SynapticNulship

It’s certainly not new to propose recursion as a key element of the human mind—for instance Douglas Hofstadter has been writing about that since the 1970s.

nested recursion

Michael C. Corballis, a former professor of psychology, came out with a new book this year called The Recursive Mind. It explains his specific theory that I will attempt to outline here.

The Recursive Mind

As I understand it, his theory is composed of these parts:

1. The ability of the human mind to generate concepts recursively is what causes the main differences between homo sapiens and other animals.
2. A Chomskian internal language is the basis for all external languages and other recursive abilities. (See this blog post by Corballis for a summary of an internal language as a universal grammar).
3. External languages evolved on top of the recursive abilities primarily for storytelling and social cohesion.
4. External languages started with gestures, and most likely were followed by mouth clicking languages before vocal languages emerged.

You’ll notice that toolmaking and other modern human capabilities are not mentioned in my list there. That is because those are considered to be evolved/developed after the recursive mind appeared and after rudimentary language based on recursion appeared. The author talks about how the ability to build multi-part tools and using tools to make tools probably depends on recursion, but he thinks that came after a certain amount of language development.

recursive construction

A host of abilities might be dependent on recursive thinking, even things we take for granted like story telling. Planning, talking about the future, and making fictional stories all might be dependent on recursive processing.

primitive gestures

Corballis has been doing research on gestures for a long time. By gestures we mean both bodily and facial. It certainly sounds plausible based on the evidence we have that gestures might have been the first real external language. Corballis claims that the discovery of mirror neurons added support for this theory. A primate watching another one perform an action has mental processing similar to actually doing the same action itself. Corballis proposes here and in previous works that sign language with grammar and syntax appeared long before it was mainly replaced with the cultural development of vocal speech.

(As a related aside, see this TED video about the power of communication via dance.)

Conclusion and a Warning

The Sierpinski Triangle

It’s certainly an interesting theory, and I can buy that recursion is part of, if not the single key element, of a general protocol in the mind. Even if we forget the linguistic aspect, the power of recursion seems to be a fundamental ability of the mind at some level.

Fortunately, as a computer programmer (amongst my many roles), I don’t have to limit myself as academics love to do when talking about the sole “language of mind” or the single important algorithm or type of algorithm needed to turn an pre-human mind into a human mind. I can easily imagine lots of protocols (I think that is a better word than “language” for system communications) at all kinds of arbitrary levels, in many relationships to each other. I think it’s kind of silly to assume there’s only one universal protocol and that it underlies all the others. Even in a digital computer (of which most computers are), the only “general” protocol that underlies all others is the fact that information is represented with binary. You have to go to another level above that to describe anything else, and it won’t be completely general. And a digital computer is much simpler than the brain. But what about the fundamental difference between humans and other animals? Well, again, recursion seems to be a good candidate, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s only one of several intertwined informational abilities that make human minds different than others.

Postscript

Based on comments on Science 2.0, I may have made this summary too thin. So why exactly would recursion be of interest to single out? Isn’t it just one of many run-of-the-mill features of information processing? Basically, Corballis proposes this:

Generative functions require recursiveness. Episodic memory requires generative functions. Episodic memory may be unique to humans. Planning future events and making fictional stories requires episodic memory. Communication of future events and storytelling–which in turn requires ways to communicate the time component–may have co-evolved with human external language abilities.

References

[1] Corballis, M.C. The Recursive Mind. Princeton University Press, 2011.

Image Credits

Inception Chair by Vivian Chiu
book cover, Princeton University Press
Derek O’ Reilly
Rhys Davenport (found via Sean Williams)
Sierpinski Triangle, public domain

Kevin Kelly concluded a chapter in his new book What Technology Wants with the declaration that if you hate technology, you basically hate yourself.

The rationale is twofold:

1. As many have observed before, technology–and Kelly’s superset “technium”–is in many ways the natural successor to biological evolution.  In other words, human change is primarily through various symbiotic and feedback-looped systems that comprise human culture.

2. It all started with biology, but humans throughout their entire history have defined and been defined by their tools and information technologies.  I wrote an essay a few months ago called “What Bruce Campbell Taught Me About Robotics” concerning human co-evolution with tools and the mind’s plastic self-models.  And of course there’s the whole co-evolution with or transition to language-based societies.

So if the premise that human culture is a result of taking the path of technologies is true, then to reject technology as a whole would be reject human culture as it has always been.  If the premise that our biological framework is a result of a back-and-forth relationship with tools and/or information, then you have another reason to say that hating technology is hating yourself (assuming you are human).

In his book, Kelly argues against the noble savage concept.  Even though there are many useless implementations of technology, the tech that is good is extremely good and all humans adopt them when they can.  Some examples Kelly provides are telephones, antibiotics and other medicines, and…chainsaws.  Low-tech villagers continue to swarm to slums of higher-tech cities, not because they are forced, but because they want their children to have better opportunities.

So is it a straw man that actually hates technology?  Certainly people hate certain implementations of technology.  Certainly it is ok, and perhaps needed more than ever, to reject useless technology artifacts.  I think one place where you can definitely find some technology haters are the ones afraid of obviously transformative technologies, in other words the ones that purposely and radically alter humans.  And they are only “transformative” in an anachronistic sense–e.g., if you compare two different time periods in history, you can see drastic differences.

Also, although perhaps not outright hate in most cases, there are many who have been infected by the meme that artificial creatures such as robots and/or super-smart computers (and/or super-smart networks of computers) present a competition to humans as they exist now.  This meme is perhaps more dangerous than any computer could be because it tries to divorce humans from the technium.

Image credit: whokilledbambi

Cross-posted with Science 2.0.

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.

————

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

Without the existence of parody, I would have far less hope for our society. Robert Brockway’s recent article on the Cracked website, “If The Internet Wins The Nobel: A Proposed Acceptance Speech,” makes fun of the effort to give the internet the Nobel Peace Prize.

Unfortunately the Nobel Prize agency hides the nominees list for 50 years in a secret volcano lair, so I’m not sure if the intertubes is actually a nominee right now.

Brockway points out the strangeness of recent awards/nominations to abstract concepts, such as “You” for Time’s Person of the Year. Why don’t we nominate abstract concepts for President?  Brockway bemoans the internet’s qualifications, concluding that this would really be a peace prize for pornography.

Despite his brilliance, Brockway misses one aspect of the internet that makes it somewhat different than other abstract concepts, which is that it’s also a tool. Even if you disagree with the usage, the acceptance of a tool for a major award may be a predecessor to a future culture in which intelligence, personhood and rights apply to a myriad forms, not just humans.   And not just in object-oriented forms.

“In the future, your clothes will be smarter than you.”
—Scott Adams

The interfaces of the web allow us to interact with agents who may not be human. Would you care if other players in multiplayer games were bots, as long as they acted like humans? Would you follow software agents on Twitter? I certainly would.  Would you have sex with a sufficiently humanlike robot (or web agent + peripheral)?  I certainly…um…

“Smart” gadgets now are still relatively idiotic. But we’ll have more and better mobile assistants and home appliances in the future. Also, if we can work out the interfaces, automatic systems and software agents will become better at doing online chores and information aggregation for us.

In the real world, augmented pets and socially adept robots may be among your friends. Telepresence robots will let you interact in the same physical space with remote humans, software agents, pets, corporations, etc.

This could be the era in which humans finally start accepting machines, distributed systems, and other non-humans as people. Or if not as people, than as new classes of rights-bearing entities.

Bonus points to anybody who makes an “I for one welcome…” comment.