Slashdot Mirror
A Mind Made From Memristors
Csiko writes "Researchers at Boston University's department of cognitive and neural systems are working on an artificial brain implemented with memristors. 'A memristor is a two-terminal device whose resistance changes depending on the amount, direction, and duration of voltage that's applied to it. But here's the really interesting thing about a memristor: Whatever its past state, or resistance, it freezes that state until another voltage is applied to change it. Maintaining that state requires no power.' Also theoretically described, solid state versions of memristors have not been implemented until recently. Now researchers in Boston claim that memristors are the new key technology to implement highly integrated, powerful artificial brains on cheap and widely available hardware within five years."
How do you read that state back without applying any voltage to it?
I look at the wikipedia page and its all greek to me.
This is nothing like the cognitive human brain. This is only a variable memory device.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Now that's 'Change We Can Believe In!'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I'm going to be the laziest bastard alive
Ever notice that anytime some cool sounding new development is announced the people behind it say 'we see this having applications in/within/in about five years?
Call me when you actually have something to show us.
Even if the rest of the things explained in the article happen many years away, the last couple of paragraphs explain the trend:
Neuromorphic chips won't just power niche AI applications. The architectural lessons we learn here will revolutionize all future CPUs. The fact is, conventional computers will just not get significantly more powerful unless they move to a more parallel and locality-driven architecture. While neuromorphic chips will first supplement today's CPUs, soon their sheer power will overwhelm that of today's computer architectures.
The semiconductor industry's relentless push to focus on smaller and smaller transistors will soon mean transistors have higher failure rates. This year, the state of the art is 22-nanometer feature sizes. By 2018, that number will have shrunk to 12 nm, at which point atomic processes will interfere with transistor function; in other words, they will become increasingly unreliable. Companies like Intel, Hynix, and of course HP are putting a lot of resources into finding ways to rely on these unreliable future devices. Neuromorphic computation will allow that to happen on both memristors and transistors.
It won't be long until all multicore chips integrate a dense, low-power memory with their CMOS cores. It's just common sense.
Our prediction? Neuromorphic chips will eventually come in as many flavors as there are brain designs in nature: fruit fly, earthworm, rat, and human. All our chips will have brains.
Hopefully, this is the solution to 2018's problem of reaching atomic levels of miniaturization. We have a breaktrought to continue with Moore's law beyond current technology.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
This opens up a whole huge assload of debate again.
Let us assume they map out the brain, create an FPGA of memristor devices like this that can mimic the brain's exact structure.
First round it doesn't work.
Because robots can't have a soul. You need a spirit to have that kind of consciousness. You'll hear this argument immediately; I'm not going to argue directly against the spirituality thing, but the question to me is more complex than that, of course. Still, that'll be the first argument.
Then someone will make it work.
Now the interesting shit happens.
A lot of people have told me they're never going to die because, by the time they're old, technology will exist to copy their minds into machines. Think about that. Immortality through perpetuated consciousness.
Stop for a moment.
Realize you are alive, aware, and conscious.
Now, why do you experience consciousness?
You want to say, well, all that "soul" bullshit is weird and freaky. Scientifically unsound. I experience consciousness due to a series of electrochemical reactions in my brain. End of story.
Now suppose I move your brain's data into another organic brain, electronic brain, or anything else of the source. Would you continue to "live"? Would YOU continue to live?
To make the point more clear, what if I made an identical copy and booted both at the same time. Do you suddenly develop a psychic link with your other self, experiencing both existences at once, living in two different places? ... ridiculous.
So you're bound to your brain. You cannot live forever unless your particular, specific, physical brain stays in tact. If I copy your brain to another cloned brain, yank yours out, and replace it with the clone, everyone else will interact with you as if you were you, no difference; but YOU would vanish into the blackness, you'd stop living, you'd die.
Why are you conscious?
Hmm that would be convenient for suicide cases. So much easier. Copy my brain into a biological clone brain, swap, and destroy mine. I get to die and nobody else has to worry about it because I don't die. The ultimate escape: you make your life someone else's problem!
