The more I study nature and biology, the more I see that anthropomorphism gets in the way of understanding animals as well. Certain birds, cats, dogs, and even rodents are intelligent, but thinking of their intelligence merely as inferior to humans is not the whole story. Different forms of intelligence have to be understood on their own terms — not through starting with an archetype of human intelligence and making incremental modifications to that archetype. That sort of thinking can lead to anchoring.

- Michael Anissimov

Read the whole thing on Michael’s blog.

N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;

and

R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space

One easy way to deal with the Fermi Paradox is to plug in low numbers for fl, fi, fc and L. It’s pretty easy for me to see how it could be rare for life to arise, but I find it quite implausible that there are very many living planets out there that won’t at some point create intelligences capable of making radios. Most of this is moot, however, because the Drake equation deals only with present civilizations, not past ones. It’s my understanding that any civilization with a level of technological power greater than or equal to where we’ll be in a century or so would be able to easily make Von Neumann probes.

A Von Neumann probe is essentially a self-replicating spaceship capable of autonomously exploring the galaxy. On each probe is a beacon that broadcasts its findings as it explores and when it finds a new system it establishes a factory that makes more probes. Each factory also has a beacon, so the probes know to avoid previously-explored systems. Because of the self-replication factor a single Von Neumann probe would likely be able to blanket the entire galaxy with beacons in less than ten million years. Initially this seems like a long time, but considering the galaxy has been around for over 12 billion years it’s a curiosity to me that SETI has been operating for so long without any trace.

So how do I resolve the Fermi Paradox, especially considering self-replicating artifacts? Just recently I found a hypothesis which seems reasonable, and I’ll lay it out in the form of axioms and conclusions. When I talk about “power” below I mean ability to reach assorted goals. Intelligence, resources, and knowledge are all forms of power. When I talk about “the singularity” I mean an intelligence explosion that leads to a civilization being controlled by artificial intelligence (which may or may not be acting in accordance with the desires of its makers.)

Axiom: Contact with a less intelligent alien has no significant power benifit post-singularity.

Axiom: Contact with a more intelligent alien has a mild power benefit if they are benevolent.

Axiom: Contact with a more intelligent alien is incredibly dangerous if they are hostile.

Axiom: A society capable of inter-stellar spaceflight is almost certainly going to be post-singularity.

Axiom: A constructed intelligence will always destroy an alien that might possibly interfere with its goals if said alien is not an asset and protection or existence of said agent is not explicitly a goal.

Axiom: Evolved intelligences will typically not state explicit preservation goals for aliens when building their superintelligence. (Many will likely not even code in preservation goals for their own species.)

Therefore: Alien civilizations will either be major existential threats or of no real value.

Therefore: A rational intelligence will avoid attracting attention from aliens if not actively hiding from them.

Therefore: A civilization will have only a tiny window between when they develop radios and when they are either wiped out or hidden away by advanced AI.

Therefore: There may be plenty of intelligent life out there, but it’s likely hanging around star systems hidden by Dyson spheres.

Okay, so it’s not quite predicate calculus but it was the easiest way for me to organize my thoughts. If you find errors with my logic or disagree with an axiom please leave a comment. ^_^

Here’s an excerpt:

6. Christ is your identity
Christ is your identity. I don’t care what you’ve done, and I don’t care what has been done to you. Those things are horrible and we can deal with them in Redemption Groups, biblical counseling, community groups, friendship, and relationship, but here’s your identity. It’s not what has been done to you or what has been done by you, but it is what Christ has done for you. In the eyes of Christ, you are clean. You were forgiven. You were adopted. You were redeemed. You are beloved. You are, you are. And I know some of you, the guilt is deep, the sin is real, and life is a wreck. And Christ is good. And if you believe that your identity is transformed in Christ as an adoptive, loved, forgiven, regenerated, transformed, empowered, renewed, hopeful child of God, you will live differently.

I’d hope that without having to go into the truth or reality of religion that everyone reading this post can recognize the sheer memetic power of the idea above. This is what makes religious arguments so difficult and emotional; it is why it’s impolite to bring up religion (and politics). When we tell ourselves that an idea is who we are we cease to want (anyone) to think critically about it. Many have died because they dared question such ideas. I’m glad that happens less often nowadays.

Yesterday I decided to play with some genetic programming. Though I found a neat GP resource, I decided to work from scratch and build a simulated tide-pool with algae/plants and animals of indeterminate form. Truth be told, I’m not even sure what I did really “counts” as genetic programming because the only evolved feature is the behavior for the animals. Regardless, I wrote the thing in a single day and got some neat emergent behavior and a screen-saver-wannabe. Green dots are “plants” and yellow/white/red/black are “animals”.

The code and runnable Jar are here. Everything is public domain, though I humbly request you don’t try to pass the work off as your own. The pulsing brightness is supposed to be day & night. The source code is really sloppy, so keep in mind that this was a quick, shoot-from-the-hip sort of project and please have forgiveness.

