Chemical Basis for Minimal Cognition

September 5, 2010 by Evgenii Rudnyi · Leave a Comment
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Chemical Basis for Minimal Cognition
Martin M. Hanczyc and Takashi Ikegami
Artificial Life 2010, Vol. 16, No. 3: 233-243.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/artl_a_00002

Abstract: We have developed a simple chemical system capable of self-movement in order to study the physicochemical origins of movement. We propose how this system may be useful in the study of minimal perception and cognition. The system consists simply of an oil droplet in an aqueous environment. A chemical reaction within the oil droplet induces an instability, the symmetry of the oil droplet breaks, and the droplet begins to move through the aqueous phase. The complement of physical phenomena that is then generated indicates the presence of feedback cycles that, as will be argued, form the basis for self-regulation, homeostasis, and perhaps an extended form of autopoiesis. We discuss the result that simple chemical systems are capable of sensory-motor coupling and possess a homeodynamic state from which cognitive processes may emerge.

I have found the paper quite interesting. Well, in my view it is quite far from cognition but it may be a good test system indeed to understand the border if it exists.

Authors homepages:

http://sacral.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~ikeg/index.html
http://flint.sdu.dk/people/martin_hanczyc.html

Ambient Information Society

September 3, 2010 by Evgenii Rudnyi · Leave a Comment
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I have seen the next announcement on the alife-announce list (see http://www.anarg.jp/bioambis2010/).

In the future ambient information society, not only can a user obtain information in a flexible manner as in the ubiquitous information society, but also the information systems autonomously provide desired information to the user and control the environmental conditions according to the context of the user, e.g. time, place, occasion, and personal preferences. To realize the ambient information society beyond simply extending conventional IT, new innovative technologies are required to tackle the expected challenges, such as inference of user’s desires, recognition of environmental conditions, adaptation of ambient systems, and provisioning of information to users. The new technologies also need to be scalable, adaptive, reliable, and robust. Biologically inspired approaches are promising in building such technologies by opening up an interdisciplinary way of thinking and working.

Somehow it scares me. Do I want that the environment will adjust itself automatically according to my wishes? Well, it is a big question if I know what I wish. Presumably the environment will talk directly with my unconscious mind and then reveal what I actually want. It is really scaring. Or I am getting too old?

What crazy scientists make with brain nowadays

September 2, 2010 by Evgenii Rudnyi · Leave a Comment
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I have received an offer to download one audio book for free from Audible.de. Well, it happens that they have their own audio format, not mp3 and they use DRM. However, it was working with my iPod Shuffle and I have decided to take a bite. In Russian this called “halyava” and I could not resist it. After some search, I have decided for Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Matter, and Tomorrow’s Brain (editor Floyd E. Bloom). The book comprises 21 papers from Scientific American published since 1999 about brain. I have decided to look what crazy scientists do in this respect, as I actually have no idea what is going on in my brain, not speaking about the question what my mind is.

It happens to be quite a good choice. I have really enjoyed the book. It is especially good for people in the middle life crisis like me. Say in one paper there is a new way  to treat depression, they plant an electrode to some brain area (area 25), put a voltage, and voilà: depression is over. Well, it is not directly applicable to the middle life crisis but it is good to know that anyway.

The collection is divided in three sections

Part I: Mind

  • Ulrich Kraft, Unleashing Creativity
  • Mark S. George, Stimulating the Brain
  • Mark Solms, Freud Returns
  • Carl Zimmer, The Neurobiology of the Self
  • Antonio R. Damasio, How the Brain Creates the Mind
  • Eric R. Kandel, The New Science of Mind

 Part II: Matter

  • Nikos K. Logothetis, Vision: A Window on Consciousness
  • James M. Bower and Lawrence M. Parsons, Rethinking the “Lesser Brain”
  • Gregory Hickok, Ursula Bellugi, and Edward S. Klima, Sign Language in the Brain
  • Juergen Andrich and Joerg T. Epplen, Hunting for Answers
  • Fred H. Gage, Brain, Repair Yourself
  • Steven E. Hyman, Diagnosing Disorders
  • Eric J. Nestler and Robert C. Malenka, The Addicted Brain
  • Daniel C. Javitt and Joseph T. Coyle, Decoding Schizophrenia
  • David Dobbs, Turning Off Depression

