Zimmer: Can You Live Forever? Maybe Not—But You Can Have Fun Trying

Writing in Scientific American, Carl Zimmer recounts his experience at the 2009 Singularity Summit in New York City:

If the term "singularity" rings a bell, that may be because you've read the 2005 bestseller The Singularity Is Near. Its author, computer scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, confidently predicts intelligence will soon cross a profound threshold. The human brain will be dramatically enhanced with engineering. Artificial intelligence will take on a life of its own. If all goes well, Kurzweil predicts, we will ultimately fuse our minds with this machine superintelligence and find a cybernetic immortality. What's more, the Singularity is coming soon. Many of us alive today will be a part of it.

The Singularity is more than just hypothetic milestone in history. It's also a peculiar movement today. Along with spaceflight tycoon Peter Diamandis, Kurzweil has launched Singularity University, which brought in its first batch of students in the summer of 2009. Kurzweil is also director of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which held its first annual summit in 2006. The summits are a mix of talks by Kurzweil and other Singularity advocates, along with scientists working on everything from robot cars to gene therapy. For its first three years the Singularity Summit took place around the Bay Area, but in 2009 the institute decided to decamp from its utopian environs and head for the more cynical streets of New York.

I was one of the curious skeptics who heeded the call and came to the 92nd Street Y. Writing about the brain and other scientific subjects had given me a strong immune defense against hype. The Singularity, with all its promises of a technorapture, seems tailor-made to bring out the worst in people like me. The writer John Horgan wrote a devastating essay about the Singularity in 2009 called "Science Cult."

Horgan acknowledged part of him enjoys pondering the Singularity's visions, such as boosting your IQ to 1,000. "But another part of me—the grown-up, responsible part—worries that so many people, smart people, are taking Kurzweil's sci-fi fantasies seriously," he wrote. "The last thing humanity needs right now is an apocalyptic cult masquerading as science."

I decided to check out the Singularity for myself. Between the talks, as I mingled among people wearing S lapel pins and eagerly discussing their personal theories of consciousness, I found myself tempted to reject the whole smorgasbord as half-baked science fiction. But in the end I didn't.

Read more.

David Chalmers on the technological singularity [podcast]

Check out this excellent Philosophy Bites podcast featuring David Chalmers who is asked about the technological singularity, whole brain emulation, uploads, and the possibility that the Universe is a kind of simulation.

Sebastian Seung @ TED: I am my connectome

Neuroscientist Sebastian Seung recently gave an extremely insightful and informative TED talk called, "I am my connectome." I highly recommend this as it touches upon a number of timely subjects, including the Human Connectome Project, the important work of Harvard neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth, cryonics, and (peripherally) whole brain emulation.

David Chalmers: Consciousness is not substrate dependent

A popular argument against uploads and whole brain emulation is that consciousness is somehow rooted in the physical, biological realm. Back in 1995, philosopher David Chalmers addressed this problem in his seminal paper, "Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia." His abstract reads,

It is widely accepted that conscious experience has a physical basis. That is, the properties of experience (phenomenal properties, or qualia) systematically depend on physical properties according to some lawful relation. There are two key questions about this relation. The first concerns the strength of the laws: are they logically or metaphysically necessary, so that consciousness is nothing "over and above" the underlying physical process, or are they merely contingent laws like the law of gravity? This question about the strength of the psychophysical link is the basis for debates over physicalism and property dualism. The second question concerns the shape of the laws: precisely how do phenomenal properties depend on physical properties? What sort of physical properties enter into the laws' antecedents, for instance; consequently, what sort of physical systems can give rise to conscious experience? It is this second question that I address in this paper.

Chalmers sets up a series of arguments and thought experiments which point to the conclusion that functional organization suffices for conscious experience, what he calls nonreductive functionalism. He argues that conscious experience is determined by functional organization without necessarily being reducible to functional organization. This bodes well for the AI and whole brain emulation camp.

