Ivan Bogachev

Recently, I witnessed an interesting discussion about natural selection. The vast majority of participants supported an idea that depression provides benefits to our species. We were selected to be able to have it from time to time.

The main argument was that an organism in depression saves energy and reduces risks by not participating in dangerous endeavors and interactions. It's a simple survival strategy.

There are bits of evidence that support that story. It seems convincing. However, if we interpret it from the perspective of my work, we may come to a different conclusion.

Complexity of systems increases with time. Combinations. Mutations. You know the drill. It's a long process. We get our 16 patterns of behavior eventually. We can do various things and can work efficiently in different circumstances.

Flexibility of behavior may or may not be beneficial on its own, but it becomes extremely important when we build the next levels of complexity. Groups. Societies. Civilization. We need all our patterns of behavior to construct the world we know.

There is an issue, or course. Sophisticated system of patterns requires switches. Small and fragile. They can be destroyed by force. They can get stuck or start to wobble. This is where we get a variety of malfunctions, depression included.

Psychiatric diseases are inevitable at our level. We weren't selected to have one disease or another because it's cool to be sick. We just became too complex to avoid them.

Species with simple designs, with one pattern to follow, if any, would be immune to depression. No switches. No problems. However, their civilization will require symbiotic connections between many species with different default patterns.

Technically, it should be possible, but these species will have to share their communication protocols and synchronize their long-term goals. It's a tricky task, especially for biological systems that depend on random mutations in their evolution. Chances won't be in their favor.

I think we should be careful when speculating about natural selection and the benefits of having diseases. It's easy to convince ourselves of something because it sounds good, but completely miss the engineering aspects of that phenomenon.

It's much more interesting to design different species from scratch and see all the technical limitations. It becomes obvious that sometimes systems are vulnerable by design.

Sequences of data are basic building blocks of memory. They may have various functional roles. Let's take a look at some.

Facts. These are your most standard pieces of information. If a sequence is a fact, then it exists. It's true.

Associations. They may look differently, depending on your technical design, but their role is to connect other sequences. These are like edges of the graph of memories.

Rules. These are like instructions for reasoning and behavior, based on one-directional associations. It's your program.

Patterns. We save them as symbols and build an internal world. When we combine them with fuzzy transitivity and create complex associations, we get some understanding of reality.

These roles exist without any languages. Yes, it may sound odd outside of the IT world, but that's the fact. Programs in our computers don't speak, but they work with all these things.

What happens when we add a language? We add a bunch of facts. Words. We find more patterns for grammar and stuff. We add associations to connect words with our facts and symbols.

When you walk through your graph of memories, you can grab the words that are connected to your path. Make a sentence. It doesn't have to be grammatically perfect, but you can explain your line of thought to others. But what if your path goes through multiple sequences with no words associated with them?

Fact can be reproduced as it is. You can draw a picture, make a sound, or whatever your design allows you to do. If your listener has similar experiences, it can be enough to make the right guess. It's not a silver bullet, but it works.

Associations are easy to explain. Things come together. We connect them. Rules are the same. You can forget why you created some rules, but you can share them with us. If you use transitivity, then just explain everything step by step.

But what about patterns? If you don't have any words for a symbol or its parts, then you have a problem. It would be practically impossible to explain it. You may share every fact in a symbolic group, but it's highly unlikely that your opponent will find some tricky pattern immediately.

If you spend some time with data from the same environment, you find a lot of patterns and get a good understanding of it, but there are no words to explain it. Everything works, but you can't share anything. It's like personal magic.

Intuition.

Let's say you have some basic consciousness. You save and extract data from your memory. What's next? How to evolve? Try to mix things. Associate sequences of data if they come together.

Now compare some sequences. Are they identical? Similar? You don't understand anything at this moment, but you can make a rule. A to B. Once you receive a sequence A, find that rule and proceed to B.

Do you have any free will in your pockets? Use it. Override your instructions for behavior with new rules. You can create rules and follow them. You got a tiny bit of intelligence. Congratulations! You're a genius bacteria! It's time to increase your cache and play with more complex relations.

Take three sequences. A. B. S. If A = S, and B = S, then A = B. You just learned Euclidean relations. Great. Try to work with parts. If A includes S1 and S2, and B includes S1 and S2, then A = B. We're getting somewhere. Try to compare a lot of sequences. Find a pattern.

