Tag: brain

Dream a Little Deep Dream of Me (III)

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Can a machine dream?

Since it is the most high-profile example of purported machine dreaming and inspired the name of this blog arc in the first place, I will use the example of Google’s Deep Dream to discuss whether or not a machine can dream.

Deep Dream is a computer program developed by Google in 2014 and released in 2015. At the time Google was experimenting with image recognition in its search engine and one of the machine learning techniques it adopted was using neural networks, convolutional neural networks (CNN) in particular. You can create your own Deep Dream-influenced images here. Mine of the Statue of Liberty is below.

If you look up Deep Dream images, they are all slightly creepy like this, filled with eyes, animals and psychedelic patterns

Basically, a neural network imitates physical neural networks in humans and other animals by attributing one or more specific functions to individual neurons, or nodes, in a network. In the case of image recognition, some nodes would focus on recognizing specific edges, other specific shapes, others colors, and so on. Ultimate, higher level recognition of “dog” or “motorcycle” would occur with all those nodes in concert, as they fed off each other’s activity and output and “learned” from researchers what were correct and incorrect responses.

But beyond recognizing images and sorting them into categories (helpful for a search engine with massive amounts of data, or to conduct facial recognition such as what Facebook does), the researchers discovered that they could run the program in “reverse,” or inside-out: The program could create a representation of what it thought (using the term loosely) or at least predicted, the thing they were recognizing would look like. In other words, after showing Deep Dream millions of pictures of cats, dogs and other things, researchers asked the program to look at an image and tell them what they saw, and of course, they saw, and created images of, a bunch of animals in the image.

…or what passes for animals in bizzaro land

These pictures have been likened to dreams, although they’re really more akin to nightmares or psychedelic experiences. But if you look at the way Deep Dream works from both the ground-up, shape recognition and the top-down, high-level recognition, it’s actually surprisingly similar to at least my conception of how dreams are formed (see my dream journal for more details). When you are in a dream, clearly your lower-level shape and form perception has to operate in order for you to make any sense of the images you are seeing, and those neural networks, if you will, have been trained on the years of exposure to the outside world.

Then at a higher level, there are, at least in my dreams, certain references to daily activities or plots or cultural references (mostly anime and computer games, go figure) that I have to interpret as such upon seeing them, and they in turn conform to my preconceived cultural or emotional knowledge. It’s a two-way street, much in the way Deep Dream is interpreting and creating images based on its “incepted” knowledge.

Not to mention the dreams I have about rooms or cityscapes filled with objects or buildings that conform to some sort of emotional or physical memory of such experiences, but do not exactly mimic the experiences that created them in the first place. So this is similar to the repetitive, “variations on a theme” nature of the Deep Dream program when it comes to recognition of objects within images. There is an internal alchemy that is producing these images, a specific set of conditions within the neural network including memories that is giving rise to them.

One of my recurring dreams is seeing cityscapes, especially seeing the roofs and tops of buildings from above

But similarities or mimicry of human/animal experiences and functions does not necessarily equate to actual experience and functioning. In the next post, I will explain the conditions which should be met for a machine to dream.

Dream a Little Deep Dream of Me (II)

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I elaborate on facets of the Light State of consciousness, see my previous post for details

Three further notes on the Light State: First, Liberty is an especially prominent figure in Liberty Leading the People and will probably draw most people’s initial focus, just as certain loud noises or disturbances generally attract the same amount of Foreground processing regardless of who is experiencing them. But there can be substantial variation in what attracts the Foreground processing of different individuals, especially if the perceptive range is not dominated by any given stimulus. Observe, for example, the below painting by Kandinsky. What initially attracts the attention may vary from person to person.

On White II, Wassily Kandinsky

Second, there may be instances when Foreground processing may almost recede to the Background, such as when completing repetitive or relaxing activities. This activity can be likened to a landscape painting, such as Van Gogh’s below, where no particular spot demands foreground processing attention and instead it is the cohesive whole of the painting – the cohesive whole of Light State consciousness – that prevails.

