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## Archive for the ‘Consciousness’ Category

December 25th, 2009 by Sean Higher Intelligence

I find it interesting that there seems to be this conflict between science and religion. There are times when modern scientific belief seems to spit in the face of spirituality, but really, I derive a lot of spiritual feelings from understanding science.

One thing that continues to amaze me is evolution. The classical argument is always between evolution vs. intelligent design - i.e., did nature randomly produce living creatures, or did some higher intelligence design living creatures?

If you believe in evolution, it usually implies you are denying the existence of some form of higher intelligence. If evolution is true, then God didn’t create everything… natural processes that don’t rely on God’s existence did.

What’s really interesting though is that - if you believe in evolution - it becomes highly probable that higher intelligences do exist.

Evolution is something that happens inside of systems. If a system is flexible enough to have self-replicating objects, then life will eventually evolve. This “system” can be the reality that we live in… or it can be numbers in a computer. The system itself doesn’t matter - just whether the system has enough flexibility to support the process of evolution.

The physical world we live in, on Earth, is flexible enough to support the process of evolution. Self-replicating objects, starting at the molecular level, slowly evolved over millions of years into multi-cellular organisms.

How far-fetched is it to believe that there are other systems in our reality that are flexible enough to support evolution? I would argue that it’s not only possible - it strikes me as quite probable.

For example, perhaps the laws of electro-magnetism have enough flexibility to support evolution. If they do, then non-physical beings of light could exist right now, having evolved for the past 13 billion years. That destroys humanity’s 6 million years of evolution.

It does sound silly to say “non-physical beings of light”, but that’s exactly what it would be. And if the laws of electro-magnetism are flexible enough to support evolution, then these non-physical, highly-evolved light organisms most certainly exist.

How can you justify being an Atheist, other than you’re just pissed off at your dad?

Posted in Consciousness, Science | 5 Comments »

August 15th, 2009 by Sean Neural Networks pt. 1

Background

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a really cool subject. It combines two things I love - programming, and the mind. It’s interesting to read about psychology and biology… but for me, programming is more real. A psychologist or biologist studies the mind/brain. An AI programmer attempts to create a mind/brain.

In AI, a popular technique is to use something called a Neural Network. Basically, the programmer first attempts to write code to mimic a single neuron. Then, the programmer creates a network of these individual neurons, and watches them interact. This technique comes from the belief that our brain’s power comes from the billions of networked neurons inside of it.

AI programmers first came up with the idea of making a digital Neural Network from talking to biologists. After all, if you want to build a digital brain, why not talk to people who study real brains? Biologists taught programmers how neurons actually worked - programmers took the concept, and create a simplified digital counter-part.

There is another way to arrive at the conclusion that a Neural Network is a good idea, though. We can arrive there just using logic and math, without any knowledge of how real brains work. Granted, this line of reasoning only became clear in hindsight - but it explains why evolution might have naturally created the brain in the first place:

The Neural Network’s Purpose

A Neural Network is awesome at one thing - detecting relationships.

Imagine you have a series of numbers… 12, 4, 0, 4, 16, 3, 7, 6, 9, 11. Just with that series of numbers, you have no clue about any meaning behind it. It could be a random sequence, or some parts might be random, but other parts might have meaning. Some formula might determine the numbers. Or it might represent money, or time, or butterflies, or word counts, etc. As it stands right now - you simply don’t know.

Now imagine I feed you a stream of numbers, like so:

1. 12, 4, 0, 4, 16, 3, 7, 6, 9, 11

2. 13, 6, 0, 3, 18, 2, 7, 4, 10, 12

3. 14, 8, 0, 2, 16, 1, 7, 2, 11, 13

4. 15, 10, 0, 1, 10, 0, 7, 0, 12, 14

If you’re clever, you’ll notice there are a lot of patterns in that stream. The first number always increases by one, the second increases by two, the third is always zero, the fourth decreases by one, the fifth is the second number times the fourth number, etc.

You can see the pattern because you have a brain, and I just told you what the patterns are. Imagine you are a computer, with zero knowledge, and your job is to figure out the pattern from scratch. How would you go about it? How would you conclude that the fifth number is the second times the fourth?

Since you have no prior knowledge, what you have to do is try every combination. Is the first number the second times the third? No. Is the first number the second times the fourth? No. Is the first number the second times the fifth? No. Eventually, while trying everything out, you find that the fifth number is the second times the fourth.

The only way the computer can detect a pattern is by trying every possible combination, and see if it finds anything. In fact, this is what humans do too - if you look at a sequence of numbers, and attempt to find a pattern, you’ll sit there and try different things out… searching for something that makes sense.

Creating the Network

Why create a network of neurons? You can think of a neuron as a little detector. It takes in input, and spits out a “yes” or “no”. Then, more neurons take in a collection of yes’s and no’s, and spit out their own yes or no. So there’s a bunch of these yes’s and no’s flying around.

