My posting this morning on analog approaches to AGI. (http://
s33light.org/post/10356965451). Some of you probably know a lot more
about analog technologies and experiments and might be able to say
whether these ideas are already in circulation.
9/19/11
Learn To Forget (Fade Out)
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets
Speak in secret alphabets
I light another cigarette
Learn to forget, learn to forget
The Doors - Soul Kitchen
I woke up just now thinking about how remembering and forgetting is
the method by which a Turing machine, and therefore all modern
computers, do what they do. Reading, writing, and erasing. It is an
appealing way to describe the essence of consciousness, and indeed we
have seen how successful it has been in extending our own
consciousness into these kinds of these devices and through them.
Going back (again) to wag (http://s33light.org/post/3991599269) and
wegh (http://s33light.org/post/4002126588), it occurs to to me how
this sense of passively ‘rocking to sleep’ versus actively ‘getting
ready to roll’ corresponds to forgetting and remembering. What you do
when you wake up is remember who and where you are. That’s a profound
little detail if you think about it. If you didn’t do that, you would
wake up a confused amnesiac and probably start wandering around the
neighborhood wondering what planet you were on.
So this if wag and wegh are the sensorimotive correlates to
electromagnetic* frequency and amplitude (private subjective feelings
through time rather than public objective behaviors across space) then
that might mean that the way to get from a binary computer to a living
organisms is not to start with an inanimate memory machine and speed
it up, but to start with energy and slow it down. Organic matter is a
complex resistor. From semi-permeable membranes to synaptic clefts,
living organisms and their nervous systems (bugs have em too -
http://insects.about.com/od/morphology/ss/internalanatomy_2.htm) slow
down and spread out the read/write operation to a continuum of partial
remembering and partial forgetting.
Like a game of telephone** or RNA transcription, evolution is driven
by imperfect replication. Each remembering is imperfect, each
forgetting leaves recoverable traces, so that our bodies both
recapitulate the entire history of evolution and present a completely
unique and novel individuality, regardless of the number of iterative
replications. It is an Infinite State Autopoietic non-machine. Non
machine because it never does exaactly the same thing twice but never
entiirely abandons what it did before. The sensorimotive correlate of
this is the experience of learning - making sense of what is
experienced. Keeping what seems significant but also not forgetting
completely about what seems insignificant. It’s a different kind of
memory than a semiconductor. Slower. Less precise, but more meaningful
and sensible in both the sense of richer sensation and being open to
possibilities of making greater sense.
Is it enough to just deepen each binary digital impression into an
analog wave form event? Each keystroke a nano-scale lightning strike
or piano chord with an attack and decay? Is that all there is to
Frankenstein’s Dream - focus more on optimizing the energy pattern of
the event within the semiconductor than counting more events faster?
Instead of using transistors as binary memory switches, you use them
to wax and wane, like a billion microcosmic sunrise-sunsets.
Sunsets within lunar orbits within seasons within synodic periods
along the ecliptic. That’s how our anthropological scale system does
what it does. You might have to suspend the components apart in orbits
rather than connect them together in circuits; by spinning them in a
vacuum or floating them a fluid to let the right kind of evanescent
wave functions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4NEgA7BC5o) (fade-
outs) occur. Not ginormous supercolliders, but nanocolliders to tune
into multiple levels and frequencies of orbiting rhythms and
oscillations at the same time, from slow gentle waves washing up on a
long flat beach to heartbeats and animal respiration to molecular and
tissue level vibrations that we see and hear.
This machine will not communicate
These thoughts and the strain I am under
Be a world child, form a circle
Before we all go under
And fade out again and fade out again
Radiohead - Street Spirit
Anyone want to help me patent artificial life?
*or quantum, or EM-quantum if you like
**I’ve never thought of the game of telephone as a possible divination
tool - like if someone starts by asking a question in someone else’s
ear and the you kept circulating and circulating until some external
event triggers a stopping point to get your answer.
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