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Well, the whole problem with the destruction of the original could probably be solved by slowly replacing the original organic brain with the electronic one. Instead of copying everything at once and then deleting the original you basically "graft" the electronic brain onto the original (obviously it would be a lot trickier than that in practice but so would "just copying" it be) and slowly let the electronic hardware do more and more while the organic does less. Eventually you'll have an all electronic brain.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Yes, and this would work why? (in practice, would it?) My point is we don't understand consciousness (and have no way to verify things like this actually work) and that the question is very complex. Even if you don't accept the concept of a "soul," you have a very difficult problem in front of you. If you DO accept the concept of a "soul," you have something confusing and complex in front of you.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Now suppose I move your brain's data into another organic brain, electronic brain, or anything else of the source. Would you continue to "live"? Would YOU continue to live?
I don't want to foster a false dichotomy but it seems to me that there IS something of a binary choice here. Either there is some undefinable quality we can call a "soul", or what you think of as "life" or "consciousness" is an illusion. The data of whatever was just going through your head is still there to some degree, so you perceive your continued existence, but life is actually only a series of moments and one only has to do with the other because they're somehow connected, not because there's something special about being alive.
If there is a soul and you "die" tomorrow then destruction of the flesh is not the ending of your life. But if there is not a soul and you "die" tomorrow you won't care. And if there is not a soul and you copy yourself to a mechanical brain, then you're both "alive" in that you are both functioning. You're both "you", and yet, neither of you is really you. Change your memories and you're someone else.
Or in other words, when we actually have the technology to mimic the behavior of the human brain, then we may actually be able to answer fundamental questions about the "soul" that cannot be answered today.
Personally I don't see any need for a soul to explain the behavior of a human; it's the same physical processes at work all the way down through bacteria and vira. But we could argue about that all day and achieve nothing but a big fat waste of time, both user and CPU.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Pity Frank Herbert isn't still around to see the fruits of his imagination!
So you're bound to your brain. You cannot live forever unless your particular, specific, physical brain stays in tact. If I copy your brain to another cloned brain, yank yours out, and replace it with the clone, everyone else will interact with you as if you were you, no difference; but YOU would vanish into the blackness, you'd stop living, you'd die.
First of all, I'm not convinced I want to live forever. Immortality sounds cool... But I suspect it would get dull after a while.
Second, I suspect that your little conundrum here could be solved by a slow migration to the clone/artificial/constructed brain. Rather than yanking it out suddenly you just replace bit by bit. You'd remain conscious the entire time. You'd never "die".
But...
A large part of the whole afterlife/immortality/soul debate essentially revolves around fear. Folks are terrified by the idea that they're going to cease to exist. That they'll never be able to kiss their wife again, or have a banana split, or enjoy a walk on the beach, or whatever. Folks don't want it to end.
I'm thinking that even if your organic brain did genuinely die in the process, and you did genuinely lose consciousness and die in the process, this kind of assisted immortality would still be immensely popular. Sure, one of you would die... But then there'd be another you, a replacement you. Complete with all your memories, hopes, dreams, fears, whatever. And that second you would get to keep kissing wives and eating banana splits and walking on beaches. So there would be less fear about things ending.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Well, I don't know why works. "Why" is a question above my pay grade. But your body is already doing it when it replaces dead cells with newly created cells.
http://xkcd.com/678/
This is my great-great-great-grandfather's axe. It has had the head replaced twice and the handle replaced three times.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Yes, and yes.
If you absolutely cannot dispense with the existence of a soul, just pretend it "finishes" up my life, then circles back around and lives the life of my copy. Since all informational attributes of the human mind can be biologically explained, this time-travelling "soul" does not violate causality (because it carries no information).
I don't see why you act as if everything is so mutually exclusive.
If I have a "Soul" - it can easily be tied to how my brain functions, as my brain is obviously the central point where all my consciousness is based. If you copy my brain, you've copied my soul.
If you cloned a billion of me, perfect exact replicas of me, what would really make them any less human? What would mean they aren't life? Doesn't all life have souls?
So - with that in mind, no, when you copy me, I don't get a psychic link, but its still ME in that other body, its still MY soul, its just not the one inside this body. Much like how I copy a CD, they're both mine, sure one is the original but they are still one in the same.
So yes - much like a photograph won't live forever, you can it in, copy it, now it does live forever.
Would I want to be immortal in that case? Sure why not. Each soul will have its own death, but a copy of that soul will remain forever. It's the blessing of living forever minus the curse of actually living forever.
When you stop thinking about everything as a unique item that is unduplicatable - which cloning and bionics seems to push more towards every day, that doesn't mean you have to disconnect spirituality from it.
