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.

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.

Let’s get something out of the way. I’m not worried about a robot apocalypse. I don’t think Skynet is going to launch nuclear missiles in a surprise attack against humanity. I don’t think Matrix robots will turn us all into batteries, nor will Cylons kill us and replace us. HAL’s not going to plan our ‘accidental deaths’ and Megatron’s not lurking behind the moon ready to raid our planet for energon cubes. The ‘robo-pocalypse’ is a joke.

There are a host of errors in Saenz’s post, and I said as much on twitter by lumping him in with people like Jeff Hawkins, Monica Anderson (both of whom I admire for their work in the field) as “people who dismiss AI existential threat by citing sci-fi”. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they dismiss the threat while citing sci-fi, as Saenz himself points out that science fiction isn’t even discussing the issue, but I feel like the implication is there: “Oh, that’s nothing to worry about. It’s the product of sensationalist writers trying to tell an action-packed story.”

Yes, it’s the subject of fiction for reasons other than realism, but no, this does not mean the concept itself is unrealistic. (Most stories are incredibly unrealistic in their depictions of robotic minds, of course, but that’s a side-issue.) I’m not sure what logical fallacy that is, but I’m pretty sure it has been identified elsewhere. (Speaking of elsewhere, I’ve talked about this issue before.)

But this post is not supposed to be about Saenz. This post is a response to a very good question I received on Twitter by @notcalledjack:

Well H. sapiens was an existential threat to H. heidelbergensis, but from a larger perspective, was that such a bad thing?

IOW, I question the (applicability of the) word “threat”. :)

This question, if I may be so bold as to interpret, revolves around the concept of evolution. Would it really be such a bad thing if human intelligences were replaced by robotic ones? How would this be any worse than a child outliving a parent?

I believe that humans are goal-pursuing agents. All I mean by this is that we prefer certain worlds and we all work to change the world towards one that we prefer. This preference can come from many places, and can range from being well rested, to having lots of offspring, to making lots of money. I hope this point is totally non-controversial.

A “threat” then is something which has a chance of destroying a preferred world; something which might mess us up and keep our goals from being achieved. To be even more precise, the word threat is typically reserved for things that might cause massive amounts of goal-failure, often involving death.

If I were told that people in the future would wear more glasses than modern people, I wouldn’t care in the least. That’s a trend that doesn’t impact my goals at all. Likewise, if I think about a new species of ant out-competing another species I don’t really care. Trends themselves, including evolutionary ones, are bad things (as far as goals are concerned) and probably not much of a good things, except insofar as we’re curious and like seeing what’s next.

Trends that DO have specific impact on our goals DO have weight when it comes to our choices (i.e. they can be bad or good). A trend where 10% of my cells die each year is incredibly bad for me, and is similarly a threat. A trend where I get a 10% raise every year is good for me, etc.

So, when I think back on Homo heidelbergensis I am not moved. Their deaths were part of history—part of the evolutionary chain—a trend of about as little meaning to me as that of ant species. But if I were put back into that age, and I were a “Heidelberg Man”; my family were being killed by H. sapiens invaders and I was starving because they guarded the hunting grounds, I would surely wish them gone.

If we take the long view, and pretend that humans are tiny aliens living on a distant blue dot, it hardly matters whether a machine comes that kills all organic life. From our distant perch we can say “oh, interesting” and see what happens next. But on the ground, when faced with the end of everything human, including myself and everyone I’ve ever known, I cannot help but call the trend a threat.

The following is a message I sent to a new friend, where we were discussing transhumanism, ecology, and specifically whether the transhumanist perspective is egocentric and not concerned enough about environmental health and sustainability. I’m a neohippy and environmentalist, so I could totally relate to the values expressed, but I wanted to clarify a point about egoism.

As I see things (which may certainly be wrong), there is no objective moral system. (This is what I mean when I say I’m an amoralist or moral non-realist.) What this means, essentially, is that all notions of “good” and “bad” are inventions of people. (Same with “purpose”.) This doesn’t mean that ethics don’t exist–just that they’re entirely subjective (within an ethical context something can be good or bad, but it’s probably healthy to recognize that said context is artificial).

If morals were an objectively true part of the universe, like rocks, it would make sense that so many cultures would have them, as they’d be a natural product of perception. But if ethics are invented, the question then emerges as to why they exist at all. There are plenty of good reasons to suggest that ethics are largely a product of social coercion (implicit in in-group/out-group boxing), but I think it’s pretty likely that there is a basic human desire to look at things in such ways (evolution probably played a large role here).