 Part III: Tomorrow’s Brain

  • Steven D. Hollon, Michael E. Thase, and John C. Markowitz, Treating Depression: Pills or Talk
  • Ray Kurzweil, The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine
  • Miguel A. L. Nicolelis and John K. Chapin, Controlling Robots with the Mind
  • Nicola Neumann and Niels Birbaumer, Thinking Out Loud
  • Kwabena Boahen, Neuromorphic Microchips
  • Stephen S. Hall, The Quest for a Smart Pill

A Brief History of Computing

September 2, 2010 by Evgenii Rudnyi · Leave a Comment
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On Linkedin in the group Artificial Intelligence Researchers, Faculty + Professionals there was an interesting discussion “Can we compute an answer to every question?” with over 600 comments. Here I have realized that I cannot give a good definition what computing is, in spite that I have been working with numerical methods all my life and programmed some codes. I have decided to see what other say about computing and started with the book A Brief History of Computing by Gerard O’Regan, 2008.

It happens to be a lovely book where the author gives an enjoyable overview on many aspects of computing from history perspectives. He covers

  • Early Civilisations
  • Foundations
  • Computer Programming Languages
  • Software Engineering
  • Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems
  • The Internet Revolution
  • Famous Technology Companies

and this gives pretty good feeling what is computing , although there is no direct formal definition. Funny enough, numerical methods as well as scientific computing are not there but, I guess, this just reflects that their market share is not that big.

Neurons only die

August 24, 2010 by Evgenii Rudnyi · Leave a Comment
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A somewhat gloomy citation from Vital Dust by Christian de Duve (Chapter 26, Brain, p. 240):

The human brain has completed all the neurons it will ever make some five month before birth. Contrary to what happens to other cell types, multiplication of neurons ceases after that. Henceforth, neurons only die, starting in uter0, to the tune of hundreds of thousands per day. I have lost several billion neurons since I was born. Between starting and finishing this centence, I have lost about one hundred more. The thought is unsettling, but I take comfort in assurance from my neurobiologist friends who tell me that many brain connections are superfluous and redundant and that, even though I cannot replace my neurons, I can still rewire some connections if I keep sufficiently busy.

Amazon associates and Wordpress

August 23, 2010 by Evgenii Rudnyi · Leave a Comment
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Sometimes I write about books and I have applied for Amazon associates to advertize these books. The use of the links from Amazon associates happened to be problematic though. They produce them as iframe and Wordpress does not like iframe. When I copy the code to the HTML editor and then go back to the visual editor, the iframe code dissapears.

Quick solution is just to use the HTML editor and not to switch to the visual editor at all. This works but I like comfort and did not want to loose the opportunity to use the visual editor. Then I have searched for plugins and finally I have found Insere Iframe

http://blog.idealmind.com.br/wordpress/insereiframe-a-simple-wordpress-plugin-to-insert-iframe-in-posts/

With this plugin installed it is necessary to modify the link from Amazon in the HTML editor, for example

<iframe src="AmazonLink" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>

as follows

[iframe: src="AmazonLink" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"]

Then plugin will transform it to the normal code on the fly. You will see however this code in the Visual Editor, not what will be shown in the blog. I have found useful to add float:left;margin-right:10px;margin-bottom:10px; to the style. With that one gets the link from Amazon as follows

http://matrixprogramming.com/2010/08/linkers-and-loaders

Computable Universes & Algorithmic Theory of Everything

August 21, 2010 by Evgenii Rudnyi · Leave a Comment
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Some time ago, I have occasionally found

Nick Bostrom, Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?
http://www.simulation-argument.com/

I should say that this idea looks crazy but on the other hand why not?

The page of Prof Schmidhuber adds mathematical insight into this problem

Computable Universes & Algorithmic Theory of Everything
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html

Interestingly enough, it was not cited by Nick Bostrom but it seems to be related. Prof Schmidhuber mentions Konrad Zuse as a pioneer in this area.

Zuse’s thesis: The Universe is a Computer
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/digitalphysics.html

On this page there is a link to a pdf of the translation of the book Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space).

