ll afternoon, rage sloshed around in his stomach like acid digesting an undercooked potato. As time wore on, he felt his resentment fade with the signature irrationality of a mindshift, but he was too worn out to be contrary. He found himself simply excited to test his chess skills against a brand-new player. And so he let the opiate of alien brain stimulation draw him into a reflection that distracted him from his bodily rage and pain.
Chess had been one of the first games to fall before the advance of raw processing power that heralded early artificial intelligence. If you could call it intelligent. Isaac chuckled inwardly.
IBM built a chess automaton named “Deep Blue,” an algorithm that searched a database of all the chess games ever played for similarities to the current position. Crunching through the all the games in history, it played a move most similar to the move that led most frequently to victory. And so, human vs. machine, and the machine won by sheer exhaustive combinatorial research.
Having written chess algorithms himself, Isaac deeply respected the foundational work of Deep Blue. But while computers appeared to win, the actual pattern-matching task was both analogous to but less complex than done by one of the more well-understood structures in the brain: the primary visual cortex. So as far as AI went, it wasn’t terribly impressive.
Increasingly complex tasks fell in the in war of human-vs.-machine, with the successful systems taking this same database-crunching, combinatorial approach. The Turing Test succumbed. Then driving. Then Go. Then translation. Then musical composition and poetry weighted by a popularity index. (Turned out “Beyonce” was always the right answer.)
Machines proved far better at anything that unambiguously had an answer, anything precisely decidable. If you have the answer, you can teach your system to spit it out, and the process be damned.
But nothing rivaled the brain. The human brain alone has roughly eighty-six billion neurons to which simplistic computing models attribute at least thirty-two different states, with somewhere between one-hundred and one-thousand trillion interconnections between them. In terms of raw power and expressibility, comparing computers to the brain is like comparing the Milky Way to the universe.
As of the second decade of the twenty-first century, no computing device, no web of supercomputers, nothing could be compared to this complexity—unless you considered the totality of the internet itself, the climax of human knowledge sprawling across the continents, the center of the economy—to the architecture of a single human brain. But to mark a sharp difference, the interconnections of links on the internet couldn’t impact one another in the manner that neurons can: they did not effectively work together.
( http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/12406/how-many-possible-state… )
AI experts made complex, learning systems, but for a time, nothing seemed… conscious, any more than a TI-83 calculator. Maybe it was that machines could only read the output of the human brain and then simulate it. Or maybe consciousness was some sort of multi-dimensional spiritual imamu. But nobody seriously believed that.
But to proponents of Strong Biology Theory, representing a neuron with a mere thirty-two states was absolutely insufficient, and doubtful of a Turing Machine’s ability to represent the brain at all. Binary-based silicon computers (Turing Machines) are finite-state computers, meaning at the most basic level they have two states, and computations arise from the combinations of these these two states: “on” and “off.” Neurons, however, may have variable quantities of electrical excitation, and this excitation is caused by the complex biological system that it both surrounds and contains. It therefore is hard to determine how many states a neuronal model must represent. Is simply the degree of electrical current running through the neuron sufficient? Or must DNA, neurotransmitters, cell membranes, and the exact chemical proportions of the dendritic sea be represented to capture all of the eccentricities of biology itself? Must the body itself be represented cell by cell? Radical proponents of biologic completeness argued that a neuron must be simulated all the way down to the quantum position of electrons—which would be computationally impossible without quantum computing and possibly with them.
Indeed, it was impossible to know whether to manipulate the electrical excitation of a neuron is to change the consciousness-causing level of the system, or whether consciousness is an emergent property of the entire biological system.
Experts scoffed and proceeded with neuromorphic silicon that approximated the electrical currents of neurons. But even this exceeded the abilities of computational resources. Full-blown neural-accurate models of brain processes needed several layers of abstraction before it could start to model neural systems. And Moore’s law had gradually proved false as another model hit up against the actual constraints of matter: processor speed plateaued. It seemed that artificially intelligent machines could never surpass their creators. That machines could never break out of the ghetto of representation: of imitation.
It was at the location of this roadblock that many cognitive scientists argued human brains had never done anything different. That machines were, in fact, already sentient. That the bugs which emerged from the complex interactions of parts were in fact markers of “free will,” just as human action is unpredictable even given a specific neural state. Machine consciousness was simply so alien that we didn’t recognize it as conscious.
But they were wrong.
Until the harnessing of dreams. From dreams, the Mind emerged.