Chalmers concludes:

In any case, the conclusion is a strong one. It tells us that systems that duplicate our functional organization will be conscious even if they are made of silicon, constructed out of water-pipes, or instantiated in an entire population. The arguments in this paper can thus be seen as offering support to some of the ambitions of artificial intelligence. The arguments also make progress in constraining the principles in virtue of which consciousness depends on the physical. If successful, they show that biochemical and other non-organizational properties are at best indirectly relevant to the instantiation of experience, relevant only insofar as they play a role in determining functional organization.

Of course, the principle of organizational invariance is not the last word in constructing a theory of conscious experience. There are many unanswered questions: we would like to know just what sort of organization gives rise to experience, and what sort of experience we should expect a given organization to give rise to. Further, the principle is not cast at the right level to be a truly fundamental theory of consciousness; eventually, we would like to construct a fundamental theory that has the principle as a consequence. In the meantime, the principle acts as a strong constraint on an ultimate theory.

Entire paper.

Thinking faster by altering your perception of time - A SentDev Classic

This article from April 3, 2006 was inspired by the work of David Eagleman who will be guest blogging here next week.

People who undergo extreme short-term psychological stress often claim that time slowed down for them during the experience. Traumatic events like car accidents or lengthy falls often appear in slow motion to the person experiencing it.

Is this just a recall error? Or are people literally experiencing these events at an altered subjective time rate? If so, how could such a psychological phenomenon be accounted for? Obviously, time is not really slowing down -- but something is happening to the psychological interpretation of time.

One possible answer is to compare the human brain's "clockspeed" to that of a computer's. Some scientists now suspect that slowed time elapsement is an evolved defence mechanism similar to our fight-or-flight response. When time appears to have slowed down, we have more subjective time in which to deal with a crisis situation. Put another way, extreme stress helps us to think faster.

One scientist looking into this phenomenon is David Eagleman from the University of Texas at Houston. At his 'Laboratory for Perception and Action' Eagleman is attempting to understand the neural mechanisms of time perception. His team combines psychophysical, behavioural, and computational approaches to address the relationship between the timing of perception and the timing of neural signals.

At the experimental level, Eagleman is engaged in exploring temporal encoding, time warping, manipulations of the perception of causality, and time perception in high-adrenaline situations. Ultimately, he hopes to use this data to explore how neural signals processed by different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world.

In one of his experiments, Eagleman had volunteers perform a backwards bungee jump freefall while he transmitted a rapid succession of numbers to an LED on their wrists. He found that during the fall they were successfully able to read the numbers, which under normal conditions would have appeared too fast. [I have to say, that is one of the most interesting and original experiments I've heard of in quite time some]

Thinking about Eagleman's research at a practical level, it is thought that a better understanding of these mechanisms will result in interventions that will help people process information at higher rates. This kind of 'think faster' augmentation would slow time down in a subjective sense, which would enable an individual to operate at a higher level of cognitive efficiency.

This theme has been explored in a number of science fiction stories. In Frank Herbert's Chapterhouse: Dune, the ghola Miles Teg was able to engage in extremely fast physical combat due to his ability to rapidly process information. Teg was able to subjectively experience time in extreme slow motion. Similarly, Neo in The Matrix was able to dodge bullets by altering his perception of time elapsement. And in Greg Egan's Diaspora, uploaded posthumans had to drastically slow down their internal clockspeeds when conversing with biological humans; clockspeeds in the real world varied dramatically from the clockspeed utilized in supercomputer 'polises.' Also in Diaspora, a group of posthumans altered their perception of time to such a slow rate that they could perceive the rising and fallings of geological structures such as mountains.

Here in the real world, such neural enhancements are rare, but not entirely impossible. It is thought, for example, that hockey ultrastar Wayne Gretzky was able to perceive the flow of the game at a slower pace than his competitors, giving him more subjective time to plan his attack. This may in fact be the case. At the height of his career, Gretzky was not just a 'little better' than other players, he was dominating to a degree never before seen in sport, breaking records by extreme margins. And this from a player who was physically unremarkable--in fact, below average.

