Conscious Intelligence

So one of the Big Questions is: how do you prove something is intelligent, what is an accurate definition consciousness? And associated with that is the question: can computers eventually become self-aware as the processing power increases?

I came up with a theory during college that I felt was on the right track and would be important if I could prove it. I thought of the way I could prove it too, if had enough computing power to carry out the experiment.

My answer to the second question is, no, because conscious intelligence is not a phenomenon that can be separated from a living host. In order for the computer to "think" on its own, it would need to be alive. In order for it to be alive, it's circuitry and physical brain would have to change with each thought process and feedback from the external environment.

A computer can run different sets of rules, but those rules themselves are all predefined at the most basic level and they are not shaped by random factors of the external environment, or the consequences of the actions the computer takes on its surroundings. I believe that's the way our brains are capable of conscious intelligence.

Every time we think and act, physical processes in the brain occur that strengthen, weaken, or maintain the neurological pathways that carry our electrical impulses. These impulses direct our body, which acts upon our external environment, and the environmental response either sustains our life or hinders it (food, temperature, social, emotions), this then affects our senses, which then affects our brain to adjust our conscious state - like hands on a steering wheel. The feedback loop is the first essential requirement for conscious intelligence.

The second requirement is that the brain is physical. It's a physical machine, not an abstract one. It can wear down, or modify itself through its control over the rest of the body, which gathers resources and physically changes the make-up of the brain. A computer cannot do this. It's circuitry and electrical pathways, the motherboard, the ram, the cpu etc are set "at birth" and do not functionally change for the life of its existence. Components can be swapped out, but not modified by the computer itself. The "brain" of a computer is essentially an abstract machine.

So what is the important implication of this difference? It's that the brain is capable of forming new thoughts, albeit somewhat at the mercy of the randomness of external environment and stimuli. But a computer cannot change its set of rules, because its actions have no consequence its own existence.

To get a better sense of this idea, imagine a marble that is dropped down an array of pegs into a row of slots, like in a science museum exhibit that teaches the binomial distribution. You can get different outcomes by random chance that the marble bounces one way or the other. The array of pegs is like the computer. It can produce different outcomes, but the array is fixed. In the long run, it will always produce a distribution of marbles roughly like a bell curve.

The brain is different from the peg array. The peg array has no intention of its own, it exists whether or not you use it. But the brain has one clear primary purpose, to stay alive and if it does not gather resources to preserve itself, it will deteriorate and cease to exist. The brain finds out which path the marble ends up in, with its senses and whether or not its receiving nutrients from the body. And so, where the marble ends up influences the position of the pegs of the brain for the next sequence. The brain wants the marble to end up in the right slot, so it will adjust the path the next marble takes!

OK, so now this almost doesn't seem to work as a definition, because the brain "wanting" something suggests using intelligence to prove something is intelligent. But the breakthrough is that the brain doesn't "want" anything, it is governed by the same rules of physics that applies to all matter and chemicals. It is the composition of biological chemicals and their interaction that determines its affinity toward one process or the other. Life is a chemical reaction like fire, but it has one additional ability that the process manipulates its environment to gather more fuel for itself.

So, let's say OK we'll humor this concept and assume its true. How are we going to even prove or disprove it?

The first step. I thought it would be most accurately demonstrated by writing a computer simulation at the molecular level of a very basic life form. Say a primordial one-cell bacterium, with as few genetic strands as possible. And then let it run, and show that its behavior matches actual life. Demonstrate that this simulation, is actually in fact, alive. That life for the computer is not possible, but that a program running in a virtual world, can in fact be alive.

OK turns out that is impossible with current technology. To model something at the molecular interaction level on the scale of even a single cell is unfeasible.

The idea after that was to model the brain in the same way and demonstrate the simulation is capable of running its own instructions. If we could do it, I think that would be sufficient evidence to support the theory, it's just we can't do it with current computers. Maybe quantum computing in the future? Probably not either.

(But that amazes me, that the universe how does it have so much computing power to calculate what happens next all the time everywhere instantaneously. It obviously doesn't calculate anything, it just happens. But there is so much information stored in matter, energy everywhere in the universe that it would require additional universes of meta-data just to explain itself. Anyways.)

So that first experiment is very, utterly, naively impossible. But I still think there's a possibility to design a program that is alive and demonstrates intelligent consciousness. This should be fairly simple in comparison. Create a critter in a 64x64 universe, and make it scavenge for food that is randomly periodically created. OK the problem with doing only that much, is the rules we impose are artificial, not physical laws of the artificial universe of our program. In order for the simulation to truly be alive, the critter needs to live or die due to the physics of its universe not because we check an if-else statement about how much food the critter ate. So that problem can grow to become more involved. But I feel its more approachable than the true to life model, because we can probably dumb down the physics of the virtual world.

Once we establish that the virtual organism is truly alive within the context of its virtual environment, running in the software, we move on to establish virtual intelligence. We could extract the essential functions of an abstract brain and model now just a brain. A machine that does not operate by any set of instructions we impose specifically to exhibit living behavior, but based on physics of its universe, it should be a phenomenon that "pops up" as a consequence of putting this chemical along side this other one and due to interactions they create a fire that does not burn itself out, but is self-sustaining.

So yeah. That's as far as I've gotten with the concept. Once I became aware how naive, unfeasible, and colossal amount of development it would take to carry out this little idea, I thought about other things like doing laundry and taking out the trash. But I would love it if my ideas were influential, and less ambitious minds, smarter minds, and people with access to more resources would hop on board with my ideas.

I feel like I could do it. It's just it would take up all of my life to get a few steps toward the goal. I'd rather be thinking on other things that I haven't conceptually figured out, rather than engineering my own or other people's ideas that feel banal in comparison.

When I was in my teens I read books about "the nature of time and space" and I thought I wanted to be a "theoretical physicist". But then going through college, I was told that wasn't a precise job. Sure, there were theorists and then there were experimentalists, but high level physics work was separated into choices like Solid State, Optics, Nuclear, Particle. I wasn't really interested in any narrow path.

I wanted to answer Big Questions. What is Time? What is Thought? None of those fields really aimed to answer what I was interested in. What I wanted to be can be better described as "Natural Philosopher", the title given to scientists before the 20th century. Their motivation I felt was to understand the most basic questions about existence and our role in the universe around us.

I liked how back then the knowledge was rudimentary so that the giants of science made discoveries without specialization: chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics. They knew everything. Knowledge was like the big bang before everything dispersed and spread out among empty space unreachable from one galaxy to another. Or maybe it was ignorance that was like that.

I really thought Physics could answer some of those Big Questions. But I don't know anymore. Everything in Science feels motivated by self-interest and profitability within a global economic system. I don't really see any way of carrying out the research I'm interested in without having my own company and supporting it with my personal resources. I'm not filthy rich and don't have any desire to become so.

Computer simulation appealed to me, because I thought it was a way to carry out my own experiments without need for a large lab and any funding. But all this stuff with computers, big data and analytics they claim is possible, seems like a ruse motivated by government and marketing agencies to collect private data. If I was a mathematical genius, I could make discoveries without any funding (read: without needing the rest of the world to support what I do), but I am acutely aware that I exhibit above normal intelligence and proving a Millennium problem on my own without any intellectual support such as being a professor and having ten years to work on a problem is practically impossible for me. And so, I lost hope about pursuing anything.