The Future of the Mind

[Zarathustra]

This is thread for Michio Kaku's new book of the same title. I've mentioned his name in many discussions, but in case there are some who don't know, he's a theoretical physicist and popular science author. I've read 3.5 of his books now (only halfway done with this one), and I can't recommend them enough, especially the three that look into the future of science: Visions, Physics of the Future, and this one. There's also a Physics of the Impossible, but I haven't read that one yet.

Since I've only read half, I've pasted a quote from a review. But my impressions so far are a constant state of awe. Each page reveals another astonishing feat that we're doing right now, and then extrapolates that current technology into the near future. We ARE unlocking the secrets of the brain. This field of science is exploding. We're like those who lived in the time right after the telescope was invented, seeing the universe open before our eyes--literally. MRI, PET, CT scans, SPECT, etc. have opened up the universe within our skulls. Currently there are three international projects to definitively decode the brain, at last determine its exact functioning. I had no idea how far along this road we are. We are reverse-engineering the brain like some alien technology dropped from the heavens, giving us the secrets of intelligence and consciousness itself.

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookr ... eview.html

28 Feb 2014


Quadriplegics move artificial limbs with the mind. Video games are directly controlled by the power of thought. A monkey’s brain connected to the internet can control an avatar on a video screen or a robot half a world away. A mouse’s memory is erased and reprogrammed. All these and more have already happened but may be as nothing compared to what is coming.

Dreams will be videotaped. New forms of entertainment will record smell, taste and touch as well as the full range of emotions which can then be re-experienced by their audience. Scientists will build an internet of the brain, through which thoughts and emotions can be sent around the world. Spies will be able to intercept brain waves from a considerable distance. Soldiers will communicate thoughts directly to each other. And devices as fantastic as anything in Star Trek – a hand-held MRI the size of a mobile phone that, like the tricorder, can also diagnose disease, a “holodeck” where you wander in a virtual world (or a representation of a distant real world) but feel sensations when you bump into virtual objects, just as if they were real – will become feasible.

....
“We have,” writes Kaku, “learned more about the brain in the last 15 years than in all of human history.” And what comes next may be even more amazing.

... describes the technologies already making possible the recording of memories, mind reading, videotaping and telekinesis (that is, the ability to move things by thinking about moving them, and linking the thought via a computer to a robot or other machine).

... One area of study is attempts to reverse-engineer the brain. At least three major efforts are under way. The Human Brain Project, a €1 billion EU initiative, aims to simulate the brain electronically on computers. The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, funded by the US government, aims to map the neurons of the brain directly. A third project, funded by Paul Allen, billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, aims to decipher the genes that control brain development.

....Diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and some forms of depression may be alleviated within a few years, with economic benefits that could dwarf the cost of current research. Kaku is right to highlight and celebrate this.

A second focus in Kaku’s tour of possible futures is superhuman intelligence, whether in our biological or mechanical successors. He is sceptical of the claims of singularity apostle Ray Kurzweil that the ability to upload a brain on to a computer will be feasible within a couple of decades. Good evidence supports his scepticism. As the technologist and science-fiction writer Ramez Naam argues, the problems to be overcome are non-linear. Man may be, in Nietzsche’s phrase, a bridge not a goal, but the chances are that we are a bridge with some way to go.

Still, Kaku thinks that future is not beyond reach. “Perhaps one day the mind will not only be free of its material body, it will also be able to explore the universe as a being of pure energy. The idea that consciousness will one day be free to roam the stars is the ultimate dream. As incredible as it may sound, this is well within the laws of physics.”

...

This review makes some philosophical criticism that I actually agree with, conceptually, but in terms of the technology described in the book, I'm not sure how important it is. There are ethical concerns of materialistic reductionism inherent in Kaku's technological focus, but it may be that these are eventually accounted for in an even deeper level of brain science itself, as Roger Penrose points out. The fact that the mind isn't exactly an organic computer doesn't mean that it isn't produced by the brain. Even if consciousness is an "emergent property" that can't be reduced to individual neurons, this doesn't mean that we can't eventually develop a physics that explains even the emergence itself. You might need a quantum theory of the brain, that doesn't rely upon the reductionism inherent in classical physics.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

As I have said many times before, my thinks I am crazy when I say things like this but I would volunteer to have a USB slot wired into my brain--the ability to have multiple GB of data instantly available to me with no error in recall would be amazing. Throw a translation program in there and we could become instantly fluent, from a literacy point of view, in any language--no you couldn't order in a restaurant but you could read the menu or any signs you come across, as well as books or web pages written in an language unknown to you. Uploading a medical database complete with step-by-step procedures and videos, as well as diagnosis and pharmacology databases, could make anyone a physician almost instantly.

