Finally, consciousness as an engineering problem!

I noted this recent research from MIT: "Making computers explain themselves:
new training technique would reveal the basis for machine-learning systems’ decisions"

"In recent years, the best-performing systems in artificial-intelligence research have come courtesy of neural networks, which look for patterns in training data that yield useful predictions or classifications. A neural net might, for instance, be trained to recognize certain objects in digital images or to infer the topics of texts.

"But neural nets are black boxes. After training, a network may be very good at classifying data, but even its creators will have no idea why. With visual data, it’s sometimes possible to automate experiments that determine which visual features a neural net is responding to. But text-processing systems tend to be more opaque.

"At the Association for Computational Linguistics’ Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present a new way to train neural networks so that they provide not only predictions and classifications but rationales for their decisions."

The article is itself pretty opaque  - we appear to be at the very beginning of this difficult road.

But ..

A neural net system C which observes another neural net system B and confabulates a symbolic, causal, intentional model explaining how B behaves. Does any of that sound familiar?

The most convincing (obviously still hand-waving) paradigm for thinking this through is due to R. Scott Bakker's Blind Brain Theory (BBT). I do advise you to read his PDF here.

Transgressive Science-Fiction

"The Garden of Earthly Delights"

I still recall the shell-shocked faces of the BBC Newsnight team at the Cannes Film Festival. Kirsty Wark had been too scared to go while Mark Kermode, who had attended, self-consciously praised and defended Lars von Trier's latest film. It was the transgressive "Antichrist".

In mainstream literature think Bret Easton Ellis; in painting, Hieronymus Bosch; in TV, 'Game of Thrones'.

Transgressive art is characterised by psychological and often physical violence; visceral, graphic and explicit sex; profane language; the unleashing of the id; subversion of our safe little lives.

In science-fiction there are some notable practitioners (most transgressive first):

1. Scott Bakker (Neuropath)
2. William Barton (When We Were Real)
3. Richard Morgan (Takeshi Kovacs novels)
4. Peter Watts (The Rifters Trilogy; Blindsight & Echopraxia)
5. Dan Simmons (Hyperion Cantos - Simmons just makes the cut)

I'm currently reading 'Neuropath'. It's difficult, though wholly engrossing - if you can stomach psychopathic brain-control torture, edgy relationships, dense discussion of mind, brain and consciousness.

Amazon link

OK, let me do it this way. Look at your most significant other: his or her smile, affectionate glance, amusing quip. Now make the the skull transparent and look again with the eyes of an MRI scanner. For every quirk of personality you love so much, there's that small net of neural tissue lighting up. That's all there is and ever has been. Meaningless.

Oh, and you too.

One of the themes of this novel is how resistant people are to even engaging with this concept. They shy away - too transgressive.