How does the Mind Works? --- Easy.

"What we haven't been able to figure out are the proper algorithms to make it happen and there is a huge ongoing research effort at the moment to reverse engineer the brain to figure out what kind of algorithms it employs."

I figured this out a number of years back. It's an evolutionary algorithm. In fact, understanding that evolution is the mechanism by which intelligence works also explains a lot of distinct phenomenon like why human brains recognize intelligence in clearly evolved things like trees and such. A well done, open ended algorithm, slated with predicting future events given very sparse data would necessarily develop an embodied reality simulation, and allow us to understand things like what we mean to understand things. We have an accurate model by which we can predict the activities of such elements. And to borrow terminology from other known evolutionary algorithms like science (amazing how children learning and science seem very similar), consciousness is like having a theory of self much like it's accurate to say children have a theory of mind. And as far as useful organs go, predicting the future is basically worth dedicating a massive amount of resources towards, it's just that doing that requires one to accurate predict what's going on during the present. And it does this by testing the world with the senses, rather than brains processing the senses it's more akin to the brain predicts what should be happening and the sense check whether that's consistent with their perceptions, so from basically no information we evolve an understanding of the world such that our eyes, that cannot see what we see, can tell us whether or not our impressions of what's going on are right or not. -- One will find under this model basically every observation about brains and consciousness are explained.

The invisible hand of the market and God.

Apparently every third-order emergent property is God at work. There's apparently a belief gaining some steam that the invisible hand of the market is God at work.We see this same thing in various other places too, in Evolution by natural selection we see that it's God at work, and within the human brain we see that that too is mysteriously God.

a third-order emergent structure is a consequence of shape, time, and heritable instructions. For example, an organism's genetic code sets boundary conditions on the interaction of biological systems in space and time.

Well, sometimes things like markets, intelligence, science, and evolution which all rely on evolutionary algorithms are easy to confuse. Early on we develop a theory of minds, and are often keen to assign minds where they don't belong and end up painting with a broad brush to catch all human minds and any other third-order emergent structures, so we see the products of nature as the products of minds. And the invisible hand of the market as God's hand. And the amazingness of our own minds. We see minds in every third order emergent structure, because realizing something is/has too much design to be the result of first or second order emergent structures typically in our lives means it's the result of a mind. Though, it could similarly be the result of anything implementing the evolutionary algorithm, which basically is just the non-random selection of randomly occurring differences.

Evolution Is Intelligence: Paley, Design, Hume, Darwin and Conclusions

I do accept that there is merit to the bits of Paley's argument that survive Darwin's explanation. Because the Argument from Design, if we remove the ad hoc conclusion that 'God did it', still says something. While Darwin explained how nature can design itself through a rather amazing emergent phenomenon, he didn't explain why these things look "intelligently" designed.

The conclusion Hume draws is still, I believe, acceptably true. "Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man..." -- The equivalency fundamentally holds. Darwin simply showed us that the Author of Nature was a bottom up process of self-design by evolution. He in no way showed that therefore it's nothing like "the mind of man." This is generally and wrongly ignored, and often thought to be a complete rebuttal. That because we know how design occurs in nature, that it can't be intelligence. But, really we don't know how intelligence fundamentally works, so Darwin pinning down the "Author of Nature" side of the equation does nothing to negate the equivalency and we should, I believe rightly, conclude that the mind of man works very similarly to evolution by natural selection.

In fact, if one considered a robust evolutionary algorithm surviving on, accurate predictions about some external environment, rather than energy, one would find that such a system would account easily for the senses, how they work, how they adapt to shortfalls and gaps, how they cooperate, and a great deal of the robust bits of intelligence which current theories completely fail to explain, much less predict. As well as giving a rather interesting paradigm for how the brain would necessarily have to work. Namely as a virtual black box, which could be as isolated as DNA is from the ongoings of nature, but still able to contain a great deal of very important and accurate information about that environment. DNA, afterall, knows a lot about the world, and the only sense it possesses is death. Is it therefore much wonder that a skullful of neurons testing theory after theory against confirming or rejecting senses could create a remarkably accurate view of the world, without those senses in anyway necessarily causing that view or needing to be fundamentally accurate?

