Author Archives: BVarey

On the 300 Millisecond Issue II

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I have written earlier about Sam Harris’ book Free Will, particularly a passage on page 8 where he cites the work of Benjamin Libet. To recap, in the 1970’s, Libet used EEG scans to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex region can be detected approximately 300 milliseconds before a person is consciously aware of having taken a simple decision to move his or her finger or wrist.

This work has been used as an argument against the notion of free will, and Harris doesn’t hesitate to press it into service:

These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next — a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please — your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision”, and believe you are in the process of making it. (Free Will, pg. 9)

It strikes me as curious that Harris should lean so heavily on an experiment that tests such a simple aspect of conscious human decision making. It is a big leap from trivial finger movements to more decisive or contemplative situations in life, where really significant issues of free will come into play.

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A Key to the Charles Bridge, Prague

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Every once in a while you hear a story that is just so good, the pessimist gets the better of you, and you immediately think it is of apocryphal origin. But I trust the guy who told me this one, and he claimed it happened to him. So I believe it.

And it would be so nice if it were true….

I was in Prague at the beginning of February, pursuing a job opportunity, and had the chance to meet up with a friend there, a mathematician and engineer, Václav. He reminds me a bit of my old Classics professor/friend, Ceri Stephens: kind, engaging, intelligent, and loves his beer. Not quite the same age as Ceri, so perhaps in his 60’s. Václav and I had dinner on the outskirts of town near the castle that overlooks it, and walked back towards Prague around 23:00.

Charles Bridge, Prague

The Charles Bridge, Prague

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On the 300 Millisecond Issue I

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In Free Will, page 8, Sam Harris describes the research of Benjamin Libet in the 1970’s relating to the timing of certain human brain functions. Libet used EEG scans to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex region can be detected approximately 300 milliseconds before a person is consciously aware of having taken a simple decision to move his or her finger or wrist.

Many commentators, Harris amongst them, feel these findings deal a substantial blow to our common notion of free will. In Harris’ words,

These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next — a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please — your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision”, and believe you are in the process of making it. (Free Will, pg. 9)

Harris goes on to query, “Where is the freedom in that?” (Free Will, pg. 9).

Although on the face of it, these findings do seem to threaten a notion of free will, it is not clear to me that they really threaten all notions of free will. Rather, although I agree they do deal a blow to what might be called conscious free will, there might be other notions of free will that, as Daniel Dennett puts it, “are still worth having”.

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Bricks and Mortar in Human-Level Artificial Intelligence

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Bricks and Mortar:

Strategic Positioning of a Long-Term, Human-Level AI Project

Bricks and Mortar
Bricks and Mortar

Précis

  • Any 10 year project needs to have a robust strategy for dealing with change during its lifetime
  • This is particularly true for a human-level AI project, as all key aspects of the field are changing dramatically
  • To date, all previous AI projects have been narrowly-focused and highly specialized: designed to achieve one goal (diagnose a disease, play chess, decide when to sell a stock, etc.)
  • Any human-level AI project, by contrast, will be orders of magnitude more complex, integrating sub-systems that will need to work together to achieve many sub-goals simultaneously, so…
  • Any human-level AI project will end up being a cooperative affair, involving many manufacturers/labs producing many specialist components. It is useful to think of these components as bricks, and the larger project as an edifice to be built
  • This heterogeneous nature will lead to novel constructs not seen in previous AI projects. Most notably, a human-level AI project will be a distributed system, not a monolithic program. Some data and third-party AI sub-systems will be called as services, not bolt-on components
  • To carry the “bricks” metaphor to its logical conclusion, a kind of highly dynamic “mortar” will also be required to bind any human-level AI project together: a mechanism that will allow the bricks to discover one another; to coordinate and sequence their activities; to recover gracefully when a component fails, gets upgraded or goes off-line; to communicate with outside sensors, AI services and data
  • The best business strategy involves developing the mortar, not the bricks

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Book Review: What to Think About Machines That Think

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Intelligentsia impresario John Brockman has done an admirable job of assembling some very impressive thinkers for his web site Edge.org. Although most are scientists, there is a fair number of people from the other estates, and the cross-fertilisation of ideas frequently draws even hardened specialists out of their shells, to make pronouncements on things well outside their fields of expertise.

