From Informatics to Consciousness – early extract from my new book

The following extract is an early example that focuses on some of the more abstract concepts in the book, “Building the Digital Enterprise – architecting Physical and Virtual Digital Workspaces”, Publisher Palgrave Macmillan due in 2015. This section explores the boundary of consciousness and cognitive computing and the difference between human perception and physical world spaces. It touches on up-to-the-minute concepts in these fields and the latest research and ideas shaping this exciting boundary.

From Informatics to Consciousness

Some researchers argue that the ability to integrate information is a key property of consciousness. They argue that in conscious minds, integrated information cannot be reduced into smaller components. For instance, when a human perceives a red triangle, the brain cannot register the object as a colourless triangle plus a shapeless patch of red. Consciousness is the ability to assimilate and combine various sensory inputs and to process together as whole. An example of this is Integrated Information Theory (IIT) 3.0 for consciousness (1). This describes the entanglement of information as the relationship between consciousness and its physical substrate by first identifying the fundamental properties of experience itself: existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion. IIT then postulates that the physical substrate of consciousness must satisfy these very properties.

Figure 1 Integrated Information Theory 3.0 (1)

The topic of consciousness is a hotly debated area in academic research and touches on deep philosophical meaning. Competing theories defining consciousness raise criticism between a reductionist approach like IIT 3.0 where consciousness can be reduced into its basic building blocks and in effect can be “computed” versus a more holistic emergence that consciousness cannot be defined from an external observer and that information is subjective and observer independent. Information and experience exists as an absolute fact from the individual’s perspective and not dependent on an external observer as recognized by Descartes, je pense donc je suisis an undeniable certainty. Something that paranoia about consciousness has been expressed in examples such as “does something move if I am not watching them …?” (4) Whether the Integrated Information Theory is correct for consciousness is open to debate. From both sides of the argument we can provide examples of current axiomatic thinking in being able to define information about existence:

• information can be separated from the physical world,

• the focus on information and events depends on the individual or the observer perspective

• filtering is the ability to exclude nonessential or irrelevant information

• objects, actions and events exist and occur regardless of whether they are in view of the observer or from the individual own field of view

• Context is to focus on relevant information and actions

These principles regardless of theoretical foundations from a practitioner point of view is relevant for architecture of systems.

The IIT 3.0 model is predominately a theory of the human brain, the scope of our work is also individual humans but also social groups and the enterprise, the wider environment of markets and world views. The human brain of course has to exist in this same space with its ability to sense and perceive this environment. It’s a useful way to contrast where we are today and the concepts that this suggests in technically developing human environments that are augmented by different levels of automation. Recent debates include the replacement of humans by computer automation. Recent research by Oxford University suggest 47% of all human jobs could be replaced by automation in 2034 in the next two decades (9) and Google CEO Eric Schmidt in Davos2014 conference (10) raised similar questions warning the jobs problem will be “the defining one” for the next two-three decades as a result of computing advances being able to replace unskilled and some semi-skill human tasks altogether. The smarter computation is changing economy through altering the types of jobs and services that may become automated and implicated with new intelligent machines described in the “Second Machine Age” by Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (11). The use cases in this book expand on the level of automation and digital information that ae filling in to our different work and social living environments. New kinds of intelligence is being developed from the view point of being able to observe remote events, form global social groups, develop complex graphical models and analyse enough data sets of information well beyond the capacity of the human brain. Yet artificial intelligence and conscious synthetic life is still some way off. What is happening is the road to a technological ecosystem system where this may be possible has begun. New kinds of digital enterprise and user experience are reimaging how work and information can be done and visualized.

We have a long way to go, we are still in the first era of information awareness, looking at robotics models this comparison is little more than the sensing and reactive response of a bacteria with 1 neuron, able to move and sense basic information. A human brain has on average 84 Billion neurons with 100 trillion synaptic connections (12). Research in to robotics and the progress of computation power to emulate the human brain continues but simulating the human brain using computing is a monumental task. A recent example in 2013 Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Technology Graduate University in Japan and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany took 40 minutes to simulate a single one second of human brain activity with 82,944 processors creating an artificial neural network of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses (13).

Figure 2 Examples of Body-brain size and neuron capacities (14)

The whole area of body to brain size ratios also illustrates another interesting feature that size does tend to follow a power law of about 0.75 in mammals (15). The largest brains are those of sperm whales, weighing about 8 kg. An elephant’s brain weighs just over 5 kg, a bottlenose dolphin’s 1.5 to 1.7 kg, whereas a human brain is around 1.3 to 1.5 kg (16).