I mean, look at it this way. If you woke up one day and you were in a bed beside what appeared to an exact replica of you, and you were told that you were a clone copy, would you automatically write yourself off as having no soul (if you believed in that)? Because thats likely what the experience would feel like for the clone. (This is assuming memories transfer over and you're built to that age and stuff like that, lets not get into the super technical details)
Couldn't this be used to make cheaper solid-state storage?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
When you go to sleep (or are knocked out, or drugged, or in a coma, etc) your consciousness ends. When you wake up, your consciousness resumes. You do not freak out about that. You remember your consciousness from before, that it was in the body from before. We believe we have a soul that is immutable from our consciousness because we have had no other experience and cannot comprehend what it would be like.
Look at the experiments that have "reprogrammed" people to believe they like something they didn't before by creating memories of experiences where they liked it. They cannot remember not liking it.Or schizophrenics or people with split/multiple personalities. Our brains are not the infallable machine devices that we like to think they are; they are squishy, malleable things. Consciousness is not a black and white state; it only appears to be because that is the typical way of experiencing our mind.
What makes us conscious? The belief that we're conscious. If you cloned your mind and put it in another body you would have two minds that both believed they were you. But why should we have trouble with that? We don't believe twins are one person. Their actions distinguish them. The two entities that shared one mind at one time would diverge and quickly become two distinguishable entities.
If I copy your brain to another cloned brain, yank yours out, and replace it with the clone, everyone else will interact with you as if you were you, no difference; but YOU would vanish into the blackness, you'd stop living, you'd die.
Which is the exact reason I'd never take a ride on a Star Trek teleporter. I don't want to die and leave my entire physical, mental, and emotional estate to my identical twin who hasn't been born yet.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Amnesia and Alzheimer's is enough proof we don't have souls, no doubt what we call "consciousness" is really just a network of developed cells and memories that are attached to it. After all no one claims to be able to remember what it was like as an embryo, also when one is under amnesia. One's "soul" doesn't float away. The concept of "soul" is just our irrational psychic defense against the fact we all die someday. That so many peoples and cultures have come up with an afterlife speaks volumes that it is just a reaction against our powerlessness to heal and fix ourselves because of the expense, energy, intelligence and tools to do so.
We experience the self as a unified thing but it isn't. This is proven by people who've had brain damage in accidents and strokes where their "self" functions but they lose specific functions and aspects of 'who they are'.
You can find out more by reading the following book by a Neurologist.
This is Damasio's refutation of the Cartesian idea of the human mind as separate from bodily processes draws on neurochemistry to support his claim that emotions play a central role in human decision making.
http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X/
Also related clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
They always say our forefathers would vomit up a lung if they saw what we did to their country. Times were better back then, even with the government handing bibles out in schools and children getting their asses beat by teachers.
Japan had a much different society and instead of naturally degrading they've seen our 20th century garbage FORCED on them. It'd be like if we found something identical to post-revolution America and forced modern american democracy on it, with the sleezy politicians and disney megacorporations. 1804 would be the year of the frontier, 1805 the year of everyone wanting to die to avert this horrible future.
Japan's bullshit largely revolved around the Shogun effectively owning the people in their domain as property. The Meiji restoration eliminated that, dropped in other political issues; however the culture was always the same.
Look at America and you'll see a culture of people scraping by to survive; they may be rich, but they're always caught up in making more money, getting laid, watching TV, buying shiny things. Japanese culture always had a deep-seated focus on personal philosophy: even under oppression and famine, even facing certain death, people wanted to maintain their honor. A Japanese murder conflict would inflict an immensely painful fatal wound on himself at his execution, and then be beheaded; an American murder convict will escape at first chance, and of course we've argued hanging and electrocution are "Cruel" for child rapist-murderers and instead inject them with an unbelievable amount of ANESTHETICS so they die feeling GOOOOOOOD.
Americans are shocked by the idea of seppuku: it seems barbaric to us. But think about it for a minute. They expected someone who committed treason or murder or any given capital crime to not just be executed, but to inflict a painful and fatal wound on themselves. If they didn't, they'd behead them anyway--quick, relatively painless, less fear involved (self-inflicted wounds are scary as HELL; you can dissociate yourself a lot more from your impending execution). They still executed them, but they'd consider the social debt paid and honor restored after seppuku. This was important.
Imagine living through that. You get to see the social change where everyone stops meditating and thinking about life and honor and what it means to be a warrior and the nature of beauty... and instead starts screaming and clapping at anything shiny, buying their food from vending machines (fast food!), and dressing in unbelievably gaudy crap.