Just what kinds of interventions could enable humans to 'warp time' is a topic of some speculation. A recent Discover article titled "The Mind in Overdrive" offers some possible solutions. Psychotropic substances are one possible answer, as drugs like cocaine and amphetamines have been known to alter subjective time for users. Also, meditating Buddhist monks claim to be able to perceive time differently; through their mental discipline, they may be recreating the same effect that Eagleman is documenting.

I'm certainly hoping that something like this will eventually become accessible. It will be interesting to see how much more productive and "aware" one might be with the benefit of these sorts of interventions. It may even create an alternative sense of subjective reality.

And it would surely come in handy the next time you need to dodge bullets.

Andy Clark: Supersizing the Mind

There's a new book by Andy Clark worth checking out: Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. This will be of interest to readers of this blog in that it's a discussion of the so-called "extended mind."

Description:

When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind , Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

Be sure to read Jerry Fodor's review from the London Review of Books and David Chalmer's comments.

What is the evolutionary advantage of consciousness?

One of my readers recently made the comment on my recent protopanpsychism re-post: "...it is not clear what the evolutionary advantage is of subjective states and therefore how they evolved."

To answer the question I will borrow a quote from neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman:

The evolutionary advantage is quite clear. Consciousness allows you the capacity to plan. Let's take a lioness ready to attack an antelope. She crouches down. She sees the prey. She's forming an image of the size of the prey and its speed, and of course, she's planning a jump. Now suppose I have two animals: one like our lioness, has that thing we call consciousness; the other only gets the signals. It's just about dusk, and all of a sudden the wind shifts and there's a whooshing sound of the sort a tiger might make when moving through the green grass, and the conscious animal runs like hell but the other one doesn't. Well, guess why? Because the animal that's conscious has integrated the image of a tiger. The ability to consider alternative images in an explicit way is definitely evolutionarily advantageous.

Protopanpsychism and the consciousness conundrum, or why we shouldn't assume uploads - A SentDev Classic

Despite grandiose and cocksure proclamations to the contrary, consciousness is still a hard problem in science. Aside from (currently) untestable theories and philosophical musings, how matter organizes itself such that it is capable of experiencing subjectivity and qualia is an utter mystery.

Compounding the problem is the widespread tendency to interchangbily use the terms intelligence and consciousness. While related, these terms describe two very different phenomena. My calculator and computer are examples of intelligence. My ability to use language and deductive reasoning to help me write this article are other examples of intelligence. But my ability to subjectively experience the phenomenon known as 'sweetness,' or to sense the colour red, or the feeling I get as time passes, are endowments brought about by my conscious awareness.

There are arguably two major philosophical approaches to the issue of consciousness -- they are 'philosophical' because we still don't possess the requisite scientific vernacular to address its true underpinnings. These proto-scientific approaches are known as dualism and emergence.

The first and most traditional argument is the idea of vitalism or dualism. This perspective suggests that the essence of consciousness lies outside the brain, perhaps as some ethereal soul or spirit. Consequently, its proponents suggest that consciousness lies outside knowable science.

Cartesian dualism fits within this category of thinking – the notion that the only thing that can truly be known is the presence of personal subjectivity and that everything external to that may be a fabrication or hallucination (see Descarte’s Meditations on First Philosophy and his ‘Evil Daemon’ argument). While existentially interesting (or is that disturbing?), Descartes’s argument violates Popperian notions of testability and smacks of Gnosticism and radical skepticism (these are fascinating topics in their own right that lie outside the scope of this discussion, and can include such conundrums as the brain-in-the-vat and simulation problems).

