Huh! What in heaven's sake does that mean ? Oh well, I just went about neologistic in an eccentric mood in naming a new form of literature I just thought about! Well, I am not strictly "positive definite" on whether it is a new form of literature, but probably, in the sense that I am trying to combine both my left and right brain activities in a cohesive framework, it could be! An illustration of this idea is depicted in the story here.
Another example which I just thought about is the following! Well, forgive my thoughts in random directions!
Patterns of distances: Like my friend once pointed out, humans can't really digest random events. They always try to find patterns in them and tries to "predict" what could be next! The following are the distances of myself from my home in ascending order of time which I had thought about in a rather pensive mood of homesickenss. (O(x) means "in the order of")
0 ~ O(0) - 1980 - unborn
8kms ~ O(10) - 1985 - home to school
165kms ~ O(100) - 1998 - home to college
1330kms ~ O(1000) - 2005 - home to Hyderabad (for work)
13832kms ~ O(10000)- 2007 - home to Minneapolis
Now where could I be next to satisfy the geometric progression ? Doesn't it look like a Translogical or Pseudo mathematical sentimentalism ? :P where you bring about logic and sentiments into one framework ?
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Time Travel !
A year back, during one of those coffee table chats, in the cafetaria of Microsoft, this imaginative idea of 'the third eye' popped up! Won't it be a great add-on for a human to have a mechanical camera eye, which will record everything in the world he sees! Well, there can be immensible possibilities with such an eye, but jokingly we were basically looking for an appropriate position to place that eye on the face and finally decided to put it in the un-utilized space at the center of the forehead! This later formed the basis for my cartoon "The third eye, everything is useful atleast twice" :)
Obviously, one of the main reasons I would love to have something like this would be, to see again those cherishing great moments of my life once again! Thinking about this further, what if we recorded not only the visual feedback from our eyes, but also the complete brain activity ? A kind of brain photo or whatever you call it! Its like an active snapshot of the brain activity for the duration of recording!
Elaborating it further, anologus to a video camera recording visual scenes, lets assume that we have a brain camera that records brain activies. Since recording brain activities include recording of the nerve signals from all the sensory points (that includes eyes, skin, ear, nose, tongue...). This, I will call the brain activity photo (BAP :) ). Now, if we have a mechaism of feeding the BAP back to the brain, may be in the subconscious level or as a dream (so that the actual functioning of the brain is unaffected), then wont this bring a feeling of time travel ?
How does it be equivalent to a time travel? Well, if you would formulate a Turing test for time travel, then one possibility would be to ask the testee what time he thinks he is in! And feeding the right set of BAP signals to his brain would obviously make him belive that he is actually in that particular timeframe! So I believe this is a kind of timetravel itself ! Well, there are psychological problems of belief that might come into picture here, like do you believe in the dream you see when you are seeing it or does your subconscious tell you that you are actually seeing just a dream and its not real? In that case, the model Turing test for timetravel might fail! But anyways, thats a different story!
Concluding, this is like getting a four dimensional photo of oneself, having all the three dimensional space cordinates and the fourth dimensional time cordinate. Anyways, this is just a feeling of time travel (which is actually real relative to the person) and is perfectly coherent unlike the quantum mechanical time travel paradoxes :)
Obviously, one of the main reasons I would love to have something like this would be, to see again those cherishing great moments of my life once again! Thinking about this further, what if we recorded not only the visual feedback from our eyes, but also the complete brain activity ? A kind of brain photo or whatever you call it! Its like an active snapshot of the brain activity for the duration of recording!
Elaborating it further, anologus to a video camera recording visual scenes, lets assume that we have a brain camera that records brain activies. Since recording brain activities include recording of the nerve signals from all the sensory points (that includes eyes, skin, ear, nose, tongue...). This, I will call the brain activity photo (BAP :) ). Now, if we have a mechaism of feeding the BAP back to the brain, may be in the subconscious level or as a dream (so that the actual functioning of the brain is unaffected), then wont this bring a feeling of time travel ?
How does it be equivalent to a time travel? Well, if you would formulate a Turing test for time travel, then one possibility would be to ask the testee what time he thinks he is in! And feeding the right set of BAP signals to his brain would obviously make him belive that he is actually in that particular timeframe! So I believe this is a kind of timetravel itself ! Well, there are psychological problems of belief that might come into picture here, like do you believe in the dream you see when you are seeing it or does your subconscious tell you that you are actually seeing just a dream and its not real? In that case, the model Turing test for timetravel might fail! But anyways, thats a different story!
Concluding, this is like getting a four dimensional photo of oneself, having all the three dimensional space cordinates and the fourth dimensional time cordinate. Anyways, this is just a feeling of time travel (which is actually real relative to the person) and is perfectly coherent unlike the quantum mechanical time travel paradoxes :)
Monday, January 21, 2008
What good is consciousness to machines?
The blog below is a peek at my own continuing thoughts to understand some terms and is written to evoke a discussion (in case!) or criticism!
