SynapticNulship

One of the films which inspired me as a kid was Moontrap, the plot of which has something to do with Bruce Campbell and his comrade Walter Koenig bringing an alien seed back to earth.

Nothing ever happens on the moon

This alien (re)builds itself out of various biological and electromechanical parts.

The Moontrap robot

At one point the robot had a skillsaw end effector, not unlike the robot in this exquisite depiction of saw-hand prowess:

Cyborg Justice (Sega Genesis, 1993)

In that game—which I also played as a child—you could mix-and-match legs, torsos, and arms to create robots.

The later movie Virus had a similar creature to the one in Moontrap, and if I remember correctly, the alien robots in the movie *Batteries Not Included could modify and reproduce themselves from random household junk.

The ability for a creature to compose and extend itself is quite fascinating. Not only can it figure out what to do with the objects it happens to encounter, but it can adjust its mental models in order to control these new extensions.

I think that building yourself out of parts is only a difference in degree from tool use.

Tools

During the long watches of the night the solitary sailor begins to feel that the boat is an extension of himself, moving to the same rhythms toward a common goal.  The violinist, wrapped in the stream of sound she helps to create, feels as if she is part of the “harmony of the spheres.”  The climber, focusing all her attention on the small irregularities of the rock wall that will have to support her weight safely, speaks of the sense of kinship that develops between fingers and rock, between the frail body and the context of stone, sky, and wind. —Csikszentmihalyi [1]

Human tool use

Humans are perhaps the most adaptable of animals on earth (leave a comment if you know of a more adaptable organism).

Our action-perception system may have morphology-specific programming. But it’s not so specific that we cannot add or subtract from it. For instance, anything you hold in your hand becomes essentially an extension of your arm. Likewise, you can adapt to a modification in which you completely replace your hand with a different type of end effector.

Alternate human end effector

You might argue that holding something does not really extend your arm. After all, you aren’t hooking it directly to your nervous system. But the brain-environment system does treat external objects as part of the body.

We have always been coupled with technology. We have always been prosthetic bodies.
–-Stelarc

Something unique about hands is that they may have evolved due to tool use. Bipedalism allowed this to happen. About 5 million years after bipedalism, tool use and a brain expansion appeared [2]. It’s possible that the homo sapiens brain was the result of co-evolution with tools.

Oldowan Handaxe (credit: University of Missouri)

The body itself is part of the environment, albeit a special one as far as the brain is concerned. The brain has no choice but to have this willy-nilly freedom of body size changes—or else how would you be able to grow from a tiny baby to the full size lad/gal/transgender you are today?

An example of body-environment overlap is the cutaneous rabbit hopping out of the body experiment [3].

The white cutaneous rabbit

The original cutaneous (==”of the skin”) rabbit experiment demonstrated a somatosensory illusion: your body map (in the primary somatosensory cortex) will cause you to report tapping (the “rabbit” hopping) on your skin in between the places where the stimulus was actually applied. The out of the body version extends this illusion onto an external object held by your body (click on figure below for more info).

Hopping out of the body (credit: Miyazaki, et al)

Some other relevant body map illusions are the extending nose illusion, the rubber hand illusion, and the face illusion.

Get Your Embody Beat

Metzinger’s self-model theory of subjectivity [4] defines three levels of embodiment:

First-order: Purely reflexive with no self-representation. Most uses of subsumption architecture would be categorized as such.

Second-order: Uses self-representation, which affects its behavior.

Third-order: In addition to self-representation, “you consciously experience yourself as embodied, that you possess phenomenal self-model (PSM)”. Humans, when awake, fall into this category.

Introspection

Metzinger refers to the famous starfish robot as an example of a “second-order embodiment” self-model implementation. The starfish robot develops its walk with a dynamic internal self model, and can also adapt to body subtractions (e.g. via damage).

I don’t see why we can’t develop robots that learn how to use tools and even adapt them into their bodies. The natural way may not be the only way, but it’s at least a place to start when making artificial intelligence. AI has an advantage though, even when using the naturally inspired methods, which is that the researchers can speed up phylogenetic development.

What I mean by that is I could adapt a robot to a range of environments through evolution in simulations running much faster than real time. Then, I can deploy that robot in real life where it continues its learning, but it has already learned via evolution the important and general stuff to keep it alive.

Body Mods

The ancient art of cyborg hands

This natural adaptability that you have as part of your interaction with the world could also help you modify yourself with far stranger extensions than chainsaws and cyborg hands.

Well-designed cyborg parts will exploit this natural adaptability to modify your morphology, if you so desire. Perhaps the same scheme could work even with a complete body replacement, or a mind-in-computer scenario in which you may have multiple physical bodies to choose from.

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References

[1] M. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.

[2] R. Leaky, The Origin of Humankind. New York: BasicBooks, 1994.

[3] M. Miyazaki, M. Hirashima, D. Nozaki, “The ‘Cutaneous Rabbit’ Hopping out of the Body.” The Journal of Neuroscience, February 3, 2010, 30(5):1856-1860; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3887-09.2010. http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/30/5/1856

[4] T. Metzinger, “Self models.” Scholarpedia, 2007, 2(10):4174. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Self_models

UPDATE 2011: There is a new/better version of this essay:  “Enactive Interface Perception and Affordances”.

There are two theories of perception which are very interesting to me not just for AI, but also from a point of view of interfaces, interactions, and affordances.  The first one is Alva Noë’s enactive approach to perception.  The second one is Donald D. Hoffman’s interface theory of perception.

Enactive Perception vs. Interface Perception

Enactive Perception

The key element of the enactive approach to perception is that sensorimotor knowledge and skills are a required part of perception.