I think that Intelligent Design in Paley's time had merit, and was right about a lot of things. But, like Einstein expanding Newton. Darwin actually built on Paley and Intelligent Design, by finding the underlying process for bottom-up self-organizing design, and explaining not only the design but ultimately intelligence. The best metric for intelligence is the Turing Test which explains nothing but comes off as a version of Justice Potter's pornography test: "I don't know what intelligence is, but I know it when I see it."  -- And yet, for thousands of years people have been looking at trees and saying: "That's so clearly made by intelligence!", and thus, in a very general sense, passing the Turing Test with evolution. And I think that with such an proper understanding creationism and intelligent design is hollower than anybody ever dreamed. When they offer that the intelligence behind nature is God, they are really deifying evolution, an apotheosis of a simple bottom up mechanism for producing additional order by ruling out what doesn't work, very much akin to the accusation of "worshiping evolution" that atheists are occasionally pilloried with; frankly I don't blame them.

David Hume, I pencil, Markets, and Intelligence.

All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man...

 One should logically draw this conclusion. The author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man. Somehow about the time Darwin looked behind the curtain and determined  that the author of nature is nothing more than compounded dumb luck, blind chance distilled into the miraculous, where life cheats at thermodynamics and only collects on the winning bets and forgets it even made the losing ones. That design is the product evolution by natural selection sufficed to give cause for forgetting these previous conclusions. Why should we accept a logical conclusion of the sort that "the author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man"? When we know full well how the author of nature writes? Sure we don't have a flipping clue how the mind of man works, but certainly we can be justified to ignore the logical arguments above out of hand, without explaining it. After all when one considers the amazing nature of  human minds, it ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. And equivalences somehow only go one way, to say that the author of nature is similar to the mind of man, certainly it true but to be disregarded because we now have Darwin to explain the authorship of nature. And why should anybody bother taking that one tiny extra step of saying that perhaps the mind of man is somewhat similar to Darwinian evolution? -- I would argue that they should because it explains the vast majority deep mysteries about intelligence. But that's just me.

There was a somewhat influential essay within Economics, which some are coming to understand  is Darwinian in nature, called I Pencil. Which argues, that the markets are such that nobody really knows how to make a pencil. That we cannot fathom how trees are made and so we conclude that it must be God. Only God can make a tree. But, nobody really knows how to make pencils. We know they are wood, graphite and brass (now aluminum for the ferrule) but who knows how to mine graphite, who knows how to make the mining equipment, who knows how to drill for oil to power the equipment, who knows how to make the lighthouse for the shipments of tin, or to power the saws. The division of labor by the markets is so profound that nobody really knows all the steps. You could set no person on a massive island filled with resources for the taking and have them make a pencil, because nobody knows how to do it.

There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.

Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

 That evolution plays a distinctive role is nothing new, to economics. It's gaining some steam but isn't a rather widely understood point. Evolution is decentralized and doesn't require that particular part know the whole. It's just not needed. And though, Read here seems to suggest that God is behind the invisible hand rather than the same blind watchmaker behind the tree. And also concludes his essay with a presumption of laissez faire faith.

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed.

Neglecting that the blind watchmaker does better for humans when humans gum up the works. Everything in nature is on a knife's edge. Nature's red in tooth and claw. And filled from the foot fungus to head lice with parasites. We shouldn't have faith in the markets, we should recognize that they are the single most powerful economic tool we have but are far better off domesticated than dominating.

In any event, the invisible hand of the markets, the blind watchmaker, the homunculi that live in the pituitary gland are really just different sides of the same process. A decentralized process that doesn't require knowing anything to know everything, to design without understanding, to arrange without forethought, to create without a creator. Is it any wonder that religious people the world over have been saying intelligence is behind the designs of nature? Darwinian evolution looks exactly like intelligence, because intelligence is likely the same process at its core. Intelligent design is trying to replace the cranes (in the Dennett sense) of evolution with the skyhooks behind intelligence often wrongly attributed to God, but really if one takes the arguments seriously, the universal acid of evolution flows the other way. It doesn't save God from the clutches of evolution, it allows the universal acid of the explanatory power of evolution to explain away that meek idol of that He who made the lamb made thee. It ends up splashing acid in the face of God. Because yes, you can argue for intelligent design in nature, but the intelligence, like all intelligence, is just another face of Darwin. The illusion of design, and the thoughts of intelligence behind nature, which even Darwin noted tend to come and go, are the other side of the same coin.

