Archive
Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 27 Aug
QuEST 27 Aug 2021
This week we want to return to our discussion on impacts of our S3Q Theory of Consciousness on architectural insights relevant for 3rd Wave AI. Assuming we crack the nut of representations that replicate those discovered by nature to achieve robust intelligence and that those are also the representations associated with consciousness (big assumptions but they are the premises of QuEST) how would we fold those representational constructs into an information flow consistent with tools we are creating in AI possibly leading to a novel approach to next generation, 3rd Wave, AI. For example, does the consciousness construct run in the background providing a ‘veto’ mechanism to overrule sys1 pattern recognition outcomes that are the forte of existing ML approaches? When does it, if ever, make the decisions / accomplished sensemaking for the agent? What is the basis for the conceptual system that makes up the ‘artificial conscious’ parts of the representation.
We will return to our discussion of ‘what is the Readiness Potential’ – if the calculations that we associate with consciousness are not in fact making the decision leading to actions we need to know that. We will start with the work of a person we encountered some years back when we first starting looking at consciousness, Ben Libet.
Reaction time experiment
• Subjects demonstrated .25 secs – normal
• When the sensory cortex is directly electrically stimulated – It may take ½ sec of activity in the sensory cortex before consciousness occurs but the subjective experience is assigned to an earlier point in time – namely the point in time when the stimulation occurred (I would suggest the moment in time when the faster representation update of the stimulus got posted – what we’ve called the Libet part of the representation has to be synchronized) synch’d with evoked potential
What Is the Readiness Potential?
• Aaron Schurger,1,2,3,4,7,* Pengbo ‘Ben’ Hu,5 Joanna Pak,2 and Adina L. Roskies6,7,*
• Trends in Cognitive Sciences, July 2021, Vol. 25, No. 7 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.04.001
• © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
• The readiness potential (RP), a slow buildup of electrical potential recorded at the scalp using electroencephalography, has been associated with neural activity involved in movement preparation. It became famous thanks to Benjamin Libet (Brain 1983;106:623–642), who used the time difference between the RP and self-reported time of conscious intention to move to argue that we lack free will. The RP’s informativeness about self-generated action and derivatively about free will has prompted continued research on this neural phenomenon. Here, we argue that recent advances in our understanding of the RP, including computational modeling of the phenomenon, call for a reassessment of its relevance for understanding volition and the philosophical problem of free will.
A modern version of the Libet work using FMRI by Soon et al 2008:
• Unconscious determinants of free
• decisions in the human brain
• Chun Siong Soon1,2, Marcel Brass1,3, Hans-Jochen Heinze4 &
• John-Dylan Haynes1,2
•
• There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively ‘free’ decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.
•
• Nature neuroscience – brief communications: Received 8 January; accepted 21 March; published online 13 April 2008; doi:10.1038/nn.2112
• – the question we have to answer is does consciousness play a role in decision making and actions in real time – or is it a means to accomplish sensemaking for subsequent decisions – possibly just capturing the experience in a form that can be folded into memory – the real goal of 3rd wave ai is robustness /flexibilities (unexpected queries) – we believe consciousness is a key to that – but even if we have the right representation where / how do we insert it in our architectures – consciousness might also be the means to resolve ‘incongruencies’ in the world model narrative
Consciousness lags behind but our subjective representation doesn’t – the consciousness construct has its own timeline – some have suggested a ‘veto theory’ – that is consciousness is to decide whether to execute decisions made subconsciously – this discussion is attempting to answer the challenge of Ancient Mike on the purpose of consciousness:
• The Cell paper is a technical showing of how these questions are being asked in the field today (modeling, neuroscience, etc.). It doesn’t seem at all to be settled. Establishing biomarkers (brain measures) that index something like a “Free Won’t Mode,” (such as the Readiness Potential) for conscious controlled /unconscious automatic processing could work and have a lot of applications, and then through modeling experiments provide principles for Safe AI.
• https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(21)00093-0
‘What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than
myself in me’ – James Clerk Maxwell on his deathbed, 1879 (user illusion)
(implying ‘myself’ being the conscious agent)
We also want to return to the descriptions of the two systems abstraction – as D. Kahneman says there is no such thing as sys1 and sys2 – it is an abstraction to help people think about processes going on in the brain/mind. To that end we will review some of the work of Kahneman and also the work of Evans and Stanovich.
• Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition: Advancing the Debate, Perspectives on Psychological Science 8(3) 223–241 © The Author(s) 2013
• Evans and Stanovich
• Dual Process Theories,
• Betram Gawronski, Laura A. Creighton, in D.E. Carlson (Ed.) (2013) the Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition, pp 282-312, Oxford University Press, Ny Ny
We also want to head towards when you can trust Sys1 decisions – using the work of Kahnamen and Klein – on a failure to disagree –
Conditions for Intuitive Expertise A Failure to Disagree
ARTICLE in AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST · OCTOBER 2009
Impact Factor: 6.87 · DOI: 10.1037/a0016755 · Source: PubMed
Conditions for Intuitive Expertise A Failure to Disagree
Daniel Kahneman Princeton University
Gary Klein Applied Research Associates
This article reports on an effort to explore the differences between two approaches to intuition and expertise that are often viewed as conflicting: heuristics and biases (HB) and naturalistic decision making (NDM). Starting from the obvious fact that professional intuition is sometimes marvelous and sometimes flawed, the authors attempt to map the boundary conditions that separate true intuitive skill from overconfident and biased impressions. They conclude that evaluating the likely quality of an intuitive judgment requires an assessment of the predictability of the environment in which the judgment is made and of the individual’s opportunity to learn the regularities of that environment. Subjective experience is not a reliable indicator of judgment accuracy.
The most obvious model for the 3rd wave is intuition (pattern recognition) systems provide the sensemaking solution unless there is a sensed ‘non-fit’ (incongruence / incoherence) – where the sys2 has to resolve and provide alternative perceptions and thus lead to different patterns of focus that potentially lead to different decisions
Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 20 Aug
QuEST 20 Aug 2021
Some of the QuEST team have been working on how our ideas on next generation artificial intelligence could be used to address challenges in social inequities (health / income / violence / housing / …). We want to spend some QuEST time to open up these discussions. Some background articles that are relevant include:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/get-psyched/201705/how-violence-spreads-contagious-disease
How Violence Spreads Like a Contagious Disease
New research explains how violence spreads like a virus from person to person.
Posted May 31, 2017
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in 1958 that “violence begets violence,” recognizing the contagious aspect of violence. More recently, there is hard science to back up King’s observations.
In 2013, the National Academies of Science published a 153-page report titled “The Contagion of Violence,” which looked at how violence occurs.[1] This analogy—that violence is like a contagious disease that spreads from person to person—can shed light on how to reduce and prevent violence.
…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207247/
https://www.tedmed.com/talks/show?id=75793
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/get-psyched/201705/how-violence-spreads-contagious-disease
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1913079/
This is an area that many of us are committed to address and believe the path to new approaches can only be found by ‘outside the box’ discussions that then get grounded in real analytics. QuEST believes next generation AI could in fact lead to ‘full meaningful employment’ for every person versus the predicted massive unemployment for the uneducated.
Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 13 Aug
QuEST 13 Aug 2021
This week we want to focus our discussion on impacts of our Theory of Consciousness on ideas for the 3rd Wave AI. Assuming we crack the nut of representations that replicate those discovered by nature to achieve robust intelligence and that those are also the representations associated with consciousness (big assumptions but they are the premises of QuEST) how would we fold those representational constructs into an information flow consistent with tools we are creating in AI. For example, does the consciousness construct run in the background providing a ‘veto’ mechanism to overrule sys1 pattern recognition outcomes? When does it, if ever, make the decisions / accomplished sensemaking for the agent?
We might start with a discussion of ‘what is the Readiness Potential’ – if the calculations that we associate with consciousness are not in fact making the decision leading to actions we need to know that. We will start with the work of a person we encountered some years back when we first starting looking at consciousness, Ben Libet.
• Reaction time experiment –
• Subjects demonstrated .25 secs – normal
• When he asked the subjects to increase their reaction time – NONE OF THEM COULD – when they tried to slow down slightly – more than a quarter of a second it leaped to .5 sec
• Conclusion – humans can react quickly but they cannot voluntarily react a little more slowly – if they react a little more slowly than they do instinctively they have to react consciously and that takes a lot longer.
• It may take ½ sec of activity in the sensory cortex before consciousness occurs but the subjective experience is assigned to an earlier point in time – namely the point in time when the stimulation occurred (I would suggest the moment in time when the faster representation update of the stimulus got posted – what we’ve called the Libet part of the representation has to be synchronized) synch’d with evoked potential
Consciousness lags behind but our subjective representation doesn’t – some have suggested a ‘veto theory’ – that is consciousness is to decide whether to execute decisions made subconsciously – this discussion is attempting to answer the challenge of Ancient Mike on the purpose of consciousness:
• The Scientific American one would be a good one to start. The Cell paper is a technical showing of how these questions are being asked in the field today (modeling, neuroscience, etc.). It doesn’t seem at all to be settled. Establishing biomarkers (brain measures) that index something like a “Free Won’t Mode,” (such as the Readiness Potential) for conscious controlled /unconscious automatic processing could work and have a lot of applications, and then through modeling experiments provide principles for Safe AI. Happy to dig deeper with you guys if it’s interesting.
