An Introduction to Consciousness & Robots

Friday, December 19, 2003

It seems that “thinking about thinking” should be an easy task. Since we all think, we should all be able to describe how we think. But over the centuries, many professional thinkers (philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists and the like) have tackled this subject, but few have succeeded in pinning it down to everyone's satisfaction. Most start with a disclaimer as to how very little agreement exists between thinkers, and how difficult they have found it to even define the scope of “consciousness”.

But as robot builders wishing to create robotic consciousness, we must cut through the tangle of competing philosophies and complete the sentence

“Consciousness is _______.”

CONSCIOUSNESS WAS...

We can group the many studies of consciousness into two general views:

View 1) Consciousness exists as something “out there”, in some other dimension, and our human brains “tap into” it, like a well drilled into an aquifer. Proponents of this view claim that a “cosmic network” lies waiting for all to access, if we can only manage to “log in”. Now if such a phenomenon does exist, then it relies on forces not yet detected or measured by science.

View 2) Consciousness exists “inside us”, as a function of our neural tissues, as a process that has developed over time like other evolved features such as language, dexterous hands or bipedal walk.

This approach follows the scientific method. It looks at the components and processes inside our bodies and concludes, as Marvin Minsky said, “minds are simply what brains do” and that some minds make consciousness. However this view does not diminish the astounding and miraculous capabilities of our brains, indeed it acknowledges their wonders and seeks to understand them in relation to all our other experiences of the world.

NAVIGATING THE MIND-FIELD

On any adventure into a new realm, one finds it helpful to enlist the assistance of an experienced guide. For this role we shall engage the knowledge and wisdom of Princeton professor of psychology Julian Jaynes and his classic book Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

This challenging volume delves into a wide range of disparate subjects; psychology, anthropology, history, philosophy, religion and ancient literature, and presents the premise that human consciousness developed out of an earlier "hallucinatory mentality" perhaps as recently as 3000 years ago.

Figure 2 - Professor Julian Jaynes, 1920-1997. (Houghton Mifflin Co.)

Though occasionally dismissed for some historical and neurological suppositions that have proven inaccurate since its publication in 1976, "Origins" withstands the test of time in many important respects. It remains in print after a quarter century, and provides uniquely powerful clues as to how we might build systems that "emulate" human consciousness.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT...

Jaynes begins his treatment of consciousness with an overview of previous thinkers' views, ideas and philosophies, and he dismisses each with real-life examples. Briefly, in Jaynes' view, the following phenomena do not comprise part of consciousness.

* Consciousness is not required for problem solving, or pattern recognition.

Try to NOT read signs. Once we become proficient readers we cannot stop the words from speaking in our minds. If you only know how to read the western alphabet and find yourself in a city where all signs are in non-western characters, you will shortly find your mind in a much quieter state, as all of those reading voices will have nothing to say!

Figure 3 - If you don’t know the words, they cannot speak. If you know them, you cant stop them from speaking!

* Consciousness is not needed to "react" to the world or to perform routine tasks.

Experienced drivers may occasionally find themselves suddenly aware of having just driven for many miles without really knowing it - having been "lost in thought". Yet somehow the car remained on the road, traveled at a safe rate of speed, handled obstacles, accommodated other drivers, all without the driver's "conscious" participation.

Figure 4 - Our bodies and our thoughts sometimes go different places.

* Consciousness is not "continuous" like a movie or a video recording.

Just as we do not "see" the blind spot in our retinas, nor do we detect the process that fills it in, consciousness cannot be aware of what it is not aware of! Our senses only present a representation of some aspect of the "real world" and each sense incorporates its own biases, errors and modifications. We cannot truly experience the real world in any way, shape or form!

For example, we hear sound waves of increasing frequency as a continuum that rises from low to high. However, even though light of increasing frequency generates the color spectrum, we see light as a combination of three colors, due to the chemical natures of the color-detecting cone cells in our retinas.

Figure 5 - Our vision system reports on relative amounts of red, green and blue light detected, not on the actual wavelength or frequency of the light.

* Consciousness is not a copy of experience.

Repeated experiments show that witnesses to any given event will each experience different aspects of it, and are greatly influenced by external and internal factors. In fact, a witness's recollection of experiences changes over time, can be manipulated, enhanced, erased and even intentionally falsified by later events.

Figure 6 - If human consciousness accurately recorded the world, human interactions would be much different.

* Consciousness is not needed for performing "high level" tasks, and in fact it often interferes with them.

Riding a bike, playing a musical instrument or a rapid-fire video game, and even typing, proceed better without the interference of consciousness. An experienced typist of English will invariably type the letter "u" automatically after the letter "q", since essentially every usage in the English language pairs them together. However, if one must type a few foreign words such as Qinglong or Qantas, one may find themselves automatically inserting an undesired "u".

Figure 7 - Experienced typists: try rapidly typing these words without striking the letter u. Click image to enlarge.

So consciousness can be a gateway for performing complex tasks, but it does not participate in, and can even interfere with, many processes usually considered "high level".

CONSCIOUSNESS IS...