Within research into intelligence, we haven't produced anything even remotely intelligent and fail to produce anything, there is an utter lack of something we could confuse for intelligence. Within biology we have gobs of intelligence, it's all over the place infecting ever facet of what biologists do, and a seeming effort to call it an illusion of design, a mirage of intelligence. On one side of intelligence, we have no intelligence and deeply want something we could confuse for intelligence and no understandable processes and on the evolution side, we have lots of intelligence and a process we understand and all the while deep in the vaults of human intellectual history we have valid arguments which say these are the same thing. It was a mistake to disregard the equivalence of the Author of Nature with the contrivances of human minds, just because Darwin fully explained nature. We should have, at the time, and in the years since, realized that Darwin also explained human minds. It isn't that intelligence in nature is an illusion or that the design is a mirage, it really is there. It's actually completely really deeply and truly a part of nature. God is the illusion. We see the intelligence in the essence of nature and claim that it must belong to somebody, but that's just not the way it works. You can worship the Author of Nature as God, the Intelligent Designer as a divine being, but really if you look behind the curtain you'll find that you're just worshiping what Darwin so aptly described. But "It's intelligent!" one  might insist, rightfully I concede, but that's not a contradiction. Darwin's process is behind that curtain as well. Intelligent Design doesn't save God from evolution, it meekly attempts to call evolution God. Somehow I don't think that even theists who find Paul Tillich's God (a theism as close to atheism as twilight is to night) palatable could manage to swallow that bitter idolatry when properly unmasked.

Properly, the argument for design has been touted as the greatest argument for God ever devised, but really, when you get down to the core, and a dollop of universal acid is splashed on it. We find that much of theological effort, has been, over the years, engaged in worshiping Darwinian Evolution. Insisting on the false distinction that because it's intelligent, it can't be evolution.

Perpetual Motion and the Singularity.

Many futurists and transhumanists tend to focus, in part, on something called the singularity. The point of intelligence explosion where the world before is qualitatively different than the world after:

A technological singularity is a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so extremely rapid, due to positive feedback, that it makes the future after the Singularity  qualitatively different and harder to predict. It has been suggested that a singularity will occur during the 21st century, and there are several mechanisms by which a singularity could occur.

That at a certain point intelligence will become self-recursive and improvements to intelligence will lead to improvements to intelligence and eventually we'll have growing infinite intelligence, and the world will be a completely different place.

This is stupid.

It's based on a flawed assumption that you can tweak up intelligence and get greater amounts of intelligence. That just isn't the case. You can't just gather more and more intelligence and reach a point where you can use intelligence to make intelligence and then make more intelligence. Because, intelligence isn't a thing, it's a process and it takes real work to do. It's equivalent to evolution (I also mean this literally) and you don't get something for nothing. You can't have something that evolves to the point where it goes into superevolution. Evolution takes real work. This is the insight of Paley and the legacy of Darwin. You can't get it for free. You don't get solutions out of the blue like gifts from on high granted by your possession of intelligence as a skyhook. Intelligence is only and can only be a crane. You can only build from the ground up, and improve upon what you've already built. And while we're building better and faster, you don't at some point turn into a rocket ship and fly to the end of the universe abandoning your foundations.

There is an older and clearly example of this idea at work with regard to the idea of perpetual motion. That at some point with growing technological improvements the work out keeps improving and the energy in keeps decreasing and at some point these lines are going to cross and the energy in is going to exceed the energy out and we'll have a brave new world. Because once that happens, even if the amount is very slight we can use that energy to make more energy and more energy and more energy and soon we'll have limitless supplies of ever increasing energy.