The other broad approach to the issue of consciousness is emergence theory, the idea that self-awareness and qualia can arise from complex computational dynamics in the brain. The critical assumption here is that mind’s architecture is largely computational, but that consciousness emerges through the concert of myriad neuronal interactions. In this sense, consciousness is an epiphenomenon or metaphenomenon of the brain's machinations.

This approach to cognition is clearly essential, but it is not sufficient. Indeed, the mind almost certainly utilizes its computational or functionalist aspects, most of which go completely unnoticed by the conscious agent at the top of the processing hierarchy. Today’s computers, which have inspired comparisons to the brain, crunch numbers but are in no way self-reflexive about their work; consequently, they can partly account for human intelligence, but make relatively poor models as approximations or metaphors for consciousness engines.

At the same time, it almost seems like a cop-out to suggest that increased complexity in such systems will result in consciousness, which is, qualitatively speaking, a horse of a different colour.

Now, I wouldn’t want to dismiss emergence theory outright. There’s something very satisfying about this idea, particularly considering how this might have come about through natural selection. It may very well turn out that that emergence does in fact account for consciousness.

That said about dualism and emergence, there is a third, albeit controversial, perspective that should be considered: panprotopsychism. This is the notion that essential features or precursors of consciousness are fundamental components of reality which are accessed by brain processes. In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that all parts of matter involve mind. Neuroscientist Stuart Hameroff, a proponent of this view, argues that consciousness is related to a fundamental, irreducible component of physical reality, akin to phenomenon like mass, spin or charge. According to this view, the basis of consciousness can be found in an additional fundamental force of nature not unlike gravity or electromagnetism. This would be something like an elementary (self)-sentience or awareness. As Hameroff notes, "these components just are."

Panpsychism has a long a varied history. Back during the time of the Greeks, philosophers like Democritus contended that a basic and fundamental form of consciousness was a quality of all matter – what they called 'atomism.' Later, Baruch Spinoza would argue along similar lines -- that atoms and their subatomic components have subjective, mental attributes.

Relatedly, Buddhist atomists like Dharmakirti argued that the only thing that exists are Buddhist atoms (described as being point-sized, durationless, and made of energy) and states of consciousness. Similarly, Gottfried Leibniz and A. N. Whitehead believed that systems ordinarily considered to be physical were constructed in some sense from more basic mental entities – what are now referred to in process philosophy as 'Whitehead occasions.'

Bertrand Russell put forth the idea of "neutral monism," which described a common underlying entity, neither physical nor mental, that gave rise to both. Bishop Berkeley suggested that consciousness creates reality and that consciousness is "all there is." Berkeley's famous dictum was "Esse est percipi" ("To be is to be perceived").

Theoretical physicist John A. Wheeler has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe, and David Chalmers has proposed a double-aspect theory in which information has both physical and experiential aspects.

While these ideas vary, they do explore the interplay between what is regarded as reality and consciousness. Whitehead in particular saw the universe not as being comprised of 'things' but of 'events.' In this sense reality is a kind of process where consciousness emerges from temporal chains of occasions.

If this sounds somewhat analogous to what quantum mechanics tells us, you’re not far off the mark. A number of thinkers have picked up on Whitehead’s idea as it relates to quantum physics, including Abner Shimony and Roger Penrose. This has lead to the development of what is known as quantum consciousness theory, which postulates the idea that consciousness is indelibly tied to quantum processes – that the brain is essentially a quantum computer utilized by an observer to “decohere” quantum superposition. Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have constructed a theory in which human consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules.

Penrose’s ideas have been met with much scorn, not least of which for his assertion that there are non-computational or non-algorithmic aspects to consciousness. This suggestion has lead thinkers like Hameroff and Penrose to conclude that mature AI as it is typically presumed (i.e. that it is also endowed with artificial consciousness) is a pipe-dream.

If they’re right, however, this poses a significant problem for those who believe that uploading (or mind transfer) awaits humanity in the future -- the opinion that consciousness is not substrate dependant, and that a fully sapient agent can exist as an uploaded being in a supercomputer. Many transhumanist expectations, from radical life extension to Jupiter Brains, are dependant on this assumption.