If I am lucky I will be able to upload my mind into a computer before I die.

[Vraith]

This book is on my list...in fact I recall when I first heard it was coming saying something in re a post where you mentioned him like "Hey Z!, did you know he's got a new one coming out?"

Even if consciousness is an "emergent property" that can't be reduced to individual neurons, this doesn't mean that we can't eventually develop a physics that explains even the emergence itself. You might need a quantum theory of the brain, that doesn't rely upon the reductionism inherent in classical physics.

I think we've discussed all kinds of things related to this around here...I think something along those lines is so. I fully expect...eventually...a complete understanding of how "minds" come about and the fields/rules that govern. [[I fully expect more than one kind to be possible, too]] But that doesn't mean we'll know WHO the mind will be, what they will/can do with it, what being means.
What it MIGHT do is massively INCREASE the options/choices we have.

Hashi: I don't want to upload...though I'd take that as second choice.
I really want a true integration...our bio-brains continually kept healthy and young and [[we're closer than people think, I think, to keeping the biological forever young]] INTEGRATED with machine intelligence [[or at least machine processing]]. Cuz of what I said above: the physical structure/material of a mind/thinking machine will have an impact on what it can do/think. I'd like both.

edited for typos, though probably still some in there

[Avatar]

Not close enough for us though probably.

--A

[peter]

Miraculously my library seem to have a copy which I have duly ordered . Expect to see my complete misunderstanding and failure to grasp the book laid out in due course.

[Zarathustra]

I finished the book last week during Spring Break (we took off with our son). The book has so many things worthy of discussion, but I'm not sure I'll ever get around to it here, not unless someone else starts reading. I just wanted to chime in on the end. Actually, the Afterward. In the final paragraphs of the book, Kaku finally mentions Penrose as having an opposing opinion on the underlying philosophical implications of the rest of the book. What blew my mind was that Kaku seemed to have reversed his materialistic, reductionist position by the end! Though his position was still grounded in physics, namely quantum mechanics, he said that an artificial mind probably wouldn't have freewill, and thus be "alive" in the same way we are--though he'd probably still count it as "conscious" in the strict definition he articulates in the book. Maybe he thought this the entire time, but given the tone of the rest of the book, it's nearly impossible to detect. Given that this is in the Afterward, it gives the impression that this was a change after the book had been written, based on further research which included Penrose.

Now I'm reading his PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE. Mind still being blown.

[Fist and Faith]

sonova b...

[peter]

Am a quater into the book [hadn't realised this guy was a physicist I had encountered in a number of 'popular science' television programs; clearly a very smart dude to be able to build a particle accelerator in his mom's garage as a high school student!]

Will look out for this 'shift' in perspective at the end with interest.

[Fist and Faith]

I'm almost done with the second chapter.

[Fist and Faith]

Chapter 3: Telepathy is pretty amazing. My ignorance of these things is no surprise. Still, incredible that they're as far along on some of these things as they are.

I like his definitions of Consciousness. A different approach, for sure. Good to look at things from different angles.

[Zarathustra]

Wow, others are reading! Cool. Yes, I was amazed at our progress. There is so much happening in this field.

His definition of consciousness misses much, but it's a fine working definition for the "mechanical" view of "biological machines" interacting with an environment. One can see how it would certainly provide survival advantages and fit nicely into evolution.

For those who haven't read the book, he defines consciousness as feedback loops with features of the environment, and then ranks them in a hierarchy of greater quantity and complexity. On this view, even a thermometer would be ranked on this scale (well, at Level 0) since it has a feedback loop with temperature. Spatial awareness I believe is the next level up (feedback loops with 3-d objects; perception), then social awareness (feedback loops with members of your species; emotions) and then the ability to simulate the future with the aim of predicting benefits, danger, etc. (feedback loops with abstract models; rational thought).

It's also cool that he links each of these levels with distinct features of the brain which evolved in precisely that order to handle precisely these functions. They correspond roughly with the reptilian brain, mammalian brain, and the human brain.

Peter, the shift is very small, just a paragraph or two, but philosophically it's huge.

[Fist and Faith]

Reading about memory. I never knew that different aspects of the memory of an event are stored in different parts of the brain. Short-term memories are run through the hippocampus, where they are broken down into different categories, and sent to different parts of the brain for long-term storage. The emotional content of the event in the amygdala; the visual aspects of the same event in the occipital lobe; etc.

