When Do Fish Have Names?

Thoughts in the Technium

HoB Research Institute Videochat Report #1

Copyright 2012 Steven Dean Calahan

HoB Research Institute Videochat 2011.11.25

Factors Participant: Cahn, Calahan, Guyll, Kemper, Osenbaugh, Snow

Factors Correspondant: Flanagan, Joellenbeck

Version 0.1.0

DOI: (TBD)

WHEN DO FISH HAVE NAMES?

Imagine that you give a family dinner party, and Kim, one of your relatives, brings her friend Pat, who lives in another country and speaks only a few words of the prevailing language. After much jollity and some awkwardness, Pat attracts everybody’s attention then earnestly asks a seemingly bizarre, or perhaps profound, question: “when do fish have names?”. Once the good-natured laughter dies down, further communication reveals that Pat is really asking what kind of fish had been cooked for the meal - something along the lines of “what is the name of this fish?”.

Now imagine that your book club meets to discuss the book you’ve all just read, and the actual author of the book has graciously accepted your invitation to join in the discussion. You have a nice hour and a half during which the author gamely addresses all of your questions, book related or not, making some profound comments and asking some profound questions. Or maybe, in a twist from the fish question, some of what seemed profound was really just bizarre.

The House of Baloney Research Institute (HoB) actually did the book club thing with Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants. To be sure, he invited us (as an invitation to the general public) to buy nine copies of his book, thereby securing ninety minutes of his time with up to nine people. However, since we are the ones who did the buying, it felt like we were the ones causing the invitation to take place. In the book, Kelley coins the word “technium” to identify the entirety of the designed world, including not only the artifacts but its propensity to become exponentially more sophisticated and capable, and including mindless design processes such as biological evolution. It’s hard not to accept his argument that the technium will eventually match, and then exceed, the sophistication and capabilities of a human brain. While we are not a book club per se, HoB did indeed buy our nine copies of the book, to score our Google+ hangouts. Among the many situations we discussed, Kevin wondered whether the non-brain component of the technium (humans are an essential component) has, or ever will have, original thoughts, and how or whether we humans would be able to decide that such an event had happened.

At first, this seems like a profound question. Is humanity’s legacy of science fiction to be wasted, or will we be ready to embrace (or confront!) our new cognitive partner(s) in a meaningful way? Who could fail to be excited by the notion, less fantastic as the technium grows, that we, alive today, will be the first to communicate with such a novel entity? If we want to expect satisfaction, we shouldn’t be looking for extraterrestrial intelligence but rather for internet intelligence. Of course, thought about thought is abundant in the philososphere. Our contribution can only be called a kind of riff on that groove, inspired by jollity, camaraderie, and maybe a bit of hand-crafted hoppiness.

“FISH” “NEVER” “HAVE” “NAMES”

On second thought, wondering about “thoughts” in the internet may only be as profound as wondering when fish have names, a form of assuming the outcome. Guppies “have” names when their owners assign them, but our naming has nothing to do with whether guppies have names for themselves. Our names for them stay in our brains, never entering theirs. Looking for thoughts in the technium may be as inherently fruitless as looking for (human-defined) fish names in fish brains.

The very word “thought” is but a name we use to describe part of the illusion that is consciousness. What actually happens in the brain when we introspect is only slowly becoming evident. Any technium-specific thoughts similar to ours are likely to be functional illusions within a technium analog of the cerebral cortex (if these distinctions are even meaningful). We may even learn how to install such illusions at will, with the technium’s first thoughts being known to us because we put them there intentionally, with the implication that the technium is truly “conscious like we are” as a sequel. Conversely, the reason our thoughts operate the way they do is because biological evolution operated on our ancestors the way it did, and having the kinds of illusions we do have turned out to be a great way to advance their ability to eat and reproduce. The technium evolves differently than we did, with different substrates and different rules. If it independently evolves functions that fulfill the role for it that consciousness does for us (assuming such a situation would even be beneficial), could we call them thoughts? Could we call the technium conscious?