Jaynes reduces the process of consciousness to six essential sub-processes, all of which involve relationships between the individual and their experiences of the external world. These relationships exist in consciousness as "metaphors". Now the concept of "metaphor" provides the key to the whole discussion here. You probably have a working idea of "metaphor" but we need to be clear about it.

For our purposes a metaphor is this: a mental structure formed by the connection of two experiences, and the assignment of certain qualities of one experience to aspects of the second experience.

Say what? For an example, consider the opening words from a monologue in William Shakespeare's "As You Like It":

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Ol' Bill begins with a metaphor, calling upon our experiences of "the world" (a busy place, full of people, laughing and crying, living their lives), and connecting them with aspects of our experiences with "the stage" (a place of performance where we as actors or audience may experience the full range of life; comedy, drama, laughter and tears).

In connecting these aspects of "world" and "stage" our consciousness generates a new resulting idea – that the world around us exists as a place where we both act and watch, and where we play our parts to the best of our ability, until the day that we exit "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

Note that many aspects of both "world" and "stage" do not get involved in this metaphor. Our mind deftly selects and connects essential aspects of our experiences to literally "build" our consciousness out of pure, solid, shimmering metaphor.

So to build robot consciousness, we will sculpt in metaphor.

So say it again please...

A metaphor is a mental structure formed by the connection of two experiences,

and the assignment of certain qualities of one experience,

to aspects of the second experience.

Jaynes identifies six essential sub-processes (pages 59 to 64), each of which use metaphoric structures, and all of which involve relationships between the individual and their experiences of the external world. These six sub-processes include:

1) Spatialization

Consciousness bases everything "within" it on physical, real world, three dimensional experiences. It recreates essential aspects of the physical world, and uses metaphors of the three dimensional world to help arrange and manipulate our experiences inside our heads.

Take a moment to consider this exercise as presented by Jaynes: "If I ask you to think of your head, then your feet, then the breakfast you had this morning, then the Tower of London, and then the constellation of Orion, these things have the quality of being spatially separated."

Notice how you "recognize" each of the target subjects, and how they seem to be arranged. Reread the quote and note how each phrase evokes an image and an associated feeling of "place". This is spatialization - the aspect of consciousness that arranges and uses "mind-space".

2) Exerption

Consciousness picks and chooses from all our perceived experiences, both external and internal.

Our minds do not act like video cameras, recording a constant stream of pictures and sounds for later analysis. Instead we retain only certain aspects and impressions of our world. How many times has a familiar location yielded something seemingly new, but that had always been there. You exclaim "I never noticed that!" but you may not realize that something has changed in what your exerption process deems worthy of recognition.

Again an example from Jaynes; "if I ask you to think of a circus, for example, you will first have a fleeting moment of slight fuzziness, followed perhaps by a picturing of trapeze artists or possibly a clown in the center ring... Or if I ask you to think of yourself, you will make some kind of excerpts from your recent past, believing you are then thinking of yourself. In all these instances, we find no difficulty of particular paradox in the fact that these excerpts are not the things themselves, although we talk as if they were. Actually we are never conscious of things in their true nature, only of the excerpts we make of them."

3) Analog "I"

The aspect of consciousness Jaynes refers to as the Analog "I" moves about in our mind performing things. Jaynes states "We imagine 'ourselves' 'doing' this or that, and thus 'make' decisions on the basis of imagined 'outcomes' that would be impossible if we did not have an imagined 'self' behaving in an imagined 'world'."

Picture yourself walking down a green and leafy path in a dense jungle. You come to a fork in the road and must decide to take one of the paths. Both ways lead back to your campsite, the longer route goes past a beautiful waterfall and swimming hole, whereas the shorter route passes a cave where tigers have been seen. Which will you take? With each choice, what might happen? Will you stop for a swim? What happens if a tiger should appear?

The Analog "I" create and oversee this "simulation" in mind-space, looking at the paths, considering the options, creating possible encounters, responses, outcomes, and imagining the possibilities. The Analog "I" builds the scenarios out of past experiences that have been excerpted, and based on the suggestions given.

Now the subject of these musings, the little "you" that you "see" swimming in the water, or fleeing from the tiger, represents the fourth essential process.

4) Metaphor "me"

This essential process acts as the subject of the thinking and scenes created in the mind-world, the miniature "you" that moves about and reacts to the scenarios created by the Analog "I".

In the jungle the Metaphor "me" gets placed on the path, goes for a swim, reacts with surprise or fear at seeing a tiger. The Analog "I" places the Metaphor "me" into the scenarios. (Notice how much all this resembles a child playing with toy figures and speaking aloud all the parts - our childhood experiences play essential roles in generating our consciousness.)

Even though both "I" and "me" represent important aspects of our "selves", separating them can prove difficult. Does the Analog "I" simply move the Metaphor "me" around like a doll? Jaynes acknowledges these daunting challenges. "There are of course quite profound problems here, particularly in the relationship of the 'I' to the 'me'". But for our purposes, conscious robots will undoubtably exhibit aspects of both Analog "I" and Metaphor "me" within their systems as well.