A lot of artificial perception schemes, e.g. for robots, run algorithms on camera video frames.  Some programs also use the time dimension, e.g. structure from motion.  They can find certain objects and even extract 3D data (especially if they also use a range scanner such as LIDAR, ultrasound, or radar).  But the enactive approach suggests that animal visual perception is not simply a transformation of 2-D pictures into a 3-D (or any kind) of representation.

Example of optical flow (one of the ways to get structure from motion). Credit: Naoya Ohta.

My interpretation of the enactive approach is that it suggests perception co-evolved with motor skills such as how our bodies move and how our sensors, for instance, eyes, move.  A static 2D image can not tell you what color blobs are objects and what are merely artifacts of the sensor or environment (e.g. light effects).  But if you walk around this scene, and take into account how you are moving, you get a lot more data to figure out what is stable and what is not.  We have evolved to have constant motion in our eyes via saccades, so even without walking around or moving our heads, we are getting this motion data for our visual perception system.

Of course, there are some major issues that need to be resolved, at least in my mind, about enactive perception (and related theories).  As Aaron Sloman has pointed out repeatedly, we need to fix or remove dependence on symbol grounding.  Do all concepts, even abstract ones, exist in a mental skyscraper built on a foundation of sensorimotor concepts?  I won’t get into that here, but I will return to it in a later blog post.

The enactive approach says that you should be careful about making assumptions that perception (and consciousness) can be isolated on one side of an arbitrary interface.  For instance, it may not be alright to study perception (or consciousness) by looking just at the brain.  It may be necessary to include much more of the mind-environment system—a system which is not limited to one side of the arbitrary interface of the skull.

Perception as a User Interface

The Interface Theory of Perception says that “our perceptions constitute a species-specific user interface that guides behavior in a niche.”

Evolution has provided us with icons and widgets to hide the true complexity of reality.  This reality user interface allows organisms to survive better in particular environments, hence the selection for it.

Perception as an interface

Hoffman’s colorful example describes how male jewel beetles use a reality user interface to find females.  This perceptual interface is composed of simple rules involving the color and shininess of female wing cases.  Unfortunately, it evolved for a niche which could not have predicted the trash dropped by humans that lead to false positives—which results in male jewel beetles humping empty beer bottles.

Male Australian jewel beetle attempting to mate with a discarded "stubby" (beer bottle). Credit: Trevor J. Hawkeswood.

All perception, including of humans, evolved for adaptation to niches.  There is no reason or evidence to suspect that our reality interfaces provide “faithful depictions” of the objective world.  Fitness trumps truth.  Hoffman says that Noë supports a version of faithful depiction within enactive perception, although I don’t see how that is necessary for enactive perception.

Of course, the organism itself is part of the environment.

True Perception is Right Out the Window

How do we know what we know about reality?  There seems to be a consistency at our macroscopic scale of operation.  One consistency is due to natural genetic programs—and programs they in turn cause—which result in humans having shared knowledge bases and shared kinds of experience.  If you’ve ever not been on the same page as somebody before, then you can imagine how it would be like if we didn’t have anything in common conceptually.  Communication would be very difficult.  For every other entity you want to communicate with, you’d have to establish communication interfaces, translators, interpreters, etc.  And how would you even know who to communicate with in the first place?  Maybe you wouldn’t have even evolved communication.

So humans (and probably many other related animals) have experiences and concepts that are similar enough that we can communicate with each other via speech, writing, physical contact, gestures, art, etc.

But for all that shared experience and ability to generate interfaces, we have no inkling of reality.

Since the UI theory says that our perception is not necessarily realistic, and is most likely not even close to being realistic, does this conflict with the enactive theory?

Noë chants the mantra that the world makes itself available to us (echoing some of the 80s/90s era Brooksian “world as its own model”).  If representation is distributed in a human-environment system, doesn’t that mean it must be a pretty accurate representation?  No.  I don’t see why that has to be true.  So it seems we can combine the two theories together.

There may be some mutation to enactive theories if we have to slant or expand perception more towards what happens in the environment and away from the morphology-dependent properties.  In other words, we may have to emphasize the far environment (everything you can observe or interact with) even more than the near environment (the body).  As I think about this and conduct experiments, I will report on how this merging of theories is working out.
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References

Noë, A., Action in Perception, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

Hoffman, D.D, “The interface theory of perception: Natural selection drives true perception to swift extinction” in Dickinson, S., Leonardis, A., Schiele, B., & Tarr, M.J. (Eds.), Object categorization: Computer and human vision perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp.148-166.  PDF.

Hawkeswood, T., “Review of the biology and host-plants of the Australian jewel beetle Julodimorpha bakewelli,” Calodema, vol. 3, 2005.  PDF.

According to philosopher Alva Noë, “Consciousness is more like dancing than it is like digestion.” I.e., consciousness happens while you are interfacing with the world.

But is it ballroom dancing, techno dancing, break dancing…the robot?

Consciousness

Sure, you can dance by yourself—especially to industrial and EBM—but you need music. And music is at least partially external. And there’s probably people around you. Crazy people. And a disco ball, and strobe lights…it’s an environment.

Does this mean your consciousness is dependent on interactions?

If you were in a sensory deprivation chamber would you be unconscious? I think you would have hallucinations and eventually go insane. But you would probably still be self aware and relatively conscious, at least until the black hole of strange loop madness consumed you.

However, that is in lifetime space (ontogeny). Consciousness might be fully dependent on interactions in evolution space (phylogeny).

So can this metaphor stretch to unconsciousness? Maybe unconsciousness is like doing the fish stick.

Unconsciousness