Regardless of origin, however, I see all people adopt and maintain ethical systems because it is in their (perceived) interests to do so. The foundation of ethics, in other words, are our goals. (I think this is the reason many people stop maintaining ethical guidelines (such as kosher, or the sabbath) when it becomes clear that they’re highly impractical.)

If ethics serve goals (be they aggregate or individual), then it makes sense to me to recognize that no intentional action can be anything other than deluded (i.e. incoherent) or self-serving, as long as we include peace-of-mind as benefit (most charity is based on this, for instance). The anthropocentric, egocentric worldview seems to me not to be bad in any way, but rather the true state of things, after we dig past ethical facades.

Now, to be egocentric doesn’t mean I have to be cruel or destructive. Empathy means that the joys of others can bring me my own joy, and I can be altruistic even fully recognizing how I’m doing it because of my own desire. Similarly, I cherish the earth and life in general, and I seek to protect the biosphere because of that internal goal.

This is another section of the same message. The recipient was interested in the concept of an intelligence explosion, so I figured I’d write something quick and simple. Unfortunately, I am incredibly verbose, and this is the result.

The term intelligence explosion is really referring to a “power explosion”. Power, here, means the ability for an agent (note: agents can be composed of sub-agents; corporations are a kind of agent) to change the world. If one agent can do x, y, and z, then it is more powerful than an agent that can only do x and y. One of the most important aspects of power is increasing one’s own abilities. As an agent becomes more powerful, they’re generally able to make themselves even more powerful. This, like all positive feedback loops, results in an exponential growth of power (an “explosion”).

Power explosions happen all the time on micro-scales. In the game Monopoly, for instance, the winning player has more ability to buy up property from competitors, thus increasing their own revenue. A few times it has also happened on macro-scales, such as when empires form. As I zoom out, it seems clear to me that the rise of humans with tools and culture are themselves a *massive* power explosion. (The Quaternary Extinction is evidence of this.)

Power explosions are limited or halted by various factors, depending on the context. The positive feedback loop of population growth is slowed/stopped by limited resources, for instance. As history and various models will show, however, nearly all limiting factors can be bypassed through sufficient knowledge
(this is what I think of as the “no true scarcity” theorem). Knowledge, then, is a kind of meta-power that can bypass normal limits. The power explosion of human civilization has been as big as it has been largely due (I think) to culture being a storage-vat for knowledge (pre-cultural people (which I’m sure many folks would just as soon not call people (though why an intelligent ape isn’t a person is beyond me)) lacked a good way to accumulate knowledge across time).

As powerful as culture has been in facilitating bypass on limits to power growth, there is one major limiting agent remaining: intelligence. As much as humans have grown more intelligent over the ages (and I think they have), we’re still mostly as smart as we were a few thousand years ago. The rate at which we can learn is not meaningfully higher.

This is due to the incredible complexity of our intelligent bits, but we’re on the cusp, I think, of understanding intelligence to the point where we can apply our power towards making ourselves smarter (IMO primarily through the creation of intelligent machines, but I recognize that an intelligence explosion could occur via other means). As intelligence is boosted by power, knowledge will be boosted by intelligence, and power will be boosted by the combination. As long as I’m correct in assuming that true scarcity is far, far beyond our current vision, this should mean an unparalleled power explosion that will almost certainly change the entire world quite rapidly into something beyond anything but wild speculation.

“How much did it cost, Mr. Feynman?”

“Well I flew to San Fransisco, so it’s the airfare, plus the parking at the airport while I was away.”

“Do you have your ticket?”

I happened to have the ticket.

“Do you have a receipt for the parking?”

“No, but it cost $2.35 to park my car.”

“But we have to have a receipt.”

“I told you how much it cost. If you don’t trust me, why did you let me tell you what I think is good and bad about the schoolbooks?”

There was a big stew about that. Unfortunately, I had been used to giving lectures for some company or university or for ordinary people, not the government. I was used to, “What were your expenses?”–”So-and-so much.”–”Here you are, Mr. Feynman.” I then decided I wasn’t going to give them a receipt for anything. After the second trip to San Francisco they again asked me for my tickets and receipts.

“I haven’t got any.”

“This can’t go on, Mr. Feynman.”

“When I accepted to serve on the commission, I was told you were doing to pay my expenses.”

“But we expected to have some receipts to prove the expenses.”

“I have nothing to prove it, but you know I live in Los Angeles and I go to these other towns; how the hell do you think I get there?”

They didn’t give in, and neither did I. I feel when you’re in a position like that, where you choose not to buckle down to the System, you much pay the consequences if it doesn’t work. So I’m perfectly satisfied, but I never did get any compensation for the trips.

