From: hsr4@vax.oxford.ac.uk (Auld Sprurklie)
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
Subject: Re: Multiple Experiences
Date: 21 Aug 92 22:26:46 GMT
Article-I.D.: planchet.Aug.21.18.26.44.1992.20235

In article <Aug.19.20.16.26.1992.28146@planchet.rutgers.edu>, wreck@fmsrl7.srl.ford.com (R. Cage) writes:
> In article <Aug.15.10.24.12.1992.10798@planchet.rutgers.edu> hsr4@vax.ox.ac.uk (Auld Sprurklie) writes:

""You mention 'beating neurons' which suggests that we may be talking at cross-
""purposes - I can see that it would be possible to model the brain and operate
""the -model- at a much faster rate, but that's not what I was commenting on.

" I can see I'm not spelling out my assumptions in sufficient
" detail.  I'm assuming that the fastest way to get a functional
" brain-equivalent is to replicate the connections and weights
" between neurons, and what better way to do it than in situ?
" I think the distinction between the reworked brain and a model
" of a brain is mainly semantic.

Aha! Realisation dawns!  Several things now fall into place - I hadn't twigged
that you were thinking of replacing the brain altogether with a Mark II version.

I can think of even more problems associated with having a high-speed brain
lodged in a low-speed body; one has only to look at the behaviour of children 
diagnosed as being very intelligent for their age but trapped in an immature 
body which they have not yet learned to control, or at disabled individuals who
appear to all intents and purposes to be cabbages but who possess bright, alert
minds trapped in an unresponsive shell - the result can be intense frustration
at the very least.

Slowing down the reworked brain when needing to handle the body is also likely
to cause problems - if you're used to zipping along on a nifty 100MHz 486DX2,
then being forced to behave as if you are a 4.77MHz 8088 could be equally as
frustrating (apologies for the analogy, but I'm drawing on the behaviour of
colleagues when forced to use slower machines or slow peripherals - the air
becomes almost electrified with frustration!). 

(I'm assuming that some vestige of control must be left operating at the higher
speed, or the old cliche about why anyone would want to operate at some 
fantastic speed raises its ugly head, and the enhanced brain may become 
condemned to operate at the lower speed :) - this too is taken from observation
of other colleagues who have not yet seen the need to use anything faster than a
an XT).

Assuming we find a way of similarly enhancing the body as we hope to enhance 
the brain (and assuming that the brain can be reworked in situ):

" Once you have an axon-equivalent that is N times as fast as an
" axon for the same power consumption, a synapse-equivalent ditto,
" you can remodel in place with the speed turned down and test as
" you go.  When everything is reworked and tested OK, you can crank
" up the speed.  *Then* you have the problem of managing boredom
" when the world is thousands of times slower than it used to be.
" Time-sharing is a means of managing this.

[Just injecting a personal note here: I don't suffer from boredom because I
always have something on the boil - I have far too many interests, projects,
ideas, and so on, to ever manage to be bored - and if I could operate at
10,000 times my present rate, I'd inevitably create 10,000 times more interests,
projects, and ideas, such is the nature of this particular beast :) ]

""This point seems to me to refer to manual activities (I include speech in this
""category), whereas I thought the original idea was to let a clone loose on a
""resource (a network, say) by 'plugging' it in and have it absorb information
""rather than indulge in discourse.
" 
" Absorbing information is fine if you're doing the equivalent of reading
" a book, which is a sequential flow of information.  On the other hand,
" if you are carrying on discourse, or traversing an index of information,
" or anything else which has a lot of query-response interactions, isn't
" easily made parallel and doesn't lend itself to read-ahead, you're going
" to have problems with speed-of-light delay.  At 10,000 times standard
" speed, you're going to have a "felt" 2.5 seconds of round-trip delay
" if you're talking to a site only 23 miles away.  For all intents and
" purposes, it will be as aggravating as talking to something on the moon.
" The "world" with which you can interact comfortably will become much
" smaller.  This applies to everything, including virtual realities
" with actors spread over space.

I think (I may be wrong) that this is a task or task group which is different 
from that which I first understood to be under discussion.  I'm reasonably sure
that all that was proposed for clones (selective copies of 'parts' of the 
primary) was passive information gathering - equivalent to sitting in front of
a vcr rather than engaging in active discourse (except that, I think, the vcr
is almost certainly a poor analogy for database searching).

