from FAZ.NET, 15th June 2010
A spirit of software
W ground computers can think again? And what Sigmund Freud would have to do with cyberspace? The American Internet pioneer David Gelernter predicts the next stage of development of artificial intelligence.
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"Answer Us" by David Gelernter
What does it mean to think? Can you think of machines or just people? These questions drive the computer science since the fifties, and they are provided with each Urgent days, at which the firmament of the Internet closes over our heads and leaves us in the portentous half-darkness of cyberspace. The network as a whole is an amazingly complex collection of computers, the same brain cells and how they are connected tightly together. Also, there is growing 
millions of places simultaneously, as if it were a living organism - or more than alive? So it is natural to ask whether the Internet will one day begin to think for themselves.
millions of places simultaneously, as if it were a living organism - or more than alive? So it is natural to ask whether the Internet will one day begin to think for themselves. If it is not already doing.
These questions affect not only the Internet but also the individual computer. Computers are becoming more powerful. Already, in the entire software landscape programs play an important role not only be controlled by means of calculations, but also with the aid of plausible assumptions.
Such programs are examples of an applied artificial intelligence, whose big dream is to build a spirit of software, a thinking computer - a machine with human-like or even superhuman intelligence.
the subject
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In a way, this frightening possibilities. At least, they force us to think. On the other hand, human intelligence is the most valuable thing we know in the universe, and we never have enough of it. A computer-generated increase in global intelligence would offer to say the least welcome.
A kind Cyberpest
It would not be unreasonable to expect that computers will help us to eliminate the mess they have caused. Every day they unload huge amounts of information in the cyber sphere. Can you help us to evaluate this mass of information in an intelligent way?
Or are they just unlocked oil wells, escape constantly from which flows a kind Cyberpest - currents, which are scattered today, perhaps only to us but could paralyze more if they increase our choices and information channels of control? If each of us sees only once surrounded by a growing amount of digital paparazzi, all current issues to shout and wave data without security personnel anywhere in sight?
It is important to take an unpleasant truth note: The currently prevailing ideas of human and artificial thinking will lead to nothing.
Three key false assumptions
We are caught in a system of assumptions, which dissolve into thin air as soon as we think about them, and by "we" not only lay are meant, but many philosophers and scientists. Three key false assumptions are the following:
First, many people believe that thinking and reasoning are essentially the same. But if I interrupt for a moment, his work, looking out the window and let your thoughts run free, they still think. Our minds work even then. This kind of free association is an important part of human thought. No computer will ever think like a man, if he can not free associate.
Second, many people believe that the reality is a Thing and our thoughts to another. The reality is out there, and the mental map that is created by our thoughts, however, is in our heads, in our mind - whether his health condition. But we hallucinate every day when we sleep and dream. And when we hallucinate, then defines our mind, what is our reality, the "real" reality, the external reality disappears. No computer will ever think like a man, if he can not hallucinate.
And thirdly, many people believe that the thinker and the thought are two different things. For many people "think" means the bottom line is something like looking at a current of thought, as if it were a PowerPoint presentation: The Thinker looks at the current of his thoughts. This idea plays in the artificial intelligence research has an important role: if the thinker and his thoughts flow are two different things, then we can replace the human thinker thinkers through a computer, without breaking off the event. Man steals on tiptoe out of the theater. The computer slides on the empty chair. The Power Point presentation continues.
But if someone dreams, hallucinating - if he is in a mental generated fantasy landscape - then the thinker and his thoughts are not separated flow. They may overlap. The Thinker occupied his thoughts. No computer will ever be able to think like a human, if not he live in his thoughts, can be immersed in its spirit.
Halfway
But what does this mean for the Internet? Will the Internet ever think? If a single computer ever think?
We must first realize that we remain in our thinking about human thought generally midway. Because in reality the human mind oscillates in a range that is at one end by the usual logic and defines the other by the dream-logic. The dream logic is no less meaningful when the days of logic, but they follow different rules. Most philosophers and cognitive scientists, however, see only the days and ignore the logic of dream logic - which is not much different than one would imagine the earth with a north pole, but without a south pole.
variable vigilance
Let us consider how a proper presentation would look like the everyday understanding of thinking. Philosophers like to do such ideas as "folk psychology" from, and of course our goal is ultimately a scientific explanation. The first goal of science is, however, to explain the common sense - or explain away.
It begins with concentration, constant focus, attention and vigilance. Vigilance is not a constant size. We are vigilant, if we are rested and alert. If we get tired, to be our focus or alertness. From this simple observation arises a comprehensive intuitive, even immediately clear understanding of thought - which is different however from all the prevailing notions.
We think differently, depending on whether or not we are vigilant vigilant, so are sleepy. To solve analytical or mathematical problems to think hard or think logically, we must be vigilant.
