VR, vision and sense of self

A couple of days ago I received a post from a team mate (its in Hebrew so I wo'nt bother with it). It basically talks about two separate experiments that were carried out in Europe and deal with recreating rigorously "out of body" experiences for tested subjects by using sensory inputs from video cameras to their eyes in which they see themselves. These were both part of the latest Science issue but the two originals can be found at the UCL Neurology institute and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Laussane. ostensibly what both researchers demonstrated was that projecting people with images of themselves from the back in real time, while conflicting physical sensory inputs (touch) to their bodies, created a perception of being outside ones own body.
As an anecdotal side note - about 10 years ago while at a government research facility and dealing with stereo vision I had pondered seriously on the implications of manipulating the points of view of our eyes and what effect that might have on our perception. My concept was somewhat different and basically talked about using the same video camera feed but with one "eye" set to normal and the other changing perspectives. I hypothesized that as long as the two images were towards the front of the subject (such that when she moves to her "real" front both eyes get closer to the far wall) she will retain her sense of balance and self. I expected that once this relation was broken (say one camera was 90 degrees to the other, or pointed backwards) our consciousness would break down and our sense of self localization could suffer. Unfortunately this was not part of the agenda at the time and I never returned to it. I wonder if some of the neuroscientists looking into this field could take on this experiment...
At any rate out of body experiences connect directly to the issue of self and the connection of our physical and mental existence as a unified pair. This has been something revisited by many philosophers theologists, cognitive scientists and even physicists over the years and seems to be a critical hub of both social science, brain and neurology, physics and artificial intelligence and a hotly debated issue these days.

MC

Mortality - is there hope...?

A colleague's father just past away a while ago. I believe he was 55 or so... it brought back some of my own thoughts in the past couple of years on the issue of mortality.
I guess a few things came together for me in a loud wakeup call:

I began to notice that my dad was not able to function his usual...getting tired quickly and needing my help with some physical stuff

My own health, although still great is not what it used to be... feeling my younger self slip away.

My 47 year old brother had some health issues - they were all benign..but still

Reading Eli Weisel's Night - especially the part where he talks about his father's dying moments and the emotional torment that he felt was the darkest part of his Holocaust abyss

But most of all I think it was the birth of my first daughter - Zoe. It was really a revelation and an incredible experience in many ways (I am sure every parent knows what I'm talking about) but it also brought a new sense to time - children are wonderful yet frightening metrics for our own demise and to the passing of time. Since they change so noticeably you begin to feel time flowing by. It also made me realize that no matter how good I feel now, how cool I might think I am Zoe will never really know me as I perceive myself to be at this point. For her I will be a 50 something old man most of his life behind him!

Of course everyone thinks of mortality, and this is not the first time by any means for me (my mother still recalls how at the age of eight I screamed from the shower saying something like "we are all gonna die - you, dad and me") but i think that having children changes everything including your view of life and death. For me it sort of symbolizes the beginning of the end.

Obviously this issue has occupied many minds ever since the dawn of man...and I wonder where exactly are we going with this. Reading some of the recent issues of Scientific American and other papers on robotics and AI it seems there are some converging trends in Nanotech Biotech and computing that will eventually change the way we live and the way we die.

Some of these advancements have to do with health issues like fighting cancer, anti aging, nerve repair or organ regeneration - but the interesting part for me is reading about augmented brain technology and the fact that we are not very far away from being able to engage not only in turbo charging our memory but maybe in actual mind uploading so what will the outcome be? The consequences of robbing man kind of mortality are of course not clear. Probably, at least for non religious crowd, the real issue lies with the continuity of consciousness (a la immortality test) and assume linear causality (unlike quantum immortality). Obviously the mere physical reincarnation is, by most accounts meaningless (popularized by motion pictures like Island and AeonFlux ). One wonders what would unending existence type of scenario do to the structure of so called humanity. Some accounts talk about stagnation and lack of any motivation others tend to look at the outcome as engineered heaven while yet others argue that existence that cannot be terminated will inevitably lead to misery as the conscious entity will not be able to commit willful suicide in cases where it no longer desires to continue an unwanted existence.