• https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(21)00093-0
What Is the Readiness Potential?
Aaron Schurger,1,2,3,4,7,* Pengbo ‘Ben’ Hu,5 Joanna Pak,2 and Adina L. Roskies6,7,*
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, July 2021, Vol. 25, No. 7 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.04.001
© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
The readiness potential (RP), a slow buildup of electrical potential recorded at the scalp using electroencephalography, has been associated with neural activity involved in movement preparation. It became famous thanks to Benjamin Libet (Brain 1983;106:623–642), who used the time difference between the RP and self-reported time of conscious intention to move to argue that we lack free will. The RP’s informativeness about self-generated action and derivatively about free will has prompted continued research on this neural phenomenon. Here, we argue that recent advances in our understanding of the RP, including computational modeling of the phenomenon, call for a reassessment of its relevance for understanding volition and the philosophical problem of free will.
‘What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than
myself in me’ – James Clerk Maxwell on his deathbed, 1879 (user illusion)
(implying ‘myself’ being the conscious agent)
A modern version of the Libet work using FMRI by Soon et al 2008:
Unconscious determinants of free
decisions in the human brain
Chun Siong Soon1,2, Marcel Brass1,3, Hans-Jochen Heinze4 &
John-Dylan Haynes1,2
There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively ‘free’ decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.
Nature neuroscience – brief communications: Received 8 January; accepted 21 March; published online 13 April 2008; doi:10.1038/nn.2112
– the question we have to answer is does consciousness play a role in decision making and actions in real time – or is it a means to accomplish sensemaking for subsequent decisions – possibly just capturing the experience in a form that can be folded into memory – the real goal of 3rd wave ai is robustness /flexibilities (unexpected queries) – we believe consciousness is a key to that – but even if we have the right representation where / how do we insert it in our architectures – consciousness might also be the means to resolve ‘incongruencies’ in the world model narrative
We also want to return to the descriptions of the two systems abstraction – as D. Kahneman says there is no such thing as sys1 and sys2 – it is an abstraction to help people think about processes going on in the brain/mind. To that end we will review some of the work of Kahneman and also the work of Evans and Stanovich.
• Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition: Advancing the Debate, Perspectives on Psychological Science 8(3) 223–241 © The Author(s) 2013
• Evans and Stanovich
• Dual Process Theories,
• Betram Gawronski, Laura A. Creighton, in D.E. Carlson (Ed.) (2013) the Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition, pp 282-312, Oxford University Press, Ny Ny
We also want to head towards when you can trust Sys1 decisions – using the work of Kahnamen and Klein – on a failure to disagree –
Conditions for Intuitive Expertise A Failure to Disagree
ARTICLE in AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST · OCTOBER 2009
Impact Factor: 6.87 · DOI: 10.1037/a0016755 · Source: PubMed
Conditions for Intuitive Expertise A Failure to Disagree
Daniel Kahneman Princeton University
Gary Klein Applied Research Associates
This article reports on an effort to explore the differences between two approaches to intuition and expertise that are often viewed as conflicting: heuristics and biases (HB) and naturalistic decision making (NDM). Starting from the obvious fact that professional intuition is sometimes marvelous and sometimes flawed, the authors attempt to map the boundary conditions that separate true intuitive skill from overconfident and biased impressions. They conclude that evaluating the likely quality of an intuitive judgment requires an assessment of the predictability of the environment in which the judgment is made and of the individual’s opportunity to learn the regularities of that environment. Subjective experience is not a reliable indicator of judgment accuracy.
The most obvious model for the 3rd wave is intuition (pattern recognition) systems provide the sensemaking solution unless there is a sensed ‘non-fit’ (incongruence / incoherence) – where the sys2 has to resolve and provide alternative perceptions and thus lead to different patterns of focus that potentially lead to different decisions
Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 6 Aug
QuEST 6 Aug 2021
This week we want to focus our discussion on impacts of our Theory of Consciousness on our ideas for the 3rd Wave AI. Assuming we crack the nut of representations that replicate those discovered by nature to achieve robust intelligence how would we fold that into a flow consistent with tools we are creating in AI.
We might start with a discussion of ‘what is the Readiness Potential’ – if the calculations that we associate with consciousness are not in fact making the decision leading to actions we need to know that.
What Is the Readiness Potential?
