Lotzi Bölöni's blog

New Scientist had published a short article about Xapagy, focusing mostly on the story generation aspect:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628945.700-storytelling-software-learns-how-to-tell-a-good-tale.html

It is a good article for general reading, and I am quite comfortable with it. It was based on last year’s crop of tech reports of I had uploaded to arXiv. Since then, the Xapagy work had been more focused on representation of tricky sentences and story segments, like “If Clinton was the Titanic, the iceberg would have sunk” and the like.

No, I still don’t have synthetic autobiographies of sufficient size to start doing really interesting stuff – like creating whole stories from scratch. But slowly, slowly, it is getting to the point that one can translate almost anything to Xapi.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Q: What was the time of the day?

A: It was brillig.

Q: What were the toves doing?

A: They were gyring and gimbling.

Q: Were the borogoves slithy?

A: I don’t know. They were certainly mimsy.

Take this, Cyc.

It came to pass that in 1270 the students of the University of Paris were gathering to hear a lecture on Aristotle by the famous Doctor Angelicus. How surprised were they, when they were told that they will be presented a virtual lecture: the lecturer will be represented by an avatar (a wood doll with a long nose), and the text delivered by a ventriloquist.

When asked in an exit survey whether they thought that the delivery mode improved on the instruction (yes / somewhat / limited) and whether they could understand the ventriloquist (yes / somewhat / limited), many of them sneaked out through alternative exits.

The ones who showed up for the next lecture had a real interest in puppetry. The ones interested in Aristotle went somewhere else.

I don’t understand all this mystery talk surrounding consciousness and qualia (which appears to go on forever in certain artificial intelligence circles). I think that there are very satisfactory technical definitions for both of them.

Consciousness: the instantaneous state of the mind, including qualia (internal and external perceptions), and reflections. We assume that these are encoded in neural firing patterns, but we shouldn’t forget about the nerve input from various body parts and sensors, as well as the brain configuration and neurotransmitter levels which make a certain firing pattern possible.

Qualia: the part of the conscious state dealing with an external perception. I assume that qualia has fuzzy borders, and the remainder of the conscious state can be, to some level part of it.

Reflections: any part of the consciousness which does not deal with direct perception. It can deal with: past qualia, past reflections, future plans, it can try to envision qualia or perceptions which it had not encountered yet etc.

Why does qualia appear mysterious: because we are not able to reproduce it completely. A reflection about a past qualia can not bring the complete qualia in mind (for obvious reasons). Examples of obvious reasons: we would need to reproduce the external sensory inputs, the neurotransmitter levels, etc.

Why does consciousness appear mysterious: because we are not able to reproduce it completely.

Another issue her is that when we say that we want to “understand” qualia / consciousness, we do not really mean that we want to reproduce a past qualia / conscious state. In fact, reproduction, with some level of approximation, is possible. Eg. I can experience the qualia of eating an apple when hungry. It is harder to reproduce the experience of seeing the Grand Canyon might be difficult to reproduce the second time, as the reflections about past visits will be part of the conscious state.

So the statement that qualia and consciousness are mysterious are simply the (correct) fact that reflections about a qualia are not the brain state as the original qualia. There is the practical obstacle of the fixed wiring of the human brain: for instance, neural patterns in the first level of sensory data processing levels (eg primary visual cortex) are part of the visual qualia, and probably cannot be “borrowed” for a reflection.

I think that the only kind of being who can successfully reflect on its own consciousness is one which (a) has a dynamically reconfigurable brain and (b) has an exponentially expanding brain which at any given moment of time contains its complete previous conscious state as a reflection in the new conscious state.

Now, we can try to visualize for ourselves this creature with the exploding brain, and decide whether we want to be like him/her.

I was re-reading the classic Thomas Nagel paper “What is it like to be a bat?”. First, of course, one need to accept the premise that there is something like “subjective consciousness”. But, let us take this premise and run with it.

What Nagel is arguing is that there is no way for me, a human, to know what is it like to be a bat, because we cannot recreate the experiences of a bat. We have a different brain and body structure, we do not have a wing, we do not have a sonar, and so on.

I think that he is right, but he is missing the real gap.

What about trying to understand what is it like to be Britney Spears? I don’t have her gender, age, experiences. One might claim that structurally I am closer to Britney than to a bat, so maybe my understanding of how it is to be her might be “closer” (provided I can create a distance measure on such a thing).

But now an easy one (for me). What was it like to be me, this morning? The facts are there: the sun was shining, and I was having a headache. My perceptions of the external world and the internal world created something which Nagel would call “experience”. Right now, the headache is gone and it is nighttime. I can describe my feelings this morning, verbally, but I can not trick my mind to feel a headache or my eyes to see sunlight.

I do not know how it was to be me this morning. The gap between the actual moment of experience, and the attempt to reproduce it later is much larger, than the gap between my experiences, Britney’s experiences, or the bat’s.

PS: Of course, I know what it is for me to finish writing this blog entry. But wait… it is gone.

I went to the AI Forum meeting today, here at EECS/UCF. The topic is about creativity on computers. As the computers are not really perceived as creative, such discussions always end up steering towards creativity in art, advertising and propping the door open (*).

But, then, surprise, surprise: a much more technical definition arises from Ken Stanley : creative is what impresses me. That is, a solution is creative if it makes me say: “Gee, that would have never occurred to me”.

This sounds relativistic and philosophical, but in fact it is easy to formalize. Let us assume that we have a search problem and a search algorithm H after time deltaT did not find a solution. Then, the algorithm is presented with a solution c, which we assume that the algorithms can verify.

Questio: how can the algorithm establish whether it would have ever found that solution of if it would have taken a very long time? I have a feeling that in the extreme this problem might prove to be just as complex as the search itself. But one can imagine some simple approximation algorithms: a solution is creative if it can not be reached with the existing operators, if it is found on paths which run against the heuristics, if it has steps which are very far from gradient descent, and so on. This way, you might even determine which steps in the solution are creative and so on.

So there are no creative solutions in abstract. The creativity is always relative to a particular heuristic. There are no creative solutions, only bad heuristics. In the land of supermen, Bicycle Repairman is the creative one.

(*) At UCF, propping the door open is almost exclusively done with the garbage can; not much creativity there.