5) Narratization - the connecting of events and experiences in mind-time.

In the jungle path example above, narratization occurs as the connecting of the imagined events, one leading to another. Each of the events is represented by one or more excerpts (vines in a jungle, wide green leaves, a tiger bareing its teeth), and they become connected by a narration that joins them one to the next.

However Jaynes contends that this process does not only occur when given imaginary scenarios, but all the time. "We are constantly doing this whenever we are being conscious... New situations are selectively perceived as part of this ongoing story... Consciousness is ever ready to explain anything we happen to find ourselves doing."

You hear the roar of a car engine and a screeching of tires outside and you might think "those reckless kids, out causing trouble again," and you might envision inattentive parents or an unfortunate accident that might occur. Consciousness continually narratizes events into some semblance of a whole and continuous story as we "try to make sense" of the world.

6) Conciliation - the arranging or gathering together of events and experiences in mind-space.

Consciousness recognizes (literally "re-thinks") new experiences and connects them with similar, previous experiences. "Since we never from moment to moment see or hear or touch things in exactly the same way, this process of assimilation into previous experience is going on all the time as we perceive our world."

Think how much more difficult (impossible?) our day-to-day existence would be if only exactly identical experiences could be connected together. We'd not recognize ourselves in the mirror each morning! By accommodating and connecting similar experiences, the process of conciliation helps us to "make sense" of it all.

Consider an upcoming trip that you may make, either far or near, and think about the process of planning for it. When do you leave? Where do you arrive? What key features of the trip must you decide in advance? Note how even if you have not taken this exact trip before, you rely on similar experiences from the past (reading a map, changing trains in a metro station, etc.) and your consciousness "conciliates" them into a coherent set of thoughts.

TIME OUT FOR TIME

Now the subject of "time" and how we perceive time forms an essential part of how we experience the world. Consider this exercise:

Think over your lifetime, first your childhood, then your school years, then the past week. Now go back to the time before you were born when your parents first met. Next imagine how you might like the final days of your life to play out.

In going through this exercise, you undoubtably recalled an excerpted experience or two to represent each topic (childhood, school years, etc.). For your parents' meeting (which you could not have witnessed) your consciousness created a "conciliation" of excerptions - perhaps stories you've heard or old photographs you've seen. And the images of your final days might be based on images from movies or tv, or a visit to a hospital you once made.

Jaynes asserts that we can only experience time as a linear, spacialized phenomena. Our consciousness narratizes and arranges excerpts in a linear form within our "mind space". It places events further in the past "more to the left" in mind-space, with more recent events "further to the right." (This may be a feature learned from our left-to-right written language. It would be interesting to study time perception in cultures that read from right to left, or top to bottom, or that don't read at all.)

IN SUMMARY

So now we can complete the sentence posed in the first section:

“Consciousness is structured metaphor.”

And we can explore some of the essential aspects of consciousness:

• Consciousness occurs as a process within the brain.

• Consciousness constructs metaphors based on experiences, and generates new experiences as a result.

• Consciousness uses objects that are metaphors of real objects.

• Consciousness takes actions that are metaphors of real actions.

• Consciousness uses operating principles that are metaphors of real world principles.  
• Consciousness builds structures that are metaphors of real world structures.

• Consciousness constructs an analog space in the mind (a mind-space).

• Consciousness directs an Analog 'I' that can observe, move about and work within the mind-space.

• Consciousness operates a Metaphor 'me' that is the subject of operations in the mind-space.

• Consciousness stores and represents all objects, actions and experiences as excerpts.

• Consciousness narratizes excerpts into coherent relationships based on time.

• Consciousness conciliates excerpts into coherent relationships based on similarity.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE...

Now just as the statement "internal combustion" explains the essential operating process of a gas powered automobile but leaves out many essential aspects and processes, we have only "looked under the hood" at consciousness. Each of the six essential processes rely on many other important operations, and the operation of these processes generate whole worlds of additional results and features.

Jaynes asserts that our mind's ability to generate metaphor comes exclusively from the use of language. Humans have existed for millions of years, and likely used language for many tens of thousands of years before we developed consciousness just a few thousand years ago.

Someday our quest to understand this miraculous process called consciousness might lead us to better understand the minds we wake up to each morning.

Since we've only become conscious recently we can give ourselves a little slack if we still have a lot to figure out about ourselves and how we perceive what goes on when we "think about thinking".

Build more robots!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In college Roger G. Gilbertson studied engineering, robotics and the walking patterns of living creatures. In 1987, he co-founded Mondo-tronics, Inc. to explore the commercial applications of Shape Memory Alloy wires, and in 1995 launched RobotStore.com, the internets first commercial robotics site. Mondo-tronics Robot Store continues to lead the field in presenting the best and most innovative new robot products for students, educators, hobbyists and experimenters. Roger lives and works in Marin County, California, where intelligent androids do not yet chauffeur humans to and from work.

© MMIII Roger G. Gilbertson

by Roger G. Gilbertson

with additional illustrations by Brian Mansfield

Published by The Society for Amateur Science.

I.INTRODUCTION