ultimately it seems that humans' philosophy that consciousness is what separates man from animals will be our demise. With that kind of definition it seems more than plausible that artificial entities with sufficient memory space, computing power and probably parallel processing and self referencing will very soon be able to be effectively self aware and will thus be effectively human under these terms (see Hans Moravec and The Singularity Institute for some data). Beyond that point we will need to face the very difficult questions of what constitutes life and death and re-examine our consciousness based theories. It might turn out that multiple consciousness and mind connectedness scenarios where an abstract conscious entity of super human intelligence and infinite existence come to "life". In fact proponents of this school of thought believe that web2.0 with its massive collaboration and co creation abilities is the beginning of such an occurrence. No doubt we are at an Archimedian point. Will we all be part of one big virtual entity (like Gaia ), will we be able to live multiple co-existence lives in virtual domains.

Whatever the future of mortality is I just want to end with a little story that my thesis advisor told me about Lev Landau (who was his doctoral advisor back in the good old days):

So Lev is sitting some really cold afternoon with Ginsburg in the Moscow Academy debating some issue in statistical mechanics. Ginsburg says something like "....but this is an extremely improbable outcome. It is like saying that this fireplace will spontaneously transform itself on the quantum level to a beautiful girl!" So Landau pauses for a second, then smiles and says: "that is true - but if that does happen the chances that she will have cloths on are REALLY zero!!"

So whatever it is, I hope the girls don't have cloths on!

MC

Race, gender and the future of intelligence

Came across this article by Malcolm Gladwell that was published 10 years ago in The New Yorker. Funnily enough this relates to a subject that has troubled me somewhat for many years, namely what is the origin of some of the seemingly strong ethnic or gender differences that we see around us. Unfortunately this indeed is a subject that most people find to be taboo. I have not run a search on Gladwell's sources (he doesn't reference them in great detail...) but indeed his argument is interesting, compelling and at least he gets some of this stuff into the open. Of course some heated subjects were not covered there and are somewhat not not in line with his argument, namely - what account for the big discrepancy in scholastic achievement between ethnic groups. Personally I subscribe to the theory that these differences probably stem mostly form the socioeconomic setting of our current time where white people have on the average better resources and an easier path to learning than some other minorities like African - Americans or Latin Americans. The same goes for women. Probably the strongest hint in that direction (at least in my mind) is the fact that if we look back in history many of the past scholastic achievements were made by non whites (mostly in the far and middle east).
This of course does not rule out the option that there is some ethnic or gender based difference. maybe there is some serious research in this subject matter - not sure.
I have recently read some material on William Shockley (Nobel laureate physicist - father of the transistor). It turns out he was an advocate of Eugenics and even donated sperm to a high IQ sperm bank. This issue is of course highly debatable (I am personally not even sure what my own thoughts on the matter are!!!) and has given rise to many new areas of thought in Bioethics (some of which centered around the great effort of the Human Genome Project to research moral issues surrounding their work).
And if all this is'nt complicated enough - I have been bouncing some thoughts in my head (more in another post) relating to human brain augmentation and surrounding subjects. I wonder how the clash of the Transhumanist movement (that advocates human augmentation towards a better future) with the Singularitans and proponents of superintelligent A.I. will pan out. Are man and machine the same?
I wish I was intelligent enough and had some more time to research all this.

MC

Book report - 10 years late

Ok - i am ashamed... I have only just recently read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I came across it at a conference i went to in NYC (VW2007 ) It really is a great book. I am not a hard core SF reader but this one was indeed a good read: fast paced and full of mindful action that pushes the reader into thought about how technology and human culture interact. The amazing part is that it was written between 88-94 or so before the big internet boom - yet its' depiction of future events is quite insightful still.
one interesting aspect was his talk about the possibility of a hard coded "machine language" in humans (i wont spoil further) at any rate researching the matter further i cam across some interesting concepts: Bicameralism seems to be the original theory that uses this line of reasoning to try and explain the origins of Consciousness. Although there are quite a few missing parts in this theory and many opposers i still think it is quite mind provoking. I wonder how it might tie in with Hoffshtader's ( the seminal work GEB and others) into the mathematical origins of consciousness and other similar works. There seems to be some obvious connection between complexity (be it societal or internally within our brain) and self awareness. This also resonates with a book i read quite a while ago (meaning i forgot most of...) Schrödinger's What is Life?. Am trying to look into this subject more deeply. Will report if i find anythng of interest.

MC