I recall that the idea was to delegate tasks to clones and leave them to their
own devices, and then receive their results as a 'brain-dump' - either serially
or in parallel - at which point I opined that there might be sequelae such as
schizophrenia (caused, I thought, by attempting to instill conflicting
conclusions into the primary).

I'm unsure about the time delays which you quote (not arguing with the maths,
just with the experience) since a clone would be unlikely to experience such
things as boredom (it would be a poor clone indeed which was created with the
propensity to become bored - you'd never receive any results at that rate :).
The clone is supposedly performing those time-consuming tasks such as trawling
databases which can be intrinsically boring - not a good idea to even let your
clones know what the word boredom means!).

" Now suppose that your brain is time-shared between multiple threads
" of consciousness, sharing a common long-term memory.  A thread doing
" something at a distance can just halt during the delays, and thus
" "feel" as if there is no delay at all.  Threads doing things such as
" reading books or the equivalent can just take whatever time remains,
" since the "input buffer" can be filled much faster than it can be
" emptied even by 10,000 readers.  Boredom disappears.
" 
""I could see even greater pitfalls if your
""clones are actually empowered to speak for you.  Just think how many enemies
""they could make for you :-).
" 
" And if they're not clones, but threads, they are *all* you.
" So, how many enemies can you make for yourself if you can suddenly
" interact with 10,000 times as many people?  How many friends?  Is
" this intrinsicly a problem?

I suspect that it would be - if we're talking about interacting with large
numbers of other individuals.  Have you ever tried holding a conversation with
someone who has suffered a stroke and is slow to complete sentences ?  You find
yourself trying to complete them, so frustrating does it become.

This suggests that any direct interaction with others will (a) have to be 
limited to those capable of answering your questions at the speed of light (or
whatever 10,000 times the present speed might be :)), since you will become
impatient with those who fail to respond quickly enough, and (b) have to involve
something other than speech as a mechanism - talking at even 1,000 times the
current speed will not only wear your lips out, it'll push your output into
the realms of ultrasound :).

Since presumably typing would be out (you'd need a heat-resistant keyboard to
cope with your 250,000 wpm basic), we're left with a direct brain connection to
whatever communication medium you choose (and which might entail some pretty
nasty risks - what happens when today's virus writers get let loose on a 
network in which users are physically (and mentally) logged in ?

""" 2.)	All the different threads share a common neural network and
""" 	long-term memory; they are *all* you.  It is all done on your own.
"" 
""Yep. That was also my point; if you can speed up the biological brain there is
""not so much need to clone it and you can do what you want alone.
" 
" In my terminology, I would consider a seperate set of hardware
" to be the rough equivalent of a "clone", while another conscious
" "self" sharing the memory of a common set of hardware is a "thread".
" 
""Ah.  This again is different from what I'd originally discussed.  In
""this case, (forgive me if I'm wrong) you're talking about a primary
""being online to all clones, rather than having the clones go offline
""to perform their appointed tasks, and then come back online when
""completed (which is where I'd thought that schizophrenia might be a
""possible risk).
" 
" Even more complicated than that.  Let's do a simple example, using
" 3 sets of hardware (call them "cephalons") a 3x speedup and 3 threads
" per unit.  Suppose cephalon A has threads alpha, beta and gamma, with
" alpha being a master task, and beta and gamma being slave tasks which
" absorb data from tasks on cephalons B and C and incorporate it into
" long-term memory.  Cephalon B has a master task beta, and slave tasks
" alpha and gamma which absorb and incorporate data from cephalons A
" and C.  Cephalon C has a master task gamma and slave tasks alpha and
" beta.
" 
" All units have all long-term memories on-line all the time; save
" for time delays, they are all effectively one mind after a while.
" (Short-term memories would not be common between threads different
" threads on the same hardware, but would be common between the same
" threads on different hardware.)  Now, suppose that cephalon B is
" destroyed in an accident.  Just about all the knowledge and
" experience of its master task beta are stored in both cephalons
" A and C, so only the body is dead, the "soul" lives on.  Either
" cephalon A or C could activate task beta at any time, so the only
" effect on beta would be a change in point-of-view and possibly a
" time delay (sleep period?).  This is a means to immunity from
" accidental death.

If all cephalons are sharing common long term memories (and presumably skills),
and one assumes that all experience modifies memory/skill in some way, then to 
prevent complications the same strategies must be employed as are currently 
utilised by servers, namely that when being accessed by any one cephalon any
memory/skill will become locked and cannot be accessed by any other cephalon 
until the process is completed.