If you apply computer power to intelligent pursuits the increases in computer power is going to make it much faster and easier to test more and more ideas and predictions and see if they are accurate or useful, but this is just going to make intelligent faster not more intelligent. You can have an intelligent computer that knows everything I know, and give it the same problem I'm given. And it might come to a consensus answer within a few milliseconds whereas it might take me a minute. And in some distant future, it might come to the answer I would come to in microseconds and it would still take me the minute. But that isn't making it any more intelligent.

I could live in super-slow motion for and exist for a thousand years, I wouldn't be any smarter. I could get to the answers faster relative to you, but my answers wouldn't be any better. I could do more research and spend more time on the problems, but I wouldn't transcend human knowledge or intellect and I wouldn't suddenly be excluded from science to determine truth from falsehood. I could understand the entire corpus of human understanding, and arrive at answers in mere seconds, or fractions thereof. But I wouldn't become magic. And even if I could modify what I am and make time go even slower for me and my life even longer, I wouldn't suddenly become magical or stop needing to do actual work to come to actual explanations. You cannot do experiments in your own head and come to true and impressive conclusions, you need to actually do the experiment and look at the real world to figure out how things work out. And while you could do this process hugely faster relative to others, it wouldn't matter how fast your processor was. You could be know everything I know and be as intelligent as I am, but run on an old 100 megahertz processor and come to my answer that takes a minute in five minutes, but five minutes or five nanoseconds, it's the same damned answer.

How much better is a chess computer that makes the best move it can in 1 minute than one that does it in 1 second? Would it be proper to argue that a faster chess computer is a "smarter" chess computer?

Are species intelligent?

There's a somewhat interesting paper written some 20 years ago about the question of intelligence and evolution qua whether evolving species can be seen to fit the definition of intelligence (Schull 1990). Which was referenced in a paper about the real flaws in the argument from design (Sharlow 2009). Schull in his paper notes that:

It may eventually turn out that there is something about nervous systems that is uniquely suited for the mediation of intelligence (Searle 1980), but until that “something” is identified, the objection seems both vitalistic and anthropocentric. Meanwhile, my bet is that some suite of information-processing, adaptation-developing, and adaptation- implementing features will prove necessary and sufficient for the implementation of intelligence, regardless of the material which instantiates them. The extent to which that suite includes the features I have attributed to species remains to be seen.

Which does seem to explicitly exclude the idea that intelligence actually is evolution and that they are really two sides of the same coin, while in other ways arguing that we can see some deep homologies between species evolution and organism intelligence.

It all turns out to be a pretty dry read although Sharlow's paper is great and certainly does explain the real flaw in design. Which is actually the explanation I agree with. There is real design in nature, and nature is entirely sufficient to result in said design. The primary flaw is the implicit assumption that if a system is designed then it cannot be self-designed. To wit, he gives a notable example of a self-designing system: the human brain. As it is entirely possible to without external input, derive a new splendid mathematical proof or other insight due to the functioning of the brain. So the brain must, in some ways, be seen to be able to redesign itself to be more designed. That self-design is possible is the principle flaw in the argument from design. When we conclude that the designs of nature are like the designs of human ingenuity, we should rather conclude that these designs are created by the system themselves (probably through a form of evolution) rather than subjected to an infinite regress of skyhooks.

There is real design in nature. Design requires a designer. That designer is nature through the self-designing process of evolution.

Most evolutionary attacks on the argument from design suppose that because it's possible for evolution to produce results that seem like design then therefore there must not be any real design in nature. But, that really does narrow the use of design rather strongly. After all, Venter recently designed a lifeform is that life form designed? Well yes. But, he cheated and used all well evolved genes. It really is a pretty silly line and if humans invented squirrels they would be considered designed.

There's a lot of philosophical arguments kicking around but they just don't go far enough in my mind.

Intelligence, Evolution, and a thought experiement.

Intelligence n. 1: capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.

If you had a biosphere that lived on prediction where, rather than getting energy from the sun or from other organisms, the energy was gleaned by way of making accurate predictions about some unknown external world. Where there exists some way of confirming or denying these predictions (senses) and survival was predicated on accuracy of predictions. We would have, in our though experiment, a mind.