I should say that such a viewpoint troubled me for some time. Yet, finally I have found the paper

David Chalmers, The Matrix as Metaphysics
http://consc.net/papers/matrix.pdf

where ther author considers The Matrix Hypothesis. A few citations

“I will argue that the hypothesis that I am envatted is not a skeptical hypothesis, but a metaphysical hypothesis. That is, it is a hypothesis about the underlying nature of reality.”

“In particular, I think the Matrix Hypothesis is equivalent to a version of the following three-part Metaphysical Hypothesis. First, physical processes are fundamentally computational. Second, our cognitive systems are separate from physical processes, but interact with these processes. Third, physical reality was created by beings outside physical space-time.”

“Importantly, nothing about this Metaphysical Hypothesis is skeptical. The Metaphysical Hypothesis here tells us about the processes underlying our ordinary reality, but it does not entail that this reality does not exist. We still have bodies, and there are still chairs and tables: it’s just that their fundamental nature is a bit different from what we may have thought. In this manner, the Metaphysical Hypothesis is analogous to a physical hypothesis, such as one involving quantum mechanics. Both the physical hypothesis and the Metaphysical Hypothesis tell us about the processes underlying chairs. They do not entail that there are no chairs. Rather, they tell us what chairs are really like.”

With such an interpretation I am actually satifsfied.

P.S. There is a discussion list related to this:

http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list

Quantum mechanics and Archimedes

August 21, 2010 by Evgenii Rudnyi · Leave a Comment
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A couple of citations from Lucio Russo, The Forgotten Revolution, How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn

“The departure of physics from the ancient scientific method started at the turn of the twentieth century, when an enormous increase in the range of observed phenomena demanded the creation of new scientific theories, toward which no light could come from reading Archimedes nor yet from browsing through all of Plutarch.”

“Instead of proposing a third scientific theory, scientists such as de Broglie and Bohr postulated ‘particle-wave duality’ and the ‘complementary principle’. Faced with the inappriority of two mutually incompatible theories, a culture that still confused theoretical entities with real objects found it normal to attribute the nature inconsistency of science itself.”

“And perhaps, too, when the Pythagorean school ran into an impasse in classifying the diagonal of the square, someone resorted to Eastern teachings and the inherently contradictory nature of the world, and proposed a solution: to declare the diagonal a profoundly ambiguous entity featuring a duality or complementary between even and odd.”

Matter and little ghosts

August 21, 2010 by Evgenii Rudnyi · Leave a Comment
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An interesting citation from Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe, Chapter 4, Water, Ice, and Vapor, p. 42.

By the most important effect of phase organisation is to cause objects to exist. This point is subtle and easily overlooked, since we are accustomed to thinking about solidification in terms of packing of Newtonian spheres. Atoms are not Newtonian spheres, however, but ethereal quantum-mechanical entities lacking that most central of all properties of an object – an identifiable position. This is why attempts to describe free atoms in Newtonian terms always result in nonsense statements such as their being neither here nor there but simultaneously everywhere. It is aggregation into large objects that makes a Newtonian description of the atoms meaningful, not the reverse. One might compare this phenomenon with a yet-to-be-filmed Stephen Spilberg movie in which a huge number of little ghosts lock arms and, in doing so, become corporeal.

The Universality of Life

August 15, 2010 by Evgenii Rudnyi · Leave a Comment
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Some citations from Christian de Duve, Vital Dust, The Origin and Evolution of Life on Earth, 1995.
Chapter 13, The Universality of Life

In the introduction to this  book, I argued on theoretical grounds – remember the thirteen spades – that the ermergance of life must have involved a very large number of steps, most of which had a high probability of occuring under the prevailing conditions. But left open the possibility that there might be more than one pathway compatible with this exigency.  My conclusion, after a consideration of the underlying chemistry, is that, given the opportunity, the development of life is very to take the course it actually took, at least in all essential steps.

The figure of about one million “habitable” planets per galaxy is considered not unreasonable. Even if this value were overestimated by several orders of magnitude, it would still add up to trillions of potential cradles for life. If my reading of the evidence is correct, this means that trillions of planets exist that have borne, bear or will bear life. The universe is awash with life.

But the term “artificial life”, applied by analogy with “artificial intelligence”, could be misleading. Life is a chemical process. If it is ever to be created artificially, it will be by a chemist, not by a computer.

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