This assumes that memories/skills are not normally read-only but are capable of
being altered just by being invoked (the analogy might be the effect of the 
observer on the event, if that makes sense).

It might well be inevitable that with shared resources there will be delays in
availability; one possible solution is the hiving off of copies of the requisite
memories/skills to each process (cephalon) to reduce delays, and then we come
full circle back to the process of updating the core memories/skills: by rote
or in parallel, and how to avoid the schizophrenic state ?

[bits deleted]

" When clones are "offline", you seem to mean that they go off and
" do not restore contact for a relatively long period.  I'm not sure
" how well long-term memories could be integrated in this fashion,
" and if that is not practical, then you are reduced to having the
" "clone" effectively make a report; you'd remember the report, not
" the research.  Then there is the issue of what to do with the
" "clone"; do you terminate it (how'd you like to go on a suicide
" mission to the library?) or have lots of them accumulate?  I'm not
" sure that this has any easy solutions.  On the other hand,
" re-weighting a neural network is *the* way of making long-term
" memories, which is why I believe that time-sharing a common network
" lends itself more naturally to solving this class of problems.

As I understand the original proposal for clone operation, yes, they might go
off for relatively long periods; I recall that the intention was for a clone
to either present a set of conclusions in its report (as a manager, one might
not want to know the fine detail, only the bottom line) or provide a set of
ready-made skills/memories to be integrated into the primary.

The possibility of suicide/murder of clones was discussed earlier (as in what
happens if a clone has sufficient self-awareness to decide that it is better
than the primary, and how would it relish the thought of being dismantled after
having completed its appointed task).

""When I joined this thread (or barged into this thread :-)) the discussion had 
""been about hiving off intellectual tasks rather than manual undertakings, and 
""about the possibility of selectively copying certain skills from your own brain
""into a number of clones, and having them exercise those skills in information-
""gathering, returning upon completion to dump their accumulated experience into
""your brain.
" 
" I consider that a different concept.  If your systems are
" sophisticated enough to make idiot-savant "agents" (as
" distinct from clones) to do tasks and return information,
" and the agents do not have enough of a sense of self to
" be worth re-integrating upon completion of their task and
" neither do they present moral difficulties about terminating
" when their usefulness is ended, I have no troubles with this
" at all.  However, until our understanding of the brain is
" good enough to be able to make subsets tailored for certain
" tasks, it will probably be easier to duplicate the whole thing.

Yes, I think it was a different concept (but I suspect the thread here has
mutated considerably from that original :)).

I think I may have mentioned in a previous post the vague details of the
Encephalon Project at Odin (I presume this is why you chose the 'cephalon'
tag) in which the aim was the creation of a complete model of the full brain -
I've not seen anything more about that.  The only reference I had to it was in
Nelson & Illingworth's A Practical Guide to Neural Nets, which talks about the
state of affairs in 1989 (mostly) - they mentioned that Motorola were backing
the project.

Making a great many assumptions (which is, I find, half the enjoyment), and
assuming above all that we are likely to comprehend all aspects of the operation
of our present biological neural networks, I can see a possible path for the
process of duplicating the present state of a biological net and conferring
that upon an artificial brain.  (And this is where even more holes in my basic
understanding are likely to appear).

What was NMR and is now MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is a mechanism for
monitoring the chemical state of part of an organism (this necessarily very
vague).  If the speed of MRI can be increased considerably to the point where
it can take a 'snapshot' of the chemical state of an entire brain, frozen in
action for a moment, and then process that chemical map to yield whatever format
would be necessary for an artificial brain, and then implement that new map in
the artificial unit (and assume that the original brain does not have time to
be modified in the interim) then I can see that part of what you propose might
be feasible.

But then a host of other ifs, buts, ands, and maybes are raised.  I cannot at
present see a way to implement the reworked brain in situ without basing the
new structure on a different chemistry; this in turn begs the question of
interfacing the growing new brain with the old brain, the problems associated
with the immune system recognising a 'foreign body' and reacting to it, and
what happens if, for some reason, the new brain does not function as expected
and one needs to return to the old brain (which presumably has been supplanted
by the enhanced version since it might be difficult to house the two brains
simultaneously - assuming I've understood correctly this time :)).

I suspect that simply copying the whole brain may open an even bigger Pandora's
box than is likely with an attempt to create subset clones.

Peter "This skull ain't big enough for the both of us" Brooks