The Spider and the Fly

For those of you who don't know, I recently gave the last exam of my B.Tech course.  To acknowledge the fact that a phase of my life however good or bad was finally getting over, I decided to end it in style by not leaving things to the last moment and study the subject in a planned and organized manner. (I had three days to study yeah, but who's counting?)

So I woke up at 4.00 in the morning, and set about to finally get to know the delightful subject they call soft computing. My mother brought me a steaming mug of coffee (I have very few needs in the morning, and all of them involve coffee.) to ensure that I don't fall back to sleep (Occasional dozing spells are unavoidable, though).  After staring at the same paragraph for 20 minutes I realized that successful early morning study requires one vital ingredient: last minute panic. Maybe a bit of sleep would clear my head and make space for neural networks.

So I laid my head down on the table and was just about to doze off when I heard this weird buzzing sound. I glanced at my mobile and it was not coming from there, so I looked around and saw this monster fly merrily buzzing around the room. Sensing my perusal (or the smell of my coffee) it speedily made its way towards me.  I ducked (In my defence, it was really big) and waved it off. Fully awake in the wake of the aforementioned events I began another valiant attempt to study. By now I had slowly gotten used to that buzzing. But after some time the buzzing escalated and became a drone. Curious, I looked around but could find no trace of the fly, yet the sound continued. Finally I looked up and saw the reason for all that commotion.        

It seemed that my early morning companion had got stuck in a spider’s web. Giving the fly credit, it was making a valiant effort to get out of the death trap, but the more it struggled, the more it got caught in those gossamer strands of the web. Sensing the erratic vibrations coming from its creation (interesting fact: spiders shoot webbing from their posteriors; Peter Parker was one lucky asshole (pun intended).) the spider slowly made its way to it’s soon to be meal. One quick jab and its prey slowly gave up its fight as the venom began coursing through the body. Once the fly became completely inert, the spider made its move. It started twirling the fly between two of its legs, like a giant candy floss machine, or one of those gift wrapping machines. Within minutes the fly was wrapped and stored away for later use.

You may think why exactly I wrote this, if somebody wanted to look up ‘Spider feeding processes’, there’s always Wikipedia. No, the main purpose was to contemplate my behaviour during this entire incident. ‘But, he did nothing’, you might think. And there’s the crux of the thing, I did nothing. All I needed to do was to get a stick and rupture that cobweb. I would have contributed to keeping the house clean, and the fly would live still. But instead, I chose to just watch the entire process. In my defence, I thought by saving the fly I deprived the spider of its meal, and even that was not fair. So I found myself contemplating a (totally unnecessary, soft computing remember??) moral conundrum, something not entirely unlike to one that King Shibi faced. But unlike that case, there was no viable solution. And while doing all this heavy thinking, a sound justification finally occurred to me. I simply didn’t care. It made no difference to me and my conscience would be clear irrespective of the fly’s life or death. If this was between a peacock and cat, I surely would have acted because a peacock meant something to me.

So finally assuaging myself, I resumed my studies. All this assessment had made me thirsty, so I turned to my mug of coffee. And what did I find?? A dead fly was floating in MY COFFEE!! I glanced up and saw a tear in that cobweb. Apparently the dead weight was too much to support and gravity did the rest.

So in the end the fly lost its life, the spider lost its meal and I lost MY COFFEE!! There’s a moral somewhere in this damned tale and for the life of me, I can’t figure it out. (Apart from ‘Don’t keep the coffee waiting’, that is.).

De humana cogitationis

                                                                             -Hari Nair

Introduction

Yesterday I picked up a book that has been lying unread on my bookshelf for the past God knows how many a year. Its name is “Gödel, Escher and Bach: An eternal golden braid” by Douglas Hofstadter. On first sight I think it makes sense why I, crudely a fantasy fiction enthusiast, never felt the need to read it. Thick, yellow paged and the title consisting of the names of three people I’d never seen anywhere (and difficult names at that!!) are not exactly things that stimulate an intense desire to read a book. But yesterday, buoyed by a felling to expand my very narrow field of literature and with a recommendation by a friend I finally picked up GEB. Actually it was a close one between War and Peace and this, but I feel I made the right choice in the end. 

Now before you guys start thinking that this is a book review (Actually that’s kind of like, my thing.) of some type, let me tell you that I am only 30 pages through this book, so a book review is nowhere in the near future. The thing that sets apart this book from the many I have read is that it dares you to think. To put it more correctly, it expects you to think.  And thought I have; a lot, in fact in the past 24 hrs. These views that I have on human thought, cognition and intelligence have been churning in my mind for a long time. 30 pages of GEB have provided me an impetus to somehow mould these deliberations into something tangible and put them on paper.