The part that makes this work is that a neuron learns which neighboring neurons it should listen to, and which ones it should ignore. You can think of the neuron as being networked with the neighbors it listens to. Likewise, there are neighbors that listen to it. This creates a web of neurons.

Network Complexity

Back to our random number example - you need a neuron at every spot you want to detect a relationship. Is the first number the second times the third? Stick a neuron there. You’ll need a network of neurons capable of performing multiplication, but you’ll need one neuron at the top that fires off a “yes” or “no” if the first number is the second times the third.

We have a lot of different relationships we want to test… so we’ll need a lot of neurons. And what if we want to test really complicated relationships? For example, maybe we want to test the fifth number is the second, plus the third, times the sixth. We’ll need a neuron for that.

So, the more complicated the relationships, the more neurons we’ll need. Really, there’s no limit… because there could be an insanely complicated relationship behind two numbers. If we don’t have enough neurons to detect the relationship, then our neural network won’t be able to figure it out.

Conclusion

There is a lot of information on Neural Networks, and I’ve glossed over a lot of the details. The important point to recognize is that you can use a network of neurons in order to detect relationships. The more neurons, the more complicated the relationships it can detect. Each individual neuron performs a simple task, but when networked intelligently (from learning over time which neighbors to listen to, and which to ignore), the network is capable of extracting meaning from a stream of input.

Stay tuned for part two…

Posted in Consciousness | 2 Comments »

July 15th, 2009 by Sean Timelessness

I’ve been trancing out before falling asleep lately, in an attempt to get back into OBEs. I haven’t escaped my body yet, but I’ve consistently hit a timeless state of mind.

I can’t pinpoint when I enter the state, but snapping back to reality is very distinct. I wake up with a sense of panic, completely oblivious to how long I’ve been in the state. The time is… lost. There is no sense for how long I’ve been laying there, stuck in this loop of non-awareness.

It’s not like dreaming, because I still have a sense of time while dreaming. My sense might be wrong (a five minute dream can feel like an hour), but the sense is there. Even with deep sleep, when I’m not in R.E.M., I still wake up with a sense of time. It’s not like an OBE, where everything might be blurry, but I still have a sense of time. This trance state is without this sense.

The reason this intrigues me so much is because the next question is: where am I while in this state? Which of course is a leading question. If I can be in a state of non-awareness, is it such a large jump to reason that death is just perpetual non-awareness?

Let’s say I’m a devout religious person who believes in life after death, heaven, hell, etc… I still can’t deny that this non-awareness state exists (because I’ve experienced it). So now I have an experience of non-existence. I have felt what not-existing feels like. How can I sit here and rationalize the existence of life after death when I’ve experienced death after death? Sure, life after death might exist, but what necessity is there for it? Not-existing already exists.

Thoughts?

Posted in Consciousness, Belief Systems, Dream Phenomenon | 14 Comments »

May 25th, 2009 by Sean Do Dogs Have Souls?

I’m (still) grappling with the concept of consciousness. Not just for fun (even though it is fun), but to conjure up methods for investigating OBEs.

There are some obvious questions about the idea of a “soul” and life after death. The largest evidence against the soul is that we can alter consciousness by altering the brain. An amazing demonstration of that is in experiments with people who have a severed corpus callosum, which is the part of the brain that connects the left hemisphere with the right hemisphere. In this video, a man without hemisphere communication has the word “phone” flashed to his left eye (which gets processed by his right hemisphere), and doesn’t know the actual word until he draws a phone on a piece of paper, and recognizes the picture on the paper.

We can do our own experiment. Drink a twelve pack of beer, and tell me if your consciousness is altered :-).

If consciousness exists as an entity separate from the body, we would expect it to be unaffected by physical and chemical fluctuations in the brain. However, if consciousness arises from the complex neural network in the brain, then we would expect consciousness to be altered by physical and chemical intrusions. The evidence shows that altering the brain alters consciousness. So the conclusion is that consciousness arises from the neural network… the soul doesn’t exist.

If consciousness can exist outside the body, then we are forced to confront the question: why does altering the brain alter consciousness?

-

I was debating with my friend about the difference between the human mind, and the bird mind. He argued that our human mind was better in some way… that we were doing something different that made us more intelligent, or more conscious, or self-aware. I argued that our minds were equivalent - the only difference being the number of neurons. More neurons, more processing power.

Do dogs have souls? How different are we really from any other animal? And where do you draw the line — chimps? Fish? Insects? Cells? Atoms?

If consciousness exists outside the body, then aren’t atoms capable of consciousness, even though they may not be able to exercise their awareness in the physical world?

-

Is it one or the other? Is there no middle path?

Posted in Consciousness | 15 Comments »

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