The basic fact of human thought
On the other hand, low vigilance also plays an important role: In this state, our thoughts tend to their own efforts, without our conscious direction hike. If we are almost asleep, thoughts run through our minds that we do not consciously control. As the poet Shelley says: "The human spirit will go through full force, the waves / Of the universe of things in a mighty flow ..."
In this state of free association is similar to the previous, each new idea, or it overlaps or connects to it. While our vigilance continuously decreases and we are getting tired, we lose contact with external reality. "In your light sleeper eyelids Design / expectorant tasted the sweetness Vorschlaf -." After all sleep and we dream.
follows that the degree of our concentration or alertness is essential to human thought. We can imagine the concentration as a value equal to the physiological heart rate or body temperature. The concentration of each person varies throughout the day between its peak and its low point. It is at its peak when we awake are. It decreases when we are tired, and reached its low point, when we sleep. (In fact, she commutes several times a day up and down.) This continuum of thought styles is the "cognitive spectrum", the fundamental fact of human thought. suffer
from the outside or inside
But why do we have a loss of reality when we sleep and dream? How is that done? Our mind stores memories, some of whom remembered events or experiences.
Each remembered experience is potentially an alternative reality. to remember such experiences in the traditional sense - and thus remind them of "the beach last summer" - is actually to look at the memory from outside. But there is another kind of memory: Sometimes the memory is running at "the beach last summer," beyond the fact of entering into a new experience to explore the beach last summer again: to see the sea, hear the waves to feel the sunshine and the sand and the potential reality that is encapsulated in mind, let be real.
(An analogy would be: We store potential energy in an object by lifting it against gravity. We save a potential reality in our minds as we bring forth a memory.)
As the dream logic memories changed
Just as the thinking at the top and bottom of the cognitive spectrum differs, differs even remembering. At the point of highest concentration means remembering the conventional Remember: the beach again, "retrieve". At the point of lowest concentration means remembering the repeated experience of reliving the Beach. To some extent we can relive memories at will: We can imagine the sight and scent of a red rose. But if we are distracted, we have no choice: If we remember now, something we have to relive it.
We are experiencing memories again (or get into it again) when we dream. The memories, in which we happen again, are sometimes distorted or incomplete, you may also have been mixed with other memories: to the process, relived in the memories in dreams, is subject to a dream logic. The dream logic connects memories superimposed sometimes one with another, and they are the powerful glue of a common emotional content served. Does the concentration to be sticky memories.
beyond ordinary conscious control
If we are highly concentrated, we control our thoughts. We observe and think logically, we take on a problem and solving it rationally. The extent to which decreases the concentration, we start to lose control of our thinking. Our thoughts wander from one leads to another. Looking out the window, we loosen the Reins of our mind and let our minds run free - but we can still take back control and go back to work when we want.
Does the concentration even further, then our thoughts entirely cut off power of our conscious control. And when we sleep, our dreams seem to be set without conscious guidance. We are experiencing dreams almost in the same way as we experience the external reality. losing
Control of our stream of thought is tantamount to losing touch with reality. On Halfway through this spectrum, we have as we look out the window and let our minds wander, not the reality lost, we still have an awareness of our environment. But we are on daydreaming, distracted, less aware of the reality. If our concentration is reduced further and we are close to bed, walk the loss of thought control and the reality of loss is continuing. (. With the word "expectorant" Rilke describes our sense of reality when we are almost asleep) As soon as we sleep and dream, our thoughts are usually beyond conscious control - the dreams bring excelled themselves, the reality is gone.
***
"One should not say, I think," Rimbaud wrote, "but I shall remember." Like most poets he regularly sought those spiritual realm between waking and sleep on, which is located just beyond conscious control, and just this side of sleep and dreams. "What is time? - When is present, "Rilke asks in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, after he has completed Duino Elegies." He was a champion of the weak focusing thought, he carefully watched his mind when this is in the thick long rope of the cognitive spectrum in those regions mental condescended, in which the external reality fades and stays on the imaginary reality begins to flow freely and in which the thoughts forming strange new analogies. Rilke himself used in a letter to Auguste Rodin, the mental image of a descent: "Deeper than ever I have descended into my work."
poets and madmen care of yourself in this spiritual realm to loiter. Coleridge was as fascinated by the state, "half awake and half asleep" to be, his poem "Kubla Khan", which he calls "psychological curiosity" called, he wrote opiumbenebelt. Keats: "Your pain song soars. . . ! Who will tell me whether I sleep or wake up "and the slightly crazy Büchner Lenz characterized as follows:" If I could only distinguish whether I am dreaming or awake ... "
a habit the technology we have forgotten
Some prophets and poets to experience this awareness as a zone of twilight visions. A friend of William Blake wrote: "He told me that all children who saw visions', and then added that all people could see them, they were not fully worldliness and unbelief, which make the mind's eye blind "in other words. see visions, Blake was normal for all people could. And all the people move so really every day down the cognitive spectrum.