Controls:
Minus/Underline = Slower
Plus/Equals = Faster

Continuing my search for AGI I’ve been thinking about conscious and unconscious thought. Investigating these led me to explicit and implicit memory. This actually led me to the lecture by Eric Kandel (above), which goes into good detail the mechanisms by which animals learn. It’s not complete, though. Kandel only describes learning as an emphasizing of existing synapses, rather than the formation of connections to new neurons. To make things worse, he admits that this is not well understood by the scientific community… so I’m still mostly stuck.

All this pondering has led me to some interesting ideas, though. Earlier, I had associated conscious thought with logical thought, and unconscious with intuitive. Branching out from there I began to wonder if logical thought was the product of explicit memory, and intuitive from implicit memory. It now seems clear to me that this cannot be such a clearly-defined dualism, because mice possess an explicit memory and are not competent at logic. Logic is a procedure that is perhaps only available to conscious entities, but I should not jump to the conclusion that consciousness entails logic, either, as it seems to me that a lot of the conscious (deliberate) action taken by humans is not based on theory.

Humans possess both explicit and implicit memories, and have the capability to use intuition or logic to solve problems. If I’m right, and strong artificial intelligence requires replicating the capability of non-human animals, then I’d do well to first disregard logic, then disregard explicit learning of events and facts, and focus instead on how novel neural links form in nerves.

Of course, I always try to assume I’m wrong. So in hopes I’ll figure out how, I’m off to watch the syntience (artificial intuition) videos.

I was given How to Think About God by Mortimer J. Adler to read, but I find it very difficult to focus on the dry concepts while my eyes droop from fatigue. In the pages that I’ve read so far I’ve come across an interesting concept—that of a “supreme being.” Adler elaborates a bit on the concept by clarifying that a supreme being is one that is greater than any other, like the concept of infinity is greater than any number. As the author moves on from this to discuss things such as the existence or non-existence of such a being, I have trouble following because I fail to see the metric by which the greatness of a being is measured.

Adler brings up the Ontological argument provided by Anselm of Canterbury, where a being that comes into or out of existence is lesser than one that must always exist, which makes me think that he at least associates quantity of existence with “greatness”. This would imply that a being of infinite greatness would be all things, which would also imply that there is no distinction between the cosmos (all that is) and God (the greatest imaginable being). This seems consistent with the more pantheistic flavors of the major religions, but I’ve always had trouble seeing why the concept of a god is necessary in such a case, as Nature or the Universe would be synonymous.

In other thoughts, I read up on Artificial Intuition before I left, and I was struck by the connection to my thoughts after reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. Lehrer distinguishes between what I think of as our Head vs. our Gut. We use our head to do specific logical reasoning and self-examination, but most of our behavior is governed by the subconscious split-second intuition that we use for everything from picking favorites to moving limbs. Monica Anderson emphasizes this point as it relates to artificial intelligence, and describes how intuitive models of reality are far more likely to produce general AI (AGI) than a logic-focused, reductionist, approach.

I’m in total agreement here, but it’s a bit frustrating, because it implies that consciousness is not capable of examining intuitive mental structures in great detail. For example, if you make a split second decision on whether to sit next to a person on the bus, it is nearly impossible to determine why you decided as such (most reasoning will likely boil down to false rationalizations). So now I’ve been separated from my greatest tool; I can no longer build AI based on how I think my own thought works. My intuition (lol) says that the place to start examining intuition is with simple animal behaviors, so now I’m on the lookout for good fruit fly brain studies or whatever.

Well, not really. Right now I’m on the lookout for something to keep me occupied while I ride through Kansas.

Everything (code and images) is public domain. Credit is nice, but not necessary. Download code (and runnable jar) here. Created using Slick (Build #266) with LWJGL (2.0b1).

A Geocentric View of the Universe.

Another Geocentric Perspective.

View from Jupiter.

Oh, and I almost forgot! One of the other neat things I did with the simulation was “experimentally” measure the speeds of the planets (except Neptune). I looked up average orbital distances and the mass of the sun on Wikipedia and then tweaked the initial velocity of each planet until the orbit looked roughly circular. I did this mostly out of laziness, but I was shocked at how close I had gotten to the real values.

Vanguard has some of my favorite reporting on global events and trends. This week they investigate robotic warriors, a subject which I have written about in the past. The only thing which was really news to me was the fully-automatic shotgun (3:20). Scary stuff.

The internet is a basket of wonderful things.

My favorite web tool, Google Reader, recently added a feature called Popular Items, which has opened up the best of the internet that I don’t actively follow. I am increasingly pleased with my ability effortlessly to coast on a wave of interesting items which trigger the quiet drip of pleasure chemicals deep within my skull. The trick now is to learn to reward myself with novelty, and not drown myself in it.