How do you think that'd feel?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
How do you know this doesn't happen every time you go to sleep? Your stream of consciousness is interrupted, for all you know aliens are swapping out your meat processor every night.
If you fall asleep in a hospital, senile from old age, then wake up to a doctor saying you just came out of a coma and it is the future so they fixed you using "new medical techniques", would you freak out if you found out it involved a machine eating your brain neuron by neuron and shitting out a fresh cells with identical properties?
How is that different from brain cells dying and being replaced by new ones and how is that different than having the machine spit out circuits that also act identically?
Why must be that "link" there? If you make a exact copy of you (forget chips, memristors, electronic, just focus on the copy part) will be 2 "you" around, with experiences that will start to diverge at that point. There is no universal "you", will be 2 entities that will think that each one is the real one, and the other the copy, and even could arge which is the one that got the soul, and with a bit of luck decide that or there are free souls around for anyone wanting one, or that never were one to start with.
Of course, if such "duplication" of people can be done (in real or virtual world) it could cause big legal troubles, and having only one copy "active" will solve most of it. But killing one of them will be for him dying, no matter what will or is happening at the same time to a completely separate entity that could look or think like you.
In this scenario, suiciding is not a good scape pod. You still dying, and you are forcing the "other you", someone that knows and feel exactly like you, to keep with the problem (so probably he will suicide too, because will have to add to the original problem realizing how retard was his former self).
Don't give so much value to your concience, could be just a meme.
Mod this guy up. He's quite right. In my view consciousness is non-physical. That is to say it is not a measurable physical property. If this is the case, simply replicating the cognitive structure of a conscious organism does not necessarily instantiate a conscious state. Don't forget only 10 years ago photosynthesis was well understood in physical and biological terms, but now we discover that leaves take advantage of quantum effects to increase efficiency. There's a whole lot more going on in the brain than simple classical state change.
I hate to break it to you, but Japan wasn't all honor, philosophy and appreciation of beauty like popular culture loves to depict it. There was plenty of turmoil and poverty for centuries in Japan, if not millennia. A lot of people struggled merely to survive. Ask the Ainu if their lives consisted of honor and philosophy and being at peace with nature. Certainly, Japanese aren't going to argue about how their history has been romanticized, and they engage in plenty of that themselves.
American's haven't corrupted their culture. I don't think anyone can rationally disagree that Japan isn't way better off today than it was 60+ years ago. And Japan's culture is so strong that I don't think it's seen any real American influence in decades. If anything I'd say they've influenced some aspects of American culture more strongly, and at least it's been mutual. That's the way of the world.
Culturally Japanese have embraced technology on a level American will never fathom. But that's no because of evil American meddling; especially given they build everything themselves. I'd love to see Americans embrace some of that Japanese work ethic and national pride. Because both are seriously lacking.
The nature of illusion is that it needs somebody to fool. Think about this for a second.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Braincells communicate via synapses(of which there are approximately 10000 per neuron), synapses can form for long time or very transient. But at any given time you are constantly reforming and pruning synapses. At the end of the day you're having a new heap of synapses that are the days impression and when you wake up the next day the body have pruned away the vast majority of these synapses, giving you a fresh start.
At what point of artificial intereference with this synapse forming game would we lose ourself? And at what physical place do we find the "core of our being, I-ness self synapse" that we just can't get rid of and still be ourself? Or could it be that we're looking at a holistic concept which actually is always transient and delude ourself into thinking it's some constant and continuity to the process?
Probably we're just networks, not all to different from the internet at our core, of course there's a bit more than two webcams on the internet, and it doesn't need to work or find food to sustain itself, but at its core a lot of interconnected nodes, talking to eachother.
That was the old theory. Years ago it was discovered that new brain cells are in fact produced throughout your lifetime.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Here is why this is just yet another pipe dream: any hardware that we can build can be emulated identically in software. It will perhaps run slower, but it will do the same thing. There have been no software agents that have been modeled for the past 50 years that are anything close to 'real ai', so why would shifting the problem to hardware do anything to advance the underlying problem? Speed and transistor counts don't make up for a lack of understanding.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
At least some are, just at a slow rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurogenesis#Adult_neurogenesis
http://preview.tinyurl.com/dxar9m
Also in mice at least, fetal cells can get into the mother's brain and grow neurons etc there: http://brainethics.wordpress.com/2006/07/20/on-a-mothers-mind/
Maybe that's why some couples start looking like each other over time :).