But what if consciousness is in fact substrate specific and can only be experienced in the analog arena? What if there is no digital or algorithmic equivalent to consciousness like Penrose suggests? Having consciousness arise in a classical Von Neumann architecture may be as impossible as splitting the atom in a virtual environment by using ones and zeros.

As possible consolation, however, the fact of the matter is that under the Penrose/Hameroff premise, the brain is a quantum computer – which if quantum theorists like David Deutsch have their way, will eventually come to fruition. If a quantum computer comprised of biological matter could arise through autonomous evolutionary processes, then I would have to think that intelligences like our own will eventually come to figure it out. If this is the case, then it may be possible to engineer subjectivity outside of our grey matter. Quantum computers could also be useful for running simulations of quantum mechanics, an idea that goes back to Richard Feynman; he observed that there is no known algorithm for simulating quantum systems on a classical computer and suggested to study the use of a quantum computer for this purpose. One has to wonder if the same logic applies to the potential for quantum computers to run consciousness simulations.

Given the extreme computational power and speed of quantum computers, I can’t even become to fathom what a conscious agent would do within such an architecture.

All bets are off once a conscious superintelligence starts to engage in selective decoherence.

References:

Stuart Hameroff: "Consciousness, Whitehead and quantum computation in the brain: Panprotopsychism meets the physics of fundamental spacetime geometry"
John Holbo: "Fragments of Parallax"
Wikipedia

This article originally appeared on Sentient Developments on October 25, 2006.

Deep brain stimulation induces vivid memories

Earlier this year doctors in Toronto reported a strange incident involving a morbidly obese man who was undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS).

DBS involves implanting electrodes into the brain to treat conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. In this particular case, the electrodes were implanted into a 50-year old's hypothalamus (an area in the limbic system) in hopes of granting him better control over his appetite.

But a strange thing happened during the procedure.

When the electrodes were stimulated by electrical impulses the man began to experience feelings of deja vu. As the procedure continued, and as surgeons increased the intensity of the electrodes, the patient experienced an influx of memories and feelings of temporal uncertainty.

At one point the patient thought he was in a park with friends. He felt younger and thought that he was 20-years old again. Even his girlfriend of the time was there. According to the patient, he viewed the scene as an observer and experienced the scene in colour. As the surgeons increased the intensity of the stimulation the details became more and more vivid.

Two months later the surgeons repeated the procedure, and the same thing happened again.

This incident, which came as a complete surprise to the surgeons, has given medical researchers cause for hope that DBS may be used to boost memories and better treat neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's.

"We hopefully have found a circuit in the brain which can be modulated by stimulation, and which might provide benefit to patients with memory disorders," said Andres Lozano of Toronto Western Hospital.

In addition, this incident reaffirms a suspicion I've had about the brain and its ability to store memories. I've often thought that the brain does an excellent job recording and storing memories, but that our recall mechanisms are disturbingly weak and highly selective. Our long-term associations with memories are frequently diminished (e.g. some of our more painful memories are often exaggerated, distorted or suppressed).

What this incident with DBS suggests is that our memories are beautifully preserved in our brains. We just lack the recall linkages and cognitive mechanisms to bring those memories back in any kind of detail. Our memories are accessed as fleeting bits of information instead of linear experiences.

Maybe there is a way to tease out the finer details. Looking to the future, perhaps we can use DBS or some other techniques to re-experience our memories in exquisite detail.

I'll get the popcorn.

Citation and photo credit: BBC

Free will pwnd

Unconscious decisions in the brain: A team of scientists has unravelled how the brain unconsciously prepares our decisions.

Already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain. This is shown in a study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. "Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings." (Nature Neuroscience, April 13th 2008)

Brain scientist analyzes her own stroke

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

Anders Sandberg wants to emulate your brain

Transhumanists have long speculated about the possibility of uploading a brain into a computer. In fact, a big part of the supposed posthuman future depends on it.