But some of them are receptive to this experience than others. TS Eliot writes of the medieval sensibility Dante: "Dante's visual imagination is ... It is visually in the sense that he lived in an age in which people saw visions yet. It was a psychological habit, the technique we have forgotten. "On his way to sleep by running each of us every day that zone of the visions, but the journey leaves no impression on most, and we feel no desire to stay there longer.
concentration and creativity
The daily oscillation of the human mind is like the tides. If we follow this analogy: When the tide (or our ability to concentrate) is falling, be exposed large stretches sandy ocean floor - and you can see the ground of ideas that are normally hidden. If you lose control of his thinking, one may bizarre or unpleasant thoughts no longer consciously avoided - even though they are what Freud pointed out, can still avoid unconsciously.
The creativity has always fascinated man. Cognitive psychologists agree that something creative is done when a new analogy is invented. If our mind connects two things, between which there is usually no connection - the first flight of the young bird, the jump in a teacup to use Rilke's example - then we have a new analogy, and the basis for the world in a new light to . see (Rilke draws a conclusion from his new kind of analogy: "This rips the track / the bat mouse across the porcelain of the evening. "Of all the great lyric poets Keats may have had only one for the imagery even more fertile mind.)
Most new analogies lead to nothing, but sometimes they reveal something important. Creativity does not adapt, if we are highly concentrated, only when our thoughts began to wander, it is possible. We find creative solutions to a problem if we keep it vaguely in mind, and not when it forces itself into the foreground and our attention fully uses it. We can not fall asleep force, just as we can force us to a creative Inspiration to have (as we can force us to solve a math problem). Sleep and creativity is only when our thoughts are beyond our control.
How it feels
What leads us to one last observation. As we invent new analogies? This is one of the great unsolved problems in cognitive science. Often are remembered and re-experienced feelings of the key to new, unexpected analogies. Feelings summarize experiences. If the subtle feeling you on the first warm spring day, serene feel (a feeling for which there is no name), the feeling is like the one sat next to his chosen ones for the first time at the movies, then this particular emotion could link the two events together, and the first warm spring day in the next year could help cause that one remembers the girl and the film.
No computer will ever be creative when he is not able to simulate all the nuances of the human emotional life.
When we think of emotions, we tend to see them in a few primary colors: happy, sad, angry. . . Our real Emotional states, however, are almost always much more subtle and complex. How does it feel when you hit a tennis ball hard and well, or a nail with two perfect hammer has driven into a board? If you as an adult for the first time in the school comes, in which one is gone as a child? When you see the church steeples of Chartres appear on the horizon, or remind a young friend of his own son to a woman you once knew? Or the day suddenly darkened and lightning storms, or our best friend is about to commit a huge mistake that we can say he not?
coded experience
feelings are the music, the soundtrack or the soundtrack, which accompanies us through life. Emotions are as individual as musical phrases. And so, as we can get a scrap of a bygone musical situation in mind, so we can again experienced feeling reminiscent of another place and another time.
But here the analogy ends. A song or a phrase may be pure coincidence associated with a particular experience. The feeling, however, is caused by the experience and take decisions in a complex sensation of an entire scene together. A feeling encodes a Experience.
***
We are literary works are not adequately understood unless we know that various works were written in different "levels of concentration" or "focus levels", as one tapes in accommodates different speeds. We must read on the proper concentration level or with the correct "line speed". Kafka is a case in point. He targets, according to a diary entry that the presentation of his "dreamy inner life".
This was meant literally, we can understand his works as examples of the dream as a literary form or a literary genre. Kafka's transcription of the dream-thought is so precise that we can work as a guide to the structure and logic of use of the dream. In his study of Kafka characterized Louis Begley, whose great invention as follows: "incidents, which, as every reader knows very unlikely. . . or even completely impossible. . . He is in his stories left as a matter of course, dar. "But it is better to say that his great invention in a modern version of the dream as a literary form was.
Genres weak focusing in particular play in the ancient literature a large role. Jacob's night-long struggle in 1st Genesis, 32 can be best understood as an ancient example of the dream genre (such as the medieval philosopher Maimonides knew). 2. Exodus 4, 24-26 - perhaps the most difficult passage in the Bible at all - can be understood only as an example of the revived by Kafka nightmare genre.
epic, tragedy, and romantic love story, literary forms with their own unique structures. Otherwise it is with prophecy, dream and nightmare.