This is my great-great-great-grandfather. He has had his head replaced twice and his, erm, "handle" replaced three times. Grandad is a randy old gentleman.
I think, therefore I'm still not sure if I am or not?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
This is where standpoint theory comes into play. The copy over there has a different vantagepoint than you do. It begins with little differences, like it wakes up next to the window and you wake up next to the door. It expands outward from there as you make different decisions.
Take identical twins, for example, They can have remarkably similar lives, perhaps due to living through somewhat similar circumstances while also tending towards making the same sorts of decisions about those things (perhaps they're informed by nearly identical biological and cultural programming...). But no matter how similar their lives, no one (I hope) would claim identical twins are actually the same person.
Neither would you and your copy. As soon as the "other you" begins to exist, they cease to be you and start being your identical twin, with the main difference being that they'd share memories of part of your life and, possibly, claims to your rights & responsibilities accumulated during that portion of your life.
As for "dying as part of the copying process," I think it still means the copy would be a new entity (after all, it would be one who went through the copying process and lived, which is pretty different from you who would be dead), but that it would probably identify strongly as "still the same person," as it has no reason to socially define itself against you as a still living human being.
This technology fundamentally mistakes what is the hard part about building brains as adaptable as biological ones. The physical instantiation is not important, if the Church-Turing thesis is true. (And if you're saying Church-Turing is false, that's an enormous claim and you'd better have very compelling evidence to back you up.)
The hard part about building a brain is figuring out the patterns of connectivity between neurons. Biology solves this in some brilliant way, starting from a seed with almost no information (the genome) and implementing some process to incorporate environmental data, self-organizing into a very robust and complex structure with orders of magnitude more information. The great unknown is the process whereby this growth and self-organization occurs. Figure that out, and you'll be able to make any kind of computer you like function as a brain.
It's called "Where Am I?" by Daniel Dennett.
Yes! Thank you, now off to read it again! It really is an excellent short story on this topic. So please read and enjoy, Where Am I?
OK, we're way off topic here but I just had to post.
The Japanese modernized all on their very own, they didn't have anything forced upon them. They went out and embraced reform, it's how they were able to dominate East Asia in the first half of the 20th century. Post Second World War, they were fairly eager to embrace the changes foisted upon them by MacArthur.
Prior to the Meiji Restoration, you seem to overstate the idea of personal philosophy and underestimate the idea of merchants and economic trade. The merchant class grew substantially under Tokugawa Japan, they developed their own class and some merchants grew exceedingly wealthy despite the feudal system, as the nobles (samurai) had no access to land based profit, they often had to borrow money from the merchants. Merchants dominated the urban life of Tokugawa Japan especially in cultural aspects as they rose to be the new bourgeoise.
Remember by 1770 there were already about a million people in Tokyo, so there was a huge shift in relations, commercial activity and culture. Under Tokugawa rule women lose their rights to inheritance, they also lose the right to divorce their husbands, but men could bring other women into the house.
Basically life was good (relatively) if you were part of the elite, but the notion that people spent all their time thinking about personal honour is a fiction
In my view consciousness is non-physical.
Of course it's physical -- what else would it be? What else *could* it be? The problem is that brains don't have JTAGs, and so it's quite difficult to tap all the inputs and outputs to run reproducible experiments, particularly while keeping the brain alive and functional. Add to that the fact that no two brains are identical, and you've really got your work cut out for you. The reason it's so easy to reverse engineer a chip (relatively speaking) is that one is an exact duplicate and representative of all others of its kind. This almost definitely does not hold true for brains except in a very generalized sense.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
This is the program I wrote in 5th grade. I replaced the computer twice, the monitor 3x, and now it runs in an emulator.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You're not a verb. "Is" is a verb. Quite a common one. And "doing" is also a verb. In the sentence you quoted, they work together. In this case, "is" is an auxiliary or "helping" verb.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
The reason slow replacent would work is because the opposite also works. Consider that everyday, hundreds of neurons in your brain are dying right now. Some are replaced by new neurons while others are not. And yet the continuity of you still exists.
See the twins that can understand and/or hear each others thoughts
http://gizmodo.com/5682758/the-fascinating-story-of-the-twins-who-share-brains-thoughts-and-senses
And yet if we poke certain areas of your brain, we can not only make you do things, but you will also believe that you wanted to do them. Explain that.
If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.
Emerson M. Pugh. : )