So finally I justify the title of this article (It’s Latin by the way, in case you were wondering) and present to you my thoughts about intelligence. There’s no doubt that this first draft will contain many mistakes, ambiguities and aberrations but as I progress in my reading of GEB and with your feedback I hope to iteratively refine this version to something that is at the least intuitively pleasing and logically sound if not, wholly provable.

An Existing Definition of Intelligence

Let me be honest from the beginning. Unlike (or like) many of you who harbour an interest in this field I haven’t done a lot of reading on the subject. Actually my score is an hour of Jeff Hawkin’s “On Intelligence”, which my friend very kindly allowed me to borrow and 30 pages of GEB. This I feel, has both its advantages and disadvantages. I definitely do not know a lot, but then again it allows me to think freely and clearly about the subject without being bounded or influenced by existing schools of thought. (For those of you who don’t know, Jeff Hawkins is the man who gave the world the palmtop. An engineer par excellence, his lifetime passion though, is to create a reproduction of human intelligence. A lofty aim, but no less can be expected by a man of such brilliance.)

One thing that I came across in that hour’s reading of Jeff Hawkins was the way he defined intelligence. In his view, the true definition of intelligence is prediction. Humans are intelligent because they can predict how, what and why things behave or will behave. Somehow, this definition did not seem satisfactory to me. It seemed too mechanistic and bare bone to me. According to me, to define intelligence solely based on prediction, is limiting the broad reach that this thing (for want of a better word) possesses. The problem that I think is that all said and done, in the end Hawkins is an engineer. He defines Intelligence as an engineer would. But is that right?

From the discovery of fire to cybernetic implants, we have accomplished a lot. Why, we may safely declare ourselves to be the forward most among the countless living organisms on this planet. And there is no doubt human intelligence is the sole and only reason for this. Literature, arts, philosophy, music, engineering; these are only some of the many genres of expression that man has created to communicate human imagination and thought to the outside world. To define Intelligence, the reason behind the conception of so much, just in terms of prediction, somehow just does not feel right. How does prediction fit in with Van Gough’s Sunflowers, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? Or are they not testimonials to their creator’s intelligence???

A Tentative Model

A model of the human thought process, it’s nothing complicated though. It’s just a formal representation of how I think, we think.

The Filing Cabinet Model

I sometimes feel that the brain can be logically represented as a huge filing cabinet. There are compartments in our brain and we store our information batch wise. Taking the file cabinet analogy forward, I then liken experience files stored in the filing cabinet.

So now when we are presented with an input (some situation) the following things take place:

1.      The given input is examined and the appropriate ‘drawer’ is chosen.

2.      Now access this drawer and ‘rifle’ through the experiences stored there. Actually by ‘rifle’, I mean a careful analysis of these experiences, and draw a plausible conclusion from them (The processing element is nothing but a logical representation of this process).

3.       Then the output is produced by coupling two factors

a.       The output generated after Intelligence completes its analysis and processing

b.      Our experiences

A Critical Appraisal

The above model may seem intuitively correct. It is no doubt a fairly accurate schematic of the way we think. But it raises a few interesting issues, given below.

The Role of Intelligence

Let’s sum up the role of intelligence in the above model. It basically goes through our experience set and then operates on it to produce a result. So in a way I have defined intelligence as a heuristic that accepts our experience set (or a knowledge base in formal language) as an input, and gives an output.

 But the above definition is too vague to be of any use. This definition basically characterises any system. All I am sure of at this moment is the input section i.e. I am pretty certain that Intelligence does use our experiences as an input.

Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom

 Let’s start from the input. As I have said, our experiences act as an input to the entire human thought process. It would be interesting to examine what exactly we mean by this term ‘experience’. By experience I mean what we have learned or observed so far. Now according to me this learning and observation can be stored as 4 types.

1.      Data

It is Storage at the lowest level. Mostly we don’t even notice it. The rustle of your clothes against your skin, or anything that you see but don’t focus on can all be examples of data. Basically data is anything that you perceive from your surroundings. 

2.      Information

It is the next step in the storage hierarchy. Information is nothing but useful data. Once we get to know our objective, then any data that we gather having relevance pertaining to our focus at the time is termed as information. So data and information are not actually that different. It’s nothing but the semantic difference that pushes information up the hierarchy.  Information has some real time semantic relevance that data does not.