Landscape with Olive Trees, Vincent Van Gogh

Third, there remains the question of the subconscious. Freud did not find this concept helpful, using instead the idea of the preconscious and unconscious minds to encompass what others would normally describe as the subconscious. Preconscious is easy enough to explain using art, such as in the Arnolfini Portrait below: The symbolic meaning of the oranges, dog, mirror and various carvings in the painting can be consciously recalled separately from one’s direct perception of the objects, just as thoughts in the preconscious can be recalled to the conscious mind. 

The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck

But where Freud found little difference between the unconscious, which could not be recalled, and the subconscious, I see the subconscious as being the part of the unconscious that cannot be actively recalled, but can manifest itself in conscious behavior to the extent that it can be identified as the subconscious. If a person behaves poorly towards people of a certain race without knowing it, they are unconscious of the reasons behind this behavior. If they are called out or come to certain realizations about the nature of their prejudice – if that is indeed the reason behind their behavior – then the subconscious is revealed, much like a surfacing submarine now reveals its existence.

Sigmund Freud

All this is to say that dreaming transcends all three states – Bright, Light and Dark. We can experience survival mode while in a dream and wake up in a sweat. We can experience dreams very similar to our normal waking experiences or experience heightened states of mental and physical arousal. And we can dream without really knowing we are dreaming at all. So can a machine dream? Stay tuned…

My Machine Life – Intro

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My Machine Life (MML) is a series of philosophical explorations into consciousness and “spiritual machines”

Legendary Formula One champion Ayrton Senna once said that after a race car driver crosses a certain mental and physical threshold, the car drives itself – or so my mother used to say. In actuality, this is the quote from Senna, which is in reference to an experience he had on the circuit at Monaco in 1988:

“And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel.”

There is a great 2010 documentary on Senna that is available on Netflix

Maybe the car really was taking over – not consciously, but in the sense that it dominated Senna’s very being, and that every fiber in his body was devoted to making the machine run as fast as possible, even at great personal risk. In such a case, it is difficult to say exactly who was controlling what. 

I am no F1 driver, but I can relate to Senna’s experience. I grew up playing a lot of computer and video games, even since preschool and kindergarten, with the heaviest amount of play occurring during my elementary school and middle school years. Quite a few times I experienced the “tunnel,” when my perception of the passage of time was altered: I would play for hours, even overnight, without resting. 

When I look back on those times playing Command and Conquer and Final Fantasy and Starcraft and Counterstrike (and others) they were really my solace during times of loneliness and disquiet. And in my loneliness and isolation I formed a bond with (the) computer(s): They were my friends, my playmate when I had none. It didn’t matter if I was home in Taiwan or on summer vacation at my grandparent’s house in North Carolina. The computer was always there when friends my age were not. 

Diablo 2 gameplay

A few years ago, I revisited that “tunnel” when playing Diablo 2, one of my favorite role-playing games. I had gotten so good at that game after years of playing it that again, the game almost played itself. It made me look back at my experiences playing computer games as being spiritual experiences, and it made me wonder: If I could could have a spiritual experience when playing with a computer, could a computer have a spiritual experience while playing with a human?

Admittedly, none of the machines I played with were capable of experiencing spirituality. But it has made me more aware of the possibilities of machine intelligence advancing to the point where such a threshold could be crossed. Where do we draw the line? When do we do it? Why?

Beyond what the machine alone can do, there is still the issue of what a machine can do in tandem with humans. To me, Senna’s mastery of the race car medium and the limits he and other drivers broke through represent a new frontier in the connection between humanity and machines. Indeed, the idea that the more perfect merger of human and machine could occur has captivated me, not the least because of my own experience with technology. Today’s F1 cars are packed to the brim with electronic sensors and controls, providing feedback to drivers at a level never seen during Senna’s time. Now the car actually can literally drive itself. But are we closer to the machine than Senna was? Or does new technology just make us more and more alienated from ourselves?

Thus are the dual foci of this blog: I want to focus on the possibility of “spiritual machines,” and explore the merger of humans and machines, which may itself lead to spiritual machines. This of course requires commentary on the nature of the machine-human relationship, and whether or not a machine can achieve consciousness. This is my machine life. 

I hope you will enjoy this journey with me.

Thank you for reading,

Philip Hsu