Hal and Dave
Hal and Dave

Although this is not always a good thing, it does make entertaining, stimulating discussion, and I can recommend the site wholeheartedly.

Every year Brockman sets a current question to his group (whose members are, cringingly, called “Edgies”), and turns the resulting answers into a book. This year’s question, and the book’s title, is “What do You Think About Machines That Think?”

The responses, which take the form of short essays, are only very roughly organized by theme. These themes bleed slowly from one to another, without dividing section headings. This provides a surprisingly effective minimalist structure to the book, hinting at emergent concepts that transcend the distinct points made by individual authors.

There are so many excellent ideas presented in the book, that I can recommend it, too, without reservation. So rather than write a normal critical review here, I thought it would be more useful to look at these themes, especially how the thinkers have thought through them, rather than just analyse what they’ve written. From this we can glean a lot about the state of the fields of AI and machine intelligence.

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Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14, Opus 131 I

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In 1826, a year before his death, Ludwig van Beethoven completed his string quartet number 14 in C# minor, opus 131.

Although it was not well received by the general public upon its first performance, a rather large number of quite significant musicians seem to have thought highly of it in their time.

Beethoven String Quartet 14, Opus 131, first movement

Beethoven String Quartet 14, Opus 131, first movement

When Schubert first heard the piece, he is reported to have said, “After this, what is left for us to write?” And as he lay dying, a year after Beethoven’s own death, Schubert asked for it to be played, and his closest friends obliged him. It was very possibly the last piece of music Schubert heard in his life.

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A Note On Timelines and Measures

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Different cultures have different ways of expressing common concepts. One of the most interesting aspects of this cultural relativism arises when it comes to notions of number, small sets, plurals, and so on.

Prague Astronomical Clock

Prague Astronomical Clock

For example, in English, we have the concepts of singular and plural. If there is one of something, it is singular; any more, and it is plural.

One stone; two stones.

Russian, on the other hand, includes a concept of “twoness” before moving on to the more generic plural. It is as if we had a construct like…

One stone; two stonae; three stones.

One finds other differences, especially when cultures are viewed historically: how the concept of number and measure has changed over time. As is well known, it took a long while for the concepts of zero and infinity to be invented.; Roman numerals are particularly difficult to use to do math; the mathematical community needed many years to come to grips with the notion that the square root of a negative number could in fact be a pretty useful concept (if you didn’t let its inherent weirdness bother you too much).

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Mindfulness Meditation and Detachment I

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Mindfulness Meditation and Detachment I

I wonder if there isn’t a certain danger of arriving at a position of emotional and intellectual detachment if one follows the precepts of Mindfulness Meditation as outlined by its founder and chief spokesperson, Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Before saying even a single word more, I’d like to list my qualifications for making such an accusation:

I have none whatsoever.

I have never done a formal Mindfulness programme, have only read one of Kabat-Zinn’s books (the unfortunately-titled Full Catastrophe Living), and of the secondary descriptions and articles I have read – many in scientific journals — pretty much all of them have been very, sometimes wildly, favourable.

Here’s a fact about Mindfulness: It works.

Moreover, if I do have any kind of valid criticism, I am not all that sure I am justified in laying it at the feet of Kabat-Zinn himself, nor his many followers and practitioners. Quite the opposite: I am pretty sure he is not preaching detachment, or at least wouldn’t want to. But as I said in the opening paragraph, I fear that through following the programme, there is a danger of arriving at that position.

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Mindfulness Meditation and Detachment II

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In the first part of this essay, I wondered whether the practice of Mindfulness runs the danger of developing into a detached position (a term I shall explain shortly) but then spent the vast majority of the remaining paragraphs describing Mindfulness in very positive terms. I related my own beneficial experience of it. I stated twice: “Mindfulness works.” Finally, I ended with the rhetorical question,

“What’s not to like?”

It is time to answer that question now.

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