Brain size tends to vary according to body size but this relationship has other factors of evolutionary development that come into play. Indeed the largest ratio (17) is in the common shrew’s brain weighs 3g and its total weight is 30g, making its ratio 10% (18). In earlier chapters we covered price- performance ratios and the energy cost–performance ratio of computation and to some extent there are parallels here in the overhead of processing information between biological and technological worlds. As computational costs per GFLOP and Storage Gigabyte of memory to less than $0.10 (19),(20), While biological cognitive evolution has complex information integration there are also significant differences in being able to distribute technological processing and information intelligence over a wider scale of networked resources.

This field of cognitive technological development is the attempt through technology mechanisms like digitization to define an environment in our case a digital information model to extend this make it more aware and assist sentient activity. Informatics becomes a cognitive awareness model. To some extent this suggest a fourth level that of phenomenological aspects of environment where we are seeking ways to sense and collect information, process it and then react and manipulate and potentially change the environment and the things within it. We are really at the early stages of automation. While research and progress is not linear and progress will move on all these fronts translation research will continue to bring developments into the public domain and new forms of human-machine technology interface.

Emerging intelligent systems include a wide and varied range of immersive computing concepts that have levels of pervasive and non-invasive intrusion in our everyday lives. We are still in the era of automation and today can realistically see the advent of unmanned automation machines increasingly moving from the research lab to trials in the human spaces of living environments. The International Society of Intelligent Unmanned Systems (ISIUS) describes several key developments in the near term horizon innovations that are not science fiction (21) (See next figure). There are many examples of new technology assisted spaces emerging today. The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (22) has Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and Micro-robotics that support for example minimal invasive surgery usage as a robot assist surgical device based on a snake robot research that enables precision flexible endoscopic systems to enable surgeons to access and visualize hard-to-reach anatomical locations. The system enables the potential to extend the benefits of minimally invasive surgery – shorter hospital stays and recovery times to a broader population of patients (23). The faculty highlights one of the challenges faced is to merge systems across macro-, micro-, and nano-scales. But these convergences are happening today to link cross-disciplines of nano and micro-fabrication and biotechnology and other scales of technology that a decade ago was not even imagined.

Figure 3 ISIUS unmanned and automation systems 2011-2013

The realities are that we are still early days into the computation of digital environments. Cognitive computing and artificial intelligence can and will at some time be able to rise into the level of perceived understanding that may be reclassified as some level of awareness. Today’s commercial technology is still in level of unconscious computational control and automated tasks. The growth and speed and miniaturization of computation means that we do have micro and nano technology fabrication of computer chips, flying drones, embedded biosensors and organ implants in our bodies, self-driving cars and a vast amount of every day data growing on social networks and mobile devices capturing moments of human existence. To use the IIT 3.0 model we are still in the unconscious level of contextual thinking and automation.

The principle of entanglement by which information about reality is intertwined and representative of the situation in non-living and livings systems is still a wide gulf. The sensors and automated machines are still at the level 1.0 unconsciousness. Intelligence is augmented by these machines to help intelligence is a hybrid model with increasingly greater affect. Or sure some activities of huge data storage and computation speeds are areas that computational machine excellent at and will continue to do so as the price-performance falls spreading a wider opportunity for commercial use. But the steps in robotics and ultimate sentient perspective is a conceptual approach today.

Figure 4 Status of entanglement in non-living and living systems

This does not make current digital developments less than optimal, the use of Human-Machine interfaces can and does create the potential to greatly enhance existence, information and computation can and does augment and enable new understanding and analytical insight into the world around us. Many tasks can be automated and “unmanned” today through choice and design to enable more efficiency and effectiveness in our daily tasks of physical movement or in calculation and transactions of products and services. Embedded technology in mobile devices, buildings, automobiles can and does improve safety, energy efficiency and user experience in those environments.

Our focus is on the bridge between the world view of information in context and the perspective of humans in this world. As with the IIT 3.0 model the physical substrate of existence is at two levels, one which is living and conscious and the other a non-living collective of. If you are a follower of the Gaia theory (24) then this living earth is another perspective but we will pick this theme up later in the outcomes of ecosystems in a later chapter.

Seeking to describe the automation of consciousness in the wider environment is perhaps a different perspective that some observers have described as superintelligence (25). Indeed the author Nick Bostrom makes the same point that “intelligence is a big deal”, “human brain power has enabled complex social organization and technical, economic and scientific advances underpinning human civilization”. He goes on to develop the idea that the human brain is now also the rate-limiting factor in the development of human civilization as the advancement of machines to process faster than the human brain raising future questions of how greater intelligence can be enabled through wider technological spaces of humans, objects, places and events. Unlike the fixed size and number of neurons of the human brain, technological advances of the world view has no upper-limit other than the physical and virtual spaces of nano scale to mega scale. Our earlier observation of the phenomenological level of information is perhaps this aspect of emergent properties of information that through digitization and technological advancement can create new kinds of realities.

Figure 5 Physical space existence constructs

Entanglement in digital systems has a long way to go to be in the sense conscious as a living organism. But entanglement of a different sort is rapidly building in the automated systems and platforms we see emerging across both human and the wider world is experience.

