change, social evolution cannot happen when people think, dress, talk, work et cetera the same.

John Locke, an English philosopher of 17^th century, was one of the first to express the idea that knowledge and individual’s perception is formed only by experience, which originates from senses. There will be a different meaning of an “apple” for me than there is for anybody else in our school, even though it is the same thing. But everybody needs to have some experience with an “apple” to have it a meaning for the individual.

Therefore a school is a place for children to meet all different kinds of concepts. They are taught what numbers are and their meaning and through experience the child builds up knowledge and own perception. If a child does not experience numbers it is impossible for him to even think about it. The same is with ideas. If somebody doesn’t know that there is something like vegetarian movement and isn’t aware of the way animals can be killed in a certain places, it is impossible for him to be aware of this kind of different liberal style of life.

With this hopefully not boring and long philosophical essay I want to say how the liberality of school is important for a development of an intelligent and innovative person. The more a person knows, the more he knows that he does not know much. But also the more he is aware of different opportunities and concepts and his understanding widens. Innovations and ideas come only from experience. Isaac Newton wouldn’t have thought of the gravity, if an apple had not fallen on his head J.

As a conclusion I would like to appeal on students to explore different kinds of ideas; to learn different things, from diverse sources. That is where intelligence comes from. I am glad to feel that Nový PORG has definitely broadened my knowledge and perception and that with other students and teachers we form a liberal community.

Lukas Cerny, 26. 8. 2014

Basic Questions of Artificial Intelligence

source: http://www.linternaute.com/cinema/film/dossier/robots-au-cinema/6.shtml

I am reading a book The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence (Keith Frankish and William M. Ramsey, 2014) and I would like to shortly write about some interesting ideas I came across in this text.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a relatively new field of study and research. It's aim is to create intelligent systems and programs. That means systems capable of rational thinking and reasoning. This may sound straight-forward, but it's a research where more than one discipline have to combined. AI research includes and combine subjects as neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, computer science, engineering, mathematics etc. There are many ways to look at AI, many potential uses and questions that have to be answered.

There are two basic directions to go in terms of creating AI. The symbolic AI is based on theory that intelligent system can be created within the capabilities of today's computer and programming languages, within the rules of today's computations. It's just necessary to find the way of how to create it. The other trend is based on imitation of human brain. Instead of computer units, we have to try create/imitate neural nets, with a basic units of neurons. This trend is referred to as connectionism. 

Either if it's connectionism or symbolic AI there are abilities the system has to have. These abilities are the fundamental questions of AI. One of the most important capability is reasoning. An intelligent system needs to be able to reason what he is doing. It needs to know and have reasons for its decision to be made and the output. The basic idea of any program is that it reacts to certain inputs (stimulus) and creates an output. The imitation of neuron can be represented by the McCulloch-Pitts unit, where we have m-inputs x each with a weight of w and their sum creates the output of this unit (neuron).

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron

The phi function is a transfer function (unfortunately I don't have enough knowledge to justify and comment on these equations, so I will just cite what the description of the transfer function is).

"In engineering, a transfer function (also known as the system function^[1] or network function and, when plotted as a graph, transfer curve) is a mathematical representation, in terms of spatial or temporal frequency, of the relation between the input and output of a linear time-invariant system with zero initial conditions and zero-point equilibrium.^[2] With optical imaging devices, for example, it is the Fourier transform of the point spread function (hence a function of spatial frequency) i.e. the intensity distribution caused by a point object in the field of view."

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_function

So now, we would have a machine that receives inputs, but has to create the correct reasonable outputs. That means that we have to create a machine that is intelligent and based on some knowledge rationally decides how to act. But how do we represent this knowledge? If we have a e.g. medicine robot that diagnoses a patient, he has to a great knowledge to produce a decision that would doctor deduce logically. Having algorithms for all the procedures a medicine robot would have to proceed before it reaches a decision would be inefficient, therefore we have create a logically based program.

In terms of knowledge there is another crucial question. Programs can read on the internet what does word "good" mean in thousands of articles. But after all, machine cannot think of the word good abstractly. It cannot know what it actually means and represents. By creating a machine with the human level of intelligence, that could think abstractly, logically and rationally think we would make what is called strong AI. 

There is a way how to represent knowledge, so far that we know of. We can make list of concepts (e.g. good, beautiful, charming, evil) and link these concepts. Therefore a machine receives inputs and can logically decide based on the connections and links each concept has. Mathematical operations can be used to produce a logical output. There is  fuzzy logic, where truth and false isn't strictly based on 0 and 1, but a value can obtain truth value in range of 0 to 1 (e.g. 0,75 true). Other operation is propositional calculus, which can transfer human language to mathematical logic propositions. 

"In mathematical logic, a propositional calculus or logic (also called sentential calculus or sentential logic) is a formal system in which formulas of a formal language may be interpreted to represent propositions. A system of inference rules andaxioms allows certain formulas to be derived. These derived formulas are called theorems and may be interpreted to be true propositions. Such a constructed sequence of formulas is known as a derivation or proof and the last formula of the sequence is the theorem. The derivation may be interpreted as proof of the proposition represented by the theorem."

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_calculus

One of the most important parts of AI is machine learning. In history it was thought that programs could always work only the way they are programmed, therefore the can't generate something new and creative. But machine learning changed this statement. In 1959 Arthur Samuel created a checker playing program that was learning. After a while of playing he couldn't beat it.

My idea of machine learning is this. I would think of it as if of children. When they are born, they have few instincts (algorithms) they are driven by, and through out childhood they are learning thanks to basic human senses: sight, hearing, touching. If we could make a machine learn this way, just by having parts ("organs") for receiving input and in some way recognizing the meaning of it and learning from it, we would have a system that is self-learning and it would a complete imitation of a human. 

I find it absolutely incredible just to trying to think of a way how could machines think. How could they actually know what "good" means. How could they learn. This article was based on the book mentioned in the beginning. It is a book containing many essays and texts from top universities professors on AI and looks at every aspect of AI. 

Lukas Cerny, 7. 6. 2014