3.      Knowledge

Extending the concept, I would term knowledge as useful information. So that would make it a selected portion of semantically relevant data. Just in case there’s a doubt in your mind about the difference between the three, an analogy should be of some help.

Imagine two sieves, one with finer holes than the other. Let’s these two sieves represent our knowledge gathering process. Data, information and knowledge are the pieces of clinker we wish to sieve. Now we use the first sieve, the one with the bigger perforations. The filtering operation done by this sieve can be likened to the separation of information from data. Then we use the next sieve. Now the finer apertures on this one help in selecting knowledge from information.

Thus with this sieve analogy, we can say that the ‘conversion’ of data to information is essentially a process of separation. While the next step i.e. converting information to knowledge is predominantly a process of selection.

4.      Wisdom

At the topmost position is wisdom. Wisdom, I feel is inherently different from the other three. The reason for this, I feel is that the process of acquiring wisdom cannot be reversed. Until now, all the three components, viz. Data, information and knowledge depend on the present situation. Something that is now data could be information (or knowledge, for that matter) tomorrow. Say, you have a paper on the ‘Lifecycle of a Silkworm’ to write about tomorrow. So presently, anything about silkworms would be information and knowledge to you. But normally it isn’t (unless you are an entomologist, or just weird). What I am meaning to say is that data, information and knowledge are interchangeable. It all depends on the present conditions.

I’ll define wisdom as what we get after the application of our knowledge. In a way knowledge is a resource and wisdom is a product obtained by harnessing this resource. Also wisdom is the closest to the function that the term ‘experience’ performs in the above model. Knowledge is knowing, while wisdom is understanding.

To make this clearer, consider an example: You may know that the Beatles are better than Justin Beiber, but what matters is that you understand why it is so (you better, if not you should stop reading this..... :\).  The former is knowledge and the latter wisdom.

Now this is something that I am not very sure about, but I feel that wisdom also includes a sense of judgement. Logic can no doubt help us choose a correct path of action. Thus one can argue that an appropriate amount of logic can make up for some deficiency in wisdom. But what about ethics and morality? Is it always necessary that the logically right course of action is a good course of action? This is where wisdom comes into play. Logic helps us differentiate between right and wrong, but wisdom also helps us to differentiate between good and bad.

So on the basis of these types here’s another characteristic of intelligence:

Intelligence is the process that converts data into wisdom.

The Curious Cases of Conscience and Creativity

Creativity

Creativity is the urge to create. It is that relentless and restless energy in an individual, forcing him to express his thoughts and emotions through a medium that he is most comfortable in. Everybody possesses this quantity, though in varying degrees.

So what’s so curious about creativity, one might ask. The question is that is creativity an offshoot of intelligence, or is it something separate altogether?  I’ll try to explore both possibilities.

  

First I assume that creativity is a separate entity. Then the first question that arises

Is that where does this stem from? The brain, of course is the answer. So then I am forced to admit that there are two different forces both originating within the brain. If so, then my arguments against Jeff Hawkins definition about intelligence are wrong, because those great works of art would have been produced because of creativity and not intelligence.  Now if this is right, then the quest to create ‘intelligent machines’ loses almost all its allure for me. Because for me, what differentiated man from machine is not greater speed or computational power, but the ability to create.  

Then in the second case, creativity is supposed to be a part of intelligence.  Now this presents a whole new problem. We are to date not sure about what exactly is intelligence, and now we have to tackle creativity, a subject that is almost as (if not more) obtuse as intelligence. This makes the quest of creating intelligent machines all the more difficult, and alluring at the same time.

Conscience

Conscience is a person’s moral sense of right and wrong, good and bad (yeah, they differ at times...). It’s that voice in your head that constantly berates you while playing Black Ops a day before the exams, or that one which you ruthless smother with your blanket when it exhorts you to get up and go out for a walk on a chilly December morning. Assuming that you have got the idea of what I really mean let’s analyse this weird quality, which in my opinion differentiates humans from other sentient species.

The question about the origin of conscience is tougher to answer than creativity. That’s because intelligence and creativity are very closely related, one being the measure of the other. But conscience is something different altogether. In my opinion, it has nothing or very little to do with intelligence. The logically right decision may not always be ethically correct too. So then, for want of a better answer, I’d say the soul, that metaphorical flame residing in the hollow of your heart. I also tend to believe that, conscience is an attribute that machines may never posses. (Actually, machines are yet to be attributed with intelligence. Talks about Creativity and Conscience are merely wild speculation at such a stage.)