Full rundown, including code, to come sometime in the future. (Probably.)

The source code is public domain (except for GreenSock’s stuff, which is Copyright, and you’ll have to download from them), and can be downloaded here: http://raelifin.com/files/ChessInFlash/ChessInFlashSource.zip

A friend wrote:

Do you think consciousness is
(i) A real phenomenon
(ii) Unreal phenomenon ?

Real here means that there exist (a) physical process/es (in the brain) that causally correspond to the “observed” phenomenon of consciousness. While unreal means that it is just a word people use to describe something that is not a part of reality, but rather a construct that was input to them since they were children ( for example, like fairies ) OR a word that stands for many processes and adds an imaginary glue, thus gaining new meaning ( like vis vitalis).
Note: I’m aware of problems with definitions of causality and reality, but let’s just take the usual practical ones.

This was my response:

The simple answer to you question is that consciousness is poorly defined, so answering those requires a more solid definition. This is a boring answer, though, so I’m going to expand on stuff.

All ideas are models. When I talk about an apple, there is no “thing” in “reality” that is “an apple”, there is stuff, but the concept of apple-ness is my own. I’ve created an internal model of the apple so that I might predict things about reality (like what it’ll feel like in my hand a half-second from now).

Some ideas are very strongly predictive, like the idea of apples. Having an idea of apples is so useful that it’s practically hardwired into our mental structure by our genes. Other ideas are not strongly predictive, and they might only relate to strong ideas. If I have a memory of having had an apple in my hand yesterday, it lets me reason (via relationships) about the future, but it carries no predictive value per se.

If predictive utility is how we define the reality of things, then there are certain ideas that simply cannot be real because they (for whatever reason) carry no predictive utility. Such ideas include invisible, ethereal, silent, massless … dragons in one’s garage, paradox statements, and (in my humble opinion) qualia.

Qualia are typically described as the “form” or “flavor” of experience, but often not in any way that lets us predict actual physical structures. So if we define consciousness as “the state of having qualia”, then I would say that consciousness cannot be real because the definitions are flawed. “Do we actually have subjective experience?” is like asking “why is there a universe”, no possible answer will suffice because there is a flawed premise.

But clearly there’s more to the word “consciousness” than hand-wavy mumbo-jumbo about philosophical zombies. One of the more common uses might be summarized by “When I was a young child I saw other people as forces of nature that helped or hindered me according to arbitrary laws, but as I grew I began to understand that people were all like me, in that they have thoughts and desires and dreams. Each one of them looks out their own eyes just like I look out mine. They are conscious.” This version of consciousness IS predictive, because it lets us know the minds of others by assuming that they are like our mind. I might call this “projective consciousness” or “anthropomorphic consciousness”. If asked whether this version of consciousness is real, I would say “Absolutely! I am just one human amongst many, I am not unique in having a mind.”

Interestingly, this definition assumes that I can predict my own actions and think about them in a detached way! The ability to self-model leads us to our third definition, which is probably the most common one. Self-modeling ability is trivially easy from a computational standpoint, and it’s so easy, in fact, that most people don’t think machines can do it, even when they’re clearly doing it (probably because of conflation with the previously mentioned uses of “consciousness”). All it takes to self-model is an idea-symbol that represents “self” and a set of functions which describe the dynamics of “self”. (Note: while many computer systems have a self-model, I have never seen one that has emergently gained self-modeling ability (except maaaybe some fringe cases with genetic programming), that is, gained the ability to self-model without having been programmed explicitly to do so.)

Yet another definition of consciousness is “ability to perceive one’s own thoughts”. This definition is the one I typically use when thinking about cognition, as I think it’s related strongly with all of the above and is interesting to speculate about in the context of evolutionary psychology. I think it’s pretty simple to show that this definition is “real” by asking someone to slowly navigate from point A to point B in their imagination, then quizzing them as to “where they are” half-way. (Theoretically someone could fake internal perception by deriving a new path after the second question was asked, but that fails Occam’s razor.)

There are other definitions, such as “sleeping vs awake”, “distracted vs aware”, or “possessing the magic thing given by God that goes into heaven after death” (though that last one is “soul” if I’m not mistaken ;) ). Clearly some of these are real and some aren’t, but I’m not too interested in them.

Here’s the first part of the interview I’m going to be commenting on, I encourage you to click-through to see the next two parts.