The capacity for learning new things for making a new species of predictions would be evolution. The capacity for understanding for being capable of making accurate predictions (this is largely what we mean by "understand", "I know why, how, and what it'll do in various situations") would be evolution. The aptitude for grasping things, for finding relationships, facts, meanings, and truths about the world would be, in this hypothetical biosphere, the process by which these organisms adapt to filling these new niches or better filling the niches than other species would be evolution.

* We can map the process of biological evolution on to a hypothetical world of predictions and find something that fits our given understanding of what we mean by intelligence.

* We can further understand that because of fundamental differences between this hypothetical and AI and the like, why such enterprises routinely fail miserably. It's a bit like designing squirrels by hand that could adapt to any situation. That even the best set of expert systems isn't really going to be remotely as powerful as this. And if we need something this powerful then AI in many of it's facets is an attempt to create a Creator God able to make new sets of predictions as they are needed (without really knowing predictions are needed).

*  We can also see that there are underlying evolutionary properties to the way brains grow and work. We can also see that prediction is what the brain actually does. That we constantly make predictions about the world and about what we should see next.

* This would also be able to do many of the amazing things the brain does like getting fooled by optical illusions to hallucinating away our blind spots. We don't predict there's nothing there... rather we predict what we think should be there.

If we take this thought experiment to its logical limits and to the potential complexity and usefulness of the world of nature we see around us thriving on various abstractions of sunlight. We should have little doubt that such a world, taken as a whole, should properly be seen as a mind by simply replacing light with enlightenment as the ultimate food source.

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.

-- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859, p. 449.

Pocket watches, rocks, and trees.

No - that just tells you about the difference between a pocket watch and a rock. It doesn't tell you about the complexity or the simplicity of the processes that caused/created them.

I'm not saying evolution is complex or simple or that the particular geophysics required for the production of some particular rock is complex or simple. I'm saying that there seems to be something fundamentally different about the two products (rocks and pocket watches) and something fundamentally similar about (pocket watches and trees). That there is something fundamental about the productions which is could allow dumb and ignorant processes to create rocks but seems to require what we typically see as intelligence to create pocket watches and trees.

The useful complexity of things in nature which exceeds all other non-evolutionary processes by several orders of magnitude fails to exceed similarly some of the products of man. That works of intelligent engineered products and results of evolutionary processes are in some ways similar and thus in some ways does imply something fundamentally similar about the processes which created them. I simply differ with creationists, cdesign proponentsists, and design proponents that this implies that intelligence explains the works of evolution; evolution explains itself. Rather, I think that the universal acid of evolution flows the other direction, that evolution, perhaps, explains intelligence. 

Design with/without a designer.

I guess we can talk about design without the existence of a designer, but I must confess it still strikes me as a bit odd.

Well, it shouldn't. I'm okay with a bit of personification of evolution. Evolution is the designer for lack of better words. The standoffishness of the keeping away from any sort of intentional stance or subtle hints that the products of nature are akin to intelligently designed products is largely an overreaction to Creationists. It's a pretty required overreaction because if you give Creationists a finch, they'll take an isle. But, I'm perfectly fine with that. I'm actually okay with saying that nature is intelligently designed, it's designed by evolution and evolution is synonymous at its core with intelligence. If you want to worship the "Intelligent Designer" then you're your own bizarre characterization of somebody foolish enough to worship evolution. I'm actually okay with it because I think it's absolutely damning to creationism as well as being true. I think there's some very core connections between the well understood idea of evolution and the more vague not really explained and pseudo-skyhook of intelligence.

Intelligence is evolution, thread

I did a pretty poor job of explaining my thoughts on the issue previously, but I started a thread on About's Agnosticism/Atheism forum that does a remarkably good job of explaining it when prompted for more evidence and explanations etc.

http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=ab-atheism&tid=44116

Some of the posts are quite long, but I think they are quite good.

Evolution is intelligence, summary

Imagine if there were no intelligence, and rather than intelligence, people could evolve robust new instincts in real time after repeated exposure to a given environment and do so without the massive trial and error of entire genomes but just the trial and error of specific neurons and patterns of neurons of the brain. How would this differ fundamentally from having a mind?