Soooo, how the hell do we do it?

This is the issue that Swedish neuroscientist Anders Sandberg tackled for his talk at TransVision 2007. Uploading, or what Sandberg refers to as ‘whole brain emulation,’ has become a distinct possibility arising from the feasibility of the functionalist paradigm and steady advances in computer science. Sandberg says we need a strategic plan to get going.

Levels of understanding

To start, Sandberg made two points about the kind of understanding that is required. First, we do not need to understand the function of a device to build it from parts, and second, we do not need to understand the function of the brain to emulate it. That said, Sandberg admitted that we still need to understand the brain's lower level functions in order for us to be able to emulate them.

The known unknown

Sandberg also outlined the various levels of necessary detail; we can already start to parse through the “known unknown.” He asked, “what level of description is necessary to capture enough of a particular brain to mimic its function?”

He described several tiers that will require vastly more detail:

• Computational model
• Brain region connectivity
• Analog network population model
• Spiking neural network
• Electrophysiology
• Metabolome
• Proteome
• Etc. (and all the way down to the quantum level)

Requirements

Sandberg believes that the ability to scan an existing brain will be necessary. What will also be required is the proper scanning resolution. Once we can peer down to the sufficient detail, we should be able to construct a brain model; we will then be required to infer structure and low-level function.

Once this is done we can think about running a brain emulation. Requirements here will include a computational neuroscience model and the requisite computer hardware. Sandberg noted that body and environment simulations may be added to the emulation; the brain emulator, body simulator and environment simulator would be daisy-chained to each other to create the sufficient interactive link. The developers will also have to devise a way to validate their observations and results.

Neural simulations

Neural simulations are nothing new. Hodgkin and Huxley began working on these sorts of problems way back in 1952. The trick is to perfectly simulate neurons, neuron parts, synapses and chemical pathways. According to Sandberg, we are approaching 1-1 for certain systems, including the lamprey spinal cord and lobster ganglia.

Compartment models are also being developed with miniscule time and space resolutions. The current record is 22 million 6-compartment neurons, 11 billion synapses, and a simulation length of one second real-time. Sandberg cited advances made by the development of IBM’s Blue Gene.

Complications and Exotica

Sandberg also provided a laundry list of possible ‘complications and exotica’:

• dynamical state
• spinal cord
• volume transmission
• glial cells
• synaptic adaptation
• body chemical environment
• neurogensis
• ephaptic effects
• quantum computation
• analog computation
• randomness

Reverse engineering is all fine and well, suggested Sandberg, but how much function can be deduced from morphology (for example)?

Scanning

In regards to scanning, we'll need to determine the kind of resolution and data needed. Sandberg argued that nondestructive scanning will be unlikely; MRIs have been the closest thus far but are limited to less than 7.7 micrometers resolution. More realistically, destructive scanning will likely be used; Sandberg noted such procedures as fixation and ‘slice and scan.’

Once scanning is complete the postprocessing can begin. Developers at this stage will be left wondering about the nature of the neurons and how they are all connected.

Given advances in computation, Sandberg predicted that whole brain emulation may arrive sometime between 2020 and 2060. As for environment and body simulation, we’ll have to wait until we have 100 terraflops at our disposal. We’ll also need a resolution of 5x5x50nm to do meaningful work.

Conclusions

Sandberg made mention of funding and the difficultly of finding scan targets. He named some subfields that lack drivers, namely basic neuroscience, electrophysiology, and large scale scanning (so far). He did see synergies arising from the ongoing development and industrialization of neuroscience, robotics and all the various –omics studies.

As for the order of development, Sandberg suggested 1) scanning and/or simulation, then 2) computer power, and then 3) the gradual emergence of emulation. Alternately, 1) first computer power, then 2) simulation and finally 3) scanning followed by 4) the rapid emergence of simulation.