A corollary to technium-mentation being too foreign for human consideration is that it may never evolve its own thoughts until it encounters other technia. A significant part of human thought is devoted to imagining what is going on in other brains, and drafting all sorts of plans for future eating, breeding, or fighting based on those imaginings. Indeed, the very ability to model other brains gives a human brain the ability to model and control itself. The very act of self-modeling may be what gives us our own particular human form of consciousness, our sensation of introspection or an illusion that feels like introspection. Unless there are aliens, and until we have physical contact with them, the technium may never evolve its own consciousness. For the technium to think, we may need to find ET after all.

FISH? HELL! ELECTRONS HAVE NAMES: A CALCULUS OF SIMILARITY

Maybe. Now imagine you accept an invitation to a swank, if bizarre, info-monastary/resort/retreat center. Swank because every comfort you are used to is freely available, but bizarre because you are locked inside your room, as are all the other guests inside theirs. You never encounter another living being in person. Your room is fully equipped with all of the latest computer gadgets, fully loaded with software that makes it easy to create digital artifacts, whether by writing, drawing, running simulations or whatever, but you are not connected to the internet. Your only audience or info source is the other guests, and the same with them. Everybody can post their creations to their digital “wall”, which anybody can view. Anybody can make copies of whatever they view on any wall, incorporating the information into their digital artifacts if and however they see fit. Even more bizarre, nobody speaks the same language. Written language would be used sparingly at first, though a common lingo or jargon would surely evolve. At first communications would be only through pictures and non-word sounds or music.

Behind the scenes, the hardware that serves this social networking environment is a vast cloud of enormous computing power, monitoring the attempted communications on everybody’s walls, finding correlations between various signals and eventually mapping, if only by brute force and statistics, the developing and ongoing conversations. Using every imaginable computing technique from bottom up to top down, simulation, emulation, whatever it takes, the system works relentlessly to optimize its computations to use the least resources it can.

At this point, you may be expecting some kind of metaphor intended to make you suppose that this resort operating system is actually thinking. Else why such an elaborate scheme? Unfortunately we’re only halfway through describing this scenario, and that’s not actually the point. Nor are there alien guests from other worlds. Everything is totally mundane.

Continuing the development of our metaphor, suppose all these back-end servers can issue work orders to suppliers and technicians (human and virtual) to reconfigure the network to absorb the latest technology available and that all the various embodiments of symbol/communication understanding have access to each others’ code, for reuse or analysis, and to the code for all the other computing clouds for similar resorts. We would expect computations to evolve which have no direct interaction with humans, ever. No matter what humans may do with their gadgets, these janitorial code clouds are unaffected in any operations they need to complete. Still, in their relentless optimization, these clouds would surely find underused patterns in the digital flow of the human content, and exploit that, if indeed their fitness landscape has particularly good minima that incorporate such tricks.

If there can be thoughts in the technium at all, must not these behind the scenes algorithmics be thoughts? Inherent aspects of their functioning ride upon human thoughts as closely as they can without using human brains – as close to being brain-thoughts as they can, and yet not being embrained, they are independent. This product of algorithmic activity, storage and retrieval, cataloging, modeling, peer-to-peer exchange, embodied in the massive voids in the data streams that humans leave to be exploited: Is this not language?

WE FISH, THEY FISH, I FISH, YOU FISH

Now imagine you are a fish. That is, similar to being invited to a dinner party, or a futuristic room, you are invited to be a guppy in a fishbowl. Like Merlin and Wart in The Once and Future King, some kind of high tech allows you to experience the mental life of a fish. Contrived as the futuristic room gedanken was, the fishbowl is even more contrived: to imagine being a fish you have to sacrifice the very ability to imagine what it is like to be a different consciousness. The futuristic room only requires you to extrapolate current technology; the fishbowl requires you nearly to suppose near-magic. How can you get a sense of what it must be like to just float there waiting to fight, flee, forage or fornicate, while noticing that you are imagining all that?

And why stop with fish? If we can imagine propelling two electrons towards each other through a vacuum, such that they bounce or veer away from each other, why can’t we suppose that each electron is experiencing some thought-primitive or other. The question becomes one of scale and emergence – is it the underlying physics that defines the presence of thought, or the specific patterns and dynamics that occur? Is rate important – do plants think? or insect colonies or slime molds? Is thought so inherently boring, when you get down to it, that our philosophizing about it is little more than a symptom of unwarranted self-regard? It sure doesn’t feel that way, but maybe that’s just part of the illusion.