It’s one of those games I play. They want a receipt? I’m not going to give them a receipt. Then you’re not going to get the money. OK, then I’m not taking the money. They don’t trust me? To hell with it; they don’t have to pay me.

Of course it’s absurd! I know that’s the way the government works; well, screw the government! I feel that human beings should treat human beings like human beings. And unless I’m being treated like one, I’m not going to have anything to do with them!

It’s “absurd” to make things harder than you have to. Except… it’s not. It can be highly rational to make things harder on yourself if you feel that it makes things better in the long run. This is almost a non-issue it’s so apparent, but I want to highlight how refusing to buckle to “the System” is in some ways, analogous to choosing future rewards.

I’ve decided not to return to college this spring. I’ve been out of school for over a year, and the combination of trying to get residency, applying to be accepted, and dealing with the increased costs of a full university over a community college have just been too much. The institution is gigantic and faceless, and it requires me to serve it and pay it in order for me to attend a class there; it does not treat me like a human would treat me; it doesn’t even treat me as human.

Just as Feynman could’ve easily kept his receipts and worked with the government office, I could fill out my forms, send off emails, pay hidden fees, and take out loans. In many ways that’d be easier than my alternative: getting an education without school. I’ve decided to put my small amount of money towards organizing a micro-classroom for myself, which will probably involve hiring a tutor. I’ll have to arrange things myself, determine my own curriculum, keep myself honest, and come away with no proof of having done the work except for the knowledge in my head. I’ve already been studying college-level stuff by myself (my calculus knowledge, for example, is entirely self-taught), but this is a decision to abandon the institution which I’ve been nominally attending.

This is shooting myself in the foot to a certain degree. Some people will clearly fail to even understand what it’d mean to have equivalent knowledge without a diploma. If those people won’t work with me because of that, I’ll simply have to pick someone a bit more open-minded. But here’s the thing: In a world where everyone fits themselves into a box, it’s easy to pay attention to the box instead of the person; in a world where many people refuse to box themselves, it’s harder to build an inhuman system. I don’t even have a high-school diploma. I am the grit in the gears of bureaucracy.

I see the world changing. As information becomes more free, we’ll have more self-taught people. As technology becomes more adaptive, we’ll have less need to make ourselves uniform. As more people break the mold, we’ll naturally incentivize more human, more agile organizations. I want to be part of this change. I want to be who I am, rather than who people expect me to be. I want to change the world, even if it means making things harder for myself.

I am reminded of the Stanford marshmallow experiment. We are given the choice of rolling with things, even if they’re unpleasant, or standing up for ourselves even if it means more work and less immediate reward. The payback comes for our children—the next generation—who will, because we stood up for being human, be treated as we had hoped to.

When some Jehovah’s Witnesses come to my door and ask how I know the earth is 4.5 billion years old, I tell them that I don’t know it’s that old; I believe it’s that old because it’s the best fit for my experiences (evidence).

But clearly it is not the best fit for their experiences, because they don’t believe it. So what do we do besides go our separate ways? I like to adopt the position that I’m wrong.

Note: I don’t think my experiences are wrong. I think my beliefs are wrong. Experiences cannot be false (though memories can).

Though this uncertainty in belief is artificial, I try and make it as real as I can. Beliefs are incredibly useful things, as you pointed out, and in this way I see them a bit like tools. If someone asks me to throw away my hammer, I would refuse, because the hammer has utility. But beliefs can be picked up again, after being discarded, with no cost, and as long as I hold onto them for fear of losing their utility, I am closed-minded and attached.

Now what do I do when presented with the Witnesses at my doorstep as I drop my beliefs? Naturally, I want to reform some beliefs, else I will be paralyzed. So I take the extra step of asking them what to believe. And without fail they will tell me something that makes no sense.

I want to take an aside here to let up on Christian creationists. I try to use the method I’ve been elaborating on *whenever* I disagree with someone and have the time to hash it out. Most of the time I fail to let go of my beliefs, and end up arguing like a fool. Often I forget to do this with the smartest people on the subjects that are most important to me. I use the Jehovah’s Witnesses as an example, because I use their presence as an opportunity to practice this technique, and am much more mindful during those times.

But the position of my new educator never makes sense to me, regardless of whether we’re talking about global warming, economics, genetic engineering, or religious apocalypse. If their position made sense to me, there wouldn’t have been a disagreement in the first place.

So, seeking to understand, I ask of the other party how they would reconcile the strange belief (theirs) with my experiences. For instance, if the earth is less than a million years old, how can I explain the light from stars that are millions of light-years away?