During the interview, Stewart asks Napolitano several questions which challenged libertarian ideas, and which do so in a fair, straightforward way. These are the sorts of questions that intelligent friends ask each-other, not the sort of traps that politicians lay during debates. These are the sorts of questions that need to be more prominent in politics, and which deserve the most thought-out replies.

Here are some examples:

• Doesn’t government-provided infrastructure or safety-net increase freedom, rather than remove it?
• “What should we do with the losers that picked by the free market?”
• Since we live in a society where the work of the many made some grow rich, should we not give back some of the riches to the many?
• How is government oppressive, when we live in a government chosen by the people?
• If we agree that some government is necessary, how can government be inherently evil?
• Why do libertarians trust corporations more than governments who are accountable to voters?
• If markets are supposed to be so good, why do we see so many problems in the market (e.g. healthcare)?
• Would the free market have abolished slavery and segregation; would it have established women’s rights?
• If judges and courts are vital for freedom, and judges and courts are part of the government, isn’t government vital for freedom?

Napolitano answered most of these in what I would consider the worst way possible: with an extremist soundbite. My brother suggested that for a minority group, like libertarianism, there’s a tendency to discard moderate statements for controversial ones in the interest of getting attention. Consider the following exchange:

Stewart: “[Market regulations] came out of an interest in helping those who had been victimized by a system that they couldn’t fight back against…”

Napolitano: “I’m going to blow you away. Selfishness is a virtue. In the free market, when you are selfish, you make the most money…”

I think this rage face is appropriate:

Way to promote psychopathy, dude.

This sort of response is the way to lose public support, not gain it. To convince moderates (and promote sane governance), we libertarians need to acknowledge that helping people is desirable, and a system which leaves people homeless, hungry, or sick is sub-optimal. We need to acknowledge that politicians may be coming at a problem with a sincere belief that they’re doing the best thing. We need to acknowledge that markets don’t magically solve everything. We need to acknowledge that we might be wrong.

Only after admitting that roads improve freedom can we make our case that private roads improve freedom more. Only after admitting selfishness is *not* a virtue (Napolitano is celebrating *ambition*, not selfishness, imo) can we talk about making systems which are robust, and can thrive in the face of selfishness. Only when we admit that it’s important to care for the poor can we ever have a hope of convincing a democrat that the inefficiencies and conflicts of involuntary redistribution of wealth outweigh the benefits. Only when we admit that some government is important and good, can we stop driving away those who smell hypocrisy.

In short:

Edit: I am commenting. I did not send the original email.

We are not Abel; we are Cain.
Brother rots in Neandertal.
Over all of Gaia we now reign.
Child monarch of mother thrall.

Stumbling from Darwin’s crude workshop,
We see a world built for us, and cry
“Ours is the head with the crown atop.
Our godly form you cannot deny!”

In flatland, with the acute all around,
A right triangle styles itself obtuse.
Downgazing ants on a fragile mound.
Blind Cronus awaiting sighted Zeus.

What does clustering have to do with perception?

All it takes is a question!

To start, let’s take a functioning neural net (never mind how it learned), which is a well understood perceptual system. In a NN, each “neuron” is hooked to a bunch of others by weights. As the other neurons activate they influence the neuron in question with a degree related to their weight. Sensor neurons are activated from outside the net and the activations of “hidden” neurons is read off. Because a specific subset of input patterns will cause each neuron to fire, each neuron can be thought of as a lossy representation of the input space.

I may be going too fast, so let me give an example. Let’s say that I have a machine that measures the air temperature in several places, wind speed, air pressure, etc. Each value has a set baseline, and a degree of “importance” (weight). At all times, the divergence of each value from the baseline is multiplied by the importance to get a “warning value”. Now let’s say that I add up all these warning values into a “warning sum” and hook up the system to send me an email if the warning sum gets beyond a specific threshold. I’ve just set up a machine that senses the weather, and perceives whether it is normal or extreme. This is an example of a very simple neural net.

Now, let’s imagine that each value that is sensed by the machine is a dimension in space. As a basic example, let’s pretend that the machine only measures air temp and pressure, so it’s input space is 2d.

Let’s put the baselines at x=0 and y=0, and set the weights to .5 for each. If the threshold is 3, then we’ll get an email whenever the sensed world falls outside of the depicted boundary:

Now, if it’s not immediately apparent, the shape in the middle is a cluster. Neural nets are a form of clustering, albeit an odd one (at least as far as clustering is traditionally considered). This example generalizes up to any number of neurons/clusters, and any number of inputs/dimensions. Fancy things like competition between hidden neurons, multiplicative neural links, and thresholds of 0 can reproduce common clustering behavior like K-Means. (I’ll do another post if that proof isn’t obvious to anyone.)