Its been a while since I have been trying to define this term and recently my focus went over a paradigm shift. What use does it serve in defining 'consciousness'? The major reason for this thought make over was the "feeling" that the genesis of ideas are not "normally" in the realm of consciousness, but somewhere outside it. I don't know where ideas evolve, but from my own experiences, its certainly not inside consciousness. A conscious mind is just a verifier of ideas.
These thoughts lead me to another point. Mind/consciousness is just something that arises out of itself! Its hard to explain this weird self-referencing definition, but my efforts are underway! You can't define self-consciousness, since anything you use to define it is a matter of itself. Going by Godel-ian kind of explanations, you can't define it since you are inside your own consciousness when you try defining it and to define anything you need to use the materials outside itself!
Now, what are ideas? And how do they evolve? An idea, if you ask me, is a solution to a problem! In that sense, if you can find a problem, then that problem forms an antagonistic definition of an idea. When you think of solving a problem, unless you have already seen the solution and the solution is already a part of your consciousness, the computation happens elsewhere! I don't know where this happens, and thus I would call it a peripheral computation. Mind or consciousness has no control over this computation, except that it can feed in motivation, perseverance, concentration and guidance. When a solution arises out of some "random" firing of neurons, the mind acts as a verifier and checks the feasibility of the solution!
By the above argument, I am not discarding the possibility of the influence of existing knowledge in the finding of a solution. It certainly is guided, but my point is that consciousness has nothing to do with the finding of a solution or the thought process!
Now, what do I think, could be the after effect of such a conclusion? It means that self-consciousness is just an influencing parameter for a machine to solve problems, but is not a required parameter, but peripheral computation is... whatever that means ! Sometimes people call it "intuition" !!
Corollary to these thoughts:
1) If everything happens through peripheral computation and it is based on randomness, then why is the world so deterministic ? Why do people think alike in most of the situations, if everything is equally probable?
2) Randomness is just a shield over our inability to understand what lies beneath. Thus it is not random, but is something guided. In that sense, doesn't it mean that the origin of ideas is not random, which means that what I am thinking right now is not some random thought but is an after effect of a configuration which at any cost is unavoidable due to the last series of incidents! In such an extreme sense of completely mechanical self-awareness, is it required to do something special than the conventional things, in programming a machine to act like humans? Does the turing test make any sense in such a framework?
3) Though this question does not make any sense in this context, but am just curious to know the answer: "What could be the smallest computer program that is self aware"?
Its been a while since I have been trying to define this term and recently my focus went over a paradigm shift. What use does it serve in defining 'consciousness'? The major reason for this thought make over was the "feeling" that the genesis of ideas are not "normally" in the realm of consciousness, but somewhere outside it. I don't know where ideas evolve, but from my own experiences, its certainly not inside consciousness. A conscious mind is just a verifier of ideas.
These thoughts lead me to another point. Mind/consciousness is just something that arises out of itself! Its hard to explain this weird self-referencing definition, but my efforts are underway! You can't define self-consciousness, since anything you use to define it is a matter of itself. Going by Godel-ian kind of explanations, you can't define it since you are inside your own consciousness when you try defining it and to define anything you need to use the materials outside itself!
Now, what are ideas? And how do they evolve? An idea, if you ask me, is a solution to a problem! In that sense, if you can find a problem, then that problem forms an antagonistic definition of an idea. When you think of solving a problem, unless you have already seen the solution and the solution is already a part of your consciousness, the computation happens elsewhere! I don't know where this happens, and thus I would call it a peripheral computation. Mind or consciousness has no control over this computation, except that it can feed in motivation, perseverance, concentration and guidance. When a solution arises out of some "random" firing of neurons, the mind acts as a verifier and checks the feasibility of the solution!
By the above argument, I am not discarding the possibility of the influence of existing knowledge in the finding of a solution. It certainly is guided, but my point is that consciousness has nothing to do with the finding of a solution or the thought process!
Now, what do I think, could be the after effect of such a conclusion? It means that self-consciousness is just an influencing parameter for a machine to solve problems, but is not a required parameter, but peripheral computation is... whatever that means ! Sometimes people call it "intuition" !!
Corollary to these thoughts:
1) If everything happens through peripheral computation and it is based on randomness, then why is the world so deterministic ? Why do people think alike in most of the situations, if everything is equally probable?
2) Randomness is just a shield over our inability to understand what lies beneath. Thus it is not random, but is something guided. In that sense, doesn't it mean that the origin of ideas is not random, which means that what I am thinking right now is not some random thought but is an after effect of a configuration which at any cost is unavoidable due to the last series of incidents! In such an extreme sense of completely mechanical self-awareness, is it required to do something special than the conventional things, in programming a machine to act like humans? Does the turing test make any sense in such a framework?
3) Though this question does not make any sense in this context, but am just curious to know the answer: "What could be the smallest computer program that is self aware"?