"...but reliving just one aspect of the memory (e.g., the smell of freshly cut grass) can suddenly send the brain racing to pull the fragments together to form a cohesive recollection. "

This is extraordinary!!

The next sentence is: "The ultimate goal of memory research is, then, to figure out how these scattered fragments are somehow reassembled when we recall an experience." That's all well and good for "memory research", but I haven't yet learned the actual mechanism of memory storage! HOW is the emotional aspect of a memory stored in the amygdala? HOW is the visual aspect stored in the occipital lobe? Three carbon atoms, two phosphorus atoms, and a potassium atom together means the smell of freshly-cut grass, and it's stored in whichever cortex handles smells? I guess things might be stored using the same mechanism that is used when the brain experiences them in the first place. But I have no idea what that is. *sigh* Too much to learn.

[Zarathustra]

I can't wait until you get to the part about religious consciousness being a 'malfunction' of the brain.

[Fist and Faith]

Lol!

[peter]

I'm just done with the part on savants [an area that holds endless facination for me since reading Sack's *The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat*] and am intrigued by the relationship between left and right brain function in the appearence of this phenominum. It appears [from studies both on individuals with damaged left brain function and those whose lb function has been supressed by use of TMS] that we all have latent 'savant' style abilities, funcions of right brain activity, which are actively held in check by the left brain [if I have got this right] in it's function of limiting the 'extraneous noise' of mental activity that would occur if we could recall everything, be aware of everything at all times and in all places [ie it is part of left brain function to actively make us 'remember to forget'.]

Left brain damaged individuals and TMS treated volunteers often show these incrediby elevated skill levels, particularly in artistic expression [drawing and the like], but I was unclear on one thing. Do such individuals experience a concurrent 'desire toward artistic expression', or are such increased abilities only discovered by chance over time by the individuals concerned. A small point I know, but I've often wondered to what extent we are drawn inately to the things we excell at or is it pure random chance that we happen to discover them?

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Left brain damaged individuals and TMS treated volunteers often show these incrediby elevated skill levels, particularly in artistic expression [drawing and the like], but I was unclear on one thing. Do such individuals experience a concurrent 'desire toward artistic expression', or are such increased abilities only discovered by chance over time by the individuals concerned. A small point I know, but I've often wondered to what extent we are drawn inately to the things we excell at or is it pure random chance that we happen to discover them?

The people who become gifted with some savant-like ability, usually after some sort of cranial trauma, often accidentally discover their gifts. They may have seen a dog at a park and, upon trying to sketch the dog, are able to recreate it in exacting detail or perhaps they look at a math problem somewhere and suddenly just know the answer or they may be able to tell you that your ringtone is in A-flat major. It is definitely true that TMS increases artistic ability even in people who are not savants and that this slight artistic boost lasts even after treatment with TMS.

[Zarathustra]

I thought it was very interesting how some mental disorders and things like elevated artistic skill (or memory or religiosity) were all very closely related in terms of causal factors. The brain is a delicate, complicated dance balancing many different subsystems.

One of those subsystems actually makes us forget things, which is a useful skill that happens to be the way the brain is supposed think. Too many memories get in the way, cluttering up the brain. So photographic memory is actually a malfunction of this feature of the brain.

There are also many feedback loops which can get out of balance, causing things like depression or mania. As intelligent beings--i.e. predictors of the future, in Kaku's terms--we need to evaluate both reasons for hope and reasons for fear, to seek advantages and avoid danger. But if these systems get out of balance, people emphasize one or the other, and sometimes fluctuate wildly between extremes (bipolar).

[peter]

The book stresses this particular definition of consciousness [the construction of 'models' of the world in order to asses alternate possible futures in terms of achievement of desired goals], but this seems to me to miss the one essential feature of consciousness that we all understand - self awareness. [in my dictionary this definition comes second after 'alert and awake; not sleeping or comatose]. I wonderd whether conciousness might not be more aptly described as 'awareness of the self as an extant entity'