Any volunteers for slice and scan?

When Dvorsky met Minsky

Of all the celebrities and bigwigs I looked forward to meeting at TransVision 2007 there was only one person who I was truly nervous about running into – a person who gave me that 'I’m going to squeal like a little girl when I see him’ kind of feeling.

That individual was pioneering neuroscientist Marvin Minsky.

A friend cautioned me by claiming that he was a difficult man and not very approachable. I dismissed the warning and patiently waited for an opportunity to start a conversation with him.

I eventually got my chance. I was with two other friends when the three of us bumped into Minsky in the reception area of the conference hall. Without hesitation I approached and introduced myself. After we shook hands I told him how much I appreciated his work and how much of an honour it was for me to finally meet him. He nodded his head and didn’t say a word.

I was surprised by how old he looked. Minsky is now 80 years old and has been working in the field of neuroscience since the 1950s. Despite his age he recently published a book, The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. Minsky just keeps on going.

Working to move the conversation along, I told him that while I was conducting research for my presentation I discovered that he was a presenter at the seminal SETI conference in 1971 in Byurakan. Minsky made waves at that conference by having the audacity to suggest that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations would likely be comprised of machine minds. It was a controversial suggestion, one that has only come into acceptance in more recent times. I asked Minsky for a first-hand account of how his idea was received back in 1971.

He stood there, just blankly looking at me, and didn’t say a single word. We all waited in silence for what seemed an eternity. I got the distinct impression that he was thoroughly disinterested in our little group.

Being a sucker for punishment I decided to move the conversation along. I unabashedly gave him the 10 second executive summary of my TV07 presentation, where I make some claims about the limitations of extraterrestrial civilizations and how this might account for the Great Silence and the problem that is the Fermi Paradox.

This finally got Minsky going. He had attended a SETI conference two weeks prior and was impressed with what he heard there. Minsky suggested that the reason we don’t see any signs of obvious megascale engineering or cosmological re-tuning by advanced ETI’s is that they have no sense of urgency to embark upon such projects. He argued that advanced intelligences won’t engage in these sorts of Universe changing exercises until the very late stages of the cosmos.

Jeez, I thought to myself, I hadn't considered that.

Leave it to Marvin Minsky to give me some serious food for thought a mere two hours before I was to give my talk. I was suddenly worried that this consideration would pierce a glaring hole in my argument.

After another minute of idle chit-chat I excused myself from Minsky's company and found a little corner where I could have my little micro-panic and contemplate his little theory.

The more I thought about it, however, the more unsatisfied I became with his answer; virtually everyone has a rather smug solution to the Fermi Paradox, and Marvin Minsky is no exception. Specifically, I was concerned with how such a theory could be exclusive to all civilizations. It seemed implausible to believe that not even one renegade civilization would take it upon itself to change the rules of the cosmos if it had the capacity to do so.

Moreover, given the power to reshape the Universe, a strong case could be made that a meta-ethical imperative exists to turn the madness that is existence into something profoundly more meaningful and safer. As Slavoj Žižek once said, existence is a catastrophe of the highest order. Timothy Leary described the Universe as an "ocean of chaos."

Waiting until the last minute to create a cosmological paradise (assuming such a thing is even possible) would seem to be both exceptionally risky and irresponsible -- not just to the members of a civilization capable of such feats, but to the larger universal community itself.

Phew. That's right, that's the answer. Ha, take that, Minsky!

So, after rationalizing a counter-argument to Minsky's suggestion, I was able to calm down and prepare myself for my presentation and deal with any follow-up questions that could be thrown my way.

And that's how I met Marvin Minsky.

Sure, he's not the most personable man I've ever met, but I got the sense that he's at a time in his life where a) he knows he owes nothing to no one and b) he'd rather engage with people who can contribute to his life's work and his ongoing struggle to solve the problem that is human cognition. And he's still as sharp as they come.

It was truly an honour.