***
with what has been said, we have remained on the straight and simple path of common sense. Now we can in broad and simple terms - describing the operation of the human mind - the concepts of "folk psychology".
we are about two entities before, consciousness and memory. Each of the two meet certain physical structures of the human body. We are interested of course for the piano sonata, not for the piano. The sonata structure is something real, even if not physically - in contemporary Terminology we can call the "virtual structure". The piano has its own structure, but even if we understand everything there is to be understood at a piano, teaches us nothing about the Sonata. Our topic is the sonata of thinking, not the grand piano of the brain. We can the tides of human thought by using the two variables consciousness and memory bear in mind. Imagine a small circle inside a larger circle before: At the maximum concentration is the memory (the small circle) is completely contained in the consciousness (the big circle), the awareness is in turn from the outer Surrounding reality. We have the conscious control of our thinking and remembering.
That should software be
At minimum concentration is the awareness of the small circle that is enclosed entirely from memory. The memory is between consciousness and external reality, consciousness is isolated as a castle by its moat. We are only aware of our inner, imaginary reality.
Does the concentration change after the two parties gradually their places.
And this is the daily tides of the human spirit.
Abstract, may seem like these pictures, they can make rough blueprints for software.
***
What the cognitive spectrum has to do with the artificial intelligence of the internet or thinking in general?
As the philosopher Paul can point emphasized that only human intelligence or human-like intelligence meant. (We assume that the Spirit of an animal in the measure is similar to humans in which the animal itself appears human-like.) Occasionally, one hears the claim that the Internet will bring an entirely new form of intelligence. But that notion is meaningless or, in other words, stupid. That would be as if you claimed to have discovered a new chocolate flavor. The flavor, which we call chocolate, but is exactly as what we call him, there is no other definition. When the "new flavor" tastes like chocolate, it is not new, he does not, then there is no chocolate taste. If the new form of intelligence is similar to humans, it is not new. If they are not human-like is, there is no intelligence.
could bring the Internet is a human-like intelligence? No. First, do not agree, the raw materials. Human beings and animals have consciousness, and how can conclude from an argument of the philosopher John Searle, a scientist has to assume that consciousness emerges from a specific chemical and physical structure - such as photosynthesis resulting from the plant chemistry. You can not program his laptop or his cell phone to convert carbon dioxide into sugar; for photosynthesis are computers made from the wrong material - and also for awareness.
Without motor
You can instruct a computer and a person to present a rose and to describe them. Maybe you get two similar descriptions and can not decide which of the computer and what comes from the people. But there is one important difference: if the man and recorded in his mind a rose, and he can not imagine their color and smell and how it feels.
For the computer it is not an imaginary rose and no inner spiritual world, only a void. (Faculty speaking, this is the problem of "missing qualia")
also went to the human consciousness and thinking with the gene mutation appears from a mechanism -. under the pressure of the uncompromising question of survival or death - countless subtle variations allowed to test. Neither of these initial conditions applies to the Internet as we know it. The expectation that intelligence arises out of the Internet, as the expectation of bringing a car to drive, by stepping on the accelerator, even if it has no engine.
you could at least act as if were thinking they
As far as we know, there is no way to consciousness in a computer or any collection of computers produce. However - and this is the interesting (or dangerous) aspect of the matter - gives us the cognitive spectrum, once we understand how it works in great detail, a guide for constructing simulated or artificial thought at hand. We can develop software models of consciousness and memory and then put them in rhythmic motion.
The result was a computer that seems to think. This would be a zombie have a word that philosophers of science fiction literature and films borrowed from Hollywood: a computer that had no inner spiritual world and would be virtually unconscious. In practice however, this would make no difference. The computer would ponder, talk and solve problems like a man. And we simulated artificial or thinking, "artificial intelligence" had been created.
When the computer would be happy
Before that, however, would be to overcome enormous technical problems. Just one example: There can be no cognitive spectrum exist without emotions. Feelings in the degree to which the concentration decreases and enters the re-experiencing the place of the retrieval of an increasingly important bridge between different thoughts. Computers have always presented as good models of the human brain, in the broadest sense, both the digital computer and the brain information processors. However, feelings are caused by brain and body work together. If you're happy, you have a certain body sensation, the mind registers it, and the resonance between body and mind brings forth a feeling. "I say again that the body makes the mind" (John Donne).
The natural parallel between the computer and the brain does not apply to the relationship between computers and body. But the artificial thinking will require a software model of the body to get a good model of emotion, which is essential for artificial thinking. In other words, artificial thinking requires artificial feelings and emotions are simulated to be a big problem. (The solution will likely take the form of software that it is "trained" to mimic the emotional reactions of a particular human subject.)
One day all these problems are solved, the artificial thinking will be realized. Even then, however, an artificially intelligent computer will learn nothing and have no awareness of anything. He will say, "That makes me happy," but not happy. After all, he will act as if he were. He will act like an intelligent human being.
And then what?
from English by Michael Adrian
The author, born in 1955, is a computer scientist, historian, painter and historian of culture, He teaches at Yale.