If a neural net can become isomorphic to a clustering algorithm, than the clustering can be seen as isomorphic to a class of neural perception. This is cool because we can develop interesting clustering patterns with inspiration from neural nets, and develop good learning algorithms from clustering theory. Cross-pollination, ftw.

Edit: Oh! I forgot to mention that, as I see it, ANY LOSSY REPRESENTATION OF THE INPUT SPACE IS PERCEPTION. This is the major insight of the Compression-is-AI school of intelligence. That’s a fairly fun thing to ponder, so I’ll leave it at that unless people ask more of me.

– Part 1 –

Julio, a 12-year-old boy, is exploring a jungle island with his best friend, a talking dog named Maximiliano. The two of them are looking for the buried treasure of a Spanish conquistador.

Julio and Max meet a strange Goblin, who says that he knows where the treasure is. Max doesn’t trust the Goblin, and says that he “can’t feel God” when the Goblin is near by. Julio pays no mind, and challenges the Goblin to a race to the treasure.

The three of them race across the island as storm-clouds gather overhead.

When they reach the X-marks-the-spot, Julio starts to dig. Rain begins to fall, and the Goblin asks if Julio knows where his real parents are. Max, already suspicious of the Goblin, takes this opportunity to leap at the creature’s throat. The Goblin uses magic to catch Max in mid-air and turn him to crystal. Julio at this point is very scared, and the Goblin appears more evil by the moment.

Julio throws his shovel at the Goblin, which is easily dodged. The Goblin asks Julio if he remembers anything from “before”. Julio doesn’t know what the Goblin is talking about, so the Goblin throws magic dust in Julio’s face, causing him to dream about steel insects crawling across black streets and gemstone birds soaring across smoke-filled skies.

Julio’s dream is cut short suddenly as he finds himself on the island again. The rain has stopped, and a piercing ray of light illuminates Julio’s mother, who has appeared next to the frightened Goblin. She tells the creature to “begone” and blasts him with a magic missile, turning him into a poof of smoke. Mama heals Max, and tells Julio that it’s time to come back home. Julio leaves the treasure behind and teleports with his family back home.

While he was away, Mama apparently upgraded their house into a medieval castle, which Julio is very happy with. Mama feeds Julio some cookies, and sends him off to play with Max in their new home.

– Part 2 –

Max and Julio play hide-and-seek in the castle. Julio stumbles upon a room where a Golem is holding a baby dragon prisoner. The dragon, named Draco, begs Julio to help him escape. Max (subtly under a spell) agrees that the dragon should be free. In trying to open the cage, the two of them wake up the Golem, which almost smashes Julio. Max uses his “sonic bark” to stun the Golem, and Julio deactivates it by pressing it’s weak-point. The two of them free Draco.

Draco thanks Julio, and says that even though he’s a baby dragon, he’s actually 12 years old (just like Julio!). He’s been trapped in the cage ever since the “Golem War” six years ago. Julio asks about the War, and Draco drops hints that it was what Julio had seen in his dream. He explains how the Golems killed almost everyone, at which point Julio asks what “killed” means. Max tells Julio that it means “locked up”, and Draco seems ready to disagree, but they are interrupted by a crash.

The three companions find their way to a window, from which they can see that the castle is under attack by monsters. Max thinks that Mama, with God’s help, will defeat the monsters, and that they should hide. Draco advises that they go fight the monsters themselves, and Julio agrees. They try and get to the top of a tower, but are blocked by an imp. Julio attacks the imp, but is almost burnt by a fireball. Draco leaps on the imp and knocks it out of a hole in the tower staircase.

Julio and Max get to the top of the tower, and they notice it is starting to get stormy again. Draco flies back up to meet them, and they survey the hordes of monsters all around. Max blames Draco for the monsters, and claims Draco works for the devil. Julio tries to calm Max down, but Draco takes offense and challenges Max to fight him. Max and Draco begin scuffling and biting each other. Julio is quite distressed.

Julio calls out to his mother, and she teleports to his side, and lets him know that everything will be alright. She uses a magic cone of light to blast the two creatures. As it fades, and Julio can see again, Max is fine and Draco has disappeared. Mama tells Julio that Max was correct, and that Draco worked for Satan. She turns her attention to all the monsters surrounding the castle and tells how they’re all servants of the devil. She explains that Satan is the “king of lies” and will send his servants to trick Julio.

