Consciousness Hurts

Being interested in the field of Artificial Intelligence I often stumble upon the question of how to make some artificial system capable of telling good things from bad ones. Because I am much more of a dreamer than of an engineer, multiple supervised learning techniques, which are widely applied and have proven quite useful, offer little satisfaction to me. The problem with them is that supervised learning algorithm merely provides the system being learnt with a set of questions associated with presumably right - or, to be more precise, desired - answers. Afterwards the algorithm does it's best to adjust the system's guts in such a way that it will give the right answers to the right questions - at least, in most cases. As for unsupervised learning techniques, these differ in some way - particularly in terms of applications, although they remain external algorithms trying to adjust the trainee's internals in a manner allowing to minimize the proportion of wrong answers, which are now defined by the algorithm implicitly. While dealing with different machine learning stuff I saw both these approaches producing amazing results, so I am more likely to exaggerate their power, than to underestimate it. Still I never ceased thinking that these fitting activities are too distant from the notion to which the term "learning" originally refers. The information fed to our machine learning tools obviously becomes a subject to some sophisticated memorization and even generalization, nevertheless I can hardly say that it is learnt.

 

This issue was made apparent to me by artificial neural networks. Inspired by nature - the nature of our own brain - many of these models clearly demonstrate how helpless they are until someone arrives with a proper learning algorithm and how much closer they stand to an adjustable screwdriver than to an ant. All the learning is applied to these things from the outside - it is the overseeing mechanism, learning algorithm, that makes adjustments to the system if it performs not well enough during the process of learning. Moreover, this same algorithm is the only thing, that knows what does it mean to "perform well". I know I am not of this kind: I can get beaten by a teacher, alive or not, if I don't learn a lesson properly, but it's not the teacher, who makes me learn it and imprints knowledge into my brain - much greater role is played here by my emotions and feelings: pride or shame, satisfaction or disappointment, relief or pain.

 

Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about. 

Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion 

 

Pain must be the most well known teacher - I mean there is hardly anyone conscious in our world who hasn't ever learnt something through pain - almost everyone has felt it and everyone tries to avoid it. Thus pain is possibly the most comprehensible indicator of doing something wrong and the memories of pain experienced as a result of some actions do their best to prevent one from behaving the same way in future. The high-level mechanism here looks quite simple: pain is not a pleasant sensation at all, so the things which cause it are assessed unpleasant as well. Actually, I believe we can go a little bit further to note that the thing is tangled - although pain is harsh itself, it is also strongly associated with probable injury and is therefore - mainly subconsciously - deemed dangerous and unwelcome. I also feel that it is quite safe to assume that our mind associates the feeling of pain not only with injury, but with the possibility of death as well. Taking this into consideration, there is nothing surprising about the fact that a severe agony may totally absorb one's mind - when death is possible it doesn't seem affordable to let the mind's owner think of something except the ways to escape the least desirable event. An argument supporting the idea of this strong association between pain and death may occur from the fact that an agony itself may be fatal, although I'm afraid that the underlying mechanism of neurogenic shock is too weakly related to the notion of consciousness and so this example is not that applicable here.

 

So pain is a powerful mechanism allowing us to avoid some negative events or, put another way, telling us that certain things are not good, may even appear harmful and therefore should be avoided. It is important enough, but what makes it more interesting is that this mechanism is embedded in the system - our mind and body - in such a way that it is impossible to distinguish it from the entire system itself. We could suggest that multiple sensors spread through our body act as sources of pain - it is true to some extent, but it is not the only case, unless we claim phantom limb syndrome a sort of magic. Furthermore, I believe there is no special 'device' which is fully responsible for sensations of pain in our body - the entire nervous system takes part in producing pain as well as most other feelings, which we experience during our lives. Resulting from the overall behavior of myriad neurons linked together, instead of being produced and managed by some localized distinct components of the nervous system, these strongly related sensations are also linked closely to such activities as motion, vision, thinking, learning. This sole fact allows pain to be quite a successful teacher and makes it so different from all the mechanisms used in machine learning techniques, which I have seen so far. Since it is so overwhelming - in terms of both it's impact on our life and of the degree in which it is interwoven with all activities of our mind - it is impossible to ignore the concept of pain when one wants to ignite a spark of consciousness in something that didn't show it so far.

Maybe, speaking of pain I have made the colors too dark, but the picture is not that grim. All kinds of our feelings and emotions play a vital role when it comes to thinking and learning - to being conscious. I could have chosen anything more appealing - say, pride, satisfaction, love - whatever. It was the relentlessness and severity, with which pain invades our mind, that made me write of it.