If I am doing my best, this question is not meant as an “attack” at all; I am genuinely curious. But it has the wonderful by-product of forcing the other party to question their beliefs. It puts us on the “same side” in a very serious way. Which is good, because we ARE. We’re both trying to know the truth (everyone is), and there is only one truth. Debate becomes collaboration if one or both parties have the ability to detach themselves from their priors.

As time goes on, either the other party will have accepted some major evidence and be significantly less confident, or I will have built a working model from their explanations. At the end of the night, I can take that model, and compare it to the one I used to have, and ask which one is better. If my model still looks better, I can even ask the other party “why do you prefer this model over my old one?” Which is a perfect segue into letting them listen and question. (Though it almost never gets that far, in my experience.)

This method, you may notice, resembles the Socratic method, as it is all about asking the right questions. But where I see the Socratic method as being a kind of rhetorical weapon, I see my method as being a tool for my own learning. It’s not just that I think I’m wrong when I disagree with someone, it’s that I often think I’m wrong when I’m by myself. I am an ignorant human, and as such will never be able to know all of what other people do. When I meet someone who disagrees, it is an opportunity for growth.

In the end, it is rare that I will accept the belief of the other party. Most of the time I pick up my old “hammer” where I dropped it. But even if the other party didn’t pay any serious attention to my questions, I have still learned much about the perspectives of others, and I get the opportunity to revisit the foundation of my own beliefs.

_ _ _
_ X _
O X _

The “O” player would pick randomly, because the “thought” of blocking X, and playing a drawn-out game was equally terrible as that of a quick death. Essentially, I had made an AI that really hated playing, and so would commit suicide.

Okay. Easily enough fixed. Never mind the half a day spent looking for bugs… Just keep coding…

I dropped the continual punishment/error factor and jacked up the punishment for lost games (keeping the old continual punishment factor for tie games). So now my AI played out to tie games (good)… with completely pathetic moves!

Here’s an example:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ X _ _ _ _ _ _ _

O X _ _ _ _ _ _ _

O X _ _ _ _ _ _ X

O X _ _ _ _ _ O X

O X _ X _ _ _ O X

O X _ X O _ _ O X

O X X X O _ _ O X

O X X X O O _ O X

O X X X O O X O X

Now, what’s really fascinating is that it’s not playing randomly. If there’s ever a situation where one agent could win, the other blocks it. Even in complex situations where one agent can set up a sure victory in the future (a fork), the other blocks it. In other words, it’s defense is impeccable, but it has essentially no offense.

Thankfully I had stared at the code enough, and the past bug was fresh enough for me, that I didn’t need to debug for hours to find this one. The problem is I told each agent that the other one was perfectly rational. A perfectly rational agent makes no mistakes, and in Tic-Tac-Toe this means the best outcome you can hope for is a tie. Both agents knew this, and so every action (that didn’t lead to certain defeat) was equally futile. I had convinced my AI that the very game of Tic-Tac-Toe was pointless, so it stopped “trying” to win!

I tweaked the AI so that it thinks its opponent is only probably rational, but perhaps a little spontaneous. Now it plays aggressively. ^_^

• What does the Thalamus do?
• Can synapses migrate?
• Do lesions to the hippocampus destroy existing memories?
• Is there a qualitative difference between semantic memory and episodic memory (i.e. is episodic memory just memory of historical facts)?
• How can you get a signal back from its frequency distribution (related: why is the Fourier transform its own inverse)?
• Is Buddhism just a coping mechanism for living in a painful world?
• What is the anatomical difference between short and long term memory?
• How do you find the probability of an observation (“X”) given *not* A, where A is some general hypothesis in Bayesian inference? (i.e. in finding P(A|X), you need P(X|~A). Where do you get it?)
• Why is Newton’s Method for optimization faster than gradient decent (in computational time, not steps!)?
• What is the structure of the top-level control system in the human mind?
• Can all goal-seeking agents be thought to be utility maximizers?
• Does Bayesian inference work for low-level vision systems?
• What is a Bayes-Net?
• How does a Quantum Computer avoid entangling the user?
• Why is Quantum Teleportation exciting, again?
• What is the core structure of a cortical microcolumn?
• What is the Laplace operator?
• Does transhumanism not naturally oppose Buddhism?
• Is there anything more interesting in the cerebellum than a bunch of fine-tuning circuits?

And now, because this auto-posts to twitter, my tweeples get to see yet more pontificating float by. Ah, 2011, I’ll miss you; once the robots get good at serving up only interesting text, where we go to blather into the night?