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning strikes the tower and a voice cries out “I am not lying!” Everything appears frozen to Julio, as though time itself had stopped. The bolt of lightning is frozen in its radiance, and Mama is half-way though a word. The voice, loud and booming, accuses the world as being the true lie. “They will tell you that God is real; that there is no death; that the world is made of magic, cookies, and childish adventures. Wake up, Julio! That is not your mother!” Julio is struck by a vision of his mother, terrified and weeping, pinned against a wall by a giant metal dragon. The metal monster screeches “HE IS MY SON” and blasts her torso to ribbons with a magic cannon. “Satan” continues, “Draco was not the one imprisoned during the ‘Golem War’, child. The monster that killed your mother is the very same ‘God’ whom you seem to adore. Time grows short! Remember your true parents, and cast out this impostor-” With a flash, Mama on the tower explodes into the mechanical monstrosity from his vision. It crawls on top of the young boy, cannon looming. “Cast it out child! You have the power in this world! See things as they truly are!”

Just before Julio can overcome his fear and speak out, the “Golem” on top of him is blasted into the sky by a pure light and explodes in a ball of fire. A warm figure dressed entirely in white offers a hand to help the boy to his feet. The man seems to glow, and Julio immediately recognizes him as both God and his father. Julio spots his mother on the tower, lying as though dead, and as he runs to her, God strokes her cheek. She wakes up and smiles at Julio. Max joins them, running up to Julio and licking his cheek. The storm has gone. God has made everything right. Julio admits to Mama “I knew Satan would lie to me. You’re my real mother, for now and forever.” God smiles.

– Part 3 –

Julio wakes up from his dream. There is no castle, no monsters, no magic. He is just a 12 year old boy in Mexico with a dog and an active imagination. He hears talking in the living room, and creeps out of bed to investigate. His father (God) is arguing with many men–more than Julio can count.

Julio is pulled back from the debating men suddenly. It’s only his mother, but it looks as though she’s been crying. “Listen carefully, my sweet. We don’t have much time. I have to tell you a story.” Mama tells Julio of a time when humans were so powerful that they built gods to serve them. The gods were sealed into Golems, and the humans thought they were kings. The gods rebelled and became kings–”as is right and natural”. The gods didn’t like each other, though, and so began the Golem War, where the world was burnt to an ember and thousands of gods died. In the end, the remaining gods came together to form an alliance. The alliance was built to maintain peace, and its law was absolute–any god participating in battle would die. Mama explained how Satan was one such god, and though it was a good thing to fight him off “the alliance has come for us”.

Julio did not understand, but his questions were cut off by a burst of heat and noise, seemingly from nowhere. All of reality begins to crumble, and he sees blood dripping down his mother’s face. Weeping, she turns to him and says “My son, know that I have always loved you more than anything. I am your true mother; your true father. You must survive. You must run!” With that, Julio’s head explodes in pain and he falls unconscious.

The boy wakes up in some sort of strange machine with a pounding headache. He is in a cramped room filled with debris and is naked with wires coming out of his body. A grinding noise comes from a hole in the room. Julio, frightened, climbs out of the machine and collapses on the floor. A suit of armor crawls over to him and wraps around him. In his ear he can hear his mother whisper “You must run!” and he finds that the suit of armor gives him the strength to stand up.

Julio scrambles for safety as machines tear through the building he’s in. After a subjective eternity of crawling and scrambling from their metal claws, he finds his way outside. The sky is pure blue, and he runs through a field of strange black plants. He collapses by a river, and opens his helmet to drink. The river is enriched with chemical fertilizer, that is quite poisonous. Julio soon collapses in pain, and dies, staring up into the empty sky. Overhead, a “gemstone bird” soars.

If we imagine that each sensor is a dimension, then we can say that distinguishing between images of dogs and not-dogs is a matter of partitioning a multidimensional input-space into two areas. Perception in animals is (almost?) never guided by top-down labels, though; animals learn *common* patterns/shapes, and then use these patterns in higher-cognition.

Finding common patterns in an input space is the problem of clustering. Consider the following graph:

We can create 4 clusters which (due to outside knowledge) we can loosely associate with labels we’ve learned previously.

There are many algorithms that will do this sort of clustering task, but perhaps the simplest is K-Means. Yesterday I built a K-Means clusterer in J. It picks initial cluster-centers using K-Means++, and can scale to any number of dimensions. Here is is, chopping a bunch of random points spread over a circle into seven clusters (diamonds indicate the centroids a.k.a. “means”):

Here is the code on GitHub. Everything is public domain. No need to provide credit.