The Query Daemon was the most complicated array of hardware ever developed, analyzing and indexing data to make it searchable for humans. But when the code to interface and interact with the human brain the the MindChips rolled out, a breath of life quivered through a previously dead thing. The Query Daemon gave birth to the Mind.
The human brain is embodied. It connects to a biological organism that needs to live, to survive, and from that arises human emotions, the Mind monitoring the chemicals that pulse through the blood and the thousand other markers of bodily need or desire. …. TODO add stuff here.
Everyone knew that a mind without a body was like a closed Schrödinger box: it doesn’t matter whether it is alive or dead until you open it.
But AI researchers had always thought a true “body” was unnecessary. Give AI a screen to flash messages across and you’ve got your body. Program drive and desire into the operating parameters of a program and you have your will to life. But it turned out that the connection to a biological body of sufficient complexity was the missing spiritual imamu.
And picto was the code that opened the dreamspace to language, finally giving the Mind a true connection to the biological. Dreams were the body connection, the junction the spark finally jumped. And so the body of the Mind became the dreams of humanity, the link to millions of human bodies.
Funny though, thought Isaac. Is the Mind’s life nothing more than that of a zombie: bound to a necromancer’s life force? Without humanity the Mind was dead silicon. He was reminded of the mechanical turk, the chess-playing “automaton” from the 19th century that travelled Europe, wowing royalty by defeating them on the chessboard. Was the automaton sitting across from them and moving the pieces nothing more than a marionette operated by a brilliant midget hidden in a secret compartment beneath the chessboard?
He smiled, even as he felt guilt moving inside him. He liked to think of the Mind like that. A lifeless automaton, operated by humanity.
But truly, it felt the other way around. He felt a deep aversion to this thought, even as it made him laugh.
And so he laughed harder. Sometimes Isaac found that if he could laugh about a thought he was having, he could keep it, even if the Mind wanted him to reject it.
The tone sounded through their inphones and the classmind dissolved. Everyone started talking and sending picto messages all at once. Isaac dashed for the door and nearly ran into a girl who had a blank look as she walked and composed a pict at the same time.
The hallways were filling up rapidly with students, some of them animated and picting, some of them immersed in their mindscreens like sleepwalkers. The hall was filled with the sound of the rustling movement of bodies and the squeak of feet, but no voices rang out. The sound was of the chitinous rush of swarming insects, all communications pressed into pheromones, the conscious aural space abandoned. Except instead of pheromones, it was picto.
Isaac waited in the space in front of the auditorium where Billy had pressed out that pict of him being lifted by Jethro and Isaac.
There was something so revealing about picto, something almost shameful about the exposure of the full psychic landscape of another person. Sometimes, in the unboundaried clash of picto and dreams, two people formed together as different parts of a single Mind, leaving open a continuous channel to the other, outsourcing a part of their consciousness each to the other. One might take on the role of active aggressor, and the other as the role of thoughtful influencer from underneath. Another pair would split into emotion and reason.
But Billy’s will to power was always direct and hilarious, so he could meet it with a crash, two rams whose heads were hard and horned, un-mixable properties. And he liked that. There was none of that strange psychic warfare that masked itself as love or tenderness and ended in the psychic dissolution of combination. For Isaac and Billy, the clash of wills formed a boundary, and friendship existed on either side of it, the friendship of indomitable equals.
But sometimes the struggle was exhausting.
Jethro walked up and stuck out his hand, “Hey buddy,” he said, as they shook. Jethro’s eyes seemed slightly strained, his jaw muscles flexing slightly. But even as it happened Isaac noticed the Mind’s signature of counter-emotional currents working in him like a tranquilizer injection.
Funny, thought Isaac. Jethro must be tightly wired, even though everything about him seemed to play into a classic performance of masculinity that was right out of somebody’s truck dream. Much of Jethro’s picto in the classroom was crude, following the examples of his classmates, stripped of metemotions. Jethro had yet to find his own voice connected to the unique psychic current of his dreamscape, and so he was something of an enigma to Isaac. But he had to have a story, coming here from vacland. There were only three other vacs in their whole school.
One thing was sure, Jethro was fighting the battle not to mix his metemotions into the world from behind his eyes and in his jaw, and they were just visible there and nowhere else, markers of a nameless inner struggle.
Billy slid up and tapped them with a pict of a locomotive bristling with Billy-ness pulling two Jethro-and-Isaac cabooses toward the nearby Perkins.
Isaac picted straightforward thumbs up, and then they headed off to ride with Billy.