Kaku is a physicist, and his book naturally enough takes a physicits 'slant' in its presentation, and in fairness it is from physics that the bulk of the tools with which the advances in understanding of brain function have been achieved, have come. There is no question - we are progressing in leaps and bounds in this area and as Z. noted above, every page throws up a new topic to wonder at and discuss. Halfway through I am agog at what can be done, but [very similar to the new Lords in our beloved Chronicles] am painfully aware that we are as yet only scratching the surface - and in the most primative of fashions. The brain and it's relation to the mind therein is delicate, complicated and [in my opinion] currently so far beyond our understanding that what we see here is almost akin to a bunch of chimpanzee's going to work on a Rolls-Royce jet engine with lump-hammers and chizels - and expecting to produce improvements. Now this is grossly unfair as an image, but I needed to utilise it just to explain how far I really believe we are from the types of advance the book postulates as the end result of these researches. Time and again Kaku grills the researchers on the specific advances in a given direction that are being touted to get the slightly embarrased "well the results were not conclusive", or he finishes up with the admission that "what we are talking here is way in the future. Now this is not in any way to denigrate the work and the achievements that are being made here. But - and it is a but seriuosly worthy of consideration [:roll:] - there are perhaps other factors at work here that must at least be considered. Kaku makes plain in absolute terms, the massive, massive cost of research of this type. One of the functions that popular science of this nature performs is literally to 'spread the word' in order to generate the dollars on which such work is wholly dependant. We see the same in 'big science' across the board; a regular feature of our Sunday newspapers is the latest 'Hubble' revalation on how old, how far, how big etc. The scientists involved with these stories understand that to the layman, these will be the 'hard hitting' bits of promo. Government ministers who hold the purse strings will say "Hell yes! This is what we are paying for.", and it is upon the back this hightened expectation that finance can be found. And [:hide:] I'm just wondering if this type of hightened expectation is what, to a degree, we are seeing here. Again - I state that the advances are staggering - but the mountain is huge and we are yet only taking our first real steps.

Last night I read the chapter on mind controll, frightening in it's first instance, but then - as above - it turrns out to be nigh on impossible to achieve reliable results, be it by the use of drugs, hypnosis, brain-washing or whatever [The American defence industries MKULTRA projects etc yielded no discernable advance in this field despite millions of dollars of investment into hundreds of different studies]. It occured to me that what was being tried in this unsubtle 'club-like' manner by the 'white-coats' was already being done on a massive scale and in a much more refined manner by the advertising industry with its use of human psychology and our essential 'sameness' [in behavioral terms] to direct us in the manner it chose. Take - the tobacco industry. They realised in the fifties that women were a huge untapped market for potential smokers as yet untargetted. They draughted in a psychologist whose name I forget and he came up with a plan. Position half a dozen of the most influential female figures of the day in prominent sites in fashionable locations with cigarettes in their hands, and have their photographs taken for national newspaers. By this method alone he increased female smokers in the USA by 40% [or thereabouts] in one year. Now thats controll!

[Zarathustra]

Interesting points, Peter. No doubt a lot of money will be needed for this exploding area of science. However, I have little doubt over Kaku's sincerity in wanting to educate. There is probably nothing more frustrating to a scientist--someone who has peered into reality's secrets--than being virtually alone in this knowledge, witnessing the hordes of people who walk this earth blissfully unaware of the mysteries and majesty of nature. There is little fun in knowing a great secret if you can't tell people.

However, you're right that this project will take decades, if not centuries. In fact, Kaku compares the BRAIN initiative (the program Obama announced to map every single neuron in the brain) to the great cathedrals of the middle ages, which took so long to build that the engineers and first builders knew they would never live to see their completion.

The payoff will be huge. As Kaku mentioned, alzheimer's disease is exploding as the Baby Boomers age. We need to find a cure, fast. And the only way will be to study the brain. One third of people over 85 have it! Though only 13% of alzheimer's patients are 65-75, by 2030 all Baby Boomers will have reached retirement age, swelling the numbers of people with alzheimers in this "lower risk" age group (65-75) by 50%. This will put a tremendous strain on our already strained health care system. We need to get ahead of that. 2030 sounds like it's far in the future, but that's only as distant as Y2K is from us now.

As the population ages, Alzheimer’s is becoming a more common cause of death. While deaths from other major causes have decreased, deaths from Alzheimer’s disease have increased. Between 2000 and 2010, deaths attributed to Alzheimer’s disease increased 68 percent, while those attributed to the number one cause of death, heart disease, decreased 16 percent.

The costs of caring for people with Alzheimer’s and other dementias will soar from an estimated $203 billion in 2013 to a projected $1.2 trillion per year by 2050.

link

[Fist and Faith]

I've been trying to write a book for about a year now. Never much time, and almost entirely using either my 5" or 7" Galaxy Tab. So, slow going. I haven't read anything since my last post, because I've solidified a couple ideas in it, so I've been writing whenever I can. I think I'm done with that surge, though, so I should be reading again.