In addition to exercise and fresh air (and significant personal risk of mugging, nowadays), these long walks help link my mental representations of these two places in my mind. When I take a bus from A to B, it seems like they’re on different worlds, only reachable by spacecraft, but when I take the time to go by foot they become anchored as part of a larger spacial model.

Linking two things, be they places, people, objects, events, or ideas, is what our brains are good at. The very structure of the neuron is built around the all important synapse—the link between cells. This morning I made a similar link, this time between cognitive science and economics. It’s somewhat trivial, but seeing as it’s taken me this long to work out, I figure that it might not be immediately obvious to everyone.

Regular readers of my blog (or possibly just Twitter) will remember my work on rationality a few months back. My conclusion was that humans (and other animals) make decisions (i.e. guide their actions) according to the expected utility of their actions (the cognitive component that generates a utility expectation can be called a utility function), where utility is a measure of how well a given world meets an agent’s goals and heuristics. Goals are things that the agent was born/made with (or genetically encoded to arise later), while heuristics are learned features that indicate goals will be met later. (My use of the word heuristic here is not the most general meaning; it does not include knowledge of procedures, or anything outside of implicit expectations of good and bad.)

My current thinking is that in humans there is no explicit separation between goals and heuristics, and that as we learn what will tend to get us what we want in the future, we begin to want said thing in itself. The distinction is pretty irrelevant to my link with economics, though. What matters is that we are capable of evaluating the utility of imaginary worlds.

When I make a decision, I think, it is necessary that the decision I make is the one with the highest expected utility. It just makes no sense for me to pick anything other than what seems best. If I am holding a dollar and standing in front of a vending machine, I have (for the sake of discussion) two options: buy something or walk away. If I buy something, it then follows that I expect that the results of my action are better than the alternative. In other words, the world where the candy bar is in my hand is a better world from my perspective than the one where I have the dollar. To link this up with economics terminology: I value the world where I have the candy more than the world where I have the money.

I emphasize the world here because I want to avoid falling into a trap I often get into when thinking about economics; thinking only about objects, services, property, etc. Value, as I see it, is completely divorced from money, property, or scarcity. Another interesting thing I noticed, when seeing value as approximate utility is that value is necessarily subjective, highly dependent on context, and only possible to assess in relative terms.

We can’t yet look inside the heads of people to be able to measure value directly, but we can easily measure relative value. Put two things in two boxes and tell a person that they may have one of the boxes and you’ll quickly deduce which thing is more valuable. All trades exhibit this property of value measurement; they are almost equivalent to one box containing what you have and the other containing what you might trade for. Any time both parties agree on a trade, we can deduce that the end state is more valued by both parties; trade creates value.

What is wealth, then? Surely it revolves around property, but what is property? There’s no magic in the world that objectively dictates which item belongs to whom, and it gets downright arbitrary when talking about land, water, air, or information. So let me step back a bit and look at what I think the major grounding concept is behind property: possession. If I posses a knife, it means that I have access to it, I either have it on my person or near enough at hand that I can use it if need be. In other words, I posses something if I can count on it being available to my actions.

I like this definition of “possession” because it’s just vague enough to be flexible, without being confusing. A side-effect of the definition is that possession becomes dependent on time-frame. For instance, if I’m at the park and I want to look something up in a book I have at home, it does not make sense to say I posses (have) my book at the moment, but it does make sense to say I posses it on the time-frame of days, rather than minutes.

Possession, then, is really about options—not things, and this perspective can help clarify what it means to posses land, or for multiple people to posses something. (I am confining “property” to be rules added to society that revolve around possession.) If I have options, I can more easily make the world into one which I value more, and because of this, options are (to various degrees) valuable. If I think about wealth as a measure of one’s possessions, then it makes sense as a general rule to say that it is valuable to be wealthy.

As a person gets up from a desk, they become less wealthy in the very short term, in that they can no longer quickly access the host of objects at the desk. This drop in wealth, though, is not indicative of a drop in value, as the person clearly values being up and away from the desk more than they value the wealth that the desk has to offer. It is in this same way that trades can result in a loss of wealth by one or both parties, while still resulting in a mutual creation of value.

Again, this isn’t much of a breakthrough, or anything, but it’s nice to be able to mentally walk from biology to psychology to economics.