A = B = C = D = E... = S1 + S2 + X.

What is this? It's a symbol. How do you call it? You don't. You don't speak any languages yet. But you can save it. You can play with sequences of data that exist only in your head, finding patterns in patterns, and creating a symbolic world.

Patterns and symbols are cool, but you may want to learn fuzzy transitivity as well. If you have a sequence S, it's connected to A, and A to B, then S is connected to B.

Now you can see a destination of a sequence. Reuse skills with various subjects in a symbolic group. Play with associations. You can build a lot of things, even a fancy conflict-resolving module for your rules, where you wander around the memory graph and find alternative rules for some tricky situation.

We may be from different species, but we exist in the same environment and have similar sensors. We likely receive similar sequences of data. We find more or less the same patterns and save them as symbols. This is our collective unconscious. By using it, we align our actions even if we don't know each other and don't have any common language.

Oh, right. We'll need a language. Our internal worlds may be relatively unique, but we associate sequences that come together. One day we'll find a common sequence. A word. An adapter between one of my sequences and one of yours. We can make a conversation now.

Do you monitor some of your data channels? Yes? So you have a live feed of your... thoughts? You observe sequences of data? Feel symbolic connections? And even say the words of our language somewhere inside?

Wow!

It's quite a mind you have!

Consciousness and self-awareness. They affect our behavior. But how do you technically recognize yourself in data?

I see a system as conscious if it saves and extracts data in real time. If you stop all data flows, the consciousness goes away. Complex systems may have many data channels connected to their memory. We can see different levels of consciousness, depending on which set of channels is active at the moment.

If you have a memory, a bunch of sensors, and data channels to connect everything, you may start to react to things in a structured manner. On the lower levels of evolution, where random mutations affect everything, we would expect to see all sorts of odd reactions. They don't have to make any logical sense to us. Natural selection will take care of them.

If your system is functionally independent from other things, it would be very convenient to mark sensors or channels as internal or external. You get that mutation, sooner or later.

These are simple binary flags. It definitely works on the level of bacteria. They don't necessarily have enough brains to understand what they're doing in detail, but they collect data and use it to guide their behavior in the environment.

At this moment your system is aware of the fact that there is you and there is an environment. And it's not the same. This is the most primal version of self-awareness that you can get.

You would probably say that this is far from our human self-awareness. Yes. But we add more internal sensors and connect data channels in loops. This is where the real magic begins.

You may observe data extraction from your memory. Now you're aware that you're aware. You can clearly see your selfies being used. Some people would probably argue that this is where you get the "real" consciousness and self-awareness.

If you have intelligence and work with rules, you may observe their creation. You make your own decisions! This data comes from your internal channels. It's yours! It's your will! Philosophers may call this an illusion, in the sense that this will is not free from prior causes, but it's a functional part of the system anyway. You won't be a human without it.

New sensors. More loops. More data. More rules. More bizarre effects. Eventually you pass the mirror test. But. It's not a functional self-awareness test. It's an IQ test. It's not enough to distinguish yourself from the environment. That's easy. You need to work with Euclidean relations in your data to pass the mirror test. We have to be aware of that.

We suffer from a 99 languages problem. Let's take free will for instance. One word. But. Psychologists may say that you use it to change your life. Physicists say it's impossible. Politics say it exists, but we don't want you to have it. Priests argue about freedom from god and mortal sins. Philosophers... you know, philosophers. It's a kindergarten. Every boy says that he is the real man and knows the truth.

In every field people look at the same universe. They just have different coordinate systems. We should be able to use geometric transformations to move all data into one system.

It's not just a simple linguistic translation word to word, but a projection, system to system. We can keep most of the relationships between data points and make a coherent picture using data from several fields simultaneously.

All coordinate systems should be interchangeable in our context. We can make a choice using our aesthetic preferences alone, but some options will be more convenient in practice.

For example, in physics, we have an axis from determinism towards randomness. It's hard to work with it. Data tends to be stretched between two extremes. It's either "pretty sure it's determined" or "pretty sure it's not". Our computers don't have enough precision to work with things in between.

It looks like you need free will to get away from determinism, but then you are immediately thrown into randomness. We can't work efficiently with complex models of reality in the middle.

If we get some inspiration from pagans, we may choose another axis, from order to chaos. It's similar, but it's not the same one. Data appears on our screens in a different shape.