Physiological spaces

The physiological world that the human brain and the human body represent have a set of dimensions that are physical boundaries or spaces that describe features of the conscious existence of humans.

• Anatomical space – the physical human body organs, collections of sub-systems that interact to make the whole human body

• Human physical space – how the human body is placed, moves and interacts with itself and other humans and objects in the immediate environment living habitat

• Human perception space – how humans see, feel, touch and sense their immediate surroundings

• Social and Cultural space – how the humans form communities bound by beliefs, norms, political, religious and value systems that represent these communities.

Exploring the classification of anatomical space provides some interesting insights into the potential connections with technology. The anatomical space exists between the brain, eyes and other body organs and sub systems that make up the human body all have many interacting systems. Each system contributes to the maintenance of homeostasis (26), of itself and other systems (27).

Table 1 Human subsystems and Technology comparisons

Human sub-systems and examples of similar technological machine functions shows the equivalence is possible in thinking about augmentation and technology assisted living. But, equally there may be considerable gulf between the connections of the human to the wider environment due to the complexity in providing interfaces. This is where the idea of physical spaces comes into play in defining the boundaries that exist outside the “self” and the relationship to its environment.

Physical world spaces

The physical environment has a wider set of inanimate and animate objects in it. The collective physical environment in the global sense is a planetary biosphere and represents the set of all current physical earthly resources and spaces that may be currently addressable. Out journey to other planets and from the terrestrial location of earth is a reality that provides advances in science and human knowledge and understanding.

Figure 6 The physical and physiological spaces

Physical spaces are where humans live, work, play, interact, reproduce and die. They are the physicality of our existence. The realm of how physical spaces and the resources within them are available to us.

• Object spaces are the contents of our fridge, the consumable items of everyday living.

• Living spaces – the rooms, buildings and social living structures

• Geographic spaces – the land, oceans, coast line and the geopolitical boundaries

• Resource spaces – The natural resources and man-made assets and capital

This connection between the physical and the physiological world views are the interfaces between the human and machine boundary. It’s an important distinction that this book seeks to explore in concepts of latest systems thinking as well as actual examples of how this boundary is being integrated and made real in varying degrees.

How technology computerizes and digitizes information and spaces matters in how the next generation of integrated digital systems will evolve. We have explored information and consciousness as a frontier and that there are emerging differences between the human physical perspectives and the wider physical living environment that technology can bridge between. The concept of digital ecosystems is found in these ideas where the large scale physical spaces of material objects, buildings, vehicles, cities, roads, sea ports and other man-made structures describe how marketplaces, supply chains and enterprises co-exist in these spaces. The potential of technology with the ability to create global and local network infrastructure can shape these spaces in to environments that are augmented worlds of both the physical and virtual spaces they represent.

In the next chapters we explore how this physical existence alters as the physical world is encoded into a digital form enabling virtual spaces to be created with different properties and connections. Virtual worlds can exist representing the physical information and environment but has different potential

Notes

(1) Integrated information theory (IIT) approaches the relationship between consciousness and its physical substrate by first identifying the fundamental properties of experience itself: existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion. IIT then postulates that the physical substrate of consciousness must satisfy these very properties. IIT arrives at an identity: an experience is a maximally irreducible conceptual structure (MICS, a constellation of concepts in qualia space), and the set of elements that generates it constitutes a complex. According to IIT, a MICS specifies the quality of an experience and integrated information ΦMax its quantity. See Reference (1)

(2) Entanglement is a feature of information theory that aims to define how convergence is necessary in information and its relationships to represent an existence.

(3) Quali Space is a mathematical concept of the Geometry of Integrated Information. See Reference (2)

(4) An axiom, or postulate, is a premise or starting point of reasoning. As classically conceived, an axiom is a premise as evident as to be accepted as true without controversy.

(5) Critics of competing theories of Consciousness can be illustrated in examining Guilio Tononi has proposed a theory of consciousness he calls “Integrated Information Theory” (IIT). Very roughly, the theory is based on Shannon’s concept of information, but extends this by adding a property refers to as “Integrated Information”. Consciousness Information will exist in an entity when it has information and is connected. This property this called “Phi” (rhymes with “by”, written φ) and can be computed. The higher the Phi, the more conscious the entity. See Reference (4), (5).

John Searle’s criticism of Integrated Information Theory in his review of Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (6) is that while information depends on an external observer, consciousness is ontologically subjective and observer-independent. That is to say, experience exists as an absolute fact, not relative to an observer: as recognized by Descartes, je pense donc je suis is an undeniable certainty. Instead, the information of Claude Shannon’s theory of communication is always observer-relative: signals are communicated over a channel more or less efficiently, but their meaning is in the eye of the beholder, not in the signals themselves. So, thinks Searle, a theory with the word “information” in it, like the integrated information theory (IIT) discussed in Confessions, cannot possibly begin to explain consciousness. See References (7), (8).