Monday, October 29, 2007
Brain waves and virtual reality
Never expected this technology will come out so fast! Last day, I was going through the MIT news and came across this headline reading: "MIT research helps convert brain signals into action". Dr. Lakshminarayan Ram Srinivasan, a post doctoral researcher at MIT, has invented a new neuroprosthetic algorithm to translate thoughts into computer actions! This new technology can control the characters of Second Life, without even moving a single body muscle... all just by thoughts!
Now my blog just could have ended by the above paragraph! But then I just thought I should write a bit more for those curious minds to know more about how such a technology might work. Well, I am not a neurologist by any means, but the ideas on the brain, the intelligence and the concept of consciousness has been confounding me since a long time. There have been numerous news articles on technologies like this before... but I found this one to be different since it uses neuroprosthetics. Neuroprosthetics deals with using electronic devices to interface with the brain, without actually opening the cranium! Well, such a non-intrusive method seem actually appealing to a non-medical person like me, where-in you can just communicate with the brain without actually opening it up and playing with the mess :) . I have read in the past over ideas on using the BCI to toggle light bulbs or Dr.Kevin Warwick's strange experiments in cybernetics of interfacing the nervous system with an integrated circuit, but then this one is compelling.
So what are brain waves? Well, you know our brain is a complicated electro-chemical circuit, with millions of neurons wired all across. Thus its just natural to imagine that they must be associated with electromagnetic waves too...and these are the brain waves. Fundamentally they are of four different frequencies: beta(13-38Hz), alpha(8-13Hz), theta (4-7Hz) and delta (less than 4Hz). Studies have shown that there are many other kinds of brain waves too... like the gamma waves (40-100Hz), the Sensory motor rhythm (SMR) waves etc, but for our current discussion I guess the first four are good enough, since they characterize the ones commonly seen.
So beta waves are produced when the brain is in active work, like in a conversation, or in high beta when in a debate! When a person is tired after experimenting with the beta state, he moves into the alpha brain wave state. They are basically with lower frequency and higher amplitude. Usually people taking the "art of living" puts their brain into this state :). The energy of activation in this state is low.
Next comes the theta state, which is basically associated with creativity. Whenever you day dream, or think laterally or imagine stuff, then theta waves take over... I have noticed that I come across a lot of ideas when I travel... This state is considered to be a positive mental state and the mind goes unrestricted in searching for creative things. Finally the delta waves are those which occurs when the brain goes to sleep... these are the slowest of the waves with the greatest amplitude.
So at any point of time, a human brain will be producing a mix of all these waves. But then the part of decoding the waves back to what he is thinking is just another big challenge. So if what the article stated above comes out successful, then its not very long when emotions of people can just be traced with gadgets and thus thoughts are never personal again! Well, again its interesting to see what role such inventions play in defining what consciousness "really" means!
Now my blog just could have ended by the above paragraph! But then I just thought I should write a bit more for those curious minds to know more about how such a technology might work. Well, I am not a neurologist by any means, but the ideas on the brain, the intelligence and the concept of consciousness has been confounding me since a long time. There have been numerous news articles on technologies like this before... but I found this one to be different since it uses neuroprosthetics. Neuroprosthetics deals with using electronic devices to interface with the brain, without actually opening the cranium! Well, such a non-intrusive method seem actually appealing to a non-medical person like me, where-in you can just communicate with the brain without actually opening it up and playing with the mess :) . I have read in the past over ideas on using the BCI to toggle light bulbs or Dr.Kevin Warwick's strange experiments in cybernetics of interfacing the nervous system with an integrated circuit, but then this one is compelling.
So what are brain waves? Well, you know our brain is a complicated electro-chemical circuit, with millions of neurons wired all across. Thus its just natural to imagine that they must be associated with electromagnetic waves too...and these are the brain waves. Fundamentally they are of four different frequencies: beta(13-38Hz), alpha(8-13Hz), theta (4-7Hz) and delta (less than 4Hz). Studies have shown that there are many other kinds of brain waves too... like the gamma waves (40-100Hz), the Sensory motor rhythm (SMR) waves etc, but for our current discussion I guess the first four are good enough, since they characterize the ones commonly seen.
So beta waves are produced when the brain is in active work, like in a conversation, or in high beta when in a debate! When a person is tired after experimenting with the beta state, he moves into the alpha brain wave state. They are basically with lower frequency and higher amplitude. Usually people taking the "art of living" puts their brain into this state :). The energy of activation in this state is low.
Next comes the theta state, which is basically associated with creativity. Whenever you day dream, or think laterally or imagine stuff, then theta waves take over... I have noticed that I come across a lot of ideas when I travel... This state is considered to be a positive mental state and the mind goes unrestricted in searching for creative things. Finally the delta waves are those which occurs when the brain goes to sleep... these are the slowest of the waves with the greatest amplitude.
So at any point of time, a human brain will be producing a mix of all these waves. But then the part of decoding the waves back to what he is thinking is just another big challenge. So if what the article stated above comes out successful, then its not very long when emotions of people can just be traced with gadgets and thus thoughts are never personal again! Well, again its interesting to see what role such inventions play in defining what consciousness "really" means!
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