bitstreamer

binary code and brains

Learning for the first time many years ago, that the text on the wordprocessor page was "virtual" - the "reality" from which it was created plucked from a series of 0s and 1s in a continuous chain - made a big impression on me. I can see how empowering writing software is because I have done a few simple ones that do calculations by copying the code out of a magazine, but it will always be impossible for me to grasp the arcane world of complex programming.

Even someone with little understanding of computers can work out that pressing the letter A on the keypad involves quite a lot of activity "under the bonnet". A signal is sent into the "box" to tell it to recover some of the bitstream it holds in memory. Then, presumably, some clever software is asked to translate that series of 000011111010101s in such a way that a series of pixels - each themselves represented by a few 0s &1s - are placed on the screen in fixed positions. Press DELETE and the whole effort is wiped out by a further set of programmed instructions. If you have the imagination or, should it be wonderment, this whole business does have a magicalness or, perhaps, what might be described as a transcendent quality. Others insist on the illusional and dellusional aspects of software.

I have an image of the bitstream on my PC contiguous with the bitstream that is the internet. In reality this bitstream, in toto, is physically discontinuous, but this doesn't matter when it can be stitched together by software and communications.

Trying to find analogues between this digital sytem and the brain is fraught with problems.

Firstly, though the brain has been recognised for a long time not to be a computer - rather, to have computational ability - people still insist on saying that a computer is a good model for the brain.

If the brain is a computer pure and simple, where are the correspondences, analogues, at the basic level ? What is the the binary code and its control mechanisms equivalent to? What is the neural network, the p.d. along neuronal axons? The neurotransmitters in the synapse are "gates" equivalent to those a computer processor. But there many types of neurotransmitter, divided into inhibitors and stimulators. What corresponds to the central processor? The brain is widely accepted as a modular structure but the modules don't relate one-to-one in the way the working parts of PCs do. A brief foray into brain damage shows things are more complicated in the brain. There is an Italian man who had brain damage - stroke, whatever - so cannot write vowels. Another man cannot write consonants. A lady, DF, is known to be able to put cards through slots arranged at differnet angles but her brain doesn't allow her to "see" the slots!

In the brain, the role of the DNA code must not be forgotten, though it is a more long-term facet than the action potential and the synapse.

Any undergratuate biology student learns how the mammalian brain has arrived at its present state, rather like the software in a nuclear power station: by repeated add ons, the pattern of which can be see through comparison of fish, reptile, bird and mammal brains. I like image of the the men who wrote the original code for the power-station software being dead and none of the current programmers working to keep the control and safety machanisms running having any idea how these dead men wrote their code. They write new bits of software to keep the various old bits working together without understanding completely how it originally worked.

Although there may be some correspondences between computers and brains, as soon as you get to things like consciousness and meaning, there is a parting of the ways. What is on the PC screen could be called a sort of "consciousness", but what is missing from this is the complex feedback mechanisms that make consciousness what it is.

Happening to be mad, knowing Freud called dreams the "Royal Road...", I think the dream is simply another form of consciousness. What the dream shows, according to my deranged thinking, is more of consciousness than waking consciousness shows. Included are some of the workings of consciousness. "Waking consciousness" is bound in to perception and realtime events. Dream "consciousness" shows more of what the brain does. In other words, the craziness of dreams is an expose of the way reality is constructed from separate components. It shows how what comes into consciousness , especially in thoughts, evolves. How out of all the masses of perceptions, cognitions, whatever, can we come up with a single, coherent conscious experience, which is not a psychopathic like an LSD trip? Sometimes only metaphors explain. I once had a weird "theatre" dream, in which I watched a play with players coming on and off in different parts, argiuing , shouting, moving and so forth, while at the same time seeming to be taking part in the drama myself. If any actor could pop in and out, different costume, different voice, different mannersims, randomly interferring with the flow of the written play, how ever do we get the coherence of the scripted play?

The image of a seen red cup is not held in the brain as an entity, but in the myriad features of its "redness" (that mysterious qualia business) and "cupness", scattered all over the brain. This includes the ability to imagine [from memory] a cup revolving round to show its various sides(e.g. handleless view) ,even though we are only looking at the one view. In other words, we are not taking red cup in perception/cognition anew each time, but taking inputs plus memory to create red cup. In this view even consciousness is not as "real" as we imagine. We don't really know how much is a construct of the brain and how much is real-time correpondence. It is asaid that the brains main fuctions are differentiation and integration. In vision we see the former: remocing all the confusion around us to present a useful picture. The brain even alters reality tp create foregoun/background, when this does not exist "out there". Integrative functions more easily understood in thought, where we canbreak down a problem into easier to understand components, then build things back up to the more complex answer arrived at.

Neural network computers have been designed which are said to "learn" like brains, but, so far, the tricky goings on in the synapse, the control that emotion plays in what the brain does, has not really been included in any big way. But the best way to confirm how a brain works by making an artifical one that can do everything a human brain can does. Then again, faulty thinking, because we don't know what real brains "do" except overtly. The bits and pieces of philosphical and scientific knowledge about the brain still don't add up to a complete understanding of how the brain works at every level. We have an inckling of what it would be like to do without what the brain does for us from our imagination and from malfunctions such as mental illness and physical damage through e.g. strokes.

Is it useful to think of unconsciousness as a sort of binary code with consciousness being the brain's virtual creation such as those letters on the PC screen? And yet unconsciousness would, or might not be, played out like consciousness. Nature is parsimonious.

Dreams might be a sort of "secondary" consciousness, one up from the bare bones of code. After all visual basic is not the same as working in primary programming. The pictures and sometimes sounds of dreams seem as real as waking experiences. It would seem they are produced in the same way as conscious experiences. But it may present like "real life" while actually working at a lower level, one or two up from the basic neural processes which store and manipulate the data of experience, because the senses are not involved. The "consciousness" could be playing at the lower level yet be perfectly understandable " to the brain". waking consciousness requires another layer of programming to make it consciousness. And yet that is loopy. Why two systems?

Maybe the test of whether a neural network has reached our level of sophication and complexity is if it has dreams, rather than if it has "emotions". We know emotions in brains have a great effect on what we see and think. Adding "emotion" to neural networks, in the sense of sophisticated weightings in the switches or gates, has begun. But we have to be able to experience the NNW's overt "emotions" in order to be sure they are like ours and not simulated. Seeing a display screen with the neural network's dream on it, or receiving reports from a robot while "asleep" that it is dreaming, might be an easier route to checking if a neural network was beginning to be a brain? How would it be possible to determine if NNW dream corresponded in any way to brain dreams? Have a chat with the robot! Compare notes on dreams. Shades of Turing.

posted by Adfero Affero @ 6:44 AM