You need the same free will to get away from order, but instead of two extremes we clearly see a spectrum. Some things can be more structured or more chaotic. We can work with that.

Wills look like proper forces now. They push you along the axis, free will in one direction and will to live in the opposite one. We see how they affect our society, how do you use them to make choices, how do you actually build them, why people may see them differently, etc. Everything suddenly works. We can compare our notes and make new theories.

Of course, every boy in the kindergarten will say that this is not the real free will and chaos is not true randomness. Exactly! That's the whole point. This approach is a cosmic compromise. It moves everything in one place and helps to see the big picture. We need it to build new things. Then you can project data back to your home field and use it in the "right" way.

The tree of evolution is gigantic. How do we work with it? We choose a place to start, and travel along the edges from there.

There are two distinct ways of traveling that may show us the process of evolution of matter from different perspectives.

We can choose some place and just walk around. This is what biologists do. They choose some organism and follow it. Mutation happened? We go that way. New environment? Turn over there! Predators ate your test subject? Ouch. Next one!

We may see increasing complexity or decreasing one. We can walk in circles. We observe minor mutations, gradual changes, and collect data with great precision.

We can study non-living systems in the same way. And produce never-ending debates about the borders between life and not life. Technically, the biological evolution, as we know it, is a special case. There are identical processes in different fields. We just may have a personal interest in this one.

Alternatively, we can travel from the center in a straight line. We'll have a constantly increasing complexity, evolution in a general sense, but no good subjects to follow. It's more like a theoretical travel across our data.

Subatomic particles. Self-replication. Single-celled organisms. Don't forget the big things. Stars. Planets. Ocean here. Volcano there. We get ecosystems. Predators eat prey. Machines collect data. And, eventually, we meet an alien civilization with nuclear reactors, space rockets, holy wars, and toilet humor.

This process is the same travel across the same tree, as with biological evolution. We fly at the speed of light in one direction, instead of passively orbiting around some particular subject, but we look at the same universe.

Since we have to travel fast to cover everything, we lose precision. We don't see species-specific details, but get the opportunity to study the universal patterns instead.

Major physical limitations. Logic. Energy conversion cycles. Inevitable structural parts in various systems. Invariants in behavior. Predefined sets of diseases. The longer you look, the weirder it gets. Patterns are literally everywhere.

There is no right or wrong here. Both ways of traveling have their roles in the development of the theory of everything. We need both the big picture and the fine details. Our knowledge is an organism in the same tree at the end. Combine it. Mutate it. Just don't lead it to extinction.

I'm more interested in answering the question "how the machine works?" first, rather than speculating on "how it sees itself?" with no blueprints on hand. But there are some limitations to the process that we can predict for any system. Let's dive into that.

In order to save any picture of anything, we need a memory mechanism. Then we add sensors to collect data and channels to transfer it into that memory. Once an image is created, we can use it.

Sometimes we have degenerate cases, like where the sensor and memory are located in the same place and we could say that the channel has zero length. Think about a film camera.

But, technically, that's it. We don't need much to save data. Later, we'll need a processor to process everything, but not right now.

If a system has sensors to scan itself, it'll be able to make a selfie. And yes, if we have enough energy, we can make this work for every part of it.

Series of snapshots of sensors and data channels allow us to monitor things. Ideally, it's a more or less real-time log of everything that happens with data in the system.

Logs constantly accumulate. In the real world we may have recent copies, but we don't save all logs from the beginning of time. We'll need to constantly add more storage for that.

Snapshots of data in memory can be done as well. But again, we can't create a full copy of a storing device and save it in itself. It'll not fit. We can make a partial image. By saving these images, we create a history of some part of the system.

Most likely we don't have sensors for everything. This means that our logs and snapshots include just some part of the story. There are things that we don't see. It's expected.

On average, people associate data in recent logs with consciousness and qualia, data in history with self-identity, and data in unmonitored channels with unconscious.

Some would say that our hardware is a material body and data is an immaterial soul. We definitely have some functional differences here. However, data is the same matter or energy as everything else, so this is just poetry, not physics.

Logs and snapshots show us events in the past. Looking at them, the system sees itself not only partially, but always has outdated information as well. And it doesn't depend on how the observer module actually works.

How do you see yourself in this situation?

Are you the selfie, or the system that looks at its selfie?