(6) VLSI Very Large scale systems Integration – is the process of creating an integrated circuit by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when complex semiconductor and communication technologies were being developed. The microprocessor is a VLSI device. Before the introduction of VLSI technology most ICs had a limited set of functions they could perform. An electronic circuit might consist of a CPU, ROM, RAM and other glue logic. VLSI lets IC makers add all of these into one chip.

(7) Simulating 1 second of human brain activity takes 82,944 processors. The simulation took 40 minutes while running, the simulation ate up about 1 petabyte of system memory as each synapse was modelled individually. While impressive, this is only a fraction of the neurons every human brain contains. The average human brain has 80-100 billion nerve cells, or about as many stars as there are in the Milky Way galaxy (1).

(8) The Gaia Theory proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. Topics of interest include how the biosphere and the evolution of life forms affect the stability of global temperature, ocean salinity, oxygen in the atmosphere and other environmental variables that affect the habitability of Earth. See Reference ()

(9) Homeostasis is the property of a system in which variables are regulated so that the internal conditions remain stable and relatively constant. Such systems have feedback mechanisms that enable control of conditions.

References

(1) From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0 M. Oizumi, L. ALbantakis, G. Tononi Published: May 08, 2014 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1003588

(2) Qualia: The Geometry of Integrated Information , D Balduzzi, G Tononi Published: August 14, 2009DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000462 http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000462

(3) Axiom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom

(4) Consciousness Wars: Tononi-Koch versus Searle, http://coronaradiata.net/2013/03/17/consciousness-wars-tononi-koch-versus-searle/

(5) Can a Photodiode Be Conscious? Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi, reply by John R. Searle The New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/07/can-photodiode-be-conscious/

(6) Can Information Theory Explain Consciousness?, Chris Searle The New York Review of Books January 2013 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/can-information-theory-explain-consciousness/

(7) Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist by Christof Koch MIT Press, 181 pp

(8) Our Shared condition – consciousness – John Searle TEDxCERN May 2013https://www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_consciousness https://www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_consciousness/transcript

(9) The future of employment: how susceptible ae jobs to computerization? C. Fey, M. Osborne, September 17, 2013 Oxford Martin School, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford.http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

(10)Davos 2014: Google’s Schmidt warning on jobs Emily Young, bbc website 23 January 2014 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25872006

(11)The Second Machine Age, Work progress and technology is the time of brilliant progress, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee W.M.Norton Company 2014 http://www.secondmachineage.com/

(12)Azevedo, F. A. C.; Carvalho, L. R. B.; Grinberg, L. T.; Farfel, J. M.; Ferretti, R. E. L.; Leite, R. E. P.; Jacob Filho, W. J.; Lent, R.; Herculano-Houzel, S. (2009). “Equal numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaled-up primate brain”. The Journal of Comparative Neurology 513 (5): 532–541. doi:10.1002/cne.21974. PMID 19226510.

(13)Simulating 1 second of human brain activity takes 82,944 processors. Extreme tech August 2013 http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-second-of-human-brain-activity-takes-82944-processors

(14)Robots after all , H Moravec, Communications of the ACM, Vol 46, Issue 10, October 2003 Pages 90-97 http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/robot.papers/2003/CACM.2003.html

(15)Armstrong, E (1983). “Relative brain size and metabolism in mammals”. Science 220 (4603): 1302–4. doi:10.1126/science.6407108. PMID 640710

(16)Brain Size http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size

(17)Brains of White matter, The Technium http://kk.org/thetechnium/2004/11/brains-of-white/

(18)External Measures of Cognition, O Cairo, Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, Published online Oct 4, 2011. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00108. US National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health.

(19)FLOPS http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS

(20) matt komorowski – a history of storage cost, September 2009http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte

(21)Autonomous control systems and vehicles : intelligent unmanned systems – K Nonami et al editors, Springer 2013 Proceedings from the International Conference on Intelligent Unmanned Systems (ICIUS) 2011 organized by the International Society of Intelligent Unmanned Systems (ISIUS) International series on Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering

(22)Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University http://www.ri.cmu.edu http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research_guide/mems_microrobotics.html

(23)Surgical Snake Robot To Be Marketed in Europe – March 31 2014, Robotics Institute , Carnegie Mellon University http://www.ri.cmu.edu/news_view.html?news_id=355&menu_id=239

(24)The Gaia Theory, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

(25)Superintelligence, Paths, Dangers, Strategies N. Bostrom, July 2014 Oxford University Press http://www.nickbostrom.com/views/superintelligence.pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/

(26)Homeostasis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis

(27)Human body sub-systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_body

#Consciousness #AI #Robotics