Aaron Schurger,1,2,3,4,7,* Pengbo ‘Ben’ Hu,5 Joanna Pak,2 and Adina L. Roskies6,7,*
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, July 2021, Vol. 25, No. 7 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.04.001
© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
The readiness potential (RP), a slow buildup of electrical potential recorded at the scalp using electroencephalography, has been associated with neural activity involved in movement preparation. It became famous thanks to Benjamin Libet (Brain 1983;106:623–642), who used the time difference between the RP and self-reported time of conscious intention to move to argue that we lack free will. The RP’s informativeness about self-generated action and derivatively about free will has prompted continued research on this neural phenomenon. Here, we argue that recent advances in our understanding of the RP, including computational modeling of the phenomenon, call for a reassessment of its relevance for understanding volition and the philosophical problem of free will.
Next we want to continue our previous discussions on issues with consciousness associated with the work of Ben Libet that suggest comments like:
‘What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than
myself in me’ – James Clerk Maxwell on his deathbed, 1879 (user illusion)
(implying ‘myself’ being the conscious agent)
A modern version of the Libet work using FMRI by Soon et al 2008:
Unconscious determinants of free
decisions in the human brain
Chun Siong Soon1,2, Marcel Brass1,3, Hans-Jochen Heinze4 &
John-Dylan Haynes1,2
There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively ‘free’ decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.
Nature neuroscience – brief communications: Received 8 January; accepted 21 March; published online 13 April 2008; doi:10.1038/nn.2112
– the question we have to answer is does consciousness play a role in decision making and actions in real time – or is it a means to accomplish sensemaking for subsequent decisions – possibly just capturing the experience in a form that can be folded into memory – the real goal of 3rd wave ai is robustness /flexibilities (unexpected queries) – we believe consciousness is a key to that – but even if we have the right representation where / how do we insert it in our architectures
• Reaction time experiment –
• Subjects demonstrated .25 secs – normal
• When he asked the subjects to increase their reaction time – NONE OF THEM COULD – when they tried to slow down slightly – more than a quarter of a second it leaped to .5 sec
• Conclusion – humans can react quickly but they cannot voluntarily react a little more slowly – if they react a little more slowly than they do instinctively they have to react consciously and that takes a lot longer.
• It may take ½ sec of activity in the sensory cortex before consciousness occurs but the subjective experience is assigned to an earlier point in time – namely the point in time when the stimulation occurred (I would suggest the moment in time when the faster representation update of the stimulus got posted – what we’ve called the Libet part of the representation has to be synchronized) synch’d with evoked potential
Consciousness lags behind but our subjective representation doesn’t – some have suggested a ‘veto theory’ – that is consciousness is to decide whether to execute decisions made subconsciously – this discussion is attempting to answer the challenge of Ancient Mike on the purpose of consciousness:
• The Scientific American one would be a good one to start. The Cell paper is a technical showing of how these questions are being asked in the field today (modeling, neuroscience, etc.). It doesn’t seem at all to be settled. Establishing biomarkers (brain measures) that index something like a “Free Won’t Mode,” (such as the Readiness Potential) for conscious controlled /unconscious automatic processing could work and have a lot of applications, and then through modeling experiments provide principles for Safe AI. Happy to dig deeper with you guys if it’s interesting. Cheers, Kevin
• https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(21)00093-0
We also want to return to the descriptions of the two systems abstraction – as D. Kahneman says there is no such thing as sys1 and sys2 – it is an abstraction to help people think about processes going on in the brain/mind. To that end we will review some of the work of Kahneman and also the work of Evans and Stanovich.
• Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition: Advancing the Debate, Perspectives on Psychological Science 8(3) 223–241 © The Author(s) 2013
• Evans and Stanovich
• Dual Process Theories,
• Betram Gawronski, Laura A. Creighton, in D.E. Carlson (Ed.) (2013) the Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition, pp 282-312, Oxford University Press, Ny Ny
We also want to head towards when you can trust Sys1 decisions – using the work of Kahnamen and Klein – on a failure to disagree –
Conditions for Intuitive Expertise A Failure to Disagree
ARTICLE in AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST · OCTOBER 2009
Impact Factor: 6.87 · DOI: 10.1037/a0016755 · Source: PubMed
Conditions for Intuitive Expertise A Failure to Disagree
Daniel Kahneman Princeton University
Gary Klein Applied Research Associates
This article reports on an effort to explore the differences between two approaches to intuition and expertise that are often viewed as conflicting: heuristics and biases (HB) and naturalistic decision making (NDM). Starting from the obvious fact that professional intuition is sometimes marvelous and sometimes flawed, the authors attempt to map the boundary conditions that separate true intuitive skill from overconfident and biased impressions. They conclude that evaluating the likely quality of an intuitive judgment requires an assessment of the predictability of the environment in which the judgment is made and of the individual’s opportunity to learn the regularities of that environment. Subjective experience is not a reliable indicator of judgment accuracy.
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