 

Simple Models

Recently I've started exploring Microsoft XNA platform. In an attempt to get familiar with numerous powerfull tools it offers I've decided to use it to accomplish some relatively simple but interesting task that will make use of graphics but won't prompt me to focus on sophisticated graphics stuff. Due to some strange reasons I've choosen to start with developing Rubik's Cube puzzle game. The idea for application here is quite simple - the only thing my game must offer to a user is an opportunity to solve the well-known puzzle on a computer screen.

As for development,the task accomplishment, roughly speaking, requires two smaller problems being solved: firstly I should design a Rubik's Cube representation for storing and modifying tha state of the toy in line with player's actions and secondly I need to introduce routines for showing the Cube in an appropriate state on the screen. I haven't started writing graphics-related code yet, but I feel I'm almost finished with the first stage - that means I have developed a couple of classes representing the puzzle which provide convenient ways for performing any required in-game operation on the toy (e.g. rotating one of the cube's faces).

These recent efforts to develop a simple and convenient model of a real world object encouraged me to think over Leonard Susskind's words across which I had come some time ago. Speaking about the legendary physicist - Richard Feynman - Susskind had said:

"He [Feynman] truly believed that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it."

[Leonard Susskind: My friend Richard Feynman - 9:30]

My intuition supported this idea long before I've heard these words, although I have never thought about it deeply. However this time the attempts to design a representation of a real world thing combined with revisiting Susskind's speech made me contemplate the thought.

The above quote suggests that to understand something one needs to have a simple model of the thing in mind - only possessing such a model one can explain something - that is share the model - and the explanation will be simple only in case the model is. In fact having a complete model of some object or process means understanding it - and vice-versa - so the only way to understand something is to study or design a model of the thing. A task of designing a model is usually a hard one and requires a lot of work to be done. Such a design process involves overcoming numerous problems which actually help the developer to form a better understanding of the entire object or process being described. Obviously it is difficult to design either a simple model of an object or a sophisticated one, but surprisingly the former are usually much harder to discover and develop. That means one often needs to do much more work, to face much more problems to achieve a goal of designing a simple but workable model - that is precisely one of the reasons why simpler models correspond to a better understanding.

However we actually don't design all the models we use ourselves - we tend to take ready ones and use these for our purposes. In this case one can't directly benefit from the difficulties connected with developing a simple model, though one benefits from the model's simplicity itself and really understands the things better than in case he would use a large and sophisticated one. That's because our mind's power is finite, hence it may be quite difficult for our brain to handle a sophisticated thing - roughly speaking it may fail to 'cache' a complex model completely with all of it's numerous although important details. I suppose we tend to unconsciously simplify the model if one is too sophisticated for us to handle, but in case our mind is not familiar with the model such a simplification may result in losing some important details which are just cut away and eventually this will lead to mistakes.

In this way simple models really produce better understanding through representing corresponding objects in a complete and convenient (particularly for our mind) manner. Moreover such models have another advantage over the complex ones: if your model is simple it is easy to share it because it can be explained simply.

Breaking a Habit

Sometimes one wants to change his or her own life in a dramatic way. The obvious fact here is that a sole desire to introduce significant changes is not enough. Moreover intelligence and wisdom are not enough too - when one want's to break a habit one needs to be strong.

You may suggest that you need the strength only to start changing your life and all the rest things will come easily, but such a thought proves to be a fallacy. After having successfully changed the things you wanted to change, when all the bridges seem burnt and the walls of smoke hide the unpleasant elements of your past - those same elements that you wanted to escape and forget - when you're relaxed and start enjoying the new life - when everything seems right and done, there comes a moment when you face a lack of confidence - a very simple question subtly rises from the distant depths of your mind. The question may sound like this:

"Have I done the right thing?"

However everything is still okay, because you quickly find an answer and feel happy and confident again. The only problem here is that from this particular moment a strange feeling accompanies you wherever you go. You can barely explain what does it mean or where does it come from, but a little later it conquers you and then you can see that the feeling is fear.

It's the fear of leaving the lands you know perfectly and entering the lands you've never seen before. It turns you blind, pulls you back, prompts immediate, unconscious actions. That's why you need a lot of strength to change your life - you need to be strong mainly to fight the fear of leaving a well-known road and such a fight is much harder than just making a first step off the track. 

Your own strength should keep you aware and prepared for the fight. This same strength should keep your eyes wide-open and mind clear - it is the only thing that can stop you from turning back when the fear fills you. Breaking a habit is not an easy task and accomplishment of such a task is a sign of a major inner strength.

However one should remember that the habits and the fears are means serving to protect a human being from harmful changes, but I am sure that one should better use his or her experience and clear mind for this purpose.